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A Washington Post-Schar School poll released Monday found that a wide majority of Americans support the protesters, with nearly three-quarters of the country backing them. More than two-thirds of respondents said they thought Floyd’s killing reflected broader problems with police treatment of black Americans, up from less than half after 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo.

Whether police agree remains to be seen. To at least some, the officers are the real victims.

“Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect,” New York police union leader Mike O’Meara demanded angrily at a news conference Tuesday. “We’ve been left out of the conversation. We’ve been vilified. It’s disgusting.”

This goes beyond mere hypocrisy. Top CEOs have amassed more wealth and power than at any time since the “robber barons” of the late 19th century – enough to get legislative outcomes they want and organize the system for their own benefit.

They know that as long as racial animosity exists, white and black Americans are less likely to look upward and see where the wealth and power really has gone.

They’re less likely to notice that the market is rigged against them all. They’ll cling to the meritocratic myth that they’re paid what they’re “worth” in the market and that the obstacles they face are of their own making rather than an unjust system.

it matters that Trump is pulling all the traditional backlash levers — and, so far, nothing is happening.

Biden can make the case, as he has begun to, that those who genuinely seek, yes, law and order must embrace justice and reform as the only alternatives to fragmentation and ongoing chaos. We will continue to be tormented, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observed, as long as we refuse to deal comprehensively with our legacy of racism.

“No justice, no peace” is not just a slogan. It is a truthful statement. For the first time in a long time, a large majority of Americans, moved by realities they can no longer deny, seem ready to sign up.

the best way to see the firings, outings, and online denunciations grouped together as “cancel culture,” is not through a social lens, but an economic one.

Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool.

But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival.

The department statement noted that these cities were highlighted as they meet key criteria, such as forbidding "the police force from intervening to restore order amid widespread or sustained violence or destruction", as well as seeking to disempower or defund police. Refusing to accept federal law enforcement assistance is also a factor.

All three cities have seen major protests since the death of unarmed black man George Floyd in May.

75 percent of Democrats deem it a critical concern

Climate change does not even rank in the top seven for either Republicans or independents

Spaniards patiently accepted the toughest confinement in Europe during the first wave of the virus in March, enduring serious economic losses in exchange for protecting the lives of their elders and the most vulnerable. We have been among the most disciplined in adhering to regulations like wearing masks, which are used by more than 84 percent of the population.

Before this second wave, there was plenty of time to put in place measures that have shown their effectiveness in Asian countries and have lessened the impact of the pandemic in closer ones, such as Portugal. But our politicians decided to ignore them: Health care systems were not fortified, plans were not made for the reopening of schools, and the tracking system recommended by all the experts was not put into place.

One of the keys to slowing the spread of the virus is to perform polymerase chain reaction testing on as many people as possible who have been in contact with infected people. But the average number of potential cases that Spain manages to trace is lower than Zambia (9.7 for every confirmed Covid-19 case), one-fourth that of Italy (37.5) and one-twentieth of Finland (185).

Africa’s most populous country and biggest oil producer has been convulsed by protests that started with anger over police brutality and have now broadened, drawing worldwide attention.

Tens of thousands of Nigerians have been demonstrating for weeks against a notoriously brutal and corrupt police agency, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad — a show of popular anger, fueled by longstanding grievances over corruption and lack of accountability, that posed the biggest challenge to the government in years.

Commonly known as SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad was created in 1984 in response to an epidemic of violent crime including robberies, carjackings and kidnappings. While it was credited with having reduced brazen lawlessness in its initial years, the police unit was later accused of evolving into the same problem it had been designed to stop: a criminal enterprise that acts with impunity.

“Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World” employs a wide lens, drawing on governance, economics and culture

What insights does it offer during a catastrophe that evokes the Spanish flu after World War I, which claimed 50 million — some reckon 100 million — lives?

What matters is not the ideological coloration of government or its size, but its quality, Zakaria says. He argues for “a competent, well-functioning, trusted state.”

The U.S. Justice Department and 11 state attorneys general have filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Google, accusing it of being an illegal monopoly because of its stranglehold on Internet search.

The government alleged Google has come by its wild success — 80% market share in U.S. search, a valuation eclipsing $1 trillion — unfairly. It said multibillion-dollar deals Google has struck to be the default search engine in many of the world's Web browsers and smartphones have boxed out its rivals.

Google's head of global affairs, Kent Walker, said the government's case is "deeply flawed." The company warned that if the Justice Department prevails, people would pay more for their phones and have worse options for searching the Internet.

One of the few times Trump has mentioned health care was in response to a question regarding the Affordable Care Act during last week’s NBC town hall broadcast with correspondent Savannah Guthrie. “You’ve been in office almost four years,” Guthrie said. “You had both houses of Congress, Senate and House, in Republican hands. And there is not a replacement yet. . . . The promise was repeal and replace.”

“Look, look, we should be on the same side,” Trump answered. “I want it very simple. I’m going to put it very simple. We would like to terminate it and we would like to replace it with something that’s much less expensive and much better. We will always protect people with pre-existing conditions.”

Trump and Republicans still talk about the ACA like it’s 2010 when the truth is that the public now supports it by wide margins.

