Новости за 12.04.2021

John Boehner wants you to know how appalled he is by a faction of the right whose rise he actively facilitated. In excerpts of his new memoir, On the House, that were published in Politico and reported on by numerous outlets last week, the former House speaker bemoans the “crazies” who now dominate a Republican Party he insists left him behind. The January 6 Capitol riot, he told The New York Times, was driven by “Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy... Читать дальше...

In his 2019 book, Firebrand: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution, (a document that one day will likely go by the name of “Exhibit A”), Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz made the case that the secret to a lasting political career was going on television as much as you possibly can. “It’s impossible to get canceled if you’re on every channel,” Gaetz wrote. “Why raise money to advertise on the news channels when I can make the news? And if you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.”

Gaetz... Читать дальше...

On February 11, 2020, public health and infectious disease experts gathered by the hundreds at the World Health Organization’s Geneva mothership. The official pronouncement of a pandemic was still a month out, but the agency’s international brain trust knew enough to be worried. Burdened by a sense of borrowed time, they spent two days furiously sketching an “R&D Blueprint” in preparation for a world upended by the virus then known as 2019-nCoV.

The titular narrator of Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, is a robot. This isn’t spoiler—this revelation comes early in the book. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a lifelike but nevertheless mechanical companion for children: amalgam of sibling, plaything, and nursemaid. When we meet her, she’s inventory in a showroom. We glean, from her interactions with her fellow wares, that AFs mimic being male or female, that they have names (bestowed by their manufacturer? it’s unclear) and personalities, thoughts, an interior self. Читать дальше...

Last week, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality officially approved the installation of biogas digesters at four Smithfield-owned hog waste lagoons in the Sampson and Duplin counties. The digesters, which capture fecal fumes to be converted to natural gas, are the result of a partnership between Smithfield and Dominion Energy, one of the partners behind the failed Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The digesters are part of what’s officially known as the Align RNG (renewable natural gas) Project; colloquially, the Grady Road Project.