Новости за 21.10.2022

An estimated 1.4 million people have been displaced by recent flooding in Nigeria. Wrap your mind around that number for a second. For comparison: In the United States, in 2005, an estimated 1.5 million people in Gulf states evacuated ahead of Hurricane Katrina—considered the largest climate displacement event since the Dust Bowl—but many of those were able to return home after a few days, leaving about 600,000 displaced a month later. That was a monumental disaster. Yet Nigeria’s flooding may... Читать дальше...

If you’re a payday lender or a shady mortgage broker, you are probably having a pretty good week. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency tasked with enforcing consumer finance laws, is unconstitutional. A three-judge panel of Trump appointees found in Community Financial Services v. CFPB that the agency’s funding structure violated the constitutional separation of powers.

The resignation of Liz Truss as prime minister marks the end of an epoch in Anglo-American politics. For the first time in modern memory, a conservative leader has been made to resign because she cut taxes and didn’t show how she’d make up the difference in lost revenue. Dare we conclude that the 41-year reign of Reaganomics is over?

Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, has been putting in the days and miles on the campaign trail of late. By the time I caught up with her, she was on the third state of a lengthy swing across the Western part of the United States, campaigning for candidates who support abortion rights. We spoke at a phone bank event in Phoenix, tucked away in a side office stacked with Democratic paraphernalia.

J.R. Majewski

“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule,” author and naturalist Michael Pollan once wrote in The New York Times. Tell that to the Ohio congressional candidate J.R. Majewski, who went viral in July 2020 after he painted his 19,000-square-foot front lawn to look like a Trump 2020 banner. Majewski appeared on Fox News in a QAnon T-shirt to show off the lawn art, Trump thanked him in a tweet, and Majewski returned the favor by storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Less than four months later... Читать дальше...

“Romantic” is one of those words that has traveled so far from its original meaning, and been used in so many different contexts, that by now it seems to mean almost anything. Keats’s Odes and “Roses are red, violets are blue” on a Valentine’s Day card can both be described as romantic poetry. In the fourteenth century, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was called a romance; in the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne used the same term for The House of the Seven Gables; today, you’ll find Fifty... Читать дальше...