Новости за 20.08.2021

On Thursday, the U.S. Capitol became the locus of national attention again when a man claiming to have explosives in his truck forced a standoff with law enforcement agents outside the Library of Congress for several hours. The suspect, who has been identified as 49-year-old Floyd Ray Roseberry of North Carolina, surrendered to the police in the afternoon. But despite the peaceful resolution, the ordeal was yet another reminder of the rising threat of political violence in a perilously divided nation... Читать дальше...

Last week, the world shook twice. The first shock hit Haiti, when a 7.2 magnitude earthquake erupted beneath the island’s southern peninsula. Homes, churches, and hotels crumbled in the cities of Les Cayes and Jérémie and in nearby villages. More than 2,189 people have perished; that toll is expected to rise.

Is history made by individual actors—by so-called great men—or by vast, impersonal social forces? Tolstoy, in War and Peace, saw history as the chaos of random events, a swarm of uncoordinated human actions that could never be adequately summarized without falsehood, nor directed by any individual. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, on the other hand, history has developed into a perfectly rational social science, thus allowing for the accurate predicting and planning of large-scale human behavior over the course of millennia. Читать дальше...

The Supreme Court receives thousands of requests each term to review lower-court decisions. The justices typically agree to consider only a few dozen of them in full. Most of the time, these cases are selected to resolve one specific question of law at a time—a question that’s often of significant public interest, serious legal interest, or both. A pending petition out of Colorado, however, gives the justices a two-for-one shot on vital legal issues: the First Amendment right to film the police... Читать дальше...

Twenty-five years ago, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act into law, following through on his campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” He turned the Aid to Families with Dependent Children system, with its entitlement of cash assistance, into a miserly program bound tightly by reams of red tape, now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The law was deeply divisive among Democrats and the party base—half of Democrats in Congress voted against it... Читать дальше...