Max Roser, Our World in Data:

Why do Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries, despite paying so much more for health care?

The short summary of what I will discuss below is that Americans suffer higher death rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare mean Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.

Guardian:

An Australian woman who planned to house-sit in Canada during a holiday has said she was detained, fingerprinted, interrogated about her abortion history and quickly deported during a stopover in the US.

Madolline Gourley, a Brisbane resident, says she was treated like a criminal during her transit through Los Angeles on 30 June, where she was detained at the border due to suspicions about her intention to house- and cat-sit in exchange for accommodation while holidaying in Canada.

…

At one point a US border official asked Gourley, who was wearing a loose-fitting dress, whether she was pregnant. The same question was repeated as she was moved between rooms. When she again told the US officials she was not pregnant, Gourley was asked whether she had had an abortion.

…

Gourley’s is the latest horror story to emerge from Australians who have briefly transited through the US on their way to neighbouring countries.

…

Watson-Brown said the Australian government needed to do more to provide clear and accurate information to Australians about visa waiver schemes of this type to ensure they were aware of the risks associated with transiting through places like the US. But she said, regardless of the rules, Gourley’s treatment was unacceptable.

“Regardless of the USA’s particular regulations regarding pet-sitting, Madolline Gourley was subjected to completely unacceptable behaviour from US border agents,” she said.

„the risks associated with transiting through places like the US.“

Roosevelt emerges from the pages of the documents pertaining to the history of the Yalta Conference as a true founder of the imperial presidency, running his own foreign policy by reducing the State Department to little more than an instrument for the implementation of policy devised in the White House. The result was not only the close association of U.S. foreign policy with FDR and his vision of the world but also the inability of anyone but the president himself to conduct the three-sided diplomatic exercise that inevitably came to an end after his sudden death. Roosevelt created a system in which the United States assumed the role of mediator and exercised a kind of influence on world affairs that it had not had before. With Roosevelt gone, the tripartite contest turned into a bipolar confrontation exacerbated by the implosion of the British Empire in the decade following the end of the war.

—Serhii Plokhy, Yalta, (London: Penguin, 2010), Epilogue.

If one is looking for high-level meetings to blame for the Cold War-era division of Europe, then Moscow and Potsdam come to the fore, not Yalta. It was in Moscow that Churchill and Stalin agreed to divide the Balkans in October 1944, while in Potsdam, at the prompting of James Byrnes, the new American president accepted the deal that divided Germany into distinct zones of occupation and offered Western recognition to Stalin’s puppet governments in Eastern Europe. At Yalta Roosevelt and Churchill approved the establishment of a Soviet sphere of influence in northeastern China, but it was only in Potsdam that America and Britain tacitly accepted Stalin’s control of Eastern Europe.

—Serhii Plokhy, Yalta, (London: Penguin, 2010), Epilogue.

Brendan O’Neill, spiked:

Indeed, the rebels’ letters of resignation were primarily aimed at the media. They were for the BBC and the Guardian and social media, not for us in the now broken and disregarded realm of what used to be called public life. This is why they all first appeared on Twitter – where else? – and why they were written in such media-speak. Because the audience was the media elites, not the people. A clear symbiotic relationship has now developed between an isolated political class searching for a new public realm in which to execute its business and a media that can sniff the power it accidentally enjoys in the post-party, post-ideological age.

Ω Ω Ω

In cheering Boris’s demise the left is being incredibly short-sighted. For what we’re witnessing is not really a political event but the further unravelling of political life. The further corrosion of the public sphere. And the further empowerment of isolated technocrats and media operators. Boris’s government ran out of steam, for sure, but the lonely faction that pushed Boris out doesn’t even have steam. It is more a void than a blob, more a manifestation of the end of politics than a political movement.