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Lavrov: So what if Zelensky is Jewish, even Hitler ‘had Jewish blood’

Lavrov: So what if Zelensky is Jewish, even Hitler ‘had Jewish blood’

The Times of Israel reports: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday said that the fact that Ukraine’s president is Jewish does not contradict Moscow’s claims that it launched the invasion to “denazify” the country, claiming that even Hitler “had Jewish blood.” In an interview with Italian news channel Zona Bianca, Lavrov was asked how Russian President Vladimir Putin could claim he was trying to “denazify” Ukraine when Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s democratically elected president, was Jewish. “So what if…

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Russia’s occupation of southern Ukraine brings back Soviet-style totalitarian rule

Russia’s occupation of southern Ukraine brings back Soviet-style totalitarian rule

The Wall Street Journal reports: Every day, convoys of cars and minivans trickle to a processing center on the edge of Zaporizhzhia, packed with civilians fleeing the areas of southern Ukraine under Russian occupation while they still can. A swath of southern Ukraine, including almost all of its Kherson region and the majority of its Zaporizhzhia region, have been under Russian military rule since early March. Russian occupation authorities are swiftly integrating these areas into Russia, appointing collaborationist administrations and…

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Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow is a role model for the midterms

Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow is a role model for the midterms

David Remnick writes: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” The famous line is from Brecht’s “Life of Galileo,” and it’s often trotted out in reference to repressive regimes and their dissident truthtellers: Václav Havel, in Czechoslovakia; Nelson Mandela, in South Africa; and now Alexei Navalny, in Russia. Just how unhappy political life has been in the United States was demonstrated recently in Lansing, Michigan, when Lana Theis, a Republican state senator, delivered an invocation in the legislature that…

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Evidence mounts of GOP involvement in Trump election schemes

Evidence mounts of GOP involvement in Trump election schemes

The Associated Press reports: Rioters who smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded — at least temporarily — in delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election to the White House. Hours before, Rep. Jim Jordan had been trying to achieve the same thing. Texting with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a close ally and friend, at nearly midnight on Jan. 5, Jordan offered a legal rationale for what President Donald Trump was publicly…

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The way music moves us shows that the mind isn’t just a machine

The way music moves us shows that the mind isn’t just a machine

Jenny Judge writes: The 55 Bar in Greenwich Village, with its bulging ceiling tiles and strings of fairy lights taped haphazardly to the walls, looks more like the clubhouse of a rural Irish sports team than a New York City jazz venue. Yet some of the musical experiences I’ve had in that dingy basement have bordered on the otherworldly. When I’m pinned to the back of my seat by the mind-warping rhythms of a drummer, or the harmonic ingenuity of…

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How to slash Putin’s oil revenue, avert a price shock for the West and fund Ukraine reparations

How to slash Putin’s oil revenue, avert a price shock for the West and fund Ukraine reparations

Craig Kennedy writes: As the Russian naval cruiser Moskva was engulfed in flames on the Black Sea earlier this month, Vladimir Putin gathered with senior ministers to deal with a different unwelcome consequence of his war on Ukraine — one far less dramatic than the sinking of a flagship but more dangerous to the ultimate strength of his regime. The agenda for this meeting was to find solutions to what was euphemistically termed “the current situation in the oil and…

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Ukraine has become a proxy war between NATO and Russia

Ukraine has become a proxy war between NATO and Russia

Fred Kaplan writes: The war between Russia and Ukraine is swiftly evolving into a war between Russia and NATO. In one respect, this is good: It gives Ukraine a higher chance of repelling Moscow’s invasion and even winning. In another respect, it is risky: The wider the war spreads, and the more Russia seems to be losing, the more compelled Vladimir Putin may feel to lash out with extreme violence. This shift in the West’s approach to the war was…

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How barbaric lessons learned in Syria came to haunt one Ukrainian village

How barbaric lessons learned in Syria came to haunt one Ukrainian village

The Observer reports: A dog came bounding over as Oleh Bondarenko walked towards the garden containing the burned-out house where he had been beaten, tortured and left to die. “Hey, friend,” he shouted, stroking her head and explaining the affectionate greeting. “I talked to her a lot when I was here”. He lost several teeth to Russian assaults, his torso is covered with scars, and the damage to his spine may be permanent. But his sense of humour has somehow…

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Putin’s war on truth warps reality for all of us

Putin’s war on truth warps reality for all of us

Katie Stallard writes: The Russian president is the latest in a long line of dictators to manipulate history and manufacture enemies to rally the population against and secure his own hold on power. Past Soviet leaders have drawn on the same core themes, and I have seen this playbook in action in China and North Korea, where Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un insist that they too are defending their nations against hostile foreign adversaries. Yet we must not assume…

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American nationalist: How Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news

American nationalist: How Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news

Nicholas Confessore writes: Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss. Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an…

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The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

Elizabeth Preston writes: On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city-dweller who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone. Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than…

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Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements

Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements

Nature reports: One of nuclear physicists’ top wishes is about to come true. After a decades-long wait, a US$942 million accelerator in Michigan is officially inaugurating on 2 May. Its experiments will chart unexplored regions of the landscape of exotic atomic nuclei and shed light on how stars and supernova explosions create most of the elements in the Universe. “This project has been the realization of a dream of the whole community in nuclear physics,” says Ani Aprahamian, an experimental…

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The war in Ukraine is a colonial war

The war in Ukraine is a colonial war

Timothy Snyder writes: When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it. Empire’s story divides subjects…

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The core of Putin’s weakness

The core of Putin’s weakness

John Sipher writes: In a recent discussion with New Yorker editor David Remnick, Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin put the recent invasion in historical context. According to Kotkin, “What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a…

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