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mariedhorne

Trump Weighs Many Pardons as Presidency Winds Down - WSJ - 0 views

  • President Trump was expected to issue as many as 100 pardons and commutations on his final full day in office, but on Monday was leaning against some of the more controversial proposed grants of clemency at the urging of his advisers, said people familiar with the discussions.
  • The coming round of pardons, expected Tuesday, has been the talk of Washington in recent days, as allies on Capitol Hill and close to the White House have traded tips on how soon the list might come and who might be on it. Mr. Trump is also working to firm up his defense team for his second impeachment trial as he heads into his last full day of the presidency.
  • In recent months, the president had discussed the prospect of pardoning himself, other members of his family—including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump —as well as his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. But Mr. Trump has been leaning away from those pardons in recent days as advisers have counseled him that they would be unnecessary, the person familiar with the conversations said, while noting that Mr. Trump has been known to suddenly reverse course.
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  • Mr. Broidy was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C., in October and accused of failing to report work for which he was paid at least $6 million by the man accused of masterminding the alleged fraud, Jho Low, to try to influence the Justice Department investigation into the scandal.
  • In 2001, President Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a major donor to the Democratic Party and Mr. Clinton’s presidential library, on his last day in office. President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, convicted on charges related to passing classified documents to WikiLeaks, just days before leaving the White House.
  • The two men met on Sunday, and the former New York mayor isn’t currently expected to be part of the president’s team, another person familiar with the plan said, though the person cautioned: “Never say never.”
katherineharron

Trump departs Washington a pariah as his era in power ends - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Donald Trump's era in Washington is over.
  • The President, addled and mostly friendless, will end his time in the capital a few hours early to spare himself the humiliation of watching his successor be sworn in.
  • He departs a city under militarized fortification meant to prevent a repeat of the riot he incited earlier this month. He leaves office with more than 400,000 Americans dead from a virus he chose to downplay or ignore.
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  • Trump's departure amounts to a blissful lifting of a four-year pall on American life and the end to a tortured stretch of misconduct and indignities
  • At least some of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in November are sad to see him go. Scores of them attempted an insurrection at the US Capitol this month to prevent it from happening at all. The less violent view him as a transformative President whose arrival heralded an end to political correctness and whose exit marks a return to special treatment for immigrants, gays and minorities.
  • In his final days, Trump has been surrounded by a shrinking circle of associates, many of them decades younger. Old friends who used to speak with him regularly said they can no longer reach him
  • The violent mob attack on the citadel of American democracy capped a presidency built upon disregard for democratic norms, antagonizing government institutions and willful ignorance of the far right's violent and racist tendencies.
  • There is no evidence the President has reckoned with the consequences of his actions; the opposite appears to be true. He came to regret a concession video he had recorded at the urging of his family and advisers, who told him he was seriously close to being removed from office.
  • Freshly impeached for a second time, this time with support from a few Republicans, Trump ends his term with the lowest approval rating of his tenure. Republicans remain divided on whether he represents the future of their party.
  • One thing Trump's presidency undoubtedly accomplished: revealing in stark fashion the racist, hate-filled, violent undercurrents of American society that many had chosen previously to ignore. It became impossible to overlook as Trump's presidency concluded with violent riots of White nationalists and neo-Nazis at the Capitol.
  • He even had a falling-out with his vice president, Mike Pence, whose characteristic fealty was severed after he heard nothing from Trump while mobs appeared to be hunting him during the insurrection attempt
  • They appeared to reconcile, but other senior Republicans began breaking with the President, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican.
  • Ten Republicans voted for his impeachment in the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history.
  • Instead of attending his successor's inauguration, Trump is departing the White House early to attend a military-style sendoff at Joint Base Andrews. He balked at the idea of leaving Washington an ex-president and did not particularly relish the thought of requesting use of the presidential aircraft from Biden
  • Trump is the first president in 150 years to stage such a boycott. While Pence will attend Biden's swearing-in, other members of Trump's family, including wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, will be absent.
  • Trump enters his post-presidency facing swirling legal matters and with the fate of his business empire in doubt.
  • Without some of the protections afforded him by the presidency, Trump will become vulnerable to multiple investigations looking into possible fraud in his financial business dealings as a private citizen.
  • Even as he exits the White House, there is little question that Trump's shadow will cloud the capital for the foreseeable future. The matter of his impeachment still lingers in the Senate, which will begin a trial after Biden is sworn in. And Trump's influence on his party's direction going forward will amount to a reckoning for conservatives, who now must decide whether theirs is the party of a president who incited an insurrection on his way out of office.
  • Trump has left the Republican Party in civil war.
  • Trump has amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in a leadership PAC formed after the election that he will be able to use for future political activity, including boosting candidates. There are few restrictions on how the money can be used.
  • But since then, officials have cast doubt on his intentions, suggesting instead he was more interested in keeping the potential 2024 GOP field in limbo rather than seriously contemplating another run.
  • The results of Trump's presidency are not particularly mixed. While there have been some achievements -- a reshaped Supreme Court, a dismantled regulatory state and the brokering of diplomatic achievements in the Middle East -- Trump's overarching legacy is one of division and rancor capped by the catastrophic events of January 6, when he had 14 days left in his term.
  • "This is more work than in my previous life," he told Reuters 100 days into the job. "I thought it would be easier."
  • Trump had spent his previous decades cultivating a public profile as a savvy businessman and larger-than-life New York City mogul, despite a succession of bankruptcies and collapses. His second act as a reality television star with a penchant for race-baiting conspiracies (such as questioning President Barack Obama's birthplace) led into his third act as president, and along with it an eye toward artifice and spectacle.
  • Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's ties to Russia proved an immense distraction that preoccupied both the President and his White House. It resulted in the convictions of several Trump associates, many of whom he pardoned.
  • Instead of rising to the difficulties, Trump amended the job to fit his own liking. He mostly skipped reading lengthy intelligence documents, preferring in-person briefings that on some occasions left out important information about which Trump would later claim ignorance.
  • Most tragically, Trump showed little interest in leading the nation through the coronavirus pandemic, self-styling himself a "wartime leader" for a few days before reverting to downplaying the crisis and eventually pretending it did not exist
  • . A fateful invitation to attend Bastille Day in Paris in 2017 turned Trump on to the thrills of a military parade, which he unsuccessfully lobbied for in Washington for another three years.
anniina03

