Новости за 12.07.2023

Fox already shelled out $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit to avoid further interrogation into its ranks—and now it’s being sued for defamation once again.

FBI Director Christopher Wray had a simple response for Republicans who insisted that Americans think the bureau has become far too politicized: applicants for FBI jobs from their states are up. A lot.

The Ku Klux Klan has been posting flyers all over Kentucky since March, a frightening sign of how emboldened the far right is becoming.

California Representative Ted Lieu thoroughly debunked the Republican talking point that the FBI has been weaponized against them by pointing out the obvious: The Trump administration was already packed with “criminals.”

On the surface, the connection between Mark Penn and the No Labels political group is minimal. Penn himself says it’s nonexistent. The longtime Democratic strategist who established himself as a top adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton before he was exiled from Clinton world is married to Nancy Jacobson, the activist and CEO of No Labels. That seems to be it.

Last month, Reuters published an investigation into how much of America’s political elite had ancestral ties to slaveholders. Its reporters found that “a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.” That includes more than a quarter of the U.S. Senate, two Supreme Court justices, and every living president except Donald Trump, whose German and Scottish ancestors emigrated to the United States after the Civil War. Читать дальше...

It’s a big club and still, you most certainly are not in it.

An array of high rolling lawyers with cases before the Supreme Court paid money to one of Justice Clarence Thomas’s top aides through Venmo. The Guardian reports that these lawyers have done everything from successfully arguing against affirmative action, to leading the charge to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to, well, protect the environment.

These top lawyers appeared to be paying for exclusive... Читать дальше...

If a writer lives long enough, they get a chance to glimpse their legacy in advance. Decorated with awards and lifetime achievements, they appear regularly on “best of the century” lists and see their work elevated to “classic” status. This is the kind of near-posterity that can be achieved in one’s lifetime. But literary afterlives are precarious, and a writer who might have departed with a fighting chance at permanence can find themselves quickly eclipsed. Who would have predicted, for instance... Читать дальше...

Iowa Republicans passed a bill banning abortion after six weeks, an extreme move that could tip the state for Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election.

A paradox of Bidenomics is that it’s been more beneficial to red (predominantly Republican) states than to blue (predominantly Democratic) ones. This might perhaps help explain why Biden’s approval rating among Democrats has fallen to 78 percent, but it flatly contradicts Biden’s downward approval rating among Republicans to 5 percent.

Greta Thunberg, who might be the most famous climate activist in the world, was just 15 in 2018 when she began sitting outside of the Swedish parliament building on schooldays to protest the government’s inaction on climate change. Thunberg’s actions inspired a global youth-driven movement called Fridays for Future and dovetailed with a wave of other youth-driven climate gestures. The next year, amid a roar of publicity around kids’ newly charged activism in confronting the climate crisis, Thunberg was named TIME’s Person of the Year. Читать дальше...

Minutes after midnight on December 2, 1984, a heavy, colorless, putrid gas spread over the neighborhoods surrounding Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Thousands died immediately, overtaken by coughing fits and choking to death. Tens of thousands more woke up weak of breath and frothing at the mouth, their eyes severely irritated. By some estimates, as many as 10,000 people died in the first few days after the disaster, frequently termed the “worst industrial accident in history,”... Читать дальше...

The second Tuesday in August is not the ideal time for a vote on an important ballot initiative. Indeed, the Ohio state legislature earlier this year eliminated most August elections, citing high costs and low voter participation. However, those considerations did not prevent Republican state lawmakers from scheduling an August election that could make it more difficult for Ohioans to change the state constitution—just months before a vote on a proposed amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state. Читать дальше...

Donald Trump just lost another big fight in his ongoing legal troubles.

Hundreds of people gathered Tuesday at the Iowa state Capitol to protest a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks, targeting people before they even know they are pregnant.