Browsed by
Category: Politics

Russian troops kill Ukrainian musician for refusing role in Kherson concert

Russian troops kill Ukrainian musician for refusing role in Kherson concert

The Guardian reports: Russian soldiers have shot dead a Ukrainian musician in his home after he refused to take part in a concert in occupied Kherson, according to the culture ministry in Kyiv. Conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko declined to take part in a concert “intended by the occupiers to demonstrate the so-called ‘improvement of peaceful life’ in Kherson”, the ministry said in a statement on its Facebook page. The concert on 1 October was intended to feature the Gileya chamber orchestra,…

Read More Read More

The global economy is in chaos. Nobody’s coming to the rescue

The global economy is in chaos. Nobody’s coming to the rescue

Politico reports: America is driving the West’s response to the war in Ukraine. But U.S. officials are struggling to project a global response to a worldwide economic slowdown. A sense of dread surrounded meetings of finance ministers and central bankers in Washington this week, amid one of the most foreboding moments for the world economy in years. The list of worries was alarmingly long: stubbornly persistent inflation, crippling interest rates, panic around the worsening energy supply crisis, manic markets and…

Read More Read More

Whistleblower, Will Wilkerson, reveals the turmoil inside Trump’s start-up media company

Whistleblower, Will Wilkerson, reveals the turmoil inside Trump’s start-up media company

The Washington Post reports: Will Wilkerson, then an executive at former president Donald Trump’s start-up Trump Media & Technology Group, was at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., coffee shop with company co-founder Andy Litinsky last October when Trump called Litinsky with a question: Would he give up some of his shares to Trump’s wife, Melania? Trump Media, the owner of the fledgling social network Truth Social, had just been boosted by a huge merger agreement and a flood of investment that…

Read More Read More

Racist GOP appeals heat up in final weeks before midterms

Racist GOP appeals heat up in final weeks before midterms

The Washington Post reports: Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) suggested at a rally in Nevada this month that Black people are criminals. A day later in Arizona, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) appeared to refer to a specious conspiracy theory about immigrants that has been associated with white nationalists — baseless claims that at least two GOP candidates for the U.S. Senate have echoed. And in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Democratic candidates for the Senate have faced a barrage of ads…

Read More Read More

Uncomfortable truths from which we too easily look away

Uncomfortable truths from which we too easily look away

Jonathan Freedland writes: In the summer of 2020, video footage emerged showing long lines of prisoners, bound and blindfolded, sitting on the ground at a railway station. The pictures were taken by a drone, and the captives, many of them wearing high-visibility vests, appeared to be Uyghurs. They had apparently been shipped by train to a location that analysts placed in southeastern Xinjiang. Standing over the men were Chinese police in black uniforms. In the short video, which was posted…

Read More Read More

The Jan. 6 hearings are over. These three things must happen now

The Jan. 6 hearings are over. These three things must happen now

Norman Eisen, Danielle Brian and E. Danya Perry write: On Thursday, in what was probably its final public hearing before the election, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol revealed new details about former President Donald Trump. Those details included Secret Service records documenting his determination to join a mob he knew was armed and headed for violence. The hearings have provided an indispensable record of an attempted coup that failed but that, as Representative Liz…

Read More Read More

Truss’s Brexit delusion of sovereignty

Truss’s Brexit delusion of sovereignty

Jonathan Freedland writes: Hard to believe now, when we’re in the middle of the maelstrom, but one day this too will be the past. And when it is, when we’re out of the hourly psychodrama – no longer staring at the screen, watching Kwasi Kwarteng’s plane do an actual U-turn in the sky en route to his being fired on touchdown, for the crime of doing what his boss wanted him to do – it may not look all that…

Read More Read More

Elon Musk drops threat to halt Starlink internet service in Ukraine

Elon Musk drops threat to halt Starlink internet service in Ukraine

The New York Times reports: Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX, abruptly reversed himself on Saturday, saying that his company would continue to fund the operation of the Starlink internet service in Ukraine, where it has become a digital lifeline for both soldiers and civilians. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, drew criticism on Friday when he said on Twitter that his company could not “indefinitely” fund Ukraine’s use of Starlink. The service has been crucial for the…

