Innehållsförteckning för September 23, 2019 från The Nation

Attention Must Be Paid I was very pleased to see that The Nation carried a cover story in its Aug. 26/Sept. 2 issue [“Peace Now?” by Jonathan Levi and Marta Orrantia] on the situation in Colombia. The article appropriately focused on the integration of former FARC guerrillas into civilian life after surrendering their firearms to United Nations monitors as part of the peace accords entered into with the government of President Juan Manuel Santos. The authors are correct to note that the successor administration of President Iván Duque has failed in several respects to fulfill the requirements that the peace agreement established. As the article points out, the government has not provided the resources needed to develop farm-to-market roads, educational facilities, and health clinics in rural areas. One matter of…

Sea Change 21 Years until the sea level is projected to rise by 12 inches in Florida’s Miami-Dade County 20% Area of Miami that will be underwater if the sea level rises by 12 inches 380 Estimated number of tidal floods that Miami-Dade County will experience every year with a 15-inch rise $1.7T Property value at risk of being wiped out by a sea-level rise in South Florida by 2030 2.4M Number of people who live less than four feet from the current high tide in Florida $3.2B Amount needed to build barriers to shield just Miami-Dade County from sea-level rise…

Last year The Nation published “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe,” an investigation by Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie into the decades-long campaign to manipulate media coverage and persuade government officials (as well as the public) that cell phones are safer than the independent science suggests. The authors showed the industry’s own researchers privately warned that there were “serious questions” about wireless radiation’s links to cancer and genetic damage. In August the Chicago Tribune published its own research, which measured how much radiation simulated body tissue absorbed from 11 cell phone models. The tests found that some phones were over the legal exposure limit. Now Apple and Samsung have been hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging that the companies “intentionally misrepresented” the safety of their…

ACROSS 1 Republican put off? That’s too bad (11) 7 and 28 Toy weapon suitable for older kids: uranium engulfed in fire (3,3) 9 Renewable power to fly around lake (5) 10 Like a brother reflecting a canine expression almost entirely (9) 11 Actor is a gas (5,5) 12 Declare Northern capital for a goddess (4) 13 The Spanish continue into a body of water (6) 15 Snake found outside capital of Tanzania (country in Africa) (8) 18 Flower of a certain kind overturned (8) 19 Leave an arid region (6) 21 Famous dog, child, and hoop (4) 22 Deny C-note is counterfeit (10) 26 Lusts after missing leader and gets too warm (9) 27 Distributed guiltily in the center, behind a bunch of narcs (5) 28 See 7A 29…

On August 24, at midnight, 20,000 AT&T workers walked off the job. Big strikes are surprising enough in the post-Reagan era, but this one spanned nine of the 13 states that once made up the Confederacy. Although slavery officially ended in 1865, the political elite in the South never let go of the idea. The legal structures that endorsed first slavery and then Jim Crow finally settled on right-to-work laws. The AT&T strike, which lasted four days, began over basic demands for human freedom and dignity. Christopher Walterson is the president of the Communication Workers of America Local 3122 in Miami. According to him, as contract negotiations got underway, workers began showing their solidarity by wearing union insignia: The wire technicians put on an SPF-rated UV protection arm sleeve, a…

Dear Liza, I am hoping that you can help resolve a disagreement between my partner and me about tipping in shops with counter service. She thinks that it is appropriate to tip—and tip generously—whenever there is a tip jar out. I feel that a tip is merited when you are getting food brought to your table or occasionally if someone makes you a fancy coffee. An important note is that she grew up in the US, whereas I am from the UK. So many places now have tip jars. I sometimes tip in the supermarket if they bag my groceries. But should we tip at the local bakery when they slice the bread for us? What about in the local bodega where I serve myself soup? We both have professional…

Donald Trump’s presidency is often portrayed as a break from or even a repudiation of conservative Republican dogma. But in most cases, it is merely an extreme expression of what was already there—albeit with an extra helping of egomania and ignorance. This is nowhere truer than on matters relating to Jews and Israel. Trump has coddled Israel’s most recidivist elements and asked for nothing in return. He has consistently allowed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to immiserate and humiliate Palestinians and to erase any vestiges of the peace process. In the past, some Republicans at least pretended to care about peace in the region. Today, not so much. The ideological transformation of the Republican Party into a Likud cheerleading squad was the joint project of neoconservative intellectuals and evangelical Christians, with…

On August 2, in a brazen attack on the arms control architecture forged by US and Soviet leaders during the Cold War, the United States formally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The 1987 accord banned the possession of ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers—weapons intended for nuclear or conventional combat on a regional battlefield, such as Europe, but not for intercontinental strikes. Less than three weeks later, on August 18, the Defense Department test-fired a cruise missile that would have violated the treaty, were the United States still in compliance. That test was intended less as a technology assessment than as a political statement—to demonstrate the Pentagon’s determination to rapidly field an array of treaty-noncompliant weapons and put China and…

Welcome back from your summer vacation, which I hope you spent immersed in long Russian novels or underwater, anywhere out of reach of the news from Trumplandia. To bring you up to speed, Nation intern Molly Minta and I have prepared this handy list of awful things done or said by Donald Trump and his administration—which unfortunately is not inclusive because he’s been very busy and I have space for only 1,000 words. May 30: The Trump administration imposes a tax on Mexican goods to pressure Mexico to keep Central American asylum seekers from entering the US. June 3: Trump calls London Mayor Sadiq Khan a “stone cold loser.” June 17: The US government announces it will withhold millions of dollars in aid to Central American nations until they step…

“Man Suggests We Stop Hurricanes by Nuking Them” sounds like a headline in a satirical college newspaper, but the suggestion allegedly came from the president of the United States. Donald Trump reportedly told Homeland Security and other national security officials multiple times that the US should “disrupt” hurricanes by dropping atomic bombs on them. But Trump’s unusual idea for fighting storms distracted from another, even more shocking piece of hurricane news: Homeland Security announced in August that at least $155 million of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund would be transferred to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pay for detention beds and other costs associated with holding, transporting, and deporting undocumented immigrants. This, apparently, is the Trump administration’s answer to how it will pay to detain migrant…

On July 25, 1978, Puerto Rican independence activists Carlos Enrique Soto-Arriví and Arnaldo Darío Rosado-Torres took a taxi driver hostage and ordered him to drive to Cerro Maravilla, a mountain in central Puerto Rico. They planned to sabotage a TV tower there to protest the imprisonment of several Puerto Rican nationalists—an idea that had been encouraged by Alejandro González Malavé, whom the two men believed to be a fellow organizer. In fact, González Malavé was an undercover cop, and when the pair reached Cerro Maravilla, the police were waiting. Soto-Arriví and Rosado-Torres were ambushed and murdered execution-style as they begged for mercy on their knees. They were 18 and 24, respectively. The Puerto Rican and US Justice departments initially held that the officers acted in self-defense, but later investigations…

When he said, Sometimes we learn the mostfrom losing, I think how often I’ve been bamboozledby life, how I’ve dropped a quarter in a slot machineand instead of cherries got coffins. Got death?Yeah, I’ve seen the grim reaper wandermy neighborhood in a Chanel suit and a diamondstudded scythe because we all want to be overdressedfor the afterlife, we all want to believethere is a special place for us. But when I watchedthe body of my nana fade into thinness I thoughtplease let me leave early—in a plane crash, car accident,a lightning bolt, don’t let me hold on so longI am a body longing for someone to text it—hey babe, I’m kind of into you. To say, I miss youeven though I don’t visit. Death and we butt dialthe wrong person.…