Clara Long and and Nicole Austin-Hillery write: A 14-year old told us she was taking care of a 4-year old who had been placed in her cell with no relatives. “I take her to the bathroom, give her my extra food if she is hungry, and tell people to leave her alone if they are bothering her,” she said. She was just one of the children we talked with last week as part of a team of lawyers and doctors…
Andy Beckett writes: For almost half a century, something vital has been missing from leftwing politics in western countries. Since the 70s, the left has changed how many people think about prejudice, personal identity and freedom. It has exposed capitalism’s cruelties. It has sometimes won elections, and sometimes governed effectively afterwards. But it has not been able to change fundamentally how wealth and work function in society – or even provide a compelling vision of how that might be done….
The Guardian reports: The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said. Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of…
Slate reports: Oregon’s state legislature appeared to be on track last week to pass a sweeping climate change bill aimed at curbing emissions in the state. At least until Republicans in the state Senate decided to go to extremes to prevent a vote, making a move that resulted in the governor calling in Oregon State Police. And the drama didn’t end there: Democrats cancelled a session Saturday over safety threats from a far-right militia group. The bill would make Oregon…
Lyman Stone writes: The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest…
By Tim Vernimmen The image above, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” was painted in 1884 by French artist Georges Seurat. The black lines crisscrossing it are not the work of a toddler wreaking havoc with a permanent marker, but that of neuroscientist Robert Wurtz of the National Eye Institute in the US. Ten years ago, he asked a colleague to look at the painting while wearing a contact lens–like contraption that recorded the colleague’s eye…
In response to the latest allegation that he engaged in a sexual assault, Donald Trump’s first line of defense is to claim that the victim is not his kind of woman — he doesn’t deny that he is this kind of man. In reference to E. Jean Carroll, Trump says: “Number one, she’s not my type,” but he leaves open the possibility that any woman who is his type, might be the type of woman he would consider raping if…
Andrew Rawnsley writes: The Tories have a history as a party of falling for scoundrels who present as “lovable rogues”. This has always been an integral element of Boris Johnson’s popularity with the Tory grassroots. But do they really want to hand Number 10 to someone quite this roguish? And is he actually all that lovable? The spotlight has been swivelled on to his torrid personal life by the episode in the early hours of Friday morning at his girlfriend’s…
Charles M Blow writes: I have often wondered why good people of good conscience don’t respond to things like slavery or the Holocaust or human rights abuse. Maybe they simply became numb to the horrific way we now rarely think about or discuss the men still being held at Guantánamo Bay without charge or trial, and who may as well die there. Maybe people grow weary of wrestling with their anger and helplessness, and shunt the thought to the back…
The Associated Press reports: As the U.S. piles sanction after sanction on Iran, it’s the average person who feels it the most. From a subway performer’s battered leather hat devoid of tips, to a bride-to-be’s empty purse, the lack of cash from the economic pressure facing Iran’s 80 million people can be seen everywhere. Many blame President Donald Trump and his maximalist policy on Iran, which has seen him pull out of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and…
The Associated Press reports: When the Trump administration cut hundreds of millions of dollars of aid for Palestinians last year, the Parents Circle, a coexistence group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families, lost 30 percent of its budget overnight. So members were shocked Sunday to learn that the White House is now using the group’s photos in promotional materials for a US peace plan that has been skewered by veterans of past Mideast peace efforts. “I think it’s one of…
CNN reports: In Washington, the political world was on edge as it waited for the long-anticipated release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation. In Boston, Elizabeth Warren’s policy team was also waiting — but for a different kind of document. It came on a Monday in mid-April, as Warren was kicking off a three-state tour around her new offshore drilling and public lands proposal. “I love data!” she wrote in a memo that was viewed by…
The Daily Beast reports: A few weeks ago, a prominent black leader posed what seemed like a simple question to South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg during a private meeting: Who in the African-American community back home supports you? “He didn’t name anybody,” the leader said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “If he’s got young black supporters, they do have names.” That leader, who requested anonymity to speak openly about a private meeting, was not only referring to young…
Bill Scher writes: Ploughshares Fund President Joseph Cirincione, an anti-nuclear weapons activist who informally advises Sanders, told me: “I think Senator Sanders would not hesitate to use military force to defend the country from attack, to defend our vital interests, to prevent atrocities like genocide. But he’s made clear that military force should be the very, very last option.” For a small but noticeable anti-Bernie strain on the far left, that wiggle room for military strikes makes Sanders a hypocrite….
Fred Kaplan writes: One difference between the Cuban crisis of 1962 and the Iranian crisis of 2019 is that, in the former, the American president wanted to avoid war, had read some history on how past leaders got locked into war, and thought deeply about how he might avoid the same trap. It also turned out that Khrushchev, his adversary in that crisis, proved to be an eager partner in the quest for a way out; he knew, from the…