Новости за 17.05.2021

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will reconsider part of Roe v. Wade in its fall term, setting the stage for a major ruling to curtail access to legal abortion throughout America. The justices have not heard a direct challenge to Roe since a troika of moderates saved its central holdings in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. Now the court’s moderates are all gone, and the only thing that can stop the conservatives from demolishing Roe is themselves.

Like the city itself, the push to grant Washington, D.C., autonomy and federal representation through statehood remains in an interminable limbo. While President Biden and most Democrats in Congress have backed statehood, the Admission Act, which passed the House a second time last month, stands no chance of moving through the Senate unless pivotal Democrats like Joe Manchin back the bill in substance, as well as the elimination of the legislative filibuster.

There are many ways to court the world’s media, and the state of Israel has seemingly tried all of them. In recent years, that’s included a prolific use of social media—for example, cringey tweets about the Israel Defense Forces being “the most vegan army in the world”—and online influence campaigns, to the point where there’s a popular Hebrew term—hasbara—that refers to the dissemination of feel-good propaganda whitewashing Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.

There are many things that should be left in the Pandemic Before Times: meetings that could have been emails, long and pointless commutes, and working without paid sick leave. Also, consider the debt ceiling. Two years ago, Congress and President Donald Trump agreed to suspend the need to raise the debt ceiling until after the 2020 elections. Having been kicked down the road, the can is back: The debt ceiling is now set to expire on July 31, 2021, unless it is once again extended or suspended... Читать дальше...

In October 1829, some of the last surviving leaders of America’s founding generation gathered in Richmond, Virginia, for a state constitutional convention. Two issues dominated the gathering: suffrage and apportionment. Virginia’s 1776 constitution, drafted in the crucible of revolution, had limited the vote to white men who owned a certain amount of property. It also drew the General Assembly’s electoral districts to heavily favor the plantation-dominated Tidewater region in eastern Virginia... Читать дальше...

In late October of 2020, Lance Corporal Joseph Mercurio, a Marine with the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, hit “send” on an Instagram comment: “The Jewish religion is that of Satan,” he wrote—responding to a photograph of me. His username on Instagram, “joe88mercurio,” incorporated a known neo-Nazi code: 88 stands for “Heil Hitler,” as “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

When I first met George Hagemeyer in 2013, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation was in the process of drilling six natural-gas wells in his backyard. America is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend almost limitlessly beneath the surface, and George had leased his subsurface estate in the hopes of striking it rich in the fracking lottery. As a 150 foot-tall rig pounded segments of steel pipe into the earth, I asked George if he thought that anyone else should have any say over his decision to lease his mineral estate.

After a gunman opened fire on three spas in Atlanta in March, killing six Asian immigrant women, a childhood memory that Representative Grace Meng of New York had long buried came back to light. It’s a memory familiar to most Asian American children of immigrants growing up in communities where they don’t look like their classmates: the moment you realize your otherness. The moment you realize everyone already knew.