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krystalxu

The Quixotic Effort to Get a Better Brexit Deal - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • the U.K. leaves the EU without first securing a trade deal and instead becomes subject to trade barriers
  • Still, such a move is unlikely—May has previously stated that she “does not intend” to reverse Brexit.
  • we cannot damage our country in this way,”
woodlu

The Economist explains - What is the level playing field and why is it such a problem f... - 0 views

  • The EU insisted it could allow Britain to retain its tariff- and quota-free access to its market only if the British government promised not to undercut its social, environmental, labour and state-aid rules.
  • The political declaration that was attached to the withdrawal treaty which Boris Johnson signed earlier this year duly declared that “the future relationship must ensure open and fair competition, encompassing robust commitments to ensure a level playing field.”
  • Theresa May, had sought to respond to these concerns by proposing in July 2018 that Britain and the EU should follow a “common rulebook”,
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  • Hardline Tory Brexiteers then helped repeatedly to vote down Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement, clearing the way for Mr Johnson to take over the party leadership and to become prime minister in July 2019.
  • Mrs May had at least been prepared to accept the concept of the level playing field in principle, Mr Johnson saw regulatory divergence as one of the main purposes of Brexit, and a key test of whether the EU had accepted that Britain was now a fully sovereign state
  • EU’s determination that Britain should accept “non-regression”, meaning it would not resile from current regulatory levels
  • Britain should promise to abide by all future changes in the rules. It has now partly backed away from this, in exchange for a promise of a robust British domestic regime to police state aids.
  • effort by the EU to keep the European Court of Justice as umpire, a position it has also backed away from in favour of a more neutral arbitrator of disputes.
  • the EU wants a right of instant retaliation through the imposition of tariffs if Britain diverges from its rules in a way that it deems anti-competitive.
  • having a gun on the table that can be picked up at any time.
  • The second is that any settlement of level-playing-field concerns requires mutual trust.
  • Mr Johnson proposed to legislate unilaterally (and illegally) to change the treaty’s provisions on Northern Ireland. He has now withdrawn this threat, but that may not be enough to regain the EU’s trust.
Javier E

Davos: Globalism Saved the World and Damned the West - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In 2016, Manyika co-wrote a landmark report on earnings growth in advanced economies over the previous 20 years. It was a tale of two decades, he said. In the first 10-year period, from 1995 to 2004, wages grew for at least 98 percent of households in just about every advanced economy. But in the second decade, from 2005 to 2014, everything fell apart.
  • “We found inequality, yes. But that was the least interesting thing we found,” Manyika told me. “The more interesting thing was wage stagnation in almost all the advanced economies.”
  • This was an entirely new phenomenon. Wage income declined for the majority of households in France, the Netherlands, the U.K., and Italy. The U.S. had it even worse. Four out of five households saw flat or falling income before accounting for taxes and transfers
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  • Between globalization, the Great Recession, and the not-so-great recovery, the middle class was slammed.
  • they felt it, too. Manyika’s research team asked more than 6,000 people in the United States, the U.K., and France to describe their economic status. Between one-third and 40 percent of respondents in each country felt that their incomes were falling behind. “And these people tended to blame free trade and immigrants for hurting their wages and ruining their culture,”
  • Anti-elite sentiment “has become the most potent political force in Europe,” writes Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. “It brought Brexit in Britain, electoral defeat to German chancellor Angela Merkel, drove protests in France, shattered so many political coalitions that governed Europe since World War II, and raised to prominence new parties and persons nominally attached to the right or the left but always fractious, sectarian, ‘populist.’”
  • The changing media landscape is part of the story, too
  • In other words, saving the American middle class might take a leftist intervention, but saving the world will also require something very much like free-market globalism
  • iss conference.Right-wing nationalism is the solution that solves nothing. What’s needed instead is a movement that doesn’t just succeed in outraging voters, but actually seeks to use government to address the source of their outrage.
  • some members of the American left seem to be pointing to a compromise: a new system of universal guarantees supported by higher taxes and higher peacetime deficits in this context of a capitalist system
  • For all the hatred directed toward the Davos crowd, there will be no economic growth in the West without policies that promote entrepreneurship and innovation.
  • any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs tinkering with the products of publicly funded research
  • And to reduce global emissions, the United States will have to share its eco-technology with China, southeastern Asian countries, and African nations, which account for most of the growth in future emissions
  • Globalization and poor governance created the conditions in which nativist insurgencies can grow. Social networks made it possible for political cults to organize around outrage.
  • For years government elites could silence political outsiders by denying them an audience. In the late 20th century, the Democratic and Republican Parties were terrifically effective at marshaling elite power to shape public opinion during the presidential-election process. Voters didn’t select candidates at random; rather, as political scientists like to say, “the parties decided” on the favored candidates and used their power to funnel voters toward these insiders.
  • That was before the Cambrian explosion of digital media made it impossible for insiders to control their nomination processes
  • nativist movements are gaining power by opposing the values of openness and empiricism. These nativists have often thrived by arguing that free markets and globalization have impoverished the middle class and destroyed all sense of national identity or sovereignty.
  • What’s more, taxing the rich to fund universalist programs directly addresses middle-class insecurities caused by global capitalism—unlike, say, building a giant border wall. Free markets without income security have been a recipe for instability. So have socialist policies that stamp out free markets.
  • But there’s a good reason that commentators tend to lump together Trump, Brexit, and other “populists” and “populist” movements: They’re built to oppose rather than lead, and right now it’s fair to say they’re in a shambles, unable to fulfill their nativist promises. In the U.K., Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal was voted down in humiliating fashion. In the United States, Trump’s record-breaking government shutdown led not to a wall but to declining poll numbers for the president. Both May and Trump had to cancel their appearances at the Sw
  • “All this has happened chiefly because countries—from China to India to Ethiopia—have adopted more market-friendly policies,” the CNN host Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post.
  • At a conference symbolizing the promise of capitalism, every non-plutocrat is fighting for scraps.
katherineharron

