Новости за 26.04.2021

Over the past few days, American conservatives have managed to wind themselves up into a full-blown meat panic. Let me try to recap.

On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear a case challenging New York’s concealed-carry laws, setting up what could be the court’s first major Second Amendment ruling in a decade. Gun-rights activists and some conservative justices have decried the court for treating the Second Amendment as a “second-class right” in recent years. The new case will likely give the court’s conservatives the opportunity to change course.

In recent years Apple has moved aggressively to brand itself as a privacy-friendly company that stands in contrast to competitors like Facebook and Google, whose Android operating system runs at least 70 percent of smartphones globally. (In the United States, Apple’s iOS has a slight edge in market share over Android.) Apple calls privacy “a fundamental human right” and “one of our core values,” a mantra it’s invoked repeatedly in recent keynote presentations and advertising blitzes.

Every spring, Americans flock to their local box store or nursery looking for ornamental plants—something to spruce up their front yard, perhaps, or block out nosy neighbors. Last year’s pandemic lockdowns supercharged this annual ritual, as people with time on their hands, craving distraction from stress and grief, hungered to watch something thrive. Now, as they emerge from a nightmarish winter, Americans again are on their hands and knees, digging holes for their latest haul—largely unaware that the plants they buy... Читать дальше...

It’s hard to find someone in Washington who doesn’t like Merrick Garland. There are Republicans who don’t like Barack Obama and accordingly blocked the former president from elevating Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016. There are Republicans who don’t like Joe Biden and don’t want to see him, through Garland, reshape the Justice Department into something less Trumpian than it became over the past four years. But the list of people who don’t actually like Merrick Garland for Merrick Garland’s sake is virtually nonexistent. Читать дальше...

More than 12,000 men and women have served in Congress since 1789. But only six have received the highest honor that Congress can bestow—to have their names on a Capitol Hill office building as an inspiration to future legislators. This illustrious group includes three powerful House speakers (Sam Rayburn, Nicholas Longworth, and Joseph Cannon); liberal Senate icon Philip Hart; and Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen, who was a pivotal supporter of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But the sixth figure in the group... Читать дальше...

As we rapidly approach the point where the Covid-19 vaccine is available to all those who want it, the key constraint on reaching a sufficiently high level of vaccinations to achieve herd immunity is the hesitancy of certain groups to get vaccinated. The latest survey data from the Kaiser Family Foundation breaks them down. As one can see in the first chart, ten percent of Black adults refuse to get vaccinated—which, fortunately, is down from 27 percent in October 2020—with seven percent saying... Читать дальше...

Feeding kids, as it turns out, is a good thing. Or at least that’s what the Agriculture Department decided this week, as it announced that its universal free school lunch program would be extended another year, through the summer of 2022. Rolled out at the start of the pandemic, the measure sought to alleviate some small amount of family hardship by guaranteeing every pupil who wanted a nutritious meal could get one at no cost, regardless of whether their family met income eligibility requirements... Читать дальше...