Yair Rosenberg writes: It’s a little after 8 p.m. on a frigid hill in the West Bank village of Beita, and Sa’ed Hamayyel is sitting in front of a crackling outdoor fire, his face framed by smoke, telling me how his son was killed. “He was 16 years old,” the Palestinian father says. “He was a student.” On June 11, 2021, Israeli soldiers “shot him from afar … He couldn’t have posed any threat to them.” Hamayyel is intimately familiar…
Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: “We are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks,” Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Thursday on a visit to Volgograd, where he commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s World War II victory over Nazi forces in Stalingrad. As he so often has in the past year, Putin made a direct comparison between his attempted conquest of Ukraine and what Russians refer to as the Great Patriotic War. “Again and again we are…
Anne Applebaum writes: Sixteen months after his arrest, Mikheil Saakashvili has lost more than 90 pounds and needs a walker to move around his prison hospital. The former Georgian president was for a time, on a hunger strike, which helps explain his weight loss and his exhaustion. But it does not explain the traces of arsenic, mercury, and other toxins that a doctor found in his hair and nail clippings. It does not explain the beatings he has described to…
The Washington Post reports: The network of donors and activist groups led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch will oppose Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, mounting a direct challenge to the former president’s campaign to win back the White House. “The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), wrote in a memo released publicly on…
Matt Novak writes: [S]everal reports have been published in the past two days that give us a better sense of when spy balloons operated by New Cold War adversaries have sailed into U.S. airspace. Bloomberg News reported on Friday that Chinese balloons flew over the U.S. while President Trump occupied the White House. “The balloon spotted this week over Montana was not the first time the U.S. has detected Chinese balloons over their territory—with previous incursions occurring during the Trump…
David Ignatius writes: The Chinese have been dispatching intelligence-collection balloons for years. The Pentagon official said Saturday night that five Chinese balloons have circumnavigated the globe, and China has conducted 20 to 30 balloon missions globally over the past decade. The balloons don’t appear to gather much more intelligence than could Chinese satellites in low Earth orbit. Balloons can hover longer over collection targets like the ICBM field in Montana that was overflown a few days ago, but they’re not…
In 2018, Duncan Campbell was commissioned by the “voice of journalism” and “watchdog of the press”, Columbia Journalism Review, to write an investigation into the venerable New York magazine The Nation, and its apparent support for Russia’s territorial ambitions. In 2020, after a full fact check, legal review and edit, the article was cancelled two days before the scheduled publication. In 2022, months after Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine, the CJR again refused to publish the article. Duncan Campbell wrote:…
CNN reports: Long before the leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, some Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts for sensitive transmissions instead of secure servers set up to guard such information, among other security lapses not made public in the court’s report on the investigation last month. New details revealed to CNN by multiple sources familiar with the court’s operations offer an even more detailed picture of yearslong lax internal procedures that could have endangered…
The New York Times reports: The number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000, a stark symbol of just how badly President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has gone, according to American and other Western officials. While the officials caution that casualties are notoriously difficult to estimate, particularly because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, they say the slaughter from fighting in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and the…
Josep Borrell, Vice-President of the European Commission, writes: I, for one, have long argued that we must provide Ukraine with the means to push Russia out. Tanks are necessary for Ukrainian forces to break through the current stalemate of trench warfare and to regain the momentum they had last fall when they retook Kharkiv Oblast and Kherson. Reaching the “tank agreement” took time and intense discussions, including at the European Union Foreign Affairs Council. The breakthrough came when Germany agreed…
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: Since Russia launched its brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s overseas aggression has reached a fever pitch. Yet Russia can still rely on the occasional friendly voice in Europe: Last November, for example, far-right Italian local legislator Stefano Valdegamberi penned an op-ed decrying the EU’s decision to designate Russia a terrorist state as “a serious mistake” that “foments conflict by denying historical truth.” But what Valdegamberi didn’t mention was…
The Washington Post reports: It is unclear if the balloon is following a predetermined path to loiter in certain places or is controlled directly by Chinese operators. “It is maneuverable, and I’ll just leave it at that,” Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Friday, adding that it’s expected to continue its path over the United States “for a few days.” Within the past day, the airship moved over Montana, which is home to sensitive military installations…
James Snell writes: In the depths of the Second World War the Japanese empire tried to start a plague of forest fires in the United States with squadrons of incendiary balloons. It failed, although six civilians were killed in a single successful balloon bombing in Oregon in May 1945. In February 1942 there was what people at the time thought was an aerial battle above Los Angeles. Later the authorities said everyone had been shooting at nothing. Although some theorists…
The Guardian reports: The shooting of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, believed to be the first environmental defender killed in the US, is the culmination of a dangerous escalation in the criminalization and repression of those who seek to protect natural resources in America, campaigners have warned. The death of the 26-year-old, who was also known as “Tortuguita” or “Little Turtle,” in a forest on the fringes of Atlanta was the sort of deadly act “people who have been paying attention…