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Contents contributed and discussions participated by ethanshilling

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ethanshilling

Before diplomacy begins, Israel opts for brute force against Hamas. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brute-force-against-hamas.html

israel palestine biden

shared by ethanshilling on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • As United States and Egyptian mediators headed to Israel to begin de-escalation talks, the antagonists were weighing delicate internal considerations before agreeing to discussions on ending the violence.
  • Early Friday, Israeli ground troops shelled Gaza — a potentially major move of escalation against the Hamas militants who have been launching hundreds of rockets at Israel.
  • Hamas argues that it is the only Palestinian faction that, with its large stockpile of improved missiles, is defending the holy places of Jerusalem, turning Mr. Abbas into a spectator.
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  • President Biden has spoken to Mr. Netanyahu and repeated the usual formula about Israel’s right to self-defense. The American leader also dispatched an experienced diplomat, the deputy assistant secretary of state Hady Amr, to urge de-escalation on both sides.
  • In Washington, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, when asked about American objections to a Security Council meeting, told reporters on Thursday that “we are open to and supportive of a discussion, an open discussion, at the United Nations,” but wanted to wait until early next week.
  • “This, I hope, will give some time for the diplomacy to have some effect and to see if indeed we get a real de-escalation,” Mr. Blinken said.
ethanshilling

As Ethiopia Fights in Tigray Region, a Crackdown on Journalists - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hiopia-tigray-journalists.html

ethiopia crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • One Ethiopian journalist was taken away by police officers as his distraught 10-year-old daughter clung to him. Another fled the country after she said armed men ransacked her home and threatened to kill her.
  • Six months into the war in Tigray, where thousands have died amid reports of widespread human rights abuses, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia has sought to quell critical coverage of the conflict with a campaign of arrests, intimidation and obstruction targeting the independent news media, according to human rights campaigners and media freedom organizations.
  • “It’s a sharply disappointing state of affairs given the hope and optimism of early 2018 when Mr. Abiy became prime minister,” said Muthoki Mumo, representative for sub-Saharan Africa for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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  • When Mr. Abiy came to power, Ethiopia was among the most repressive countries for journalists in Africa, and he quickly won global praise for a series of sweeping reforms.
  • But Mr. Abiy’s ambitious reforms quickly ran into stiff headwinds, including opposition from regional political parties and outbreaks of ethnic violence in several restive regions. His government began to revert to the old ways, shutting down the internet during political protests and detaining journalists under laws that had been introduced by the previous government.
  • After Mr. Abiy began a military operation in Tigray on Nov. 4, hoping to oust a regional ruling party that had challenged his authority, press freedoms deteriorated further.
  • Last week, government officials confirmed that they had revoked the accreditation of Simon Marks, an Irish reporter based in Ethiopia working for The New York Times.
  • In a war that has already caused thousands of deaths, displaced at least two million people and led to charges of ethnic cleansing, news media coverage has become a “very sensitive” topic for the government, said Befeqadu Hailu, an Ethiopian journalist imprisoned for 18 months by the previous regime.
  • Mr. Marks, who works for The Times and other publications, has reported from Ethiopia since 2019.
  • A day earlier, Mr. Marks had returned to Addis Ababa from Tigray, where he interviewed civilians who described atrocities by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, and women who said they suffered horrendous sexual assaults.
  • Officials told Mr. Marks that The Times’ coverage of Ethiopia had “caused huge diplomatic pressure” and that senior government officials had authorized the decision to cancel his papers.
  • The next test of Ethiopia’s openness is likely to be the June 5 election, the first for Mr. Abiy since being appointed prime minister in 2018.
ethanshilling

Uruguay Death Toll Soars as Virus Slams South America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uguay-covid-south-america.html

pandemic south america

shared by ethanshilling on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • For most of the past year, Uruguay was held up as an example for keeping the coronavirus from spreading widely as neighboring countries grappled with soaring death tolls.
  • As of Wednesday, at least 3,252 people had died from Covid-19, according to the Uruguayan Health Ministry, and the daily death toll has been about 50 during the past week.
  • Six out of the 11 countries with the highest death rates per capita are in South America, a region where the pandemic is leaving a brutal toll of growing joblessness, poverty and hunger.
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  • The country with the second-highest death rate per capita is nearby Paraguay, which also had relative success in containing the virus for much of last year but now finds itself in a worsening crisis.
  • On March 1, Uruguay had 76 Covid-19 patients in intensive care units. This week, medical professionals were caring for more than 530, according to Dr. Julio Pontet, president of the Uruguayan Society of Intensive Care Medicine who heads the intensive care department at the Pasteur Hospital in Montevideo, the capital.
  • “It is still too early to reach the conclusion that we’ve already started to improve, we’re in a high plateau of cases,” Dr. Pontet said.
ethanshilling

