Music: Hvalfugl — ‘Tanken Om Irland’
How Volodymyr Zelensky became savior of Ukraine
Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Traveling the 4,880 miles from Kyiv to Washington may be a shorter distance than Zelensky has journeyed from just another faltering Ukrainian leader to Time magazine’s Person of the Year. In December 2021, his domestic approval rating was 31%, an anemic figure but by no means uncharacteristic for a Ukrainian incumbent during peacetime. Olga Rudenko, editor of the Kyiv Independent, wrote in the New York Times on Feb. 21 that three days before…
Russians hunt down and murder influential Ukrainians to neutralize resistance
The Associated Press reports: Three days after the first Russian bombs struck Ukraine, Andrii Kuprash, the head of a village north of Kyiv, walked into a forest near his home and began to dig. He didn’t stop until he had carved out a shallow pit, big enough for a man like him. It was his just-in-case, a place to lie low if he needed. He covered it with branches and went back home. A week later, Kuprash got a call…
Informant warned FBI weeks before Jan. 6 that the far-right saw Trump tweet as ‘a call to arms’
NBC News reports: On Dec. 19, 2020, the day that then-President Donald Trump sent a tweet summoning his supporters to a “wild” protest in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, one of the FBI’s own confidential sources warned the bureau that the far-right considered Trump’s message “a call to arms,” according to an email reviewed by NBC News. That tip to the FBI, from a source who is still used by the bureau and spoke on the condition of anonymity,…
In testimony under oath, Hannity and other Fox employees said they doubted Trump’s fraud claims
The New York Times reports: On Nov. 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was “corruption all across the country, in countless districts,” in a plot to steal re-election from the president, Donald J. Trump. At the center of this imagined…
Rep.-elect George Santos lied about grandparents fleeing anti-Jewish persecution during WWII
The Forward reports: Congressman-elect George Santos’ emotional narrative of having Jewish grandparents who fled Europe during World War II appears to be untrue, like much of the rest of his campaign biography, according to genealogy websites reviewed by the Forward. Santos, a Long Island Republican, has said that his father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish, and that both faiths “are mine.” The very first line of the “About George” page on his campaign website states: “George’s grandparents fled…
No, the FBI is NOT ‘paying Twitter to censor’
Mike Masnick writes: Sigh. Look. I want to stop writing about Twitter. I want to write about lots of other stuff. I have a huge list of other stories that I’m trying to get through, but then Elon Musk does something dumb again, and people run wild with it, and (for reasons that perplex me) much of the media either run with what Musk said, or just ignore it completely. But Musk is either deliberately lying about stuff or too…
Strange, tentacled microbe may resemble ancestor of complex life
Science reports: By growing an unusual tentacled microbe in the lab, microbiologists may have taken a big step toward resolving the earliest branches on the tree of life and unraveling one of its great mysteries: how the complex cells that make up the human body—and all plants, animals, and many single-celled organisms—first came to be. Such microbes, called Asgard archaea, have previously been cultured—once—but the advance reported today in Nature marks the first time they’ve been grown in high enough…
Music: Hvalfugl — ‘Dugvåde Asfaltstriber’ / ‘Blåst ved Molen’
Abortion roiled the midterms. Now it will define the presidential race
Politico reports: Donald Trump delivered the Supreme Court majority that voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, signed a laundry list of executive actions that chipped away at abortion access and openly embraced the anti-abortion movement, becoming the first sitting president to appear in person at the annual March for Life in 2020. Yet the response from anti-abortion groups when he announced his 2024 presidential campaign was, in more careful and polite terms: Take a number. “We look forward to President…
Congress moves ahead on Electoral Count Act reforms in response to Jan. 6
The Washington Post reports: A bipartisan bill that would change how members of Congress could object to electoral votes has been included in a sweeping spending bill lawmakers unveiled early Tuesday that must be approved in the coming days to fund all government agencies and departments. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), would amend the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and reaffirm that the vice…
The man behind Trump World’s myth of rigged voting machines
Reuters reports: The conspiracy theory seemed to come out of nowhere: Dark forces had hacked into voting systems nationwide to rob Donald Trump of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The myth started spreading even before the votes were counted. One of the earliest versions, from an obscure right-wing website, had a hero: Dennis Montgomery, a computer programmer and self-described former contractor for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The writer cited Montgomery’s claim that he had built a supercomputer called…
Postal Service will electrify trucks by 2026 in climate win for Biden
The Washington Post reports: The U.S. Postal Service will buy 66,000 vehicles to build one of the largest electric fleets in the nation, Biden administration officials announced Tuesday, turning to one of the most recognizable vehicles on American roads — boxy white mail trucks — to fight climate change. Postal officials’ plans call for buying 60,000 “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles” from defense contractor Oshkosh, of which 45,000 will be electric, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told The Washington Post. The agency…
U.S. to send $1.8 billion in aid, Patriot battery, to Ukraine
The Associated Press reports: The U.S. will send $1.8 billion in military aid to Ukraine in a massive package that will for the first time include a Patriot missile battery and precision guided bombs for their fighter jets, U.S. officials said Tuesday, as the Biden administration prepares to welcome Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Washington. U.S. officials described details of the aid on condition of anonymity because it has not yet been announced. The aid signals an expansion by the…
China could see nearly a million deaths as it exits zero-Covid, study says
CNN reports: China’s abrupt and under-prepared exit from zero-Covid could lead to nearly 1 million deaths, according to a new study, as the country braces for an unprecedented wave of infections spreading out from its biggest cities to its vast rural areas. For nearly three years, the Chinese government has used strict lockdowns, centralized quarantines, mass testing and rigorous contact tracing to curb the spread of the virus. That costly strategy was abandoned earlier this month, following an explosion of…
The Romantics who laid the foundations of modern consciousness
Andrea Wulf writes: In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German expedition’. The realisation of the scheme, he explained to a friend, was of the highest importance to ‘my intellectual utility; and of course to my…