Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items matching "NY" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

A Marijuana Stash That Carried Little Risk - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-that-carried-little-risk.html

stop-and-frisk

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • While scores of people are arrested on these charges every day in New York, the laws apparently don’t apply to middle-aged white guys. Or at least they aren’t enforced against us.
  • About 87 percent of the marijuana arrests in the Bloomberg era have been of blacks and Latinos, most of them men, and generally under the age of 25 — although surveys consistently show that whites are more likely to use it.
  • These drug busts were the No. 1 harvest of the city’s stop, question and frisk policing from 2009 through 2012, according to a report released Thursday by the New York State attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman. Marijuana possession was the most common charge of those arrested during those stops. The few whites and Asians arrested on these charges were 50 percent more likely than blacks to have the case “adjourned in contemplation of dismissal,” the report showed.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • having a little bit of pot, like a joint, is not a crime as long as you don’t burn or openly display it. Having it in my backpack was a violation of law, meaning that it is an offense that is lower than a misdemeanor. Pot in the backpack is approximately the same as making an illegal turn in a car. Taking it out and waving it in the face of a police officer or lighting up a joint on the street would drive it up to the lowest-level misdemeanor.
  • How was it that all the black and Latino males were displaying or burning pot where it could be seen by the police? The answer is that many of them were asked during the stops to empty their pockets. What had been a concealed joint and the merest violation of the law was transformed into a misdemeanor by being “openly displayed.”
  • LAST year, the Bronx Defenders, which represents poor people in criminal court, tried to have suppression hearings in 54 cases involving marijuana possession. In such hearings, the police officer would have been required to testify about the circumstances under which the marijuana was found. If it was the result of an illegal search, the judge could have barred the use of the evidence. But not once did the hearings go forward: missing paperwork, officer’s day off, the drip, drip of wasted time. On average, each case required five court appearances, and stretched over eight months. Most of the charges were dropped or lowered to noncriminal violations. The process itself was the punishment, and it was inflicted almost exclusively on blacks and Latinos.
Javier E

The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World's Richest - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...longer-the-worlds-richest.html

income US international comparison rich poor growth

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States
  • The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.
  • Finally, governments in Canada and Western Europe take more aggressive steps to raise the take-home pay of low- and middle-income households by redistributing income.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the most commonly cited economic statistics — such as per capita gross domestic product — continue to show that the United States has maintained its lead as the world’s richest large country. But those numbers are averages, which do not capture the distribution of income.
  • Three broad factors appear to be driving much of the weak income performance in the United States. First, educational attainment in the United States has risen far more slowly than in much of the industrialized world over the last three decades, making it harder for the American economy to maintain its share of highly skilled, well-paying jobs.
  • technology skills that are above average relative to 55- to 65-year-olds in rest of the industrialized world
  • Younger Americans, though, are not keeping pace: Those between 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries, well behind their counterparts in Canada, Australia, Japan and Scandinavia
  • The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.
  • Whatever the causes, the stagnation of income has left many Americans dissatisfied with the state of the country. Only about 30 percent of people believe the country is headed in the right direction,
  • both opinion surveys and interviews suggest that the public mood in Canada and Northern Europe is less sour than in the United States today.
  • Elsewhere in Europe, economic growth has been slower in the last few years than in the United States, as the Continent has struggled to escape the financial crisis. But incomes for most families in Sweden and several other Northern European countries have still outpaced those in the United States, where much of the fruits of recent economic growth have flowed into corporate profits or top incomes.
  • Even in Germany, though, the poor have fared better than in the United States, where per capita income has declined between 2000 and 2010 at the 40th percentile, as well as at the 30th, 20th, 10th and 5th.
  • the poor in the United States have trailed their counterparts in at least a few other countries since the early 1980s. With slow income growth since then, the American poor now clearly trail the poor in several other rich countries. At the 20th percentile — where someone is making less than four-fifths of the population — income in both the Netherlands and Canada was 15 percent higher than income in the United States in 2010.
  • By contrast, Americans at the 95th percentile of the distribution — with $58,600 in after-tax per capita income, not including capital gains — still make 20 percent more than their counterparts in Canada, 26 percent more than those in Britain and 50 percent more than those in the Netherlands. For these well-off families, the United States still has easily the world’s most prosperous major economy.
aqconces

Hitler constantly high on crystal meth while leading Nazi Germany: report - ny Daily News - 0 views

m.nydailynews.com/...rmany-report-article-1.1973719

hitler nazi meth research history

shared by aqconces on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • New research shows that the German Nazi leader was on a constant supply of crystal methamphetamines to stay awake and energized, according to the UK Independent.
  • The intoxicated Fuhrer, a famous hypochondriac, was on more than 74 different medications while he ordered the systematic murders of Jews across Europe
  • It also claims he took nine shots of methamphetamine while living out his last days in his bunker to ease his pain and stress
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Hitler was on a steady stream of barbiturate tranquilizers, morphine, nasal and eye drops containing cocaine and other drugs — along with bulls’ semen to boost his testosterone — thanks to his Berlin-based personal physician, Theodor Morell, according to the report
  • He was characterized as “a quack and a fraud and a snake oil salesman”
  • Hitler was shown to have signs of Parkinson's disease by the end of World War II in 1945, and the dizzying array of drugs likely contributed to his serious health issues.
  • aqconces on 01 Jun 15
     