Read More Read More

‘It was a massacre’: How security forces cracked down on protesting worshipers in southeastern Iran

‘It was a massacre’: How security forces cracked down on protesting worshipers in southeastern Iran

The New York Times reports: Some of the wounded tried to crawl away to escape the gunfire. Others bled to death on prayer mats as people tried to drag them to safety. But the snipers and officers kept pulling their triggers, firing bullet after bullet into men and young boys at a worship area where Friday Prayer had been underway. The horrific scene unfolded on Sept. 30 in Zahedan, a city in southeastern Iran that is home to the ethnic…

Read More Read More

‘Uncle Xi’ to exalted ruler: China’s leader embodies his authoritarian era

‘Uncle Xi’ to exalted ruler: China’s leader embodies his authoritarian era

The New York Times reports: In his first years as China’s leader, Xi Jinping paid for his own steamed dumplings in a cheap diner, casually rolled up his trouser legs to avoid splashes in the rain, and was serenaded with sugary pop tunes. His image-makers cast him as “Xi Dada,” the people’s firm but genial “Uncle Xi.” How vastly different now. A decade on, Mr. Xi looms over the country like a stern Communist monarch, reflecting on China’s fallen ancient…

Read More Read More

Musk threatens to stop funding Starlink internet Ukraine relies on in war

Musk threatens to stop funding Starlink internet Ukraine relies on in war

The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk said Friday that his space company could not keep funding the Starlink satellite service that has kept Ukraine and its military online during the war, and he suggested he was pulling free internet after a Ukrainian ambassador insulted him on Twitter. A Starlink cutoff would cripple the Ukrainian military’s main mode of communication and potentially hamstring its defenses by giving a major advantage to Russia, which has sought to jam signals and phone service…

Read More Read More

Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and midterm candidates are peddling Russian propaganda on Ukraine

Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and midterm candidates are peddling Russian propaganda on Ukraine

Laura Thornton writes: When Tesla chief executive Elon Musk tweeted his support for Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine, he used some highly revealing language. Crimea should be Russian, he tweeted, because of “Krushchev’s mistake”—a reference to Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev’s redrawing of internal Soviet borders. That particular wording has never been part of the U.S. debate about Ukraine, but it is the standard language used by the Kremlin for its claims on Ukrainian land. It’s not the only talking point Musk…

Read More Read More

Judge rules against Trump, orders Pence aide to testify to Jan. 6 grand jury

Judge rules against Trump, orders Pence aide to testify to Jan. 6 grand jury

The Washington Post reports: A former top aide to Vice President Mike Pence returned before a grand jury Thursday to testify in a criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election after federal courts overruled President Donald Trump’s objections to the testimony, according to people familiar with the matter. In a sealed decision that could clear the way for other top Trump White House officials to answer questions before a grand jury, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell…

Read More Read More

The Secret Service actively enabled the January 6 insurrection to take place

The Secret Service actively enabled the January 6 insurrection to take place

David Rothkopf writes: The real culmination of the inquiry must be left to the Sphinx-like Department of Justice, whose silence might reveal its commitment to the secrecy that should surround an historically significant investigation. Or that silence might be followed by inaction. We just cannot know at this point, even though the Jan. 6 committee’s revelations made it clear that inaction in the face of the evidence that exists would be one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in U.S….

Read More Read More

Loss of Steele dossier source damaged national security, FBI agent testifies

Loss of Steele dossier source damaged national security, FBI agent testifies

The New York Times reports: A veteran F.B.I. counterintelligence agent testified on Thursday that the Trump Justice Department’s decision in 2020 to release sensitive documents about a bureau informant to a Senate committee examining the bureau’s Russia investigation had damaged national security. The agent told jurors at the trial of Igor Danchenko, who is charged with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about matters related to the anti-Trump Steele dossier, that Mr. Danchenko, a Russia analyst, had provided extraordinary…

Read More Read More