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cartergramiak

In 2020, the Suburbs Are Stressed - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In 2020, however, politics have disrupted this sense of calm. The suburbs are shifting in both their racial and political makeup. Lawns are packed with campaign signs, leaving no doubt where residents stand in the presidential contest.
  • In Lakeville, about 25 miles south of Minneapolis, local Democrats set up a pop-up shop to distribute campaign signs. Lorraine Rovig, 72, drove an hour round trip from her home in Northfield because she couldn’t wait for the roving distribution site to come to her.
  • “I don’t remember this nastiness in any other election,” she said. “I thought, What can I do? I can encourage people and let them know they are not alone. The quiet Democratic people are out here, too.”
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  • While Mr. Kelly voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, his adult children remained dedicated Democrats. That changed, however, with the unrest over the summer. #notifications-inline { font-family: nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; min-height: 111px; margin: 40px auto; scroll-margin-top: 80px; max-width: 600px; width: 100%; border-top: 1px solid #e2e2e2; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2; padding: 20px 0; } .Hybrid #notifications-inline { max-width: calc(100% - 40px); } #notifications-inline h2 { font-size: 1.125rem; font-weight: 700; flex-shrink: 0; margin-bottom: 0.5em; } #notifications-inline .styln-signup-wrapper { margin-top: 20px; max-width: 400px; } @media screen and (min-width: 768px) { #notifications-inline { min-height: 90px; } #notifications-inline .main-notification-container { align-items: center; } #notifications-inline .notification-stack { display: flex; } #notifications-inline .notification-stack > div:not(:first-child) .styln-signup-wrapper { padding-left: 20px; margin-left: 20px; border-left: 1px solid #e2e2e2; } #notifications-inline .notification-stack > div .styln-signup-wrapper { display: flex; position: relative; } #notifications-inline .notification-stack > div .styln-signup-wrapper .signup-error { position: absolute; bottom: 0; left: 20px; transform: translateY(100%); } #notifications-inline .notification-stack > div:first-child .styln-signup-wrapper .signup-error { position: absolute; left: 0; } #notifications-inline .notification-stack > div { display: flex; } #notifications-inline .styln-signup-wrapper { margin-top: 13px; } }
  • “It feels as though we are being forced to choose between the lesser of two evils,” Mr. Kelly said. He will be voting again for Mr. Trump and will be joined by his children this year.
  • Winning Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes has been a priority for Democrats since Mr. Trump’s narrow victory there in 2016. Outside the Ozaukee Democrats office, James Quick, 58, said that people who sat out that election were now energized by anti-Trump sentiment. The suburbs of Milwaukee, however, remain split between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden.
  • Mayor Shawn Reilly of Waukesha, a Republican, has become more outspoken about his views. He did not vote for Mr. Trump in 2016, he said, and he won’t this time either. He said a billboard near Lake Mills that simply says “ENOUGH” resonates with him.
  • When Conor Lamb, a Democrat, won a special election in 2018 to represent a Pittsburgh-area district in Congress, his party saw how crucial suburban support could be.
  • The front lawn of Bobbi Bauer’s two-story brick home in Elizabeth Township, about 20 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, is decorated with rose bushes, small American flags and a giant Trump banner stretched across her white garage. She runs a day care at her home, and her clients have a mix of party affiliations.
martinelligi

Hundreds Of Iowa Polling Places Shuttered Due To COVID-19 : NPR - 0 views

  • Philadelphia, still on edge following days of protests and unrest that engulfed the city in response to the police killing of a 27-year-old Black man, Walter Wallace Jr., experienced a relatively quiet night Wednesday.
  • it will be an extraordinary and rare step for the Philadelphia Police Department to take.
  • Police said earlier this week that Walter Wallace was armed with a knife and "advanced toward officers." When he did not drop the weapon, two officers fired at him several times, according to law enforcement.
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  • Wallace was experiencing a psychological episode on Monday, according to a family attorney. His mother attempted to calm him, the lawyer said, but was unable to and called 911 for an ambulance. But the police arrived first.
  • "As Black Lives Matter protests demanding justice for Walter Wallace Jr. will likely converge with demonstrations related to the elections, Philadelphia's history of using tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray against its own citizens also looms large," according to a statement from the council.
  • The Philadelphia City Council on Thursday approved a measure that would bar the use of non-lethal crowd dispersal tactics, including the use of rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray on those peacefully protesting.
  • This spring, the pandemic prompted unprecedented polling place consolidations during the primaries in jurisdictions across the U.S., sparking an outcry over images of voters standing in hours-long lines in places such as Milwaukee and Atlanta. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for election administrators to "maintain or increase the total number of polling places available to the public on Election Day to improve the ability to social distance." The guidance also says to avoid increasing the number of potential registered voters assigned to each polling place "unless there is no other option."
  • Everything about the act of voting in 2020 has been shaken by COVID-19. A record number of ballots have been cast early, either by mail or in person. All over the country, sports teams are turning over their arenas to be used as large-scale, socially distanced polling places.
  • Iowa voters won't be able to cast their ballot at any of those polling places this Election Day because of hundreds of closures and consolidations that have rippled across the state due to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • "I'm certain that it's going to make it harder for people to vote. But I am seeing a resolve right now, where people are determined," Brown said. "Whatever you do, we're going to counteract it."
hannahcarter11

Japan's New Leader Sets Goal of Being Carbon Neutral by 2050 - The New York Times - 0 views