Brexit: What is the Withdrawal Agreement Bill and why is it so controversial? - CNN - 0 views

  • We're in the Brexit endgame -- or so Boris Johnson hopes.
  • By Thursday evening, the British Prime Minister intends to have done the seemingly impossible and passed a Brexit deal.But whether he is able to do that depends on a series of crucial votes by lawmakers on his Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB).
  • But the government's efforts to force it through in three days are proving controversial, and the bill could be picked apart and reshaped by lawmakers even if it succeeds in its initial vote on Tuesday.
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  • The deal looked similar to the one previously negotiated by his predecessor Theresa May, with one big difference: Johnson's pact strips out May's hated Northern Irish backstop mechanism for a customs border in the Irish sea -- something May said she would never agree to.
  • Johnson is desperate to stick to his promise that the UK will leave the EU on October 31, but he can only achieve that with a rapidly accelerated timetable.
  • But that timeframe for such a lengthy and significant bill is causing anger on the opposition backbenches."Issues like this need to be properly debated not rushed through. Government is storing up very serious future problems by the way it is trying to implement this," Labour MP Yvette Cooper tweeted.
  • Ken Clarke, a former Conservative minister turned independent whose vote could be crucial, added: "If the Government is for some reason insistent on dashing for this completely silly and irrelevant date which it keeps staking its fate on then give some proper time for debate. Two-and-a-bit days of ordinary parliamentary hours is plainly quite insufficient."
  • The Labour Party is arguing that Johnson is running from proper parliamentary scrutiny. Its official position is to vote down both the bill and his timetable, but rebel MPs within the party could swing the votes towards Johnson.
  • It's looking like the Prime Minister could squeak the WAB through Parliament on Tuesday evening.A CNN analysis showed that he could win by around three to five votes, with just enough Labour rebels and independents joining his side.
  • Alternatively, the Prime Minister could abandon the legislation altogether and seek a general election in an effort to resolve the mess.
brookegoodman

Marie-Antoinette - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755, Marie Antoinette married the future French king Louis XVI when she was just 15 years old.
  • Marie Antoinette herself became the target of a great deal of vicious gossip
  • Marie Antoinette was arrested and tried for trumped-up crimes against the French republic. She was convicted and sent to the guillotine on October 16, 1793.
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  • Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the powerful Habsburg empress Maria Theresa
  • More than 5,000 guests watched as the two teenagers were married. It was the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life in the public eye.
  • Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly the American Revolution, in which the French had intervened on behalf of the colonists–had created a tremendous debt for the French state
  • Life as a public figure was not easy for Marie Antoinette.
  • she spent most of her time socializing and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had a model farm built on the palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could dress in elaborate costumes and pretend to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.
  • Before long, it had become fashionable to blame Marie Antoinette for all of France’s problems.
  • There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said that starving peasants should “eat cake” if they had no bread. In fact, the story of a fatuous noblewoman who said “Let them eat cake!” appears in the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which was written around 1766 (when Marie Antoinette was just 11 years old).
  • ordinary people, on the other hand, felt squeezed by high taxes and resentful of the royal family’s conspicuous spending.
  • Louis XVI and his advisers tried to impose a more representative system of taxation, but the nobility resisted.
  • Marie Antoinette continued to be a convenient target for their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French nation.
  • One of Marie Antoinette’s best friends, the Princesse de Lamballe, was dismembered in the street, and revolutionaries paraded her head and body parts through Paris.
  • In July 1793, she lost custody of her young son, who was forced to accuse her of sexual abuse and incest before a Revolutionary tribunal. In October, she was convicted of treason and sent to the guillotine. She was 37 years old.
  • She and the people around her seemed to represent everything that was wrong with the monarchy and the Second Estate: They appeared to be tone-deaf, out of touch, disloyal (along with her allegedly treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused the queen of adultery) and self-interested. What Marie Antoinette was actually like was beside the point; the image of the queen was far more influential than the woman herself.
brookegoodman

