Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

has faced almost universal criticism from opposition legislators, environmentalists, industry analysts, Mexican and international business groups and even Mexico’s antitrust watchdog.

But the new legislation effectively restores preferences for state-run, fossil-fuel-driven plants that generate power at higher costs and produce greater carbon emissions.

“I think the impact of this reform is a major reversal,” said Lourdes Melgar, who was a top energy official in the administration of Mr. López Obrador’s predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. The Mexican president, she said, “has had a very nationalistic view of how to utilize resources.”

Gas-fired plants generate more than half of Mexico’s power; the vast majority of the natural gas is imported, with most of it coming from the United States, according to the Mexican government.

“This doesn’t have any economic logic,” said Víctor Ramírez Cabrera, spokesman for the Mexico, Climate and Energy Platform, a research group in Mexico City. He called the new model for power sourcing “absurd.”

“There is no way to comply with the Paris Agreement under these conditions,” Mr. Ramírez said. “Just give it up for dead.”

“Investment levels are dropping, and nobody wants to invest here,” said Israel Tello, a legal analyst at Integralia, a Mexico City-based consultancy group. “Legal uncertainty is the most lethal weapon against investment.”

That means banks must decide how much longer they want to accept new applications, since it now takes 24 to 48 hours for a bank to hear back from the SBA on whether a submitted loan application has been approved.

Bank of America, for instance, stopped accepting new applications on Tuesday. "As the largest lender in the program since it began, we have 30,000 applications in process and want to allow enough time to complete the work and get each client's application through the SBA process by March 31," a bank spokesman said in an email to CNN Business.

The American Rescue Plan includes nearly $29 billion to create a grant program that provides direct relief to restaurants.

Another $15 billion will be added to the Shuttered Venue Operators Grants program, created by the previous economic aid package. The grants are intended to help those who run museum, theater, concert and other venues that had to shut down due to Covid restrictions. The bill also allows such operators to apply for PPP loans in addition to these grants.

To help the SBA administer all the new programs that have fallen under its purview as a result of the pandemic, the bill allocates another $1.325 billion to its budget.

The vice president, until now, had not been tasked with a key portfolio issue distinct from Biden. Instead, she acted as a "full partner" to Biden, appearing often physically alongside him on all the administration's efforts, including their self-proclaimed top priority of managing the coronavirus pandemic.

Those close to Harris said foreign policy and national security are key areas she wants to develop in her portfolio, and she's taken steps to beef up her experience since taking office, including by speaking with foreign foreign leaders.

During her own presidential run, Harris said she would expand the use of deferred action immigration programs and utilize executive actions to remove the threat of deportation of millions of undocumented people in the US if elected president.She said earlier Wednesday in an interview with CBS News that the White House was frustrated by the current situation.

Officials said Harris would rely on her experience as attorney general and senator from California, a border state, to inform her diplomatic efforts.

They said she would be supported by officials from the Cabinet, including the State Department and USAID, and was likely speak with the leaders of key countries, though did not have specific phone calls to preview.Officials said Biden brought Harris into the new role because of an inherent level of trust.

Still, a separate official said Harris would approach the matter differently than Biden, who traveled to Guatemala City in 2015 for a trilateral meeting with the leaders of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in part to develop solutions to issue of migrants from those countries coming en masse to the United States.

In fact, basic and simple hygiene practices during antenatal care, labor and birth can reduce the risk of infections, sepsis and death for infants and mothers by up to 25%, according to the WHO

Even before the pandemic, approximately 2f 810 women died every day 2f from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth -- 94% of these deaths occurred in low and lower middle-income countries, according to UN Women.

Around the world, women and children spend 200 million hours every day collecting water, according to UNICEF. This makes up an additional 266 million hours of time each day lost because they have no toilet at home.

According to the World Bank, 18% of the workforce in water and sanitation are women, yet they make up less than one in four managerial or engineering staff, resulting in policies and systems that aren't designed for women's needs.

Mr. McCarthy sought to equate the progressive policies in the bill with socialism, and said “House Democrats have abandoned any pretense of unity.”

The bill that will go before the House on Wednesday differs in notable ways from the legislation that the chamber initially approved last month. It no longer contains an increase to the federal minimum wage, which Mr. Biden had proposed and House Democrats had included in their bill, but the Senate omitted.

The bill, which cleared the Senate on Saturday, would send direct payments of up to $1,400 to many Americans and extend a $300-per-week federal unemployment benefit until early September. It would provide funding for states and local governments as well as for schools to help them reopen. The bill also contains money for coronavirus testing, contact tracing and vaccine distribution.