Turkey's Looming Lockdown Prompts a Rush to Stock Up - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-turkey-lockdown.html

pandemic turkey

shared by ethanshilling on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The streets of Istanbul were abuzz, the grocery stores packed, the seaside promenades crowded — but it was not the bustle of an ordinary spring Thursday. People were flocking to take advantage of the last day before a new lockdown takes hold, the strictest in Turkey since the pandemic began.
  • The country’s heath minister, Fahrettin Koca, has said that more contagious variants of the virus are partly to blame for the accelerating spread. Critics say the government relaxed too soon in March, before the country had made much progress with vaccination.
  • Turkey has fully vaccinated only about 11 percent of its people so far — 8.8 million out of a population of 83 million — using mainly the CoronaVac vaccine developed in China and the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
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  • For weeks, scientists have been calling for a total lockdown to stem the surge, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held off, mainly for economic reasons. He changed course after a cabinet meeting on Monday, and announced a new three-week lockdown to take effect Thursday evening and last through the end of Ramadan.
  • The announcement prompted a rush to stock up on groceries, alcohol and other supplies for the lockdown, which will include Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival to mark the end of Ramadan. And many city dwellers hurried to reach rural hometowns or holiday resorts while travel was still allowed.
  • The lockdown will land hardest on the many Turks who depend on informal day work. A single mother with five small children in Istanbul who collects and sells paper said her family can eat only on days when she can work.
  • “I really don’t know what to do,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her welfare payments from the government. “I wish the state would give me a job.”
ethanshilling

Biden Invites South Korea's President to White House in May - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...orea-biden-president-moon.html

biden korea

shared by ethanshilling on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden will meet with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea in Washington on May 21, the White House announced on Thursday.
  • In an interview with The New York Times published last week, Mr. Moon urged Mr. Biden to sit down with North Korea and kick-start negotiations, calling denuclearization a “matter of survival” for South Korea.
  • He also called for the United States to cooperate with China on North Korea and other global issues, like climate change. Deteriorating relations between the two countries could threaten negotiations over denuclearization, he warned.
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  • Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald J. Trump, left office without removing a single North Korean nuclear warhead. Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, has resumed weapons tests.
  • Mr. Biden met with Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan at the White House on April 16, marking the first in-person visit of a foreign leader during his presidency.
ethanshilling

'This Is a Catastrophe.' In India, Illness Is Everywhere. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...India-delhi-covid-cases.html

pandemic india

shared by ethanshilling on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Crematories are so full of bodies, it’s as if a war just happened. Fires burn around the clock. Many places are holding mass cremations, dozens at a time, and at night, in certain areas of New Delhi, the sky glows.
  • “I have no idea how I got it,” said a good friend who is now in the hospital. “You catch just a whiff of this…..” and then his voice trailed off, too sick to finish.
  • I’m sitting in my apartment waiting to catch the disease. That’s what it feels like right now in New Delhi with the world’s worst coronavirus crisis advancing around us. It is out there, I am in here, and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before I, too, get sick.
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  • India is now recording more infections per day — as many as 350,000 — than any other country has since the pandemic began, and that’s just the official number, which most experts think is a vast underestimation.
  • New Delhi, India’s sprawling capital of 20 million, is suffering a calamitous surge. A few days ago, the positivity rate hit a staggering 36 percent — meaning more than one out of three people tested were infected. A month ago, it was less than 3 percent.
  • The infections have spread so fast that hospitals have been completely swamped. People are turned away by the thousands. Medicine is running out. So is lifesaving oxygen.
  • Experts had always warned that Covid-19 could wreak real havoc in India. This country is enormous — 1.4 billion people. And densely populated. And in many places, very poor.
  • A new variant known here as “the double mutant” may be doing a lot of the damage. The science is still early but from what we know, this variant contains one mutation that may make the virus more contagious and another that may make it partially resistant to vaccines.
  • India is a story of scale, and it cuts both ways. It has a lot of people, a lot of needs and a lot of suffering. But it also has lot of technology, industrial capacity and resources, both human and material.
  • However difficult and dangerous it feels in Delhi for all of us, it’s probably going to get worse. Epidemiologists say the numbers will keep climbing, to 500,000 reported cases a day nationwide and as many as one million Indians dead from Covid-19 by August.
  • Mr. Modi remains popular among his base but more people are blaming him for failing to prepare India for this surge and for holding packed political rallies in recent weeks where few precautions were enforced — possible super-spreader events.
  • “Social distancing norms have gone for a complete toss,” said one Delhi newscaster the other day, during a broadcast of one of Mr. Modi’s rallies.
ethanshilling

As Virus Rages in South America, No End in Sight to Covid-19 Suffering - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-latin-america.html

pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
  • “I have tried to be optimistic,” he also wrote in a recent essay. “I want to think that the worst is over. But that turns out, I believe, to be counter-evident.”
  • Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
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  • As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
  • Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest.
  • But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
  • Inequality, a longstanding scourge that had been easing before the pandemic, is widening once again, and millions have been tossed back into the precarious positions they thought they had escaped during a relative boom.
  • “This is a story that is just beginning to be told,” Alejandro Gaviria, an economist and former health minister of Colombia who leads the nation’s Universidad de los Andes, said in an interview.
  • But with millions of people working in the informal sector, enforcing quarantines became unsustainable. Cases rose quickly and hospitals soon fell into crisis.
  • “The worst-case scenario is the development of a new variant that is not protected by current vaccines,” he said. “It’s not just an ethical and moral imperative, but a health imperative, to control this all over the world.”
  • Across the region, doctors say that the patients coming into hospitals are now far younger and far sicker than before. They’re also more likely to have had the virus already.
  • Official daily death tolls have exceeded previous records in recent days in most of South America’s biggest countries. Yet scientists say that the worst is yet to come.
  • The region is not prepared. Colombia has been able to issue a first vaccine to just 6 percent of its population, according to Our World in Data, a project at the University of Oxford. Several of its neighbors have achieved half that, or less.
  • By contrast, the United States, which bought up vaccines ahead of other countries, is at 43 percent.
  • The virus arrived in Peru in March last year, like much of Latin America, and the government moved quickly to lock down the country.
  • Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
  • Last month was the deadliest of the pandemic by far, according to official data, with health experts blaming the increase on holiday gatherings, crippled health systems and the new variants.
  • Vaccines arrived in Peru in February, followed quickly by anger after some politically connected people jumped the line to get vaccinated first.
  • Rafael Córdova, 50, a father of three, sat on a square drawn in the sand that marked his claim to land overlooking the Pan-American Highway and the Pacific Coast.
  • in May, he became sick with Covid and was fired. He believes his bosses let him go because they feared that he would sicken others, or that his family would blame them if he died.
  • “I left the hospital with my daughter in a black plastic bag and got in a taxi and went to the cemetery,” he said. “There was no Mass, no wake. No flowers. Nothing.”
ethanshilling

Supreme Court Rejects Limits on Life Terms for Youths - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-court-life-terms-youths.html

US supreme court

shared by ethanshilling on 22 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that judges need not determine that juvenile offenders are beyond hope of rehabilitation before sentencing them to die in prison. The decision, concerning a teenager who killed his grandfather, appeared to signal the end of a trend that had limited the availability of severe punishments for youths who commit crimes before they turn 18.
  • Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling, said it was enough that the sentencing judge exercised discretion rather than automatically imposing a sentence of life without parole.
  • “In a case involving an individual who was under 18 when he or she committed a homicide,” he wrote, “a state’s discretionary sentencing system is both constitutionally necessary and constitutionally sufficient.”
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  • Over the past 16 years, the court, often led by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, methodically limited the availability of the harshest penalties for crimes committed by juveniles, first by striking down the juvenile death penalty and then by restricting sentences of life without the possibility of parole.
  • Thursday’s decision, Jones v. Mississippi, No. 18-1259, concerned Brett Jones, who had recently turned 15 in 2004 when his grandfather discovered his girlfriend in his room. The two men argued and fought, and the youth, who had been making a sandwich, stabbed his grandfather eight times, killing him.
  • In 2005, Mr. Jones was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, then the mandatory penalty under state law. That same year, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty for juvenile offenders was unconstitutional.
  • In Montgomery v. Louisiana in 2016, the court made the Miller decision retroactive. In the process, it seemed to read the Miller decision to ban life without parole not only for defendants who received mandatory sentences but also “for all but the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.”
  • “How low this court’s respect for stare decisis has sunk,” she wrote. “Now, it seems, the court is willing to overrule precedent without even acknowledging it is doing so, much less providing any special justification.”
  • Justice Kavanaugh rejected the charge that the majority had twisted the earlier decisions, saying it had faithfully complied with stare decisis, the legal doctrine requiring respect for precedent.
  • Justice Sotomayor responded that the majority had satisfied none of the usual criteria for overturning earlier decisions.
  • Writing for the majority on Thursday, Justice Kavanaugh said the resentencing did not violate the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishments, because the punishment imposed by the trial judge had been discretionary rather than mandatory.
  • Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions had made life-without- parole sentences for juvenile offenders uncommon. In Mississippi, he wrote, resentencings following the Miller decision have “reduced life-without-parole sentences for murderers under 18 by about 75 percent.”
  • The experience in states that require a finding of incorrigibility was different, she wrote. In Pennsylvania, for example, fewer than 2 percent of resentencings have resulted in the reimposition of life-without-parole sentences.
  • Justice Kavanaugh wrote that states had tools to address juvenile life without parole.“States may categorically prohibit life without parole for all offenders under 18,” he wrote. “Or states may require sentencers to make extra factual findings before sentencing an offender under 18 to life without parole. Or states may direct sentencers to formally explain on the record why a life-without-parole sentence is appropriate notwithstanding the defendant’s youth.”
ethanshilling

Fallen British Empire Soldiers Overlooked Because of Racism, Inquiry Finds - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-soldiers-racism-inquiry.html

britain racism history

shared by ethanshilling on 22 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Tens of thousands of soldiers from Africa and Asia who died during World War I in the service of what was then the British Empire were not properly commemorated, partly because of prejudice and racism, according to the findings of an inquiry issued on Thursday.
  • The report, written by an independent committee, found that the graves of 45,000 to 54,000 people who died serving the British war effort — largely East Africans, West Africans, Egyptians and Indians — did not receive appropriate memorials.
  • First reported by The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday, the inquiry found that, though some colonial subjects had volunteered their service, “an equally high proportion may have been coerced or forcibly conscripted by the military and colonial authorities,” especially in African colonies and in Egypt.
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  • Those who died, in some cases, were commemorated collectively on memorials rather than with their own individual headstones or grave markers, like their European counterparts were. In other cases, soldiers who were missing had their names recorded in registers rather than in stone.
  • The war grave findings come as British institutions grapple with a reckoning over racial injustice, fueled by Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the country last summer.
  • Statues of slave traders have been torn down in some cities in Britain, and museums in the country have been working to highlight links to slavery and colonialism in their exhibits.
  • “No apology can ever make up for the indignity suffered by The Unremembered,” Mr. Lammy said on Twitter in response to the inquiry. But recognition that the commission had failed to treat Black African and other ethnic minority soldiers the same as others was a “watershed moment,” he said
  • Responding to the findings, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission apologized for “historic failings” and said that it was fully committed to delivering on a series of recommendations made in the report.
  • The British defense secretary, Ben Wallace, apologized on behalf of the government on Thursday. “There can be no doubt that prejudice played a part in some of the commissioners’ decisions,” he said in Parliament.
  • But Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, said “It’s really farcical that in the 21st century, now, they want to apologize.”
  • Many Britons were unaware that nonwhite colonial subjects were involved in the empire’s wars, and that was because of gaps in the history that is taught in schools, Professor Andrews said. “If government institutions were serious, you have to fundamentally rebuild the school curriculum from scratch,” he added.
  • “This was 100 years ago,” he said, adding that the current accounting of past wrongs was “too little, too late.”
ethanshilling

