Новости за 22.09.2021

In March 2020, the Trump administration effectively closed the border, citing the Covid-19 pandemic in order to invoke Title 42, a little-used public health provision in the U.S. code. It quickly became clear that this was not, in fact, necessary to combat the pandemic—it was a pretext to enact the twisted white nationalist fantasies animating the president’s immigration policies. Trump adviser Stephen Miller, The New York Times reported last year, had “suggested using the president’s public health... Читать дальше...

Of the set of lawmakers working to slow down or completely stop progress on the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, almost no one is more famous—or infamous—than Senator Kyrsten Sinema. The Arizona Democrat has styled herself as a moderate and underscored that position by vowing to oppose the reconciliation bill at its current $3.5 trillion price tag.

For most of the last 30 years, it’s been Republicans who have charted Nevada’s political destiny. The GOP won every governor’s election from 1998 until 2018 and usually controlled the state Senate. In the 2000s, the state went to George W. Bush twice, albeit by a few percentage points. Then, three years ago, Nevada Democrats did something remarkable.

The Biden administration’s decision Monday to issue a regulation that limits workers’ exposure to extreme heat didn’t come soon enough to save the life of Sebastian Francisco Perez. Perez was a 38-year-old agricultural worker from Guatemala making not quite $12 an hour in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. On an afternoon in late June, Perez was hauling irrigation pipes in 106-degree heat—part of a heat wave that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called “astounding”—when he collapsed and died from heat exposure. Читать дальше...

In his 1995 essay The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, the radical historian Mike Davis references a story published several years earlier in The Malibu Times. The article details the pluck of two local housewives who escaped the ravenous 1993 Old Topanga Fire on kayaks, towing their little dogs along with them. Davis, as always, digs deeper. “Only the fine print revealed that, in saving their pets, they had left their Latina maids behind,” he writes.

The Washington Post published an op-ed over the weekend by Alan Braid, a Texas doctor who said that he had performed an abortion earlier this month in violation of a state law that effectively banned the procedure after six weeks. Braid explained that he began practicing medicine one year before the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, a span in which he said he saw three teenagers die from illegal abortions, and that he could not stand by as the ruling was all but overturned in Texas through the high court’s inaction. Читать дальше...

“Sex,” the philosopher Amia Srinivasan reminds us, “isn’t a sandwich.” Here she responds to Rebecca Solnit, who in her 2009 essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” argued against the misogynist claim that lonely, sex-starved men are being “oppressed” by women who refuse to sleep with them. “You don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you,” wrote Solnit, “and that’s not a form of oppression.” This is certainly true, Srinivasan agrees. But, she asks, what if... Читать дальше...

On Tuesday, Biden delivered his first address to the United Nations; its unstated aim was to reassure increasingly dubious allies and continue to make the argument he made early in his presidency: “America is back.” For the president, his maiden address before the international body was framed by a pair of foreign policy crises—the chaotic, high-stakes pull-out from Afghanistan and the ongoing, very French freakout over a deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. But one criticism has been lobbed at Joe Biden again and again... Читать дальше...