    Studies show that Hitler was constantly high on crystal meth while leading Germany.  Fuhrer was on more than 74 different medications while he ordered murders of Jews.  
Javier E

Daniel W. Drezner | FOREIGN POLICY - 1 views

drezner.foreignpolicy.com

foreign policy fact-checking debate president Obama Romney

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 11 - Cached
  • let's acknowledge that both candidates fudged, exaggerated, or flat-out lied on just about everything pertaining to foreign economic policy during last night's debate.  It was a truly bipartisan fib-fest.  I could go through the debate transcript line by line, but let's just hit the highlights.  At varous points, one or both of the candidates tried to convince undecided voters of the following:  1)  Energy independence is the cure for what ails the U.S. economy; 2)  The U.S. loses from trade with China, and tougher trade enforcement will fix that; 3)  Free trade with Latin America will create millions and millions of jobs; 4)  The only reason China is doing well comparatively is that it's keeping its currency undervalued; and finally 5)  Illegal immigration is threatening the American economy.  Let's inject a little reality here, shall we?  Repeat after me:  1)  Because most energy sources are traded in global markets, energy independence has zero effect on the economy (though there might be a few security dividends). 2)  The United States benefits a great deal from trade with China and the rest of the world. 3)  Perfect trade enforcement would have only a marginal impact on employment; 4)  China's currency interventions have been slowing down for much of 2012.  Literally. 5)  Illegal immigration into the United States "has been in reverse for several years."
  • The biggest whoppers in last night's U.S. presidential debate
  • After spending the past year designing  and making this course, however, let me say that those who believe that it will be easy to "scale up" existing lecture courses into the online world are kidding themselves.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Teaching to a classroom audience requires a very different pedagogy than teaching to a captive online audience.  The former can provide instantaneous feedback, which is crucial for a professor.  They can ask for a concept to be repeated, or ask a follow-up question, or query about how the abstract concept under discussion connects to a headline of the day.  None of these things are easy to pull off for an online audience. 
  • With a strictly online course, the professor has to do a lot more work to keep it engaging. 
rachelramirez

Iran, Emerging From Sanctions, Faces Crisis After Saudi Arabia Embassy Attack - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tion-after-embassy-attack.html

sanctions Iran Saudi Arabia politics

shared by rachelramirez on 05 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Iran, Emerging From Sanctions, Faces Crisis After Saudi Arabia Embassy Attack
  • a Saudi state executioner beheaded the prominent Shiite dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday
  • Within hours of the execution, nationalist Iranian websites were calling for demonstrations in front of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and its consulate in the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Iran might have capitalized on global outrage at the executions by Saudi Arabia, but instead it finds itself once again characterized by adversaries as a provocateur in the region and abroad.
  • The moves formalized the Sunni-Shiite polarization that has fueled the chaotic proxy wars
  • Now, some Iranians are wondering whether Saudi Arabia has again gained the upper hand in the new diplomatic crisis.
  • Sheikh Nimr was not only a leading opposition figure in the Saudis’ Sunni kingdom but also a symbol of Shiite activism abroad. After he was sentenced to death by the Saudi judiciary in 2014, Iran warned of “dire consequences” if Sheikh Nimr were to be executed.
  • The act of cutting ties seems a simple one, but the consequences can be far-reaching.
rachelramirez

The New York Times' first article about Hitler's rise is absolutely stunning - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...ny-times-hitler

ww2 Vox history

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The New York Times' first article about Hitler's rise is absolutely stunning
  • On November 21, 1922, the New York Times published its fvery first article about Adolf Hitler. It's an incredible read — especially its assertion that "Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded."
  • But the really extraordinary part of the article is the three paragraphs on anti-Semitism. Brown acknowledges Hitler's vicious anti-Semitism as the core of Hitler's appeal — and notes the terrified Jewish community was fleeing from him — but goes on to dismiss it as a play to satiate the rubes
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Now, Brown's sources in all likelihood did tell him that Hitler's anti-Semitism was for show. That was a popular opinion during Nazism's early days.
sgardner35

Tensions Simmer as a Small Town Seeks Answers in a Boy's Killing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...llips-in-potsdam-new-york.html

