Dina Zirlott writes: My story is one that some already know, but for the sake of those who might not, and in light of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, it is best summarized by these three sentences: I was raped when I was 17 years old. I was forced to give birth to a baby when I was 18 years old. My baby died when I was 19 years old. I wrote my first essay for HuffPost in…
Grain warehouse destroyed by Russian attacks in Kopyliv, Kyiv province, Ukraine, May 28, 2022. Dogukan Keskinkilic/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images By Tom Dannenbaum, Tufts University; Alex De Waal, Tufts University, and Daniel Maxwell, Tufts University A hideous contradiction is playing out in war-torn Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainians are starving in cities besieged by Russian forces. Meanwhile, the country’s grain stores are bursting with food, and the government is begging for international assistance to export Ukrainian grain to world markets. Freeing…
The New York Times reports: It was shortly before 11 p.m. when Izabela Sajbor realized the doctors were prepared to let her die. Her doctor had already told her that her fetus had severe abnormalities and would almost certainly die in the womb. If it made it to term, life expectancy was a year, at most. At 22 weeks pregnant, Ms. Sajbor had been admitted to a hospital after her water broke prematurely. She knew that there was a short…
The Washington Post reports: Russia is responsible for inciting genocide and perpetrating atrocities that show an “intent to destroy” the Ukrainian people, a new legal analysis signed by more than 30 independent experts concluded. The report, published Friday by the Washington-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, also concludes that there is “serious risk of genocide in Ukraine,” and that states have a legal obligation to prevent genocide from occurring….
Simon Tisdall reports: Apocalypse is an alarming idea, commonly taken to denote catastrophic destruction foreshadowing the end of the world. But in the original Greek, apokálypsis means a revelation or an uncovering. One vernacular definition is “to take the lid off something”. That latter feat is exactly what Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, achieved last week, possibly inadvertently, when he suggested Britain was facing “apocalyptic” levels of food price inflation. Tory ministers fumed over what they saw…
Zeynep Tufekci writes: Over 130 years ago, a young lawyer saw an amazing new gadget and had a revolutionary vision — technology can threaten our privacy. “Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person,” wrote the lawyer, Louis Brandeis, warning that laws needed to keep up with technology and new means of surveillance, or Americans would lose their “right to be let alone.” Decades later, the right…
Rashad Ali and Anna Lekas Miller write: As soon as the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, familiar — and troubling — Islamophobic tropes began to emerge in the discourse. “America’s Taliban really hates women and minorities,” wrote Daily Beast editor Naveed Jamali on Twitter, harkening back to late September when dozens of commentators, including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, started referring to Texas lawmakers as the “American Taliban” — a trope that…
George Monbiot writes: For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008. While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of…
The Associated Press reports: Nearly one in 25 people in a county in the Uyghur heartland of China has been sentenced to prison on terrorism-related charges, in what is the highest known imprisonment rate in the world, an Associated Press review of leaked data shows. A list obtained and partially verified by the AP cites the names of more than 10,000 Uyghurs sent to prison in just Konasheher county alone, one of dozens in southern Xinjiang. In recent years, China…
The Guardian reports: Millions of people will starve to death unless Russia allows the export of Ukrainian grain from blockaded ports, foreign ministers from the G7 have said. As Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, warned that Vladimir Putin was intransigent during their bilateral call on Friday, the ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US condemned Moscow for stoking a food crisis. The G7 governments said the Russian president was pushing 43 million people towards famine by refusing…
Margaret Atwood writes: In the early years of the 1980s, I was fooling around with a novel that explored a future in which the United States had become disunited. Part of it had turned into a theocratic dictatorship based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence. I set this novel in and around Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for…
The Guardian reports: When the first Russian bombs fell on Ukraine, Myroslava Marchenko was a gynaecologist at a private clinic in Kyiv. The next day, one of her patients was due to have an abortion after prenatal tests showed a high chance of Down’s syndrome. Instead, like millions across the country, Marchenko and her patient fled to safety, crossing the border into Poland where abortions due to foetal abnormalities – or “on eugenic grounds” in the language of the country’s…
i reports: Thousands of Ukrainians have been sent to remote camps up to 5,500 miles from their homes as Vladimir Putin’s officials follow Kremlin orders to disperse them across Russia, i can reveal. They include survivors from the besieged port city of Mariupol, where civilians remain trapped at the Azovstal steel plant as Russian forces make a final push to subdue to city’s last defenders. An investigation by i analysing Russian local news reports has identified 66 camps in a…
Margaret Atwood writes: Nobody likes abortion, even when safe and legal. It’s not what any woman would choose for a happy time on Saturday night. But nobody likes women bleeding to death on the bathroom floor from illegal abortions either. What to do? Perhaps a different way of approaching the question would be to ask: What kind of country do you want to live in? One in which every individual is free to make decisions concerning his or her health…
The Washington Post reports: President Biden’s aggressive push to admit up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees has generated resentment among those clamoring for his administration to help extract the tens of thousands of Afghan citizens desperate to escape Taliban rule now eight months after the calamitous end of America’s war there. The Department of Homeland Security this week unveiled its program to accelerate the admissions process for Ukrainians, allowing U.S.-based family members, organizations and other groups to apply, using a dedicated…
Ronan Farrow writes: Commercial spyware has grown into an industry estimated to be worth twelve billion dollars. It is largely unregulated and increasingly controversial. In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to…