Chile protests Santiago: At least 11 dead as violent protests rage - CBS News - 0 views

  • Protesters defied an emergency decree and confronted police in Chile's capital Monday, continuing violent clashes, arson and looting that have left at least 11 dead and led the president to say the country is "at war."
  • The unrest was triggered by a relatively minor increase in subway fares of less than 4% — but analysts have said the protests are fed by frustration from a long-building sense among many Chileans
  • Officials said it could take weeks or months to fully restore service.
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  • Conservative President Sebastián Piñera said Sunday night that the country is "at war with a powerful, relentless enemy that respects nothing or anyone and is willing to use violence and crime without any limits." He did not identify a specific enemy.
  • the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Bachelet called for an investigation into all acts, by government or protesters, that have led to injuries and death.
  • "I'm protesting for my daughter, for my wife, for my mother, not just for the 30 pesos of the Metro — for the low salaries, for the privileges of the political class, for their millionaire salaries,"
  • The nation of 18 million people has won worldwide acclaim for its low poverty, inflation and unemployment, rarities in a region still struggling to leave behind economic dysfunction. But Chile's rate of inequality is among the worst in Latin America.
anonymous

Thailand royal consort: How did Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi fall from grace? - BBC News - 0 views

  • Sineenat, 34, was the first royal consort in Thailand for almost a century. When she was given the title in July, it made her an official companion - but not a queen - of the king shortly after he married his fourth wife, Queen Suthida.
  • Historically, polygamy and the taking of royal consorts was used by Thailand's royals to assure the allegiance of powerful families across the provinces of the large kingdom.
  • Thai kings throughout the centuries took multiple wives - or consorts. The last time a Thai king took an official consort was in the 1920s and the title has not been used since the country became a constitutional monarchy in 1932.
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  • "In any situation like that you find a system of patronage behind the scenes. Sineenat might have been part of that system of patronage and she might have played it in a way that didn't work well for her," she says, hinting at possible factionalism in the court.
  • Earlier this year, the two most important army units in the capital Bangkok were placed directly under his command, showing a concentration of military power in royal hands unprecedented in modern Thailand.
  • Under the country's lese-majeste law, the controversial demotion cannot be discussed publicly in the country - but observers believe this dramatic fall from grace will be uppermost in many people's minds.
johnsonel7

