Politics Archives - Page 593 of 1019 - Attention to the Unseen

Russia’s stunning failure to seize Kyiv

April 6, 2022 From elsewhere

The Associated Press reports: Kyiv was a Russian defeat for the ages. The fight started poorly for the invaders and went downhill from there. When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraine’s borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos — the best of the best of Russia’s “spetsnaz” special forces soldiers — to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyiv’s doorstep. Other Russian forces struck elsewhere across Ukraine, including toward…

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Five Supreme Court justices used the shadow docket to revive a Trump-era pro-pollution rule

April 6, 2022 From elsewhere

Mark Joseph Stern writes: On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 shadow docket order reviving a Trump-era ruling that radically limited the ability of states and tribes to restrict projects, like pipelines, that will damage the environment. With their decision, the majority upended decades of settled law recognizing states’ authority to protect their own waters without bothering to issue a single sentence of reasoning. Just two days earlier, Justice Amy Coney Barrett once again declared that the Supreme Court…

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Wealthy GOP donors form secret coalitions to wield more influence

April 6, 2022 From elsewhere

The New York Times reports: A new coalition of wealthy conservative benefactors that says it aims to “disrupt but advance the Republican agenda” gathered this week for a private summit in South Florida that included closed-door addresses from former President Donald J. Trump and an allied Senate candidate at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to documents and interviews. The coalition, called the Rockbridge Network, includes some of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors, such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and has…

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The Bridgewater CEO who went full MAGA in a Pennsylvania Senate race

April 6, 2022 From elsewhere

Bloomberg Businessweek reports: If you were to pick the high point of David McCormick’s career in finance, it might’ve come on a bright summer day in 2019 at the Belle Haven Club, a Gatsby-esque waterside retreat in Greenwich, Conn., that’s popular with local billionaires. Among them on this occasion was McCormick’s boss, Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. Dalio had gathered the financial elites of Bridgewater and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and brought in…

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IPCC’s starkest message yet: Radical steps needed to avert climate disaster

April 5, 2022 From elsewhere

Nature reports: Humanity probably isn’t going to prevent Earth from at least temporarily warming 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels — but aggressive action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and extract carbon from the atmosphere could limit the increase and bring temperatures back down, according to the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report makes it clear, however, that the window is rapidly closing, and with it the opportunity to prevent the worst impacts of…

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U.S. blocks Russian debt payments and unveils new sanctions in bid to raise pressure on Moscow

April 5, 2022 From elsewhere

Reuters reports: The United States stopped the Russian government on Monday from paying holders of its sovereign debt more than $600 million from reserves held at American banks, in a move meant to ratchet up pressure on Moscow and eat into its holdings of US dollars. Under sanctions put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, foreign currency reserves held by the Russian central bank at US financial institutions were frozen. But the Treasury Department had been allowing…

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How a Russian propagandist justifies genocide in Ukraine

April 5, 2022 From elsewhere

Mariia Kravchenko has posted a translation of an article by a Russian propagandist, originally published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti: In this article, the author is describing ways how Russians want to wipe out Ukraine in the same way the Soviet regime did it. ⠀ It’s important to spread this article. The Russian war should be stopped now. It was supposed to be stopped 8 years ago when it only began. 71% of Russians feel proud about…

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Russia’s biggest rappers are going hard against Putin’s war on Ukraine

April 5, 2022 From elsewhere

Rolling Stone reports: A blazing-yellow Bentley. Face tattoos. Booming bass lines in a parking garage. The burnt-out husk of a bullet-riddled car. As the rapper, who would look comfortably at home on a Tekashi 69 set, spits bars about Cartier and riches from behind the wheel, a woman and her son are held at gunpoint. Suddenly, blood spatters the car’s glossy yellow contour as the victims are dispatched offscreen. This might look like just another hip-hop video. In fact, the…

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Russian invaders are now treating the whole Ukrainian population as combatants, as dirt to be cleansed

April 4, 2022 From elsewhere

Franklin Foer writes: On the morning of March 4, a teacher was sheltering in a basement in Bucha, an old railroad stop northwest of Kyiv that over the centuries had grown into a verdant suburb. The town lay along the Russian military’s intended path of conquest, leading into the Ukrainian capital. And while the invaders struggled to realize their overarching plan, they gained a toehold in Bucha. At 7 a.m., the teacher, huddled alone with her two dogs, heard a…

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History stokes Putin’s imperial dream of a ‘Greater Russia’

April 4, 2022 From elsewhere

Samuel McIlhagga writes: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become an exemplary instance of the use of historical ideas to justify invasion. Whereas U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was couched in abstract rhetoric about “the power and appeal of human liberty,” Putin has resorted to esoteric historical arguments to explain his choice to invade. Putin, in his information and propaganda war, has repeatedly used certain imperial tropes that make historical claims about how Russia should be…

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Women and girls recount huge scale of sexual violence inflicted by Russian soldiers in Ukraine

April 4, 2022 From elsewhere

The Guardian reports: Women across Ukraine are grappling with the threat of rape as a weapon of war as growing evidence of sexual violence emerges from areas retaken from retreating Russian forces. The world was horrified on Sunday by a picture taken by the photographer Mikhail Palinchak on a highway 20km outside the capital, Kyiv, in which the bodies of one man and three women were piled under a blanket. The women were naked and their bodies had been partially…

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Hungary’s election, a dismal day for democracy

April 4, 2022 From elsewhere

In an editorial, The Guardian says: What now for the European Union’s most challenged and compromised democracy? The scale of Viktor Orbán’s fourth consecutive election victory in Hungary was crushing, comprehensive and unexpected. Faced for the first time with a united opposition alliance that put internal differences aside, predictions of a close race – or at least a competitive one – were confounded. On a high turnout, Mr Orbán’s Fidesz party actually won a greater number of seats than it…

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Is Trump criminal referral by January 6 panel actually necessary?

April 4, 2022 From elsewhere

Politico reports: Should the Jan. 6 committee ask the Justice Department to pursue a criminal case against Donald Trump? It’s a question with political heft but no practical effect — and some panel members are increasingly skeptical. After all, as multiple lawmakers on the select committee noted in recent interviews, the Justice Department is aware of the volume of evidence pointing to violations of the law by Trump. That evidence got underscored emphatically last week, when a federal judge ruled…

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The post-liberal intellectuals who are reshaping conservatism

April 4, 2022 From elsewhere

Gabby Birenbaum and Phillip Longman write: On February 22, as tensions that would soon spill into war mounted on the Ukrainian border, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson opened his show—the most popular cable news program in the country—with a searing monologue ripping into the U.S. foreign policy establishment. At the center of it was a sinister question: Why should Americans hate Vladimir Putin? In a series of rhetorical questions, Carlson asked: Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened…

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