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Category: Politics

Back in the USSR: Lenin statues and Soviet flags reappear in Russian-controlled cities

Back in the USSR: Lenin statues and Soviet flags reappear in Russian-controlled cities

The Observer reports: Last week a familiar figure returned to the main square of the seaside town of Henichesk. Dressed in a three-piece suit, and sporting his familiar goatee and moustache, Vladimir Lenin was back on his pedestal. A statue of the Bolshevik leader had been erected outside the town’s main council building. Flying from the roof were the Russian and Soviet flags. All in time for Lenin’s 152nd birthday on Friday. Henichesk, however, is not in Russia. It is…

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Changes at CNN and New York Times signal less advocacy, more journalism

Changes at CNN and New York Times signal less advocacy, more journalism

The Guardian reports: The highest echelons of the US media were once again in the spotlight this week, after CNN this week abandoned a newly launched streaming service and the New York Times appointed a prominent Bostonian to lead it. CNN+ will shut down on 30 April, about a month after it was launched with a $300m investment. The new owner of the network, Warner Bros Discovery – itself the product of a $43bn merger between AT&T and the Discovery…

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In a creative play on three different languages, Ukrainians identify an enemy: ‘ruscism’

In a creative play on three different languages, Ukrainians identify an enemy: ‘ruscism’

Timothy Snyder writes: The City Council of Mariupol, Ukraine, was trying to make a point about mass death. Their city had been hit hardest by the Russian invasion, and thousands of corpses lay amid the rubble after weeks of urban warfare. After the revelation of Russian atrocities in Bucha and other cities in northern Ukraine, the elected representatives of the port city wished to remind the world that the scale of killing in the south was still higher. In dry…

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Russian general reveals a secret plan to invade another country and seize Ukraine’s entire coastline

Russian general reveals a secret plan to invade another country and seize Ukraine’s entire coastline

The Daily Beast reports: As Russian troops tighten their grip on the strategic port town of Mariupol, their strategy is finally becoming clear. Russian military commander Rustam Minnekaev now says the second phase of President Vladimir Putin’s “special operation” is focused on establishing a “land corridor” from the Donbas all the way to Moldova, which would cut off the rest of Ukraine from the sea. “One of the tasks of the Russian army is to establish full control over the…

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Marine Le Pen’s far-right French party to pay nearly $13 million to Russian military contractor

Marine Le Pen’s far-right French party to pay nearly $13 million to Russian military contractor

The Wall Street Journal reports: The far-right party of French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has begun paying a settlement of 12 million euros—equivalent to $12.94 million—to a Russian military contractor under U.S. sanctions, part of a debt restructuring that granted her party more time to repay a loan it took from a Russian bank, according to Russian and French government records. Aviazapchast JSC—a Moscow-based company that supplies Russian military aircraft and parts across the Middle East, Africa and Asia—took…

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New EU law takes aim at social media’s harms

New EU law takes aim at social media’s harms

The New York Times reports: The European Union reached a deal on Saturday on landmark legislation that would force Facebook, YouTube and other internet services to combat misinformation, disclose how their services amplify divisive content and stop targeting online ads based on a person’s ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The law, called the Digital Services Act, is intended to address social media’s societal harms by requiring companies to more aggressively police their platforms for illicit content or risk billions of…

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GOP gives up on the free market and puts its faith in vindictive governance

GOP gives up on the free market and puts its faith in vindictive governance

Robert Schlesinger writes: “The market is rational and government is dumb,” Dick Armey, one of the leaders of the 1994 Republican Revolution, liked to say. That used to be a cornerstone of conservatism. Today, it’s increasingly the reverse. While they still mouth free-market platitudes, Republicans fulminate against corporate America for taking political positions that they oppose—without any apparent awareness, or a refusal to recognize, that such decisions reveal the free market in action: Conservatives’ culture-war positions are broadly toxic to…

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Democrats, you can’t ignore the culture wars any longer

Democrats, you can’t ignore the culture wars any longer

Jamelle Bouie writes: Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950’s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.” Likewise, in a much more recent…