U.S. Spies: Turkish-Backed Militias Killing Syria Civilians | Time - 0 views

  • Turkish-backed militias, armed by Ankara, have killed civilians in areas abandoned by the U.S., four U.S. military and intelligence officials tell TIME. The officials say they fear that the militias committing those potential war crimes may be using weapons that the U.S. sold to Turkey.
  • Turkey and its allies may be preparing to clear civilian populations from the area, which has largely been controlled by the Kurds, Ankara’s long-time enemies in the region. Turkish President Recep Erdogan told the United Nations on Sept. 24 that he planned to establish a safe zone across the border in Syria, and to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently sheltered in Turkey.
  • This intelligence is emerging as the U.S. struggles to manage the fallout from its precipitous retreat from Syria, which was announced Oct. 13, after Erdogan told Trump that Turkey was about to attack territory in northern Syria where U.S. troops were deployed. Trump gave the Pentagon and State Department no warning of his decision to pull the U.S. out of the area, and no time to plan an organized retreat or to negotiate a handover of territory. That has left U.S. military officials and diplomats scrambling to deal with the situation.
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  • The scope of U.S. intelligence activity in the region has drawn renewed interest in recent days, in the wake of a U.S. raid on Saturday that killed ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The CIA, as well as Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officers, tracked the ISIS chief by interviewing the wife of an al-Baghdadi aide and one of his couriers, and by recruiting local spies along the Syrian-Iraqi border.
  • “The oil fields are small, we blasted them after Daesh [ISIS] seized them, and they will take years to rebuild,” said one official. So why leave forces there to protect them? “Talking about oil was the only way we could talk the President into keeping any U.S. military force in the area,” the official says. On Friday, after the plan to protect the oilfields was unveiled, Trump tweeted, “Oil is secured.”
  • U.S. officials are worried that a humanitarian crisis and renewed fighting in the region will invite a resurgence of ISIS, which operates best in chaotic situations. Many captured ISIS fighters remain in Kurdish custody in northern Syria. Trump appeared to dismiss the danger of a renewed terrorist threat Friday, when he tweeted, “ISIS SECURED”. Esper told reporters at NATO that the U.S. mission remains preventing a resurgence of ISIS.
  • U.S. intelligence officials aren’t the only ones seeing evidence of war crimes. The human rights group Amnesty International reported on Friday that Turkish-backed Syrian forces have committed war crimes, including executions of Kurdish civilians.
anniina03

In 1797, Congress confronted a Trump-like figure - and impeached him - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Even for those who are convinced that President Trump must go, the prospect of impeaching him is daunting.In part, that’s because Trump is already calling his critics “spies” and “savages” and has warned of a civil war if the charges against him move forward.
  • The deeper reason there is so much uncertainty around impeachment is because no sitting president has ever actually been thrown out of office for high crimes and misdemeanors.
  • Except that it has happened, to another real estate mogul turned politician with improper ties to foreign leaders. It’s just that he was a senator, not a president.
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  • His name was William Blount, born in 1749 to a wealthy family in North Carolina, one of the most corrupt parts of British North America.
  • But with so many groups — the Cherokee and Creek nations, the Continental Congress, the British, the Spanish, etc. — vying for the southern frontiers, no one knew how to claim those lands.
  • Blount had other ideas.His strategy was simple: Make up the names of hundreds of settlers and then snap up the best plots with these ghost entries at North Carolina’s new land office, which opened in 1783. Then, he tried to raise land values by luring British investors with fairy tales of North America’s emerging real estate markets.
  • With his associates, among them a young lawyer named Andrew Jackson, Blount eventually “owned” about 1 million acres, much of it deep inside Indian country. He used these claims to gain influence with both state and federal officials. In 1790, Blount became governor of the Southwest Territory
  • In the face of constant invasion, several hundred Cherokees declared war on the Southwest Territory on Sept. 11, 1792.
  • Blount begged U.S. officials for aid, but federal authorities were focused on Ohio, prompting Blount and his confidants to privately rage that the do-gooders in the nation’s capital preferred “savage” friends to white families. So they took matters into their own hands, with Blount quietly instructing Jackson and other confidants to launch scorched-earth missions into Indian country.
  • required U.S. citizens to abide by solemn treaties, including a new one with the Cherokee in 1794.
  • this treaty blocked white settlers from further trespassing on Indian grounds, which meant they could not buy Blount’s more remote claims.
  • in early 1797, he used his position as one of the first senators from Tennessee to approach British agents about invading the Spanish-held lands of the Gulf Coast.
  • President Adams found out about these half-baked plans in a bombshell letter, which he showed to his wife, Abigail. “Here is a diabolical plot,” she wrote. The president also sent the evidence to the House of Representatives, which voted to impeach Blount “for high crimes and misdemeanors” on July 7, 1797. The senators then used their removal powers from Article I, Section 5, to expel him from the chamber.
  • The next year, they drew up five articles of impeachment, each of which noted that Blount had acted “contrary to the duty of his trust and station” and “against the peace and interests” of the United States.
katherineharron

