How long can Erdogan sustain threat to veto Finnish, Swedish NATO bids?

How long can Erdogan sustain threat to veto Finnish, Swedish NATO bids?

Semih Idiz reports: The crisis Erdogan has precipitated within NATO has raised eyebrows not just in Europe but also in Turkey. Many former Turkish diplomats and veteran foreign policy analysts have criticized Erdogan’s move for its timing and the manner in which it was brought up. They believe Erdogan is attempting to cash in on Turkey’s renewed strategic importance for the West after the invasion of Ukraine and force Finland and Sweden to comply with his demands. All decisions within…

Read More Read More

Information leaking out about losses in Ukraine tests Russians’ faith

Information leaking out about losses in Ukraine tests Russians’ faith

The Guardian reports: The satellite and drone imagery from above Bilohorivka tells a tale of folly and destruction. Dozens of Russian tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and trucks lay destroyed, some sinking into the waters of the Donets River by a broken pontoon bridge, pointing to the latest disaster in Russia’s three-month war in Ukraine. The toll of Russia’s attempts to cross the river, part of its costly offensive in the east, are staggering: more than 485 killed and as many…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

An agreement with Elon Musk is worthless

An agreement with Elon Musk is worthless

Matt Levine writes: Elon Musk is the richest person in the world, and an active Twitter user. When he tweets, he gets a lot of spammy replies, many of which seem to be written by automated bots. He has complained about this a lot. Eventually he decided to do something about it. The thing that he decided to do about it was buy Twitter. On April 13, he sent a letter to Twitter Inc.’s board of directors offering to buy…

Read More Read More

Cultivating a sense of wonder

Cultivating a sense of wonder

Anelise Chen writes: When the marine biologist Rachel Carson was a young girl, she discovered a fossilized shell while hiking around her family’s hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Those who knew her then would later contend that this relic sparked such intense reverie in her that she instantly felt a tug toward the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what was the world it had known? Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More