Some odds and ends observations for this Sunday afternoon/evening.
* Twitter and Telegram had an above average number of pictures and videos of destroyed Russian equipment and more dead Russians than I’ve seen all war. Ukraine seems emboldened, and in particular, it appears to be pressing its advantages in northwest Kyiv and in the Mykolaiv region—the best evidence yet of continued counter-offensives by the defenders.
The heat on the train was as thick as the anxiety as Ukrainian survivors of one of the most brutal sieges in modern history fled to the safer western city of Lviv.
The editor, who rushed onto a live state-run broadcast to protest propaganda, said she was partly trying to show that many Russians are against the war.
Vivek Murthy said the nation is in a good position to get through new waves.
Illustrations by Miki LowePoems about the seasons tend to get a bad rap. Soft snowfall, chirping cardinals, bare feet on soft grass, crisp autumn leaves: These are obviously lovely scenes that, in their unambiguous beauty, are sometimes perceived to lack complexity or literary worth.Yet some of the greatest poems derive depth as well as beauty from the seasons.
This is not an article about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. It is, rather, a look back at the Supreme Court she once knew—knew intimately, in fact, during the 1999–2000 Court term, when she was a law clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer, the justice whom President Joe Biden recently nominated her to replace.From a certain perspective, nothing is unique about Judge Jackson’s status as a former Supreme Court law clerk. A majority of the justices are former clerks, Breyer among them.
In the West, nearly every country has embraced draconian sanctions against Russia. Countless private actors have joined sweeping economic and cultural boycotts of the country, hoping to pressure President Vladimir Putin into ending his unjust war of aggression against Ukraine.Whether this approach will work is not yet clear. Years of sanctions have failed to stop other murderous regimes from staying in power and waging war.
FDA is set to convene its advisory committee of vaccine experts next month to deliberate how to approach Covid booster shots.
Over the past two years, the U.S. has experienced Covid waves similar to those in Europe — only several weeks later.
The increase reported by the Labor Department reflected the 12 months ending in February and didn’t include most of the oil and gas price increases that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb.
The Fed is already expected to begin a campaign of interest rate increases next month in a bid to remove its support for economic growth amid a blistering job market and rapidly rising prices.
“America’s job machine is going stronger than ever,” Biden said at the White House.
The burst of jobs came despite a wave of Omicron inflections that sickened millions of workers, kept many consumers at home and left businesses from restaurants to manufacturers short-staffed.
Congress needs to create a new safety net for such lenders — not let regulators squeeze them out of business.
Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last year, the country has faced a humanitarian crisis with half of the population experiencing acute hunger. The U.N. Refugee Agency says 3.
The United Nations is warning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could lead to a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” that would be especially devastating for the Global South. Wheat and fertilizer prices have soared since the war began three weeks ago. Global food prices could jump by as much as 22% this year as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupts exports from two of the world’s largest producers of wheat and fertilizer.
President Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal for the first time Wednesday for atrocities in Ukraine, as the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on whether Russian forces have been using cluster munitions in populated areas in Ukraine. Cluster bombs explode in midair and spew hundreds of smaller “bomblets.” The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said their use in Ukraine may amount to war crimes.
As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth week, Ukrainian officials say Russian forces have increasingly attacked civilian areas to pound Ukrainian cities into submission, a strategy Russia has employed to devastating effect in Syria, where the Russian Air Force has bombed many cities to rubble in an effort to support the government of Bashar al-Assad since entering the war in 2015.
As of Sunday morning in Ukraine, fighting continues in Mariupol as territorial defense forces struggle to prevent Russia from capturing more of the city. Meanwhile, additional sources have confirmed the story that Russian forces put local citizens on buses and took them out of the area, either to Donetsk or into Russia. For those not already kidnapped or engaged in a firefight, the situation remains dire.
Republican Rep. Don Young, who was first elected in 1973 to Alaska’s sole House seat, died Friday at the age of 88 after losing consciousness while on a flight. Young’s 49-year tenure made him the longest-serving sitting member of either chamber of Congress, as well as the body’s oldest member. Young additionally holds the record for longest-serving Republican in congressional history.
What is there to say about Fox News and the right-wing-o-sphere that hasn’t been scratched by the nails of demons into the toilet stall walls of hell? Every day, every hour, every minute, Fox News and the propaganda machines it has birthed are either selling their audience lies, misinformation, and disinformation about the world, or selling them pillows, telling them to sell their gold, and saying that the way out of debt is to give Magnum P.I. your home in a reverse mortgage.
WaPo:
Putin’s KGB past didn’t help him with intelligence on Ukraine
The botched invasion suggests that—as happens with many authoritarians—his analysts told him what he wanted to hear
Putin’s present problems can be reduced to two main options: Either he ignored the advice of his national security and intelligence advisers; or, as with so many authoritarian leaders before him, he set the conditions under which his subordinates only told him w
Friday made for a very busy day in court as deals were struck, guilty pleas were entered and sentencing dates scheduled for defendants facing charges—including conspiracy—related to the Jan. 6 assault of the U.S. Capitol.
First up before Senior Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C., was ex-police officer Jacob Fracker. The 30-year-old pleaded guilty Friday to corruptly conspiring to obstruct or impede the counting of votes by Congress on Jan. 6.
At one point in the routine the troupe chanted: “Scalp ’em, Indians, scalp ’em.
America’s hospital regulator wants patients to report facilities that request they remove their masks.
In The Batman, Matt Reeves’s long and grim superhero epic, Robert Pattinson plays a brooding sophomore of a dark knight. He wears mascara. He journals. He is vengeance. He is the shadows. But despite all the memes and fanboy hand-wringing generated from the Twilight actor’s casting, Pattinson’s is a back-to-basics Batman. He isn’t the tired, aging crimefighter played by Ben Affleck, nor is The Batman the umpteenth pearl-scattering origin story for the character.
Kyiv is often described as the cradle of Slavic civilization. According to legend, the city was founded in 482, when a group of siblings from a royal Slavic tribe staked out a settlement along the banks of the Dnipro River. By the end of the millenium, under the leadership of Volodymyr the Great, it had become the capital of a major European civilization—Kyivan Rus. At this point, Moscow was barely a village.
The option was added after the state was unable to obtain the drugs necessary to carry out lethal injections.
For the past few decades, whenever a geopolitical crisis or market tumult has led to higher oil prices, policy makers in the United States have generally followed the same playbook.First, they try to get more oil on the market as soon as they can. That almost invariably has meant asking Saudi Arabia, which geology has blessed with the world’s most agile oil reserves and which the U.S. has blessed with several billion dollars in weapons, to pump and sell more petroleum.
A month ago, another installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series was released, an attempt to modernize the horror franchise while still harkening back to its gritty 1970s roots. It was a creative failure, too reliant on digitally enhanced gore and thudding callbacks. The task of matching an all-time classic seemed impossible.