Новости за 15.09.2020

In a video shared by the United Farm Workers on Friday evening, the sky was orange and the air hazy. In Oregon City that day, the Air Quality Index was hovering between 201 to 300, deemed “very unhealthy” by the Environmental Protection Agency. But the farmworkers were there all the same, standing in a field with masks, handkerchiefs, and neck gaiters on, trying to pick as many grapes off the vine as possible.

Even by Donald Trump’s standards, his September has been dismal. No convention bump; allegations that he called soldiers killed in the line of duty “losers”; a bombshell Bob Woodward book in which Trump admitted, on the record, that he downplayed the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic. Oh, and the pandemic is still killing a thousand Americans a day. Recent polling has shown that Trump is trailing Biden in nearly every key metric: leadership, trust, even “law and order,” the president’s big campaign slogan. Читать дальше...

If you haven’t heard of Ernest “Ernie” Moniz, there’s still a good chance you’ve seen a picture of him. The 75-year-old nuclear physicist, MIT professor emeritus, multimillionaire, and former energy secretary for the Obama administration sports longish silver hair that looks fit for a daguerrotype. His aesthetic sensibilities have turned him into a lovable meme among energy wonks, who for the most part regard him as a slightly quirky but eminently competent, whip-smart technocrat, credited as... Читать дальше...

Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has surveyed the state of the 2020 election and drawn an unusual conclusion from it. “As someone who has argued against catastrophism—I don’t believe Donald Trump is a fascist or a dictator in the making, and I don’t believe America is a failed state—I find myself truly worried about only one scenario: that Trump will win reelection and Democrats and others on the left will be unwilling, even unable, to accept the result,” he wrote on Saturday in The Atlantic. Читать дальше...

Over a decade since the financial crisis revealed an unimaginable level of white-collar crime by some of the highest-status people in our society, a major question remains unanswered. Why did no one go to jail in the United States? Actually, two people did go to jail. The first is a well-known story: Kareem Serageldin, the Egyptian-born banking executive who ended up being sentenced to 30 months in low-security prison. The other was a loan officer named Ken Yu at a small, family-run bank in Manhattan’s... Читать дальше...

Sunday night, wildfires still had most of Clackamas County, Oregon, under a “level 3” evacuation order—which comes with the guidance of “Go! Evacuate now!”—while the sheriff’s office has been juggling multiple crises. Its sworn officers were seemingly at odds with one another, some promoting unfounded conspiracy theories, like claiming “antifa” was intentionally lighting fires and looting, and others pleading with people who had set up militia-style checkpoints and were stopping drivers they deemed unfamiliar or suspicious at gunpoint... Читать дальше...