U.S. Home Sales Are Surging. When Does the Music Stop? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-home-sales-surge.html

US new york housing

shared by ethanshilling on 22 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • In the first week of April, U.S. search interest in the phrase “when is the housing market going to crash” jumped 2,450 percent compared to the previous month, and is now more popular than anytime since 2004, according to Google. The search terms “should I buy a house” and “sell my house” also reached record interest.
  • Market watchers are right to be wary. The median sale price of an existing home in the U.S. was $313,000 in February, up nearly 16 percent from a year earlier, when a 3 to 5 percent annual increase is considered healthy, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors, a trade group.
  • The answer will depend largely on where you live and how the pandemic continues to reorder buyer priorities, but it will hinge on two trends: rising mortgage rates and incredibly tight inventory in some markets, which will likely keep demand strong through the rest of 2021, even as price growth moderates, several analysts said.
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  • What awaits at the end of this frenetic period is not likely to resemble the 2008 housing bubble, which brought on a drawn-out crash when it finally burst, they said.
  • Nationwide, housing inventory was at a record-low 1.03 million units at the end of February, down 29.5 percent from a year earlier, a record decline, according to the National Association of Realtors.
  • “It gives the feel of a bubble,” Mr. Yun said, recalling the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis that cratered prices after 2008. “But the fundamental factors are different.”
  • “We don’t have the reckless lending that we had before,” said Mr. Miller, and so even as market conditions get frothy, some may find that they overpaid for their property, but the ebb and flow will be more in line with regular economic cycles.
  • He also expects home prices to keep rising in the short term, because of more than a decade of sluggish housing construction, hobbled by restrictive zoning and high labor costs.
  • Unlike much of the country, New York had a glut of luxury inventory before the pandemic, and prices had been softening since around 2017. From 2018 to the end of 2019, Manhattan saw a roughly 15 percent drop in sale prices, Mr. Miller said.
  • In the week ending April 11, there were 783 new signed contracts citywide, the highest since the company began tracking weekly pending sales in 2019, when the peak was 491 contracts, she said.
  • “The rate at which homes are selling nationally is not sustainable, but in New York, the uptick is just getting started,” said Nancy Wu, an economist for StreetEasy, a listing website.
  • The price cuts have been a boon to a broader range of people. First-time buyers made up 41.9 percent of sales in Manhattan last quarter, the highest share in at least seven years, Mr. Miller said.
  • “It does have the potential to last for a while, because the results are only based on a half-tank of gas,” Ms. Olshan said, referring to the fact that most of these signings were from domestic and local buyers, as international buyers remain mostly on the sidelines with travel restrictions.
  • New York’s revival also challenges one of the early assumptions during the pandemic — that the suburbs would benefit at the expense of big cities, where buyers, untethered from office commutes, could choose to live farther from work.
  • So far, thanks to limited supply, many suburbs remain in high demand. Fairfield County, Conn., for instance, recorded 3,045 sales last quarter, the most in that period in more than 16 years, along with the lowest inventory in 25 years, according to a report from the brokerage Douglas Elliman.
  • “Manhattan finally joined the party,” he said, referring to the city’s sales turnaround. “But we’re not sure if this is the party we want to be in — because there’s uncertainty about how this plays out.”
ethanshilling

Biden Will Seek Tax Increase on Rich to Fund Child Care and Education - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-taxes.html

