Новости за 18.03.2021

The AstraZeneca vaccine rollout was already chaotic. But overly jumpy governmental decisions may have made it even worse. Countries like Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, and Italy all temporarily halted AstraZeneca vaccinations in the past week amid reports of some people developing rare blood clots after getting the shot. The move followed false starts in the clinical trials (the vaccine may not match the efficacy those trials promised) and production and distribution of the shots falling well short of targets. Читать дальше...

On January 13, one week before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States and seven long days after the storming of the Capitol by an armed right-wing mob, it was easy enough to miss an article published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science, despite its eye-catching title: “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” The headline was itself a train wreck: six dully innocuous words piling up in front of a modifier more suitable to a 1950s horror comic than a sober... Читать дальше...

State courts! Of all the institutions of American government, they might receive the least attention relative to their impact on day-to-day life. State courts are where most criminal trials are held, most civil lawsuits are filed, and most of the legal business of American society is actually conducted. They range from the hyperspecialized water courts of the American West to the Delaware Court of Chancery, which quirkily decides an outsize share of corporate law cases for most of the country’s largest companies. Читать дальше...

It is probably good news that Donald Trump, speaking on Fox News on Tuesday, encouraged viewers to get a Covid-19 vaccine. “I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it,” the former president told the former financial news anchor Maria Bartiromo, “and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly.” It’s also probably, in terms of the wider vaccination campaign, not particularly important news.

Pundits have gotten kind of goofy about Joe Biden recently. After the president signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act on March 11, David Brooks called Biden a “transformational president,” while some on the left said he had ushered in the dawn of a new economic era. Opinion pieces in The New York Times,  Newsweek, and Vox have recently cast Biden in a long line of U.S. presidents that expanded the country’s welfare state, comparing his passage of “FDR-sized legislation” to the domestic... Читать дальше...

“The purpose of the Democratic Party,” the political consultant Robert Shrum once advised, “is to take care of ordinary Americans.” Fair enough, as far as his statement goes. But if that’s the purpose of the Democratic Party, what serves as the mission of its counterpart on the right?