Women were the center of attention over the weekend on Rai Uno, the main channel of Italy’s taxpayer-financed public television. A Mar. 18 talk show dedicated a whole segment to “the charm of Eastern European women,” speculating why Italian men might prefer Eastern European women.
This week’s election in the Netherlands had one clear loser: Geert Wilders and his far-right Party of Freedom, which got fewer seats than forecast. And it also had a clear winner: not only Mark Rutte, the incumbent prime minister (who could take months to stitch together a coalition government) but Jesse Klaver, the 30-year-old leader of the left-wing Green Party, nicknamed “Jessiah” by his supporters.
Established in the 1946 charter of the United Nations, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) holds one of the largest, most important yearly events addressing progress in women’s equality on an international scale. The meetings are attended by thousands of representatives of member states, non-member states (such as Taiwan), and non-governmental organizations—some of whom travel with their countries’ official delegations.
Update: On Sept. 27, Trump announced that his tax reform plan would, as promised, abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax. In 2005, he paid $31.3 million due to the provision, which is designed to ensure very high earners pay at least some tax.
This item has been corrected.
The US is the world’s largest national economy, and the epitome of industrialization. Because of its wealth, high standards of living, and availability of world-class services, many Americans believe theirs to be one of the better—or outright best—countries in the world to live.
On March 10, US president Donald Trump hits his 50th day in office—halfway through the crucial first 100 days. The president promised a clear list of things to get done over that period in his “Contract with the American Voter” (pdf). So, we’ve gone through that contract—a mixture of easy wins, direct guidelines, and weighty legislative ideas—and graded Trump on how well he’s doing, using a scale of his favorite catchphrases:
“I really like my Dior t-shirt,” said Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian author and feminist icon.
If lower-income Americans want health care under the new Republican replacement for Obamacare, they’ll need to stop buying expensive gadgets like iPhones, Utah Representative Jason E. Chaffetz said on Tuesday (March 7).
With so few women running large US companies, it would seem that the number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 could only go up.
As reported March 2 by The Indianapolis Star, US vice president Mike Pence, when he was governor of Indiana, conducted official state business using his personal AOL account. And he got hacked.
US attorney general Jeff Sessions, responding to mounting pressure from Democrats and from his own party, announced that he is recusing himself from any current or future investigations into the 2016 US presidential campaigns. The decision followed reports that he had spoken twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the US. Russia, of course, is widely believed by US intelligence agencies to have meddled in the election.
The Donald Trump who took the podium on Feb. 28 to deliver his address to the joint session of Congress, many have been quick to point out, was different from the one we’ve seen so far. He stuck to the script. His demeanor was not aggressive. He spent little time attacking the Washington elite, or complaining about the unfair press. He invoked the goals of the civil rights struggle, and abandoned the ominous tone of the “American carnage” discussed in his inaugural address to adopt uncharacteristically hopeful tones.
The New York Times is correct to call Julius Evola, the thinker that Steven Bannon quoted in a speech he gave at the Vatican in 2014, taboo.
On Feb. 19, 1942, then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 authorizing the relocation of all persons considered a threat to national defense from the west coast of the United States inland.
The MacArthur Foundation, known for awarding the prestigious “genius” grants to people who have distinguished themselves in the arts and sciences, is in the process of assigning its largest grant ever. It will give $100 million to one of the contenders for 100&Change, a contest to find a compelling and achievable proposal to tackle a big social issue.
If one had to pick a word that could sum up discrimination against women, that word would be “no.”
A proposed law that would require written consent for an abortion from the “father of the fetus” was approved by an Oklahoma House committee on Tuesday. The measure drew condemnation from reproductive rights groups even before sponsor Justin Humphrey described pregnant women as “hosts” who give up their rights if they have been “irresponsible.”
In the wake of former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s resignation over his failure to disclose the full extent of a conversation he had with a Russian diplomat, and his overall questionable ties with Russian president Vladimir Putin and his surrogates, an old question has started circulating online.
For the first time since he became US president, Donald Trump met today (Feb. 13) with his Canadian counterpart, American liberal icon (and Barack Obama bro) Justin Trudeau.
In the 1750s, the United States of America was not yet a country, but its trouble with immigrants already had begun.
The US president, one imagines, must have access to all sorts of information the rest of us have to wait for the next broadcast or newspaper scoop to learn, if we ever learn it at all. After all, he’s the leader of the free world, isn’t he? But Americans, and the world, are discovering the president can be behind the news cycle too—a lot behind.
Citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries can continue to enter the United States after an appeals court rejected the government’s emergency motion to reinstate the ban.
US airport and airline executives today met president Donald Trump and White House staff to discuss airport infrastructure, traffic control, and industry regulations. But, by multiple accounts, there was no discussion of the most contentious issue at US airports in recent weeks: the Trump administration’s recent immigration order and the chaos it has spawned.