    • hannahcarter11
       
      Even if they're just doing this in competition, whatever it takes to clean up the planet!
  • Achieving that goal will be good not only for the world, he said, but also for Japan’s economy and global standing
  • Taking an aggressive approach to global warming will bring about a transformation in our industrial structure and economic system that will lead to big growth
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  • major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees
  • Japan is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It had previously said it would go carbon neutral “at the earliest possible date,” vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 205
  • Joseph R. Biden Jr., his challenger in the presidential election, has vowed to restore the United States’ participation in the accord.
  • reinforced just how much of an outlier the United States, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter
  • decision was most likely driven by a combination of domestic and external political pressures
  • As a developed nation, Mr. Kuramochi said, it would be “somewhat embarrassing for Japan to have a net zero emissions timeline later than China.”
  • he would harness the power of “innovation” and “regulatory reform” to transform the country’s energy production and usage
  • The country has made steady progress in reducing its emissions, but still generated 1.06 billion tons of the gas in the one-year period that ended in March 2019, placing it among the top 10 per capita emitters
  • By the early 2000s, Japan had made substantial progress in curbing carbon dioxide emissions through the use of nuclear power. But the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in Fukushima after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011 led to a widespread shutdown of the country’s energy-producing reactors, which had generated roughly a third of Japan’s total power supply. Only a handful of the plants have since restarted.
  • Short on energy sources, Japan decided to reinvest in coal.
  • Japan currently plans to reduce — but not eliminate — its dependence on coa
  • The country has also vowed to end contentious government subsidies for the export of coal-fired power technology to developing nations, where the use of coal for electricity continues to rise
  • Further efforts to decrease Japan’s domestic commitment to coal will likely meet powerful resistance from Japanese industry, which is still heavily dependent on the fuel
  • Japan is already considering a substantial increase in its supply of wind and solar power, and it is also looking at newer, less-established technologies, such as plants that burn ammonia or hydrogen.
  • Mr. Suga said that Japan would continue to develop nuclear power with “maximum priority on safety,”
  • Movement toward the new goal had already started on the local level, where 150 municipal governments have pledged to be carbon neutral by midcentury.
  • But even if Japan achieves its goal, it will not by itself be enough to halt or even slow the current trend of global warming, a goal that requires a global effort
  • Preventing a climate catastrophe will require “a transformation of the energy system that has underwritten modern society,”
  • Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said on Monday
  • The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan’s regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060.
clairemann

Missing From Supreme Court's Election Cases: Reasons for Its Rulings - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “shadow docket” without a murmur of explanation.
  • Or perhaps “rulings” is too generous a word for those unsigned orders,
  • “This idea of unexplained, unreasoned court orders seems so contrary to what courts are supposed to be all about,”
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  • “If courts don’t have to defend their decisions, then they’re just acts of will, of power. They’re not even pretending to be legal decisions.”
    • clairemann
       
      an issue many worry about
  • On that docket — the “merits docket” — the court ordinarily agrees to hear about 1 percent of the petitions asking it to intercede. In its last term, it decided just 53 merits cases.
  • “The political branches of government claim legitimacy by election, judges by reason,” he wrote. “Any step that withdraws an element of the judicial process from public view makes the ensuing decision look more like fiat, which requires compelling justification.”
    • clairemann
       
      another argument in allowing the next president to nominate
  • The Trump administration has been a major contributor to the trend, Professor Vladeck wrote, having filed 36 emergency applications in its first three and a half years.
  • Lower courts have struggled to make sense of the court’s orders, which are something less than precedents but nonetheless cannot be ignored by responsible judges.
  • One is that Republicans tend to win.
  • “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”
  • A trial judge refused to block it, but, about a month before the 2006 general election, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an injunction forbidding state officials to enforce it.
  • “The Purcell principle,” he wrote, is “the idea that courts should not issue orders which change election rules in the period just before the election.”
  • “No one can read Purcell itself and think it created the doctrine that it now has been transformed into by the Supreme Court.”
  • “bolster the legitimacy of the court in the eyes of the public, something especially important in controversial cases, such as election cases.” And they “may also discipline justices into deciding similar cases alike, regardless of the identity of the parties.”
aleija

Young and Jobless in Europe: 'It's Been Desperate' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Her job as a personal assistant at a London architecture firm, where she had worked for two years, was eliminated in September, leaving her looking for work of any kind.
  • After scores of rejections, and even being wait-listed for a food delivery gig at Deliveroo, she finally landed a two-month contract at a family-aid charity that pays 10 pounds (about $13) an hour.
  • “At the moment I will take anything I can get,” Ms. Lee said. “It’s been desperate.”
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  • The jobless rate for people 25 and under jumped from 14.7 percent in January to 17.6 percent in August, its highest level since 2017.
  • But in Europe, the pandemic’s economic impact puts an entire generation at risk, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
  • Graduates are facing unprecedented competition for even entry-level positions from a tsunami of newly laid-off workers.
  • The scarring effects may linger. “If you’re unemployed earlier on in your career, you’re more likely to experience joblessness in the future,” said Neal Kilbane, a senior economist at Oxford Economics.
  • Many are resorting to internships, living with parents or returning to school to ride out the storm. Young workers without higher education risk sliding even further.
  • Ms. Davis recently took a four-week gig conducting surveys for a car company. It pays Britain’s minimum wage of £8.20 an hour.
  • The work leaves her with less time to push out job applications, and she wonders when she will get an opportunity to start a career in occupational psychology.
  • “I have energy, and I know how to roll up my sleeves at any sort of job,” Mr. Palumbo said. “But everything is stuck, and my hands are tied.”
  • To earn extra cash, she babysits occasionally and would tend bar at night if she could. But her current workload leaves her exhausted with little time to spare.
dytonka

US Election: Coronavirus looms over vice presidential debate as Pence and Harris quarre... - 1 views

shared by dytonka on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
    • dytonka
       
