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Category: Politics

Russia sentences Kara-Murza, Putin critic and Washington Post contributor, to 25 years

Russia sentences Kara-Murza, Putin critic and Washington Post contributor, to 25 years

The Washington Post reports: A Russian court sentenced Vladimir Kara-Murza, a longtime opposition politician and Washington Post Opinions contributor, to 25 years in prison Monday on charges of treason for criticizing Russia’s war against Ukraine. Amid a draconian crackdown on dissent, it was the harshest penalty yet for an opponent of the war, in a case that Kara-Murza condemned as “unfounded, illegal and politically motivated.” The closed trial further highlighted Russia’s isolationist path, as President Vladimir Putin has disregarded Western…

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The ‘diploma divide’ is the new fault line in American politics

The ‘diploma divide’ is the new fault line in American politics

Doug Sosnik writes: The legal imbroglios of Donald Trump have lately dominated conversation about the 2024 election. As primary season grinds on, campaign activity will wax and wane, and issues of the moment — like the first Trump indictment and potentially others to come — will blaze into focus and then disappear. Yet certain fundamentals will shape the races as candidates strategize about how to win the White House. To do this, they will have to account for at least…

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Why GOP culture warriors lost big in school board races this month

Why GOP culture warriors lost big in school board races this month

Politico reports: Amid all the attention on this month’s elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out. Democrats and teachers’ unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning record, they said, was particularly noticeable in elections where conservative candidates emphasized agendas packed with race, gender identity and parental involvement in classrooms. While there’s…

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How Portland police blanketed parts of the city with toxic chemicals

How Portland police blanketed parts of the city with toxic chemicals

The Guardian reports: Investigators have created a 3D simulation of the Portland police bureau’s (PPB) extraordinary use of teargas during a major protest event on 2 June 2020. Forensic Architecture (FA), a research agency that investigates human rights violations, worked with weapons experts to analyze hundreds of videos from that evening, along with internal police files, invoice records, manufacturer data and photos of teargas canisters. The analysis reveals that the city’s downtown was blanketed with gas at more than 50 times the level federal regulators…

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Social-media account overseen by former Navy noncommissioned officer helped spread secrets

Social-media account overseen by former Navy noncommissioned officer helped spread secrets

The Wall Street Journal reports: A social-media account overseen by a former U.S. Navy noncommissioned officer—a prominent online voice supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine—played a key role in the spread of intelligence documents allegedly leaked by Airman First Class Jack Teixeira, reposting files from obscure online chat rooms. A purported Russian blogger known as Donbass Devushka, which translates as Donbas Girl, is the face of a network of pro-Kremlin social-media, podcasting, merchandise and fundraising accounts. But the person who hosted…

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Russians boasted that just 1% of fake social profiles are caught, leak shows

Russians boasted that just 1% of fake social profiles are caught, leak shows

The Washington Post reports: The Russian government has become far more successful at manipulating social media and search engine rankings than previously known, boosting lies about Ukraine’s military and the side effects of vaccines with hundreds of thousands of fake online accounts, according to documents recently leaked on the chat app Discord. The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1 percent of the time, one document says. That claim, described here…

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The military loved Discord for Gen Z recruiting. Then the leaks began

The military loved Discord for Gen Z recruiting. Then the leaks began

The Washington Post reports: For years, the U.S. military has pushed to meet prospective Generation Z recruits on Discord, the online group-chat tool where many spend their time. It even runs a 17,000-member chatroom there for service members to talk about first-person shooter games, meet with career counselors and participate in what one sergeant in 2019 called the “Army of tomorrow.” But Defense Department officials have also struggled to confront the risks of how Discord’s closed channels operate — and…

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As Ukraine’s LGBTQ soldiers fight on the front line, acceptance grows in the conservative country

As Ukraine’s LGBTQ soldiers fight on the front line, acceptance grows in the conservative country

NBC News reports: On a riotous Instagram profile featuring pole-dancing, cross-dressing and fierce makeup, a picture of Ivan Honzyk in high heels and stockings next to an image of him in military uniform has gotten the most likes by far. The junior sergeant’s posts are a bold statement in socially conservative Ukraine, where pride parades were often attacked before the war and swaths of the country are occupied by forces loyal to Russia, one of the world’s most conspicuously homophobic…

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Clarence Thomas has for years claimed income from a defunct real estate firm

Clarence Thomas has for years claimed income from a defunct real estate firm

The Washington Post reports: Over the last two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has reported on required financial disclosure forms that his family received rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a firm called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership. But that company — a Nebraska real estate firm launched in the 1980s by his wife and her relatives — has not existed since 2006. That year, the family real estate company was shut down and a separate firm was…

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Fox News is on trial, and so are lies about 2020

Fox News is on trial, and so are lies about 2020

The New York Times reports: A judge in Delaware Superior Court is expected to swear in the jury as soon as Monday in a defamation trial that has little precedent in American law. Fox News, one of the most powerful and profitable media companies, will defend itself against extensive evidence suggesting it told its audience a story of conspiracy and fraud in the 2020 election it knew wasn’t true. The jury will be asked to weigh lofty questions about the…

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Matthew Kacsmaryk falsified record of his publications provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Matthew Kacsmaryk falsified record of his publications provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee

The Washington Post reports: As a lawyer for a conservative legal group, Matthew Kacsmaryk in early 2017 submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions. The Obama administration, the draft article argued, had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.” But a few months after the…

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In counties with more Black doctors, Black people live longer, ‘astonishing’ study finds

In counties with more Black doctors, Black people live longer, ‘astonishing’ study finds

STAT reports: Black people in counties with more Black primary care physicians live longer, according to a new national analysis that provides the strongest evidence yet that increasing the diversity of the medical workforce may be key to ending deeply entrenched racial health disparities. The study, published Friday in JAMA Network Open, is the first to link a higher prevalence of Black doctors to longer life expectancy and lower mortality in Black populations. Other studies have shown that when Black patients are treated…

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Alexei Navalny in ‘critical’ situation after possible poisoning, says ally

Alexei Navalny in ‘critical’ situation after possible poisoning, says ally

The Guardian reports: Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition politician, has been grappling with severe stomach pain in jail that could be the result of slow-acting poison, a close ally said on Friday. Ruslan Shaveddinov said an ambulance was called last week to the maximum security IK-6 penal colony at Melekhovo, about 155 miles (250km) east of Moscow, where he is being held. “His situation is critical, we are all very concerned,” Shaveddinov told the Guardian in a phone interview….

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Leak raises fresh questions about Pentagon’s internal security

Leak raises fresh questions about Pentagon’s internal security

The Washington Post reports: The leak of hundreds of classified intelligence documents about the war in Ukraine and U.S. spying on allies has left many officials asking: How did this happen again? Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old, low-level National Guard member assigned to an intelligence support squadron in Massachusetts, allegedly removed hundreds of classified documents from his office on base and brought them home. He then shared them with his friends in an online community united by their love of guns…

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India’s descent into authoritarianism shouldn’t be ignored by its democratic allies

India’s descent into authoritarianism shouldn’t be ignored by its democratic allies

Howard W. French writes: When a judge in India’s Gujarat state sentenced the country’s most prominent opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, to two years in prison last month for a remark personally offensive to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he was doing more than sanctioning speech in a narrowly censorious way. If it is upheld, his ruling, seemingly by design, would remove Modi’s rival from the parliament and dramatically marginalize his place in India’s politics. In most democracies, speech in general,…

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