Putin defends his Ukraine invasion, invoking World War II, but does not signal an escalation. he did not make any new announcements signaling a mass mobilization for the war effort or an escalation of the onslaught. ...... restated his past claims that attacking Ukraine was “inevitable” and “the only correct decision.” ....... Russian troops in eastern Ukraine were fighting “on their land” ....... “So that there is no place in the world for executioners, punishers and Nazis.” ....... evoking Russia’s victorious World War II past — perhaps the most unifying element of the country’s diverse identity. ......... His army’s efforts have fallen well short of expectations: They have been vanquished around Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital; pushed back in the northeast; and are making only sporadic gains in the Donbas, the eastern region Russia now says it is focused on. ....... The Russian leader did not renew his implicit threats of nuclear war, after warning late last month that countries that “create a strategic threat to Russia” during the war in Ukraine could expect “retaliatory strikes” that would be “lightning fast.” ........ depicting America as the true aggressor and Russia as a stronghold of patriotism and “traditional values.” ......... He also made plain his ever-more-open nostalgia for the Soviet empire, describing May 9, 1945, as a day of triumph for “our united Soviet people.” ......... “But we are a different country. Russia has a different character. We will never give up love for the Motherland, faith and traditional values, the customs of our ancestors, respect for all peoples and cultures.”
Ukraine’s turbulent history overlays commemorations at World War II memorials. generally the capital’s streets were nearly empty. Local governments canceled all ceremonies, telling citizens to stay home and urging them to pay attention to air raid sirens. Many residents who could find gasoline in the midst of a countrywide fuel shortage left the city over the weekend for the relatively safer countryside. .........
“On the day of our victory over Nazism, we are fighting for a new victory”
I’m a Pro-Choice Governor, and I’m Not Going to Sit on My Hands Waiting for Congress As I read the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, I was devastated. It was shocking to see, laid out in cold legalese, the blatant ideological reasoning gutting the constitutional right to abortion. ........ If Roe falls, abortion will become a felony in Michigan, without exceptions for rape or incest. ........ a very real danger that in a few short years, with complete control of the federal levers of power, anti-choice, anti-women extremists could enact a federal abortion ban, which could abolish abortion nationally, regardless of state law. This is not theoretical — it is their endgame. ....... A handful of states protected access to abortion via ballot initiatives in the 1990s. In 2019, Illinois, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont codified access in their state laws. Massachusetts joined in December 2020, and New Jersey did in January 2022. Colorado did last month, and Connecticut did last week. In California, there are efforts underway to add access to safe, legal abortion to the state constitution. States are leading the way. .......... despair is a choice, and pessimism is a luxury. We must take unprecedented steps to protect the right to choose.
The War Is Getting More Dangerous for America, and Biden Knows It Things are actually getting more dangerous by the day. ....... For starters, the longer this war goes on, the more opportunity for catastrophic miscalculations — and the raw material for that is piling up fast and furious. ....... Putin’s behavior is not as predictable as it has been in the past. And Putin is running out of options for some kind of face-saving success on the ground — or even a face-saving off ramp. ........ Putin was trying to push back on NATO expansion, and he’s ended up laying the groundwork for the expansion of NATO. ........ I am in awe of Zelensky’s heroism and leadership. If I were him, I’d be trying to get the U.S. as enmeshed on my side as he is. ......... Ukraine was, and still is, a country marbled with corruption. ....... Putin’s Plan A — taking Kyiv and installing his own leader — has failed. And his Plan B — trying just to take full control of Ukraine’s old industrial heartland, known as the Donbas, which is largely Russian speaking — is still in doubt. ........ After the war started, Biden personally explained to Xi in a lengthy phone call that China’s economic future rests on access to the American and European markets — its two largest trading partners — and should China provide military aid to Putin, it would have very negative consequences for China’s trade with both markets.
