The Rev. Al Sharpton delivered a "passionate" eulogy at Andrew Brown Jr.'s invitation-only funeral on Monday at Fountain of Life Church in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, The Washington Post reports. Brown, a 42-year-old Black man, was killed by police who were executing search and arrest warrants on felony drug charges at his home in Elizabeth City last month. An investigation into Brown's death is ongoing, but authorities have not yet released body camera footage of the incident to the public (it would require a court order to do so). "Release the whole tape and let folks see what happened to Andrew Brown," Sharpton said, the Post reports. "If nothing is on tape, won't be nothing on it in 45 days. Let the world see what it is to see. If you've got nothing to hide then what are you hiding? All we want is justice." In addition to calling for the release of the footage, Sharpton lamented the numerous incidents of police violence that caused the death of Black Americans in the last year. "Before we could get through one 24-hour cycle after the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the lynching by knee of George Floyd, a policeman killed Andrew Brown Jr. — a day that we were getting ready to go the wake of Daunte Wright," he said. "From Daunte Wright to Andrew Brown to Breonna Taylor to Ahmaud Arbery to Rayshard Brooks to George Floyd ... All within a year. And you want to talk about everything other than what the times demand we talk about." Read more at The Washington Post. More stories from theweek.com5 brutally funny cartoons about Giuliani's legal woesCarter Library releases endearingly odd photo of the Bidens visiting Jimmy and Rosalynn CarterFlorida Republicans reportedly fear they miscalculated on new voting restrictions
A new letter to President Biden calling for a temporary patent waiver doesn't have the signatures of Congress's biggest recipients of pharmaceutical industry money.
When Angeleno Wine Co. reopened its tasting room, co-owner Amy Luftig Viste teared up seeing old friends reunited for the first time since the pandemic had shuttered so many businesses it left major cities looking like ghost towns. “It felt like the winery had come alive again,” Luftig Viste said Sunday, the day after it reopened after being closed all but two weeks over the past 13 months. The din in the small space is destined to get louder when capacity is allowed to double to 50% as Los Angeles and San Francisco lead the way toward a broader reopening of California businesses.
Julius Randle scored 28 points, Derrick Rose added 25, converting 11 of 15 shots and the New York Knicks held off the Memphis Grizzlies 118-104 on Monday night for their 12th win in 13 games. “I like the toughness of the team,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. With the win, the Knicks are assured of their first winning record in a season since going 54-28 in 2012-13.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced a midnight deadline on Tuesday to put together a new coalition government — or be looking at the possibility of leading his Likud party into the opposition for the first time in 12 years. Netanyahu has struggled to secure a parliamentary majority since March 23 — when elections ended in deadlock for the fourth consecutive time in the past two years. Despite repeated meetings with many of his rivals and unprecedented outreach to the leader of a small Islamist Arab party, Netanyahu has not been able to close a deal during a four-week window.
An overpass in Mexico City's metro collapsed Monday night, sending a train plunging toward a road, trapping at least one car under rubble and killing at least 15 people, authorities said. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said 70 people were injured, with 34 hospitalized, and people could still trapped inside the train, which was split in two and appeared partially suspended. The overpass was about 5 meters above the road in southern Mexico City.
The billionaire couple, who jointly run a charity organisation, say they can no longer "grow together".
When Melinda French Gates asked her husband, Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, to let her co-author the 2013 annual letter about their foundation, the conversation blew up into a fight. "It got hot," Melinda wrote in her 2019 book, "The Moment of Lift." "Bill said the process we had for the Annual Letter had been working well for the foundation for years, and he didn't see why it should change."
Images of the couple, who set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, after they announce their divorce.
Bill Gates' eldest daughter, Jennifer, recently gave an interview discussing growing up enormously wealthy. Take a look inside her life.