biden tax US

shared by ethanshilling on 22 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The next phase of President Biden’s $4 trillion push to overhaul the American economy will seek to raise taxes on millionaire investors to fund education and other spending plans, but it will not take steps to expand health coverage or reduce prescription drug prices, according to people familiar with the proposal.
  • Administration officials had planned to include a health care expansion of up to $700 billion, offset by efforts to reduce government spending on prescription drugs.
  • The president is set to outline his so-called American Family Plan, which includes measures aimed at helping Americans gain skills throughout life and have more flexibility in the work force, before his first address to a joint session of Congress next week.
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  • But after weeks of work, administration officials have closed in on the final version of what will be the second half of Mr. Biden’s sweeping economic agenda, which also includes the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan the president described last month.
  • It also seeks to extend through 2025 an expanded tax credit for parents — which is essentially a monthly payment from the government for most families — that was created on a temporary basis by the $1.9 trillion economic aid package Mr. Biden signed into law last month.
  • “Expansion of the child tax credit is the most significant policy to come out of Washington in generations, and Congress has an historic opportunity to provide a lifeline to the middle class and to cut child poverty in half on a permanent basis,” the lawmakers said this week in a joint statement.
  • Democrats on Capitol Hill have urged Mr. Biden to instead make permanent that credit, which analysts say will drastically cut child poverty this year.
  • The president will also propose eliminating a provision of the tax code that reduces taxes for wealthy heirs who sell assets they inherit, like art or property, that have gained value over time.
  • All of the tax provisions would keep with Mr. Biden’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on individuals or households earning less than $400,000 a year.
  • Mr. Biden’s team was under pressure from Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and the chairman of the Budget Committee, to instead focus his health care efforts on a plan to expand Medicare.
  • Mr. Sanders has pushed the administration to lower Medicare’s eligibility age and expand it to cover vision, dental and hearing services.
ethanshilling

House Approves D.C. Statehood, but Senate Obstacles Remain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dc-statehood-vote.html

US washington politics

shared by ethanshilling on 22 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The House voted along party lines on Thursday to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., as Democrats moved to use their congressional majority to accomplish a long-held goal that has become a central plank in the party’s push to expand voting rights and address racial inequity.
  • The legislation would establish a 51st state called Washington, Douglass Commonwealth — in honor of Frederick Douglass, the Black emancipation and civil rights leader — while leaving the National Mall, Capitol Hill, the White House and some other federal property under congressional control.
  • The new state would have a single voting representative in the House and two senators representing its more than 700,000 residents, most of whom are people of color.
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  • “Congress has both the moral obligation and the constitutional authority to pass H.R. 51,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s nonvoting House delegate, using the legislation’s symbolic designation to reflect the new state.
  • The vote in the House was 216 to 208. The White House confirmed President Biden’s support for the measure this week, with the Office of Management of Budget issuing a statement of administration policy declaring that making the District of Columbia a state would “make our union stronger and more just.”
  • But even with Democrats now in control of a 50-to-50 Senate, prospects for the measure remain dim. A few Senate Democrats have not publicly endorsed the proposal, and advancing it would most likely require at least 10 Republicans to vote in support, while none have said they would.
  • A group of House Democrats gathered for a news conference on Thursday to call on their Senate counterparts to abolish the filibuster, as many of their legislative ambitions are doomed to fall short of the 60-vote supermajority threshold needed to advance bills.
  • “Statehood for the District of Columbia is about showing respect for our democracy, for the American people and for our Constitution,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on the House floor on Thursday.
  • Republicans have mounted a fierce campaign against the legislation, insisting it was not about equal representation, but ensuring that Democrats would secure three reliable votes — two in the Senate and one in the House — and pad their slim margins in both chambers.
  • Other Republicans have pushed for retroceding the nation’s capital into Maryland as a solution to ensure representation, a suggestion that has been repeatedly rejected by both Washingtonians and Marylanders.
  • Some proponents of statehood have begun pushing for the bill to be incorporated in sweeping legislation to expand voting rights and overhaul national elections, which Democrats have staked out as a top priority.
  • Backlash over the violent removal of protesters outside the White House during demonstrations against police brutality galvanized the movement. A decision to treat the District of Columbia as a territory when initially distributing state pandemic relief in 2020 also shortchanged the local government more than $700 million, local officials have said.
  • They are continuing to send legislative priorities to the Senate’s doorstep, in a bid to ramp up pressure on moderate Democrats who remain reluctant to do away with the blocking tactic.
ethanshilling

Democrats' Supreme Court Expansion Plan Draws Resistance - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-supreme-court-expansion.html

US politics supreme court

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • A group of House and Senate Democrats on Thursday introduced legislation to expand the Supreme Court to 13 members from nine, working to build momentum for rebalancing the court after an aggressive Republican drive to move it to the right.
  • The bill, which would change the makeup of the court for the first time in 150 years, is unlikely to move forward even with Democrats in control of Congress — at least not before a new commission named last week by President Biden completes a study exploring the subject.
  • Democrats, who announced their plan on the steps of the Supreme Court, said the change was necessary to restore equilibrium on its bench after Senate Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee in 2016 and pushed through three of President Donald J. Trump’s conservative appointees, including one — Justice Amy Coney Barrett — just days before the election last year.
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  • Mr. Biden has been dismissive in the past about calls to expand the court. But it became a major issue in the Democratic presidential primaries, and his promise to create a group to explore the idea was his way of avoiding taking a definitive stance.
  • “The president’s taking the right approach to have a commission to study such a thing,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters. “It’s a big step. It’s not out of the question. It has been done before.”
  • Ms. Pelosi said she preferred the approach taken by Mr. Biden, who ordered the new commission to study the issue and report within six months on potential changes to the court.
  • “Nine justices may have made sense in the 19th century, when there were only nine circuits, and many of our most important federal laws — covering everything from civil rights to antitrust, the internet, financial regulation, health care, immigration and white-collar crime — simply did not exist, and did not require adjudication by the Supreme Court,” said Mr. Nadler, another sponsor of the bill.
  • Republican political operatives quickly criticized the proposal to expand the court, which also surfaced in 2020 Senate races, signaling that the party would try to use the issue to portray Democrats as radical even if the legislation fails.
  • Republicans are pushing back on the idea in other ways. A group of House Republicans has proposed a constitutional amendment fixing the membership of the court at nine justices. And the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative advocacy group, started on Thursday what it said would be a $1 million advertising campaign criticizing Mr. Biden for exploring a change in the makeup of the court after resisting the idea for years.
  • “We know this isn’t going to be an easy fight and that there’s work to do,” said Christopher Kang, the chief counsel for the advocacy group Demand Justice. “We’re prepared to go neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend, member to member, senator to senator, until we gain a majority of support in both the House and the Senate to pass this legislation.”
ethanshilling