      False, Biden's raising tax on the top 1%.
  • In the opening minutes of the debate, Harris -- 12 feet from Pence and shielded by plexiglass --delivered a swift condemnation of the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, noting that some 210,000 people have died and more than 7.5 million people have contracted the disease.
  • Harris argued that because the election is underway, Republicans should not attempt to confirm a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Trump has nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who appears to have a clear path to the seat if Republicans can hew to their scheduled timeline of confirming her by the end of the year.
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  • He also attacked Biden's economic policies, and said that he would raise taxes on working Americans that would harm the nation's economic recovery.
anonymous

2016 Nonvoters, a Key Prize for Biden and Trump, Turn Out in Droves - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In Pennsylvania and other battlegrounds, both parties are succeeding in coaxing infrequent voters off the sidelines. The all-important question is who does it better.
  • I’m petrified of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi getting power and doing all this stuff that’s going to totally destroy the economy,”
  • secret weapon,
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  • Mr. Walsh called polls showing the president trailing “a joke,” adding, “He will do nothing but gain in the areas he won last time.”
  • About one in four of the 1.3 million registered Democrats who have voted did not vote in 2016.
  • But that is partly because Mr. Trump has made mail-in ballots toxic to many of his supporters through his frequent (and unfounded) claims that mail voting is ripe for fraud.
  • Although it is impossible to know how a person voted, the voter file unlocks a trove of information, including a voter’s age, race, sex and history of past voting. In states without partisan registration, the firm models voters’ likely party preference based on other information.
  • The Biden campaign said that Mr. Trump’s share of voters has not grown even if he is turning out new supporters.
  • showed Mr. Biden with a seven-point lead over Mr. Trump. Pennsylvania’s districts were redrawn two years ago; Mr. Trump lost the equivalent of the new Seventh District to Mrs. Clinton by one percentage point.
  • Ms. Sanchez had to work last week during the final debate, but she plans to catch up with a recording. Depending on what she sees, she said, she will make up her mind about whether to cast a ballot or not.
clairemann

Why Joe Biden Is Bullish in Battleground Michigan  | Time - 0 views

  • Trump spent most of 2016 in a one-way fight with Detroit’s automakers. He hammered them for moving jobs to Mexico and for shuttering iconic factories that were long linked to Detroit’s core identity.
  • Republicans a slim win in the state for the first time since George H.W. Bush carried it in 1988.
  • Four years later, Michigan’s economy has, quite simply, not seen the promised benefits of a Trump presidency. Despite Trump’s rhetoric that America’s Black voters had nothing to lose by backing him, racial disparity in the state is still staggeringly deep.
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  • Blacks are six times more likely than whites to live in economically distressed areas in this state.
  • Among the 12 Michigan counties that went from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, these disparities are getting worse by a two-to-one margin, according to one study out just this week
  • Michigan’s manufacturing legacy is still a point of pride for the state’s residents and a source of near-nostalgia for voters who remember when General Motors’ 2.1-million-square foot plant in Warren provided a lifetime gig with tremendous benefits.
  • During the primary in 2016, Trump visited Warren for a boisterous rally, promising harsh tariffs for automakers taking parts of their business abroad. “You’re going to pay a 35% tax every time you ship a car, truck or part into the United States,”
  • He handily won the state’s primary a few days later. He’d repeat the victory eight months later against Clinton.
  • Voters there should brace for more rosy talk about a roaring economy and revitalized auto industry — despite Michigan having 4,700 fewer jobs in the auto industry than when Trump took office. That’s almost a 12% dip.
  • Michigan’s economy as a whole is in trouble, too. Sixteen percent of Michiganders live in economically depressed areas, outpacing every state in the region but Ohio
  • Of the 60 surveys included in Real Clear Politics’ polling universe, Trump has led in just four, and they’re all from the same Republican-leaning pollster. At this point, Biden’s advantage in Michigan — up 6.5 percentage points — is roughly twice as strong as Clinton’s final polling standing before she lost the state by less than 11,000 votes.
  • A review of Kantar/CMAG data accessed through the Wesleyan Media Project shows Biden’s side has aired almost 12,000 more ads than Trump since Oct. 12. In all, Michigan voters have seen more than 22,000 ads in the last three weeks.
  • The New York Times/ Siena College poll of Michigan, released this week, shows 69% of Michigan Republicans plan to vote in-person on Election Day, while 28% of Democrats said the same.
  • And Trump has been here before — and he is his best closing pitchman. It will just require Michigan voters to once again believe the President can solve the state’s legacy economy with bluster and nostalgia.
rerobinson03

