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Category: Politics

Russia’s commando units gutted by Ukraine war, U.S. leak shows

Russia’s commando units gutted by Ukraine war, U.S. leak shows

The Washington Post reports: The war in Ukraine has gutted Russia’s clandestine spetsnaz forces, and it will take Moscow years to rebuild them, according to classified U.S. assessments obtained by The Washington Post. The finding, which has not been previously reported, is among a cache of sensitive materials leaked online through the messaging platform Discord. U.S. officials attributed their assessments to Russian commanders’ overreliance on the specialized units, which have been put to use as part of front-line infantry formations….

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Ukraine says U.S. intelligence leaks won’t impact its planned offensive

Ukraine says U.S. intelligence leaks won’t impact its planned offensive

The Wall Street Journal reports: A senior Ukrainian official played down the seriousness of the online leak of classified U.S. intelligence documents, saying they would have no impact on a critical Ukrainian offensive planned for the coming weeks. The leaked files “have no operational significance,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, said in an interview. “They have no impact on the front line or the planning of the General Staff.” The documents published so far don’t contain any major intelligence…

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Why Jack Teixeira had access to so much classified information

Why Jack Teixeira had access to so much classified information

Fred Kaplan writes: One of the odd mysteries in the case of Jack Teixeira—the 21-year-old airman arrested on Thursday for pilfering and leaking hundreds of highly classified documents to pals online—turns out not to be so odd after all. The puzzle, as I noted in a column on Thursday, is why the Massachusetts Air National Guard, which is where Teixeira worked, would have access to such material in the first place. The answer is that Otis Air Base, the Cape…

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Israel’s one-state reality

Israel’s one-state reality

Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami write: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in Israel with a narrow, extreme right-wing coalition has shattered even the illusion of a two-state solution. Members of his new government have not been shy about stating their views on what Israel is and what it should be in all the territories it controls: a Greater Israel defined not just as a Jewish state but one in which the law enshrines Jewish…

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How Tennessee illustrates the three rules of MAGA

How Tennessee illustrates the three rules of MAGA

David French writes: While Trumpism is a complex phenomenon, there are three ideas or principles that are consistently present: First, that before Trump the G.O.P. was a political doormat, helplessly walked over by Democrats time and again. Second, that we live in a state of cultural emergency where the right has lost everywhere and must turn to politics to reverse this cultural momentum. And third, that in this state of emergency, all conservatives must rally together. There can be no…

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A rural Texas county just blinked on library closures. Pressure worked

A rural Texas county just blinked on library closures. Pressure worked

Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent write: It isn’t every day that the ruminations of local bureaucrats in a small rural Texas county become national news. But when commissioners in Llano County — population 21,000 — voted Thursday to keep its three-branch library system open, the moment was closely monitored by the biggest news organizations in the country. That’s because Llano County has become a national symbol of local right-wing censorship efforts after officials threatened to close its libraries entirely rather than allow offending materials to remain on shelves….

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New leaked documents show broad infighting among Russian officials

New leaked documents show broad infighting among Russian officials

The New York Times reports: The depth of the infighting inside the Russian government appears broader and deeper than previously understood, judging from a newly discovered cache of classified intelligence documents that has been leaked online. The additional documents, which did not surface in a 53-page set that came to wide public attention online last week, paint a picture of the Russian government feuding over the count of the dead and wounded in the Ukraine war, with the domestic intelligence…

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Russia says China agreed to secretly provide weapons, leaked documents show

Russia says China agreed to secretly provide weapons, leaked documents show

The Washington Post reports: China approved “provision of lethal aid” to Russia in its war in Ukraine earlier this year and planned to disguise military equipment as civilian items, according to a U.S. intercept of Russian intelligence revealed in leaked secret documents. The intercept, apparently obtained through U.S. eavesdropping on Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), was included in a top-secret summary, dated Feb. 23, of recent Ukraine- and Russia-related “products” compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence….

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FBI makes probable cause arrest of Jack Teixeira in connection with classified documents leak

FBI makes probable cause arrest of Jack Teixeira in connection with classified documents leak

ABC News reports: The FBI on Thursday made a probable cause arrest in North Dighton, Massachusetts, in connection with the leaked documents probe. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Jack Teixeira was taken into custody in relation to the investigation into “alleged authorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information.” Teixeira, 21, is a member of the Massachusetts Air Force National Guard. “FBI agents took Teixeira into custody earlier this afternoon without incident,” the attorney general said. “He will…

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Tennessee’s legislature is broken and it’s not alone

Tennessee’s legislature is broken and it’s not alone

The New York Times reports: There are 99 legislators in the Tennessee House of Representatives, the body that voted on Thursday to expel two of its Democratic members for leading an anti-gun protest in the chamber. Sixty of them had no opponent in last November’s election. Of the remaining House races, almost none were competitive. Not a single seat flipped from one party to the other. “We’re just not in a normal political system,” said Kent Syler, a political science…

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Billionaire Harlan Crow bought property from Clarence Thomas. The justice didn’t disclose the deal

Billionaire Harlan Crow bought property from Clarence Thomas. The justice didn’t disclose the deal

ProPublica reports: In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives. The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the…

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The Fox Tapes

The Fox Tapes

  The Daily Beast reports: On Wednesday night, MSNBC aired explosive audio recordings of former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump campaign officials telling Fox News after the 2020 election that there was no evidence Dominion voting machines flipped votes for President Joe Biden. The existence of the tapes, recorded by former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, was first revealed in an amended legal complaint by Grossberg earlier this week. Grossberg is suing Fox News for harassment and discrimination, accusing…

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‘I’m all for climate change’: Axel Springer CEO faces heat over leaked messages

‘I’m all for climate change’: Axel Springer CEO faces heat over leaked messages

The Guardian reports: The German CEO of Europe’s largest media publisher tried to use his flagship tabloid, Bild, to influence the outcome of Germany’s last election and fed the newspaper his personal views attacking climate change activism, Covid measures and the former chancellor Angela Merkel, leaked messages suggest. The internal chats, emails and text messages published by the German weekly Die Zeit on Wednesday clash with the public presentation of Axel Springer SE’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, who recently said…

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EPA lays out rules to accelerate sales of electric cars and trucks

EPA lays out rules to accelerate sales of electric cars and trucks

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration on Wednesday proposed the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations to date, two plans designed to ensure two-thirds of new passenger cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032. The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry, a moment in some ways as significant as the June morning in 1896 when Henry Ford took his “horseless carriage”…

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Meet the young Democrats waging war on MAGA from behind enemy lines

Meet the young Democrats waging war on MAGA from behind enemy lines

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman write: Catalyzing events in U.S. history have a tendency to shape generations of public officials. In the 1920s, Prohibition and the GOP’s depression economics gave rise to the New Deal Democrats. Racial and cultural repression in the mid-20th century spawned classes of lawmakers fighting for the “rights revolution.” In the 1970s, the Vietnam War and Watergate inspired the antiwar “Watergate babies” to run for Congress. It might be happening again: The reactionary turn underway in…

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Vladimir Kara-Murza’s last statement to Russian court: A reckoning will come

Vladimir Kara-Murza’s last statement to Russian court: A reckoning will come

At the closing session of his trial in Moscow, Vladimir Kara-Murza delivered these remarks: Members of the court: I was sure, after two decades spent in Russian politics, after all that I have seen and experienced, that nothing can surprise me anymore. I must admit that I was wrong. I’ve been surprised by the extent to which my trial, in its secrecy and its contempt for legal norms, has surpassed even the “trials” of Soviet dissidents in the 1960s and ’70s….

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