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The battle for Donbas: Why the weapons the U.S. is rushing to Ukraine are so critical

The battle for Donbas: Why the weapons the U.S. is rushing to Ukraine are so critical

ABC News reports: As Russia’s military gears up for what it hopes will be a decisive victory over Ukraine in the eastern part of the country, the U.S. is rushing to send weapons and equipment needed to hold off the larger invading force in the rural and open Donbas terrain — a far different battlefield from the urban fighting where Ukrainian forces held an advantage. What could make all the difference now is the new $800 million military aid package…

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‘What we now know … they lied’: How big oil companies betrayed us all

‘What we now know … they lied’: How big oil companies betrayed us all

The Guardian reports: There is a moment in the revelatory PBS Frontline docuseries The Power of Big Oil, about the industry’s long campaign to stall action on the climate crisis, in which the former Republican senator Chuck Hagel reflects on his part in killing US ratification of the Kyoto climate treaty. In 1997, Hagel joined with the Democratic senator Robert Byrd to promote a resolution opposing the international agreement to limit greenhouse gases, on the grounds that it was unfair…

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Fewer Americans see climate change as a priority than they did a year ago, CBS News poll

Fewer Americans see climate change as a priority than they did a year ago, CBS News poll

CBS News reports: With issues like the economy and inflation, crime, and the war in Ukraine weighing most on Americans’ minds, the percentage who think climate change needs to be addressed right now has dipped some since one year ago. This dip in urgency, while not steep, is widespread. Fewer people across age, race, and education groups, as well as partisan stripes, think climate change needs to be addressed right away than thought so a year ago. Still, most Americans…

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Obama warns social media disinformation is hurting democracy

Obama warns social media disinformation is hurting democracy

HuffPost reports: Former President Barack Obama said Thursday that disinformation on social media is hurting democracy, and that social media companies should be subject to regulation. “One of the biggest reasons for democracy’s weakening is the profound change that’s taken place in how we communicate and consume information,” Obama said in a speech at Stanford University. Obama noted that most people rely on search tools and social media as main sources for news and information, but warned a constant feed…

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‘We Build the Wall’ leaders who worked with Bannon plead guilty to fraud

‘We Build the Wall’ leaders who worked with Bannon plead guilty to fraud

NBC News reports: “We Build the Wall” campaign crowd-funders Brian Kolfage and Andrew Badolato pleaded guilty Thursday for their roles in pocketing donations solicited to help build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Kolfage, 39, and Badolato, 57, each pleaded guilty in federal court in New York City to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Kolfage, a triple-amputee Air Force veteran, also pleaded guilty to tax…

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Moral equivalence and Ukraine

Moral equivalence and Ukraine

Gabriel Schoenfeld writes: The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a criminal act: waging aggressive war, the supreme crime for which the Nazis were punished at Nuremberg. And Russian forces have also engaged in other crimes of war: the unremitting shelling and bombing of civilian targets like the martyr city of Mariupol, widespread rape, and the torture and murder of civilians, as seen in Bucha and other Kyiv suburbs as revelations come before the world. With every passing day, Ukrainian suffering…

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Some Kremlin insiders alarmed over growing toll of Putin’s war in Ukraine

Some Kremlin insiders alarmed over growing toll of Putin’s war in Ukraine

Bloomberg reports: Almost eight weeks after Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine, with military losses mounting and Russia facing unprecedented international isolation, a small but growing number of senior Kremlin insiders are quietly questioning his decision to go to war. The ranks of the critics at the pinnacle of power remain limited, spread across high-level posts in government and state-run business. They believe the invasion was a catastrophic mistake that will set the country back for years, according to ten…

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Trump’s most loyal lawmakers are actually losing money

Trump’s most loyal lawmakers are actually losing money

The Daily Beast reports: Last year, it was a fundraising feast for the MAGA Goon Squad. But in 2022, without the donor stimulus of an attempted insurrection, things are going in the wrong direction. The first three months of the year took more than $275,000 combined out of the pockets of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), and Matt Gaetz (R-FL)—the foursome of America First, Donald Trump-loving, exhibitionist election objectors. All told, it was their…

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