World War I Memorial in Washington Raises First Flag After Years of Wrangling - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...world-war-i-memorial.html

politics memorial washington

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Memorials to the war dead of the 20th century are among the central attractions in the nation’s capital. So it has always been notable that one of the most consequential American conflicts, World War I, lacked national recognition.
  • Now, as the United States withdraws from its longest war, a memorial that recognizes one of its most complicated ones officially opens in Washington on Friday, after years of tangling among preservationists, urban planners, federal officials and the commission that realized its creation.
  • “Our objective was to build a memorial that would stand shoulder to shoulder with other monuments and elevate World War I in the American consciousness,” said Edwin L. Fountain, the vice chairman of the World War I Centennial Commission
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  • The design, restoration of the original park and construction of the new memorial will cost $42 million; the commission has $1.4 million left to raise.
  • Critics — many of whom fought Mr. Fountain’s concept with every tactic available — say the structure falls short in marrying a historically significant park with a big-dream memorial.
  • “The real question is: Did the memorial leverage the power of place in which it now resides?” said Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, who tried to have the park added to the National Register of Historic Places, which trimmed the memorial planners’ large-scale plans.
  • Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, tried for years to expand the memorial effort on the National Mall before he retired. Congress considered transforming the District of Columbia War Memorial, at the end of the mall, into a national monument.
  • “I was doing very myopic, classical male figurative sculpture derived from Hellenistic art,” Mr. Howard said. “Neither one of us was ready. It is just insanity. You are entering into this process that could take away 15 years of your life.”
  • Mr. Howard said he was conscious of making the sculpture visually engaging but also educational. “My client said, ‘You have to make something that dramatizes World War I in a way in which visitors will want to go home and learn more about it,’” he said.
  • Accuracy gave way, however, to artistic license. The piece, which depicts Black, Latino and Native American soldiers, blurs the reality.
  • While Mr. Howard changed the helmets of the Black troops to reflect that, he said he was unmoved by the broader argument. “You had segregation in the Army ” he said in an interview. “However, on the battlefield, there is no distinction.”
  • As such, even if Black soldiers were depicted in a way that was historically incorrect, he said, “they needed to be treated as equal stature.”
  • The memorial is unlikely to quell longstanding criticism that too many monuments in Washington focus on war and death.
  • “There are stories that have been marginalized that could have been celebrated and sobering stories of the reality of the war experience that could more effectively honor sacrifice,” said Phoebe Lickwar, who was a landscape architect in the early stages of the project.
ethanshilling

U.S. Suicides Declined Over All in 2020 but May Have Risen Among People of Color - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-suicide-cdc.html

pandemic research

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Ever since the pandemic started, mental health experts have worried that grief, financial strain and social isolation may take an unbearable toll on American psyches. Some warned that the coronavirus had created the “perfect storm” for a rise in suicides.
  • While nearly 350,000 Americans died from Covid-19, the number of suicides dropped by 5 percent, to 44,834 deaths in 2020 from 47,511 in 2019. It is the second year in a row that the number has fallen, after cresting in 2018.
  • But while the number of suicides may have declined over all, preliminary studies of local communities in states like Illinois, Maryland and Connecticut found a rise in suicides among Black Americans and other people of color when compared with previous years.
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  • “We can’t make any bold statements until we have more national data,” said Arielle Sheftall, a principal investigator at the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
  • Suicides are comparatively rare events, and it is hard to know how to interpret changes in small numbers and whether they represent statistical hiccups or broad trends. Rates usually fall off during times of war or natural disasters, when people feel drawn together to fight for survival against a common enemy.
  • In the early days of the pandemic, families posted colorful drawings of rainbows in their windows and children stuck their heads out each day at 7 p.m. to ring bells and cheer for health care workers.
  • The initial sense of crisis and purpose may have been a source of strength for people around the world. A new study of suicide trends among residents of 10 countries and 11 states or regions with higher incomes found that the number remained largely unchanged or had even declined during the early months of the pandemic, though there were increases in suicide later in the year in some areas.
  • People of color have also been pummeled financially, particularly low-wage earners who have lost their jobs and had few resources on which to fall back. Many who remain employed hold jobs that put them at risk of contracting the virus on a daily basis.
  • Anxiety and depression have risen across the board, and many Americans are consumed with worry about their health and that of their families. A recent study found that one in 12 adults has had thoughts of suicide; Hispanic Americans in particular said they were depressed and stressed about keeping a roof over their heads and having enough food to eat.
  • “It’s one stressor on top of another stressor on top of another stressor,” Dr. Sheftall said. “You’ve lost your job. You’ve lost people in your family. Then there’s George Floyd. At one point, I had to shut the TV off.”
  • Researchers who study the racial trends said increases in suicide among people of color were consistent across the cities and regions that they examined — and all the more striking because suicide rates among Black and Hispanic Americans had always been comparatively low, about one-third the rate among white Americans.
ethanshilling

