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Category: Politics

Fox News has become a platform for Russian propaganda

Fox News has become a platform for Russian propaganda

William Saletan writes: For seven months, Russia has waged a vicious war of aggression in Ukraine, killing thousands of civilians. To make matters worse, in the past two weeks, Vladimir Putin has illegally annexed parts of Ukraine and has once again threatened to use nuclear weapons. A principled American conservative TV network might advocate a muscular response to this behavior. At a minimum, it would tell the truth. But Fox News is unconstrained by such principles. In primetime hours, it…

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Trump says GSA packed top-secret documents. These emails suggest otherwise

Trump says GSA packed top-secret documents. These emails suggest otherwise

Bloomberg reports: Former President Donald Trump publicly said that one reason that the FBI found boxes of classified documents improperly stored at his Florida estate was that federal workers had packed up the White House after his 2020 defeat. But documents obtained by Bloomberg News under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest a different story. More than 100 pages of emails and shipping lists between White House and transition staff and the US General Services Administration describe the minutiae…

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Talk of ‘civil war,’ ignited by FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, is flaring online

Talk of ‘civil war,’ ignited by FBI search at Mar-a-Lago, is flaring online

The New York Times reports: Soon after the F.B.I. searched Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend. Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours as Mr. Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on…

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We mustn’t be cowed by the bluster of a bully who knows he’s losing

We mustn’t be cowed by the bluster of a bully who knows he’s losing

Mikhail Khodorkovsky writes: When declaring the annexation of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, and parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin showed characteristic contempt for the truth. The announcement followed sham referenda reflecting Putin’s brand of democracy — where voting takes place at gunpoint and the outcome is predetermined. Delivered amid deranged bombast regarding the “satanic” West, this was Putin’s latest attempt to regain the initiative and deflect attention from the fact that he’s losing his…

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Russia’s elites are starting to admit the possibility of defeat

Russia’s elites are starting to admit the possibility of defeat

Tatiana Stanovaya writes: When Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine back in February, many believed a Rubicon had been crossed after which the Russian president’s relationship with his elites would never be the same. It was then that Putin began to be seen as a desperate leader, no longer capable of normal interaction with the outside world. Nonetheless, the feelings of despondency and doom that prevailed among the elites didn’t stop them from continuing to demonstrate loyalty to the…

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Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts

Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts

The Washington Post reports: Ukrainian troops on Tuesday accelerated their military advances on two fronts, pushing Russian forces into retreat in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to the east and Kherson region to the south. The gains showed Kyiv continuing to recapture occupied territory on the same day that President Vladimir Putin and his rubber-stamp parliament sought to formalize their increasingly far-fetched annexation claims of four Ukrainian regions. “The Ukrainian armed forces commanders in the south and east are throwing…

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Woman, Life, Liberty: A slogan one hundred years in the making

Woman, Life, Liberty: A slogan one hundred years in the making

Nahid Siamdoust writes: Of all the videos to surface from the Iran protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16th, one in particular has caught the public imagination. In this short clip, we see a large gathering of people around a bonfire when a young woman dressed all in white enters the circle energetically, whirls toward the fire almost joyously and halts in a dramatic pose before throwing her headscarf to the flames. The crowd cheers ecstatically….

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In Trump White House, classified records were routinely mishandled, aides say

In Trump White House, classified records were routinely mishandled, aides say

The Washington Post reports: Aides who had worked in Donald Trump’s White House were not surprised this summer when the FBI found highly classified material in boxes at Mar-a-Lago, mixed with news clippings and other items. They’d seen such haphazard collections before. During his four years in office, Trump never strictly followed the rules and customs for handling sensitive government documents, according to 14 officials from his administration, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what…

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Election officials confront a new problem: Whether they can trust their own poll workers

Election officials confront a new problem: Whether they can trust their own poll workers

Politico reports: Election officials are growing concerned about a new danger in November: that groups looking to undermine election results will try to install their supporters as poll workers. The frontline election workers do everything from checking people in at voting locations to helping process mail ballots — in other words, they are the face of American elections for most voters. And now, some prominent incidents involving poll workers have worried election officials that a bigger wave of trouble could…

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Lawyer refused Trump request in February to say all documents returned

Lawyer refused Trump request in February to say all documents returned

The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump asked one of his lawyers to tell the National Archives and Records Administration in early 2022 that Trump had returned all materials requested by the agency, but the lawyer declined because he was not sure the statement was true, according to people familiar with the matter. As it turned out, thousands more government documents — including some highly classified secrets — remained at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club. The later discovery…

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Donald Trump is extremely racist

Donald Trump is extremely racist

Jonathan Chait writes: One of the important phenomena of this current era that has been weirdly hiding in plain sight is Donald Trump’s habit of saying racist things in public. These episodes tend to go underanalyzed in part because American intellectuals are riven by disputes over much subtler forms of racism. Progressive intellectuals are debating structural racism embedded in American history and its social systems and tearing each other to shreds over questions like whether journalists should be fired for…

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Kremlin unsure about which parts of Ukraine it has ‘annexed’

Kremlin unsure about which parts of Ukraine it has ‘annexed’

The Guardian reports: The Kremlin is still determining which areas of occupied Ukraine it has “annexed”, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson has said, suggesting Russia does not know where its self-declared international borders are. The surprising admission came in a phone call with journalists, during which Dmitry Peskov was peppered with requests to clarify to which Ukrainian territory Putin had laid claim at a pomp-filled Kremlin ceremony last week. Putin has vowed to protect Russia’s newly claimed territories using “all means at…

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A whole generation revolts against Iran’s oppressive regime

A whole generation revolts against Iran’s oppressive regime

Kim Ghattas writes: “From Beirut to Tehran, one revolution that does not die,” people chanted on the streets of Beirut during a wave of protests against Lebanon’s corrupt politicians in October 2019. It was catchy, it rhymed in Arabic, and it was an expression of a surprising new sense of solidarity among members of a young generation connected across borders. The protesters were not chanting in support of the revolution that turned Iran into a theocracy in 1979, but against…

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America is choosing to remain vulnerable to pandemics

America is choosing to remain vulnerable to pandemics

Ed Yong writes: Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “the pandemic is over.” Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of “semantics,” but the facts we are living with can speak for themselves. COVID still kills roughly as many Americans every week as died on 9/11. It is on track to kill at least 100,000 a year—triple the typical toll of the flu. Despite gross undercounting,…

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Justices shield spouses’ work from potential conflict of interest disclosures

Justices shield spouses’ work from potential conflict of interest disclosures

Politico reports: A year after Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court, the boutique Indiana firm SouthBank Legal opened its first-ever Washington office in Penn Quarter, a move the firm hailed in a 2021 press release as an “important milestone.” The head of the office, Jesse M. Barrett, is the justice’s husband, whose work is described by the firm as “white-collar criminal defense, internal investigations, and complex commercial litigation.” SouthBank Legal — which lists fewer than 20 lawyers — has…

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A plan to turn America into a theocracy

A plan to turn America into a theocracy

Rolling Stone reports: Lance Wallnau, A self-styled “prophet” and one of America’s most strident Christian Nationalists, and Doug Mastriano, the GOP candidate who casts his bid for governor of Pennsylvania as a mission from God, are birds of a feather. They each fired up the faithful at the Jericho March / ”Let the Church ROAR!” event in Washington, D.C., in December 2020, a Christian protest seeking divine intervention to keep Donald Trump in office. And both men were on the…

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