—At least 29 people were killed after explosions went off through Mexico’s best-known fireworks market in Tultapec. More here
—German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the deadly attack at a Christmas market in Berlin as a likely “act of terrorism.” At least 12 people were killed Monday when a truck plowed through a crowd at the open-air shopping area. The suspect remains at large. More here.
—The District of Columbia passed the most generous paid-family-leave law in the country. More here
—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
29 Killed, Dozens Injured in Mexico Fireworks Market Explosion
Firefighters and rescue workers walk through the scorched grounds of a fireworks market in Tultepec, Mexico, on December 20, 2016. (Eduardo Verdugo / AP)
Updated at 9 p.m.
At least 29 people were killed after explosions went off through Mexico’s best-known fireworks market Tuesday in Tultapec, Reuters reports. Luis Felipe Puente, Mexico’s National Civil Protection coordinator, said at least 60 people were injured. The explosions caused huge plums of smoke to rise from the open-air market. This is what the scene looked like:
D.C. Passes the Most Generous Paid-Family-Leave Law in the U.S.
Jeff Chiu / AP
The District of Columbia passed the most generous paid-family-leave law in the country Tuesday, joining a growing number of state and local governments implementing similar legislation. The D.C. council passed the legislation by a vote of 9 to 4, enough to override a possible veto by Mayor Muriel Bowser. As my colleague Alexia Campbell explains, the legislation will provide full- and part-time employees with eight weeks of paid parental leave. It also provides two weeks of sick time and six weeks to take care of ailing family members. The fund for the legislation, which provides up to 90 percent of a worker’s wages for eight weeks, capped at $1,000 a week, comes from a 0.62-percent increase in employer payroll taxes, which would raise $250 million every year in new taxes. The legislation does not apply to federal or District government workers. The legislation was opposed by business groups, including the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world without a national paid-family-leave law.
Obama Bans Offshore Drilling in Large Parts of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans
Jason Redmond / Reuters
President Obama permanently protected hundreds of millions of acres of U.S.-owned large sections of the Arctic Ocean and some sections of the Atlantic Ocean from oil and gas leasing. Announcing the withdrawal Tuesday, the White House said the move was designed in part to protect 31 canyons stretching from Massachusetts to Virginia along the edge of the Atlantic continental shelf and the wildlife that depends on the area. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced similar plans Tuesday for that nation’s section of the Arctic Ocean. Obama, in using the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, guaranteed that subsequent presidents cannot override his order, The Washington Postreports. Congress, though, may act on its own. The U.S. has relied less on crude from the Arctic. According to the Associated Press, just 0.1 percent of offshore production came from that region. The move also protects tourism and the fishing industry in those regions.
Swiss Police Say Gunman Had No Links to Terrorist Organizations
Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters
The gunman who shot three people worshipping at a mosque in Zurich had no links to terrorist organizations, and was a Swiss-born man with Ghanaian roots, police said Tuesday. Officers did not give the name of the suspect, who killed himself 300 yards from the mosque, but they did say he was a 24-year-old from the nearby town of Uster. Investigators said the man quit his job on Friday, then killed another man, an acquaintance, on Sunday. The motive for the attack is not yet known.
The USS Bowditch, an oceanographic research vessel, deployed the drone in the South China Sea Friday before it was seized by the Chinese Navy. (Reuters)
The Chinese Navy returned the unmanned drone it seized in international waters back to the United States Monday near the area where it was taken, the Department of Defense said. The Chinese government also confirmed its return. The drone was deployed Thursday as part of a mission to collect data on ocean and weather patterns in the South China Sea when a Chinese vessel seized it and left, ignoring calls by the U.S. crew that deployed it to give it back. The incident prompted the State Department to file a formal request asking China to return the drone—an incident Peter Cook, a Defense Department spokesman, called “inconsistent with both international law and standards of professionalism for conduct between navies at sea.” It is unclear what condition the drone was in when it was returned. President-elect Donald Trump condemned the seizure as an “unprecedented act,” then suggested that China should keep the drone. China’s Defense Ministry accused the U.S. of “hyping up” the incident Sunday, adding that the drone would be returned in an “appropriate manner.”
Swiss Police Call Off Search for Suspect in Mosque Shooting
Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters
Police in Zurich have stopped the search for the assailant who shot and wounded three people inside a mosque Monday night. Officials believe a body found nearby the Islamic Center in the Swiss city may be that of the suspect. Three people, all men, sustained injuries at the mosque, which is popular among Somali immigrants, and are in the hospital in serious condition.Investigators do not consider the attack to be an act of terrorism. Police are expected to release more information at a press conference later today.