Biden Administration Says Russian Intelligence Obtained Trump Campaign Data - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...telligence-trump-campaign.html

politics trump

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The Biden administration revealed on Thursday that a business associate of Trump campaign officials in 2016 provided campaign polling data to Russian intelligence services, the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign.
  • The revelation, made public in a Treasury Department document announcing new sanctions against Russia, established for the first time that private meetings and communications between the campaign officials, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and their business associate were a direct pipeline from the campaign to Russian spies at a time when the Kremlin was engaged in a covert effort to sabotage the 2016 presidential election
  • “During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy,” the Treasury Department said in a news release.
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  • The Biden administration provided no supporting evidence to bolster the assessment that the Russian intelligence services obtained the polling data and campaign information.
  • Having the polling data would have allowed Russia to better understand the Trump campaign strategy — including where the campaign was focusing resources — at a time when the Russian government was carrying out its own efforts to undermine Donald J. Trump’s opponent.
  • “It was from both public and internal sources,” Mr. Gates said. “It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. It was ‘topline’ numbers and did not contain any strategic plans.”
  • It is unclear how long American spy agencies have held the conclusion about Mr. Kilimnik. Senior Trump administration officials, fearing Mr. Trump’s wrath, repeatedly tried to keep from the public any information that seemed to show Mr. Trump’s affinity for Russia or its president, Vladimir V. Putin.
  • The report contained several significant redactions that appeared related to Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik but said that Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share the information with him “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
  • The Senate report portrayed a Trump campaign stacked with businessmen and other advisers who had little government experience and “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
  • Mr. Trump’s obsession over Ukraine’s supposed role in the election was the impetus for a 2019 phone call with the Ukrainian president that was central to the first impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump.
  • Mr. Manafort and his longtime business associate, Mr. Gates, joined the Trump campaign after years of doing political consulting work in Ukraine, where they met Mr. Kilimnik, a Russian Army-trained linguist.
ethanshilling

How the G.O.P. Lost Its Clear Voice on Foreign Policy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republicans-afghanistan.html

gop policy

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • For decades, Senator Lindsey Graham traveled the world with his friend John McCain, visiting war zones and meeting with foreign allies and adversaries, before returning home to promote the Republican gospel of an internationalist, hawkish foreign policy.
  • “I miss John McCain a lot but probably no more than today,” Mr. Graham said. “If John were with us, I’d be speaking second.”
  • Mr. McCain, the onetime prisoner of war in Vietnam, in many ways embodied a distinctive Republican worldview: a commitment to internationalism — and confrontation when necessary — that stemmed from the Cold War and endured through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush before evolving after the Sept. 11 attacks to account for the threat of global terrorism.
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  • And for ambitious Republican officials, the political calculation remains stark: To the extent that Republican voters care at all about foreign policy issues, many have come to embrace Mr. Trump’s nationalistic views on issues like trade, overseas military ventures and even Russia.
  • Mr. Graham, who made an unsuccessful run for president and was always overshadowed by Mr. McCain as a Republican voice on foreign policy, spoke for more than half an hour at a news conference on Wednesday, walking listeners through a history of the Afghan conflict.
  • Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, warned that pulling out the troops would be a “grave mistake.”
  • “Apparently, we’re to help our adversaries ring in the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them,” he said in a speech on the Senate floor.
  • “We don’t want to engage in nation building, we don’t want to engage in endless police actions,” said John McLaughlin, who also conducted polling for Mr. Trump.
  • For Republicans, the shift inward comes as their long dominance over issues of national security and international affairs is waning. Mr. Trump rejected Republican foreign policy orthodoxy but largely struggled to articulate a cohesive countervailing view beyond a vague notion of putting America first.
  • “To say that there is a single Republican foreign policy position is to miss what’s been happening within the conservative movement on these issue for the last 20 years,” said Lanhee Chen, a Hoover Institution scholar and policy adviser to a number of prominent Republican officials.
  • Foreign policy, particularly withdrawing from Afghanistan, was one of the few areas where Republican elected officials were willing to publicly criticize Mr. Trump.
  • Yet chances that Republicans will achieve a complete restoration of the traditional party platform seem low, particularly if Mr. Trump continues to flex his political power among his base.
  • When asked about the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, 58 percent of Republicans surveyed said the outbreak showed the United States should be less reliant on other countries, compared with just 18 percent of Democrats who said the same.
  • And Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has ambitions of developing a new policy framework for the party, praised the decision.
  • Mr. Pompeo, who recently became the co-chairman of a new foreign policy group at the Nixon Foundation that aims to reassert “conservative realism,” said he supported Mr. Biden’s decision.
  • Of course, as the Fox News hosts pointed out, had Mr. Trump won re-election, the troops would have been coming home next month — with the full support of Mr. Pompeo, if not many other Republican leaders.
ethanshilling

