Новости за 07.06.2021

The transition was supposed to be a smooth one. After President Joe Biden tapped Michael Regan, head of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, it made perfect sense that North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper would tap Regan’s no. 2 to head DEQ. Every one of Cooper’s previous Cabinet picks had been seated without too much of a fuss from the state Senate, despite it being under Republican control. But with Dionne Delli-Gatti’s nomination, the GOP... Читать дальше...

The structural integrity of his brain might be questionable, but if anyone can spot a scam, it’s former President Donald Trump, whose business history is riddled with complaints of unpaid bills and shady financial dealings. On Monday, in an interview with Fox Business, Trump denounced Bitcoin, the volatile digital currency. “Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam,” said Trump. “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.” (Trump added, strangely for a supposed billionaire... Читать дальше...

In 2009, Senator John Ensign, a Republican from Nevada, acknowledged that he had had an affair with a staffer. The authorities took notice when it came to light that Ensign’s parents had given the staffer and her husband $96,000 in what appeared to be hush money. The Justice Department would later suspend its investigation into the payments without taking action, but Ensign announced his intention not to seek reelection anyway. Then, oddly, he gave the Senate Ethics Committee a trove of damning... Читать дальше...

Well, it’s looking pretty grim. Last week, Kyrsten Sinema said that the filibuster, which for decades was used chiefly to sustain apartheid in the South and in our time has been used to block passage of measures that have clearly enjoyed majority support among the people (higher minimum wage, stricter gun laws, etc.), “is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation.”

Several months into the largest mass vaccination campaign in U.S. history, nearly half the country’s residents have yet to get a shot. While pollsters and journalists have strained to sort that cohort into subgroups, based loosely on varying degrees of persuadability—anti-vax diehards slotted into one box; patients concerned about deaths linked to the Johnson & Johnson formula slotted into another—a somewhat unexpected obstacle has emerged that deserves attention. Though Congress passed legislation... Читать дальше...

In November 2006, Niall Ferguson traveled to the Bahamas. Then a professor of history at Harvard, he had been invited to address Morgan Stanley’s swank annual gathering for investors in Lyford Cay, a 1,000-acre gated community (and tax shelter) of 450 homes in the British Colonial style. Ferguson implored his audience to consider the possibility that boundless liquidity might not last forever. The crowd was “distinctly unimpressed,” he recalled. Months later, the financial system seized up precisely as Ferguson had warned. Читать дальше...