Новости за 21.04.2020

If someone gave you two minutes, as well as an experienced crew of advertising professionals, and asked you to produce a video explaining how and why Donald Trump bears personal responsibility for the severity of America’s coronavirus epidemic, there are countless ways you might approach that assignment.

There are some records that sound as if their creators were hit over the head, forgot how to put together a song, then had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Think of Van Morrison’s mad originality on Astral Weeks, for example—the way he mixes styles like a person’s mind mixes memories, jazz and classical and Irish forms intertwining. It sounds like something half-remembered from a dream: familiar, although utterly new.

For the first time ever, oil is trading at negative prices after plummeting sharply yesterday. In other words, because it costs money to store and transport oil, drillers—and, specifically in this case, those of West Texas Intermediate Crude—are now having to pay pipeline and storage companies to take product off their hands, as space for storing excess oil runs out fast. This might be the greatest crisis to face the oil industry since there’s been an oil industry, and no one in power seems to have a plan for what to do about it. Читать дальше...

In Indian Country right now, like so much of the country, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed itself as a series of overlapping and compounding crises: Tribal leaders have rushed to secure personal protective equipment for essential workers; organized to ensure vulnerable community members have access to food, water, and safe housing; and lobbied for desperately needed federal relief. But as the number of positive cases in Indian Country continues to outpace the American average—from the pueblos of New Mexico to Navajo Nation and the Mandan... Читать дальше...

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Sixth Amendment requires juries to reach unanimous verdicts when they find defendants guilty of serious crimes. This may come as a surprise to many Americans, who likely assumed after watching films like Twelve Angry Men that there was no alternative. Monday’s ruling takes aim at less well-known practices in Louisiana and Oregon, where defendants have been found guilty even if one or two jurors harbor doubts.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon inked a contract to pay $818 million to Lockheed for hundreds of new extended-range, air-launched cruise missiles with thousand-pound explosive warheads. By then, Americans had learned that the United States’ Strategic National Stockpile—the federal emergency medical supply cache, whose annual budget is less than that missile contract—faced critical shortages of ventilators and even N95 respirator masks, which retail (in ordinary times) for 60 to 80 cents.

Last week, Jennvine Wong, staff attorney for the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, told me there were cops walking around outside of her Brooklyn apartment who weren’t wearing masks. It was notable, since it was just a day after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a mandate around mask-wearing inside stores and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a separate order requiring everyone over the age of two to wear a face covering in public if they couldn’t keep six feet of distance from others. Читать дальше...

Most presidential nominees leave the primary season behind with a sprint to the political center. It’s a testament to the power progressives have built within the Democratic Party since 2016 that Joe Biden is instead being urged to make a showy detour to the left. There is no chance whatsoever that Biden will campaign on Medicare for All or many of the other policies that were cornerstones of Bernie Sanders’s campaign. And for all progressives know, his commitment even to the proposals his camp has billed as overtures to the left... Читать дальше...

If you can make it in New York, the cliché goes, you can make it anywhere. But there’s making and then there’s making it. A recent feature in Eater identified a trend in the habits of a sliver of New Yorkers: the increasing use of “private dining” venues accessible only to the wealthiest and most networked people in the city. These sanctums for the hungry elite often sit steps away from the watering holes of the mere bourgeoisie; above the cavernous Tavern restaurant in Hudson Yards, for example... Читать дальше...