Music: Yussef Kamaal — ‘Remembrance’
Ukraine liberated Kherson city. Now, Russia is destroying it, having already looted its cultural treasures
The Washington Post reports: Four charred baby cribs were all that was left in the maternity ward’s bomb shelter. The rest of the room was destroyed Wednesday when Russian forces attacked the city, striking one of the only hospitals in Kherson where babies can still be delivered. By fate or luck, many staff, accustomed to near-constant shelling, chose to hide in a nearby corridor rather than run to the place actually meant to keep them safe — a decision that…
Biden’s classified documents blunder is nothing like Trump’s crime
Jonathan Chait writes: The sweet spot for Donald Trump’s allies has always been when they can justify his abuses and crimes through misdirected comparisons rather than direct defense. Did Trump extort Ukraine into smearing his opponent? Well, Ted Kennedy once did something kind of like this. Did Trump try to stay in office after losing the election? Maybe so, but let us tell you about the time a Democrat registered an objection to the Electoral College count in Congress. The…
Harbor City called George Santos a ‘perfect fit.’ The SEC called the company a fraud
The Washington Post reports: In July 2020, a small Florida-based investment firm announced that a man named George Devolder had been hired as its New York regional director. “When we had the opportunity to welcome him to our team, I was delighted,” the company’s founder and chief executive said in a news release. “He’s a perfect fit.” Devolder is now better known as George Santos, the 34-year-old freshman Republican congressman from New York’s 3rd Congressional District who brazenly lied to…
Santos’s lies were known to some well-connected Republicans
The New York Times reports: In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him. Campaigns frequently rely on this kind of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opponent might seize on. But when the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings by a Washington research firm were far more…
Bolsonaro faces investigation for inspiring Brazil’s capital riot
The New York Times reports: As the bus made its way from Brazil’s agricultural heartland to the capital, Andrea Barth pulled out her phone to ask fellow passengers, one by one, what they intended to do once they arrived. “Overthrow the thieves,” one man replied. “Take out ‘Nine-Finger,’” said another, referring to Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who lost part of a finger decades ago in a factory accident. “You might escape a lightning strike,” another man…
Saudi prosecutors seek death penalty for academic over social media use
The Guardian reports: A prominent pro-reform law professor in Saudi Arabia is facing the death penalty for alleged crimes including having a Twitter account and using WhatsApp to share news considered “hostile” to the kingdom, according to court documents seen by the Guardian. The arrest of Awad Al-Qarni, 65, in September 2017 represented the start of a crackdown against dissent by the then newly named crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Details of the charges brought against Al-Qarni have now been…
Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins
The New York Times reports: Mammals in the ocean swim through a world of sound. But in recent decades, humans have been cranking up the volume, blasting waters with noise from shipping, oil and gas exploration and military operations. New research suggests that such anthropogenic noise may make it harder for dolphins to communicate and work together. When dolphins cooperated on a task in a noisy environment, the animals were not so different from city dwellers on land trying to…
Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘Herbie’s Dance’
West will likely soon respond to Ukraine’s urgent need for tanks
The New York Times reports: Western officials increasingly fear that Ukraine has only a narrow window to prepare to repel an anticipated Russian springtime offensive, and are moving fast to give the Ukrainians sophisticated weapons they had earlier refused to send for fear of provoking Moscow. Over the last few weeks, one barrier after another has fallen, starting with an agreement by the United States in late December to send a Patriot air-defense system. That was followed by a German…
Germany must move past the crossroads
Judy Dempsey writes: Germany’s Ostpolitik, or eastern policy, was not only about trying to use trade to influence the behavior of the former Soviet Union. Germany’s political elites, whether they were the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, or the liberal Free Democrats, believed Ostpolitik was about maintaining stability during the Cold War. That stability was based on the division of the continent; on the Kremlin occupying Eastern Europe and denying them their freedom and independence. For the architects and ideologues of Ostpolitik, this was a price…
Furor over handling of classified documents creates unexpected political peril for Biden
The Washington Post reports: For Democrats traumatized by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 struggle to justify the handling of her own records — with some blaming the media for giving the story outsize influence — Thursday’s furor provided an uncomfortable hint of what might lie ahead, while threatening to muddy Democrats’ criticism of Trump for taking larger numbers of sensitive documents to his home in Mar-a-Lago. “I don’t think Biden has legal worries here, I don’t think he has political worries,” said…
Biden’s new special counsel
Semafor reports: Robert Hur, the new special counsel, had been serving as the U.S. attorney in Maryland until February 2021, shortly after President Biden took office, when he left for the private sector. He was a Trump appointee, but earned bipartisan support for his nomination — including from both Democratic senators representing his state. “He handled himself with real professionalism when he was U.S. attorney in Maryland,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. told Semafor in a phone interview Thursday afternoon shortly…
Rightwing group pours millions in ‘dark money’ into U.S. voter suppression bid
The Guardian reports: The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative thinktank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states. Previously unreported 2021 tax filings from Heritage Action for America, which operates as the foundation’s activist wing, shows that it spent $5.1m on contracting outside lobbying services….
America exporting far-right violent extremism in Brazil and beyond
By Jacob Ware, Council on Foreign Relations, January 10, 2023 Just two days after Americans had marked the two-year anniversary of the horror that visited the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, an eerily familiar scene played out four thousand miles south, in Brasilia, Brazil. Angered by recent election results and perceptions of foul play, supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the Brazilian presidential palace, Congress, and Supreme Court. “It was an attack on democracy, on the constitution. It…
‘Judicial reform’ in Israel will make it a ‘democracy in name only but not in substance,’ says attorney general
Neri Zilber writes: On the evening of Jan. 5, a politician with the dry manners of a suburban accountant but the inner fury of a steely zealot stepped up to a podium in Jerusalem and declared his intention to end Israeli democracy. In a primetime press conference, Yariv Levin, the new justice minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s two-week-old government, announced a series of far-reaching changes to the country’s judicial system that, if put in place, would hand unchecked power to the…