shared by sgardner35 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Garrett Phillips, a popular and outgoing 12-year-old, was strangled in his home in fall 2011. The murder set off a mad, all-consuming pursuit for a killer in a region where such crimes are extraordinarily rare.
  • It took more than 30 months for prosecutors to charge him with second-degree murder, in May 2014 — and months more to secure a second indictment after the first was thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct. Despite the long pursuit, the case that a jury will hear this summer is far from perfect: There is a distinct lack of hard evidence, according to police testimony — no fingerprints, no witnesses, no hair or tissue samples, seemingly no conclusive forensic evidence at all connecting Mr. Hillary to the crime.In the long lead-up to the prosecution of Mr. Hillary, his supporters have highlighted not only the absence of physical evidence but the lack of any plausible motive or history that would suggest he was capable of murdering a child. They have also said that another man, a local sheriff’s deputy who once dated Garrett’s mother, was removed from suspicion too quickly.
  • “I can’t think of any other person who would want to hurt Garrett,” Ms. Cyrus said in a statement to the police after her son died.Like the Raquette River, which splits Potsdam in two, the case has divided opinion and tested residents’ patience in St. Lawrence County, a rural and job-challenged region where 94 percent of the population is white. But the emotional impact on Potsdam is raw and evident: Garrett’s former teachers and family friends cry at his memory, while the village’s elders echo one another, saying such terrible crimes simply do not happen in places like this.“It was like a meteor hitting,” said Ron Tischler, the mayor of Potsdam, home to around 9,600 residents that is about 25 miles south of Ontario.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Mr. Hillary has also accused the county prosecutor, Mary Rain, of forsaking justice in the name of keeping a campaign promise: Ms. Rain was elected in 2013, in part on the strength of campaigning with Ms. Cyrus and promising to focus the energies of her small office on Garrett’s murder.
  • The suspicions and repercussions surrounding the boy’s death have rippled through time and distance. A key defense witness, for instance, suddenly discovered “Justice for Garrett” signs posted near his new workplace and home — each hundreds of miles from Potsdam. Mr. Hillary, now free on bail, found himself rearrested in September for allegedly violating an order of protection by using a drive-through A.T.M. at the bank where Ms. Cyrus worked.
  • Garrett Phillips was an ebullient child despite an early-life tragedy: When he was a toddler, his father, Robert — an amiable grounds worker at the State University of New York at Potsdam — suffered a brain aneurysm and never recovered. He died before Garrett was 3.Though Garrett never knew his father, the boy emulated him as he grew. Like his father, he hunted and fished; played any sport involving a ball; and balanced his rowdy and respectful sides, rambunctious sometimes in public but polite to family and strangers.
  • On the afternoon of Oct. 24, 2011, Garrett was playing basketball at the middle school with some friends as rain fell intermittently. A little before 5 p.m., Tandy Cyrus called his cellphone and told him to go home to do schoolwork.
  • Garrett got on his caster board — something of a cross between a skateboard and a snowboard — and headed home, his progress captured by a series of surveillance cameras and later described in a police timeline.
  • Combing the apartment for evidence, investigators found a possible clue: The screen of the bedroom window, about 20 feet off the ground, was “bent outward,” according to the incident report. A tile seemed to be broken on the roof of a lower section of the building, about 10 feet below, and there was a gash in the grass
  • His appeal, as both a coach and a person, is evident: His energy is intense, but his smile is unencumbered. He said he had always loved the North Country region’s rural mountains and summertime greenery — when it was warm it reminded him of Jamaica — though he was aware of the cultural boundaries beyond campus.“You’re a black person,” he said in an interview. “You were viewed as such.”A year after being hired by Clarkson, Mr. Hillary found that his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Stacia Lee, the mother of his three children, was struggling. At a bar called Ton’s, he became acquainted with a bartender, Tandy Cyrus.
  • “I go, ‘Listen. Help me understand. Are you and Tandy together?’” Deputy Jones said.Ms. Cyrus, 37, declined to be interviewed for this article, but Mr. Hillary said he had been harassed because of his relationship with her. “It’s not a community with a lot of interracial relationships,” he said, adding that he had “to be mindful” when he was out. “I would go to the local restaurant,” he said, and Deputy Jones’s “friends would come up to me and like, ‘You know you’re not supposed to be dating John’s girl.’”A few months after they met, Mr. Hillary and Ms. Cyrus moved in together, forming a household of five, including his teenage daughter, Shanna-Kay, and Ms. Cyrus’s two sons.
  • Lieutenant Murray saw Mr. Duff as deeply credible.“I just can’t bring myself to fathom why a collegiate person playing on a Division III soccer team with his entire future ahead of him would lie and perjure himself on a sworn statement for no reason,” he said.On the evening after the murder, Lieutenant Murray went to watch Clarkson’s men’s soccer squad and videotaped Mr. Hillary coaching the penultimate game of a rough season. (The 2011 Clarkson squad had more losses than goals.)According to a search-warrant application, as Mr. Hillary strode along the sideline, he seemed stiff and sedate and had a “significant limp in his right leg,” something the detective inferred would have been caused by jumping from a second-story window. Last year, though, The Watertown Daily Times posted a clip from Lieutenant Murray’s video: In it, Mr. Hillary appears to walk unhindered along the sidelines.
  • As the men were being questioned, detectives searched for damning evidence. They seized Mr. Hillary’s phone and examined the contents of his pockets and his socks. Nude photographs, fingerprints and palm prints were taken. Mr. Hillary’s car was searched. (The timing of the seizures, and of the subsequent search warrants, has been a focus of Mr. Hillary’s civil suit.) The police also obtained his DNA from a coffee cup and the butt of a cigarette.
katyshannon