As a ‘Seismic Shift’ Fractures Evangelicals, an Arkansas Pastor Leaves Home Kevin Thompson thought he would lead his hometown church for the rest of his life. Then came Trump and everything after........ a loving, accessible God and remote, inaccessible celebrities. ........ A young woman texted him, concerned; another member suggested the reference to Mr. Hanks proved Mr. Thompson didn’t care about the issue of sex trafficking. Mr. Thompson soon realized that their worries sprung from the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims the movie star is part of a ring of Hollywood pedophiles. ........... “Jesus talks about how he is the truth, how central truth is,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “The moment you lose the concept of truth you’ve lost everything.” .......... The disruption, fear and physical separation of the pandemic has exacerbated every rift. ........ Forty-two percent of Protestant pastors said they had seriously considered quitting full-time ministry within the past year ....... a “seismic shift” coming, with white evangelical churches dividing into two broad camps: those embracing Trump-style messaging and politics, including references to conspiracy theories, and those seeking to navigate a different way. ......... more often, the ruptures are quieter: a pastor who moves to another church to avoid a major confrontation, or who changes careers without fanfare. ........... In many evangelical settings, “political” means biased or tainted — an opposite of “biblical.” .......... attributes like gentleness and self-control, which show that the Holy Spirit is working in a Christian’s life. ......... if he spoke about race in ways that made people uncomfortable, that was “politics.” And, Mr. Thompson suspected, it was proof to some church members that Mr. Thompson was not as conservative as they thought. ......... The pastor wrote a blog post that did not critique Mr. Trump by name, but whose point was clear. “Many who thought Bill Clinton was the Antichrist now campaign for a man who would make Bill Clinton blush,” he wrote. .......... When Mr. Thompson wrote in a 2020 blog post that “Black lives matter,” the friction in his church suddenly looked more like a crisis. ..........
the phrase “Black lives matter” rankled some congregants.
........ America does have a history of racism, he said. But “if the slave trade had never happened, would they still be in Africa? Would they have the prominent positions?” he wondered about Black people. “And now our pastor’s talking about it, and we’re systemically racist because we’re white?” ....... “If you grew up in any way like me, there’s bigotry within you” and encouraged listeners to seek out perspectives other than their own. ......... His friend Steven Dooly, a white former police officer with two Black children, sometimes urged him to speak even more directly on racial justice. But he knew Mr. Thompson was in a difficult position. “You’d hate to see a church fall completely apart over a few lines in a sermon,” he said. ....... “A lot of people are getting tired of going to church and hearing this message: ‘Hey, it’s a great day, every day is a great day, the sun is always shining.’ There’s this big disconnect between what’s going on behind the pulpit in those churches and what’s going on in the real world.” ........ People he thought should have known better were endorsing online conspiracy theories about Covid and the results of the 2020 election. On his blog, he called for Christians to apply “research and discernment.” “When we share, promote, like and further things that are not true about others, we are violating the ninth commandment,” he wrote. ....... Issues including masks and vaccination have fractured relationships, and people doubt the leaders they once trusted. ........ A local woman emailed her Bible study group in the summer of 2020, warning that he was promoting a “progressive Leftist agenda.” When Mr. Thompson invited her to meet with him, pointing out that he was a frequent guest of Focus on the Family Radio and hardly a leftist, she accused him of being beholden to “The Marxist Agenda” and “the BLM agenda.” ........ Seminaries are shrinking, and many in his own congregation seemed to view his theological training as the thing that turned him “liberal.” The next generation might have less training, and be more inclined to turn churches into “an echo chamber of what the people want.”Clarissa Ward: ‘Fear and Panic Are Bedfellows’ in Ukraine Putin has had to dramatically downsize his ambitions in Ukraine. ....... their progress has been incremental at best. And it’s really shaping up to be a long grind, a war of attrition ........ if Russia was hoping for an easier victory in the East, it’s already becoming clear that it’s not going to be that. And this could go on for months. .......... it’s the danger of a lot of autocracies that you start to believe your own talking points and your own propaganda ........ to give them some credit, if you look at how things played out during the annexation of Crimea, where not a shot was fired and where the Russian presence there has largely been embraced, you can understand the sort of hubris that allowed President Putin to think it might be a similar reception in other parts of the country. ......... All of us were shocked to see how effective Ukrainian counteroffensive forces were.... if you remember at the beginning of the war, U.S. intelligence officials were saying, two or three days until Kyiv falls. ......... and again, this happens a lot in dictatorships — where President Putin is just being told all the time whatever people think he wants to hear. ........ Ukraine has been fighting a war for eight years, and it’s been much more limited in its scale and scope. But what that has done is, you know, there’s already been a paradigm shift in the mentality of people. .......... Ukrainians are fiercely patriotic, by and large. .......... Kharkiv is — I mean, first of all, it’s a wonderful city. It’s Ukraine’s second largest city. Beautiful city center — used to be a major buzzing sort of tech town, and everything changed overnight. I mean, completely changed. Anyone with children now lives underground. They’ve either left or they live underground. ............ there’s no part of the city that’s really safe. ........ a tactic the Russians used a lot in Syria. It’s called the double tap. So you send a mortar or an artillery round into — an apartment building, in this case. You wait half an hour. And then, when the first responders get on the scene, and there are more people on the scene trying to help those, you hit it again. And in doing so, you maximize the number of casualties. ........... let fear sit in the passenger seat, but you don’t let it take the driver’s seat. Because the problem with fear is that fear and panic are bedfellows, and panic is what will really get you hurt, potentially, in a war zone. .......... it’s still a bit of a taboo to talk about mental health and PTSD and trauma and therapy. ......... I used to come back from Syria particularly, and I’d feel so detached. I would feel like — I feel nothing for my husband, I feel nothing for my — I know intellectually that I love you, but I feel nothing. ........... a really undisciplined army? ....... oh my gosh, this camp, this mess, this squalor speaks to a real lack of discipline and a lack of morale. .......... a lot of the women who have been raped, particularly in and around Kyiv and those suburbs, have said that there was one guy, and the other soldiers were trying to tell him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop. So they have framed it as more of a kind of regular aberration, as opposed to, this was the strategy. ......... this intercepted phone call, which literally haunted me — I can’t stop thinking about it — between this man and his wife. He’s a Russian soldier. He’s talking to his wife in Russia. And he’s like, do I have permission to rape women while I’m here? And she’s like, yeah, sure, you do, just make sure you use protection. ........... what we have found time and time again in Ukraine is people want their story on the record. .......... Her daughter was taken by Russian troops. She was also taken for three nights, and then they let her go. She has no idea where her daughter is. ......... and see and feel the full force of that horror and that suffering is by far and away the hardest part of the job. ......... I think as storytellers and as journalists, our job is to keep finding ways to make sure that we don’t become numb and desensitized to the horrors of war, because that is exactly how wars continue and grind on. ......... some of the most powerful storytelling comes out of opportunities where you do have a little bit more time. .......... the fact that the Americans — this $33 billion, which is very, very significant — I think the fact that the Europeans are talking about an oil embargo — these are things that probably would have been inconceivable at the beginning of the war. So I do think it speaks to an intensification of Western support. ........
there’s a sense of, wait, the Ukrainians actually could win this thing.
....... every day they’re not winning is a day they’re losing ...... there is very clearly a right and a wrong here. ........ the obvious one is chemical weapons or some kind of a tactical nuke, which — again, it would be so disastrous and so horrifying, it’s impossible to fathom how that would be possible. I still believe that Putin is a rational actor within the context or framework of his universe. So I want to believe that that would not happen. ....... I was wrong about the invasion. I never thought the invasion would happen. ......... we’re actually going to consider doing this and call it a false flag, and just escalate things off the charts. ......... This is a war of information. It’s really the first internet war in a lot of ways ......... blatant censorship. ..... I lived in Russia twice. I have had a long and very complicated relationship with Russia, but have a lot of love for many elements of it, particularly the culture and the history and the literature. ..........Navalny, of course, which is their biggest, most painful spot.