Mr. Biden is expected to sign the bill Friday. All but one Democrat, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, voted in favor.

Congress gave final approval on Wednesday to President Biden’s sweeping, nearly $1.9 trillion stimulus package, as Democrats acted over unified Republican opposition to push through an emergency pandemic aid plan that included a vast expansion of the country’s social safety net.

It would provide another round of direct payments for many Americans, an extension of federal jobless benefits and billions of dollars to distribute coronavirus vaccines and provide relief for schools, states, tribal governments and small businesses struggling during the pandemic.

“With the stroke of a pen, President Biden is going to lift millions and millions of children out of poverty in this country,” Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said. “It is time to make a bold investment in the health and security of the American people — a watershed moment.”

“House Democrats have abandoned any pretense of unity,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader. “This isn’t a rescue bill, it isn’t a relief bill. It’s a laundry list of left-wing priorities that predate the pandemic.”

“This bill represents a historic, historic victory for the American people,” Mr. Biden said at the White House following the measure’s approval, thanking Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House.

The bill also includes $30 billion for transit agencies; $45 billion in rental, utility and mortgage assistance; and billions more for small businesses and live performance venues.

Federal unemployment payments of $300 per week would be extended through Sept. 6, and up to $10,200 of jobless aid from last year would be tax-free for households with incomes below $150,000. It would also provide a benefit of $300 per child for those age 5 and younger — and $250 per child ages 6 to 17, increasing the value of the so-called child tax credit.

And for six months, it would fully cover COBRA health care costs for people who have lost a job or had their hours cut and who buy coverage from their former employer.

The station will be "built on the lunar surface and/or on the lunar orbit," the statement said, and will carry out activities such as "lunar exploration and utilization, lunar-based observation, basic scientific experiment and technical verification.

Russia and China "will jointly develop a Roadmap for the creation" of the station, and "conduct close interaction in planning, justification, design, development, implementation, [and] operation [of] the project ... including its presentation to the world space community."

The announcement from the former Cold War rivals comes as NASA is working toward a return to the moon, decades after the last of the Apollo landings wrapped up in 1972.

The joint China-Russia proposal doesn't include a timeline.

The former Soviet Union put the first human in space in 1961 and managed a number of firsts in the decades-long "space race" with the U.S. However, since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Russia has shown more willingness to engage in cooperative efforts in space. It has built and launched sections of the International Space Station, sent periodic re-supply missions to the orbiting laboratory, and provided transportation to and from the ISS for astronauts from the U.S. and other countries.

The challenge of global climate action isn’t that other people will benefit from your emissions cuts; it’s that many interests actively oppose decarbonization. The key to passing climate policy is stitching together a coalition that will support and sustain decarbonization.

is is familiar enough: Coal mines suffer; electric utilities prosper. Because political leaders want, above all, to maintain the support of key constituencies, climate policy flows from a societal negotiation between potential winners and potential losers, a fight between climate reformers and climate obstructionists

In essence, climate policy restructures the economy, creating new economic winners and losers

Surveying the past few decades, they find that countries almost never care about free riding. “Governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do,” they write, “and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free-riding has been in place or not.”

When Donald Trump took the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, other nations did not react by withdrawing as well. Instead, revulsion at Trump himself—and his climate views by proxy—strengthened political support in those countries for continuing climate action.

both Aklin and Mildenberger’s coalitional idea and the free-rider conception of climate action seem to operate within the Biden administration

The president’s domestic-policy staff, epitomized by his adviser Brian Deese, is pursuing coalition-building climate policies, primarily characterized by public spending. The policies spread the economic gains of decarbonization around and increase the Biden coalition’s support for further action.

An older guard, epitomized by Kerry, hopes to secure other countries’ involvement as well, in order to prevent free riding.

Whose theory is better? Neither seems necessarily awful to me. Kerry’s approach actually fits within Deese’s: Securing foreign climate commitments makes the task easier at home.

now. The Biden administration has sold climate action as concretely in America’s interests: Its infrastructure package seeks to develop green industries not out of a sense of global do-goodism but because America’s economic competitiveness is at stake. And Xi Jinping’s government has, since last year, pursued aggressive climate policy as a way to build its international prestige. China uses climate policy to sell the orderliness and sanity of its system over the cacophonous and chaotic American approach.

So the weekend’s announcement seemed anticlimactic, to be honest. Of course the Biden administration and the Xi government now say they want further emissions reductions in the 2020s: Both governments are already acting domestically as if climate action is in their concrete interests.