Russia said Friday that it is prepared to cut ties with the European Union if the bloc slaps economic sanctions on the Kremlin in retaliation for the detention of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

In the event that we again see sanctions imposed in some sectors that create risks for our economy, including in the most sensitive spheres," he said.

"We don't want to isolate ourselves from global life, but we have to be ready for that. If you want peace then prepare for war,"

“I remember him saying: ‘History will be written Before Covid and After Covid.’ And I thought, he’s got something here. It began to sink in that this was different from anything I’ve ever encountered in my 30-year career at the British Library, and that we should do something about it.”

For the past year, that has meant gathering interviews with thousands of NHS workers, archiving websites, recording TV and radio channels, and collecting poetry and audio diaries, sometimes with partner organisations. It will build, he hopes, into a national archive of Covid-19 reminiscences, and an “amazing resource” for future researchers.

It is not just the Covid pandemic that can make these feel like unusually significant times. Populism, Trump’s rise and (perhaps) fall, Brexit, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo protests, mass movement of refugees, the increased might of both China and India and many other issues have contributed to a sense of humanity having reached a historic moment, all while the climate crisis rages with ever more urgency.

Burke foresaw, more accurately than most of his great contemporaries, what the revolution would bring: the executions of Louis and Marie Antoinette; the ineffectuality of moderate revolutionary leaders

Burke’s objection to the French revolutionaries is that they paid so little attention to this complexity: They were men of theory, not experience.

a champion of Catholic emancipation — the civil rights movement of his day — and other reformist (and usually unpopular) causes.

last year, as the progressive movement in Georgia was on the cusp of historic electoral triumph, Mr. Calhoun, a small-town lawyer whose family had long roots in the state, suddenly abandoned the Democrats. And not only that, he pledged to kill them.

“I have tons of ammo,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter three months before storming the U.S. Capitol with a pro-Trump mob. “Gonna use it too — at the range and on racist democrat communists. So make my day.”

Some Black residents of Americus, Mr. Calhoun’s hometown, were not shocked that a person so worldly could end up doing something like this. “The Jekyll and Hyde effect,” said the Rev. Mathis Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter.

Trump himself is a horror show, but the most horrific story of the last four years has been the complete surrender of the GOP to Trumpism, not just on policy but on everything. The party that once imagined itself to be about ideas became a cult of personality for one of the most deplorable personalities in political history.

This suggests that the dysfunction in the GOP was a pre-existing condition; and that bringing the party back to sanity won’t be easy.

The transactional nature of the Senate GOP’s groveling surrender to Trump is straightforward: Simply ignore his awfulness and you will get things you want. That bargain required ignoring an ever-growing pile of awfulness. At some point the ignorance morphed into rationalization and ultimately active collaboration.

one thing, at least, has gotten better. More than 1 billion people have escaped extreme poverty—so many, so fast, that the world might be able to declare, within a decade, the end of this most miserable form of deprivation. “The global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history,” Jim Yong Kim, a former president of the World Bank, recently argued. “This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time.”

Or perhaps not. In an acidic rebuke to world leaders, the outgoing United Nations special rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, argues that the effort to end global poverty has failed. More people live in deprivation now than two decades ago. “We squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic,” Alston wrote in his last report.

The pessimistic argument is a hard one to make when looking at the raw, headline numbers. The global extreme-poverty rate fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015; the number of poor people dropped from 2 billion to 700 million. But Alston believes that by focusing only on those numbers, the world is deluding itself.

After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in 1921 as the newly formed Soviet Union. The world’s first Marxist-Communist state would become one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, occupying nearly one-sixth of Earth’s land surface, before its fall and ultimate dissolution in 1991. The United Socialist Soviet Republic, or U.S.S.R., was made up of 15 soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

A long and bloody civil war followed. The Red Army, backed by the Bolshevik government, defeated the White Army, which represented a large group of loosely allied forces including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism.

Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalin rose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in 1953—Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.

here are questions as to whether the leftward shift seen in the polls “is short-term or reflects a long-term trend.” Whites’ racial attitudes, Banks wrote:are fairly stable. Once their attitudes are crystallized, they tend not to change. It would take a shifting of racial norms to change the country’s (e.g. whites’) views about policing and the black community.” He added that “much more would need to be done from both political parties and activists to cause a major change in the politics of race.

White Americans have a history of losing interest in racial justice soon after they acknowledge injustice, as if their acknowledgment, rather than actual changes in the world, was the end of the matter. We saw as the Sixties progressed, many whites who were appalled by dogs attacking black children eventually lost patience with demands for greater economic equality for blacks and resisted changes in their own communities.

He warned that “this is a moment when it’s especially dangerous to misunderstand what public opinion surveys tell us.”The fundamental analytical danger is to believe that the result of opinion polling matters in any straightforward way. That’s not how America works, otherwise we would have had stricter gun control after Parkland, etc. The actual question is not whether a majority of Americans say they want X on a survey, but whether enough Americans care enough about X in their lives to overcome the resistance and resources of those who benefit from/believe in X as well as a system of government that puts up enormous procedural barriers against the kinds of X’s we are talking about.

“I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”

You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable.

Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.