News & Features

This distinction is significant because it elucidates the current role of women in this South American country, both at the political and constituency levels. Practices and philosophies that may appear commonplace within American politics are disputably still in their infancy in Ecuador. And while women may make up 38 percent of the National Assembly in Ecuador, the power they yield to enact legislature for women’s rights remains largely dependent on the executive branch: PAIS Alliance, the president’s political platform, controls the assembly with 74 members out of 137. 

The only reason that Gorsuch hasn’t matched his mentor and idol Scalia’s 19th century grounded voting record on key cases, is because he hasn’t been on the court for the decades Scalia was on the high court. But there’s enough in his thin resume on some cases that pertain to abortion rights, Planned Parenthood funding, a powerhouse federal judiciary, and most menacingly the strictest of strict reading of the constitutionalism, branded “originalism,” to serve as fair warning of what’s to come if he gets on the SCOTUS. 

March 15 marked the 100th anniversary of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The milestone has attracted little notice. It is the opinion of most historians that Nicholas was a failure: feckless, dimwitted, reactionary—and henpecked to boot. But as Robert Massie makes clear in his admirable biography, Nicholas and Alexandra, the real Nicholas was more complex, more human and more interesting than the caricature.

Many of those customers could lose their health insurance under the new bill, called the American Health Care Act, which would change Medicaid funding so that states would be forced to choose Medicaid funding as a block grant or as a per capita cap. Healthcare advocates believe neither funding mechanism will cover California’s ongoing needs. They have spoken out strongly against the bill. 

The idea that Felt simply changed his procedural and cultural spots because he was so offended by the misdeeds of the Nixon Administration requires an enormous amount of blind faith about human nature. Clearly FBI directors are much more overtly political than they once were. Finding FBI loyalty during the campaign inadequate because it now refuses to take direct orders from the White House (which it never has) may result in one of the more interesting and unreported power struggles of our day.

If America was once a country that opened its doors to immigrants and refugees, today its policies stand in stark contrast to this tradition, and its premise of open societies and sustainable, equitable growth are undermined by ineptitude and barely veiled racist intentions. It’s a country in which the immigrant becomes the enemy. To be sure the voice of opposition to the Trump White House and its assaults on civil liberties are reassuring.

A year ago, the headline of the report on hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center read “Hate Groups on the Rise.” This year’s report concludes that hate groups have risen for the second year in a row. The rise in the number of hate groups in the U.S. corresponds with the radical right getting emboldened by the candidacy of Donald Trump, according to the SPLC’s annual census of hate groups and other extremist organizations​.

In Peru we met eleven of the fourteen conditions. In the United States today, the rhetoric, actions, and expressed intent of the current administration arguably meet all of them. I have lived this story before and the march towards extreme authoritarianism is one that inexorably follows its own logic to terrible conclusions. This means that now is the time to address the early symptoms.