Islam - Five Pillars, Nation of Islam & Definition - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide.
  • 7th century
  • Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad’s life.
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  • , making it the youngest of the major world religions.
  • The word “Islam” means “submission to the will of God.”
  • Muslims are monotheistic and worship one, all-knowing God, who in Arabic is known as Allah.
  • Followers of Islam aim to live a life of complete submission to Allah
  • Mosques are places where Muslims worship.
  • The prophet Muhammad
  • was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 570 A.D
  • Muslims believe he was the final prophet sent by God to reveal their faith to mankind.
  • Starting in about 613, Muhammad began preaching throughout Mecca the messages he received. He taught that there was no other God but Allah and that Muslims should devote their lives to this God.
  • n 622, Muhammad traveled from Mecca to Medina with his supporters. This journey became known as the Hijra
  • marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
  • He continued to preach until his death in 632.
  • After Muhammad’s passing, Islam began to spread rapidly.  A series of leaders, known as caliphs, became successors to Muhammad. This system of leadership, which was run by a Muslim ruler, became known as a caliphate.
  • During the reign of the first four caliphs, Arab Muslims conquered large regions in the Middle East, including Syria, Palestine, Iran and Iraq. Islam also spread throughout areas in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
  • he caliphate system lasted for centuries and eventually evolved into the Ottoman Empire, which controlled large regions in the Middle East from about 1517 until 1917, when World War I ended the Ottoman reign.
  • When Muhammad died, there was debate over who should replace him as leader. This led to a schism in Islam, and two major sects emerged: the Sunnis and the Shiites.
  • The Quran (sometimes spelled Qur’an or Koran) is considered the most important holy book among Muslims.
  • t contains some basic information that is found in the Hebrew Bible as well as revelations that were given to Muhammad.
  • The book is written with Allah as the first person, speaking through Gabriel to Muhammad. It contains 114 chapters, which are called surahs.
  • The Islamic calendar, also called the Hijra calendar, is a lunar calendar used in Islamic religious worship. The calendar began in the year 622 A.D., celebrating the journey of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.
  • Muslims follow five basic pillars that are essential to their faith. These include:Shahada: to declare one’s faith in God and belief in MuhammadSalat: to pray five times a day (at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening)Zakat: to give to those in needSawm: to fast during RamadanHajj: to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during a person’s lifetime if the person is able
  • Islam’s legal system is known as Sharia Law. This faith-based code of conduct directs Muslims on how they should live in nearly every aspect of their lives.
  • The prophet Muhammad is credited with building the first mosque in the courtyard of his house in Medina.
  • Muslim prayer is often conducted in a mosque's large open space or outdoor courtyard. A mihrab is a decorative feature or niche in the mosque that indicates the direction to Mecca, and therefore the direction to face during prayer.
  • Men and women pray separately, and Muslims may visit a mosque five times a day for each of the prayer sessions.
Javier E

A Broken Health System Is a Threat to Freedom - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • the United States is not a normal democracy. Untreated illness and uncertain care fill our politics with unnecessary fear and rage. Our president pushes this logic by offering insecurity instead of security as the aim of politics
  • This is not inefficiency or neglect. It is a pattern evident all across the Trump administration: Governing is not about problems to be solved, but emergencies to be magnified.
  • Health care is always political, but the politics can confirm or deny democratic norms and practices. A democratic country that handles a pandemic well generates trust in government, and even national pride. If care is not universal, then the political equation, especially during a pandemic, is entirely different.
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  • When citizens cannot imagine security, politics becomes the distribution of insecurity, the allocation of fears and anxieties that push us away from an idea of common citizenship and toward authoritarianism. What is lethal for Americans is also lethal for our democracy.
  • I am an American historian who has seen the pandemic from both sides of the Atlantic, and who has just written a book about health care in the United States. When journalists from other countries ask me why so many Americans have died during the coronavirus pandemic, they phrase the question actively: “What have Americans done to bring about such needless mayhem?” And that is the right way to think about our COVID-19 policy. It is not a blundering, but a bludgeoning.
  • In other rich nations, it is easier to see a doctor and harder to die than in the United States. As I write these lines, I am sick in Austria. That means that if I call a doctor, I see her the same day, get tests right away, fill out no forms, and pay no fees. Without worries about access to care, I am a freer person. On the scale of a whole society, the gain in liberty is extraordinary. 
  • Lost to us are the political consequences: If we take for granted radical inequality and repeated emergencies in the realm of health, we are primed for authoritarianism in the realm of life.
  • Our babies and their mothers die at rates that Europeans find unbelievable. American Millennials will likely pay more for health care yet die younger than their parents and grandparents did. Life expectancy peaked here in 2014, even as it continues to rise elsewhere.
  • Americans pay twice as much per capita for health care as the citizens of peer countries do, for the privilege of dying years younger.
  • Many of us, by some calculations nearly half, simply avoid care because it seems unaffordable.
  • Those of us with insurance think about how good our insurance is, and where it will get us. Those of us who get access believe that we deserve it. It does not occur to us that the less-bad access we have is worse than what everyone has in countries with universal health care.
  • Too many of us take for granted that health and freedom are somehow in contradiction—and so we exclude our own bodies from our notion of rights. We treat as normal a system of commercial medicine in which decisions about life and death are made on the basis of profit.
  • ur sense that suffering is normal is also racial
  • Many white Americans regard their own suffering as virtuous, while maintaining that public health care would only be abused by Black people and immigrants. In other words, suffering is normal so long as others suffer more
  • In the health-care debate in the United States, proposals to extend coverage to all are decried as government overreach, socialism, even outright tyranny. But the lack of health security is what makes Americans vulnerable to demagogues and authoritarians.
  • Racial inequality brings unnecessary death. It also brings a sentiment that an authoritarian leader can exploit: Namely, that those who suffer the most are themselves at fault. When racism is a preexisting condition, the disproportionate death rates of Americans of color during a pandemic seem normal.
  • America’s only hope of stopping the COVID-19 pandemic was to do so at the outset. Such efforts have been mounted before. Under George W. Bush, the number of SARS cases in the U.S. was limited, and no one died. In 2014, the Obama administration took the fight against Ebola to West Africa, a prudent step that was normal then but that seems like science fiction now.
  • Before the novel coronavirus arrived in the U.S., the Trump administration dismantled the institutions that were responsible for early warning and early action
  • By telling Americans in February what they wanted to hear about the virus—that it was not serious, that it would disappear, that everyone could get a test—Trump ensured that death would be widespread.
  • By failing to institute a regime of testing, he made it normal for us to follow our own guesswork and emotions rather than dealing with facts.
  • The Trump administration announced a kind of new federalism, in which governors would have to show their loyalty to get federal assistance, and in which the Democratic ones would be blamed regardless of what happened
  • The bluster shrouded the basic decision, which was not to launch a federal response to the pandemic. No nationwide lockdown, no national testing initiative, no national contact-tracing initiative, no nationwide signaling on wearing masks and washing hands. This set the United States apart from every other comparable country.
  • After first blaming Democrats for not doing enough, Trump switched to blaming them for doing too much.
  • This is America’s basic problem: Health care is not a promise for all, but rather an expectation of the rich that they will do relatively better than the poor, and of white people that they will do relatively better than Black people
  • Suffering can seem meaningful if it affirms this basic order, even if that suffering is one’s own
  • Yet a democracy can become suffused with suffering, to the point where many voters do not even expect that policy might help them or loved ones stay well
  • An aspiring authoritarian such as Trump knows what to do: provide the emotional jolts of pleasure that distract from the general decline. “Winning” is no longer about gaining something for oneself, such as a healthier or longer life, but about taking pleasure in the suffering of others. This is a sensibility—the strong survive; the weak get what they deserve—that favors authoritarianism over democracy.
  • In this election, Americans face a choice not between individuals, but between regimes: between tyranny and a republic as forms of government, and between suffering and happiness as its aims. If Trump is defeated, our democracy should be reinforced by universal health care. Health and freedom collapse together, and they can be recovered together. We would be much freer as a people if we accorded ourselves health care as a right.
mariedhorne

