Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.

Balko’s article makes clear that this is not an environment where the police are protecting and serving but instead harassing and self-serving. I am in no way justifying assailing a police officer (or anyone for that matter), verbally or physically, but you are not a young Black man living in what is still ostensibly the South and facing harassment for just being. I challenge you to invite Black males to tell you their stories of police harassment. How many times they have been detained, cuffed, kicked and threatened with death because they fit a profile, looked suspicious or were just somewhere some cop didn’t think they belonged? Yes, this is in America.

there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.

Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.

on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.

Most notoriously, in June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.

World War II prompted the largest displacement of human beings the world has ever seen—although today's refugee crisis is starting to approach its unprecedented scale. But even with millions of European Jews displaced from their homes, the United States had a poor track record offering asylum.

What Bahr didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t mind, was that his story would be used as an excuse to deny visas to thousands of Jews fleeing the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Government officials from the State Department to the FBI to President Franklin Roosevelt himself argued that refugees posed a serious threat to national security. Yet today, historians believe that Bahr's case was practically unique—and the concern about refugee spies was blown far out of proportion.

In the court of public opinion, the story of a spy disguised as a refugee was too scandalous to resist. America was months into the largest war the world had ever seen, and in February 1942, Roosevelt had ordered the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans. Every day the headlines announced new Nazi conquests.

These suspicions seeped into American immigration policy. In late 1938, American consulates were flooded with 125,000 applicants for visas, many coming from Germany and the annexed territories of Austria. But national quotas for German and Austrian immigrants had been set firmly at 27,000.

Immigration restrictions actually tightened as the refugee crisis worsened.

With politicians in the U.S. and Europe again calling for refugee bans in the name of national security, it’s easy to see parallels with the history of World War II.

"So far, I cannot believe how civil it's been up here," Mr Trump observed at one point.

"Islam hates us, there's a tremendous hatred", and railed against political correctness.

But Mr Rubio said: "I'm not interested in being politically correct. I'm interested in being correct."

In early debates the top-tier candidates largely ignored the New York billionaire, hoping he'd self-destruct on his own. In the past few showdowns, they've gone after him relentlessly.

"I can't believe how civil it's been up here," Mr Trump said at one point.

Mr Cruz, in particular, launched most of his barbs with sighs and head-shaking resignation, rather than ferocity.

"We've never targeted innocent civilians and we're not going to start now" Mr Cruz said.

"We have to obey the laws, but we have to expand those laws", he said.

The video report, which aired in several installments, credited the U.S. conservative group Judicial Watch with “keeping an eye” on Soros.

Judicial Watch also appears to have served as the foundation for the earlier Martí report on Soros, which was unknown to Soros’s organization until The Post shared a link to the story last week. The existence of the Martí article was first reported in El Nuevo Herald, a sister publication of the Miami Herald.

Silber, the spokeswoman for Soros’s organization, said that the apology ­USAGM offered for the one, previously known broadcast is no longer sufficient.

“We are deeply concerned to learn about additional content with the same nefarious, anti-Semitic undertones. USAGM needs to be much more forthcoming and Congress needs to conduct more vigorous oversight. In the end we want to know how this content got made, who made it, and who’s been held accountable so that it will not happen again.”

or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.

the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.

Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution

Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.

One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”

Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.

The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.

As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.

At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote

Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.

“I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”

The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.

The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.

Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.

So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”

Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”

Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”

In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.

Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”

Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.

voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.

Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”

As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.

But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes

Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.

for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.

Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”

In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.

Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.

One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee

Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.

Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.

This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.

I remarked that the phrase “freeing up land” occurs like clockwork in conversations with Singapore’s planners. He laughed.

But reclaiming land from the ocean has its limits, particularly in an age of a warming planet. Scientists warn that by 2100, sea levels may rise by as much as six feet, and furious storms will pound our coasts.

People have begun to leave Tuvalu, in the South Pacific; the Marshall Islands; and Nauru, in Micronesia. Five of the lowest Solomon Islands have already vanished.

“If global temperatures continue to rise,” a government official said last year, “many parts of Singapore could eventually be submerged.

At the spot where the hill was broken down and carted off to build Boat Quay, there now stands One Raffles Place, clad in steel and glass, taller, in all probability, than its rock-and-mud forefather.

Beach Road, in the island’s belly, at one time had a self-evident name; now it reads like a wry joke, given how much new land separates it from the ocean.

Once, having strayed into Indonesia’s territorial waters without a permit, they were arrested.

money can expand the imagination, swell the sense of the possible.

“Ships sail from the Suez, where they refuel, and then the next refueling stop is Singapore.”

Wang urged me to visit the Float at Marina Bay, the world’s largest floating stage, a 107,000-square-foot slice of steel that clings to the lip of Singapore’s esplanade.

Still, unnaturalness may well be the world’s conceivable future;

. Given enough ready money, thorny issues of territorial sovereignty swiftly dissolve.

but it still holds more than 200,000 human remains within its 400 acres, making it one of the largest Chinese graveyards outside China.

