Putin’s worldview is Russia’s foreign policy

Putin’s worldview is Russia’s foreign policy

Nataliya Bugayova writes: The U.S. has routinely attempted to reset relations with Russia since the rise to power of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000. The Soviet Union’s collapse led legions of scholars and policy-makers to pivot towards the new issues of a post-Soviet Middle East, Europe, and Asia. An entire generation of Americans hardly thought about Russia. The Russian Federation was seen as a former foe that could be integrated – albeit uneasily – into the international system led…

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Russian soldiers worry more about finding food than besieging Kyiv

Russian soldiers worry more about finding food than besieging Kyiv

John Sweeney reports: I’d heard reports that the Russian Army was not just stalled but that here, on this, the eastern claw of its pincer attack on Kyiv, it was going backward. “Have the Russians moved?” “No,” says Denis. “They are staying in the same place, neither moving forward or back.” “How are they?” “The villagers say that they are begging for food. They’re so hungry, they come to the villagers and ask for something to eat. The villagers say…

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Putin has become hostage to his own rhetoric

Putin has become hostage to his own rhetoric

Political scientist, Ivan Krastev, once met Vladimir Putin in Sochi, on the sidelines of a conference shortly after the annexation of Crimea: DER SPIEGEL: What was your impression of Putin? Krastev: Very intelligent and quick, forthright, confrontative. Sarcastic when speaking with someone from the West. But it is the small things that reveal the most about people. He held forth about the situation in the Donbas like a foreign service agent who knows how many people live in each village…

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Pentagon’s work with Ukraine’s biological facilities becomes flashpoint in Russia’s disinformation war

Pentagon’s work with Ukraine’s biological facilities becomes flashpoint in Russia’s disinformation war

The Wall Street Journal reports: On his first official visit abroad, the new senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, was taken to a facility in Ukraine where the U.S. helped scientists working with dangerous biological materials. But rather than produce biological weapons, U.S. officials in that ramshackle building were trying to prevent lethal pathogens from falling into the hands of terrorists. “I removed a tray of glass vials containing Bacillus anthracis, which is the bacterium that causes the anthrax,” recalls Andrew…

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Ukrainian Americans struggle to get fleeing relatives into United States

Ukrainian Americans struggle to get fleeing relatives into United States

The Washington Post reports: Every morning and every night, from her home in Falls Church, Va., Nadiia Khomaziuk messages her sister Lidiia in her hideaway in western Ukraine. Is Lidiia still okay? How about her kids, who are 7 and 11? Every day, Khomaziuk scours the Internet, calls U.S. government offices and connects with lawyers and other Ukrainian Americans, in search of a path to bring her family to safety in the United States. To get to there, Khomaziuk’s family…

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The Russians fleeing Putin’s wartime crackdown

The Russians fleeing Putin’s wartime crackdown

Masha Gessen writes: In the world as it existed before Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24th, the Vnukovo International Airport, in Moscow, was a point of departure for weekend-holiday destinations south of the border: Yerevan, Istanbul, Baku. In the first week of March, as tens of thousands of President Vladimir Putin’s troops advanced into Ukraine, Vnukovo teemed with anxious travellers, many of them young. The line for excess baggage split the giant departure hall in half. These people weren’t going…

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Those on the right who loudly praised Putin have now fallen strangely silent

Those on the right who loudly praised Putin have now fallen strangely silent

Nick Cohen writes: Across the west, institutions that collaborated with Vladimir Putin’s Russia are having a moment of revelation. Lawyers who persecuted investigative journalists and a financial service industry that feasted on oligarchical loot are shocked beyond measure by the invasion of Ukraine. They happily overlooked the levelling of Grozny, the war crimes in Aleppo, the missile attacks on civilian flights, the invasion of Crimea, the destructions of Russian democracy, the endemic corruption, the endless lying, and the poisoning of…

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A doctor’s impassioned critique of Big Pharma