Trump donor Stephen Schwarzman plans private fundraiser with Mitt Romney - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Stephen Schwarzman, an informal adviser and donor to President Donald Trump, is hosting a fundraiser with Sen. Mitt Romney in support of several Republicans colleagues seeking reelection, according to two people with knowledge of the event.
  • Helping Romney bolster his standing in the party as he attempts to cement his position as a self-described "renegade Republican" during an impeachment inquiry is notable because of Schwarzman's support for Trump. Since the 2016 election, Schwarzman has donated a total of about $850,000 to Trump's inauguration and political action committees, based on records compiled by CNN and the Center for Responsive Politics.
  • Romney also took a shot at Trump's character in an interview with The Atlantic where he criticized Trump for "berating another person, or calling them names, or demeaning a class of people, not telling the truth."
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  • "That's simply not true. As I point out, the idea that any one senator, even me — even Mitch McConnell — is not going to convince other senators to reach a different conclusion than they would reach on their own," said Romney in the interview.
  • Schwarzman has also contributed to Romney's various political campaigns over the years. Since 1993, Schwarzman, along with his wife Christine, have contributed around $94,200 to Romney's federal campaigns or Romney linked groups, according to Center for Responsive Politics. Most recently, the couple each donated the maximum to Romney's Senate bid in 2018.
  • Schwarzman reportedly visited the White House this summer at Kushner's request, who convened a dinner to discuss his father-in-law's campaign fundraising strategy.
magnanma

A Brief History of Courtship and Dating in America, Part 1 - Boundless - 0 views

  • prior to the early 20th century, courtship involved one man and one woman spending intentional time together to get to know each other with the expressed purpose of evaluating the other as a potential husband or wife. The man and the woman usually were members of the same community, and the courting usually was done in the woman’s home in the presence (and under the watchful eye) of her family
  • between the late 1800s and the first few decades of the 1900s the new system of “dating” added new stages to courtship. One of the most obvious changes was that it multiplied the number of partners (from serious to casual) an individual was likely to have before marriage
  • we have not moved from a courtship system to a dating system, but instead, we have added a dating system into our courtship system
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  • Bailey observes that by the 1930s and ’40s, with the advent of the “date” (which we will look at more fully in the next installment) courtship increasingly took place in public spaces such as movie theaters and dance halls, removed by distance and by anonymity from the sheltering and controlling contexts of the home and local community
  • A second cultural force that influenced the older courtship system was the rise of “public advice” literature as well as the rise of an “expert” class of advisers — psychologists, sociologists, statisticians, etc. At the same time that the public entertainment culture was on the rise in the early 20th century, a proliferation of magazine articles and books began offering advice about courtship, marriage and the relationship between the sexes.
  • the invention of birth control. There is too much that could be said here, so I’ll be brief. Simply put, with the onset of the widespread use of chemical and other means of birth control, the language of procreation — of having children — was separated from the language of marriage.
  • The new courtship system gave importance to competition (and worried about how to control it); it valued consumption; it presented an economic model of scarcity and abundance of men and women as a guide to personal affairs
Javier E

Stanford scholar upends interpretation of philosopher Martin Heidegger - 0 views

  • According to Sheehan, standard academic readings have long claimed that Heidegger believed Being gave weight and value to our world. There’s only one problem, Sheehan says: “Nobody seems to know what Being means.”
  • After an exhaustive survey of Heidegger’s works, Sheehan concluded that Heidegger’s philosophy centers not on Being but rather on his early insight that our mortality is the source of all meaning. Sheehan explains, “Humans are characterized by the need to interpret everything they meet, and this need arises from our radical finitude, from what Heidegger called ‘temporality.'”
  • According to Sheehan, Heidegger never intended to cultivate the cultic, quasi-mystical philosophy that sprang up around him. Rather, his aim was to uncover the sources of our need to make sense of the world. In that way, Heidegger is much more subversive than we give him credit for,
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  • Much as he admires Heidegger, Sheehan said he believes it is important to acknowledge his strict limitations as a philosopher. In Sheehan’s opinion, Heidegger shows us how to live authentically but then stops short. “Now what do I do?” Sheehan asks. “Do I become a Nazi – or read the pre-Socratics? He has nothing to say about where one might go next. There’s no ethics in Heidegger, and no meaningful political philosophy.”  
  • “My approach is to take a fire hose and hose down the Teutonic bombast that so many Heideggerians find so fascinating but that in fact hides what he’s really driving at,” he explains. “Then you can clearly see the basic existential focus of his work rather than the obsession with being– a term that in fact no Heideggerian can define.”
  • he claims that the 1989 publication of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, which contained evidence that Being was not the real centerpiece of Heidegger’s thought, exploded the Being paradigm and debunked what scholars had claimed was Heidegger’s “turn” in the 1930s from human existence to Being. Contributions to Philosophy ushered in a third wave of Heidegger studies that finds its articulation in Sheehan’s Making Sense of Heidegger.
  • he regards the current juncture in Heidegger scholarship as an opportunity for scholars to rethink the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy. “Finding out that he was a lifelong anti-Semite (not to mention outrageously unfaithful to his wife) has demolished that personality cult,” Sheehan says. “That’s a positive development, because now we’re down to brass tacks. We have to get back to the texts.”  
  • Sheehan said he hopes his work will speak to analytic as well as continental philosophers – both of whom are subjects of his criticism. “The analysts follow a somewhat scientific model of evidence and argument, which I think is admirable and utterly necessary but which sometimes appears to overlook the existential dimensions of life and philosophy.
  • as Sheehan puts it, continental philosophers, and especially the Heideggerians “with their utterly fuzzy and loopy ‘logic,’ risk pricing themselves out of being taken seriously by those who justifiably ask for reasoned arguments.”
Javier E

