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The Republican Party may not have much of an agenda to sell to the public right now, but it does have an enemy with which to rally its troops: “woke capital,” or those corporations that have adopted progressive rhetoric on social issues and used their platforms to support voting rights or back movements like Black Lives Matter.

To the extent that “woke capital” even exists, it involves real questions of political economy. Simply put, there are few countervailing forces in American life to corporate speech, corporate money and corporate political action.

If “woke capital” is a real problem, then the solution is to reanimate those countervailing forces, which is to say, to put life back into organized labor.

In particular, Philadelphia has been a focus for Trump; four years ago, only 15% of the city's voters picked him. Trump has claimed — with little evidence — that the local election system is corrupt. His critics say the president is trying to suppress turnout in the city.

There have been issues, including technical hiccups on the first day of early, in-person voting. A laptop used to program voting machines was stolen. A reporter for NPR member station WHYY got inside a warehouse where voting machines are stored, although city officials beefed up security after that.

A new state law has made it much easier to vote early and by mail.

President Biden will announce on Wednesday that the Port of Los Angeles will begin operating around the clock as his administration struggles to relieve growing backlogs in the global supply chains that deliver critical goods to the United States.

Mr. Biden is set to give a speech on Wednesday addressing the problems in ports, factories and shipping lanes that have helped produce shortages, long delivery times and rapid price increases for food, televisions, automobiles and much more.

The resulting inflation has chilled consumer confidence and weighed on Mr. Biden’s approval ratings. The Labor Department is set to release a new reading of monthly inflation on Wednesday morning.

hen Prime was introduced, in 2005, Amazon was relatively small, and still known mostly for books. As the company’s former director of ordering, Vijay Ravindran, told Recode’s Jason Del Rey in 2019, Prime “was brilliant. It made Amazon the default.”

It created incentives for users to be loyal to Amazon, so they could recoup the cost of membership, then $79 for unlimited two-day shipping. It also enabled Amazon to better track the products they buy and, when video streaming was added as a perk in 2011, the shows they watch, in order to make more things that the data indicated people would want to buy and watch, and to surface the things they were most likely to buy and watch at the very top of the page.

And most important, Prime habituated consumers to a degree of convenience, speed, and selection that, while unheard-of just years before, was made standard virtually overnight.

Maps Class-Divided Cities: San Francisco Edition Richard Florida and Sara Johnson 11:05 AM ET 9 Comments inShare4 Share Print Share on emailEmail Author's Note: This is the 11th of a series of posts that explore the class divides across America's largest cities and metros. Using data from the American Community Survey, each post explores the geography of class within a large city and metro area. For a detailed description of methodology, see the first post in the series. The map above charts the geography of class for the city of San Francisco. The creative class lives in the areas that are shaded in purple, the red areas are primarily service class, and the blue are working class. Each colored space on the map is a Census tract, a small area within a city or county that can be even smaller than a neighborhood.

Most of the city proper is purple, reflecting a large creative class concentration in some of the most sought-after neighborhoods such as Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. SoMa or South of Market, which stretches below Market Street along the eastern part of the city south of the Bay Bridge, is an area of mixed-use and warehouse buildings that are now home to the city's tech scene, including lots of start-up companies as well as big names like Twitter, Zynga, and Airbnb.

Demand continues to outpace supply, and major retailers and users persist in their scramble for warehouse and distribution space nearer to customers

“I think 2017 is still going to see rising rents and supply-demand imbalance that will lead to shrinking vacancies, but the magnitude will get a bit smaller this year,” Egan said.

Del. David E. Vogt III (R-Frederick) said he terminated Cameron Harris “on the spot” after learning that he was the ­mastermind behind Christian­TimesNewspaper.com and its fabricated Sept. 30 article, which reported that there were tens of thousands of “fraudulent Clinton votes found” in an Ohio ­warehouse.

Harris, who graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina in May, had worked for the Republican delegate since June. He did not return a call for comment, but he apologized in a Twitter post to “those disappointed by my actions” and called for a “larger dialogue about how Americans approach the media” and other issues.

Harris told the Times that he created fake news to earn money. After investing $5 for the domain name, he earned about $22,000 in online advertising revenue.

the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes?

In Mr. Vance’s estimation, the answer is: a lot. Economic insecurity, he’s convinced, accounts for only a small part of his community’s problems; the much larger issue is hillbilly culture itself. Though proud of it in many ways, he’s also convinced that it “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

“Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation,” Mr. Vance writes. He suspects those cellphones have a lot to do with it. “I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largess enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”

The Obama administration is considering the resumption of nonlethal military aid to Syria’s moderate opposition, senior administration officials said on Thursday, even if some of it ends up going to the Islamist groups that are allied with the moderates.

