On Friday, the U.S. condemned China's National's People's Congress (NPC) proposal to impose national security legislation on Hong Kong, saying it "would be a death knell for the high degree of autonomy Beijing promised for Hong Kong under the Sino-British Joint Declaration." The proposal, which was unveiled late Thursday, would ban "treason, secession, sedition and subversion." There is fear that if the draft bill is passed, it could severely impact the freedoms in Hong Kong. "The United States strongly urges Beijing to reconsider its disastrous proposal, abide by its international obligations, and respect Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy, democratic…

Tighter U.S. border security to stop the spread of the coronavirus has led to a decrease in illegal immigration, including along the northern border with Canada. Like the U.S., Canada has also put in place the policy of turning migrants back immediately, according to the Associated Press (AP): Five Mexican citizens apprehended this week after illegally entering the United States in remote northern Maine were returned to Canada within hours under a rule put into place as part of the U.S. government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the restrictions haven’t ended illegal immigration into the United States from Canada, the emergency policy has…

FOR A MOMENT last month, it looked like the broader left, both inside Congress and out of it, might be about to get its act together. Since the dawning of the pandemic, the national response to it had been written in a series of sweeping pieces of legislation with virtually no input from progressives, who had hardly organized themselves enough to even make coherent demands. Instead of organizing as a bloc to make coordinated demands or threatening to withhold votes, the progressive approach has been to meet with leadership individually with legislative wish lists, with the hope that working behind the…

When gun-toting protesters descended on the state capitol in Richmond back in January (God, it seems like a lifetime ago) to protest Governor Ralph Northam’s gun control proposals, I was slow to condemn them. I’m a staunch (though not fanatical) supporter of the Second Amendment, and the rally ended up being entirely peaceful. There was a certain logic to it: Northam wants to restrict our gun rights, so we’ll demonstrate our ability to exercise them responsibly. Look! We’re all standing around with AR-15s, and nobody’s getting hurt.   Little did I know that guns would soon become a permanent fixture at right-wing…

On Tuesday, Donald Trump was asked by a reporter to comment on new projections showing even more deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic than previously were expected. “Those projections are without mitigation,” Trump responded. “We’re doing a lot of mitigation.” He added, “The people of our country should think of themselves as warriors. Our country has to open.” On their own terms, these comments are incoherent and self-refuting. The main mitigation the United States is doing is social distancing, which has been effective in slowing down the spread of the disease but not stopping it. In fact, outside of New York and…