Denver Wants to Fix a Legacy of Environmental Racism - The New York Times - 0 views

  • DENVER — In most American cities, white residents live near parks, trees and baseball fields, while communities of color are left with concrete and the heat that comes with it. Now, in a push that could provide a road map for other cities, officials in Denver are working to rectify that historical inequity.
  • Correcting decades of discriminatory municipal planning is especially important as climate change heats up American cities. Adding green space, researchers have found, can help residents cope with rising heat and brings all sorts of side benefits, like filtering air pollution or boosting residents’ mental health.
  • “It’s always just felt more like it’s a whole front,” said Alfonso Espino, a community activist and lifelong Denver resident, speaking of the city’s parks initiative. “Not for us, you know. It’s for the people that are coming.”
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  • That year, the city allocated $1 million of the new tax money for saplings along the 16th Street Mall, the city’s downtown business district, with no funds for poorer neighborhoods with sparse canopies. By the end of 2020, the city will have allocated six times more for trees in downtown areas than in residential zones.
  • “There’s these tough histories that make it really hard for residents to trust government, to possibly trust nonprofits,” said Kim Yuan-Farrell, executive director of The Park People, a local nonprofit group that advocates for parks and helps organize tree plantings in low-income neighborhoods.However, Ms. Yuan-Farrell said, things seem to be changing.
lmunch

How Voting by Mail Tops Election Misinformation - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Of all the election misinformation this year, false and misleading information about voting by mail has been the most rampant, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company.
  • Of the 13.4 million mentions of voting by mail on social media; news on television, print and online; blogs and online forums between January and September, nearly a fourth — or 3.1 million mentions — have most likely been misinformation, Zignal Labs said.
  • The misleading information about voting by mail was not uniform. It broke down into six main categories
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  • mentions of absentee voting or ballots
  • mentions of voter fraud, such as mentions of misleading stories about criminal conduct involving mail-in ballots
  • mentions of voter IDs, such as the baseless idea that in states with strict voter ID laws, mail-in ballots have been dumped out
  • mentions of foreign interference
  • mentions of ballot “harvesting,”
  • mentions of a “rigged election”
  • Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have made combating false information about voting a priority, including highlighting accurate information on how to vote and how to register to vote.
carolinehayter

Breonna Taylor Grand Jury Recording Released: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

