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Category: Politics

Moldova names new pro-EU prime minister after government falls amid Russian pressure

Moldova names new pro-EU prime minister after government falls amid Russian pressure

Politico reports: Moldovan President Maia Sandu on Friday nominated a new prime minister to keep her country on a pro-EU trajectory after the previous government fell earlier in the day, following months of rising Russian pressure amid the war in Ukraine. She named Dorin Recean, a noted pro-EU figure and current national security adviser, to replace Natalia Gavrilița, as the new head of government. The Moldovan parliament, where Sandu’s party holds a comfortable majority with 63 out of 101 seats,…

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Ron DeSantis’s New College takeover is just the beginning of the right’s higher ed crusade

Ron DeSantis’s New College takeover is just the beginning of the right’s higher ed crusade

Vanity Fair reports: It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she…

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The GOP is starting to plot against Donald Trump

The GOP is starting to plot against Donald Trump

David Freedlander writes: “It is,” he said, “A five-alarm fire. And there is nobody coming to put it out.” “It,” in this case, is the possibility that once again Donald Trump will prevail over a splintered Republican field, getting the same 30-40 percent he received in the early primaries in 2016, enough to win the nomination. “He,” is a Republican donor and bundler, a Wall Street financier who regularly hobnobs with senior Republican officials but who also was, uniquely for…

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Chinese surveillance balloon carried antennas, other equipment to gather intelligence, U.S. says

Chinese surveillance balloon carried antennas, other equipment to gather intelligence, U.S. says

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Chinese balloon that crossed the U.S. carried antennas and sensors for collecting intelligence and communications, administration officials said, laying out the most detailed evidence to date about China’s surveillance program. The new information was described Thursday by a range of officials from the Pentagon, State Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation as the Biden administration prepared to take unspecified action against companies and entities linked to the Chinese balloon program that the U.S. says…

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How the case of arrested FBI agent Charles McGonigal is tied to a Russia-linked influence effort

How the case of arrested FBI agent Charles McGonigal is tied to a Russia-linked influence effort

Mother Jones reports: It was shocking news: Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief for the FBI, was arrested for his alleged role in two separate schemes. In one, he purportedly accepted $225,000 from an Albanian American businessman, while he was still in the FBI, and did favors for that businessman and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. In the other, McGonigal, after he retired in 2018, allegedly provided investigative services to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned in 2018 for assisting the global “malign” activities of Putin’s…

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Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast is top misinformation spreader, study says

Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast is top misinformation spreader, study says

The New York Times reports: When Stephen K. Bannon, the White House strategist turned podcaster, was explaining the latest Covid-19 developments in 2021, he passed the microphone to a special guest: Clay Clark, an evangelist and anti-vaccine activist. For nearly 10 minutes, Mr. Clark rattled off one false and misleading statement after another. Covid is “100 percent treatable” with hydroxychloroquine and other drugs. (No.) Covid vaccines are filled with fetal tissue. (False.) Concentration camps are coming. (Nope.) Bill Gates owns…

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Apartheid: Republicans create white-appointed court system for Blackest city in America

Apartheid: Republicans create white-appointed court system for Blackest city in America

Mississippi Today reports: A white supermajority of the Mississippi House voted after an intense, four-plus hour debate to create a separate court system and an expanded police force within the city of Jackson — the Blackest city in America — that would be appointed completely by white state officials. If House Bill 1020 becomes law later this session, the white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would appoint two judges to oversee a new district within the city —…

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Syria’s White Helmets work miracles after earthquake

Syria’s White Helmets work miracles after earthquake

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: This is not how editorial discussions normally go. This morning I contacted Fared Al Mahlool over WhatsApp for a potential story on the catastrophic earthquake that hit Turkey and northern Syria on Monday. Fared is an internally displaced Syrian living in Idlib. He’s a photojournalist who has contributed to New Lines in the past. Fared told me that he was willing to take on the assignment, but first had to attend to a more pressing business….

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Putin’s real threat comes from Russia’s ‘turbo-patriots’

Putin’s real threat comes from Russia’s ‘turbo-patriots’

Mark Galeotti writes: Does Vladimir Putin face a challenge, not from cuddly, West-looking liberals, but from even sharper-toothed nationalists? Certainly this is suddenly the message coming from loyalists. Oleg Matveychev, a parliamentarian and spin doctor, who also has a widely-read blog, has made waves by claiming in an online video that ‘2023 will be very dangerous,’ because of the threat of so-called ‘turbo-patriots.’ Discounting the liberals (who ‘have all run away’), he warned that the turbo-patriots had become ‘the only…

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Can Russia learn from its failures in Ukraine?

Can Russia learn from its failures in Ukraine?

Dara Massicot writes: Three months before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, CIA Director William Burns and U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan met in Moscow with Nikolai Patrushev, an ultra-hawkish adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Burns and Sullivan informed Patrushev that they knew of Russia’s invasion plans and that the West would respond with severe consequences if Russia proceeded. According to Burns, Patrushev said nothing about the invasion. Instead, he looked them in the eye, conveying what Burns took…

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Twitter kept entire ‘database’ of Republican requests to censor posts

Twitter kept entire ‘database’ of Republican requests to censor posts

Rolling Stone reports: When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down. That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere…

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Biden isn’t too old to successfully bait congressional Republicans

Biden isn’t too old to successfully bait congressional Republicans

David Frum writes: In September 2009, a Republican representative from South Carolina named Joe Wilson inserted himself into history. He interrupted President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress by shouting, “You lie.” The outburst shocked viewers. Wilson, not Obama, was the top trending item on Twitter in the aftermath of the speech. Wilson apologized, “I let my emotions get the best of me.” Then–Republican Conference Chair Mike Pence expressed regret: “Joe made a mistake.” Wilson was formally…

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Investigate Bolsonaro for genocide, says Brazil’s environment minister

Investigate Bolsonaro for genocide, says Brazil’s environment minister

The Guardian reports: Former president Jair Bolsonaro should be investigated for genocide, Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has said, as she prepares an operation to drive illegal goldminers from the site of a humanitarian disaster on Indigenous land. In the coming days, armed police and environmental protection agents will launch the first of a series of operations by plane and helicopter to expel thousands of miners, who proliferated in Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous territory during Bolsonaro’s administration, contaminating Amazonian rivers, wrecking…

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How deepfake videos are used to spread disinformation

How deepfake videos are used to spread disinformation

The New York Times reports: In one video, a news anchor with perfectly combed dark hair and a stubbly beard outlined what he saw as the United States’ shameful lack of action against gun violence. In another video, a female news anchor heralded China’s role in geopolitical relations at an international summit meeting. But something was off. Their voices were stilted and failed to sync with the movement of their mouths. Their faces had a pixelated, video-game quality and their…

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China has more ICBM launchers than U.S., American military reports

China has more ICBM launchers than U.S., American military reports

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. military has notified Congress that China now has more land-based intercontinental-range missile launchers than the U.S., fueling the debate about how Washington should respond to Beijing’s nuclear buildup. “The number of land-based fixed and mobile ICBM launchers in China exceeds the number of ICBM launchers in the United States,” the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees nuclear forces, wrote the Senate’s and House’s Armed Services Committees on Jan. 26. The notification…

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