Angela Merkel Calls Truck Rampage at Christmas Market 'Act of Terrorism'
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday the truck rampage at a Christmas market in Berlin a day earlier was likely “an act of terrorism.” At least 12 people were killed and 48 injured when a vehicle plowed through the crowded open-air shopping area, pinning people under its wheels or throwing them onto pavement. Police detained a person suspected of driving the truck, but the AP now reports, citing Berlin’s police chief, that officials are not sure they have the right suspect in custody. The rest of Berlin’s Christmas markets were closed Tuesday, and flags were flown at half-mast across the country. We’ll be following further developments on this story here.
It is best not to diagnose the president from afar, which is why the federal government needs a system to evaluate him up close.
President Donald Trump’s decision to brag in a tweet about the size of his “nuclear button” compared with North Korea’s was widely condemned as bellicose and reckless. The comments are also part of a larger pattern of odd and often alarming behavior for a person in the nation’s highest office.
Trump’s grandiosity and impulsivity has made him a constant subject of speculation among those concerned with his mental health. But after more than a year of talking to doctors and researchers about whether and how the cognitive sciences could offer a lens to explain Trump’s behavior, I’ve come to believe there should be a role for professional evaluation beyond speculating from afar.
I’m not alone. Viewers of Trump’s recent speeches have begun noticing minor abnormalities in his movements. In November, he used his free hand to steady a small Fiji bottle as he brought it to his mouth. Onlookers described the movement as “awkward” and made jokes about hand size. Some called out Trump for doing the exact thing he had mocked Senator Marco Rubio for during the presidential primary—conspicuously drinking water during a speech.
Each year, local governments spend nearly $100 billion to move headquarters and factories between states. It’s a wasteful exercise that requires a national solution.
The Amazon HQ2 saga had all the hallmarks of the gaudiest reality TV. It was an absurd spectacle, concluding with a plot twist, which revealed a deep and dark truth about the modern world.
Fourteen months ago, Amazon announced a national beauty contest, in which North American cities could apply to win the honor of landing the retailer’s second headquarters. The prize: 50,000 employees and the glory of housing an international tech giant. The cost? Just several billion dollars in tax incentives and a potential face-lift to the host city. Then last week, in a classic late-episode shock, several news outlets reported that Amazon would split its second headquarters between Crystal City, a suburban neighborhood near Washington, D.C., and Long Island City, in Queens, New York.
The White House’s explanation of President Trump’s absence from a ceremony in France raises more questions than it answers.
Why, exactly, did Donald Trump not join Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and Justin Trudeau at Saturday’s commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the original Armistice Day? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone outside the White House does at this point.
What I do know is that one hypothesis that has shown up in many stories about his no-show—that Marine One, the presidential helicopter, “can’t fly” in the rain—doesn’t make sense.
As you’re looking for explanations, you can dismiss this one. Helicopters can fly just fine in the rain, and in conditions way worse than prevailed in Paris on November 10.
First, about helicopters and weather. (What follows is based on my having held an instrument rating as an airplane pilot for the past 20 years, and having worked in the Carter-era White House and occasionally having been aboard the Marine One of that era.)
For the third time in a century, leftists are driving the Democratic Party’s agenda. Will they succeed in making America more equitable, or overplay their hand?
If you gauge the climate inside the Democratic Party merely by which candidates won its 2018 primaries, you might think reports of its leftward lurch are exaggerated. Despite the hoopla about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and Ayanna Pressley’s upset victories in congressional races in New York and Massachusetts, not a single incumbent Democratic governor or senator lost a primary to a left-leaning challenger.
But who wins an election is often less important than who sets the agenda. And ideologically, the Democratic Party has veered so sharply that “establishment” or “centrist” Democrats now frequently support larger expansions of government, and more vehemently scorn Big Business and Big Finance, than most liberal Democrats did a few years ago. In 2016, Hillary Clinton said a single-payer health-care system “will never, ever come to pass.” In 2017, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, by some measures the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, said the idea “should be explored.” During the 2013–14 election cycle, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey received more money from Wall Street than any other member of Congress. This February, he announced that he would no longer accept donations from corporate political-action committees.