House Reaches Accord on Spending and Tax Cuts - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gency-workers-zadroga-act.html

house accord spending tax cuts new york times politics US

shared by katyshannon on 18 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Republican and Democratic negotiators in the House clinched a deal late Tuesday on a $1.1 trillion spending bill and a huge package of tax breaks.
  • Legislative drafters, racing a midnight deadline, met the time limit for issuing the tax package but apparently missed it for the spending bill. That could push back a vote on the House floor by one day, until Friday.
  • The late-hour tension emphasized the deep disagreements over an array of policy provisions that have left weeks of negotiations tinged with acrimony. Since the Republicans took back control of the House in 2011, a majority in the party has routinely opposed compromise budget and spending measures, forcing party leaders to rely on Democrats for votes to clear the bills. All signs indicate that the same dynamic is playing out now.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • But the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, has voiced angry opposition to the huge package of tax breaks, saying it would unfairly benefit big business.
  • And even Tuesday night, some Democrats in the House leadership said Ms. Pelosi was on the verge of turning against the omnibus spending measure because of her opposition to a Republican provision that would lift the 40-year ban on exports of crude oil from the United States.
  • The question of delaying important provisions of the Affordable Care Act provided a surprising area of common ground — among Republicans who have sought to dismantle President Obama’s signature health care law, and Democrats who had reservations about a tax on generous health plans. The White House and many economists have defended the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost employer-sponsored health plans as a way to reduce health costs and make the health care system more efficient.
  • Throughout Tuesday, major components of the spending legislation appeared to be falling into place, including a tentative agreement to alter major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, delaying a planned tax on high-cost health insurance plans and suspending a tax on medical devices for two years.
  • Paul D. Ryan has gained momentum in his early weeks as speaker, clearing a major highway bill and an important education measure. But the omnibus spending bill, needed to keep the government functioning, presented a particular challenge given the Obama administration’s opposition to numerous policy prescriptions that Republicans wanted to attach to the must-pass bill.
  • And while Mr. Ryan has won plaudits from his rank and file for running a more inclusive House, the late rush to finish the spending deal seemed likely to test him on that front.
  • Republican congressional leaders and the White House reached a budget accord in late October that set top-line spending levels for 2016 and 2017.
  • But lawmakers said they had tentatively agreed to delay the tax, originally scheduled to take effect in 2018, by two years. Labor unions strenuously opposed the tax, saying it could lead to reductions in health benefits prized by their members.
Javier E

The moral rot is spreading - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html

gop corruption

shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) stood on the Senate floor Wednesday morning for his first public remarks since the seismic events of the day before: The president’s former personal lawyer pleaded guilty to fraud and breaking campaign finance laws, implicating the president in a crime; the president’s former campaign chairman was convicted on eight counts of financial crimes, making him one of five members of Trump’s team who have been convicted or have admitted guilt; and a Republican congressman was indicted, the second of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters to be charged this month.
  • McConnell’s counterpart in the House, Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), was equally cowardly. “We are aware of Mr. [Michael] Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges” was his office’s official statement. “We will need more information than is currently available at this point.”
  • What more do you need, Mr. Speaker? What more will it take, Republicans? It seems nothing can bring them to state what is manifestly true: The president is unfit to serve, surrounded by hooligans and doing incalculable harm.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This intolerable silence of the Republicans — through “Access Hollywood,” racist outbursts, diplomatic mayhem and endless scandal — is what allows Trump and his Fox News-viewing supporters to dock their spaceship in a parallel universe where truth isn’t truth. At Tuesday night’s rally in West Virginia, Trump’s irony-challenged audience could be heard chanting “Drain the Swamp!” and “Lock her up!” (Hillary Clinton, that is), just a few hours after Paul Manafort’s conviction and Cohen’s guilty plea.
  • there doesn’t have to be collusion, or even speculation, to recognize that something is terribly wrong. There is no good answer to the question Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis posed after his client said under oath that Trump directed him to pay off two women to influence the election: “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”
Javier E

Trump is tearing apart all that prevents another world war - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8aea-86e88ae760d8_story.html

WWII Pax americana

shared by Javier E on 21 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • At 25, Lundberg was no stranger to America First, protective tariffs and nationalism. No American of his age or older could be. These themes had been among the most prominent topics for public debate throughout his short life. And each had contributed, in one way or another, to the chain of events that took Lundberg to war. The isolationism that fueled the original America First movement died with the first bomb at Pearl Harbor.
  • The danger and folly of these policies were written in an ocean of blood — Lundberg’s and all the others’. So when the wasteful war finally ended, the United States led the world away from those policies and built institutions to prevent new eruptions.
  • No sniveling Eastern elitist erected this framework. It was a bipartisan project guided by a Missouri farm boy, Harry S. Truman. A chastened former isolationist, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, delivered Republican support to the Democratic president. “Politics,” the senator declared refreshingly, “stops at the water’s edge.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This U.S.-led network of international institutions has produced the longest period without a war between great powers since the days of the Roman Empire. We’re at 73 years and counting. Prior to its creation, Europe had plunged the world into two global wars in the span of just 25 years. This alone — peace among the great powers — has been worth every penny spent and every hour of haggling.
  • But peace is not the only benefit. There’s prosperity, too.
  • during the ensuing decades of peace, the GDP of the United States has grown to roughly $20 trillion — more than 500 percent. We’ve accomplished that while also enabling the ruined nations of Europe and Asia, our partners in free trade, to achieve similar economic miracles.
  • Warts and all, this Pax Americana is the unparalleled gem of diplomatic history and the epitome of bipartisan achievement. President Barack Obama was widely seen as backing away from America’s lead role; now President Trump is reviving the very policies that once darkened the world. I can’t shake the image of that young man. He’s asking: How can you forget?
Javier E