The End of the United States' Forever War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...afghanistan-forever-war.html

world US afghanistan

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Wesley Morgan’s recently released book about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, “The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley,” is unique in its completeness. Arguably, it is the closest any book about the American war in Afghanistan has come to capturing what transpired in a slice of territory occupied by U.S. forces.
  • It is especially relevant now, in the wake of President Biden’s announcement that all American troops will withdraw from the country by September. Books like Morgan’s will serve as the epitaphs for the failures of the American military in its two-decade-long war.
  • Thousands of troops passed through the Pech in Afghanistan’s violent east, where famous documentaries and films were born and the Korengal Valley turned practically into a household name. The soldiers there built and tore down outposts. Went on hundreds of patrols. Fought and died.
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  • Morgan, a military affairs reporter, documents it all from the beginning to the end, a herculean task in a conflict that has gone on for so long, and with characters who continuously rotated in and out every few months.
  • I think in the Pech and its tributaries, we’re already well into the post-withdrawal phase. It’s been this way at a bunch of points in the story: The U.S. embraced the counterinsurgency outpost in the Pech a couple of years before it did in other places like Kandahar and Helmand.
  • So I think for the Pech and its tributaries, the post-2021 future is already happening. The government and the Taliban are fighting each other, but they’re also observing truces with each other and finding ways to accommodate one another on governance and especially on fighting ISIS, which is their mutual enemy.
  • Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used by the United States and Western allies in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base after American troops leave the country.
  • Many Afghans fear that without the umbrella of U.S. protection, the country will be unable to preserve its modest gains toward democracy and women’s rights.
  • Pakistan’s military stayed allied to both the Americans and Taliban. But now the country may face intensified extremism at home as a result of a perceived Taliban victory.
ethanshilling

How Democrats Who Lost in Deep-Red Places Might Have Helped Biden - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-down-ballot.html

biden democrats politics

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.
  • State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.
  • For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races.
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  • The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, the study found.
  • The study showed a reverse coattails effect: It was lower-level candidates running in nearly hopeless situations — red districts that Democrats had traditionally considered no-win, low-to-no-investment territory — who helped the national or statewide figures atop the ballot, instead of down-ballot candidates benefiting from a popular national candidate of the same party.
  • In 2005, when Howard Dean became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he tried to institute a “50-state strategy” to build up party infrastructure and candidate recruitment at every level and in every state — even in solidly Republican districts.
  • The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates.
  • “Now that we’ve gotten through the 2020 election, we really need to make sure that this is what we’re focused on,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “We’ve elected Joe Biden, but Trump and Trumpism and the things he’s said and stood for are not gone, and we could lose everything again.”
  • Republicans have lapped Democrats in their legislative infrastructure for years, said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster. “Democrats are pretty open at a legislative level that they’re playing catch-up,” he said. “For whatever reason, Democrats have gotten more fired up about federal races.”
  • “It came as a shock to everybody that Republicans ran as strong in those districts as they did,” Mr. Hobart said. “But if you have candidates on the ballot for everything, it means you’re primed to take advantage of that infrastructure on a good year.”
  • In Georgia, Run for Something believes that Ms. Carter’s presence on the ballot significantly helped Mr. Biden’s performance in her area of the state. While the group said that district-level data alone could be misleading, and needed to be combined with other factors taken into account in its analysis, Mr. Biden averaged 47 percent of the vote in the three counties — Newton, Butts and Henry — in which Ms. Carter’s district, the 110th, sits.
  • Ms. Carter said she spent a lot of time during her campaign trying to educate people on the importance of voting, especially in local races that often have more bearing on day-to-day life, like school and police funding.
  • “I thought it was a lot of the work that people didn’t want to do or felt like it wasn’t going to benefit them,” she said. “We are not going to win every race, but we could win if we just did the legwork.”
ethanshilling

Japan to Start Releasing Radioactive Water From Fukushima in 2 Years - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukushima-wastewater-ocean.html

japan fukushima

shared by ethanshilling on 13 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Japan said on Tuesday that it had decided to gradually release tons of treated wastewater from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the ocean, describing it as the best option for disposal despite fierce opposition from fishing crews at home and concern from governments abroad.
  • Disposal of the wastewater has been long delayed by public opposition and by safety concerns. But the space used to store the water is expected to run out next year, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said during the cabinet meeting on Tuesday that disposing of the wastewater from the plant was “a problem that cannot be avoided.”
  • The Fukushima crisis was set off in March 2011 by a huge earthquake and tsunami that ripped through northeastern Japan and killed more than 19,000 people. The subsequent meltdown of three of the plant’s six reactors was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
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  • The government will “take every measure to absolutely guarantee the safety of the treated water and address misinformation,” he said, noting that the cabinet would meet again within a week to decide on the details for carrying out the plan.
  • Ten years later, the cleanup is far from finished at the disabled plant, which is operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company. To keep the three damaged reactor cores from melting, cooling water is pumped through them continuously.
  • There are now about 1.25 million tons of wastewater stored in more than 1,000 tanks at the plant site. The water continues to accumulate at a rate of about 170 tons a day, and releasing all of it is expected to take decades.
  • But the Japanese government’s plan faces strong opposition from local officials and fishing crews, who say that it would add to consumer fears about the safety of Fukushima seafood.
  • Responding to Japan’s decision, the U.S. State Department said in a statement, “In this unique and challenging situation, Japan has weighed the options and effects, has been transparent about its decision, and appears to have adopted an approach in accordance with globally accepted nuclear safety standards.”
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