When former First Teen Malia Obama walks onto campus this coming fall, she'll be part of a historic class.
The Harvard University incoming class is reportedly the school's most diverse in the 380 years it has been around. Slightly more than half of the cohort, which consists of 2,056 people, will be made up of non-white students [....]
Still, the conversation about affirmative action continues to happen—and a lawsuit against Harvard that suggests race-based discrimination against Asian Americans is still pending. It was put on hold after the Supreme Court's ruling on the Fisher vs. The University of Texas at Austin case [.....]
Like most of us, I've read alot of articles about Hillary Clinton over the years - this one's a bit different.
Now, as Clinton works to rehabilitate her public image and figure out the next steps after her brutal November loss, religion is taking a central role. After long months of struggling to persuade Americans that she is trustworthy, authentic, and fundamentally moral, Clinton is lifting up an intimate, closely guarded part of herself. There are no more voters left to lose. In sharing her faith, perhaps Clinton sees something left to win, whether political or personal.
Yes, black voters support Democrats. But black Republicans don’t need them to win.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is more popular
in South Carolina than his white Senate
colleague Lindsey Graham, one study
found. (Alex Holt/for The Washington Post)
Theodore R. Johnson is a fellow at New America and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. (And let's get this over with: the author is also black, there is a photo.)
[....] An examination of gubernatorial and senatorial elections since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shows that there have been comparable numbers of popularly elected black Republicans (eight) and popularly elected black Democrats (10). Though the two black governors were Democrats, the majority of the 10 black lieutenant governors have been Republicans, including the two currently holding office: Jenean Hampton of Kentucky and Boyd Rutherford of Maryland. In the Senate, there have been two black Republicans to four Democrats. At the statewide level, where gerrymandered districts aren’t a factor, a black Republican in a top office is no more anomalous than a black Democrat.[....]
A SUPERB piece of reporting that hit me like a ton of bricks. Where "you are there" on a factory floor for a couple of days as two robots are tried out to come in to do the work of unreliable and hard-to-hire-and-keep low-wage humans depressed about their lives. The robots, cheaper than the low-wage humans, do it well, and two more are ordered. Just the realities, in one example. This story makes very clear that nearly everyone without training or education or a willingness to take on responsibility is going to have to go into service work within a very few years or be unemployed. As one of the more responsible line workers says: “Me and Val and 12 robots, I would be happy with that.”
“Now hiring” can be seen on a sign
and an inflatable air dancer
outside Tenere in Dresser, Wis.
(Tim Gruber/For The Washington Post)
The factory had 132 job openings, and felt that finding people was like trying to “climb Everest.” In earlier decades, companies would have responded to such labor shortages by either giving up on expansion hopes or boosting wages until they filled their positions. But now, they had another option. Robots had become more affordable.
Kid Rock in New York last year.
(Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Southern Gothic is a literary genre and, occasionally, a political style that, like the genre, blends strangeness and irony. Consider the current primary campaign to pick the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions. It illuminates, however, not a regional peculiarity but a national perversity, that of the Republican Party.
In 1986, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III — the name belongs in a steamy bodice-ripper, beach-read novel about Confederate cavalry — was nominated for a federal judgeship. Democrats blocked him because they considered him racially “insensitive.” [....]
There’s a norm in American political journalism that requires journalists to generally be unfazed by the political disputes they cover, the job of a journalist is to remain neutral and unemotional That tone might be appropriate in normal political disputes, but in the Trump era, it’s made news coverage feel totally inadequate. Many of the news stories of the past few months haven’t been normal; they’ve represented significant breakdowns in democratic norms.
An Oxford University employee suspected in a murder has been arrested alongside his alleged accomplice, a US professor, Chicago police have said.
