New York Times (September 10)
“Rather than remain silent,” Serena Williams “insisted on being heard. Rather than contain herself, she used her rage for the countless women silenced by sexism and racism.” Accusing the chair umpire at the U.S. Open of sexism was Serena’s “gift to Naomi Osaka, and Women.” By protesting his calls, “she opened new possibilities of black womanhood.”
Tags: Black womanhood, Naomi Osaka, Protesting, Racism, Rage, Serena Williams, Sexism, Silent, U.S. Open, Umpire, Women
Washington Post (September 8)
“Washington feels like the capital of an occupied country,” filled with “institutional and administrative chaos; our military chain of command is compromised; people around the elected president feel impelled to act above the law and remove papers from his desk. The mechanisms meant to protect the state from an incompetent or dictatorial president are not being used because people in power no longer believe in them, or are afraid to use them. Washington feels like the capital of a state where the legal order has collapsed.”
Tags: Administrative, Chain of command, Chaos, Collapsed, Dictatorial, Elected, Incompetent, Institutional, Law, Legal order, Military, Occupied, Power, President, Protect, Washington
Wall Street Journal (September 7)
“More than a million homes in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido were without power two days after an earthquake that highlighted the fragility of the nation’s energy supply following its nuclear accident in 2011. The effects of the Hokkaido quake and a typhoon that hit Osaka rippled across the world’s third-largest economy.”
CBS News (September 7)
“The Trump administration’s trade battles with China, Canada, Mexico and other countries around the world can feel like a bewildering descent into the obscure. But you don’t have to be an expert to grasp that, in the era of globalization, a trade war upends the way countries have operated for decades.”
Tags: Administration, Bewildering, Canada, China, Globalization, Mexico, Trade war, Trump, Upends
Bloomberg (September 7)
“One of the paradoxes of this year’s trade tensions is that in many parts of the world, it doesn’t yet feel like a crisis.” Although it may be “tempting to think the global economy is riding out the turmoil,” it would be “mistaken. Look closely: The slowdown has begun.”
Newsweek (September 4)
“September 15 will mark the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and near meltdown of Wall Street, followed by the Great Recession.” With household debt at “an all-time high of $13.2 trillion,” we’re now close to a repeat. The direct cause will be income imbalance, not a banking crisis. “The U.S. economy crashes when it becomes too top heavy because the economy depends on consumer spending to keep it going…. For a time, the middle class and poor can keep the economy going nonetheless by borrowing. But, as in 1929 and 2008, debt bubbles eventually burst. We’re getting dangerously close.”
Tags: Anniversary, Banking, Collapse, Consumer spending, Crisis, Great Recession, Household debt, Income imbalance, Lehman Brothers, Meltdown, Top heavy, U.S., Wall Street
Washington Examiner (September 4)
Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, “alleges the president is basically losing his mind, and that top White House officials constantly work behind his back to curtail his worst impulses, including the time he supposedly instructed Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. to plan a pre-emptive strike on North Korea.” And the official White House response is perhaps even “more disconcerting than Woodward’s reporting.” In attempting to distract from the allegations, the Trump administration makes the book’s allegations more believable.
Tags: Allegations, Disconcerting, Distract, Dunford, Fear, Impulses, North Korea, Officials, Pre-emptive strike, Response, Trump, White House, Woodward
South China Morning Post (September 3)
“Bankers did not cause the 2008 financial crisis…. Instead, blame for the crash lies squarely with the world’s governments. Sure, bankers were both greedy and reckless. But it was government policies that created the conditions in which greed and recklessness were allowed–even required–to flourish.” By ignoring this and “failing to learn from their mistakes, they have made another crash inevitable.”
Tags: Bankers, Blame, Crash, Financial Crisis, Governments, Greedy, Inevitable, Reckless
The Economist (September 1)
“If Silicon Valley’s relative decline heralded the rise of a global web of thriving, rival tech hubs, that would be worth celebrating. Unfortunately, the Valley’s peak looks more like a warning that innovation everywhere is becoming harder.”
Tags: Decline, Innovation, Peak, Rivals, Silicon Valley, Tech hubs, Warning
New York Times (August 31)
“Worldwide, insect pests consume up to 20 percent of the plants that humans grow for food, and that amount will increase as global warming makes bugs hungrier…. That could encourage farmers to use more pesticides, which could cause further environmental harm.”
Tags: Bugs, Environment, Farmers, Food, Global warming, Humans, Hungrier, Insects, Pesticides, Pests, Plants, Worldwide
