Ukraine and the dark lessons of war: What does it mean to “take” a country or a city?

Kherson, a port city in the south of Ukraine, has fallen to Russian forces. It is an important port on the Dnieper River delta, and military strategists say that now that the Russians have taken Kherson, they can turn their attention to Odessa to the west, Ukraine’s third largest city, a major port and a center of tourism on the Black Sea.

Meanwhile to the north, Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, remain under siege, with Russian forces targeting civilian neighborhoods indiscriminately. According to the UN, the number of civilians killed by Russian bombs and shelling is approaching 1,000, but judging from what I’ve seen in television coverage, it’s likely much higher. A video on the website of the New York Times on Thursday showed what appear to be projectiles fired from a Russian rocket launcher hitting a civilian neighborhood in Chernihiv, a city to the east and north of Kyiv. You can see civilian pedestrians on the street near where the rockets were about to hit, and then you can’t see them. The video has red circles picking out six rocket warheads as they fly in and strike the street and surrounding buildings.

I’ve also seen a video showing cluster munitions striking an apartment complex in Kharkiv. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons that are banned under international agreements that Russia and the U.S., among others, have not signed. There are no concentrations of Ukrainian army forces on battlefields in this war against which cluster munitions could legitimately be used. The fact that these bombs are landing in neighborhoods populated entirely by civilians suggests that Russian forces have been issued the munitions specifically to target civilian human beings.

Numerous photographs emerged this week of extensive damage to civilian neighborhoods in various cities in Ukraine showing the faces of apartment complexes entirely blown off, fires in what appear to be office and apartment buildings, and other damage to civilian areas.

What does it mean to “take” a city like Kyiv or Kharkiv or Kherson? Russian military commanders have clearly been ordered to “take” these Ukrainian population centers in the process of conquering and occupying the entire country. But from video footage of this war — and from the evidence of every other war in history — “taking” a city pretty much means destroying it, as in the famous GI saying that became a symbol of the Vietnam War: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

What is the purpose of an aggressor “taking” a city, or even the entire country, if in the process you are destroying the thing you say you want? If you are the one who ordered the invasion — in this case, Vladimir Putin — what do you do after you have “taken” a country you have destroyed, and how do you plan to deal with a population you have devastated by intentionally killing them with your military forces?

The contrast between “taking” a city or a country and what happens after that defines the essence of war. Look at Aleppo, for example, one of the Syrian cities the Russian air force was credited with helping to “take” from rebel forces opposing the Assad regime. Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and one of the capitals of the cradle of civilization. It has a history that goes back to a time before the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Dozens if not hundreds of wars were fought over thousands of years between rulers of Aleppo and the kings and potentates of Ur and Babylon, in what is now Iraq, and the Egyptian empire. Aleppo was destroyed and rebuilt again and again. The ruins of Assad’s and Russia’s war on Aleppo sit on top of the ruins of one king’s destroyed empire after another.

In the modern context, that’s exactly what is happening today in Ukraine. The Russian army has been ordered to “take” Ukraine, and in so doing it is destroying Ukraine’s cities and killing its citizens. In the coming days, we will no doubt see the ruins of onion-domed Orthodox cathedrals that have been destroyed in Kyiv and Kharkiv. I looked at Google Maps to check out Chernihiv, the city mentioned above that was hit hard by Russian rockets and artillery on Wednesday and Thursday. Along with several elaborate Orthodox cathedrals, there is something called the Hollywood Mall in Chernihiv located next to the Hypermarket Vena and the city’s Hospital No. 2. Already we are seeing videos and reading reports of hospitals and schools destroyed in Kyiv, and I expect that soon we will see the ruins of the Hollywood Mall in Chernihiv alongside a hospital battered by Russian artillery shells and rockets.

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There is a contradiction between the orders given in wars and what those orders accomplish. When armies of aggression invade foreign nations, the homes and apartment buildings and hospitals and grocery stores don’t belong to those armies, so they just follow orders and destroy them. Sometimes the destruction occurs by accident, but in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is being done on purpose on the orders of the Russian president.

You don’t have to take the Ukrainians’ word to understand that this is Putin’s intent. All you have to do is see that he has issued rocket launchers with thermobaric missiles to his army, with the apparent intention of using them against Ukrainian cities. Thermobaric warheads, also known as “vacuum bombs,” are not intended to destroy military fortifications. They have one purpose, and that is to kill human beings by exploding a gas cloud that sucks the oxygen from the air around the explosion, collapsing the lungs of anyone near it. There has been video footage that appears to show these missiles landing in civilian neighborhoods where people are walking down the street. The Russians are not even trying to hide what they’re doing. They’ve allowed American TV reporters to film TOS-1 rocket launchers mounted on T-72 tank chassis as they cross the border into Ukraine on their way to Kharkiv. The only purpose of these rocket launchers is to fire thermobaric warheads.