[....] Police had released few details of the investigation. However, they said on Friday that on the day of the killing – but before the body was discovered – Lathem and Warren drove about 128km (80 miles) north-west to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where one of them made a $1,000 cash donation to the public library there in Cornell-Duranleau’s name. Lake Geneva police said the man making the donation did not give his name. “I’ve never seen where suspects in a homicide would make a donation in the victim’s name,” said Lieutenant Edward Gritzner.
Police said Lathem had a personal relationship with Cornell-Duranleau, who moved to Chicago from the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area after receiving his cosmetology licence [....]
President Trump clearly doesn’t want to release his income tax returns to the public. Members of the public and commentators have progressed through stages of outrage, speculation and acceptance that they’ll never see the goods, while others have made attempts to pry the documents free [....] But Trump’s most pressing tax problem may come from somewhere else entirely: a pre-election transfer of property to a company controlled by his son that could run afoul of the IRS.
According to a recent story by ProPublica and the Real Deal, in April 2016, a limited liability company managed by Trump sold two condominium apartments to a limited liability company managed by Eric Trump [....]
This is a crib sheet on a fascinating American popular culture meme about boy-men that I have totally missed. I caught it on their "most popular" list. Besides its application to current political stories, it also seems to have some things going on with male boomers' disappointment with their millennial sons. The beginning excerpted:
In January, 2015, shortly after Mike Huckabee announced that he was exploring a second bid for the Presidency, a Twitter user with the handle @JuliusIrvington posted an old Huckabee family photo in which the politician, wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt, sits next to his wife on a wooden bench. Behind them, three kids smile at the camera. On the right is a young Sarah Huckabee (now Sanders). Next to her are her two brothers, John Mark and David, who are the same size as their father and wear matching striped shirts. “My favorite thing in the world is that Mike Huckabee literally has large adult sons,” @JuliusIrvington wrote.
This seems to be roughly when the large-son meme went more or less mainstream. It had been germinating in arcane corners of the Internet for a couple of years by then. In 2012 [....]
Two Republican House Intelligence Committee staffers traveled to London earlier this summer to track down the former British intelligence operative who compiled a controversial dossier on President Donald Trump and Russia, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The previously unreported trip underscores the importance of the 35-page dossier Christopher Steele wrote last year to congressional probes into possible collusion between Moscow and the 2016 Trump campaign.
It also has inflamed simmering tensions between House and Senate investigators as they pursue simultaneous probes into the Trump-Russia connection. House Intelligence Committee Republicans did not tell Democrats on the panel, the Senate Intelligence Committee nor special counsel Robert Mueller’s office that the investigators were pursuing Steele [....]
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday announced a government-wide crackdown on leakers, which will include a review of the Justice Department’s policies on subpoenas for media outlets that publish sensitive information.
At a press conference with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Sessions announced that the Justice Department, FBI and government intelligence agencies will direct more resources into the investigations of government leaks and would prioritize prosecuting those that pass sensitive information along to the press or foreign officials [....]
[....] “We found that there was a paradoxical social benefit for Asian-Americans, where extra weight allows them to be seen as more American and less likely to face prejudice directed at those assumed to be foreign,” said Sapna Cheryan, an author of the study and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington, where the research was conducted.
But it isn’t simply that heavier people are seen as more American: The authors did not find the same effect for whites, blacks or Latinos. Instead, they suggest, assumptions about where Asian-Americans come from seem to play a role [....]
WASHINGTON — President Trump engaged in contentious telephone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia in his early days in office, pressing them to make concessions to satisfy his own domestic political needs in exchanges so sharp that he said talking to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was more pleasant.
Transcripts of his calls with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia confirm previous news reports of tension during the conversations in January, just a week after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, and show a new president eager to fulfill campaign promises while developing relationships with foreign counterparts.
WASHINGTON — The White House has engaged in a slow-motion purge of hard-line officials at the National Security Council in recent weeks, angering conservatives who complain that the foreign policy establishment is reasserting itself over a president who had promised a new course.