How Marie Antoinette's Downfall Was Hastened by a Diamond Necklace - HISTORY - 0 views

  • It is a story whose characters and actions are so implausible that at times it seems like the wild invention of a work of fiction. But the Diamond Necklace Affair was a scandal that was all too responsible for the eventual execution of Marie Antoinette—the last Queen of France before the French Revolution.
  • Undaunted, La Motte took a lover, Rétaux de Villette, a soldier who served with her husband, and also, in 1783, became the mistress of the prestigious Cardinal de Rohan. The cardinal, who had been French ambassador to Vienna a few years earlier, had fallen foul of Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, and wanted nothing more than to win back royal approval. La Motte saw her chance.
  • She discovered that the jewelers Charles Auguste Boehmer and Paul Bassange were trying to sell off an extraordinarily expensive necklace that had originally been designed for Madame du Barry, the mistress of the former king Louis XV. The necklace was worth an estimated 2,000,000 livres (roughly $15 million today). At the death of the King, the necklace was unpaid for, and the jewelers were facing bankruptcy. They had already tried to sell it to the current king, Louis XVI, but the Queen refused, saying “We have more need of Seventy-Fours [ships] than of necklaces.”
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  • The cardinal believed these letters to be authentic and agreed to buy the necklace for the Queen. A late-night secret liaison was arranged in the garden of the Palace of Versailles, where the cardinal was to meet “the Queen.” In reality, La Motte sent a prostitute who resembled the Queen, called Nicole le Guay d'Oliva), who assured him of her forgiveness. Now completely convinced of his close relationship with the Queen, the cardinal contacted the jewelers, agreeing to pay for the necklace in installments.
  • The cardinal was arrested, along with La Motte, the forger, Villette, the prostitute, d’Oliva and Count Cagliostro, one of the cardinal’s clients, whom La Motte accused of having orchestrated the entire con.
  • Jeanne de la Motte, the adventuress at the heart of the story, was found guilty and sentenced to be whipped, branded and imprisoned for life in the Salpêtrière, a notorious prison for prostitutes. However, she managed to escape disguised as a boy and made her way to London where, in 1789, she published her memoirs. Unsurprisingly, she blamed Marie Antoinette for the whole affair.
  • Only a few years later, she would face the guillotine, the dying symbol of the corruption of the ancien régime. 
mariedhorne

Control of U.S. Senate Centers Around a Handful of GOP-Held Seats - WSJ - 0 views

  • Republicans and Democrats enter Election Day in a fight for control of the Senate, with key races tightening during a final push to turn out voters at the close of the chamber’s most expensive contests in history.
  • Republicans are fighting to hang on to their majority, which now is a narrow 53-47 advantage.
  • A total of 14 seats are now considered competitive, as record small-dollar donations have enabled Democrats to expand the map of close races from just 11 during the summer. Of the total, strategists have zeroed in on a handful of GOP-held seats in Maine, Iowa, North Carolina and Georgia as most likely to determine control of the Senate.
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  • Two Senate seats in Georgia are up for grabs this week and both could end without any candidate getting more than 50% of the vote, triggering runoffs that could leave the control of the Senate in question until Jan. 5. If the Senate is split 49-49 after Election Day, Georgia will become a political ground zero.
  • “We may be dependent on one or two elections in Georgia after the election to get to the 51-plus votes we need,
  • Ms. Collins has been hit hard by the fundraising disparity, raising $24 million from 2019 through Oct. 15, a period over which Ms. Gideon has raised almost $70 million.
  • “Me breathing helps him raise money,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who has raised $70 million since the start of 2019, more than any other Republican, and still has been outraised by his opponent, Democrat Jaime Harrison, who has raised $109 million—a record for any Senate candidate.
  • Republican Sen. Joni Ernst has pulled ahead of Democrat Theresa Greenfield, 46% to 42%, in a Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll conducted between Oct. 26 and Oct. 29.
  • “It’s health care—it’s the No. 1 issue, it has been even before the pandemic,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D., Nev.), who is chairwoman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm.
lmunch

