Russia accused of blackmail after gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria halted

Russia accused of blackmail after gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria halted

The Guardian reports: Russia has been accused of seeking to blackmail Europe, as the energy giant Gazprom confirmed it had halted gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria and was prepared to target other countries. The Kremlin said the dramatic move, widely seen as an attempt to weaponise Russia’s energy supplies, was a response to the failure by the two EU countries to make their payments in roubles. The immediate consequence of Gazprom’s decision was a 20% rise in the wholesale…

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Elon Musk is a problem masquerading as a solution

Elon Musk is a problem masquerading as a solution

Anand Giridharadas writes: It is a perfect marriage for an age of plutocracy: Twitter with its serious problems and Elon Musk, the embodiment of those problems. What happens when the incarnation of a problem buys the right to decide what the problem is and how to fix it? Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about Covid vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of…

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Elon Musk probably won’t buy Twitter

Elon Musk probably won’t buy Twitter

Lauren Silva Laughlin and Gina Chon write: There are good reasons for him to get cold feet. The biggest is Tesla. The electric-vehicle maker’s stock has fallen around a fifth since Musk first revealed his stake in Twitter, partly because Musk may sell shares to fund his new adventure. If Tesla’s stock bounces back – likely if the Twitter deal falls away – the $40 billion of recouped wealth would more than make up for the break fee. China is…

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The Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election

The Republican blueprint to steal the 2024 election

J. Michael Luttig writes: Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about. Fewer still understand why former President Donald Trump and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the “stolen” election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen. January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual…

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China’s Covid lockdown outrage tests limits of triumphant propaganda

China’s Covid lockdown outrage tests limits of triumphant propaganda

The New York Times reports: Immediately after Beijing said it had detected a new coronavirus outbreak, officials hurried to assure residents there was no reason to panic. Food was plentiful, they said, and any lockdown measures would be smooth. But Evelyn Zheng, a freelance writer in the city, was not taking any chances. Her relatives, who lived in Shanghai, were urging her to leave or stock up on food. She had spent weeks poring over social media posts from that…

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Why you should care about the insect crisis

Why you should care about the insect crisis

Allie Wilkinson writes: Imagine a world without insects. You might breathe a sigh of relief at the thought of mosquito-free summers, or you might worry about how agriculture will function without pollinators. What you probably won’t picture is trudging through a landscape littered with feces and rotting corpses — what a world devoid of maggots and dung beetles would look like. That’s just a snippet of the horrifying picture of an insect-free future that journalist Oliver Milman paints in the…

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The Putinomics playbook won’t work forever

The Putinomics playbook won’t work forever

Chris Miller writes: On March 27, President Joe Biden claimed that U.S. sanctions had reduced Russia’s currency to “rubble.” Yet in the past few weeks, the currency has rebounded, while the country shows no outward signs of crisis. So what impact are sanctions having? Plenty of questions remain in the short term. But the long-term consequences of the sanctions are clear and severe. Russian industry now faces difficulties in acquiring crucial tools and components. The future of entire sectors of…

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Russian leaders know they’re committing war crimes. Their laws of war manual says so

Russian leaders know they’re committing war crimes. Their laws of war manual says so

Evan Wallach writes: The Russian armed forces and their commanders know they are committing war crimes in Ukraine. It says so in the 2001 “Manual on International Humanitarian Law for the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” In my 2017 book, “The Law of War in the 21st Century,” I thought it might be useful for readers and researchers to have examples of non-NATO views of the law of armed conflict, so in an appendix I included law of war…

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Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the creation of Trump’s stolen election myth

Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the creation of Trump’s stolen election myth

By Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how…

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In Afghanistan, vice and virtue are front and center

In Afghanistan, vice and virtue are front and center

Ahmed-Waleed Kakar reports: Muhammad Sadiq Akif was not in Kabul as the city fell to the Taliban last August. An insurgent propagandist who had been chronicling the frantic last days of the war on Twitter, he was over 60 miles to the southeast, in Loya Paktia. Taliban control there was tenuous and the surrender of a regional CIA-created militia, the notorious Khost Protection Force, was still being negotiated. Akif arrived in Kabul days later. Across the city, fluttering in the…

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Young people are lonelier than ever

Young people are lonelier than ever

Vice reports: At the beginning of 2022, a TikTok video of a tearful woman talking about friendship and loneliness made the rounds on Twitter. “I have people who love me and who care about me but it was so clear that I’m a Tier 2 or a Tier 3 friend and that resulted in me having to spend the last two years literally alone [during lockdown],” she says. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what did…

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The world’s richest person didn’t like Twitter. So he’s buying it

The world’s richest person didn’t like Twitter. So he’s buying it

David Leonhardt writes: Two years ago, the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman published a statistic that you don’t normally see. It was the share of wealth owned by the richest 0.00001 percent of Americans. That tiny slice represented only 18 households, Saez and Zucman estimated. Each one had an average net worth of about $66 billion in 2020. Together, the share of national wealth owned by the group had risen by a factor of nearly 10 since 1982. This…

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Ancient genes for symbiosis hint at mitochondria’s origins

Ancient genes for symbiosis hint at mitochondria’s origins

Veronique Greenwood writes: Once, long ago, the only players in the grand drama of life, predation and death were invisibly small and simple cells. Archaea and bacteria jigged and whirled through seas and ponds, assembled themselves into fortresses a few microns wide, and devoured films of organic matter. Then some of them began to change, and eventually the first eukaryote — the first organism to keep its genes locked away in a nucleus, to line its interior with ramifying compartments,…

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Ukraine: First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing

Ukraine: First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing

Anne Applebaum writes: In the terrible winter of 1932–33, brigades of Communist Party activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They…

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