Denmark Election Is Fueled by Anger on Climate and Immigration - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ction-climate-immigration.html

climate immigration election denmark crisis culture climate change

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • It was the sort of campaign appearance that Mette Frederiksen, leader of the left-leaning Social Democrats, would have ordinarily considered friendly terrain — a gathering of environmentally minded students in her hometown, Aalborg, in Denmark. Except the students demanded whether Ms. Frederiksen knew the carbon footprint of the red roses her party gave away at campaign stops.She didn’t. And the students — who also criticized her climate policy for failing to mention the Paris accord — didn’t let her forget it.
  • “We want action. Something must happen,” said Mathilde Christiansen, a senior.
  • Four years ago, climate change barely registered as an election concern in Denmark. But in a nation that juts into the North and Baltic Seas, polls now show that 46 percent of voters rank climate change as their top concern, compared to 27 percent in 2017.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Mr. Madsen, the political analyst, said that many parties were only recently waking up to the climate rebellion, which is happening among the broader electorate as well as among students and other younger voters.
  • In a recent survey of 9,000 Danish respondents, more than 50 percent said they were willing to make “significant reductions” in consumption and wealth to mitigate the climate problem, while four out of five predicted that future generations would suffer from environmental change.
  • “I was doubting if I could allow myself to have children in this world which could collapse in 30 to 40 years,” Frederik Sandby, 26, said.
  • Pia Kjaersgaard, a leader of the Danish People’s Party and the speaker of Parliament, recently dismissed environmentally focused voters as “climate fools,” while her party’s chairman, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, warned that critics who criticized the agricultural sector for its carbon emissions were guilty of “climate hysteria.”
  • Martin Krasnik, editor in chief of Weekendavisen, a weekly newspaper, said their appearance on the scene was part of a trend. “For 30 years, everybody’s been moving to the right, right, right,” he said
  • Figures show the number of asylum seekers has actually dropped to the lowest level in Denmark in a decade. Even as the Danish People’s Party warns that the Social Democrats could loosen immigration policies, the reality is that both parties have largely supported the tougher line in parliamentary votes in recent years.
  • Ms. Frederiksen, the leader of the Social Democrats, has been ahead in the polls and has said that she would mostly maintain a tough stance on migrants, creating a highly unusual policy mix for a European left-wing party. She said such an approach was a necessity, “if we want this society to function.”
  • Mr. Madsen, the analyst, noted that the tactics could provide a template. “What we’re seeing is a laboratory for what the center-left can be,” he said.
malonema1

FACT CHECK: Has Citizenship Been A Standard Census Question? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...een-a-standard-census-question

US culture policy

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • After a controversial decision by the Department of Commerce to add a question about U.S. citizenship to the 2020 census, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the move as nothing out of the ordinary.
  • In 1970, the Census Bureau began sending around two questionnaires: a short-form questionnaire to gather basic population information and a long form that asked detailed questions about everything from household income to plumbing. The short form went to most households in America. The long form was sent to a much smaller sample of households, 1 in 6. Most people didn't get it.
  • The state of California has already sued to block the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, and New York's state attorney general has announced plans for a multistate lawsuit. The concern expressed by states with large undocumented immigrant populations is that asking about citizenship will scare people off, forms won't get filled out and the count won't be accurate, affecting federal funding and the number of congressional seats. (The Census Bureau is legally required to keep answers confidential, even from the FBI and other government entities. That means it isn't allowed to release data identifying an individual. But federal agencies and researchers can request census information on specific population groups.)
  • malonema1 on 01 May 18
     
    " "
runlai_jiang

Made-up to look beautiful. Sent out to die. - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...look_beautiful_sent_out_to_die