A doctor’s impassioned critique of Big Pharma

By Troy Farah, Undark, March 18, 2022 Compared to other high-income countries, the fitness of Americans is in dismal shape — and has been declining for decades. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated health disparities, crisis on top of crisis has compounded to create even more devastating conditions for a growing number of people, especially marginalized groups. There is the diabetes crisis, the obesity crisis, and, of course, the despair crisis, which includes the rising tide of suicides, alcohol poisoning,…

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Syrian mercenaries join Russian ranks in Ukraine as Putin calls in Assad’s debt

Syrian mercenaries join Russian ranks in Ukraine as Putin calls in Assad’s debt

Martin Chulov reports: After 11 years of war, the destruction of towns, cities and much of the Syrian military, Bashar al-Assad’s army has launched a recruitment drive. But the recruits are not fresh from bootcamps and will not fight on the home front. They are the vanguard of what could be the biggest state-backed mercenary force in the world. Within days, Syrian troops could be deployed to reinforce the stalled Russian frontlines in Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin is about to…

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Reported detention of Russian spy boss shows tension over stalled Ukraine invasion, U.S. officials say

Reported detention of Russian spy boss shows tension over stalled Ukraine invasion, U.S. officials say

The Wall Street Journal reports: Recriminations and finger-pointing have begun within Russia’s spy and defense agencies, as the campaign that Moscow expected to culminate in a lightning seizure of Ukraine’s capital has instead turned into a costly and embarrassing morass, U.S. officials said. The blame game, which includes the detention of at least one senior Russian intelligence official, doesn’t appear to pose any immediate threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s iron grip on power, but the U.S. officials are watching…

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Russian foreign minister praises Fox News coverage of war in Ukraine

Russian foreign minister praises Fox News coverage of war in Ukraine

The Guardian reports: Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has praised Fox News for its coverage, appearing on the Russian state-controlled RT network to hail the right-leaning US cable channel, whose primetime host Tucker Carlson has played down the invasion. “We know the manners and the tricks that are being used by the western countries to manipulate media, we understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent western media,” said Lavrov, speaking in English in a studio…

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Two former British prime ministers back Nuremberg-style tribunal for Putin

Two former British prime ministers back Nuremberg-style tribunal for Putin

The Guardian reports: The former UK prime ministers Gordon Brown and Sir John Major are among those calling for the creation of a new international tribunal to investigate Vladimir Putin and those who helped plan his invasion of Ukraine. They have joined a campaign – along with leading names from the worlds of law, academia and politics – aiming to put the Russian president and others on trial. Launched with a website and a target of 2 million petition signatures,…

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Antarctica, Arctic simultaneously 70 and 50 degrees above normal

Antarctica, Arctic simultaneously 70 and 50 degrees above normal

The Associated Press reports: Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn. The two-mile high (3,234 meters) Concordia station was at 10 degrees (-12.2 degrees Celsius),which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station…

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Recent megafire smoke columns have reached the stratosphere, threatening Earth’s ozone shield

Recent megafire smoke columns have reached the stratosphere, threatening Earth’s ozone shield

Inside Climate News reports: Scientists researching how the recent spike in extreme wildfires affects the climate say that just a few weeks of smoke surging high into the stratosphere from one intense fire can wipe out years of progress restoring Earth’s life-protecting ozone layer. Close study of Australia’s intense Black Summer fires in late 2019 and early 2020 suggests the smoke they emitted was a “tremendous kick” to the atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer by 1 percent, said MIT scientist…

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Another Covid surge may be coming. Are we ready for it?

Another Covid surge may be coming. Are we ready for it?

The New York Times reports: Scarcely two months after the Omicron variant drove coronavirus case numbers to frightening heights in the United States, scientists and health officials are bracing for another swell in the pandemic and, with it, the first major test of the country’s strategy of living with the virus while limiting its impact. At local, state and federal levels, the nation has been relaxing restrictions and trying to restore a semblance of normalcy. Encouraging Americans to return to…

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