The defenders of cities and countries under attack by invaders have only one order that they must follow: Defend their land and their homes and their country’s treasures at all costs, with their lives if necessary. Their orders contain no contradictions at all. The cities and their buildings and their cathedrals and their homes belong to them. That’s why they fight so hard, as the Ukrainians appear to be doing at this very moment. And that’s why almost every time the invaders end up being driven away. In Aleppo, that’s been going on for thousands of years. The people who live there today are descended from the ancient civilizations that defended the city from Hittites and Assyrians and Phrygians and Babylonians and Persians, and eventually the Macedonians and Byzantines. Now they are rebuilding their city, but if any lesson at all can be learned from history, they will one day be doing it again.

I’ve been watching the coverage of the war in Ukraine on MSNBC with great interest. One of the sharpest commentators has turned out to be Gen. David Petraeus, who had various commands in both Iraq and Afghanistan and was credited with the “surge” in Iraq that supposedly “won” that war, until it didn’t.

As a reporter in Iraq in 2003, I was embedded in the unit Petraeus commanded, the 101st Airborne Division, in Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. Mosul incorporates Nineveh, the ancient city that was first settled in 6000 B.C. and was the center of the Assyrian Empire around 2000 B.C. — yes, the same Assyrian Empire that included Aleppo. Mosul, which succeeded Nineveh, was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. and was conquered by other armies along the way. When I was with Petraeus and his division in 2003, they were only the latest in that very, very long line of conquerors.

Petraeus was helpful to me as a reporter. He gave me the run of the region his division had “taken,” including Mosul and Tal Afar and other towns his division “held.” After I had been there for a while, I discovered something curious. Neither Petraeus nor his brigade commanders — three very talented West Point colonels — seemed to know what they were doing there. They established various base camps, both large and small, their units drove around in Humvees and the commanders flew around in helicopters, but they weren’t really doing anything.

One day, when I was in Petraeus’ headquarters in a former Saddam Hussein palace in Mosul (where I had gone to take a shower, because the palace had hot water), I asked the general what he was doing in Mosul. The way I put the question was, “General, what were your orders before you left Baghdad for Mosul?” He gave me a blank look, as if he had never been asked that question before. I then asked him, “Were you ordered to ‘take Mosul,’ for example?” He again looked at me blankly. It wasn’t like I was asking him to divulge some top-secret piece of information. His entire division was up there in northern Iraq, right out in the open. The war was being widely covered on television and by newspapers. Everybody knew where the 101st Airborne was in Iraq. I was wondering what they were doing there, so I asked him a third time: “Were your orders, ‘Go to Mosul?'” He didn’t answer the question directly, but there was enough of a flicker of recognition on his face that I realized I had hit pretty close to the nub of it.

An entire American infantry division had been ordered to go to Mosul and not told what to do when they got there, other than to do what they were now doing, which was driving around and defending themselves from insurgent attacks, but basically occupying space. Being there. You might say they were engaged in the occupation of Mosul, but that wasn’t true, because you can’t occupy a city or a country unless you’ve conquered it, and that wasn’t what had happened with the 101st and Mosul.

Petraeus and his soldiers faced different reactions from the citizens of Mosul and northern Iraq. The Kurds were happy they were there. I visited a Kurdish unit at an outpost near the Turkish border, and they couldn’t have been nicer to the brigade commander I was with. They served us a lavish lunch and took us all around and showed us their fortifications and told us what they were doing. The Shiites were less happy, but they weren’t what you would call angry with Petraeus and his army, because they had been second-class citizens under Saddam and now that the Americans had come, they saw an opportunity to take over from the hated Baath Party of the Sunni tribes loyal to Saddam, who had run the country before the Americans got there. And then there were the former Baath party officials and Sunni commanders and soldiers of Saddam’s army. They weren’t happy at all, because they had been deposed from power, and they were probably the ones who were laying IEDs and shooting at American soldiers every time they got a chance.

And then it came to me: Petraeus and his division were waiting to be relieved by another American unit so they could go home. I soon discovered they were scheduled to return to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, about a month later. I asked who was coming to replace them and discovered it was a “Stryker” brigade from the 9th Infantry Division, which was downright astounding. Petraeus had about 30,000 troops spread over an area the size of Pennsylvania, and even he admitted he didn’t have a large enough force to occupy this area that was full of insurgents who were fighting his soldiers and killing them. And now a unit one-third the size of his division was coming in.

I asked one of the brigade commanders who gave that order, and he answered, “General Rove.” He was referring to Karl Rove, the Republican consultant who had run George W. Bush’s campaign and was now a senior adviser to the president. The sarcastic referral to Rove as a “general” was because everything coming out of Washington to the American forces in Iraq was being done with an eye to Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. Orders had come down for the 101st and other units in Iraq to lower their casualty rates, because dead American bodies weren’t exactly selling well to voters back home. Now “General Rove” was going to send a much smaller force into Mosul, perhaps in hopes that with fewer soldiers, they would suffer fewer casualties. Which was upside down and backward, of course, but then Rove wasn’t really a general, so how the hell would he know?