  • An audio recording of the grand jury inquiry into the killing of Breonna Taylor was made public on Friday, a rare disclosure that shed light on the evidence jurors considered in the proceedings.
  • 15 hours long
  • captured interviews with witnesses, audio of 911 calls and other evidence presented to jurors over two and a half days.
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  • He has insisted that the 12 jurors were given “all of the evidence” and were free to pursue additional charges.
  • As is customary in the recording of Grand Jury proceedings, juror deliberations and prosecutor recommendations and statements were not recorded, as they are not evidence,
  • The audio files do not include statements or recommendations from prosecutors about which charges they think should be brought against the officers. Mr. Cameron has said that jurors were told that the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor were justified in their actions. Ultimately, the jurors indicted a former officer last week on three charges of endangering Ms. Taylor’s neighbors by firing into their home during a raid of her apartment in March, but did not charge either of the officers who shot her.
  • Mr. Hankison’s rounds did not hit anyone, investigators have said, but some of them flew into an apartment behind Ms. Taylor’s, leading to the three charges.
  • grand jurors indicted Brett Hankison, a former detective, on three counts of “wanton endangerment” last week, saying Mr. Hankison had recklessly fired his gun during the raid after Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend — who has said he thought intruders were entering the apartment — shot an officer in the leg.
  • Grand jurors are given broad powers to request evidence, call witnesses and determine which charges to pursue, but prosecutors often closely guide the jurors, presenting them with certain charges and telling them about their own roles. The process almost always remains secret.
  • Detective Myles Cosgrove, who the F.B.I. said fired the shot that killed Ms. Taylor, described a disorienting scene of flashing lights as officers breached the door and seemed to suggest uncertainty about exactly what happened.
  • But, he added, “It’s like a surreal thing. If you told me I didn’t do something at that time, I’d believe you. If you told me I did do something, I’d probably believe you, too.”
  • Detective Cosgrove said he also saw a shadow of a person, a “larger than normal human shadow,” when they raided the apartment and he saw flashing lights.
  • The first witness was an investigator for the Attorney General’s office, who presented photos and videos of the scene, including the body camera videos of three officers who arrived after the shots were fired
  • Grand jurors asked whether Kenneth Walker, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, had been named in the search warrant (he had not), what exactly the officers saw when the apartment door opened, and whether the officers executing the warrant were aware that the police had already found Jamarcus Glover, who was the target of an illegal drug investigation.
  • Mr. Glover was Ms. Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, and he was in custody by the time they raided her apartment. At times, the jurors’ questions suggested they were skeptical of what they were being shown: one asked about the time stamps on the video. Another asked why they had not seen the room where the gun was found; the investigator said that would be shown in a different video.
  • The unidentified neighbor yelled at them, “something about leave her alone, there was some girl there,” Detective Cosgrove said in an interview with police investigators last month that was played for the grand jury.
  • Grand jurors heard at least two Louisville police officers who were at the raid on Ms. Taylor’s apartment say the group knocked and announced their presence several times before breaking down the door, according to a recording of the proceedings released on Friday.Those accounts, which have been questioned by several of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors and her boyfriend, were included among roughly 15 hours of audio filed by the attorney general on Friday, which includes interviews heard by the grand jury over several days last week.
  • He said officers were outside knocking for 90 seconds, and that the volume escalated from “gentle knocking” to “forceful pounding” to pounding while yelling “police.”
  • Detective Nobles, who held the battering ram that broke through Ms. Taylor’s door, said he stood at the door, knocking and announcing himself as police for one or two minutes before he used the battering ram to force his way into Ms. Taylor’s apartment. His interview was also played for grand jurors. He said it took three knocks with the battering ram to break down the door completely.The first blow hit the handle, he said. The second broke the door, but left it still on the hinges. The third broke down the door completely. When he entered, Mr. Nobles said it was “pitch black,” and that Sgt. John Mattingly, one of the officers who shot Ms. Taylor, was quickly shot in the leg after the team entered the building.
  • In previous interviews with The Times, 11 of 12 of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors said they never heard the police identify themselves. One neighbor said he heard the group say “Police,” just once.
  • Grand jurors were played recordings of radio calls from Mr. Hankison, the detective who fired blindly from outside the apartment and has been charged with wanton endangerment, as well as 911 calls that came in after the shooting began.
  • The calls suggest that Mr. Hankison, who was fired after the shooting for violating department procedure, believed that Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly had been wounded by someone with an “A.R.” who was “barricaded” inside the apartment. Mr. Hankison’s reference to an “A.R.” on the call appears to be a reference to either an assault rile or the AR-15, a type of a military-style semiautomatic rifle.
  • The only charges brought by the grand jury were three counts of “wanton endangerment in the first degree” against Mr. Hankison for his actions during the raid.
  • Under Kentucky law, a person commits that crime when he or she “wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person,” and does so “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” Other states may use terms like “reckless endangerment” for an equivalent offense.
  • But the charges against Mr. Hankison are not for killing Ms. Taylor. None of the 10 shots he fired are known to have struck her. Instead, the Kentucky attorney general said the former detective was charged by the grand jury because the shots he fired had passed through Ms. Taylor’s apartment walls into a neighboring apartment, endangering three people there.
  • The crime is a Class D felony in Kentucky, which means it can carry a sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine on conviction for each count.
  • A person can be guilty of wanton endangerment even if they did not intend to harm anyone or to commit a crime; it is sufficient to recklessly disregard the peril that one’s actions create.
  • Mr. Hankison was fired from the force. During the raid, he fired into her apartment from outside, through a sliding glass patio door and a window that were covered with blinds, in violation of a department policy that requires officers to have a line of sight.
  • The name Breonna Taylor has echoed across the nation for months as demonstrators demanded the police be held accountable for her death.
  • The police killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died in May after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee, brought renewed attention to deadly episodes involving the police, including Ms. Taylor’s death, and fueled Black Lives Matter protests that persisted throughout the summer.
  • In September, when the grand jury announced no charges against the officers who killed Ms. Taylor, protesters poured into the streets of Louisville with renewed strength and anger, demanding stronger charges. The protesters called for all three officers, who are white, to be held to account for Ms. Taylor’s death. Ms. Taylor’s family, too, has pleaded for justice, pushing for criminal charges against the officers. Ms. Taylor’s case has also been the center of campaigns from several celebrities and athletes, some of whom have dedicated their seasons to keeping a spotlight on her case.
anonymous

Russian peacekeepers deploy to Nagorno-Karabakh after ceasefire deal | Reuters - 0 views

  • Russian peacekeeping troops deployed to the mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh on Tuesday as part of a ceasefire deal to end six weeks of heavy fighting between Azerbaijan and ethnic Armenian forces.
  • Azerbaijan will keep territorial gains made in the fighting, including the enclave’s second city of Shusha, which Armenians call Shushi. Ethnic Armenian forces must give up control of a slew of other territories between now and Dec. 1.
  • Armenia’s defence ministry said military action had halted and calm had been restored
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  • NATO member Turkey, Azerbaijan’s main supporter and arms supplier, said the deal had secured important gains for its ally
  • Some Azeris regretted fighting had ended before Azerbaijan controlled all of Nagorno-Karabakh and were wary of the arrival of peacekeepers from Russia, which dominated the region in Soviet times.
  • We were about to gain the whole of Nagorno-Karabakh back,” said 52-year-old Kiamala Aliyeva. “The agreement is very vague I don’t trust Armenia and I don’t trust Russia even more.”
  • rance, which has long mediated in the conflict with Russia and the United States, said any lasting agreement must take into account Armenia’s interests.
  • Appealing to Armenians to see the deal as starting an era of national unity, he said: “This is not a victory, but there is no defeat until you consider yourself defeated.”
  • Russia, which has a defence pact with Armenia and a military base there, is likely to hail the deal as a sign it is still the main arbiter in the energy-producing South Caucasus,
  • Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there had been no agreement on deploying any Turkish peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, but the Turkish military will help staff a joint monitoring centre with Russian forces.
  • Putin said displaced people would be able to return to Nagorno-Karabakh and prisoners of war and bodies of those killed would be exchanged. All economic and transport links in the area would be reopened.
anonymous