Opinion | Who Killed the Knapp Family? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him.
  • Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.
  • We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation.
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  • Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.
  • “The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.”
  • Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”
  • Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class
  • The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them
  • The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays.
  • If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.
  • we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.
  • “I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.
  • One consequence is that the bottom end of America’s labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country’s competitiveness
  • we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don’t graduate from high school.
  • “We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place,”
  • We have to treat America’s cancer.
  • the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances
  • In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.
  • A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.
  • Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable.
  • Family structure collapsed.
  • The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years
  • The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies.
  • The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did.
  • Americans also bought into a misconceived “personal responsibility” narrative that blamed people for being poor.
  • It’s true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors.
  • But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making.
  • If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.
  • Why did deaths of despair claim Farlan, Zealan, Nathan, Rogena and so many others?
  • First, well-paying jobs disappeared
  • Second, there was an explosion of drugs
  • Third, the war on drugs sent fathers and mothers to jail, shattering families.
  • Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor — especially children of color — to failing schools
  • Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts.
  • Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma $70 million in prison spending,
  • ob training and retraining give people dignity as well as an economic lifeline. Such jobs programs are common in other countries.
  • For instance, autoworkers were laid off during the 2008-9 economic crisis both in Detroit and across the Canadian border in nearby Windsor, Ontario. As the scholar Victor Tan Chen has showed, the two countries responded differently
  • The United States focused on money, providing extended unemployment benefits. Canada emphasized job retraining, rapidly steering workers into new jobs in fields like health care, and Canadian workers also did not have to worry about losing health insurance.
  • The focus on job placement meant that Canadian workers were ushered more quickly back into workaday society and thus today seem less entangled in drugs and family breakdown.
  • Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons.
  • We attended a thrilling graduation in Tulsa, Okla., for 17 women completing an impressive local drug treatment program called Women in Recovery.
  • The graduates had an average of 15 years of addiction each, and all were on probation after committing crimes. Yet they had quit drugs and started jobs
  • Yet it’s not hopeless. America is polarized with ferocious arguments about social issues, but we should be able to agree on what doesn’t work: neglect and underinvestment in children. Here’s what does work.
  • Bravo for philanthropy, but the United States would never build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can’t build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money.
  • For individuals trying to break an addiction, a first step is to face up to the problem — and that’s what America should do as well
brookegoodman

French Revolution - HISTORY - 0 views

  • began in 1789 and ended in the late 1790s with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte
  • The upheaval was caused by widespread discontent with the French monarchy and the poor economic policies of King Louis XVI,
  • Not only were the royal coffers depleted, but two decades of poor harvests, drought, cattle disease and skyrocketing bread prices had kindled unrest among peasants and the urban poor. Many expressed their desperation and resentment toward a regime that imposed heavy taxes – yet failed to provide any relief – by rioting, looting and striking.
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  • they wanted voting by head and not by status.
  • they met in a nearby indoor tennis court and took the so-called Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume), vowing not to disperse until constitutional reform had been achieved.
  • many consider this event, now commemorated in France as a national holiday, as the start of the French Revolution.
  • The document proclaimed the Assembly’s commitment to replace the ancien régime with a system based on equal opportunity, freedom of speech, popular sovereignty and representative government.
  • This compromise did not sit well with influential radicals like Maximilien de Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton, who began drumming up popular support for a more republican form of government and for the trial of Louis XVI.
  • On January 21, 1793, it sent King Louis XVI, condemned to death for high treason and crimes against the state, to the guillotine; his wife Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later.
  • In June 1793, the Jacobins seized control of the National Convention from the more moderate Girondins and instituted a series of radical measures, including the establishment of a new calendar and the eradication of Christianity.
  • They also unleashed the bloody Reign of Terror (la Terreur), a 10-month period in which suspected enemies of the revolution were guillotined by the thousands.
  • Over 17,000 people were officially tried and executed during the Reign of Terror, and an unknown number of others died in prison or without trial.
  • Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “first consul.” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, in which France would come to dominate much of continental Europe.
brookegoodman