crisis terrorism Islam suicide women rights

shared by runlai_jiang on 08 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • She was just 13 when she was snatched by two men on a motorbike while she was walking to a relative’s house near the border with Cameroon.
  • ually they reached their destination - a huge, makeshift camp. Falmata had no idea where she was.
  • The camp belonged to Boko Haram, the militant group that has been fighting a long insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic state in northern Nigeria.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Falmata was forced to make a choice - marry a fighter, or go on a “mission”.
  • Life in the camp was incredibly monotonous. Wake up, pray, eat, clean, pray, eat, and clean - all day long. There were daily religious lessons, long hours reciting verses from the Koran.
  • almata was approached by armed men and instructed to prepare herself for something important. Her feet were to be decorated with henna. Her hair was to be straightened. Was she being prepared for her wedding, she wondered. Was she going to be married off to a fighter after all? “My friend Hauwa had agreed to get married as a way of trying to stay alive,” Falmata says. “She wanted to find a way to escape.
  • Two days later, she was approached by fighters. A bomb was forced around her waist.
  • Falmata was told that if she killed non-believers, she would go straight to paradise.
  • In their hands were small, homemade detonators. On the way, the three of them discussed whether to carry out the “mission” or abandon it. Should they just do as they were ordered, or try to make their escape? They decided not to carry out the attack.
  • “A lot of the people we meet who have been in these camps haven’t had much education before, neither Western nor Islamic,” says Akilu.
  • Sanaa Mehaydali is thought to have been the first female suicide bomber in modern history. The 16-year-old killed herself and two Israeli soldiers in a suicide attack in southern Lebanon in 1985.
  • s that hundreds of young girls have been forced to carry out attacks in the past three years, in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
  • She had not gone far before she met two men on the side of the road. What she didn't know was that they, too, belonged to Boko Haram - but a different unit. Falmata was kidnapped for a second time.
  • The first time a girl was forced by the group to carry out an attack was June 2014. The bombing of a military barracks took place shortly after the notorious kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls, who became known as the Chibok girls.
  • She says at first it was mainly young men who carried out suicide attacks - ones who were inspired by Boko Haram’s ideology and rhetoric.
  • n] military offensive got more intense, the pool of young men volunteering dropped significantly, so Boko Haram started kidnapping and coercing young girls for suicide missions.
  • It was the same daily cycle - eat, clean, pray, recite Islamic verses for hours, sleep.
  • d of 2017, 454 women and girls had been deployed or arrested in 232 incidents, Pearson says. The attacks killed 1,225 people. Pearson is the author of a study about Boko Haram’s use of female suicide bombers.
  • ny actually learn about the Koran for the first time w
  • . They find that religion is a coping strategy.”
  • A belt of explosives was attached to her stomach. But this time she ran into the forest as soon as the fighters left her.
  • On the way she joined a group of hunters who allowed her to travel with them across the woods.
  • Fatima Akilu has met a number of youngsters like Falmata. She says that when they return, they need time to re-establish family bonds. “She’s been away from her family for too long and she might have changed during this time. But her family may also have changed and have traumas of their own.”
  • She had tasted freedom, but this would turn out to be short-lived. So why didn’t she detonate her suicide belt and end it all? “I wanted to live,” she says. “Killing is not good. It’s what my family taught me and what I believe in too.”
  • runlai_jiang on 08 Feb 18
     
    "subjected"
Javier E

US-China trade war and interest rate rises spell losses for the super-rich | News | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...pell-losses-for-the-super-rich

rich wealth global

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • After seven years of steadily rising wealth, the richest people on the planet saw the combined value of their assets slide by 3% from a year earlier to stand at $68.1tn as financial markets plunged against a backdrop of rising tensions, with China hit the hardest by the decline
  • According to the annual world wealth report from the consultancy firm Capgemini, which surveys the global elite, the number of “high net worth individuals” (HNWI) dropped by about 100,000 to stand at 18 million.
  • A high net worth individual is defined as anyone with $1m (£641,000) or more in “investable assets”. The definition excludes the value of a main home and of any consumer durables such as cars
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Asia accounted for about $1tn of the decline in the total wealth of the world’s super-rich, with China accounting for more than a quarter of the fall in total HNWI wealth against a backdrop of plunging Chinese stock markets.
  • HNWI wealth declined across nearly all other regions: Latin America declined by 4%, Europe by 3% and North America by 1%, while wealth rose by 4% in the Middle East. The total wealth of the US super-rich declined by 1%, despite US GDP rising and the rate of unemployment dropping to the lowest level since the 1960s
  • In the worst annual performance since the financial crisis, the widespread turmoil dragged the FTSE All-World index down 11.5%. More than £240bn was erased from the value of London-listed shares, while the Shanghai composite index crashed by 25%, leaving investors suffering heavy losses.
  • The 18 million HNWI individuals have at least $3m each, on average, while the total wealth pile of $68.1tn is almost worth as much as the total output of the world economy each year
  • Oxfam warned earlier this year that the rising concentration of the world’s wealth meant 26 billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.
  • nearly half of all global pay is scooped up by the top 10% of workers, while the lowest-paid 50% receive only 6.4%.
Javier E

What Was Liberalism? By James Traub (NY: Basic Books, 2019).pdf - 0 views

liberalism democracy authoritarian trump history politics

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • this does not fully express the difference between Trump and those who came before. Words were not his sole, or maybe even chief, medium. Trump tended with exquisite care to what Max Weber would have called his charismatic aura—a matter of imagery rather than language. His campaign appearances had an elaborate aesthetic, one that seemed to draw equally on the orchestrations of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and the Super Bowl halftime show.
anniina03