COVID Economic Help: What Biden Can And Can't Do : NPR - 0 views

  • Joe Biden will still inherit a fragile economy and a possibly uncooperative Congress, which raises questions about what — if anything — the next president can do on his own to bolster an economic recovery.
  • the best way the president can directly stimulate the economy is by tackling the public health crisis and ensuring vaccines are deployed efficiently.
  • "The No. 1 rule of virus economics, I always say, is that if you want to help the economy, you need to get control of the spread of the virus,"
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  • Biden could help control the virus, some say, by encouraging Americans to wear masks, but he could also mandate changes to make workplaces safer.
  • Many economists believe additional congressional spending is vital right now, but if that's not feasible, then it's worth considering what Biden could do autonomously.
  • "It is my belief that the new president — President Biden — within the first few weeks of becoming president can simply sign an executive order and eliminate, end, $50,000 of student debt from every student,"
  • "Ninety-five percent of all student debt is actually held by the government, and so the secretary of education would have it in his or her authority to cancel a lot of that debt,"
  • "The Trump administration stretched the bounds of what maybe almost anyone thought would be possible with multiple billions of dollars to payments to farmers [and] diversions of billions of dollars from defense budget to building the wall,"
  • The president also adopted a number of COVID-19 relief measures without Congress, issuing a moratorium on evictions and taking disaster money away from FEMA to pay for expanded temporary unemployment assistance.
  • Shierholz also questions how much some of these unilateral moves — such as canceling student loan debt, which might provide a "more equitable economy" in the long run — would actually tackle the immediate financial problems people are facing.
  • But the president can't dole out more money to state governments — Congress would need to allocate those funds.
  • "The thing he'll have to resort to is trying to lean on his nearly 50 years of experience in Washington," Shierholz said. "That is what it will come down to. Can President Biden convince [current Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell to move on some of that stuff because that is what it will take to get the stimulus that is needed."
Javier E

Fast food chains close dining rooms amid protracted labor shortage - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Fast-food restaurants have a problem: Customers are returning but workers aren’t.And, increasingly, neither are their dining rooms.
  • Some current and former fast-food workers say labor shortages merely reflect the limited appeal of low-wage work that can be physically demanding and stressful, conditions that existed long before the pandemic.
  • That’s 1,734,000 openings vs. an estimated 1,475,000 unemployed people, the Fed data shows.
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  • For the industry to meet customer demand, restaurants would probably have to draw workers from other industries, but there are indications that the opposite is true. An analysis of job seekers’ search history data by the company review site Glassdoor found that people who used to search for “restaurant server” are now more likely to type in “office assistant,” “data entry” or “Amazon,” for example.
  • Fast-food wages historically trail those in other service industry jobs, with the typical U.S. worker collecting about $11.80 per hour or $24,540 a year as of May 2020,
  • broke? Or do I want to be broke working 40 hours a week and working my life away?’”
  • some economists question the accuracy of the term “labor shortage” in this context, saying businesses are simply offering too low a wage for an hour’s work.
  • When I go shopping for an Audi and I can’t afford it, I don’t get to declare an Audi shortage,” said Erica Groshen, a labor economist with Cornell University. “At the wage being offered, businesses still aren’t getting as many applicants for work.”
  • “I think the problem is workers are being paid too little working full time. That’s the real scandal,” he said.
  • Of the nearly 10 million job openings in the United States, roughly 1 in 6 are in the leisure and hospitality sector that includes food service workers,
  • Nonsupervisory workers in the accommodations and food service sector made an average of $15.91 per hour as of August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February 2020, they made an average of $14.46 per hour.
  • “The fact that nominal wages have been increasing so rapidly over the last several months is itself pretty strong evidence that businesses really are doing a lot to attract and retain workers. … The labor market is just really competitive,”
  • McDonald’s announced that it had raised its hourly rate to a range of $11 to $17 for entry-level workers, and $15 to $20 for managers.
  • one of the company’s locations in Hendersonville, N.C., recently increased its starting hourly wage to $19, for example.
  • For many fast-food establishments, the pandemic has accelerated a trend toward online and app-based ordering, and drive-through technology.
  • quarter — momentum that CEO David Gibbs said was underpinned by the Louisville-based company’s digital investments and “ability to serve customers through multiple on- and off-premise channels.”
  • McDonald’s also reported strong-second quarter gains, boosted by growth in its delivery and digital platforms and higher menu prices. U.S. sales were 25.9 percent higher than the same period in 2020 and 14.9 percent above where they were in a pre-pandemic 2019, the company said.
  • The average cost to close a restaurant to improve or add an advanced drive-through ranges from $125,000 to $250,000
  • drive-throughs account for about half of annual sales for all fast-food and fast-casual restaurants, or roughly $169 billion.
  • “One of other things they have done is turn all of us into the cashiers,” he said, pointing to restaurant apps, and touch-screen kiosks that have taken the place of some food service workers. “We did a study on automation and robotics and found that at least half could be replaced with robots or automation.”
woodlu

