Новости за 08.10.2020

On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump tweeted a nearly five-minute video in which he directly attributed his progress recovering from Covid-19 to a monoclonal antibodies treatment from Regeneron, a company in which he has previously invested. In the video, Trump implied that we no longer need to worry about the coronavirus because there is a “cure.”

Guilford County, the third most populous in North Carolina, is currently facing something of an electoral crisis. Earlier this month, data provided by the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida found that Guilford ranked first in the nation for the number of absentee ballots being marked as Not Accepted by the county board, at 4.8 percent. Of those voters whose ballots remain in limbo, Black voters have been overrepresented among the pulled ballots: As of this writing, while white... Читать дальше...

If you’re freaked out about the climate crisis, it might be nice to live in Mike Pence’s imaginary world. There, the Paris Climate Agreement is a muscular international treaty capable of shaping trade flows and investment decisions through binding rules. The Democratic Party and its presidential ticket are in lock-step behind a wide-ranging Green New Deal, pledging to ban fracking and stop burning fossil fuels as it spends vast sums of public money to take on the greatest existential threat humanity has ever known. Читать дальше...

On Thursday morning, Donald Trump, the king of real estate bankruptcy, declared political bankruptcy. Trailing Joe Biden by double-digit margins in recent national polls, the Covid-stricken president did what he does best—he had a self-destructive temper tantrum. After the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that next week’s face-off with Biden would be held virtually because of concerns about the coronavirus, Trump said in an interview on the Fox Business Network, “I’m not going to waste... Читать дальше...

The Social Dilemma, director Jeff Orlowski’s buzzworthy Netflix documentary about Big Tech, starts casually, with the interviewees settling down in their chairs, taking their last sips of coffee, and making small talk with faint voices off-screen. It’s the part of the movie that is supposed to get cut in editing, but this is the film’s version of breaking the fourth wall, nudging us to see its subjects not as powerful and wealthy corporate leaders but as normal guys getting jitters before appearing on camera. Читать дальше...

Twelve days ago, The New York Times published a story based on documents that reporters had wanted to see for years: Donald Trump’s tax returns. The story revealed that the president was deeply in debt, that he rarely pays much tax at all, and that he is obligated to pay back $400 million to lenders in the next four years. In any normal political environment, it would be the biggest story of the election, possibly even of an entire presidency. It has, instead, passed almost entirely from view.

On Tuesday, not long after he had concluded an astonishing performance of dexamethasone-fueled theatrics from Walter Reed Hospital, President Donald Trump announced he would be quashing further negotiations on a new stimulus package intended to extend much-needed relief to those caught in the economic stresses of the failed response to the coronavirus pandemic. Like so many of his haphazard decisions, there was an obvious and unsurprising cruelty underlying Trump’s out-of-the-blue pronouncement. Читать дальше...

Two weeks ago, the White House held an event with more than 200 attendees where President Donald Trump formally announced his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Since then, the coronavirus has sent the president to the hospital, infected some political allies and many of his top-level staffers, and forced multiple Republican senators into quarantine. The Senate itself took a two-week hiatus in an attempt to slow down the spread.

The Social Dilemma, director Jeff Orlowski’s buzzworthy Netflix documentary about Big Tech, starts casually, with the interviewees settling down into their chairs, taking their last sips of coffee, and making small talk with faint voices offscreen. It’s the part of the movie that is supposed to get cut in editing, but this is the film’s version of breaking the fourth wall, nudging us to see its subjects not as powerful and wealthy corporate leaders, but as normal guys getting jitters before appearing on camera. Читать дальше...

Believe it or not, while it seems like an eternity has passed since the first presidential debate, it was actually only eight days ago. After the lights went down on that frenetic affair—which was marked by President Donald Trump’s raging abandonment of anything resembling decorum, a spectacle so grotesque that it left moderator Chris Wallace defeated and ashamed—you might have looked toward Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate as a respite of sorts. Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris are... Читать дальше...