Новости за 14.12.2017

Throughout the last presidential campaign, no Republican hated Donald Trump more than Lindsey Graham did—or so The Washington Post declared, with the evidence to back it up. The South Carolina senator frequently warned of the dangers of nominating Trump, calling him a “jackass” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.” “You know how you make America great again?” Graham, then a presidential candidate himself, said in December 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” After quitting the race... Читать дальше...

Even after the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the threat of nuclear destruction receded, the world’s nuclear states continued to follow the diplomatic and behavioral norms of that era. Years of inflammatory statements by North Korea and Russia, for example, were met with comparative calm from the United States, whose responses were carefully calibrated to deter aggression. Global leaders learned to look to the United States as a voice of nuclear reassurance.

The Post—Steven Spielberg’s movie about the Washington Post during the publication of the Pentagon Papers—is, like many of his movies, a David-and-Goliath story. The theme of a little guy taking on a mighty power—inevitably heartwarming and a bit corny—has dominated Spielberg’s work in some form since Duel, a 1971 television movie he made when he was 24. In Duel the Goliath is an 18-wheel tanker truck operated by a man in cowboy boots with a bad case of road rage. The David is a Plymouth sedan driven by a mild-mannered traveling salesman. Читать дальше...

They say that there are decades where nothing happens; and weeks where decades happen; but sometimes there are 18 months where so much and so little happens that it is hard to tell whether events are static or in constant flux. This is the strange impasse at the heart of British politics today: a stalemate that manifests itself as chaos, a historic decision that has brought Britain to a dreary standstill, ever since the Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016.