Charlie Sykes writes: By now the cast of Putin’s useful idiots is familiar, ranging from Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley to Candace Owens, MTG, and Maria Bartiromo. Fiona Hill, the former senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council, calls them “the ultimate stooges,” but at least for now, these right wing voices do not speak for most congressional Republicans, who have tended to take a far more hawkish stance. But Putin can be forgiven if he…
Ezra Klein writes: Ninety-five percent of Afghans don’t have enough to eat. Nearly nine million are at risk of starvation. The U.N.’s emergency aid request, at more than $5 billion, is the largest it has ever made for a single country. “The current humanitarian crisis could kill far more Afghans than the past 20 years of war,” David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, wrote recently. And we bear much of the blame. We have turned a crisis into…
Politico reports: Maybe it was his move to raise taxes and fees on farmers. Or his regular practice of alienating state lawmakers. Or his decision to pick a fight with the BBQ industry. Or the bribery scandal surrounding his political consultant. Sid Miller has accumulated so many enemies and courted so much controversy in his two terms as Texas agriculture commissioner that even his conservative credentials and Donald Trump’s endorsement might not be enough to save him in the state’s…
Katie Surma writes: Until recently, so-called “rights of nature” provisions that confer legal rights to rivers, forests and other ecosystems have been mostly symbolic. But late last year, Ecuador’s top court changed that. In a series of court decisions, the Constitutional Court translated the country’s 2008 constitutional rights of nature provisions into reality, throwing the future of the country’s booming mining and oil industries into question. The most important of the decisions came in the Los Cedros case, where the…
Robin Wright writes: In his final State of the Union address, in 1992, President George H. W. Bush sounded almost ecstatic. “The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: by the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” The ideological struggle between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet-dominated East—which played out in proxy wars around the world over four decades—had not simply ended, the President declared. The U.S. had triumphed….
The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia will extend its military drills with Belarus because of rising violence in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the government in Minsk said, as Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted a new round of talks with Kyiv in the midst of warnings of an imminent Russian invasion. Mr. Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron said after speaking Sunday that they agreed to continue seeking a diplomatic solution. Russia has amassed as many as 190,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders,…
John Harwood writes: Fiona Hill doesn’t know whether President Joe Biden can lead Western allies to ward off Russia’s threat to Ukraine. But unlike his predecessor, he’s trying. Hill has a special vantage point on this slow-rolling crisis that US officials say could bring war in Europe at any moment. As a White House national security aide, she advised then-President Donald Trump on Russia and Ukraine — and became a star witness in impeachment proceedings that resulted from his conduct….
Bloomberg writes: Climate change is seen as a bigger threat than war by a majority of people living in some of the world’s top economies, according to new data being presented to diplomats and military officials who convene Friday for a key security meeting in Germany. The poll commissioned by the Munich Security Conference listed concern over global warming, habitat destruction and extreme weather as the top three risks named by 12,000 people surveyed globally in November. The results are…
The Guardian reports: A massive leak from one of the world’s biggest private banks, Credit Suisse, has exposed the hidden wealth of clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes. Details of accounts linked to 30,000 Credit Suisse clients all over the world are contained in the leak, which unmasks the beneficiaries of more than 100bn Swiss francs (£80bn)* held in one of Switzerland’s best-known financial institutions. The leak points to widespread failures of due…
Politico reports: Timothy Ramthun’s entry into Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary last weekend was the car wreck no one could look away from. His campaign is built around the preposterous idea the 2020 election could still be overturned — something even sympathetic Republicans here acknowledge is impossible. His campaign website went live, only to be deactivated. His three-hour campaign kickoff featured the appearance of Mike Lindell, the pillow salesperson and conspiracy theorist. “It’s Tim time,” Ramthun, a state lawmaker, told supporters, while…
Adam Frank, Sara Walker, and David Grinspoon write: Almost a century ago, the revolutionary idea of the biosphere gained a foothold in science. Defined as the collective activity of all life on Earth—the tapestry of actions of every microbe, plant, and animal—the biosphere had profound implications for our understanding of planetary evolution. The concept posits that life acts as a potent force shaping how the planet changes over time, on par with other geological systems like the atmosphere, hydrosphere (water),…
The New York Times reports: Vladimir Pozner was an English-language Soviet propaganda editor in Moscow in 1962, a job that gave him rare access to American newspapers and magazines. That allowed him to follow the Cuban Missile Crisis outside the Soviet media filter, and sense a world at the brink of war. Mr. Pozner, a longtime Russian television journalist, says he now feels something similar. “The smell of war is very strong,” he said in an interview on Friday, a…
The Observer reports: Secret discussions are under way between western allies over how to arm what they expect to be fierce Ukrainian resistance in the event of a Russian invasion that topples the Kyiv government. Boris Johnson laid bare the case for such a move in a dramatic speech to the Munich security conference where he stated it was in the collective self-interests of the west for any Russian invasion to “fail and be seen to fail”. He said that…
Reuters reports: Russia’s strategic nuclear forces held exercises overseen by President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, and Washington accused Russian troops massed near Ukraine’s border of advancing and being “poised to strike”. With Western fears of war rising, foreign ministers from the G7 group of rich nations said they had seen no evidence Russia is reducing its military activity in the area and remained “gravely concerned” about the situation. After Kyiv and Moscow traded accusations over new shelling near the border,…