As America Awaits a Winner, Trump Falsely Claims He Prevailed - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The president made his unfounded claim even though no news organizations declared a winner between him and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and a number of closely contested states still had millions of mail-in ballots to count.
  • “Frankly, we did win this election.”
  • Mr. Trump said, without offering any explanation, that “we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” and added: “We want all voting to stop.”
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  • Mr. Biden projected optimism but asked voters for patience. He pointed to Pennsylvania and Michigan, among other battlegrounds, as slow-counting states that he expected to win.
  • “As I’ve said all along, it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people. But I’m optimistic about this outcome.”
  • Vote-counting was moving relatively slowly in some battleground states on Tuesday night because of the scale of the turnout, a backlog of absentee ballots received by mail and scattered problems with processing the vote. And each state handled the counting and releasing of its ballots differently.
  • For all the angst about a potential breakdown in voting procedures in advance of Election Day, there were no prominent reports of technological failures or chaos at the polls, nor was there any evidence of significant civil unrest midway through the evening.
  • Mr. Biden, the former vice president, was outperforming Hillary Clinton in a number of the country’s large metropolitan areas, but Mr. Trump was reprising or enlarging his margins in many rural areas.
  • While it was too early to say which party would control the chamber in January, Democrats faced disappointment in three solidly red states where they were making a bid to stretch the campaign map. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, easily defeated Jaime Harrison; Representative Roger Marshall of Kansas defended an open seat that Democrats had contested aggressively; and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa turned back a challenge from Theresa Greenfield.
  • Mr. Biden, 77, appeared to be underperforming with Latino voters, especially in the critical battleground of Florida, where he led Mr. Trump by only single digits in the group, according to exit polls. Mrs. Clinton won Latinos in the state by a wider margin four years ago; Mr. Trump’s improvement appeared to reflect the success of his insistent anti-socialist message in South Florida, where Cuban-Americans and other immigrant communities are wary of far-left policies.
  • Mr. Biden’s candidacy also had the potential to create a history-making moment for his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who is of Indian and Jamaican descent; she was seeking to become the first woman on a winning presidential ticket. And Mr. Biden would be only the second Catholic president, along with John F. Kennedy.
  • Mr. Biden’s coalition was more impressive for its breadth than its depth, and despite its size and diversity, most voters supporting him appeared more excited to reject Mr. Trump than to install Mr. Biden in his place.
  • No American presidential race in half a century or more has featured the same scale of civil unrest and uncertainty about the legitimacy of the political process, and no modern campaign has been so defined by an incumbent president who seemed to relish both factors the way Mr. Trump has.
lmunch

Opinion | Donald and Joe Are Ready to Go - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Trump people claim they hate, hate, hate this idea. But when you think of it, nobody could benefit more from being muted than Donald Trump.
  • It’s election debate season, all right. While the Trump-Biden face-off is getting all the attention, there have been some other pretty memorable encounters for political junkies to savor.
  • We tend to remember the worst moments in political debates. Nixon getting all pale and sweaty in 1960; Michael Dukakis answering a question about whether he’d still oppose the death penalty if his wife was raped and murdered with an answer so calm and muted you’d think he’d been asked which tie he planned to wear for the inauguration.
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  • Trump, of course, is not a front-running candidate of any stripe.
  • Really, a clear front-running candidate would have to screw up royally — wander absent-mindedly offstage reading emails or forget the kids’ names when introducing the family — to have a debate change the election outcome.
  • In Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst and her Democratic opponent, Theresa Greenfield, had one where there was so much shouting the moderator stopped the action to demand whether this was “the way Iowans expect their senator to act?”
  • And the celebrities who do come will of course be masked. Except maybe the Trumps, who shucked theirs off during the first debate in Cleveland. Will they do it again? Belmont says masks are a requirement.
  • This last debate is being held at Belmont University in Nashville, a spunky midsize Christian college that was one of the very few institutions considered that didn’t back out.
  • You’ve got to remember, however, that when Ernst won her Senate seat six years ago, she ran an infamous ad in which she bragged about her talent for castrating hogs on the family farm. (“Washington is full of big spenders. Let’s make ’em squeal.”)
  • On Wednesday, he sent out one of his mass emails to supporters and anybody else who happened to get on the list, announcing that while he was still totally confident of debate triumph, “before I go on LIVE TV, I need to know that you’re still in this fight with me … I’ve asked my team to hand me an updated list of donors who choose to step up at this critical time, and I’ll be disappointed if I don’t see your name on there.”
martinelligi

