Current Events Cheat Sheet
With the holiday season in full swing, it means all those long lost aunts, uncles and cousins you haven’t seen since last year will all be reconvening to celebrate. Most of us have a fair share of family dysfunction as it is, and that crazy relative that still posts political rants as their Facebook status. You, however, have probably been too busy with school, finals and everything else to really take a good look at the news recently. Here is a quick guide to current events to help get you through those painful political conversations you would have rather avoided in the first place.
IMPEACHMENT
The whole thing is over a call President Trump had with the President of Ukraine, allegedly telling him to investigate the Biden’s or else he would withhold aid. There were private depositions of top White House people, but then there were also some public ones for a week. The Democrats need 216 votes in the House to impeach, which they already have, and a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate in order to remove Trump from office, which may be harder to accomplish.
2. ECONOMY
The unemployment rate is at 3.5 percent, the lowest it has been since 1969, and the labor force now consists of 164.4 million Americans. With the end of the General Motors strike came the return of over 40,000 workers. Hourly wages haven’t increased as much over the past year as we had hoped. However, the economy seems to be stronger than economists had thought, so that’s good news.
3. INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Brexit is one of the biggest headlines at the moment with another general election scheduled for Thursday 12/12. Protests in Hong Kong are still going strong after thousands filled the streets to pressure the government to allow more civil liberties among their people. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been in hot water for bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges. and now two former aides are facing corruption charges as well.
4. 2020 ELECTION
Kamala Harris dropped out at the beginning of this month. The Democrats don’t seem to have a clear frontrunner to nominate as of right now. The Iowa caucuses begin in February. Buttigieg is definitely close in the front of the pack somewhere among Bernie, Biden and Bloomberg. The only Republicans facing Trump for the nomination are Joe Walsh (former congressman) and William Weld (former Massachusetts governor).