Media

Manik Suri is the archetypical overachiever from an Indian American family. The 34-year-old runs a start-up in Silicon Valley. He speaks four languages. He's got two Ivy League degrees.

And yet, when the windows at an Indian restaurant near his house were shot out in late February, along with those of an Eritrean place nearby, he felt shaken. "We catered my wife's sister's wedding in that restaurant," he said. "The whole conception of the Indian community as a model minority—we benefitted from that perception." This is "the first time I've ever felt, ‘Wow, it doesn't matter.'"

President Donald Trump won this state by a landslide after promising to reopen Appalachia's coal mines and put its miners back to work. But here, along the banks of Paint Creek in eastern Kentucky's legendary coal fields, some displaced workers are pinning their hopes instead on Silicon Valley.

In the wake of the Republican failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Friday, leading figures in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rallying behind a single-payer health insurance and a raft of other bold reforms.

These lawmakers and grassroots leaders have long believed that the problems plaguing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are rooted in the original health care law's attempt to accommodate, rather than gradually replace, the private, for-profit health insurance system.

The disconnect between Silicon Valley and the American heartland was one of the issues highlighted by Donald Trump's surprise victory, which was largely attributed to working-class voters who felt ignored by business elites and left behind by the forces of globalization. After all, when you're a 50-year-old in Kentucky who was just laid off at the coal mine, the tech giants aren't likely to help you find a new job, and the digital economy must not seem like it's improving your life beyond offering you expensive new smartphones.

When President Donald Trump rolled out his first federal budget proposal last week, the administration defended its call for a $54 billion increase in defense spending by pointing to "an ambitious reform agenda" that would "reduce the costs of military programs wherever feasible."

The crowd was so large at U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna's first town hall meeting in Fremont that many who came to hear the freshman congressman speak about his ideas for strengthening the Democratic Party couldn't get in and ended up creating their own makeshift town hall in an overflow area.

The Feb. 22 turnout even surprised Khanna, who told the standing-room-only crowd in the Ohlone College auditorium that the town hall's online RSVP system received slightly more than 100 responses.