Perhaps the most striking difference between the middle class of 50 years ago and the middle class today is a loss of confidence — the confidence that you were doing better than your parents and that your children would do better than you. President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar suite of economic proposals is aiming to both reinforce and rebuild an American middle class that feels it has been standing on shifting ground. And it comes with an explicit message that the private sector alone cannot deliver on that dream and that the government has a central part to play. “When you look at periods of shared growth,” said Brian Deese, director of Biden’s National Economic Council, “what you see is that public investment has played an absolutely critical role, not to the exclusion of private investment and innovation, but in laying the foundation.” Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times If the Biden administration gets its way, the reconstructed middle class would be built on a sturdier and much broader plank of government support rather than the vagaries of the market. Some proposals are meant to support parents who work: federal paid family and medical leave, more affordable child care, free prekindergarten classes. Others would use public investment to create jobs, in areas like clean energy, transportation and high-speed broadband. And a higher minimum wage would aim to buoy those in low-paid work, while free community college would improve skills. That presidents pitch their agendas to the middle class is not surprising given that nearly 9 out of 10 Americans consider themselves members. The definition, of course, has always been a nebulous stew of cash, credentials and culture, relying on lifestyles and aspirations as much as on assets. But what cuts across an avalanche of studies, surveys and statistics over the past half-century is that life in the middle class, once considered a guarantee of security and comfort, now often comes with a nagging sense of vulnerability. Before the pandemic, unemployment was low and stocks soared. But for decades, workers have increasingly had to contend with low pay, sluggish wage growth and more erratic schedules as well as a lack of sick days, parental leave and any kind of long-term security. At the same time, the cost of essentials like housing, health care and education have been gulping up a much larger portion of their incomes. The trend can be found in rich countries all over the world. “Every generation since the baby boom has seen the middle-income group shrink and its economic influence weaken,” a 2019 report from the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation concluded. In the United States, the proportion of adults in the middle bands of the income spectrum — which the Pew Research Center defines as roughly between $50,000 and $150,000 — declined to 51% in 2019 from 61% 50 years ago. Their share of the nation’s income shrank even more over the same period, to 42% from 62%. Their outlook dimmed, too. During the 1990s, Pew found rising optimism that the next generation would be better off financially than the current one, reaching a high of 55% in 1999. That figure dropped to 42% in 2019. The economy has produced enormous wealth over the past few decades, but much of it was channeled to a tiny cadre at the top. Two wage earners were needed to generate the kind of income that used to come in a single paycheck. “Upper-income households pulled away,” said Richard Fry, a senior economist at Pew. Corrosive inequality was just the beginning of what appeared to be a litany of glaring market failures, like the inability to head off ruinous climate change or meet the enormous demand for affordable housing and health care. Companies often channeled profits to buy back stock instead of using them to invest or raise wages. The evidence was growing, liberal economists argued, that the reigning hands-off economic approach — low taxes on the wealthy; minimal government — was not producing the broad-based economic gains that sustained and grew the middle class. “The unregulated economy is not working for most Americans,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics. “The government has an important role,” he emphasized, in regulating the private sector’s excesses, redistributing income and making substantial public investments. Skeptics have warned of government overreach and the risk that deficit spending could ignite inflation, but Biden and his team of economic advisers have nonetheless embraced the approach. “It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and middle out,” Biden said in his speech to a joint session of Congress last week, a reference to the idea that prosperity does not trickle down from the wealthy but flows out of a well-educated and well-paid middle class. He underscored the point by singling out workers as the dynamo powering the middle class. “Wall Street didn’t build this country,” he said. “The middle class built the country. And unions built the middle class.” Of course, the economy that lifted millions of postwar families into the middle class differed sharply from the current one. Manufacturing, construction and mining jobs, previously viewed as the backbone of the labor force, dwindled — as did the labor unions that aggressively fought for better wages and benefits. Now only 1 out of every 10 workers is a union member, while roughly 80% of jobs in the United States are in the service sector. And it is these types of jobs — in health care, education, child care, disabled and senior care — that are expected to continue expanding at the quickest pace. Most of them, though, fall short of paying middle-income wages. That does not necessarily reflect their value in an open market. Salaries for teachers, hospital workers, lab technicians, child care providers and nursing home attendants are determined largely by the government, which collects tax dollars to pay their salaries and sets reimbursements rates for Medicare and other programs. They are also jobs that are filled by significant numbers of women, African Americans, Latinos and Asians. “When we think about what is the right wage,” Stiglitz asked, “should we take advantage of discrimination against women and people of color, which is what we’ve done, or can we use this as the basis of building a middle class?” Biden’s spending plans — a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package called the American Jobs Plan and a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan that concentrates on social spending — aim to take account of just how much the workforce and the economy have transformed over the past half-century and where they may be headed in the next. The president’s economic team took inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the public programs that followed it. After World War II, for instance, the government helped millions of veterans