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Category: Politics

Climate groups join for first-of-its-kind, $100 million push to mobilize midterm voters

Climate groups join for first-of-its-kind, $100 million push to mobilize midterm voters

CNN reports: In an attempt to mobilize voters around the climate crisis, six climate advocacy groups are readying for the midterms with an arsenal of $100 million — the first coordinated spending of its kind. In a difficult political year for Democrats, the climate groups are forming the new Climate Votes Project, shared first with CNN and to be announced Monday. The $100 million will pay for multiple ad campaigns, as well as an in-person field organizing to contact hard-to-reach…

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Biden to waive tariffs for 24 months on solar panels hit by probe

Biden to waive tariffs for 24 months on solar panels hit by probe

Reuters reports: President Joe Biden will declare a 24-month tariff exemption on Monday for solar panels from four Southeast Asian nations after an investigation froze imports and stalled projects in the United States, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The move comes amid concern about the impact of the Commerce Department’s months-long investigation into whether imports of solar panels from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are circumventing tariffs on goods made in China. Biden’s action would allay companies’ concerns…

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India’s war on journalists

India’s war on journalists

Zeba Warsi writes: An unsettling, eerie silence engulfed the streets of Khajuri Khas two days after the riots. The neighborhood is a Muslim ghetto and was one of the worst hit in the anti-Muslim violence that erupted in Delhi in late February 2020. Fifty-three people were killed, a majority of them Muslims. I walked through lanes covered in ashes. The air was thick with the toxic smell of burned refrigerators and charred vehicles. Broken pieces of furniture lined the streets….

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Ukraine is desperate for peace, but we won’t sign up to a bogus Russian deal

Ukraine is desperate for peace, but we won’t sign up to a bogus Russian deal

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister, writes: We Ukrainians want peace more than anyone in the world. For about 100 days, we have been fighting Russian forces on the ground, in the sky, on the sea, and in cyber and information spaces. Defence experts originally gave us little hope of success. They changed their position when we showed our ability to resist. Now we need to demonstrate the strength to hold our course and resist the temptations of a…

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Estonia’s PM Kallas calls for new government talks as coalition collapses

Estonia’s PM Kallas calls for new government talks as coalition collapses

The Guardian reports: Estonia’s prime minister, Kaja Kallas, has called for talks on a new government after her ruling coalition fell apart, urging unity because of security concerns over neighbouring Russia. Kallas spoke to reporters after President Alar Karis accepted her request to dismiss seven Centre party ministers from the 15-strong cabinet, including the foreign minister, Eva-Maria Liimets. “More than ever, Estonia needs a functioning government based on common values,” Kallas said on Friday, according to the Baltic news agency….

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Ukraine anger as Macron says ‘Don’t humiliate Russia’

Ukraine anger as Macron says ‘Don’t humiliate Russia’

BBC News reports: Ukraine’s foreign minister has hit out at French President Emmanuel Macron after he said it was vital that Russia was not humiliated over its invasion. Mr Macron said it was crucial President Vladimir Putin had a way out of what he called a “fundamental error”. But Dmytro Kuleba said allies should “better focus on how to put Russia in its place” as it “humiliates itself”. Mr Macron has repeatedly spoken to Mr Putin by phone in an…

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Ukraine isn’t just getting U.S.-made killer drones. It’s getting a whole remote warfare system

Ukraine isn’t just getting U.S.-made killer drones. It’s getting a whole remote warfare system

David Axe reports: The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden plans to offer to Ukraine the General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle, the U.S. Army’s best unmanned aerial vehicle. The possible forthcoming offer, which Reuters first reported, would be subject to approval by the U.S. Congress. But if the president follows through, lawmakers sign off on the deal and the White House can arrange financing—likely via the federal government’s fund for foreign weapons deals—Kyiv’s forces soon could operate one of the…

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Video: Debunking Putin’s propaganda

Video: Debunking Putin’s propaganda

  The Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) is an independent, non-profit social enterprise dedicated to countering disinformation, exposing human rights abuses, and combating online behaviour harmful to women and minorities.

The Kremlin-backed Wagner Group gets rich in Sudan while helping the military crush a democracy movement

The Kremlin-backed Wagner Group gets rich in Sudan while helping the military crush a democracy movement

The New York Times reports: In a scorched, gold-rich area 200 miles north of the Sudanese capital, where fortunes spring from desert-hewn rock, a mysterious foreign operator dominates the business. Locals call it “The Russian Company” — a tightly guarded plant with shining towers, deep in the desert, that processes mounds of dusty ore into bars of semirefined gold. “The Russians pay the best,” said Ammar al-Amir, a miner and community leader in al-Ibediyya, a hardscrabble mining town 10 miles…

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Thousands arrested as Kremlin clamps down on war criticism

Thousands arrested as Kremlin clamps down on war criticism

The New York Times reports: Vladimir Efimov, a local politician on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, was charged with “discrediting the army” and ordered to pay a $500 fine three times in recent months over antiwar images that he displayed on social media. When he continued, reposting battlefield pictures like the wholesale destruction of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol under Russian bombardment, prosecutors ratcheted up the charges and accused him of a felony — punishable by up…

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Eastern Ukrainians reject their Russian birth language

Eastern Ukrainians reject their Russian birth language

The Observer reports: Gamlet Zinkivskyi grew up speaking Russian in the city of Kharkiv, just like his parents. But when Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, it was the final push for him to switch fully to Ukrainian. “Unfortunately, I grew up speaking Russian, but it’s not pleasant to speak the same language as the army that is destroying whole areas of our country,” said Zinkivskyi, a 35-year-old street artist widely known to Kharkiv residents, who…

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U.S. military hackers conducting offensive operations in support of Ukraine, says head of Cyber Command

U.S. military hackers conducting offensive operations in support of Ukraine, says head of Cyber Command

Sky News reports: US military hackers have conducted offensive operations in support of Ukraine, the head of US Cyber Command has told Sky News. In an exclusive interview, General Paul Nakasone also explained how separate “hunt forward” operations were allowing the United States to search out foreign hackers and identify their tools before they were used against America. Speaking in Tallinn, Estonia, the general, who is also director of the National Security Agency (NSA), told Sky News that he is…

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White Christian nationalism ‘is a fundamental threat to democracy’

White Christian nationalism ‘is a fundamental threat to democracy’

Sarah Jones writes: An ideology is on the march. Traces of it are detectable in a racist massacre in Buffalo; in Tucker Carlson’s monologues; in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s public comments. Find it again in the right’s anti-abortion rhetoric, which poorly disguises demographic anxiety, or in the right’s response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which shows it embracing God and guns with ever greater conviction. This ideology has a name, argue sociologists Samuel L. Perry of the University of…

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Economic recession fears could be overblown

Economic recession fears could be overblown

The Washington Post reports: If there is a recession brewing in the United States, it would be news to Doug Johnson. The president of Marion Manufacturing Co. in Cheshire, Conn., Johnson is enjoying some of the best times in his company’s 76-year history. Sure, he’s heard the negative chatter about rising prices, sinking stocks and mounting risks from trouble overseas. And he’s seen the polls showing that most Americans think the economy is headed for a tumble. But as Johnson…

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While Kyiv needs all the help it can get, little has come from Germany

While Kyiv needs all the help it can get, little has come from Germany

Der Spiegel reports: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is exasperating. For months, the narrative has been that he would prefer not to deliver any weapons at all to Ukraine, and certainly not any heavy weaponry. The chancellor, according to the scuttlebutt, has had to be forced into every single concession and then he delays the deliveries. On Wednesday, Scholz had to listen in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, as opposition leader Friedrich Merz of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) lambasted him as…

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