Новости за 23.04.2021

The European Super League, perhaps the biggest debacle in sports history, was born of desperation, and it showed. Twelve breakaway clubs—the largest in England, Spain, and Italy—announced their new competition on Sunday with a logo, a half-finished website, and nothing else. They launched without two of the continent’s biggest teams, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich, and clearly hoped that they would, somehow, be peer-pressured into joining. They had the backing of one of the world’s largest... Читать дальше...

On Thursday, the Supreme Court reversed course on its decade-and-a-half-long push to reduce the most serious sentences for prisoners who committed crimes as children. In two previous decisions, the court said that life-without-parole sentences should only be given to juvenile defendants who were truly beyond rehabilitation. But in a 6–3 decision, the court’s conservative bloc took a different approach, holding that states weren’t actually obligated to make such formal findings.

It sounds a lot like extortion: After more than two years denying that runaway deforestation in the Amazon is a real problem, the Brazilian government now says it will protect the rain forest if the United States ponies up. Wednesday, on the eve of Joe Biden’s virtual climate summit with dozens of world leaders, President Jair Bolsonaro’s environment minister asserted that his country would cut deforestation by up to 40 percent in one year in exchange for $1 billion from the international community. Читать дальше...

When the Los Angeles Times asked Blake Bailey what he thought about Laura Marsh’s review of his Philip Roth biography in The New Republic, he replied, “That was harsh. I mean, wow.” He had a heavier hitter on his side, anyway: “David Remnick of The New Yorker says that I’m ‘uncowed,’ that I let the repellent in, that I present an extremely flawed man,” he said. “And if you weigh the reviews so far, most are on the David Remnick side.”

What did they know, and when did they know it? That is, when did the Sackler family know that OxyContin, the drug responsible for their vast fortune, was also partly responsible for the opioid crisis? Such questions are no abstraction to the family of billionaires currently fending off some 3,000 lawsuits filed by nearly every state, as well as many cities, counties, and tribal governments, in America. The lawsuits allege, among other crimes, that the privately owned Sackler family business, Purdue Pharma... Читать дальше...

The war over cancel culture is reaching new levels of absurdity. Earlier this year, Lucasfilm dropped the actress Gina Carano from its Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian after she likened conservatives—who she said are “hated” for their political views—to Jews who had died in the Holocaust. Her comments generated the usual cycle of backlash: #FireGinaCarano trended on Twitter, Lucasfilm responded by canning her, and her agent dropped her as well. This time, though, the story didn’t end there.... Читать дальше...