The cemetery is so overgrown with weeds that it is one of Singapore’s few truly untended spaces.

Trapped beyond the inner wall was a low pool of water, yet to be filled in. Around us, the ocean lay idle in the sun, ready to challenge Singapore’s ingenuity with its patient, adamant rise.

"It's inspiring Democratic women to run," she said. "Unfortunately, it's not inspiring Republican women to run. The rhetoric of the White House is a recruiting tool for liberal women to counter that."Ros-Lehtinen, who bursts with energy and insists guests indulge in the cafecito of her Miami-Cuban upbringing, leaves Washington with an ominous warning to her own party.

Slotkin watched her congressman beaming and applauding as the Republicans celebrated with the President, even though the House had failed to find a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. "Something just broke for me. It was the absolute straw that broke the camel's back," remembered Slotkin. Talking to the image of her smiling congressman on TV, "I said, 'you do not get to do this.' I decided to try and fire him."

Cutraro, of the nonpartisan She Should Run, cautions Democrats from celebrating this record blue female wave or Republicans from ignoring it. If the only female representation in government is among Democratic women, then the voices of elected women will all come from a liberal viewpoint, and that wouldn't be representative either, she argues. And it would not make for the best policies."The reality is, you want to have people who disagree with you at the table," Cutraro says. "You want to have people who think differently. Smart, effective people who think differently. Because at the end of the day, you're going to come out with the smartest policy.

She’s not sure what should happen in Syria or when, saying that Americans have to trust the leaders they elected to make such decisions.

He had joined other military officers in demanding the resignation of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, and was forced into hiding. He eventually slipped across the border into Colombia and got a plane ticket to Miami. He thought his training with the U.S. military would help him when he arrived.

Colina discussed U.S. policy as he sat in El Arepazo, a bustling restaurant connected to a Doral gas station that serves Venezuelan comfort food. He is grateful that Trump has placed heavy sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — but he hopes Trump will also establish an oil embargo, challenge Maduro’s authority and make it easier for refugees like him to move to the United States.

“I don’t think Haitian immigrants should be rejected if they’re trying to get to this country,” said Brown, 51, a longtime community organizer in Chicago who votes for Democrats but doesn’t think the party does enough for African Americans. “I think that our immigration policy should be humane.”

“summer low temperatures have been increasing far faster than daytime highs.”

in parts of Poland, France, Germany and the Czech Republic, temperature records were broken last month, according to Vox’s Umair Irfan.

“Historically, D.C. experienced a week’s worth of days where it felt like 100 degrees. By 2050, there could be almost six weeks (41 days) where the heat index rises to 100 degrees,” he writes. “By the end of the century, D.C. could be sweating through a solid two months and one week of days that feel like 100 degrees. This is all if the world takes no serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Lori Garver, the former deputy NASA administrator, argues that the space agency should refocus its efforts on a more terrestrial threat: a warming world. “Climate change — not Russia, much less China — is today’s existential threat,”

“By the end of the century, D.C. could be sweating through a solid two months and one week of days that feel like 100 degrees.

“Historically, D.C. experienced a week’s worth of days where it felt like 100 degrees. By 2050, there could be almost six weeks (41 days) where the heat index rises to 100 degrees,

“Climate change — not Russia, much less China — is today’s existential threat,”

Extreme floods that have historically struck some coastal cities and small island nations once every 100 years will become an annual occurrence by 2050

if emissions continue to increase, global sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century — around 12 percent higher than the group estimated as recently as 2013

Melting glaciers could harm water supplies, and warming oceans could wreck marine fisheries.

“The conclusion is inescapable: The impacts of climate change on the ocean are well underway. Unless we take very serious action very soon, these impacts will get worse — much, much worse.”

More than 100 scientists from around the world contributed to the latest report by the IPCC, which found that profound and potentially devastating consequences lie ahead for marine life, Arctic ecosystems and entire human societies if climate change continues unabated.

While dozens of smaller nations did unveil plans for coming years, the world’s largest emitters have stopped short of committing to transformational changes.

Sea level rise is accelerating, and the world could see 3.6 feet in total sea level rise by the year 2100 in a very high-emissions scenario. In 2013, t

The ocean is losing oxygen, growing more acidic, taking up an increasing amount of heat, and becoming more stratified, with warm water at the surface preventing cooler, nutrient rich waters from rising. All of these changes have profound consequences for marine ecosystems.

when scientists behind the report looked at an alternative method for gauging how much seas could rise — simply canvassing the views of experts — even larger estimates emerged. The group’s findings only highlight “likely” amounts of sea level rise, meaning they do not represent worst-case scenarios.