FACT CHECK: Biden Reopens Border Shelters For Teens, But It's Not 'Kids In Cages' : NPR - 0 views

  • The White House is continuing to defend itself against criticism from the left and right for reopening Trump-era shelters used to house unaccompanied teenagers crossing the border from Mexico.
  • White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that the administration was forced to make the "tough choice" of reopening the facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, due to the number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border, which she explained meant taking responsibility for their care.
  • In January, more than 5,700 unaccompanied minors crossed the border, up from 4,850 in December and 4,500 in November, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP.
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  • Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former senior adviser on immigration in both the Bush and Obama administrations, said the comparisons to the Trump administration are unfair and not accurate.
  • This is not "kids in cages," she said, which referred to detention facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Carrizo Springs facility is operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, and it includes educational services and medical care.
  • "A government agency is not a parent for children," she said. "The reality is that children who are alone need to be accommodated for their safety while the government identifies and reunites them with appropriate sponsors. We don't want to endanger children, and we don't want them held in detention or in facilities that don't meet their best interests."
carolinehayter

13 Races Will Determine Senate Control : NPR - 0 views

  • Republicans hold the Senate 53-47. (There are two independents — Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — but they caucus with Democrats and therefore should be counted that way in the math for Senate control.)
  • To flip the Senate, Democrats would need to net-gain four seats outright or three seats and control of the White House
  • Republicans can lose up to three seats and hold the majority, as long as President Trump wins reelection.
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  • Democrats are forecast to gain two to six seats. Control of the Senate remains a jump ball days out from Election Day. These are the races that will decide it:
  • Sen. Doug Jones is the only Democratic incumbent in a tough race this year. He is expected to lose to former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, the Republican challenger. Trump remains wildly popular in Alabama, and it would be very difficult for Jones to overcome that advantage in a nationalized political climate.
  • GOP Sen. Martha McSally is running against Democrat Mark Kelly, the popular and well-known former astronaut turned gun control advocate after the 2011 Tucson shooting of his wife, then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz. Kelly has led in all but one public poll in 2020.
  • Republican Sen. Cory Gardner is running against former Gov. John Hickenlooper, a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Hickenlooper initially indicated he was not interested in a Senate run but jumped in after his presidential campaign faded. He has run a lackluster campaign, but the overall Democratic pull of the state is probably enough to carry Hickenlooper to victory.
  • First-term GOP Sen. Joni Ernst is running against real estate developer Theresa Greenfield. This race has gotten increasingly competitive in the closing months of the campaign. Ernst had been the early favorite for reelection, but the race has become a toss-up in the close.
  • Republican Sen. Susan Collins is running against Democrat Sara Gideon, the state's House speaker. Few others have seen their political stock fall as fast as Collins has. Once one of the most popular senators in the U.S., she now ranks at the bottom.
  • Republican Sen. Steve Daines is running against term-limited Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, arguably the only Democrat who could make Montana competitive for the party.
  • Montana is a red state that wants to stay that way, and that helps Daines. A Bullock victory would be a telling sign of a broader Democratic wave.
  • Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is running against attorney Cal Cunningham, a former state senator. This is widely viewed as the tipping-point race — whoever wins here will likely represent the party in control of the Senate.
  • GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan is running against orthopedic surgeon Al Gross, who is technically an independent but will appear on the ballot as a Democrat. Trump won Alaska by 16 points in 2016, and Sullivan should be able to pull out a win. But Gross has run a surprisingly strong campaign aided by waves of grassroots Democratic fundraising, including after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Republican Sen. David Perdue is running against Democrat Jon Ossoff, best known for running and losing a high-profile 2017 special election for a U.S. House seat. Perdue has been a Trump loyalist in a state that is increasingly more purple than red. Republicans are bullish that Perdue can win reelection, but the risk of a Jan. 5 runoff is real unless a candidate wins at least 50%. A third-party candidate, Libertarian Shane Hazel, is complicating that path.
  • Appointed GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler is running to serve out the term of former Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired early for health reasons.
  • Loeffler has to fend off both a Republican challenge from Rep. Doug Collins and the top expected Democratic vote-getter, Raphael Warnock.
  • If control of the Senate comes down to Georgia, it might not be known until January 2021.
  • This is an open-seat race because Republican Sen. Pat Roberts is retiring. Republican Rep. Roger Marshall is running against doctor and state Sen. Barbara Bollier. Marshall is the GOP establishment's pick and is favored to win. Bollier is a Republican turned Democrat who has focused on her medical background during the pandemic.
  • Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is running against former Democratic congressional aide Jaime Harrison. Trump won South Carolina by 14 points in 2016, and Graham has transformed from Trump critic to Trump champion since then. Harrison has been able to turn a long-shot bid into a well-funded campaign that is polling competitively. The conservative roots of the state keep Graham as favored to win. A loss could be an indication of a massive Democratic-wave election.
  • Republican Sen. John Cornyn is favored against Democratic challenger MJ Hegar and has consistently led in public polling. A Democratic victory here would be a major upset and would likely be contingent on a surprise Joe Biden win in the state. Texas is also seeing a surge in voter turnout across the state, fueling Democratic hopes that the polls are wrong and 2020 is the year Texas goes blue.
Javier E

