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Category: Politics

U.S. shoots down claim that American balloons have been soaring over China

U.S. shoots down claim that American balloons have been soaring over China

Rolling Stone reports: China claimed on Monday that the United States has sent at least 10 unsanctioned balloons over Chinese airspace since last year, describing the U.S. the world’s largest “surveillance empire.” Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, denied the allegation. “Any claim that the U.S. government operates surveillance balloons over the PRC is false,” she tweeted. “It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection, that it has used to…

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One more sign that Special Counsel Jack Smith is deadly serious

One more sign that Special Counsel Jack Smith is deadly serious

Dennis Aftergut writes: This weekend brought the strange news that Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Donald Trump, asked the grand jury to issue a subpoena to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago office for an empty folder. Why? The Guardian reports that last month, Smith subpoenaed the folder, marked “Classified Evening Briefing,” even though Trump’s lawyers told him it had nothing in it. This tells us something important: that Smith is serious about pressing forward with a case against Trump for his 18 months of obstructing government efforts to…

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Kanye’s antisemitic rhetoric led to assaults, vandalism, ADL reports

Kanye’s antisemitic rhetoric led to assaults, vandalism, ADL reports

Rolling Stone reports: When Kanye West, a.k.a. Ye, began his antisemitic blitz late last year — threatening to go “death con 3 on Jewish people”; proclaiming his “love” for Nazis; and insisting it’s time for Jews to “forgive Hitler” — the hate didn’t just go viral on the Internet. It soon spread to college campuses and marred synagogues, and it filled the mouths of assailants attacking Jewish individuals in grocery stores and parks. A new report by the Anti-Defamation League…

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More incursions or more detections? Mystery surrounds airborne objects shot down over U.S. and Canada

More incursions or more detections? Mystery surrounds airborne objects shot down over U.S. and Canada

The Guardian reports: Questions remain after the US government shot down two high-altitude objects, one near Deadhorse, Alaska along the north-eastern Alaskan coast and a second near Yukon, Canada, that have yet to be identified. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau tweeted on Saturday afternoon that he had ordered the takedown of an unidentified object in Canadian airspace. Though efforts by the navy, coast guard and FBI are under way to recover the object shot down near Alaska, officials had yet…

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In earthquake-battered Syria, a desperate wait for help that never came

In earthquake-battered Syria, a desperate wait for help that never came

The Washington Post reports: It took four days and nights after the earthquake for the rubble to fall silent here. The strongest voices belonged to the women, residents said. Parted from their children, or fighting to save them, they screamed until their lungs gave out. In this forgotten pocket of rebel-held northwest Syria, there were no international rescue workers to save them. No aid shipments brought painkillers to the survivors when stocks ran low. Just six miles away, across the…

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The Russian soldiers who are defending Ukraine

The Russian soldiers who are defending Ukraine

The New York Times reports: The soldier knelt in the snow, aimed a rocket launcher and fired in the direction of Russian troops positioned about a mile away. He was set up at a Ukrainian firing position, and looked just like the other Ukrainian troops fighting south of the city of Bakhmut in one of the most brutal theaters of the war. But he and his comrades are not Ukrainian. They are soldiers in a Ukrainian military unit made up…

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Tear down these walls, or get used to a world of fear, separation and division

Tear down these walls, or get used to a world of fear, separation and division

Simon Tisdall writes: To drive into the heart of West Berlin on a dark, snowy night in December 1988 was to descend on to the cinematic frontline of the cold war. Watchtowers manned by armed East German border guards, searchlights, barbed wire, the blackened facade of the gutted Reichstag by the frozen River Spree – it was all there, just like the movies. Yet it was only too real. Holding centre stage: the sinister Berlin Wall. US president Ronald Reagan had…

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Constitutional originalism is going to get women killed

Constitutional originalism is going to get women killed

Madiba Dennie writes: American law has not historically been good to women, and whatever progress there once was is now vulnerable to regression. This return is being midwifed into the world by the theory of constitutional interpretation known as originalism—the idea that a law’s constitutionality today is dependent on the Constitution’s purported “original public meaning” when the relevant constitutional text was enacted. Its adherents market originalism as fair and free from favor or prejudice—but its effects are not and will not be…

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Republicans’ widening attack on egalitarianism

Republicans’ widening attack on egalitarianism

Jamelle Bouie writes: Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country. In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care. In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even…

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Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but then kept unwelcome findings secret

Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but then kept unwelcome findings secret

The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter. The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud…

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The slow UN earthquake response in northwest Syria is costing lives

The slow UN earthquake response in northwest Syria is costing lives

Tessa Fox reports: It took three days for the U.N. to announce it was readying a convoy of aid to northwest Syria, following the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked Turkey and its neighbors in the early hours of Monday morning. While 79,110 search-and-rescue personnel, including international teams, had been deployed to Turkey’s east by Wednesday, according to Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), those struggling for their lives under the rubble of their homes in northwest Syria could…

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Turkey’s earthquake response is as political as the conditions that increased the devastation

Turkey’s earthquake response is as political as the conditions that increased the devastation

Jenna Krajeski writes: When the first earthquake, 7.8 in magnitude, struck just outside Gaziantep on Monday morning, Gürkan Arpaci considered himself lucky. About eighty miles away, in Elbistan, the small Turkish town where Arpaci was born and lives, only three or four buildings had collapsed and there didn’t seem to be too many casualties. Almost everyone he knew appeared on the street in the freezing pre-dawn hour, wondering what to do next. Arpaci’s family has two cars, one belonging to…

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Russia is draining a massive Ukrainian reservoir, endangering a nuclear plant

Russia is draining a massive Ukrainian reservoir, endangering a nuclear plant

NPR reports: Russia appears to be draining an enormous reservoir in Ukraine, imperiling drinking water, agricultural production and safety at Europe’s largest nuclear plant, according to satellite data obtained by NPR. Since early November 2022, water has been gushing out of the Kakhovka Reservoir, in Southern Ukraine, through sluice gates at a critical hydroelectric power plant controlled by Russian forces. As a result, satellite data shows that the water level at the reservoir has plummeted to its lowest point in…

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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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