The year of Ukraine and Ukrainians
New Years Greeting of @ZelenskyyUa pic.twitter.com/IA4aknnSBk — Walter Report đşđŚ (@walter_report) December 31, 2022 Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s New Year’s greeting.
The war raging in Europe feels familiar
Rolling Stone reports: DĹženita MulabdiÄ hugged the ground, the sound of gunfire fast approaching. The pregnant 20-year-old Bosnian woman and her husband, Muhamed, eyed the locked basement door. Their toddler played close by, unaware of the armed men outside. The commandos from Belgrade, wearing black balaclavas, jumped the fence and entered the house in the ethnically mixed Bosnian city of Bijeljina, a two-hour drive from Serbiaâs capital. They trudged downstairs to the basement, encountering a barricade in front of a…
Leaked Jan. 6 committee report exposes Twitterâs post-insurrection chaos
Rolling Stone reports: In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, Twitter employees raged at their own company and its leadership, blaming them for the social media giantâs inept handling of Donald Trump and other top MAGA figuresâ incitement to violence. âDo you want to have more blood on your hands?â one staffer asked a top executive, Del Harvey, when she questioned whether Trump could inspire more violence in the insurrectionâs aftermath. The exchange, relayed by former Twitter employees…
The year the U.S. became the worldâs largest exporter of liquified natural gas
Inside Climate News reports: When environmentalists look back on 2022, they might remember it as the year the United States finally passed a major climate change law. Some advocates worry, however, that this significant victory is being undermined by a long-term trend that accelerated while that lawâthe Inflation Reduction Actâwas being negotiated. In the first half of the year, the United States became the worldâs top exporter of liquified natural gas, or LNG. Then, in September, crude oil exports hit…
Ukraine is in the headlines now. But a whole new world of conflict is about to erupt
Simon Tisdall writes: It was a good year to bury bad news â and bad deeds â as a clutch of dictators, assorted killers and repressive or anti-democratic regimes can testify. In Myanmar, Yemen, Mali, Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Afghanistan, to name a few crisis zones, egregious abuses and unrelieved misery attracted relatively scant, perfunctory international scrutiny. The main reason for 2022âs blinkered perspectives is, of course, Ukraine, Europeâs biggest conflict since 1945. This is not to say…
The price of weapons assistance: Ukraine pays in blood to convince Western allies
Eesti Ekspress reports: In November 2021, a group of EU ambassadors gathered in the government quarter of Kyiv. The US and UK ambassadors took the podium to discuss what their respective countryâs intelligence was saying. Most was already public knowledge. A small part wasnât. The latter was already known to the diplomat who convened the meeting: Head of the Delegation of the EU to Ukraine Matti Maasikas. He was convinced that war would erupt sooner or later. When I ask…
These lies about climate change just wouldn’t die in 2022
USA Today reports: There was a time â a recent time â when concern about the environment was relatively bipartisan, not a cultural flashpoint. A Republican, President Richard Nixon, established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. In the 1980s and 1990s, bipartisan majorities voted to strengthen the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, led by a Republican â Rhode Islandâs Sen. John Chafee. Those days are gone, and today a wide range of misleading statements and outright lies…
Exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they can
The Guardian reports: Moscowâs exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they still can, before they are made scapegoats for the hardship caused by the war in Ukraine. âWhen we look back over Russian history, whenever the political system was in danger you saw the government trying to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses towards the Jewish community,â Pinchas Goldschmidt told the Guardian. âWe saw this in tsarist times and at the end of the Stalinist…
Corruption: A charity tied to the Supreme Court offers donors access to the justices
The New York Times reports: In some years, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. does the honors. In others, it might be Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Clarence Thomas presenting the squared-off hunks of marble affixed with the Supreme Courtâs gilded seal. Hewed from slabs left over from the 1930s construction of the nationâs high court and handed out in its magnificent Great Hall, they are a unique status symbol in a town that craves them. And while the ideological…
Evidence of Trumpâs criminal tax evasion offers the best case yet for putting him in prison
David Cay Johnston writes: Donât let the cynics who know little about our tax system trick you into thinking there was nothing all that new or important in the six years of Donald Trumpâs taxes released Friday by the House Ways and Means Committee. In fact, even if some of it was previously teased by the committee, the dump includes a cornucopia of information that affects your walletâincluding powerful evidence of criminal tax evasion. Among other things, Trumpâs tax returns make a strong…
The âred waveâ washout: How skewed polls fed a distorted election narrative
The New York Times reports: Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points. So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in…
Brazilâs Lula picks Amazon defender for environment minister
The Associated Press reports: Brazil´s President-elect Luiz InĂĄcio Lula da Silva announced Thursday that Amazon activist Marina Silva will be the country´s next minister of environment. The announcement indicates the new administration will prioritize cracking down on illegal deforestation even if it means running afoul of powerful agribusiness interests. Both attended the recent U.N. climate conference in Egypt, where Lula promised cheering crowds âzero deforestationâ in the Amazon, the worldâs largest rainforest and a key to fighting climate change, by…
From climate exhortation to climate execution
Bill McKibben writes: There are about a hundred and forty million homes in the United States. Two-thirds, or about eighty-five million, of them are detached single-family houses; the rest are apartment units or trailer homes. Thatâs what American prosperity looks like: since the end of the Second World War, our extraordinary wealth has been devoted, above all, to the project of building bigger houses farther apart from one another. The great majority of them are heated with natural gas or…
Zelenskyyâs secret call to McConnell puts squeeze on oligarchs
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports: The day before Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy swept into the United States and delivered an impassioned speech to Congress, he made a quiet phone call to one of the countryâs most powerful Republicans: Mitch McConnell. Among his urgent requests: convince the Senate minority leader to help turn over the seized fortunes of Russian oligarchs â including the proceeds of their yachts, planes and mansions â to help rebuild the Ukraine presidentâs devastated country. Two days later,…
Putin, unaccustomed to losing, is increasingly isolated as war falters
The Washington Post reports: When Vladimir Putin visited Minsk last week to discuss deepening cooperation, a sarcastic joke by his host, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, seemed to ring all too true. âThe two of us are co-aggressors, the most harmful and toxic people on this planet. We have only one dispute: Who is the bigger one? Thatâs all,â Lukashenko said. As Putin approaches New Yearâs Eve, the 23d anniversary of his appointment in 1999 as acting Russian president, he appears…
Hacked Russian files reveal propaganda agreement with China
The Intercept reports: Russian officials pushed the lies first. Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian defense ministry spokesperson resuscitated debunked claims about a U.S.-funded bioweapons program in the region, accusing Ukrainian labs of experimenting with bat coronaviruses in an attempt to spark âthe covert spread of deadliest pathogens.â Disinformation is an old Russian government tactic. But this time Russia had help. Within days, Chinese officials and media outlets had picked up the lies and were amplifying and expanding on…