Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

What Pastor Scott worries about most, though, is that this pandemic is going to take away the church she and her husband, Robert, have spent more than a decade building between their shifts as corrections officers.

A tiny church serving a vulnerable corner of American society is having a life-or-death moment that will never show up in the data. And it’s doing so with little help at a time when the government and economists are hailing all that’s being poured into the economy and calling for more.

Concerns about deficits, debt, and inflation have been set aside. The consensus these days has rallied around a whatever-it-takes approach that, though focused on businesses and markets, has included social programs setting new benchmarks for economic impact.

One of the things you know if you were brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant country, as I was, is how the attempted extirpation of England’s historic Catholic faith was enforced not just by executions, imprisonments, and public burnings but also by the destruction of monuments, statues, artifacts, paintings, buildings, and sacred sculptures. The shift in consciousness that the religious revolution required could not be sustained by words or terror alone. The new regime — an early pre-totalitarian revolution imposed from the top down — had to remove all signs of what had come before.

The impulse for wiping the slate clean is universal. Injustices mount; moderation seems inappropriate; radicalism wins and then tries to destroy the legacy of the past as a whole.

for true revolutionary potential, it’s helpful if these monuments are torn down by popular uprisings. That adds to the symbolism of a new era, even if it also adds to the chaos. That was the case in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the younger generation, egged on by the regime, went to work on any public symbols or statues they deemed problematically counterrevolutionary, creating a reign of terror that even surpassed France’s.

The first part of this plan should recognize that schools should not open in person until cases of the virus in the surrounding areas are low.

Putting a precise number on this is difficult, but at a minimum places that have locked down except for essential services should not open schools

First, there needs to be what I’d call a micro plan: What happens when a single student or teacher in a classroom tests positive? Of course the affected person will need to remain home until cleared for a return to school. But what about the rest of the classroom, the rest of the floor, the rest of the school?

Amazon.com Inc has been sued for allegedly fostering the spread of the coronavirus by mandating unsafe working conditions, causing at least one employee to contract COVID-19, bring it home, and see her cousin die.

The complaint was filed on Wednesday in the federal court in Brooklyn, New York, by three employees of the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, and by family members.

One employee, Barbara Chandler, said she tested positive for COVID-19 in March and later saw several household members become sick, including a cousin who died on April 7.

WASHINGTON - Already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, cities across the United States smoldered on Tuesday after a seventh consecutive night of protests and civil unrest related to the death of African American George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police last week.   As business owners and residents yet again clean up the debris, there is growing concern that the economic damage to many of the communities where violence is taking place will persist long after the last window pane is replaced and the last burned out car is towed away. Businesses and neighborhoods where protests have turned violent will have to contend not just with the aftermath of the protests, but with multiple aggravating factors that will make recovery even more difficult. 

Many businesses had already been pushed to the edge of solvency by months of lockdown related to the coronavirus, and the slow and careful re-openings envisioned by many state and local leaders were not designed to allow commerce to rebound to pre-pandemic levels immediately.  Layered on top of that is the Depression-level unemployment currently afflicting the nation and the prospect of an economy that will, at the very least, be in recession for the foreseeable future. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office delivered an analysis to Congress warning that the virus will adversely impact the economy through much of the next decade, cutting some $8 trillion from Gross Domestic Product over that period. Another distinct possibility is a second wave of the coronavirus, either arising naturally or helped along by massive protests in which people have been gathering in close proximity. The understandable rage at the death of Floyd, who was handcuffed by police and died  after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, sparked protests in well over 100 cities across the country. His death has become the most potent recent symbol of a system in which black Americans are, with disturbing regularity, abused and even killed by law enforcement officers, frequently on camera. And while the vast majority of the protesters have been non-violent, in many cases there have been incidents of property destruction and looting, as well as attacks on police officers.

the exact kind of cost-benefit analysis implied by the president.

the economic benefits from lives saved by efforts to “flatten the curve” outweighed the projected massive hit to the nation’s economy by a staggering $5.2 trillion

Another study by two University of Chicago economists estimated the savings from social distancing could be so huge, “it is difficult to think of any intervention with such large potential benefits to American citizens.”

When Disease X actually arrived, as Covid-19, governments, businesses, public-health officials and citizens soon found themselves in a state of chaos, battling an invisible enemy with few resources and little understanding—despite years of work that outlined almost exactly what the virus would look like and how to mitigate its impact.