"It Spreads Like Wildfire": The Coronavirus Comes to New York's Prisons | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...-19-comes-to-new-yorks-prisons

us crisis history culture

shared by anniina03 on 26 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus has now found its way into New York’s prison system. On Sunday, the state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or D.O.C.C.S., confirmed that two prisoners at Wende Correctional Facility had tested positive for COVID-19.
  • “If you wanted to set up a situation that would promote rapid transmission of a respiratory virus, you would say prison: it’s close quarters, unsanitary, individuals in frequent contact.”
  • Rogers learned about the positive test from his peers, not the prison administration.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Ten days ago, D.O.C.C.S. closed all its prisons to visitors—with the exception of non-contact legal visits—and issued each prisoner five postage stamps, two electronic messages, and one free phone call per week.
  • It’s nearly impossible to provide infection control in these settings,”
  • “It is absolutely impossible to practice social distancing in prison,” Laron Rogers, who is serving twenty-five years to life at Sing Sing, wrote to me on Wednesday,
  • “All programs have been cancelled except the Soap Shop,”
  • Earlier this month, about a week after New York reported its first case of COVID-19, and when stores were beginning to run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that incarcerated workers had begun producing a state-branded hand sanitizer, called NYS Clean.
  • The soap shop is part of Corcraft, a state entity that pays workers between sixteen and sixty-five cents per hour,
  • When I asked D.O.C.C.S. about preparations for the coronavirus, a spokesperson told me that every facility has an emergency control plan, and that state prisons were used to dealing with infectious diseases,
  • On Friday, I summarized my reporting for Gregg Gonsalves, the epidemiologist, and asked him whether he considered the prison system’s preparations sufficient. “You have a gaping wound and you’re giving a Band-Aid,” he replied. Although the U.S. as a whole may be able to flatten the curve of the outbreak through social distancing, Gonsalves said, he expected to see in prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers a largely “uncontrolled, unflattened curve,”
brookegoodman

Fact check: Democratic presidential debate with Biden vs. Sanders - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

us politics

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Washington (CNN)Welcome to CNN's fact check coverage of the eleventh Democratic presidential debate from Washington, DC, ahead of the nation's third super Tuesday, where primaries will be held in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio on March 17.
  • As Vice President, Biden campaigned with New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2015 to increase the state minimum wage to $15 an hour.
  • Asked whether he would order a national lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic, Biden took a swipe at Sanders' "Medicare for All" proposal. He pointed to Italy, saying that its single-payer health care system hasn't worked to stem the outbreak there.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Facts First: This is partly true. As the experience of Italy and other countries shows, having universal coverage and a government-run health system is not enough on its own to stem the spread of coronavirus. But the US is at a disadvantage in fighting the coronavirus because tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or face high out-of-pocket costs before their insurance kicks in -- which may make people hesitant to seek testing or treatment.
  • "Addressing coronavirus with tens of millions of people without health insurance or with inadequate insurance will be a uniquely American challenge among developed countries," tweeted Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at Kaiser. "It will take money to treat people and address uncompensated care absorbed by providers."
  • President Donald Trump has tweeted his support of the package. The Senate is expected to take up the measure when it returns to session this week.
  • Laboratories in Germany developed tests to detect the coronavirus which the WHO adopted and by last week, the WHO sent out tests to 120 countries. Other countries, like the US and China, chose to develop their own tests, according to the Washington Post.
  • On February 12, the Center for Disease Control reported that some of the coronavirus test kits shipped to labs across the country were not working as they should.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the experts leading the administration's response to the coronavirus told Congress Thursday that the US was "failing" when it came to getting Americans tested.
  • In an exchange about how the government bailed out banks during the 2008 financial crisis, Biden asserted that Sanders voted against a bailout for the auto industry.
  • Facts First: Sanders is right, but this needs context. Sanders voted for a bill that would have bailed out the auto industry -- but it failed to pass the Senate. He voted against a different bailout measure, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which passed. That program released money to banks -- and a portion of that money eventually went to automakers.
  • Sanders on Sunday cited two figures about the number of people he claimed die because of the inadequacy of the US health care system.
  • Facts First: The true number of Americans who die because they are uninsured or lack adequate coverage is not known. Some studies suggest the number is in the tens of thousands per year, but other experts have expressed skepticism that the number is as high as Sanders says.
  • Biden, who was a US senator at the time of his vote, responded, "I learned that I can't take the word of a President when in fact they assured me that they would not use force. Remember the context. The context was the United Nations Security Council was going to vote to insist that we allow inspectors into determining whether or not...they were, in fact, producing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. They were not."
  • Facts First: Biden's claim is misleading by omission. Biden was an advocate of ending the Saddam Hussein regime for more than a year before the war began in 2003. While Biden did begin calling his 2002 vote a "mistake" in 2005, he was a public supporter of the war in 2003 and 2004 -- and he made clear in 2002 and 2003, both before and after the war started, that he had known he was voting to authorize a possible war, not only to try to get inspectors into Iraq. It's also unclear whether Bush ever made Biden any kind of promise related to the use of force.
  • During an exchange about Sanders' views on authoritarian countries, Biden claimed that China's income gains have been "marginal."
  • One way to measure standard of living is through a country's gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity. In other words, looking at a country's GDP per person in international dollars, a hypothetical currency used to measure purchasing parity between different countries.
  • Fact First: This Sanders' claim needs a lot of context. Biden did repeatedly support freezes in Social Security spending and at times called for raising the retirement age. In 2011, he said "changes" would have to be made to entitlements, saying they wouldn't be sustainable -- but he didn't specify what changes. Overall, the claim leaves out that Biden was typically talking about any changes to entitlements in the context of a broader legislative package.
  • And comments Biden made during a 1995 speech on the Senate floor show he was willing to make cuts to Medicare, but only as part of a broader deal that did not advocate cuts as big as Republicans want.
  • "If we are serious about saving Social Security, not raising taxes on the middle class, and not cutting back on benefits desperately needed by many senior citizens, we must adjust this artificial ceiling on Social Security taxes and make the Social Security tax more progressive."
  • Biden said upon his June 2019 reversal that he made "no apologies" for his past support of the amendment. He argued that "times have changed," since, he argued, the right to choose "was not under attack as it is now" from Republicans and since "women's rights and women's health are under assault like we haven't seen in the last 50 years."
  • Facts First: While it's unclear which ad Sanders was referring to, at least one super PAC connected to Biden, Unite the Country, ran a large television ad campaign that implicitly criticized Sanders without mentioning him by name..
  • For instance, it includes a clip from a Biden speech, in which Biden says" Democrats want a nominee who's a Democrat" -- an apparent challenge to the party bonafides of Sanders, who serves as an independent in the US Senate and describes himself as a democratic socialist.
brickol