. The question for me is whether—during this transition period—the politics of free riding help or hinder Biden’s attempt to forge a stronger pro-decarbonization coalition. If Biden commits to slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, will that make the public pay more attention to—and feel more skittish about—the rest of his climate-policy playbook?

“We’re going to do it in a way that’s very deliberate,” White House domestic climate adviser Gina McCarthy told reporters Monday in a call organized by the World Resources Institute. The administration wants to transition to a cleaner economy with good-paying occupations in communities that have been hit hardest by unemployment and underinvestment, she said. “It’s intended to meet the moment we are in.”

“We are on the verge of the abyss,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Monday

China, the largest greenhouse gas polluter, has said it plans to reach peak emissions by 2030 and effectively erase its carbon footprint by 2060, though the details remain uncertain

despite myriad diplomatic tensions between the two countries, the United States and China vowed Saturday to jointly combat climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”

The world remains nowhere near meeting the central Paris aim of limiting Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels — or ideally, remaining closer to 1.5 Celsius. Failure to hit those targets, scientists have warned, will result in a cascade of costly and devastating effects.

“We are way off track,” Guterres said. “This must be the year for action — the make-it-or-break-it year.”

To craft the new pledge in the administration’s first 100 days, White House officials scrambled staffers at agencies across the government to look for funding, programs and policies that could help curb emissions in the years ahead. Agency by agency, sector by sector, federal officials tallied up the math in an effort to make Biden’s pledge credible.

The International Energy Agency this week projected that global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise by 1.5 billion tons in 2021 — the second-largest increase in history — as the world comes out of the pandemic-induced downturn

“This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate,”

In the United States, the power sector represents one of the best opportunities to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Friday, a collection of 13 utilities, including Exelon, National Grid and PSEG, urged Biden to pursue a range of policies “to enable deep decarbonization of the power sector, including a clean electricity standard that ensures the power sector, as a whole, reduces its carbon emissions by 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.”

The Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, are already laying the groundwork to curb methane emissions from oil and natural gas drilling, in part by reviving Obama administration standards reversed under Trump

the EPA is moving ahead to phase down the production and importation of hydrofluorocarbons — which are widely used as refrigerants and in air conditioning — by 85 percent over the next 15 years, as mandated by Congress.

Environmental activists, Democratic lawmakers, foreign leaders and hundreds of private companies, including Apple and Walmart, have implored the White House to make the boldest climate pledge possible.

Advocacy groups and academics have published detailed analyses, demonstrating ways they say the nation could cut at least half its emissions by the end of the decade.

But other major emitters, including China, India and Russia, have yet to spell out how exactly they intend to help put the world on a more sustainable trajectory.

to reach the 50 percent target, the administration will have to make some difficult-to-guarantee assumptions about the future. For instance, that new regulations aimed at curbing emissions won’t be reversed by a future administration or the courts — even though Trump furiously dismantled key Obama-era climate policies.

some Republicans have insisted that the far-reaching changes needed to cut greenhouse gas pollution so fast could harm an already struggling economy, particularly in communities that still depend on the fossil fuel industry.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has argued that Biden’s aggressive climate actions could kill thousands of jobs in her state. On the Senate floor last month, she called the notion that new policies could quickly replace lost jobs in coal and other fossil fuels with ones in renewable energy “a fantasy world that does not exist.”

Persuading other key nations to bolster the promises they made in Paris remains critical if the world is to meet its collective goal of slowing Earth’s warming. The targets set by countries such as China, India, Russia and Brazil could dramatically affect whether the world can reach the goals set almost six years ago.

“The international community will have the opportunity to see that Biden is good for his word,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “A lot of diplomacy is about momentum and building momentum.”

China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has pledged that its emissions will peak by around 2030. From that point, the country will then aim to get down to net zero emissions by 2060.

Partly for that reason, some environmentalists have argued that the United States should have picked an even more ambitious target for reducing emissions.

Many Republicans in Congress have argued that the Biden administration is acting too aggressively on climate change when countries like China and India have yet to commit to absolute emissions cuts. Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said that the president was “unilaterally committing America to a drastic and damaging emissions pledge” that would punish the U.S. economy while “America’s adversaries like China and Russia continue to increase emissions at will.”

So far, the results have been mixed. Japan and Canada both agreed to strengthen their 2030 targets. The British government said Tuesday that it would step up action with a new target, cutting emissions 78 percent below 1990 levels by 2035. But other major emitters such as China, India and Russia have yet to offer significant new pledges.

