Новости за 12.01.2021

Hours after President Trump falsely claimed victory in November’s election, having claimed for weeks that the election was a fraud and Democrats would try to steal it, a Facebook group was created, called “Stop the Steal.” Within a day, it had grown to 300,000 members, reported Shayan Sardarizadeh and Jessica Lussenhop at BBC Monitoring and BBC News Washington. Many of the posts repeated Trump’s lies; some argued for “civil war.” Later that day, Facebook pulled the group, “but not before it had generated nearly half a million comments... Читать дальше...

Over the course of a few extraordinary hours on Friday, Donald Trump’s iPhone was rendered almost completely useless—it can, presumably, still make calls and take photos, but that’s it. The president was banned not only from Twitter and Facebook, where he had a combined 150 million followers, but also from YouTube, Shopify, Stripe, the video game streaming app Twitch, and, perhaps most absurdly, Spotify. If a forlorn Trump wants to dance alone to “Macho Man,” he’ll have to buy a physical copy.

In the last week, Marriott, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Commerce Bank have each paused donations to congressional supporters of the Capitol riot. So have Amazon, Comcast, and GE. (Flaming a violent assault on Congress was apparently fine. But when that violent assault actually happens almost exactly as described? Well, that changes things!) Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase and CitiGroup announced on Sunday their intentions to halt funding contributions to both Republican and Democratic campaigns for... Читать дальше...

Last week, only hours before armed but frequently maskless insurrectionists invaded the U.S. Capitol, there was a spot of bright news for Covid-19 relief in Washington. Democrats Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both won Senate seats in Georgia’s runoff election, creating a narrow majority across both sides of Congress for the political party interested in more aggressive spending on Covid-19 response and relief efforts.

On Monday, Opposite Office, an “activistic architecture studio” based in Munich, released design materials for what it called “Capitol Castle,” a plan that would encircle the entire U.S. Capitol with 36-feet-thick brick walls. The concept was not serious—or, at least, it was “serious” but not intended to be built. It was, depending on how charitable you feel about “activistic architecture studios,” a design meant to spark a debate on democracy and division, or one meant to get written up by the... Читать дальше...

People have always moved to live, from early agrarian societies seeking fertile land to the undocumented workforce that currently powers this country’s agricultural sector. More recent, though, are the systematized and codified restrictions on that movement—telling us who can move where and for how long—and one of their preeminent categories through which this sorting is done has been the all-encompassing notion of “work.”

When the director Michael Apted died, at 79 years old, on January 7, social media lit up with remembrances. He had directed many films, including Coal Miner’s Daughter, and more recently, prestige shows on premium cable, but fans mourning him were uniquely oriented toward one of his efforts, the Up series. “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man,” was the maxim of the first of the series, 7 Up. To make good on that saying, for the 1964 short TV program 7 Up, Apted interviewed... Читать дальше...

For the past two months, the bulk of the Republican Party and the conservative movement has pushed unhinged conspiracy theories about election fraud. Most of them stood back and stood by while President Donald Trump constantly lied about the outcome, or while he pressured state officials into overturning their election results. While Trump raged and ranted to his supporters about imagined crimes, their supposedly corrupt perpetrators, and the phantasmal harms they would somehow inflict if not stopped... Читать дальше...

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a single, massive victory to one of the thousands of communities and tribal nations currently struggling with the toxic waste left behind by profitable corporations. The court denied to hear the case FMC Corp. v. Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. FMC Corporation, as a result, is stuck with the lower court’s ruling, which is that the company owes the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes a multimillion sum for polluting tribal lands and skipping town.