Новости за 25.06.2021

The Justice Department filed a major lawsuit to challenge Georgia’s controversial new voting law in federal court on Friday, alleging that state lawmakers passed it to hinder Black Georgians’ ability to vote. The move is the Biden administration’s first major step to push back against the wave of Republican-backed voting restrictions proposed and enacted in state legislatures since Donald Trump’s defeat in November.

Barack Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy is alive and well under his former vice president. In a legal brief on Wednesday, President Biden’s Justice Department defended a pipeline permit approval process that was originally rushed through under the Trump administration. Supporting the Army Corps of Engineers’ environmental assessments last year for Line 3, which would cut through Minnesota watersheds, the DOJ’s attorneys argued that the Corps had sufficiently considered the impact on “wetlands... Читать дальше...

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion about voting rights with two Democratic members of Congress, during which time I took the opportunity to draw their attention to a hitherto little-discussed law that played a big role in accelerating President Donald Trump’s outlandish efforts to subvert the 2020 election: the Electoral Count Act of 1887, or ECA. Little did I know that days later, this law would find itself having a moment: In an interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker... Читать дальше...

It was all Britney’s idea. The 16-year-old singer had just recorded her first album and was about to shoot her first music video with Nigel Dick, then best known for directing videos for Oasis and Guns N’ Roses. His vision for her debut single was basically: Britney dances on Mars! Britney told the president of Jive Records, “This is horrible. No way am I doing this.” She called up Dick and pitched him something else: She wanted to be dancing in a school flanked by cute boys, like a scene from Grease. Читать дальше...

In 2006, a professional baseball player named Curt Schilling started a video game company. Schilling was probably most famous for a heroic pitching performance on an injured ankle in a 2004 playoff series for the Boston Red Sox. The team would go on to win the World Series that year, ending a decades-long championship drought, and cementing Schilling’s status as a hero throughout New England.

During infrastructure negotiations, Republicans have been eager to frame any and all green spending as a wasteful add-on that picks winners and stifles competition. But the United States already picks winners—and a new report from the Stockholm Environmental Institute, a nonprofit think tank, provides one of the first-ever estimates for just how much these subsidies have been worth to one of the world’s most harmful industries. By boosting projected earnings by billions of dollars a year, government... Читать дальше...