The fund-raising total would exceed previous monthly hauls and is more than double what the former vice president raised in July.

By Shane Goldmacher @ NYTimes.com, Sept. 1

Joseph R. Biden Jr. is expected to report a record-breaking haul of donations for August, raising more than $300 million between his campaign and his shared committees with the Democratic Party, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The sum would shatter past monthly records as small donors have poured money into Mr. Biden’s coffers, especially since the selection of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, and big contributors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, have given checks that can be as large as $721,300.

In a sign of the financial momentum behind Democrats, ActBlue, the main site that processes donations to the party, reported the second-biggest fund-raising day in its history on Monday, with more than $35 million donated. A majority of Mr. Biden’s August total came from online grass-roots donors, according to another person familiar with the figures.

The people familiar with Mr. Biden’s fund-raising did not know the exact final figure for the month of August, or how much higher than $300 million it would be [....]

Guest op-ed by Ryan & Katharine Hurlburt @ TheHIll.com, Aug. 31

It is no secret that most white evangelical Christians in the country voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But one recent survey finds that, if the election were tomorrow, his margin of victory with white evangelical voters would be just 38 points, dramatically down from his advantage of 61 points over Hillary Clinton. Evangelical voters are having second thoughts.

We are a white evangelical married couple living in Georgia. We have both worked on evangelical missions across various cultural contexts, and are absolutely committed to upholding the dignity and value of all human life, including those who are not yet born. But having witnessed the negative effects that the administration has had on vulnerable people, particularly refugees and other immigrants, we are among the significant number of evangelical Christians who will not vote for the president again [....]

Link is to Reuters article, but this graph tells the story best:

In 2011, the terms racist/racists/racism accounted for 0.0027% and 0.0029% of all words in The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively. What we see over the past decade is a continual dramatic increase in usages of “racism” and its variations. Moreover, the graph shows that this increase occurred a half decade before the arrival of Donald Trump. By 2019, they would constitute 0.02% and just under 0.03% of all words published in the Times and Post—an increase of over 700% and just under 1,000%, respectively, from 2011.

…In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.

In 2016, The New York Times published a news article detailing efforts on college campuses to train new students on how to avoid and deal with microaggressions—one of the novel categories of racism popularized over the past decade that has contributed to the perception of pervasive racial injustice. As an example of a microaggression, the article cites the following comment: “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.” This is supposedly racist because it emphasizes individual agency and implies “that race plays a minor role in life’s outcomes.” In the absence of legal discrimination, in the post-affirmative-action era, and in light of the immense absolute improvements in the quality of life of the average Black person over the past half century, concepts like “microaggression” and “implicit bias” have been critical in cultivating the perception, amplified by the media, that America still practices a form of insidious racial apartheid. This occurs by a process of concept creep—a stretching of the terminological and normative boundaries of what constitutes racism and racist behavior. In other words: The racialization of things that weren’t previously viewed or understood through the lens of race. The upshot is that the more aspects of social life the media racializes, the more “racism” there is for the media to report on.

Mr. Trump likewise reposted messages asserting that the real death toll from the coronavirus is only around 9,000 — not nearly 183,000 — because the others who died also had other health issues and most were of an advanced age.

“So get this straight — based on the recommendation of doctors Fauci and Birx the US shut down the entire economy based on 9,000 American deaths to the China coronavirus

Faced with plunging profits and a climate crisis that threatens fossil fuels, the industry is demanding a trade deal that weakens Kenya’s rules on plastics and on imports of American trash.

By Hiroko Tabuchi, Michael Corkery & Carlos Mureithi @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 30, 9:45 pm

[....] According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, an industry group representing the world’s largest chemical makers and fossil fuel companies is lobbying to influence United States trade negotiations with Kenya, one of Africa’s biggest economies, to reverse its strict limits on plastics — including a tough plastic-bag ban. It is also pressing for Kenya to continue importing foreign plastic garbage, a practice it has pledged to limit.

Plastics makers are looking well beyond Kenya’s borders. “We anticipate that Kenya could serve in the future as a hub for supplying U.S.-made chemicals and plastics to other markets in Africa through this trade agreement,” Ed Brzytwa, the director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council, wrote in an April 28 letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

The United States and Kenya are in the midst of trade negotiations and the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has made clear he is eager to strike a deal. But the behind-the-scenes lobbying by the petroleum companies has spread concern among environmental groups in Kenya and beyond that have been working to reduce both plastic use and waste [....]

By Mahir Zaveri @ "New York Today" @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 24

More than 323,900 complaints, naming more than 81,500 police officers, spanning more than three decades. The volume of records published online by the New York Civil Liberties Union last week, after state lawmakers in July repealed a law that had kept them secret, was a huge development in a long-running battle over access to information about police discipline.

Police unions and politicians have fiercely fought against disclosure of the records, and the legal confrontation will likely continue. But the records that have been released provide new insight into cases of misconduct.

I talked to my colleague Ashley Southall, police bureau chief for the Metro desk at The New York Times, to try to make sense of what the development means.

[The records offer the broadest look to date at how officers are investigated and punished.]

Q. What are the biggest takeaways?

A. The biggest takeaway is that police discipline in New York City is no longer secret. For almost 45 years, longer than I have been alive, there was a law in New York State that allowed the police to keep these records secret. And that’s no longer the case.

People who filed the complaints with the Civilian Complaint Review Board can now learn the outcome, whereas it was near impossible before. Additionally, we now have a broad-enough data set to discern what some of the norms are for police discipline.

When Daniel Pantaleo, the officer that put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold — when his disciplinary records were leaked, there was no way to tell if he was a bad guy who had just been a cowboy uncontrolled all these years, or if his activity was relatively normal. Now we can look at the data and see what the norms are and what the range of behavior is [....]

I think it news in itself that The Hill is publishing this. From its name, the publication suggests it is to cover news about and concerning "The Hill".