How Bread Shortages Helped Ignite the French Revolution - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Voltaire once remarked that Parisians required only “the comic opera and white bread.”
  • The storming of the medieval fortress of Bastille on July 14, 1789 began as a hunt for arms—and grains to make bread. 
  • bread shortages played a role in stoking anger toward the monarchy.
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  • Poor grain harvests led to riots as far back as 1529 in the French city of Lyon. During the so-called Grande Rebeyne (Great Rebellion), thousands looted and destroyed the houses of rich citizens, eventually spilling the grain from the municipal granary onto the streets.
  • a group of economists who believed that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of land development and that agricultural products should be highly priced.
  • In late April and May 1775, food shortages and high prices ignited an explosion of popular anger in the towns and villages of the Paris Basin.
  • The wave of popular protest became known as the Flour War.
  • A huge rise in population had occurred (there were 5-6 million more people in France in 1789 than in 1720) without a corresponding increase in native grain production.
  • As the monarch was required to ensure the food supply of his subjects, the king was nicknamed “le premier boulanger du royaume” (First Baker of the Kingdom).
  • in 1789 to foment rebellion against the crown, allegedly proposed several articles, the second of which was to “do everything in our power to ensure that the lack of bread is total, so that the bourgeoisie are forced to take up arms.” Shortly thereafter the Bastille was stormed.
  • the revolution did not end French anxiety over bread.
  • On October 21, 1789, a baker, Denis François, was accused of hiding loaves from sale as part of a plot to deprive the people of bread. Despite a hearing which proved him innocent, the crowd dragged François to the Place de Grève, hanged and decapitated him and made his pregnant wife kiss his bloodied lips.
  • Do not meddle with bread.
katherineharron

James Murdoch lashes out against Fox and Rupert Murdoch's other news outlets for climate change coverage - CNN - 0 views

  • Rupert Murdoch's son and his wife are lashing out against his father's sprawling media empire for how it covers the climate crisis, especially in light of the fires raging in the family's native Australia.
  • In comments first made to the Daily Beast, a spokesperson for the couple said "Kathryn and James' views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known."
  • The criticism aimed at Rupert Murdoch's news outlets is also coming from within the company. Last week Emily Townsend, a commercial financier manager for News Corp in Australia, sent an all-staff email accusing News Corp of a "misinformation campaign" in relation to the fires to "divert attention away from the real issue," climate change, according to the Guardian.
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  • The Australian, one of News Corp's papers and a target of critics who say it's been downplaying the link between climate change and the fires, defended itself in an editorial over the weekend, writing "in our coverage, The Australian's journalists report facts about how to tackle bushfires and about how to deal with the impact of climate change. Second, we host debates reflecting the political division that exists in Australia about how to address climate change without destroying our economy."
  • deniers around, I can assure you."And on Monday, the company announced it was donating $5 million AUD (approximately $3.45 million USD) to the Australian bushfire relief, in addition to the $4 million AUD (around $2.76 million USD) that both Rupert and his older son Lachlan Murdoch have donated to relief efforts.
blythewallick

Putin critics ask how his PM choice acquired expensive properties | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Russian president’s supporters praise Mikhail Mishustin as technocrat and self-made man
  • Russian opposition figures have raised questions about how Vladimir Putin’s surprise choice for new prime minister has acquired properties worth millions of dollars.
  • Mishustin’s appointment is part of a sweeping reorganisation of Russian government that will help enable Putin to maintain power after his expected exit from the presidency in 2024 under term limits. Analysts said Mishustin may play a role as a “caretaker” figure but was unlikely to be Putin’s long-term successor.
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  • Researchers for Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician and anti-corruption researcher, noted that Mishustin’s wife had earned nearly 790m rubles (nearly £10m) in the past nine years, according to government declarations. Little is known about her business and there are no companies listed in her name, the investigative group said. “Mishustin has been a ‘servant of the people’ for 20 of the past 22 years,” Navalny wrote in the investigation. “So why is he so damn rich?”
  • Corruption scandals hounded Medvedev in recent years
  • “The school of life has been tough for this man, and he is capable of big missions,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the hard-nosed chairman of Russia’s parliament, adding that Mishustin was a “self-made man”.
johnsonel7

In tiny town, immigration detainees outnumber residents - ABC News - 0 views

  • The seven-hour drive from North Carolina to the Stewart Detention Center in a remote corner of southwest Georgia has become all too familiar. One of her sons was held here before being deported back to Mexico last year, leaving behind his wife and children, who accompany Campos now. Campos fears her other son will meet the same fate after being detained when police were called on his friend.
  • Those immigrants are caught in a larger system of immigration courts that are facing unprecedented turmoil from crushing caseloads and shifting policies.
  • Campos doesn’t have money to pay for a lawyer, so her son is representing himself.
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  • It’s difficult for detained immigrants to see or even speak to lawyers who live far away, they have no access to email or fax, and the phones sometimes don’t work or are expensive, Argueta said. Communications are done by mail, which slows the process of collecting documentation, filling out forms in English and getting documents translated and notarized.
  • When detainees are released, it’s often in the evening. If they aren’t fortunate enough to have family waiting for them, they’re driven 30 minutes away to Columbus and left at one of two bus stations. “There is no set time of release, so it’s difficult to formulate plans,” said Rita Ellis, founding member and chief financial officer of Paz Amigos, a volunteer organization that springs into action when bus station staff notify them that a new group of detainees has arrived. The organization helps between 40 and 50 men a month, picking them up, feeding them and often putting them up in a hotel or a spare bedroom at a volunteer's homes. Donations of snacks, clothes and backpacks are handed out and phone calls are made to family members to arrange their travel.
brookegoodman

