Новости за 17.03.2023

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last week after a massive bank run, spurred in large part by billionaire investor and GOP donor Peter Thiel. Such a collapse could have perhaps been avoided had the massive bank been subject to higher regulation and scrutiny. But not according to the Democratic senators who helped deregulate the financial industry.

Texas Republican lawmakers are under fire for a bill that would ban students from China and three other countries from all public colleges and universities in the state, with many calling the measure racist and xenophobic.

Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson is surging. Polls are tightening. A broad coalition of labor, women’s rights, and LGBTQ advocacy groups are throwing their support behind Johnson. And this week, he has earned endorsements from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Representative and Democratic kingmaker Jim Clyburn, and Representative and former opponent Chuy Garcia.

YouTube restored former President Donald Trump’s channel on Friday, two years after he used it to help incite the January 6 insurrection.

Abortion rights played a major role in last year’s midterm elections, blunting GOP momentum in some key congressional races and helping Democrats hold governorships and state legislatures in battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. That trend shows no sign of abating in 2023. In Wisconsin, where control of the state Supreme Court is up for grabs this year, the liberal and conservative candidates are defining themselves almost entirely based on the issue.

In the last week, the Biden administration has elaborated on its shaky and ever-evolving approach to energy policy. At a confab for oil and gas executives last week, Cabinet members raised the possibility that fossil fuel CEOs could be “visionary leaders” in the fight against climate change. Days later, the administration handed the industry a giant bone: approving ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion Willow project in Alaska. At the same time, the administration announced it would close off an additional 16 million acres there to new drilling. Читать дальше...

In A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf’s brief collection of autobiographical writing, she remarks, of the failures of memoir: “They say this is what happened, but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened.” Strangers who had died were the easiest for her to conjure and to sketch out for a reader. To describe her mother, who died when Woolf was 13, long felt impossible. Woolf had the feeling “of living so completely in her atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as a person.” She was so “central... Читать дальше...

It’s a tough week to be an environmentalist, or really any person concerned about the future.

Here are some recent headlines from U.S. newspapers concerning developments in Xi Jinping’s China, putatively America’s foremost adversary on the world stage: “STIFLED BY XI, DISSENT ROARS BACK TO LIFE”; “ANTI-LOCKDOWN PROTESTS CALL FOR XI TO RESIGN”; “XI JINPING APPROACHES MULTIPLE POINTS OF NO RETURN”; “A WITNESS TO MAO SEES WORRYING SIMILARITIES IN THE ERA OF XI”; “XI’S CHALLENGE: HOW TO MOURN PREDECESSOR”; “BEIJING’S BARGAIN WITH ITS PEOPLE IS SHAKEN..”

A Florida Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill to restrict sex education in public schools that would also prohibit younger students from discussing their periods with school officials.

On Thursday, a BNSF train derailed on the Swinomish reservation in Washington state, spilling some 5,000 gallons of diesel. No one appears hurt after the derailment. But it only adds to the over 1,000 derailments that happen every year in America–any of which could turn into the next East Palestine, as lax rules allow toxic trains to move sans regulation and corporations continue making trains longer and crews smaller.