get college educations and buy homes by offering tuition assistance and subsidized mortgages. It created a mammoth highway system to undergird commercial activity and funneled billions of dollars into research and development that was used later to develop smartphone technology, search engines, the human genome project, magnetic resonance imaging, hybrid corn and supercomputers. Biden, too, wants to fix roads and bridges, upgrade electric grids and invest in research. But his administration has also concluded that a 21st-century economy requires much more, from expanded access to high-speed broadband, which more than one-third of rural inhabitants lack, to parental leave and higher wages for child care workers. “We’ve now had 50 years of the revolution of women entering the labor force,” and the most basic necessities that make it possible for parents to fully participate in the workforce are still missing, said Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former member of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers. She paused a few moments to take it in: “It’s absolutely stunning.” Right before the pandemic, more women than men could be found in paying jobs. Ensuring equal opportunity, Stevenson noted, includes “the opportunity to get high-quality early-childhood education, the opportunity to have a parent stay home with you when you’re sick, the opportunity for a parent to bond with you when born.” When it comes to offering this type of support, she added, “the United States is an outlier compared to almost every industrialized country.” The administration also has an eye on how federal education, housing and business programs of earlier eras largely excluded women, African Americans, Asians and others. In the Biden plan are aid for colleges that primarily serve nonwhite students, free community college for all, universal prekindergarten and monthly child payments. “This is not a 1930s model anymore,” said Julian Zelizer, a political science professor at Princeton University. And it is all to be paid for by higher taxes on corporations and the top 1%. Passage in a sharply polarized Congress is anything but assured. The multitrillion-dollar price tag and the prospect of an activist government have ensured the opposition of Republicans in a Senate where Democrats have the slimmest possible majority. But public polling from last year showed widening support for the government to take a larger role. “What is so remarkable about this moment is this notion that public investment can transform America, that these are things government can do,” said Felicia Wong, president of the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. “This is fundamentally restructuring how the economy works.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
Air pollution causes older men to think and speak less clearly, according to researchers at Columbia University, and even short-term spikes in airborne particles can damage brain health. In a study of nearly 1,000 white men with an average age of 69, scientists found mental performance fell after rises in air pollution a month before testing. This occurred even when peak levels of air pollution were below safety thresholds set by the World Health Organisation. Test scores from 954 men living in Boston were compared to local levels of PM2.5s, airborne particles measuring smaller than 2.5 micrometres in diameter. The tests included tasks assessing word memory, number recall and verbal fluency. The findings, published in Nature Aging, showed the fall in test scores was linked to higher levels of PM2.5s in the four weeks before the participants were assessed even when concentrations of PM2.5s stayed below 10 micrograms per cubic metre, the WHO guideline level routinely breached in London and many other cities. However, the test scores were shown to be less adversely affected if the men were taking aspirin or other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs. Xu Gao, from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the author of the paper, said: "Our study indicates that short-term air pollution exposure may be related to short-term alterations in cognitive function and that NSAIDs may modify this relationship." Earlier studies suggested the painkillers may help by reducing the inflammation triggered by air pollution particles getting into the brain. "The findings really stress the impact that air pollution is having on human health," Dr Joanne Ryan, the head of biological neuropsychiatry and dementia research at Monash University in Melbourne, told The Guardian. "The importance of this study is that the findings align with a potential causal link of air pollution on brain function and they suggest that it is not just the very high levels of prolonged pollution that are concerning. The study found that even relatively low levels of air pollution can negatively impact cognitive function, and over possibly short periods of time."
A Texas shooting suspect killed his family member while beating another man with a gun, officials say.
Will Smith flaunts his pandemic-induced Dad Bod, earning snark from Questlove and Michael Bay. At least Ava DuVernay and Arnold Schwarzenegger were nice.
He is a member of MS-13, one of the world’s most violent street gangs.
The Government has “washed its hands” of the Batley Grammar School teacher who was suspended after showing pictures of the Prophet Mohammed in class, it has been claimed. Ministers are not doing enough to ensure that Batley Multi Academy Trust’s investigation is “unduly influenced” by local imams, according to the National Secular Society (NSS). Officials at the Department for Education (DfE) are also accused of failing to ensure that the probe will examine the school’s reaction to the incident and whether it was appropriate to immediately suspend the teacher. “This is a bit of a test case for how these things are handled, that’s why it is important,” said Stephen Evans, chief executive of the NSS. “Here we have a teacher in fear of his life, in hiding and suspended from his job – yet there is nothing to indicate the materials were not handled correctly. “We are concerned that the Department for Education doesn’t seem interested enough given that the outcome of this will have national implications. They have washed their hands of it.”
Vaccine providers administered COVID-19 shots to roughly 8,000 residents a day over the past week, according to DHEC data. That’s only about a third as many jabs as they were delivering at the beginning of April, shortly after everyone 16 and older became eligible for the vaccine.
As a mom with 10 kids ranging from newborn to 19 years old, there are plenty of groceries that I buy in bulk. Here's a look at my Costco list.
Many in Varanasi are asking where their MP - India's prime minister - is in their hour of need.
The end of the US deployment could play into the Taliban's hands, warns the former secretary of state.
