Last month, 12-year-old Amari Allen appeared on television to share how she had been brutalized by racist white boys at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield, Virginia. The sixth-grader, who is black, wept as she recalled how she was pinned down during recess, had her arms pulled behind her back and had a hand placed over her mouth so she couldn’t scream.
She said the boys cut off her dreadlocks, calling it “nappy.” By Monday, it was revealed that, following an investigation by Fairfax County Police, the girl admitted she had made it all up.
When the story first broke, left-wing politicians and activists raged. Rep. Rashida Tlaib published a personalized message on Twitter to the girl: “You see, Amari, you may not feel it now but you have a power that threatens their core. I can’t wait to watch you use it and thrive.” On Twitter, some even found a way to blame the Trump administration, noting ominously that Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, teaches art part-time at the school. Read more…
China may be better off agreeing to a deal with U.S. President Donald Trump while he’s in office, an analyst told CNBC on Tuesday. That’s because things could get tougher if Elizabeth Warren, a potential Democratic rival, wins next year’s presidential election.
Warren, a U.S. senator seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, could bring up more difficult issues when negotiating with China, said Wayne Kaufman, chief market analyst at Phoenix Financial Services. That would add to the many sticking points, which currently include the lack of intellectual property rights protection, making it harder for both sides to seal a deal.
“The Chinese, they would like to wait out President Trump … they may be miscalculating because if they get a President Elizabeth Warren, she’s probably going to be even tougher than Trump,” Kaufman told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia.”
“Warren will go after them in a worse way because of climate change. She’s a big, big climate change person. China is the biggest polluter in the world so the Chinese may want to deal with Mr. Trump who I think wants to have some deal done by first quarter,” he added. Read more…
The uproar over US President Donald Trump’s latest outrageous remarks attacking four members of the US Congress – Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar, all women of colour – for constantly criticising America and telling them to “go back” to the countries “from which they came” highlights the trouble with American exceptionalism.
Exceptionalism is not unique to the US. “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” Barack Obama said at a NATO summit in the spring of 2009. And the US is exceptional in many ways. It dominates the world militarily, economically and culturally, in pretty much everything from sport to the number of Nobel laureates. In 2017, it was the preferred destination for fully a fifth of all adults worldwide who desired to permanently relocate to another country. And of course, only Americans have actually walked on the moon.
The US is also exceptional in less desirable ways. It is unique among the major industrialised nations of the world in not providing its citizens with universal healthcare and has the shortest life expectancy and highest infant mortality; it incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on the globe, its income inequality far outstrips other developed countries; and few nations can match the death toll gun violence in the US exacts every year. Read more…