Новости за 23.11.2021

President Joe Biden has notched two legislative victories in November, with the House last week passing the Build Back Better Act, his massive social spending, tax and climate bill, and approving a bipartisan bill aimed at revamping the nation’s crumbling infrastructure earlier this month. Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA, in a triumphant ceremony last week, heralding a bipartisan victory that will infuse $550 billion over a decade in new spending for the nation’s roads, bridges, ports and transportation. Читать дальше...

Sharletta Evans lost her three-year-old son in a hail of bullets one torturous December evening in 1995. The Colorado mother had pulled her car up in front of a northeast Denver house, intending to dash inside to pick up her niece’s baby girl, to bring her out of harm’s way. Gunfire on the street the night before had frightened everyone in the house.

When Lionel Trilling dismissed America’s conservative intellectual tradition as a series of “irritable mental gestures,” it’s a safe bet that he had people like Robert Welch in mind. Welch, the irascible candy executive who founded the John Birch Society, spent an enormous amount of time and energy lovingly crafting irritable gestures in the minds of his hard-right acolytes, from the conviction that the New Deal was a Communist plot to the claim that Dwight D. Eisenhower was also a Communist. Over time... Читать дальше...

According to various surveys, the cost of raising a child in the United States during their first year on this planet ranges from a median of $6,000 to $12,000. That’s after the baby is born—one study found that even for those with health insurance, being pregnant and then giving birth by C-section costs, on average, more than $5,000 (a vaginal birth is slightly cheaper). It’s the depressing reality that in the U.S., a baby, much like a college education, can equal a crippling financial burden. Читать дальше...

Last year, the advice was simple, even if it was difficult to take: It was too dangerous to have a normal Thanksgiving. Instead, many of us bunkered down—we celebrated with our pods or we stayed home with our immediate families. The decision, though grim, was pretty black and white: Gathering outside of our households could present serious, even deadly risks to ourselves and others.