‘Gerrymandering warps the balance of minority and majority rights’
Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
‘Texas is to blame for nation’s redistricting disaster’
The Dallas Morning News editorial board
The “redistricting power grab that President Donald Trump launched in Texas has ended in a stalemate for the parties and a huge loss for our nation,” says The Dallas Morning News editorial board. After “10 months of out-of-cycle, coast-to-coast congressional redistricting, Democrats and Republicans control about the same number of seats as they did before the mess began,” but “democracy and good government, meanwhile, are in negative territory.” This “has squandered public resources by requiring frivolous elections.”
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‘I’m one of Cuba’s political prisoners. When will I go free?’
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara at The New York Times
Amid “mounting U.S. pressure, the Cuban government announced that it was releasing over 2,000 prisoners in what the Cuban Embassy in Washington called a ‘humanitarian and sovereign gesture,’” says Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. But amnesty “would not extend to those who had committed ‘crimes against authority,’ a term generally applied to political dissidents.” Cuba’s government “has denied holding political prisoners,” but is “still scared of people like me, who have not been afraid to challenge the state’s authority.”
‘A “barbaric” problem in American hospitals is only getting bigger’
Elisabeth Rosenthal at The Atlantic
If you “need admission to the hospital, you can remain in the emergency department — in the hallway or a curtained bay on a hard stretcher or in a makeshift holding area — for more than 24 hours,” says Elisabeth Rosenthal. In this “limbo state,“ the “rules governing acceptable care and safety measures become much less clear.” If an “ED boarder has a medical complaint that needs quick attention, it’s easy for them to fall through the cracks.”
‘How the tech world turned evil’
Timothy Noah at The New Republic
Even “in its more innocent days, Silicon Valley inclined toward grandiosity, heralding not just a new technology but a new advancement in human consciousness,” says Timothy Noah. But “now a prince of the technocratic elite,” Peter Thiel, is “framing tech’s future prosperity quite literally as a battle against agents of Satan.” And his “was merely the most literal expression of a millenarian sentiment about the coming of AI that’s now conventional wisdom among tech barons.”