Britain's Guilty Men and Women - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Today, Britain is very much not on the edge of national annihilation, whatever the hyperbolic coverage of the past few weeks might suggest. But it is in the grip of chaotic mismanagement that has left the country poorer and weaker, having lost its fourth prime minister in six turbulent years since the Brexit referendum and with an economy pushed close to its breaking point.
  • when did this era of the small people begin? What was its genesis?
  • He had also signed up to a new European treaty that left a fatal tension at the heart of Britain’s membership in the European Union. Major’s European compromise left Britain inside the European Union but outside its single currency. In time, the inherent tension in this position would reveal itself in disastrous fashion—the historian Niall Ferguson has called it “Brexit 1.0.”
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  • 1990 offers a deeper origin story. That was the year Margaret Thatcher was pulled from office and replaced by John Major, a man no one thinks of as a giant. Major inherited a country in a stronger position than at any time since the 1960s, yet handed over power to Tony Blair having frittered away the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic management.
  • The stars of the show were the three prime ministers before her—Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron—with supporting roles for the former chancellor George Osborne and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
  • When Blair left office in 2007, the country was still relatively unified and prosperous. It fell to Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement, to watch everything explode in the great financial crisis. All of these milestones—1990, 1997, and 2007—have legitimate claims to be the genesis of the current crisis. Yet none quite fits. The regime of little men had not begun. That came in 2010
  • For the past 12 years, Britain has been led by a succession of Conservative prime ministers—each, like Russian dolls, somehow smaller than the last—who have contrived to leave the country in a worse state than it was when they took over
  • Without Truss realizing it, Britain had become too weak to cope with a leader so small.
  • In this absurd hospital drama, there were also walk-on parts for two former Labour leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. And Boris Johnson is now attempting a comeback!
  • May was a serious, qualified, thoughtful Conservative who had opposed Brexit but now assumed responsibility for it. But she was simply not up to the job. Being prime minister requires not just diligence and seriousness but political acumen and an ability to lead. She had too little of either.
  • Both Cameron and Clegg had been elected leader of their respective parties through American-style primaries. Back then, such votes were lauded as “democratization,” much-needed medicine to treat an ailing old constitution. They were no such thing. Rather than injecting more democracy into the process, they did the opposite—empowering tiny caucuses to send their minority tribunes to challenge parliamentary rule.
  • Miliband would further “modernize” the process with rule changes that would send the party careering toward populist extremism and electoral annihilation under Jeremy Corbyn. In time, such institutional vandalism would have dire consequences for both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and therefore the country.
  • Cameron and Clegg went to work hacking back public spending with extraordinary severity. The result was that Britain experienced the slowest economic recovery in its history, which meant that the coalition government failed to balance the books as it had hoped—exactly, in fact, as Labour had warned would happen
  • Britain had bailed out the bankers and then watched them get rich while the rest of the country got poorer. No wonder people were angry.
  • Cameron began to panic about the threat to British interests from a more cohesive euro-zone bloc—which was an inevitable consequence of Major’s compromise. After Cameron’s demands for new safeguards to those interests were ignored, he vetoed the euro zone’s reforms. The euro zone went ahead with them anyway. One year into Cameron’s premiership, in 2011, the nightmare of British isolation within the EU had come true.
  • For the next five years, the British prime minister took a series of gambles that ended in disaster. Alarmed by his veto failure, Cameron concluded that Britain needed to renegotiate its membership entirely—and put it to voters in a referendum, which he promised in 2013. By then he had also agreed to a referendum on Scottish independence. Britain’s future was on the line not once but twice.
  • A year after his election victory, Cameron had to keep his promise of a referendum on Europe, lost, and resigned. As with the Scottish case, he had refused to countenance any preparations for the possibility of a winning Leave vote. Cameron left behind a country divided and a Parliament that did not want Brexit but was tasked with delivering it without any idea how. By any estimation, it was a catastrophic miscarriage of statecraft.
  • A second origin date, then, might be 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Blair proved unable to change Major’s compromise and pursued instead a series of radical constitutional changes that slowly undermined the unity of the country he thought he was building.
  • May was hampered throughout her troubled final years as prime minister with a leader of the opposition in Jeremy Corbyn, who was ideologically hostile to any conciliation or compromise with the Tories, empowered by both his own sense of righteous purity and the mandate he had twice received from Labour Party members. He, after all, had a mandate outside Parliament.
  • Despite his brief tenure, Johnson remains one of the most influential—and notorious—figures in postwar British history. Without him, the country likely would not have voted for Brexit in the first place, let alone seen it pushed through Parliament.
  • In their first act in power, Truss and Kwarteng blew up the British government’s reputation for economic competence—and with it went the household budgets of Middle England.
  • Guilty Men was indeed something of a character assassination of Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin, and MacDonald, among others. Many historians now say these appeasers of the 1930s bought their country much-needed time.
  • each, unquestionably, left their country poorer, weaker, angrier, and more divided. Over the past 12 years, Britain has degraded. A sense of decay fills the air, and so, too, a feeling of genuine public fury.
lilyrashkind