Do pandemics normally lead to rising inflation? | The Economist - 0 views

  • In the euro zone annual inflation hit 3.4% in September, the highest rate in over a decade. Some economists worry that the world economy is entering a period of “stagflation”—weak growth and high inflation—reminiscent of the 1970s.Off the ChartsTaking you behind the scenes of our data journalismDirectly to your inbox every weekSign up
  • A recent paper by Dennis Bonam and Andra Smadu, two economists at the Dutch central bank, looks at the effect of pandemics on inflation and concludes that they typically lead to lower, not higher, price pressures.
  • Using data going back to the 14th century, covering six European countries and 19 pandemics, the authors find that such events have historically caused inflation to fall for more than a decade, on average, yielding an inflation rate about ​​0.6 percentage points lower than if the pandemic had not occurred.
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  • The more prolonged and severe the outbreak, the more pronounced and persistent the negative effects on trend inflation.
  • Pandemics disrupt the balance between supply and demand.
  • Historically, however, the dominant economic effect of pandemics was falling demand. As populations were decimated by disease, consumption fell, investment withered and economies suffered for decades, keeping prices in check.
  • This time around policymakers responded with trillions of dollars worth of fiscal and monetary stimulus, propping up demand and softening the economic damage.
  • central bankers remain confident that they are transitory, the result of “base effects”—whereby unusually low prices create the illusion of unusually high prices one year later
  • pent-up demand and short-term supply bottlenecks.
Javier E

Dr. Deborah Birx: Trump Could Have Prevented 40% Of U.S. COVID Deaths | HuffPost Latest... - 0 views

  • More than 400,000 people died of COVID-19 before Trump left office on Jan. 20.
  • “I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range,” Birx told the committee.Advertisement
  • During her testimony, she blamed Trump’s reaction on his dealing with a reelection campaign that she said made the White House “somewhat complacent.”The election year “just took people’s time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic in my personal opinion,” Birx said.
Javier E

Donald Kagan, Leading Historian of Ancient Greece, Dies at 89 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • He saw baseball as a Homeric allegory, one in which a hero — the batter — ventures from home and must overcome unforeseen challenges in order to return. That view set up one of his most celebrated articles: a withering review in The Public Interest of the columnist George Will’s book “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball” (1990).
  • Professor Kagan received a National Humanities Medal in 2002. Three years later he delivered the annual Jefferson Lecture,
  • he praised the study of history but warned that it was succumbing to the influence of postmodern relativism.
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  • He sounded a similar alarm in his final lecture at Yale, in 2013. Liberal education, he said, was failing to provide students with a common set of values and the tools to make sense of the world.
  • “I find a kind of cultural void and ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but the whole world was born yesterday,”
Javier E

Shanghai's Omicron Outbreak Corners Chinese Leader - WSJ - 0 views

  • China’s top leaders believe that confining residents to their homes during outbreaks is the most effective way to keep death rates low and avoid overwhelming the country’s healthcare system.
  • Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a public forum in November that China would have had about 260 million Covid-19 cases and more than three million deaths if it had adopted looser restrictions similar to those in the U.S. and U.K.
  • China has reported fewer than 260,000 cases and less than 5,000 deaths, compared with 80 million confirmed cases and nearly a million deaths in the U.S.
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  • The economic and social costs of the Chinese strategy have climbed with the rise of more easily transmitted variants. Retail sales, tourism and manufacturing have suffered from residential lockdowns, business closures and travel bans. A population that largely supported zero-Covid measures early on has tired of tight limits on the routines of daily life.
  • Her food is running low, she said. On Monday, Ms. Wang got her first food delivery from the government: two zucchini, a carton of milk, 10 sausages, noodles and a can of Spam. “As someone who hasn’t been infected by the virus, my biggest question is, ‘How long do we have to endure such lack of freedom?’ ” she said.
  • Before the latest outbreak, Mr. Xi and other top officials saw Shanghai as a model for China’s long-term goal of living with the virus, according to the people close to government decision-making. 
  • Shanghai, run by a close ally of Mr. Xi, never had serious problems. The few cases that had surfaced in the past two years were secured with limited apartment and neighborhood closures. Unlike the rest of China, mask-wearing wasn’t widely adopted by city residents.
  • Then an influx of visitors arrived from Hong Kong, hoping to escape an outbreak there. Many stayed at a Shanghai hotel where officials say the virus spread in early March to the staff and beyond. At the time, city authorities said wide-ranging lockdowns wouldn’t be necessary.
  • in undisclosed comments to members of the Politburo Standing Committee, Mr. Xi made clear that China couldn’t back down from its stringent Covid approach, even if it meant slower economic growth, according to a person close to decision-making who was briefed on the remarks.
  • A few days later, Shanghai initiated a two-stage lockdown. Speaking at a teleconference with other infectious-disease experts around that time, Mr. Wu, China CDC’s chief epidemiologist, said Shanghai didn’t act decisively enough in the latest outbreak and missed its chance to control the outbreak,
  • In Shanghai, people with Covid-19 are confined to home, and access to medical care for those with other illnesses has been limited. Food deliveries, arranged by local authorities, have been delayed in some neighborhoods, according to interviews with more than a dozen residents.
  • Local officials have reported no Covid-related fatalities. The Journal learned that at least two elder-care hospitals have been battling an outbreak, with more than 20 deaths at one of the facilities.
  • Thousands of users of Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, have shared stories of people with life-threatening illnesses such as cancer unable to get treatment, adding to citywide feelings of helplessness.
  • “Fighting all the previous variants was like putting out a forest fire, it can be done,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But Omicron is like the wind. How do you stop the wind?”
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