To get at least a 50 percent cut by 2030, a variety of studies have found, the United States would need to adopt sweeping new policies and slash emissions each year at an unprecedented rate. Possible strategies include requiring utilities to install vastly more wind and solar power, persuading Americans to buy many more electric cars, and forcing oil and gas companies to slash emissions of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas. States like California and New York could help, too, by following through on their plans to clean up their power plants and vehicle fleets.

“In countries where a change in government can derail the whole thing,” said Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, “it’s a lot harder to be sure that these goals are here to stay.”

CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.

second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.

In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

The Covid-19 relief law also included direct payments to Americans worth up to $1,400 per person; a $300 federal boost to weekly jobless payments; $350 billion to states, local governments, territories and tribes; roughly $20 billion to state and local governments to help low-income households cover back rent; rent assistance and utility bills; beefed up tax credits for families and certain low-income workers for 2021; $125 billion to public K-12 schools to help students return to the classroom' made federal premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies more generous; and $14 billion for researching, developing, distributing, administering and strengthening confidence in vaccines.

Democrats were able to pass the legislation without Republican support using the budget reconciliation process, which allows lawmakers to bypass the 60-vote threshold typically required for ending debate on the Senate floor and moving legislation forward. Instead only a simple majority is needed to end debate.

The White House is now turning to Biden's next legislative priorities: the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. Negotiations between the White House and Republican lawmakers have been intensifying in recent weeks over the infrastructure proposal, and Republicans on Thursday offered another counterproposal.

False confessions have played a role in about 30 percent of all wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence, and recent studies suggest that people under 18 are between two and three times more likely to falsely confess than adults, according to the Innocence Project.

Similar bills have been introduced in New York and Oregon, and supporters hope its passage in Illinois — by a vote of 114 to 0 in the House and 47 to 1 in the Senate — will lead to national movement on the issue.

“Our criminal justice system should not be guided by a conviction, but rather it should be guided by the advancement of the truth,” Mr. Durkin said in a statement. “Deception can never be utilized under any condition in our criminal justice system and particularly against juveniles.”

One of several cases cited by the bill’s supporters involved four men — Charles Johnson, Larod Styles, LaShawn Ezell and Troshawn McCoy — who had been arrested as teenagers and spent more than 20 years behind bars for a 1995 double murder in Chicago.

“The history of false confessions in Illinois can never be erased, but this legislation is a critical step to ensuring that history is never repeated,” Kimberly M. Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, said in a statement.

“When a kid is in a stuffy interrogation room being grilled by adults, they’re scared and are more likely to say whatever it is they think the officer wants to hear to get themselves out of that situation, regardless of the truth,” Mr. Peters, the state senator, said in the statement.

“Police officers too often exploit this situation in an effort to elicit false information and statements from minors in order to help them with a case,” Mr. Peters said. “Real safety and justice can never be realized if we allow this practice to continue.”

The U.S. Marshals Service said a task force was trying to arrest the man on a state warrant for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms both tweeted that they were responding to help investigate. The Marshals said the state BCA is leading the investigation.The Minneapolis Police Department said it was not involved in the shooting.

It was not clear how many law enforcement officers fired their weapons. A spokeswoman with the U.S. Marshals said the U.S. Marshals leads the task force, which is comprised of several agencies.

an aerial view of the top level of the parking ramp where Thursday's shooting reportedly occurred showed a silver sport utility vehicle with a shattered back window. It was surrounded by many other vehicles near a white pop-up tent. Several officers were nearby and in a glass-enclosed stairwell.

The man, who was in a parked car, didn't comply with law enforcement and "produced a handgun resulting in task force members firing upon the subject," the U.S. Marshals said in a statement.

Before Thursday night's unrest, tensions in Minneapolis already had risen after crews early Thursday removed concrete barriers that blocked traffic at a Minneapolis intersection where a memorial to Floyd was assembled after his death.

Heavy precipitation will also revisit much of coastal Louisiana this weekend as recent weather model trends have shifted the axis of heaviest rainfall slightly eastward.

Like Texas, this is also an area hit hard by recent rain and flooding and can't seem to catch a break from the rough weather. Between May 16-22, Lake Charles, Louisiana reported over 21 inches of precipitation, while Baton Rouge saw a staggering 15 inches during the same period. This amount of rain turned streets into rivers, quickly inundating vehicles with water.