The latest to go was Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who ran the N.S.C.’s intelligence division and, like others who have left, was originally appointed by Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser [....]
His departure follows several others last month. Tera Dahl, the deputy chief of staff at the N.S.C. and a former writer for Breitbart News, [....] left for a post at the United States Agency for International Development.
Later in the month, in separate developments, Derek Harvey, the top Middle East adviser, and Rich Higgins, the director of strategic planning, were each pushed out. Mr. Higgins was forced out after writing a memo arguing that Mr. Trump was being subverted by an array of foreign and domestic enemies, including globalists, bankers, officials of the “deep state,” Islamists and those questioning interactions between Trump campaign officials and Russia, according to a report in The Atlantic magazine.
All four officials were considered Trump allies who shared the antiglobalist views of Mr. Flynn and Mr. Bannon [....]
President Donald Trump’s poll numbers continue to fall, particularly among his most crucial constituents: whites without a college degree.
According to Wednesday’s Quinnipiac University poll, the president’s approval rating has dropped to a new low, yet again: 33 percent approve of his job performance and 61 percent disapprove — his lowest approval rating, and highest disapproval rating, since taking office.
Quinnipiac’s poll was divided into demographics, which gives a peek into how different groups view the president [....]
US President Donald Trump should stop conducting his international diplomacy on Twitter, Chinese state media said in a widely-published editorial, syndicated across the country.
"Trump is quite a personality, and he likes to tweet, however emotional venting cannot become the guidance for solving the nuclear issues on the Korean peninsula," said the editorial, first published on Xinhua Monday evening. The article came days after Trump wrote a series of tweets saying he was "very disappointed" in China for not doing enough to stop North Korea's missile program. [....]
The intra-Palestinian meeting in Moscow has precedent
Russia's hosted such meetings in the past, most recently Feb 2019
Russia has long lamented the US' "monopolization" of the peace process & tried to carve out a niche for itself: mediating among the disunited Palestinians/2
Events: Heavy gunfire is occuring around the area of the U.S. Embassy and residential compounds adjacent to the Trutier area of Tabarre. All Embassy personnel have been instructed to remain indoors and shelter-in-place until further notice. All others should avoid the area.
Actions to take:
Avoid the area;
Avoid demonstrations and any large gatherings of people;
Do not attempt to drive through roadblocks; and
If you encounter a roadblock, turn around and get to a safe area.
All eyes on #Chad right now
Chad has two internet trunks coming into the country: One from the Red Sea via Sudan; the other from Cameroon. Not possible for the totality of the country's internet network to be shut unless done centrally. A lot of rumors swirling; few facts. https://t.co/N6bDJZ2ixO
BREAKING: Three loss prevention employees in Macy’s across the street from Philadelphia City Hall stabbed, one of them has died from stab wounds, @PhillyPolice sources tell me. Police converged on the store as the three workers were rushed to Jefferson Hospital. pic.twitter.com/4U1eKycL4W
You don’t get it.
It’s not about an UNRWA teacher who held an Israeli kid hostage in his house.
It’s all about how for 75 years you have destroyed the future of generations of Palestinians, including my family.
My cousins in Arab countries are still not citizens - not even the… https://t.co/nv6anubGhc
It's wild that Venezuela is now holding a vote on whether 2/3 of Guyana actually belongs to them! Analysts suggest that Modoru may want military action to pump up his sinking popularity.
The lack of a cohesive delegation has allowed attention-seeking lawmakers to act on their own.
McCarthy: “You have [Rep. Matt] Gaetz, who belongs in jail…”
Gaetz: “Tough words from a guy who sucker punches people in the back. The only assault I committed was against Kevin’s fragile ego.”https://t.co/LctPuz6Pcf
"Both the AU and the intl community place more weight on whether elections are held than whether they are free and fair. Sanctions/expulsions occur when there is a coup but not necessarily when elections are rigged or if an “institutional coup” occurs." https://t.co/m9dNimJP0D