Governments had ignored clear warnings and underfunded pandemic preparedness. They mostly reacted to outbreaks, instead of viewing new infectious diseases as major threats to national security. And they never developed a strong international system for managing epidemics, even though researchers said the nature of travel and trade would spread infection across borders.

Underlying it all was a failure that stretches back decades. Most everyone knew such an outcome was possible. And yet no one was prepared.

(CNN)The death of George Floyd, an unarmed and handcuffed black man, while in Minneapolis police custody has triggered nights of protests and violence in cities across the country.

Their restaurant burned, but they're standing tall

When he found out, Islam said he only had one response: "Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served and those officers need to be put in jail."

As President Trump struggles for a political response, Republicans and their allies have seized on an answer: attacking climate change policies.

“If You Like the Pandemic Lockdown, You’re Going to Love the Green New Deal,” the conservative Washington Examiner said in the headline of a recent editorial

Elizabeth Harrington, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, wrote in an opinion article in The Hill that Democrats “think a pandemic is the perfect opportunity to kill millions more jobs” with carbon-cutting plans.

Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to show up or cross over.

there was really no way to avoid disappointment.

Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better.

The more I think about it, the more I think I’m talking about practically everything.

The most obvious place to start is with the health-care system. Hopefully, people are already considering how to strengthen the medical supply chains

We need to reward nursing homes for the basics, too, like cleaning and infectious-disease control, rather than costly extra services

Achieving that goal will be good not only for the world, he said, but also for Japan’s economy and global standing

Taking an aggressive approach to global warming will bring about a transformation in our industrial structure and economic system that will lead to big growth

and it could be one of tumult, banners colliding, incidents at the polls and attempted hacks galore. More likely than not, it will end without a winner named or at least generally accepted.

America will probably awaken on Nov. 4 into uncertainty. Whatever else happens, there is no doubt that President Trump is ready for it.

They are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House.

President Donald Trump thought he had hit the jackpot during the final presidential debate when his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, declared that he would “transition away from the oil industry.”

“He’s going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?”

say his reaction points to a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of the electorate’s shifting views on climate change, but of how profoundly the issue has already shaped the presidential race

If the United States wants to get serious about tackling climate change, the country will need to build a staggering amount of new energy infrastructure in just the next 10 years, laying down steel and concrete at a pace barely being contemplated today.

That’s one conclusion from a major study released Tuesday by a team of energy experts at Princeton University, who set out several exhaustively detailed scenarios for how the country could slash its greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by 2050.

That goal has been endorsed by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as numerous states and businesses, to help avoid the worst effects of global warming.

Chinese who are oppressed by local officials have sighed, by way of explanation: “The heavens are high, and the emperor far away.”

They want the masses to believe that, even in the remotest villages, their welfare is the concern of an all-knowing leader, Xi Jinping, served by officials striving to follow his stern but wise example.

A central task of the Xi era is to transform morale among the country’s 90m party members, including millions of bureaucrats.

Democrats have mostly focused on the process and decisions adopted by the Biden administration leading up to wrenching scenes of stranded refugees, including countless people who aided the U.S.

This framing has been widely echoed by neutral journalists, but embedded in it is a very pronounced point of view. It treats it as an established, objective fact that there existed an alternate execution of the withdrawal that would have been quasi-immaculate in nature.

Congressional investigations are appropriate, because we need to know the full story and what governing weaknesses it reveals. Perhaps such investigations will reveal that an alternate approach would have been much cleaner.

in the past five years the relationship between the world’s superpower and its Asian challenger has deteriorated in a manner that suggests few are paying heed to history.

Under Xi Jinping, China has become more aggressively assertive abroad and more authoritarian at home.

Under Donald Trump and now Joe Biden, American policy towards China has shifted from hubristic faith that it could be integrated into the existing American-led world order to something closer to paranoid containment, marked by suspicion of China’s intentions and a fearful bipartisan consensus that America’s global pre-eminence is at risk.

Xi Jinping’s announcement that China will stop funding overseas coal projects could buy the world about three more months in the race to keep global heating to a relatively safe level of 1.5C, experts say.

Ending Chinese coal financing has long been near the top of climate activists’ wishlists. For more than a decade, China has been the lender of last resort for overseas governments seeking finance for thermal power plants. That role has accelerated since the 2013 start of the country’s belt and road initiative (BRI).

Xi’s declaration is likely to affect at least 54 gigawatts of China-backed coal power projects,