Новости за 25.05.2022

Dear Victims of the Next School Shooting,

Let me first say how sorry I am for your untimely future death. Were I able to prevent your slaughter by an emotionally disturbed young male with a history of rejection, I would. But I can’t. Even if I were to know who and where you’ll be on the day you’re marked to die, I couldn’t likely help you. I’d try to do something, of course, but probably it wouldn’t help. When that emotionally disturbed young male arrives at your school with a gun, you’ll just have to take one for the team. Читать дальше...

There is something nauseating about the familiarity of the aftermath of mass shootings—a wretched feeling that’s been amplified by the slaughter of 19 fourth graders and two teachers in Texas on Tuesday. Eleven days ago, a racist teenager walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and murdered 10 shoppers and employees; a day later, a man walked into a Taiwanese church in Southern California and shot six, killing one. The grim list tracks back beyond recent history: Parkland was four years ago... Читать дальше...

Tuesday’s tragic massacre at a Texas elementary school brought gun control back to the forefront of American politics. It also drew renewed attention to a Supreme Court case where the justices will likely chart the first major expansion of the Second Amendment’s protections in more than a decade. How the court decides that case could upend whatever steps lawmakers take to address this tragedy—and the broader crisis of gun violence that it represents.

How far does an incumbent Democrat have to go to lose the endorsement of their party’s leadership? That’s the question everyone should be asking as Henry Cuellar clings to his razor-thin margin in the Democratic primary runoff election in South Texas.

As long as I have been working on Haiti, I have been forced to respond to friends and acquaintances who come up to me and ask, in true concern, “Why is Haiti like that?” And for just as long, I’ve had to explain about the debt Haiti paid to France over almost its entire history as a free republic, and how that changed the course of Haitian history, destroyed the country’s young economy, and put it for more than a century on a much weaker footing compared to the rest of the countries of the Caribbean and Latin America. Читать дальше...

Voters don’t care enough about climate, according to conventional wisdom. The best way to address climate change is for Democrats to win elections by talking about other subjects, consultants say. The problem with this political advice is that Democratic politicians, acting on the insight that voters don’t care, get into office and then don’t set a high priority on climate policy—because they want to be reelected.