Новости за 24.02.2022

Wednesday night, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. In scenes reminiscent of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and the American “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq, modern cities across Ukraine were enveloped in explosions and smoke plumes from missile and rocket attacks. It is an unmitigated tragedy and one that will likely cause grievous and needless suffering for the Ukrainian people, who have done nothing to deserve their current fate.

Absent any context, a gas tax holiday would seem like a no-brainer policy to implement. Gas is expensive, and oil prices have recently spiked as Russia escalates its conflict with Ukraine. The rising costs have come as American families face other economic pressures, including persistent inflation at its highest rate in decades. For a president struggling with low approval ratings, and a tenuous Democratic majority in Congress bracing for significant losses in the upcoming midterm elections, cutting... Читать дальше...

Almost a year after Trump was elected president of the United States, I joined the good news industry. That is to say, I took a job at a publication whose mission was finding and amplifying not the seemingly ubiquitous signs of civilizational crisis, but instead positive news stories about climate change.

Before the sun was up one misty morning in mid-January, Joshlyn Caldwell, age 51, roused the five unhoused people she let sleep in her north Houston apartment—a man, a woman, and a young family of three. The men helped Joshlyn, who has been disabled since a 2010 car accident, limp down the stairs from the second story, and everyone piled into her dark gray SUV, arriving a little before 9 a.m. at the Beacon, a nonprofit downtown that connects people to homeless service providers across the city. Читать дальше...

A moderately successful true crime writer moves to the small city of Milpitas, California, to research a possibly satanic double homicide that occurred there in the 1980s. In fact, he has moved into the onetime porn store in which a realtor and her client were butchered with a two-handed broadsword, and as the novel progresses, he moves from research to resurrection, attempting to recreate the building as it had been on the night of the murders.

It’s been a busy few years for the Constitution. Nearly every clause and section has become suddenly relevant once more, including the parts that were moribund for decades or were largely noncontroversial before now. There have been lawsuits to enforce the Emoluments Clause, heated debates over the scope of the Pardon Clause, existential questions raised over the Electoral College’s mechanisms, and even a Third Amendment challenge to Covid-19 public health measures.