Lives Cut Short: COVID-19 Takes Heavy Toll on Older Latinos | Healthiest Communities He... - 0 views

  • LOS ANGELES – In December 2020, about 10 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Javier Perez-Torres boarded a bus from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico, to buy a bracelet for the upcoming birthday of one of the five granddaughters who lived with him and his wife. Perez-Torres, 68, a Mexican immigrant, liked the selection of inexpensive jewelry available in the city just south of the U.S. border, so he made the trek, which lasted more than four hours round-trip.
  • For more than a month, Miron went to the hospital to see her husband, who’d been intubated. But nurses – following COVID-19 safety protocols – wouldn’t let her in. She’d sit on a bench outside the hospital for hours, then go home, and repeat the process.In early February of last year, a nurse called to let her know her partner of more than 40 years had died. She could now see him. “I said, ‘Why would I want to see him now?’” Alicia recalls in an interview in Spanish.
  • Overall, mortality from COVID-19 is some two to three times higher for Latinos than for non-Hispanic whites, says Dr. Michael Rodriguez, vice chair in the Department of Family Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Rodriguez also is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences in UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health.
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  • Latinos have maintained this type of edge despite generally having lower incomes, less access to health care and a greater prevalence of some chronic health issues, such as diabetes and obesity. Some researchers believe the life expectancy advantage is tied to the fact that many Latino immigrants to the U.S. are younger and healthier than many older Latinos, and have lower rates of smoking.
  • The researchers used projections of COVID-19 mortality to reach their conclusions, and a follow-up study arrived at similar findings. A CDC analysis showing provisional life expectancy estimates also pointed to a three-year drop in life expectancy for Latinos, and a shrinking gap between Latinos and whites.
  • Latino subgroups have an array of political and cultural differences. But one cultural norm that cuts across all groups is the primacy of family. Whatever country they’re descended from, it’s not uncommon for Latinos in the U.S. to live in multigenerational households that often include young children, their adult parents and a grandparent or grandparents.When young children and adults – many of whom are essential workers – live with elderly grandparents, “that increases the risk for the older people in the household,” says Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. “If the younger people in the household contract COVID-19, they may be OK, because younger people have stronger immune systems and tend to be healthier. Older people – who tend to be not as healthy and have chronic diseases – may become severely ill, with increased risk of hospitalization and mortality.”
  • “Once you put all those together, what you find is you have the disappearing of the Latino paradox,” Saenz says.While older Latinos have continued to have a higher rate of COVID-19 mortality than their white counterparts during each year of the pandemic, the difference in death rates has diminished over time. During the first year of the crisis, Latinos age 65 and older died of COVID-19 at 2.1 times the rate of older whites, Saenz and Garcia’s research shows. In 2021, older Latinos died at 1.6 times the rate of older whites, and into late April of this year, older Hispanics had died at 1.2 times the rate of older whites. Saenz attributes the narrowing difference to COVID-19 death rates among older whites in red states where vaccination rates are lower.
  • Transportation, language and employment. A study in 2020 from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative found Latinos (and Blacks) in Los Angeles County and New York City were roughly twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as non-Hispanic whites as of July 20 of that year, and noted that carpooling or taking public transportation to work may raise the risk of coronavirus exposure. The study also found that 34% and 37% of the populations in Los Angeles County and New York City were foreign-born, respectively, with Latinos making up the largest share of that population in each area. Approximately 13% of the foreign-born do not speak English, according to the report, which poses a challenge to their obtaining important health information.
  • “A three-year reduction in life expectancy is huge in historical terms. We usually have not seen reductions this large except during times of war or major pandemics,” says Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral scholar at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at USC and one of the PNAS study’s researchers. “Of course, it’s really sad to think about the individuals who died of COVID, but it also has broader implications for the family members of those who died.”COVID-19 has not only claimed the lives of many older Latinos, but many younger, working-age Latinos as well, leaving behind children, siblings, parents and grandparents who depended on them, Andrasfay says. She says she and other researchers are working on an update, tracking the effect of COVID-19 on life expectancy in 2021: “We’re finding a similar pattern (to 2020), with Latinos having the largest reduction in life expectancy.”
  • Though he wasn’t in the best of health, Salvador Macias, 83, enjoyed going to a neighborhood community center for senior activities in Long Beach, a beachside city about 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. He lived in a modest, tidy house with his wife, Manuela, and their adult daughter, Julie.Salvador suffered from three chronic health conditions: diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, says his son, Joe Macias.In August 2020 – four months before health care workers received the first COVID-19 vaccine – the elder Macias became ill with the disease, suffering from fatigue and severe shortness of breath. After several days, Salvador died at home. Manuela, who doesn’t have the chronic health conditions her husband had, also contracted COVID-19. She was hospitalized for a week, but survived.
Javier E

