Новости за 17.03.2020

Countless Americans have died for democracy and the right to vote, but none of them should now have to risk death to exercise it. The coronavirus pandemic led Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and other top state officials to shut down polling places statewide on Monday night, effectively canceling the state’s Tuesday primary elections for now. “During this time when we face an unprecedented public health crisis, to conduct an election tomorrow would force poll workers and voters to place themselves at... Читать дальше...

“We’re at war with a virus,” Joe Biden said in Sunday’s Democratic primary debate. He was not alone. “We have to fight that invisible enemy—unknown, but we are getting to know it a lot better,” President Trump said on Tuesday. “One day we will be standing possibly up here and saying, well, ‘We won.’” They were joined in this battle by Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, who announced Sunday that humanity was engaged “in a war to contain this virus,” while also wondering aloud “how we do that as employers.”

War rhetoric... Читать дальше...

Boutique grocery stores have been raided of their oat milks, bars and restaurants have been shuttered or limited to delivery-only service, a growing pool of service and retail workers have lost their jobs, the NBA and MLB seasons have been suspended and delayed, Idris Elba and Tom Hanks have tested positive for the coronavirus. Slowly, and rightfully, the shock and surreality of the pandemic is setting in across the United States.

It’s impossible to know whether a political candidate is electable until they’ve actually been elected—but that hasn’t stopped pundits from speculating ad nauseam about the question. Episode 3 of The Politics of Everything investigates where the concept of electability comes from, the nature of the historical moments in which it crops up, and the risks we invite by using the term. How central to Joe Biden’s appeal is his ostensible electability? What do supposedly unelectable candidates have in common? Читать дальше...

The Fed has pulled out its big guns, slashing interest rate targets to zero and announcing $700 billion worth of new quantitative easing. Republican Senator Mitt Romney seems to support giving every American $1,000, and Republicans in general are getting behind paid sick leave. Paul Krugman is calling for the government to spend 1 to 2 percent of gross domestic product per year on a permanent stimulus. And New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio over the weekend floated the idea of the “nationalization... Читать дальше...

In certain court systems, injuring another person without intending to by taking a risk whose danger you could have foreseen is called dolus eventualis. It’s punished less severely than dolus directus—the direct intent to harm—but it’s still a crime. The concept acknowledges that we have an inherent duty to protect other people, even strangers, from unnecessary danger.

One Christmas, I bought my parents compact-fluorescent light bulbs and a copy of Global Warming: A Greenpeace Guide. It was 1990: I was proud of my job at Greenpeace U.K., on the climate team, and the task of explaining to my puzzled family that the planet was in crisis seemed as urgent as the one we faced at work every day, trying to convince the British public. The question of how to tackle climate change—chain ourselves to backhoe loaders? Kick-start a solar revolution?—was one that tore Greenpeace apart internally. Читать дальше...

Something is stirring again in the house of Saud. In the past two weeks, as the global health crisis intensified, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), further roiled international relations by arresting four royal relatives and engaging in a risky “global game of chicken” with Russia over oil supplies that has collapsed crude prices and shaken an already fragile world economy.

The coronavirus pandemic—and the Trump administration’s failed response to it—dominated Sunday night’s debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. But one of the debate’s more intriguing moments came during a discussion about something that didn’t call panic to mind: Women and their potential role in the two candidates’ administrations.