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Category: Politics

Living with the far-right insurgency in Idaho

Living with the far-right insurgency in Idaho

Christopher Mathias reports: White nationalist Vincent James Foxx had a new video for his nearly 70,000 subscribers on BitChute, one of the few tech platforms that hasn’t banned him. On Feb. 16, he appeared wearing a baseball hat emblazoned with the state’s outline tilted on its side so that it resembled a pistol. “We are going to take over this state,” Foxx declared. “We have a great large group of people and that group is growing. A true, actual right-wing…

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Biden starts conceding that the bygone era of D.C. may, indeed, be gone

Biden starts conceding that the bygone era of D.C. may, indeed, be gone

Politico reports: The fever didn’t break. And for the Biden White House, efforts at bipartisanship have finally taken a backseat. To the frustration of many Democrats and some of his closest advisers, President Joe Biden has steadfastly spent more than a year in office insisting on trying to work across the aisle with Republicans. It’s produced some notable legislative successes. But it’s also been colored by a fair dose of in-your-face GOP obstructionism. Now, more than a year later, Biden…

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Putin involved in Ukraine war ‘at level of colonel or brigadier’, say Western sources

Putin involved in Ukraine war ‘at level of colonel or brigadier’, say Western sources

The Guardian reports: Vladimir Putin has become so personally involved in the Ukraine war that he is making operational and tactical decisions “at the level of a colonel or brigadier”, according to western military sources. The Russian president is helping determine the movement of forces in the Donbas, they added, where last week the invaders suffered a bloody defeat as they tried on multiple occasions to cross a strategic river in the east of Ukraine. The sources added that Putin…

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Russian state TV: Defense columnist Ret. Col. Mikhail Khodaryonok gives damning assessment of Russia’s war in Ukraine

Russian state TV: Defense columnist Ret. Col. Mikhail Khodaryonok gives damning assessment of Russia’s war in Ukraine

  The BBC’s Francis Scarr: “In an extremely rare moment of candour on Russian state TV today, defence columnist Mikhail Khodaryonok gave a damning assessment of Russia’s war in Ukraine and his country’s international isolation. It’s fairly long but worth your time so I’ve added subtitles.”

How the Russian occupation transformed life in Melitopol

How the Russian occupation transformed life in Melitopol

Joshua Yaffa writes: It was still dark on the morning of February 24th when Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, a midsize city in southern Ukraine, awoke to the sound of explosions. He thought it was a thunderstorm and went back to sleep. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that in the twenty-first century some sick mind would think to start firing missiles in the center of Europe,” he said. A duty officer called, waking him again, and…

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The Balkan roots of the far right’s ‘Great Replacement’ theory

The Balkan roots of the far right’s ‘Great Replacement’ theory

Jasmin Mujanović wrote last year: When Ratko Mladic’s Serb nationalist forces entered the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 11, 1995, the general of the self-styled “Army of the Republika Srpska” took a moment to speak to an accompanying camera crew. “Here we are,” he says solemnly, “on July 11, 1995, in Serbian Srebrenica.” What followed was Mladic’s rationale for the extermination campaign that was unfolding in the city, the culmination of the nearly four-year-long Bosnian Genocide…

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Uyghur county in China has the highest prison rate in the world

Uyghur county in China has the highest prison rate in the world

The Associated Press reports: Nearly one in 25 people in a county in the Uyghur heartland of China has been sentenced to prison on terrorism-related charges, in what is the highest known imprisonment rate in the world, an Associated Press review of leaked data shows. A list obtained and partially verified by the AP cites the names of more than 10,000 Uyghurs sent to prison in just Konasheher county alone, one of dozens in southern Xinjiang. In recent years, China…

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Google is sharing our data at a staggering scale

Google is sharing our data at a staggering scale

Parmy Olson writes: Along with the Pixel phones, watches and earbuds at Google’s annual showcase of software and devices last week came a pair of nifty-looking translation glasses. Put them on and real-time “subtitles” appear on the lenses as you watch a person speaking in a different language. Very cool. But the glasses aren’t commercially available. It’s also unlikely they will make anywhere near as much money as advertising does for Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc. Of the company’s $68 billion…

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Why is Larry Ellison pouring $1 billion into Elon Musk’s Twitter bid?

