Новости за 20.10.2020

Over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the White House a deadline of 48 hours to complete negotiations on a new pandemic relief package to be passed before the election, which is now two weeks away. This was the latest volley in the ongoing congressional wars over a much-needed stimulus bill, and Monday’s headlines buzzed with the appropriate alarms. But for all the rhetoric of this time we mean it, it was easy enough to forget that Pelosi had previously announced (then eventually jettisoned) a similar deadline just last month. Читать дальше...

The Constitution is a remarkably vague document, and American courts have spent the last two hundred years trying to make it more specific. What counts as “cruel and unusual punishment,” either in 1789 or in 2020? What makes a search and seizure “unreasonable” when carried out by police? When does a person deprived of life, liberty, or property actually receive “due process under law”? Sometimes, the answers in these cases can be harder to find than they might seem.

On May 31, as another night of disruptive protest overtook New York City streets, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, one of the unions representing NYPD officers, posted a photo of an arrest record on Twitter. Derived from an internal police database, the image revealed the protester’s height, weight, address, date of birth, and driver’s license information. It also revealed her name: Chiara de Blasio, the 25-year-old daughter of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. “How can the NYPD protect the... Читать дальше...

If Donald Trump is voted out of office next month, expect the ranks of the Resistance to suddenly swell.

Editors at the nation’s top science journals have been on a bit of a tear lately. For months they’ve been working overtime to publish urgent research analyzing the coronavirus pandemic. Now, in the final weeks leading up to the presidential election, several prestigious research journals and science magazines have delivered editorials excoriating President Trump for his reflexively anti-science approach to policy-making during a global health crisis. Centuries of tradition have previously barred... Читать дальше...

When a domestic violence organization in Wisconsin put up signs reading “Black Lives Matter,” they did not know that it would lead to a backlash from police and the loss of a $25,000 grant to provide services. Embrace is the only domestic violence program for four counties, including part of a tribal reservation; in Barron County, the group’s five law enforcement partners all withdrew.

It’s been nearly a year now that Luis Adrian Martinez Reyes has lived in a tent with his wife (who is pregnant), child, and godchild in the migrant camp for asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico, on the banks of the Rio Grande, which marks the U.S.-Mexico border. Camp residents are mostly like him: young parents with children. They cook on small clay stoves with wood provided by aid groups that also deliver three meals a day, along with supplies including masks, sanitizer, and baby items. People use portable toilets... Читать дальше...

The Atlantic is perhaps the quintessential American magazine. Founded by Boston abolitionists in 1857, its role in the media ecosystem stands in contrast to that of The New Yorker, which, despite regularly featuring excellent reporting, is first and foremost a literary magazine. Among political magazines, it is neither overtly right-wing like the National Review nor overtly left-wing like The Nation (or, for that matter, The New Republic). The Atlantic is a magazine not precisely of the center... Читать дальше...

If Donald Trump is voted out of office next month, expect the ranks of the Resistance to suddenly swell. 

Signs of the apocalypse are everywhere. It’s not just the worsening pandemic and Donald Trump’s determination to hold superspreader events in every swing state, but also the daily end-is-nigh stories about nightmare election scenarios, no matter how outlandish.

Just under a year after Evo Morales’s government was ousted by U.S.-backed far-right forces, his Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party looks almost certain to take back power after Sunday’s election. Morales, the country’s first Indigenous president, remains in exile in Argentina. His election in 2019 remains hotly debated: While the Electoral Observation Mission of the Organization of American States challenged the result due to a gap between preliminary and final results, subsequent analyses... Читать дальше...