For some major coastal cities, a historical 100-year flood event will happen annually by the year 2050. That includes large cities such as Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Lima, Singapore, Barcelona and Sydney, the report says

“Even our language has to adapt: What once was called ‘climate change’ is now truly a ‘climate crisis.’ … We are seeing unprecedented temperatures, unrelenting storms and undeniable science.”

“The world’s coasts provide a home to around 1.9 billion people and over half of the world’s megacities — all of which are in grave danger if we don’t act immediately to prevent rising temperatures and sea levels,”

“Extreme high temperatures, coastal flooding, and more frequent natural disasters are becoming the new normal. ... This is what the climate crisis looks like now.

the system could still tip toward very large ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica. If that happens, the rate of sea-level rise could become truly catastrophic, especially by the years 2200 and 2300, when it could exceed 10 feet.

Permafrost, which contains enormous amounts of carbon that can be released as it thaws, has warmed to “record high levels.” Summer Arctic sea ice extent is now probably lower than at any time in “at least 1,000 years,” and the oldest, thickest ice has already declined by 90 percent.

“Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,”

In the United States, cities facing fast-moving sea-level danger include Los Angeles, Miami, Savannah, Honolulu, San Juan, Key West and San Diego.

One of the most shocking findings involves “marine heat waves,” which have been blamed for mass deaths of corals, kelp forests and other key ocean organisms. The large majority of these events are already directly attributable to climate change, and by the year 2100, they will become 20 times more common in the best case, and 50 times as common in the absolute worst case, compared with the late 1800s

Many of these changes to oceans and ice are unfolding in parts of the Earth where few people live, and so the shifts are not always readily visible to most humans. But the changes taking place there ultimately will affect people around the globe, in the form of rising seas and other impacts. And as those impacts worsen, so does the difficulty of adapting to them.

the grim findings in Wednesday’s report should be a call to action.

"We must not let these climate change impacts paralyze us,” she said in an email. “We must address root causes of climate change by slowing and eventually stopping accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions.”

There is much that humans can do to blunt the expected impacts in the meantime, she said, such as restoring mangroves and protecting reefs and marshes to reduce storm impacts on coastal communities.

“Alone, these measures cannot meet all the challenges of climate change to oceans and coasts, but they are doable, cost-effective and make a difference,”

Severe economic collapse, something like war, can bring changes so sudden that there is no time to adapt. Melissa Dellapasta, 45, was setting up a meal for executives of the Cleveland Indians on March 12 when everyone seemed to just get up and leave. An announcement had come: Baseball was postponed indefinitely. She has not worked since.

Young parents said they now understood the extreme stress their parents experienced when they had been laid off, a mood they mistook as just another bout of grown-up grumpiness.

About 150 public companies managed to bag more than $600m in forgivable loans before the funds ran out. Among them was Shake Shack, a company with 6,000 employees valued at $2bn. It has since given the cash back but others have not.

Fisher Island, a members-only location off the coast of Miami where the average income of residents is $2.2m and the beaches are made from imported Bahamian sand, has received $2m in aid.

The banks that were the largest recipients of bailout cash in the last recession have also done well, raking in $10bn in fees from the government loans, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.

By 2016 – seven years after the end of the last recession – the bottom 90% of households in the US had still not recovered from the last downturn while the top 10% had more wealth than they had in 2007.

For black and Latinx Americans, the situation is worse. The black-white wage gaps are larger today than they were in 1979.

Meanwhile, billionaires have been unable to put a well-heeled foot wrong. Billionaire wealth soared 1,130% in 2020 dollars between 1990 and 2020, according to the Institute for Policy Studies

That increase is more than 200 times greater than the 5.37% growth of median wealth in the US over this same period

the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased 79% between 1980 and 2018.

President Donald Trump has approved a major disaster declaration and emergency federal aid for Florida.

It is now losing strength

rma is the most powerful Atlantic storm in a decade, and has already caused widespread destruction

"Yes, the statement is true," Jones-Johnson said. "I was in the car and I heard the full conversation."

The decision represents a dramatic shift in policy from the previous administration, which withstood bipartisan calls to grant the protections to Venezuelans.

Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic political strategist and pollster, said granting TPS to Venezuelans could open up a new relationship for Biden with an electorate that largely supported Trump in 2020.

Temporary Protected Status is granted to those from countries ravaged by natural disasters or war, allowing them to live and work in the United States until conditions improve back home.

"Venezuela is a failed state in every single measure," he said. "There's simply not enough food to go around. Hospitals had collapsed before the pandemic. You have a repressive dictatorship and extraordinary levels of violence in the street. You have pro-government militias attacking protesters. It's just inhumane to send people back into those conditions."

Bukele in subsequent messages on Twitter noted that Bitcoin could be "the fastest growing way to transfer 6 billion dollars a year in remittances." He said that a big chunk of those money transfers were currently lost to intermediaries and with Bitcoin more than a million low-income families could benefit.

He also said 70% of El Salvador's population does not have a bank account and works in the informal economy. Bitcoin could improve financial inclusion, he said.