Новости за 23.06.2022

The Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. This outcome is the culmination of five decades of fervent activism and mobilization at the polls, which begat a stacked federal bench of conservative judges and state legislatures brimming with lawmakers willing to outlaw abortion. But while abortion opponents have cultivated a movement that became central to the Republican Party and its victories, Democrats—particularly on the federal level—appear to have been caught off guard by the slow but inexorable progress of that cause. Читать дальше...

Justice Clarence Thomas spent the last few years claiming that the Supreme Court was treating the Second Amendment like a “second-class right.” He thundered against his colleagues for refusing to take up cases in which the lower courts had narrowly interpreted the right to keep and bear arms. And he awaited the day when he could correct what he saw as a grievous oversight by the court on the constitutional scope of gun rights.

I never cared for Cream or Eric Clapton’s songs,
Though his guitar can break my heart, as it does on “Layla,”
Only not because of the song. Susan and I went to the wedding
Of a friend whose name I can’t remember, and her fiancé

Butchie, in a picture-perfect church I still remember on Cape Cod.
There were pews and vows, tuxedoes and a wedding gown
As they came skipping down the church steps, beaming, with a bouquet
Held aloft and “Layla” chiming like a hymn of celebration in the background... Читать дальше...

Apparitions or injustice? Assassins or illusion?
The moment cannot be clear. I’m a late
remnant of that crowd bewildered at the dock.
An island for a continent. How strange.

It’s supposed to be solemn and settled
And in celebration of the individual human life,
Whatever it is. It’s each of us of course,
And yet the view we have of it is so oblique
It might as well be one of nobody at all,
Or of a vague interior with a figure in a room
Who could be anyone. This sense that it’s so close
It must be you: what do we really know of it,
And how could anything that simple be that real?
We would be kings of our domains, alone in majesty
“Above... Читать дальше...

Around midnight on May 19, 1990, a 15-year-old boy named Recco Rogers was shot fatally on the front steps of a friend’s house at 5607 Labadie Avenue, in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood of St. Louis. An enclave of modest brick homes and apartment houses seven miles northwest of downtown, Wells-Goodfellow was first settled around the time of the Civil War. It thrived alongside nearby factories during the early twentieth century and, like other areas in and around North St. Louis, including Ferguson, declined after World War II. Читать дальше...