The Personality Traits that Led to Napoleon Bonaparte's Epic Downfall - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise and fall are one of the most spectacular in recorded history. The French general and statesman turned self-appointed emperor revolutionized the nation’s military, legal and educational institutions. But after some of his most audacious expansionist campaigns failed, he was forced to abdicate and was ultimately exiled in disgrace.
  • A close look behind the heroic portraits and beneath the gorgeous uniforms reveals some surprising things about the great little man. (He was small.) Perhaps most striking? The number of complexes he suffered from, including class inferiority, money insecurity, intellectual envy, sexual anxiety, social awkwardness and, not surprisingly, a persistent hypersensitivity to criticism. Taken in whole, these traits drove his stark ambition, undermined his grandiose endeavors—and ultimately crippled his historic legacy.
  • He became brutally aware of social barriers when, at the age of nine, he left home and entered the military academy at Brienne in northern France. His foreign origins, atrocious French (he had grown up speaking a Corsican Italian patois) and dubious noble status laid him open to the taunts of his schoolmates.
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  • He welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, when he was a month short of his 20th birthday—not just because he was a republican, but also because by removing class barriers it opened up new prospects politically and personally. But when he found himself in revolutionary Paris five years later, 26-year-old general Napoleon faced an alarming world governed by two things he had never had much experience of: money and sex.
  • The lure of making money briefly eclipsed his military ambitions as he speculated on buying and selling the properties of émigré or guillotined nobles, and importing often-smuggled luxuries such as coffee, sugar and silk stockings. Although his dislike of what he called “men of business” never left him, neither did his determination never to be short of ready cash. When he came to power he always had with him a cassette of gold coins. He also saw money as the key to achieving the goals he set himself, creating new institutions and building public works.
  • While he was on the retreat from Moscow, a group of generals tried to seize power by announcing he had been killed in battle. The plot failed, but it revealed to Napoleon that his whole edifice of imperial glory had feet of clay. On hearing of his death, nobody reacted as they would have had he been a real monarch—by saying ‘the Emperor is dead, long live the Emperor’ and proclaiming his son’s accession to the throne.
  • As appalled as he was by Josephine’s promiscuity, Napoleon was entranced by her supposedly aristocratic background. He would be even more excited by that of his second wife, the Austrian archduchess Marie-Louise. As she was a great-niece of the late Marie-Antoinette, he would refer to his ‘uncle’ king Louis XVI and reveled in the fact that his father-in-law was the Emperor of Austria.
  • He continued to build on this image so successfully that he could turn a less-than-glorious episode in Egypt into the stuff of legend and persuade many in France that he was the predestined savior of the nation. This enabled him to seize power and begin rebuilding France from the ruins of the Revolution.
  • While he was destroying the might of Austria, Russia and Prussia by his spectacular victories at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, he received reports from Paris that people were longing for an end to the fighting so they could get on with their lives. By then, his extraordinary luck, leading from triumph to triumph, had begun to make him believe his own propaganda, that he was the darling of destiny. Yet the aura of glory could not mask an underlying frailty.
  • His sexual insecurity and distrust of women only deepened his unwillingness or inability to engage with others, hampering his diplomatic relations, which he saw as showdowns in which he had to be seen to win. He could never see that a judicious concession might win him greater advantages; had he prolonged the peace of Amiens by allowing Britain to keep Malta in 1803, for example, he could have used the respite to reinforce his position, rebuild France’s economy and his navy.
  • He went on fighting a battle that was long lost, desperate for a resounding victory he believed might redeem what, for all the bluster, was his irredeemably low self-esteem. Ironically, it was only after he had lost his throne and was even denied the courtesy of being addressed as a monarch by his British jailers on the island of Saint Helena, that he managed to recover this and project an image of grandeur in defeat that still fascinates people today.
anniina03

