Новости за 14.08.2020

It’s difficult to see Faten Abu Ali’s expression, since her white veil leaves only her eyes uncovered. But those eyes are red, and her voice quivers with fear. With good reason: Last week, the government unsealed an indictment charging her 23-year-old son, Ahmed, with aiding Al Qaeda terrorists and plotting to assassinate President Bush—charges that could carry an 80-year prison sentence. Yet, while frightened, she also feels vindicated. “We consider it a victory just having our son here,” she says. Читать дальше...

The effect of Louise Day Hicks’s voice lay as much in its texture as her words. She was careful to keep her racism from spilling into the explicit, so when the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1965 that “delays in desegregating school systems are no longer tolerable,” she used soft, grandmotherly tones to make her acid remarks. “If the suburbs are so interested in solving the problems of the Negro,’’ she cooed in 1966, “why don’t they build subsidized housing for them?’’

The stories from the front lines of this country’s abandonment of the poor in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic are not in short supply. The Washington Post reports on the devastating stories of workers waiting for benefits from the cold and broken bureaucracy of D.C.’s unemployment bureau; one ends the story with $1 left in his wallet. The Guardian brings us stories from the Deep South, where a young Black woman named Sandy Oliver counts off the number of people she knows who have died from... Читать дальше...

Ronald Reagan began laying the groundwork for his 1980 presidential run almost immediately after his defeat in his campaign for the 1976 Republican nomination. The work consisted primarily of hundreds of speeches in hotel ballrooms across the country. The most important addressed high-minded fora like the Foreign Policy Association in New York and the Public Affairs Council in Washington, D.C., from texts carefully worked over by many hands in order to present the former governor as a dignified... Читать дальше...

On Tuesday, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden officially announced California Senator Kamala Harris as his pick for vice president. Harris famously comes from a background in law enforcement as a former prosecutor who rose to the rank of state attorney general, a position she held from 2011 to 2017. Critics have dissected her record from that time with a focus on her office’s punitive response to truancy in public schools and stubbornness in cases of wrongful convictions. But over the course of her 11-month presidential run... Читать дальше...

As our country grapples with a deadly pandemic, responds to still more outbreaks of police brutality, and bears astonished witness to street after street filled with fed-up citizens calling for change, I find myself thinking of Frederick Douglass. The former slave, orator, political organizer, and self-taught man of letters in many ways speaks to the present moment of civic and racial fracture almost as powerfully as when he scourged the conscience of white America in the mid-nineteenth century.

The government has been pretty kind to fossil fuel companies these last few months. Recent disclosures from the Federal Reserve’s secondary bond-buying program show that it has now bought $17 billion worth of ExxonMobil debt and $28.5 million from Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. Private asset manager Blackrock oversees this purchasing program, among others.