Pete Buttigieg?s Faith-Based Balancing Act

That would put him in the same company as Thomas Jefferson, who was fluent in English, French, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, and knew some Dutch and Arabic (!) as well.But Buttigieg stands out in an even less conventional way: He’s an observantly religious (Episcopalian) Democratic millennial, part of a party and a generation increasingly characterized by nonsectarian belief or unbelief, and prone to thinking of religious expression in a political contest as something those intolerant, Bible-thumping conservative Republicans do. For me, it means we need to honor the separation and also speak to those who are guided (by faith.)This is a very carefully wrought answer that avoids the sort of shrugging my religion is an accident of birth language that was common in a bygone era when everyone was nominally religious, and the off-putting militancy of those who would build a Christian Left to fight the Christian Right for control of the Bible and the cross. Nobody was there as a Democrat or a Republican, which is one of the reasons why I understood that my role was simply to be there and witness.You have to acknowledge that Pete Buttigieg’s single biggest political problem as a presidential candidate is his lack of demonstrated appeal to minority voters, and especially African-American ones. Inpax gets fully 70% of its business from Amazon; some companies depend on the retail giant for all of their income.A yearlong investigation — based on that data, along with internal documents, government records, thousands of court files, and interviews with dozens of current and former Amazon employees, delivery company operators, managers, and drivers — reveals that Amazon’s pivot to delivery has, all too often, exposed communities across the country to chaos, exploitative working conditions, and, in many cases, peril.Public records document hundreds of road wrecks involving vehicles delivering Amazon packages in the past five years, with Amazon itself named as a defendant in at least 100 lawsuits filed in the wake of accidents, including at least six fatalities and numerous serious injuries. Thirteen troops were killed in 2018, and 11 in 2017.China’s Hong Kong crackdown continuesChina has effectively expelled a reporter working for The Wall Street Journal after he wrote an article about the cousin of the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, in the latest sign of a government clampdown on media freedom.The Chinese authorities declined to renew the press credentials of Chun Han Wong, a reporter in Beijing for The Journal, a spokesman from Dow Jones, the parent company of the newspaper, said in an emailed statement on Friday.“We continue to look into the matter,” said the spokesman for Dow Jones, who did not respond to a question on whether the Chinese authorities gave a reason.America’s bottom economic half can’t afford another recessionThe decadelong economic expansion has showered the U.S. with staggering new wealth driven by a booming stock market and rising house prices.But that windfall has passed by many Americans.