Новости за 14.07.2020

The online furniture seller Wayfair is not engaged in child sex trafficking. The high prices of some of its industrial-grade cabinets do not mean that they conceal children. And yet these absurd, evidence-free claims circulated so widely online that on Monday, Reuters published an extensive fact-check to disprove them, and Wayfair temporarily removed some products from its site to add more details to their descriptions. The wild allegations of a massive child sex abuse ring hidden in public can be directly traced to QAnon... Читать дальше...

There have been smoother book announcements than the one for Donald Trump Jr.’s second book, Liberal Privilege. After Axios’s Mike Allen reported that the book, focused on tarring Joe Biden, will be released during the Republican convention, the book quickly went viral—because of a glaring typo on the cover, which read Joe Biden and the Democrat’s Defense of the Indefensible. 

Following what reproductive rights and justice advocates have long fought to secure, a federal judge in Maryland ruled this week that, for now, people seeking a medication abortion do not need to visit a health care provider in person to obtain the required medications.

Last Friday, the Turkish Council of State overturned the 1934 ruling that had allowed Hagia Sophia, Istanbul’s soaring cathedral-turned-mosque, to be converted into a museum. Minutes later, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decreed that the Great Mosque of Ayasofya (its other name) will open for Muslim prayer in late July this year, righting what he framed as an 85-year-old legal injustice. Hagia Sophia happens to be Turkey’s most popular tourist attraction.

Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the Covid-19 mountain, a three-dimensional foam mound representing the pandemic’s toll on his state. He had used the “mountain” metaphor before and had apparently decided to make it tangible. Referring to the chart of daily new infections statewide, he said that New Yorkers had climbed the “mountain.” Now, with that number declining to seemingly manageable levels, he turned the chart into a monument to the state’s collective achievement. Читать дальше...

There’s nothing the American government hates more than handouts, at least those that are intended for anyone who isn’t already rich. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson stressed that the War on Poverty was meant to be a “hand up, not a handout”; in 2012, Mitt Romney famously derided the “47 percent” of Americans living off the government’s largesse at a private fundraiser. More recently, Amy Klobuchar became the voice of “common sense” when she dismissed Medicare for All as a “pipe dream.” Year after year... Читать дальше...

There is an hour on the west side of Los Angeles, before the evening traffic slows to a crawl, when the falling light turns thin and clean. But young Andrew Breitbart often had to drive all day. After barely graduating from Tulane, Andrew had gotten hired as a runner at a low-budget production company in Santa Monica through a friend, and now he was being paid $230 a week to carry scripts from his boss to other bosses all over town. Within a year, he had put 22,000 miles on his Saab convertible... Читать дальше...

For years you were a bore and a doomsayer if you mentioned climate change at a party. It wasn’t even the elephant in the room: There were no elephants. Just people.

Among all the ongoing crises currently fighting for prominence in the national conversation, the broad suspension of immigration barely registers, despite the enormous scale of the chaos happening right now. Green cards are no longer being printed, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, has stopped processing requests for new cards, both for people abroad and immigrants already inside the United States. Work visas have been greatly restricted; asylum hearings have been suspended. Читать дальше...

On Monday, the Washington NFL team announced that it will officially retire and replace its name, a slur originally used to encourage the murder of Native people. The announcement raises many questions regarding what comes next as it relates to both the franchise nickname and the remainder of professional and amateur sports teams still using and capitalizing from pan-Indian imagery. But it also raises another question—about land.