Music: Obsidiane — ‘Calm Down’
The con artists, such as Glenn Greenwald, who blame Ukraine aid for America’s social problems
Alaric DeArment writes: A scene of squalor unfolds as the camera moves along a city street lined with apparent drug addicts to the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A caption reads, “While American citizens live on the streets and take drugs not to feel the pain, the United States would rather finance a proxy war against Russia,” while a bar graph says the U.S. has sent $46.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine. The video, on TikTok, is but…
Ukraine stands to gain from Wagner Group revolt in Russia, experts say
Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Two days after the Wagner Group’s stunning, short-lived rebellion inside Russia seemingly ended in a deal that saw the mercenaries’ boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, fly to exile in Belarus, more questions than answers remain. According to Russian state media, all charges against those involved in the uprising have now been dropped. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who delivered a brief, combative speech Monday, called Wagner militants “patriots,” and said they were led by the nose into…
Prigozhin’s rebellion raises questions about Wagner’s African footprint
The Washington Post reports: The aborted rebellion in Russia has brought unease to large swaths of Africa where leaders who have turned to the Wagner mercenary group to bolster their hold on power now face the prospect that the private paramilitary organization could be weakened or even dismantled, according to experts on the region as well as Western officials and analysts. The world’s attention has largely focused on the turbulence within Russia, where the aura of President Vladimir Putin is…
There’s a time bomb in progressives’ big Supreme Court voting case win
Richard L. Hasen writes: It is indeed a cause for celebration that the United States Supreme Court, on a 6-3 vote in Moore v. Harper, rejected an extreme version of the “independent state legislature” theory that could have upended the conduct of elections around the country and paved the way for state legislatures to engage in election subversion. But after the celebration comes the inevitable hangover, and with all the hoopla it is easy to miss that the Supreme Court…
Trump’s audio masterpiece of self-incrimination
Margaret Hartmann writes: Audio recordings have landed Trump in hot water time and again — from the Access Hollywood tape to his “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the recorded call in which he asked Georgia’s secretary of State to steal the 2020 election for him. Nevertheless, in July 2021, Trump agreed to let a publisher and writer working on his former chief of staff Mark Meadows’s book record their conversation, then proceeded to brag about how he had a highly classified document about Iran at…
Lula faces powerful opposition as he seeks to protect the Amazon and recognize Indigenous rights
Farai Shawn Matiashe writes: Surrounded by thousands of supporters, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known simply as “Lula”) was sworn into office on Jan. 1, 2023, at a colorful inauguration ceremony held at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. It was not Lula’s first time assuming the highest office of Latin America’s largest country. He was first sworn in two decades ago and served two terms as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010. The 67-year-old is a…
Current heatwave across southern states made five times more likely by climate crisis
The Guardian reports: The record heatwave roiling parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mexico was made at least five times more likely due to human-caused climate change, scientists have found, marking the latest in a series of recent extreme “heat dome” events that have scorched various parts of the world. A stubborn ridge of high pressure has settled over Mexico and a broad swath of the southern US over the past three weeks, pushing the heat index, a combination of temperature…
Music: Bremer/McCoy — ‘Forsvinder’
Prigozhin couldn’t seal Putin’s fate but all of us in the West still can
Peter Pomerantsev writes: For decades, Putin’s crimes were enabled by business and political actors who claimed that greater economic interconnection would lead to a more peaceful Russia. Even after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, German companies, especially, continued to expand their business with Russia. For decades, human rights concerns were thrown out – who needed them, when on both sides economic self-interest would ultimately dictate government policy? This thinking ignored the fact that the Russian regime interpreted…
Why Wagner chief Prigozhin turned against Putin
The Wall Street Journal reports: The grainy footage announcing the insurrection appeared on the Telegram messaging site at 7:24 a.m.: Yevgeny Prigozhin had gathered two of Russia’s most senior commanders in the strategic city of Rostov-on-Don to humiliate them on camera and threaten to march his mercenary army to Moscow. “Our men die because you treat them like meat…no ammo, no plans,” said the founder of the Wagner Group private military company, flanked by masked fighters who had seized the…
Inside the world of Russia’s pro-war agitators on Telegram
Alexey Kovalev writes: Late on May 11, the pro-war segment of Russian social media on the Telegram messaging service was abuzz with breaking news about the supposed commencement of the long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. The reports were hysterical: Ukrainian armored columns are moving from Kharkiv toward the Russian border, proclaimed one. Ukrainians are using chemical weapons on Russian soldiers who are gasping for breath, said another. Some of these messages even made their way to Russia’s government-owned media, such as RT….
Trump tricks small donors to pay his own legal fees rather than paying for them himself
The New York Times reports: Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees. The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into…
The growing campaign to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank
Ori Nir writes: In April 1988, as a reporter for Haaretz, I attended the funeral of a 15-year-old West Bank settler, Tirza Porat, who was accidentally shot to death by a fellow settler. Ms. Porat was participating in a hike of teens from a settlement near the city of Nablus when, following a confrontation with Palestinian rock throwers in a nearby village, a young settler opened fire, mistakenly killing Ms. Porat. At her funeral, settler leaders called for revenge. One…
Augustine of Hippo and the virtue of hope
Michael Lamb writes: The binary between optimism and pessimism does not capture the complexity of Augustine’s thought. As concepts, ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ came to be employed only in the 18th century. Moreover, the binary overlooks Augustine’s more nuanced account of hope as a virtue that finds a middle way between the vices of presumption and despair. The difference that it makes when we understand hope as a virtue is often missed in contemporary discourse, which tends to characterise hope as an attitude or emotion and to…
The key to species diversity may be in their similarities
Veronique Greenwood writes: More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of forest on the planet. They began counting every tree with a trunk wider than a centimeter. They identified the species, measured the trunks and calculated the biomass of each individual. They put ladders up the trees, examined saplings and recorded it all in sprawling spreadsheets….