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-politics-us-health-disaster

COVID-19 us trump

shared by brickol on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
  • In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
  • One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
  • Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.
  • The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
  • Though the decision to allow private and state labs to provide testing has increased the flow of test kits, the US remains starkly behind South Korea, which has conducted more than five times as many tests per capita. That makes predicting where the next hotspot will pop up after New York and New Orleans almost impossible.
  • Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.
  • Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.
  • Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”
  • If Trump’s travel ban did nothing else, it staved off to some degree the advent of the virus in the US, buying a little time. Which makes the lack of decisive action all the more curious.
  • It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
  • In the absence of sufficient test kits, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially kept a tight rein on testing, creating a bottleneck. “I believe the CDC was caught flat-footed,” was how the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, put it on 7 March. “They’re slowing down the state.”The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.
  • In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council – which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one – was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up, wrote in the Washington Post.
  • It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.
  • As the former senior official put it: “We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science.”
  • Trump has designated himself a “wartime president”. But if the title bears any validity, his military tactics have been highly unconventional. He has exacerbated the problems encountered by federal agencies by playing musical chairs at the top of the coronavirus force.
  • The president began by creating on 29 January a special coronavirus taskforce, then gave Vice-President Mike Pence the job, who promptly appointed Deborah Birx “coronavirus response coordinator”, before the federal emergency agency Fema began taking charge of key areas, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, creating a shadow team that increasingly appears to be calling the shots.“There’s no point of responsibility,” the former senior official told the Guardian. “It keeps shifting. Nobody owns the problem.”
  • So it has transpired. In the wake of the testing disaster has come the personal protective equipment (PPE) disaster, the hospital bed disaster, and now the ventilator disaster.Ventilators, literal life preservers, are in dire short supply across the country. When governors begged Trump to unleash the full might of the US government on this critical problem, he gave his answer on 16 March.In a phrase that will stand beside 20 January 2020 as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus, he said: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”
  • In the absence of a strong federal response, a patchwork of efforts has sprouted all across the country. State governors are doing their own thing. Cities, even individual hospitals, are coping as best they can.
Javier E

Opinion | 'I Do Fear for My Staff,' a Doctor Said. He Lost His Job. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tors-protective-equipment.html

medical staff role model pandemic job risk

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Doctors and nurses responding to the Covid-19 pandemic are the superheroes of our age, putting themselves at risk to save the lives of others.
  • At least 61 doctors and nurses have died from the coronavirus in Italy so far. Already, in New York City alone, two nurses have died and more than 200 health workers are reported sick at a single major hospital.
  • Tension arises not only because of shortages of P.P.E. but also because of uncertainty about how much protection is optimal. No one knows. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have given conflicting advice, and other countries have varying standards
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • These superheroes are at risk partly because we sometimes send them into battle without adequate personal protective equipment, or P.P.E. This should be a national scandal, and now hospitals are compounding the outrage by punishing staff members who speak up or simply try to keep themselves safe.
  • It’s baffling that the richest country in the history of the world fails so abysmally at protecting its health workers, especially when it had two months’ lead time. And for hospitals now to retaliate against health workers who try to protect themselves — ousting them just when they are most needed — is both unconscionable and idiotic.
  • On websites like allnurses.com, nurses wonder aloud whether they can refuse to work because of inadequate P.P.E. or even whether they should quit the profession.
  • The doctors, nurses, technicians and cleaning staff members on the front of this pandemic deserve our eternal gratitude. Instead, we’re betraying them: They have our back, but we don’t have theirs.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 76 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page