Group items tagged

Last Wednesday, President Donald Trump made a mockery of our rule of law. His baseless denial of the results of the presidential election, his refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power and his subsequent incendiary language have brought us to this chaotic moment.

The harm could be particularly severe throughout Latin America, where the devastation of the pandemic, dire economic straits and the growing impact of climate change have shaken public confidence.

And for countries aspiring to democracy but not yet succeeding — chief among them Venezuela — Trump’s actions are particularly destructive. In 2017, the United States led the international community in condemning the fraudulent elections that kept Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in power and in standing behind Venezuela’s democratic forces.

While the richest countries in the world are grappling with shortages of Covid-19 vaccines, some of the poorest worry about getting vaccines at all. Yet a solution to both problems may be hiding in plain sight: vaccines from China and Russia, and soon, perhaps, India.

Chinese and Russian vaccines were initially dismissed in Western and other global media, partly because of a perception that they were inferior to the vaccines produced by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNtech or AstraZeneca. And that perception seemed to stem partly from the fact that China and Russia are authoritarian states.

And now there are significant data about the reliability of the Chinese and Russian vaccines. (It’s still too early to tell for Covaxin.) Trial results in the U.A.E. in early December placed the efficacy of the Sinopharm vaccine at 86 percent; others, in China, at 79 percent.

More than a century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart predicted that widespread prosperity would forestall the development of socialism in the United States. As he memorably argued: “On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, socialist utopias founder.”

million Obama-Trump voters in the last election were motivated more by economic anxiety than racial resentment, and were attracted to Trump’s economic populism and opposition to free-trade agreements.

Sanders faces serious obstacles to obtaining the Democratic presidential nomination. The gentle treatment he received in 2016 from the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign (which ran few negative television or media ads against him) means that many Democratic voters haven’t yet learned about the distinctly non-progressive positions he has taken on certain issues throughout his senatorial career.

n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.

Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.

The three women, who had suffered obstetric emergencies, had been sentenced to 30 years in prison under the nation’s strict anti-abortion laws.

resident Nayib Bukele’s government has freed three Salvadoran women who were sentenced to 30 years in prison under the nation’s strict anti-abortion laws after suffering obstetric emergencies, according to abortion rights groups.

Morena Herrera of the Citizen’s Group for the Depenalization of Abortion said late Friday that the group was told one woman would be set free at presidential order, but when they went to the prison to greet her, three were released.

Some Games, such as the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, saw countries (including the U.S. and the U.K.) threaten to pull out, before deciding to participate. World Wars I and II forced the cancellation of three Olympic Games—in 1916, 1940 and 1944. And other countries have been banned for a variety of reasons: Germany and Japan in 1948 because of their roles in WWII, South Africa during the era of apartheid and Russia in 2020, due to a doping scandal (although individual athletes were ultimately allowed to compete.)

The Details: Australia’s first hosting stint also marked the first Olympic boycott, with numerous countries withdrawing for a variety of political reasons. Less than a month before the opening ceremony, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the Hungarian Revolution against the Communist regime; in protest, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland all refused to participate. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China also withdrew—and would not return until the 1980 Winter Games—because Taiwan, which it considers a breakaway province, was allowed to participate as a separate country. And, finally, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the 1956 Olympics due to the Suez Canal Crisis following the British-Israel-French invasion of Egypt to control the waterway.

‘Blood in the Water’: Despite other countries’ boycott against the Soviets, Hungary competed in the Olympics, and its athletes received support from fans, while Soviet athletes faced boos. A violent water polo match between the two teams left one Hungarian player bleeding from the head and led to a fight among spectators and athletes. Hungary, up 4-0 at the start of the brawl, was named the winner and the team eventually won the gold medal. The Soviets, for their part, went on to win the most medals for the first time. Of Note: In a show of peace, the Olympic athletes, for the first time, marched into the closing ceremony mixed together, rather than as separate nations—a tradition that continues today.

The feeling of being ni de aquí, ni de allá—from neither here nor there—is the fundamental paradox of latinidad, its very essence.

Tobar’s book should be read in the context of other works that, for more than a century, have tried to elucidate the meaning of latinidad.

In his 1891 essay “Our America,” José Martí, a Cuban writer then living in New York, argued that Latin American identity was defined, in part, by a rejection of the racism that he believed characterized the United States.

I spoke to Mina about what seeing Covid as a textbook virus tells us about the nature of the pandemic off-ramp — and about everything else we should’ve known about the disease from the outset.

you can get exposed or you can get vaccinated. But either way, we have to keep building our immune system up, as babies do. That takes years to do. And I think it’s going to be a few more years at least.

And in the meantime?We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in mortality. We’ve even seen, I’d say, a dramatic decline in rates of serious long Covid per infection.

Abramitzky is a Professor of Economics and the Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at Stanford University. Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she also serves at the Director of Industrial Relations Section. Their new book is Streets of Gold: America's Untold of Immigrant Success

In paging through the profiles, we couldn’t help noticing one group of Americans who defies this trend: the children of immigrants. Sonya Poe was born in a suburb of Dallas, Texas to parents who immigrated from Mexico. “My dad worked for a hotel,” Sonya recalled. “Their goal for us was always: Go to school, go to college, so that you can get a job that doesn’t require you to work late at night, so that you can choose what you get to do and take care of your family. We’re fortunate to be able to do that.”

One pattern that is particularly striking in the data is that the children of immigrants raised in households earning below the median income make substantial progress by the time they reach adulthood, both for the Ellis Island generation a century ago and for immigrants today. The children of first-generation immigrants growing up close to the bottom of the income distribution (say, at the 25th percentile) are more likely to reach the middle of the income distribution than are children of similarly poor U.S.-born parents.

LOBAL DEMOCRACY continued its precipitous decline in 2021, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, EIU.

The global score fell from 5.37 to a new low of 5.28 out of ten. The only equivalent drop since 2006 was in 2010 after the global financial crisis.

For the second year in a row, the pandemic was the biggest source of strain on democratic freedom around the world.