The Dominican Republic deported an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people of Haitian descent over three years. Those left behind live in a state of institutionalized terror.
This is a story about what happens when you limit birthright citizenship and stir up hate against a certain class of immigrants. It takes place in the Dominican Republic. Like most countries in the Americas, for a century and a half the Caribbean nation’s constitution guaranteed birthright citizenship for anyone born on its soil, with a couple of exceptions: the children of diplomats and short-term travelers. And like most other peoples in the Americas, Dominicans have had a more complicated relationship with immigration than the framers of that constitution might have anticipated.
The Dominican Republic has long been dependent on a steady stream of cheap immigrant labor that cuts its sugar cane, builds its buildings, and staffs the beach resorts that draw in billions of foreign dollars a year. Almost all of that labor comes from the only country close enough, and poor enough, to have people who want to immigrate in large numbers to the Dominican Republic: its Hispaniolan twin, Haiti. Some working-class Dominicans without clear Haitian roots resent poorer neighbors willing to accept lower wages and tough conditions. Many wealthy Dominicans who profit wildly off the cheap labor supply are eager to have strict immigration laws in place, too—not because they want less immigration, but because they want a freer hand. Immigrants in the country illegally have no protection from workplace regulations and can be rounded up, deported, and replaced whenever convenient—including right before payday. (Sound familiar?)
This year will mark the passing of a full century since the end of World War I. Much of the battle-ravaged landscape along the Western Front has been reclaimed by nature, erasing the scars of the war.
This year will mark the passing of a full century since the end of World War I—a hundred years since the “War to End All Wars.” In that time, much of the battle-ravaged landscape along the Western Front has been reclaimed by nature or returned to farmland, and the scars of the war are disappearing. Some zones remain toxic a century later, and others are still littered with unexploded ordnance, closed off to the public. But across France and Belgium, significant battlefields and ruins were preserved as monuments, and farm fields that became battlegrounds ended up as vast cemeteries. In these places, the visible physical damage to the landscape remains as evidence of the phenomenal violence and destruction that took so many lives so long ago.
The problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is what led to the Civil War. It hasn’t gone away.
With the United States starkly divided and with many Americans asking what kind of nation we are, it seems a good moment to look back to November 1863 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when Abraham Lincoln tried to answer the same question. Consecrating a Civil War battlefield where thousands of young men and boys had died four months before, he spoke of a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” For most Americans since, and for much of the world, those words have attained the status of scripture. We draw our sense of collective identity from them. They were, however, not strictly true, and Lincoln knew it.
The Republican Party just suffered big losses in the House of Representatives, but the president is getting ready to ramp up his campaign—and he’s got a good shot at reelection.
Updated on November 12 at 1:12 p.m.
It’s November 4, 2020. Across the United States—and across the globe—liberals and DonaldTrump–opposing conservatives alike drag themselves from fitful sleep, red-eyed and exhausted, filled with dread, incomprehension, and déjà vu. How did he do it again?
The night before, Trump hadwon reelection as president—despite a chaotic and frustrating first term, multiple investigations, and a historically low approval rating. Of course, Trump had won in 2016 despite many of the same weaknesses, but that win was thought to be a fluke, a product of a weak Democratic candidate, Russian interference, and Trump’s novelty. His critics never imagined lightning could strike a second time.
Stan Lee offered a powerful definition of the American idea in The Atlantic’s 150th anniversary issue in November 2007.
Editor’s Note: In the comic below, Stan Lee offers a powerful definition of the American idea, illustrated by Anthony Winn. This piece was first published in The Atlantic’s 150th anniversary issue in November 2007.
Two fires have left 31 people dead in the state. But even insurance companies think blazes will be bigger in just a few decades.
Updated at 9:44 a.m. ET on November 12, 2018.
At least 31 people have been killed by wildfires raging across California as the state battles its deadliest fire season in decades.
Firefighters are warring with blazes up and down the state. In the north, the so-called Camp Fire has become the deadliest, largest, and most destructive fire in state history, killing at least 29 people and consuming 111,000 acres. In its trail of ash stand the smoldering ruins of Paradise, California, a city of 26,000 people until this week.
The Camp Fire is only about a quarter contained, and it still threatens the edge of Chico, the largest city in Butte County. At least 228 people remain unaccounted for, according to the local sheriff. The Camp Fire got its jolly name by a fluke: Most western wildfires are named after the place they started, and the Camp Fire began on Camp Creek Road.
