Новости за 20.12.2021

Democrats have been forced back to the drawing board after Senator Joe Manchin announced on Sunday that he could not support the current version of the Build Back Better Act, President Biden’s signature legislation investing in childcare, health care, and combating climate change.

Going into Monday morning, the Biden White House and Senator Joe Manchin had to face two overarching facts. One is the red-hot frustration—and worse—the Biden administration feels toward Manchin, and the anger Manchin feels toward the Biden team. The second fact is that the two parties still need to work together.

’Tis the season to rehash one of the most famous medical mysteries of canonical literature, plucked from the pages of what must be one of the most lucrative pieces of noncopyrighted source material of all time: the tragic life and death (and, ultimately, redemptive resurrection) of Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

When Silicon Valley premiered on HBO in 2014, people said one of its main characters, Peter Gregory, had to be Peter Thiel. On the show, Gregory is a famous venture capitalist who gives a ragtag crew of developers their first seed funding. Socially graceless and often inscrutable, in one episode he keeps panicked founders waiting to hear whether he will grant them a $15 million bridge loan. He stares at a stack of burger buns while ruminating on the life cycles of cicadas in Myanmar and Brazil... Читать дальше...

Last week, the White House admitted that the Build Back Better Act—Joe Biden’s signature legislative agenda—is not going to pass this year. On Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin announced that he will not vote for the bill. All signs, at this point, suggest that the bill is dead. And given the cuts it’s already endured at the hands of a handful of centrist Democrats, who helped lob off more than $4 trillion dollars, whatever might eventually pass will likely be even smaller than the meagre $1.7 trillion bill that got through the House in November. Читать дальше...

There was perhaps no one better than Cornelius H. Muller—one of twentieth-century America’s most notable oak fanatics—to document the continent’s most mysterious oak trees. In July 1932, the horseback-riding botanist first encountered Quercus tardifolia while collecting samples in the steep-cut canyons of Texas’s Big Bend National Park. Muller jotted down details of the twigs (slender, somewhat fluted), buds (hairy at the tip), leaves (dull blue-green), and branches (short, stiff). He anointed... Читать дальше...