The United States suspended the shipments last month after warehouses of equipment were seized by the Islamic Fron

some of the Islamists fought alongside the Free Syrian Army in a battle against a major Al Qaeda-affiliated rebel group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Nearly half of American jobs today could be automated in "a decade or two," according to a new paper

The question is: Which half?

Where do machines work better than people?

Do you know what technology is? We commonly think about technology as anything that was invented after you were born. My friend Denny Hills made kind of a version of that through his statement, "It's anything that doesn't work yet."

Wired, which was not about the technology, but about the culture around the technology. We like to think of ourselves as a lifestyle magazine. We are a magazine about technology culture in the way that Rolling Stone is a magazine about music culture.

This book came out of a little bit of my own efforts to try to understand what technology meant and where it should fit into the realm of the world. When a new technology came along, should we embrace it, or hold off?

Historians have increasingly written that Sherman’s plan for the systematic obliteration in late 1864 of the South’s war machine, including its transportation network and factories, was destructive but not gratuitously destructive. Instead, those experts contend, the strategy was an effective and legal application of the general’s authority and the hard-edged masterstroke necessary to break the Confederacy.

“What is really happening is that over time, the views that are out there are being challenged by historical research,” said John F. Marszalek, a Sherman biographer and the executive director of the Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association. “The facts are coming out.”

To that end, the marker in Atlanta mentions that more than 62,000 soldiers under Sherman’s command devastated “Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts” and talks of how, “contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war — railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins and warehouses.”

At the trial of Peter Liang, the jurors kept returning to the 11.5-pound trigger of his New York Police Department standard-issue 9mm Glock.

Liang was the officer who killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father, for no reason but that Gurley had walked into a dark stairwell.

iang’s defense had been that he kept his finger off the trigger, but that in the dark stairwell a loud sound surprised him. His finger twitched, leading to what Liang’s lawyers called “a tragic accident.”

The “contract” is the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The world that document created exists now only on yellowed maps, and the issues left unsettled — primarily the need for separate Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish territories — have come home begging. War is not fixing this; diplomacy might.

However, in the intervening 15 months, Turkey and Russia entered the fight, and the Saudis may soon join the fray. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies — as well as Iraq, Islamic State and Iran — never left. Only a massive diplomatic effort, involving all parties now on the playing field, including Islamic State, has any potential of ending the bloodshed. That means a redivision of the region along current ethnic, tribal, religious and political lines.

The old Sykes-Picot Agreement was enforced by the superpowers of the day, Britain and France, with buy-in from Russia. The immediate aim was colonialism; the long-term goal stability, following the massive realignment of power that was World War One. The lines were literally drawn for the next nine decades.

“We typically want to sell as much as we can, but our entire network is so full right now with just hand sanitizers and toilet paper that we don’t have the capacity to serve other demand,” said an Amazon employee involved in the changes.

The moves come on top of a drastic step Amazon took in March that prioritizes “essential” items such as cleaning products, health-care items and shelf-stable food. The mandate resulted in Amazon temporarily not accepting shipments of items from sellers that don’t correspond to the shopping needs created by the virus and caused discontent in its army of third-party sellers, which account for 58% of sales on Amazon.

The company is set to allow shipments of other products again, a step it has taken after hiring an additional 100,000 workers and announcing plans to add 75,000 more. The new employees were a factor in the company’s decision to begin facilitating sales of nonessential items once again. Amazon plans to spend nearly $500 million on increased pay for warehouse and delivery workers.

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.

for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.

This contagion has a weakness.

On March 3, Brian Kolfage tried to reach the U.S. government — through Instagram. The Air Force veteran, who’s best known for running the crowd-funded border wall project “We Build The Wall,” had stumbled into a new line of work: Medical supply middleman.

He’d posted a picture of a massive warehouse, filled with hundreds of boxes marked “3M.” They held 300 million N95 surgical masks, he wrote, just waiting to reach health professionals in need around the country.

In fact, the masks in the photo didn’t belong to Kolfage, and they weren’t for sale. Rather, they were sitting in a storehouse of supplies in Salt Lake City, part of a humanitarian shipment that, when photographed in January, was destined for a hospital in Shanghai

all is far from well in the kingdom of Bezos. At a defining moment for the company, it is letting customers down.

the promise to ship anything to our doorstep in a day or two that has gained it the trust of an astonishing 112 million Prime members in the U.S. (a nation of 129 million households) has evaporated nearly overnight.

it feels like Amazon is little better than any other retailer at getting us what we need, when we need it.

hen the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.

It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.

House Democrats have approved a bill that would provide protections for workers trying to organize, a measure that is the labor movement's single biggest legislative priority in this Congress

The bill passed Tuesday with a 225-206 vote, with five Republicans joining Democrats in favor of it

Union leaders say the Protecting the Right to Organize Act — PRO Act — would finally begin to level a playing field they say is unfairly tilted toward big business and management, making union organizing drives and elections unreasonably difficult.