Новости за 03.03.2022

This week, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP announced they would step back from their longstanding business helping pump the products that make up 40 percent of Russia’s federal budget. Exxon was the latest, announcing on Tuesday that it would exit the oil and gas production facilities in Far East Sakhalin that it manages with the state-backed firm Rosneft, and end any future investments in the country amid escalating sanctions following its invasion of Ukraine.

Joe Biden was confident. “This, in fact, is the beginning of another 50 years of peace,” he declared while serving as ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1998. The Delaware Democrat was proud of his role in helping the bipartisan congressional vote to approve the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as full NATO members.

In an era defined by climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, one apocalyptic potential fell off many Americans’ radars: nuclear weapons. But in the bitter February twilight, Russian President Vladimir Putin put them squarely back in the center of discourse when he invaded Ukraine—and appeared to threaten anyone who intervened with radioactive retribution.

It’s debatable whether the twentieth century was in fact the century of the self, as an influential documentary had it, but there’s little question that the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a bout of acute self-isolation—which, at least in the consumer cultures of the West, opened on to a predictable turn toward self-involvement. Even amid the overlapping derangements of Trumpism, vaccine denialism, and racialized political impunity, a pronounced, if in large part involuntary, strain of domestic inwardness held fast. Читать дальше...

“I’m a capitalist,” President Joe Biden said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, “but capitalism without competition is not capitalism. Capitalism without competition is exploitation. It drives up profits.”

Last month, a non-fungible token, or NFT, collector who goes by the pseudonymous Twitter handle @punk6529 posted a 56-part Twitter thread that ripped through the crypto world with viral intensity. Writing in response to the Canadian government’s decision to obstruct bitcoin transactions by members of the trucker convoy occupying Ottawa, punk6529 began with a stern pronouncement: “There are no other constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact.” What followed was a lengthy explication... Читать дальше...

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Monday in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, a case with potentially huge implications for U.S. climate policy. A coalition of energy companies and Republican-led states wants the justices to strike down the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by ruling that Congress didn’t explicitly grant the agency that power in the first place. That, in turn, would kneecap both U.S. and international efforts to limit carbon emissions.... Читать дальше...

In the days before Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Fox News’s biggest star insisted that the brewing conflict was no big deal. And in a series of monologues done with his trademark condescension, Tucker Carlson insisted that Russia was in the right and Ukraine in the wrong—or, at the very least, there was no discernible moral difference between a flawed democracy and the autocracy poised to invade it.

Twenty-eight years ago, Justice Stephen Breyer was confirmed to the Supreme Court by an 87–9 vote. Most Republicans, including Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley, voted to confirm Breyer, whose nomination had been shepherded through the Senate Judiciary Committee by then-Senator Joe Biden.