Macron escorted by police as protesters try to storm theater - CNN - 0 views

  • Police in Paris were forced to call for backup on Friday as dozens of protesters outside a theater tried to storm the building and reach President Emmanuel Macron.
  • Riot police holding up shields formed a line against the protesters, who shouted "Macron, out," in the latest of more than a month of protests against the embattled President's pension reform plans. The President and his wife, Brigitte Macron, "were secured" for several minutes but were able to return and finish watching "The Fly," French news agency AFP reported, citing sources from the President's office.
  • Protests across France over pension reforms have hit fuel and power supplies, and cause large-scale transport disruption and the shutdown of schools. Macron says the changes are necessary to make the system fairer and more sustainable, but unions say workers will lose out.
anonymous

William Winter, Reform-Minded Mississippi Governor, Dies at 97 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In his single term, he fought to improve his state’s education system. He later threw himself into civil rights work.
  • Democrats during the civil rights era and used his single term as governor to address injustice in the state’s education system, died on Friday at his home in Jackson, Miss. He was 97.
  • At the time, Mississippi’s governors were limited to a single term, and Mr. Winter was determined to make the most of his. He had run on reforming the state’s dismal education system: Mississippi was the only state without public kindergarten, and it was the only state without funding for compulsory public education, a vestige of its extreme reaction to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation.
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  • “He was the model of what you aspire to be as governor,” Ray Mabus, who worked in Mr. Winter’s administration and served as governor himself from 1988 to 1992, said in an interview. “He was the best governor Mississippi ever had.”
  • Almost immediately, he set a new tone for state leadership. He and his wife held a series of dinners at the governor’s mansion featuring prominent Mississippians, and not just white people like Walker Percy and Eudora Welty. Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, dined with them, as did Leontyne Price, the world-famous soprano whom previous governors had shunned. The Winters invited her to stay overnight in the Bilbo Room, named for Theodore G. Bilbo, an infamously racist governor and senator; the next day Mr. Winter renamed it the Leontyne Price Room.
saberal

Opinion | A Doctor's Covid Vaccine Won't Save Her Dying Patients - The New York Times - 0 views

  • My news feed is full of jubilant photos of doctors and nurses announcing their vaccinations. I consider taking my own photo, but then hesitate. Because just a few floors up, there are dozens of patients who cannot breathe, who are scared and alone, who might die simply because they shared a holiday dinner. I find myself, nine months into this pandemic, vaccinated and yet still on a pendulum swinging between hope and despair.
  • I recently cared for a man who loved Boston sports, whose wife had decided to have a quick meal with a friend. By the time she learned that her friend had symptoms of Covid-19, she had already passed the virus on to her husband. He died after weeks on a ventilator. There is a grandmother whose family took false comfort in a negative test. A father who welcomed a dozen people into his home for the holidays. Each casualty is made even more poignant by the celebratory vaccine selfies on my phone and the knowledge that had they waited, my patients might have lived.
  • watching people refuse to wear masks, assuming that youth or good health would keep them safe — I believed that fear was the only way to change behavior. If only you could see what it is to be intubated, if you could conceive of being suctioned through a tracheostomy tube while learning to walk again, you might make different choices.
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  • nd now, with headlines about the wealthy trying to pay to jump the line, and images of politicians getting vaccinated before many nursing home residents, it is so easy for some to fear that their time will never come. The vaccine selfies tell us to hold on.
  • When I work overnight, the hardest part is always the hour right before sunrise. In my exhaustion, my body’s ability to regulate temperature and my sense of time go haywire, and I often find myself reviewing lab reports while wrapped in a blanket from the blanket warmer, wondering why time feels as though it is moving backward.
saberal

Opinion | The Holocaust Stole My Youth. Covid-19 Is Stealing My Last Years. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I’m doing everything I can to stay connected, to make an impact. So even now, amid Covid, I tell my story to schools and to audiences the museum organizes for me, by Zoom.
  • I was born in 1933 in a small town called Chodorow, now Khodoriv, about 30 minutes by car from Lvov, now Lviv, in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine. We lived in the center of town in my grandfather’s house. The Russians occupied the town from 1939 to 1941, then the Germans from 1941 to 1944. My father was well liked in town by Jews and non-Jews. One day in early 1942, one of the guys came to him and said, “Moshe, it’s going to be a big killing. Better find a hiding place.” So my father built a place to hide in the cellar. My grandfather didn’t want to go. He was shot in the kitchen; we heard it.
  • Eventually, with the help of Stephanie’s 16-year-old son, they expanded the space a bit and added a way for the kids to look out. That is where I spent the next two years.
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  • I understand the fear people have, and I understand you have to take care.
  • I am scared that I am not going to be in the shape I was a year ago. When this started in March, one of my grandchildren, who lives in New Jersey, went to Maine with his wife; they never came back. They have a baby boy now, and I have only seen him on Zoom. This child will never know me. That’s a loss.
  • So when the coronavirus came, I thought, “I’m a miracle. I will make it. I have to make it.”
  • But there is no comparison of anxiety, of the coronavirus, to the terror I felt when I was a child. That was a fear with no boundary.
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