......... wide-eyed credulity with which the Russian public does seem to be absorbing a lot of this propaganda in spite of the facts that, granted, are harder for them to get to, because it’s not on state T.V., and you maybe are not on Telegram or one of these social media apps that would allow you to access some slightly more impartial and filtered information. ..... But still, I know people who should know better. ......... I have a friend who’s spent a lot of time in Russia — same thing. She can’t believe it, how many of her friends in Russia are telling her the opposite. And I was like, you do not have a Trump relative then — Fox news-watching Trump relatives. ............. there is a side of America that actually thinks that Russia is powerful and justified, and that does not hate President Putin. The other is just more broadly to cast America as this kind of chaotic, riven with internal disagreement, divided, angry nation, where people are just shouting at each other and disagree about absolutely everything. ............ you really want this? This is your democracy. Look at this. It’s just angry people shouting at each other. And so they like to trot that one out a lot. .............. It could be that President Putin decides to claim Mariupol as a victory, and that with Kherson, they can start to fashion a kind of land corridor to Crimea and try to market that as some kind of a victory. I think that’ll be very tough for him to call that a victory at this stage, especially when they’ve just said that the Donbas is the goal now. .......... I worry that the more Ukraine wins, and the more Putin’s back is against the wall, and the more likely a scenario is in which something really terrible and crazy happens along the lines of some kind of a chemical attack ........... I sort of had talked about this around the time he went back to Russia — I said, OK, he’s ready to be Russia’s Nelson Mandela. ........... rumors about his health, which are impossible to confirm, but they don’t seem to be completely unfounded. I think the oligarchs know — oligarchs will not bring him down ........... The people would be able to bring him down potentially are the so-called siloviki, right, the strong men who surround him and who empowered him. ............ He had this national security council meeting right before the war, where he summoned all of them and he made them sit like little schoolboys in these chairs, and then he sat sort of majestically aloof at this enormous desk. ............ And he made each of them stand in front of the microphone and be like, I support this, I believe that the Donbas should be independent. And he kind of humiliated a lot of them along the way. It was the most bizarre psychodrama I have seen in quite some time. ............ the intended effect, at least in part, was, well, now you’re all on the hook for this. Now, none of you can say, oh you know, I was vehemently opposed to this. You’ve all gone on television and said, we’re with you, boss. ........ wars are what the CNN machine is made for. .......... you’re always going to need content. You need great content. ..........When Health Care Workers Are Protected, Patients Are, Too
The Supreme Court as an Instrument of Oppression
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America Is Not Ready for the End of Roe v. Wade Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived. ......... The court system — and the Supreme Court in particular — exists to protect those rights when state and local authorities refuse to. ........ leaving the matter to individual states and the political process means that millions of Americans will be denied their fundamental rights — in this case, the right of women to decide what happens inside their own bodies. ........ The draft opinion relies heavily on the lack of a mention of abortion in the Constitution, and therefore argues that the document cannot be the basis for the right to terminate a pregnancy. The Constitution also says nothing about interracial marriage, but that didn’t prevent the justices from finding in the 14th Amendment the guarantee that no couple may be treated differently because of the color of their skin. ........ constitutional rights are meaningless unless they apply across the entire country. That is why the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia and Roe v. Wade as it did. These rights are inherent in the Constitution, even if they are not explicit in it. ....... Within a few months, abortion could be illegal in more than half the states. The anti-abortion movement isn’t stopping there. Efforts are already underway to impose a nationwide ban on abortion as soon as Republicans regain the White House and Congress, which could happen as soon as 2025. ........ Missouri lawmakers, for example, are considering a bill that would allow its residents to sue anyone in any state who helps a Missouri resident get an abortion. ......... the public’s complex position on a morally fraught issue. ...... The majority of Americans do not want these cases overturned, and an overwhelming majority say that abortion should not be banned outright. ..... If you thought Roe v. Wade itself led to discord and division, just wait until it’s gone.
Has Shanghai Been Xinjianged? Shanghai used to be the glamorous China, while Xinjiang was the dark China. Now both are casualties of authoritarian excess.
The Woman Steering Russia’s War Economy
Inside Elon Musk’s Big Plans for Twitter Here’s what Mr. Musk is projecting for Twitter’s finances over the next few years, according to a pitch deck he presented to investors.
A Woman Alone in Oman: Three Weeks Along the Arabian Coast In December, a photographer set off on a 2,600-mile road trip, traveling from the Yemeni border to the Strait of Hormuz. Here’s what she saw.
A Landlord ‘Underestimated’ His Tenants. Now They Could Own the Building. When a new landlord bought their building in the Bronx and threatened to raise rents and kick them out, tenants banded together. They never expected how far they might get: the chance to buy their apartments for $2,500 each.
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