Новости за 29.04.2020

Invoking the Korean War-era Defense Production Act, Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday mandating that American meat production keep running at all costs—workers and grave threats to public health be damned. According to the United Food and Commercial Workers, 20 industry employees—many working shoulder to shoulder at a rapid clip, without proper protection in what was already one of the country’s most dangerous jobs—have already died.

Kaiser Wilhelm II did not originate the term “Yellow Peril,” but after his “Hun speech” of 1900, he became forever synonymous with it. The German monarch was addressing soldiers who were shipping off to China to help put down the Boxer Rebellion, and what he said was so crass—even for the notoriously half-witted, insecure, and capricious heir—that the Prussian foreign office’s official transcript of the speech omitted its most “diplomatically embarrassing” paragraph. “Just as a thousand years... Читать дальше...

In a recent essay titled “It’s Time to Build,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen urges Americans to learn from the failures of our response to the coronavirus pandemic and recover our national ambitions. “Making masks and transferring money are not hard,” he insists. “We could have these things, but we chose not to—specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to build.” That’s a choice we’ve made “throughout American life,” Andreessen argues... Читать дальше...

On a sunny day last July, thick fumes poured into the sky over Shahid Square in central Kabul. Half a dozen gunmen stormed up a building into the office of Afghanistan’s former intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh. No stranger to attempts on his life, Saleh managed to escape through the roof, but the ensuing firefight between insurgents and security forces raged through the compound for several more hours, ending past midnight with 30 people dead and at least 50 wounded—most of whom were civilians. Читать дальше...

“I’m worried I’m exposing myself to more of this crap,” my friend Irfan texted me from his shift in the intensive care unit at a hospital in New York. A month since the first confirmed case in the state, Irfan, a critical care physician, had already gotten Covid-19 and was back at work after a weeklong isolation. (“Irfan” is not using his real name out of fear of reprisals.) Now I had a new reason to worry about him and his colleagues: Articles about frontline health care workers forced to treat... Читать дальше...

Over the weekend, Donald Trump’s critics and his advisers were, possibly for the first time, on the same page: The president’s daily coronavirus briefings, which stretch on longer than Grateful Dead sets, were causing more harm than good. All it took for everyone to reach that conclusion was the president suggesting, in front of millions of viewers, that injecting bleach could cure Covid-19.