How Sunak may succeed in stopping the boats - 0 views

  • After all, much as its backbenchers huff and puff, even Labour has admitted an important principle: there is a limit to the number of refugees this country can accept.
  • In parliament on Monday, the shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said explicitly that “safe and legal routes” for immigration must be “capped” and “based on prioritisation”
  • With an estimated 32.5 million refugees in the world, this ought to be a statement of the obvious
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  • yet it is one the government’s opponents are always reluctant to admit because its logical corollary is that there will always be an incentive for those not included under the cap to try their luck in the Channel — unless they perceive a high risk of deportation. You cannot stop the boats while taking in the passengers.
  • Sunak’s policy, despite its logic, faces a tortuous road ahead. To ministers’ surprise, they won their case on the Rwanda scheme in British courts last year, only to have the first flight blocked in the middle of the night by an ECHR judge.
  • Yet as the home secretary recently suggested, the government still believes it can get its way. The ECHR, despite its reputation for inflexible and expansionist application of human rights law, can be expedient when its institutional reach is under threat
  • In 2012, for example, after an unmanageable surge of cases that provoked European governments’ wrath, the ECHR agreed to limit itself to intervening only where it believed national courts had not done their jobs properly. Its caseload quickly shrank.
  • With the UK outside the EU and therefore able to leave the ECHR with relative ease, the court’s survival instinct has kicked in. Its officials are said to have been taken aback by the hostility to its Rwanda injunction last June and are in a mood to compromise to avoid the risk of losing the UK altogether
  • Even assuming the legislation takes full effect, it may not work. Migrant arrivals are expected to reach 65,000 this year. The asylum backlog stands at 166,000 and counting, hotels are full to bursting and the government hasn’t yet sent a single person to Rwanda, which in turn hasn’t built the capacity to house more than 200. No wonder most think the policy is doomed.
  • Between the prospect of being deported, housed in unappealing lodgings such as barges and RAF bases rather than hotels, and caught by the French, who are being given large sums of money to step up their coastal policing, the government is hoping it can make trying to cross the Channel sufficiently unattractive
  • There has been a sharp drop in the number of Albanians arriving on our beaches since the government signed a co-operation agreement with Tirana, stepped up deportations and publicised both.
  • evidence from Canada in 2016, where a publicity campaign highlighting the deportation of failed asylum seekers from Hungary led to a dramatic drop in arrivals.
  • It all depends on what’s required to deter people from crossing. The aim, after all, isn’t to run a constant, high-volume travel service to Kigali, but to stop people from getting on boats in the first place. This may already be working
  • This leaves the final piece, which is the expansion of “safe and legal routes” to the UK. It has taken months of awkward media interviews, select committee hearings and the threat of a backbench rebellion, but the government has finally accepted it needs a better system for taking in legitimate refugees.
  • One way is a broader, Ukraine-style scheme, so households can bring in refugees if they agree to take them in
  • Another is to allow for more extended family reunifications for refugees who have relatives here
  • And another would be to expand the practice of assessing and accepting people at UN camps, like the Syrian resettlement scheme
  • After years of ineffectual government under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, we have become used to the idea that ministers never have any ability or intention of keeping their promises
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