Why is Larry Ellison pouring $1 billion into Elon Musk’s Twitter bid?

Grid reports: When Larry Ellison pledged $1 billion to back Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, Musk got more than just another investor: He also gained a powerful political ally, with ties to the MAGA right and a history of backing the “anti-conservative bias” movement. Behind the scenes, Oracle, which Ellison founded and oversees as chairman of its board of directors, has been engaged in a sprawling anti-Big Tech lobbying campaign, including funding a dark money group that presents itself as a…

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Russia’s war in Ukraine isn’t over, but it’s not too soon to start thinking about what comes next

Russia’s war in Ukraine isn’t over, but it’s not too soon to start thinking about what comes next

Matti Maasikas, Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine, writes: Many things have changed since 24 February this year. European leaders are no longer just talking about the need for dialogue (dialogue with an aggressor is, in any case, questionable) and are not refraining from action just out of a fear of ‘provoking Russia’. The cliche that there is no military solution to the conflict, which is at best ignorant and at worst only serves to stoke…

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Pro-Russian military bloggers dismayed by ‘the stupidity of the Russian command’

Pro-Russian military bloggers dismayed by ‘the stupidity of the Russian command’

The New York Times reports: The destruction wreaked on a Russian battalion as it tried to cross a river in northeastern Ukraine last week is emerging as among the deadliest engagements of the war, with estimates based on publicly available evidence now suggesting that well over 400 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded. And as the scale of what happened comes into sharper focus, the disaster appears to be breaking through the Kremlin’s tightly controlled information bubble. Perhaps most striking,…

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Retreating troops flee to Russian border only to be forced back to the front line

Retreating troops flee to Russian border only to be forced back to the front line

The Wall Street Journal reports: North of Donbas, a string of Ukrainian military victories in recent days pushed Russian forces outside of field artillery range of the city of Kharkiv, where more than 2,000 residential apartment buildings have been destroyed in more than two months of pounding. In a sign of relative normalcy returning to Kharkiv, the municipality said public-transport services would resume Monday. It will initially be free of charge given that so many city residents have lost their…

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Russia’s Black Sea blockade pushing millions towards famine, G7 warns

Russia’s Black Sea blockade pushing millions towards famine, G7 warns

The Guardian reports: Millions of people will starve to death unless Russia allows the export of Ukrainian grain from blockaded ports, foreign ministers from the G7 have said. As Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, warned that Vladimir Putin was intransigent during their bilateral call on Friday, the ministers from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US condemned Moscow for stoking a food crisis. The G7 governments said the Russian president was pushing 43 million people towards famine by refusing…

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A million Covid deaths represent ‘a failure of an American ideology’

A million Covid deaths represent ‘a failure of an American ideology’

The Guardian reports: David Rosner continually talks to colleagues who are distraught about the American response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “When you are in a school of public health and a public health environment, people really feel when they are failing,” said Rosner, who studies public health and social history at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. That defeated feeling is compounded by the fact that 1 million people in the US have died from Covid-19 – the…

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Buffalo shooter’s manifesto promotes ‘Great Replacement,’ antisemitism and previous mass shooters

Buffalo shooter’s manifesto promotes ‘Great Replacement,’ antisemitism and previous mass shooters

The Anti-Defamation League reports: On May 14, 2022, a gunman killed 10 people and injured 3 more inside a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, after espousing violent white supremacist and antisemitic views online. In court following his arrest, the alleged gunman, identified as 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron, from Southern Tier, New York, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and was ordered held without bail. According to an online screed Gendron allegedly posted shortly before the attack, his goal was…

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Israeli military commander justifies killing journalists who are ‘armed with cameras’

Israeli military commander justifies killing journalists who are ‘armed with cameras’

The Washington Post reports: The death this week of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — who was shot dead during an Israeli raid in the West Bank city of Jenin — has highlighted the dangers reporters face while covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abu Akleh, a veteran correspondent who worked for the Al Jazeera news network, was wearing protective gear and a vest marked “press” as she covered the morning raid Wednesday. Such gear is standard and meant to distinguish…

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