Currently, the low pressure responsible for the inevitable soaking is churning over southern Texas. It is perfectly positioned to utilize the warm ocean waters of the Gulf of Mexico, helping to feed bands of rain into the coast.

Many vehicles on the road today already implement some level of automation technology, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration breaks down into various levels.

The COVID-19 vaccine that Vaxart is developing is similar to Johnson & Johnson's in that it uses a harmless virus to deliver instructions to cells to make proteins that will prompt an immune response to the coronavirus.

But instead of putting the delivery virus in a liquid, Vaxart freeze-dries it, turning into a powder that can be formulated into a pill that can be stored at room temperature.

Another vaccine that could be self-administered is a nasal spray vaccine.

By contrast, an intranasal vaccine induces two kinds of immunity, Lund says. You still get the systemic protection, she says, "but you will also get immunity directly at the site where you put that vaccine." That makes it harder for the coronavirus to sneak in through the nose.

Lurie says it's virtually certain the world will face new and dangerous microbes that will necessitate vaccines that are "safe and effective, fast, easy to use, preferably a single dose."

Another possible improvement is the way the spike protein is packaged for delivery in a vaccine.

The immune system of the person receiving the vaccine will react as if it has encountered the real virus when actually it has encountered a harmless mimic. That's the whole trick behind vaccines — getting the body's immune system ready if the real thing comes along.

He says there's some evidence that starting with one kind of vaccine and then switching to another may give better immunity than a single vaccine could do on its own.

In the end, among the most important qualities a new vaccine should have are that it should be able to be made and modified quickly in response to variants, as well as be distributed quickly.

One way of doing that is to modify something called the spike protein, which prompts the immune response to the coronavirus.

That way, she says, "when the next one comes, we're much closer to the starting gate than we even were for this one."

The president and his surrogates may say that the language against weakness and for fighting was metaphorical. After all, he also said that the protest would be done “peacefully and patriotically.” But when the violence first appeared on television, Mr. Trump did not immediately communicate any disapproval

The president did speak of protecting the Constitution, but made that equivalent to supporting his own electoral victory. He announced that “the Republicans have to get tougher” and then mockingly dismissed those members of Congress who worried “the Constitution doesn’t allow me.” He announced, “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules” and proclaimed, “This is a matter of national security.” He went on, “We fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

. When he did tweet a statement that afternoon, he confusingly urged his supporters to continue what they were doing (“Stay peaceful!,”) and reiterated his support for them — this at the very moment they were engaged in the attack. The president reportedly failed to order the National Guard to defend Congress.

If the cabinet and vice president decided to remove the president temporarily from his duties through the 25th Amendment, they would protect us against some immediate dangers, but their action would do nothing to stand up for the integrity of Congress as a coequal branch of government. In fact, it would reinforce the notion that true power is concentrated only in the executive branch. Impeachment and conviction offer the only constitutionally appropriate response to the president’s encroachment on the legislative branch.

They cannot allow the constitutional rights of Congress to be attacked with impunity without undermining their own reputations.

If Congress does not utilize the constitutional means of defending itself and deterring future attacks, this moment will come to be regarded by historians as a decisive capitulation, not just to President Trump, but to a dangerous new mode of presidential action. The precedent that a president can stir up mobs to intimidate the other branches will be set, and even if it recedes into the background for a while, eventually that precedent will be followed. We will have taken a large step away from constitutional self-government.

The Biden team has also promised 500,000 new charging stations for electric vehicles, a further appeal to states hungry for federal highway money. It is also another boon to electric utilities eager to boost demand from electric vehicles.

Democratic control also puts the Congressional Review Act in play. It allows Congress, with a simple majority, to overturn regulations finalized by the executive branch in the previous 60 legislative days, putting into jeopardy several Trump administration rules that eased environmental standards.

Meanwhile, the economic ramifications of heat waves become clearer every year. In 2017, 120-degree heat grounded flights in Phoenix. In Washington, D.C., and London, train service abruptly halted when tracks melted

According to the International Labour Organization, heat stress is also projected to reduce total working hours worldwide by 2.2 percent by 2030—“a productivity loss equivalent to 80 million full-time jobs.”

The direct physical threat may be most acute in cities, where temperatures on a scorching summer day can vary by as much as 45 degrees from a well-shaded area to one without trees. This is one more way in which poor Americans bear the brunt of broiling temperatures. As noted by the nonprofit American Forests, a map of tree cover in America’s cities is in many cases a map of income and race.

Heat season is upon us. We must acknowledge our risks to manage and survive them, and that process begins by calling the silent killer by its real name.