The story of Petraeus and the 101st was essentially the story of America’s war in Iraq. Units were sent over there and given tasks like occupying cities and training Iraq’s reconstituted army while suffering as few casualties as possible, which was a contradiction in terms because they were in a war. And then those units were sent back to the U.S. and replaced with new units, and so on and so on.

Petraeus returned several times on other missions, and then he was sent to solve the hellish situation the U.S. had gotten ourselves into by 2007 when it appeared to be losing the war. He came up with the “surge” that suppressed opposition for a time and lowered casualties, but it didn’t answer the question that I had way back in 2003, which was what the hell was America doing in Iraq?

Our military was also fighting a war in Afghanistan, and in 2010, Petraeus replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces there. By that time, the U.S. had been rather unsuccessfully occupying Afghanistan for almost 10 years — or doing something anyway.

McChrystal is the other commentator on MSNBC who seems to be on the ball about what is going on over in Ukraine, and it finally dawned on me why these two former American generals understand the situation so well: because they did the same thing to Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. played the role of Russia in those two countries, invading them and trying to occupy them with forces that were too small to accomplish the mission, just as the Russians have. Now Petraeus and McChrystal can sit at home in their studies with a clear understanding of the problems the Russians face in Ukraine — because they faced the same problems themselves. They had to deal with populations that didn’t want us there, and were bent on fighting us as fiercely as they could to drive us out. Iraqi and Afghan citizens who didn’t want us invading their countries fired RPGs at our vehicles. They set up ambushes to trap our convoys. They fired AK-47s at our soldiers and killed them.

We fought the insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, but neither Petraeus nor McChrystal nor the soldiers they commanded did what the Russians are doing in Ukraine: purposefully targeting civilians and civilian neighborhoods and hospitals and schools with thermobaric missiles and cluster bombs. But thousands of civilians were killed in both conflicts. The Watson Institute at Brown University has attempted to count civilian deaths in its “Costs of War” study. According to the institute, civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were caused by airstrikes, crossfire, IEDs, assassinations, bombings, night raids on suspected enemy positions, including civilian homes, and other causes. It is unknown how many civilian deaths are attributable to American forces, but the Watson Institute estimates that 71,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan and somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 were killed in Iraq.

When I was in Iraq, I saw the discipline involved in keeping American soldiers who were under attack every day by an enemy they couldn’t see from striking out indiscriminately against the neighborhoods from which hostile fire was coming. American forces made mistakes and civilians were killed, but they didn’t launch a campaign of terror against a civilian population the way the Russians appear to be doing in Ukraine.

The Russians invaded Ukraine without provocation, and they are attempting to subjugate and occupy it by attacking not just its army, but its entire population. You would think they would have learned from what happened to them in Afghanistan in 1980 when they were driven out of that country in abject defeat, and you would think they would have learned from the way the U.S. lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They obviously haven’t.

Petraeus and McChrystal understand exactly what’s going to happen to the Russians in Ukraine, because it’s the same thing that happened to our army in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians will end up being driven out of Ukraine by the people who live there, because the cities the invaders have been ordered to “take” belong to the people who are defending them. Like the Iraqis and the Afghans, the Ukrainians mean it, and that is why they will end up winning the war the Russians have brought to their country.

That is why the city of Mosul is still there and David Petraeus is gone, and it’s why Kabul is still there and Stanley McChrystal is gone. The citizens of Mosul and Kabul meant it when they told the Americans to get the hell out of their cities and go home. That’s why the city of Aleppo, damaged as it may be, is still there and will be rebuilt as it has been for thousands of years, and that’s why the Russians who bombed it are now bombing other cities in another country. Aleppo has been destroyed and rebuilt for millennia by the people who fought to defend it and those who are descended from the defenders of the past. One of the apparent lessons of history is that wars will never stop being fought over land that one group holds and another group wants.

Wars and the reasons they are fought are stupid because the people who order them are stupid, and that truth hasn’t changed for thousands of years. The Russian who ordered his army to “take” a neighboring country that doesn’t belong to him will end up in his dacha somewhere in the Ural, just as the American who ordered his army to “take” countries far from his shores has ended up on his ranch somewhere in Texas.

It’s always men, and they’re always egomaniacal and arrogant and stupid. History marches on and there are ruins to prove it that you can visit all around the world, including right here in the good old U.S. of A. Syria has Aleppo and we have Gettysburg, and soon Ukraine will have Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson.

Mark Cuban’s new pharmacy business and the future of drug pricing

In 2015, Martin Shkreli became the smirking face of drug company greed when, as founder and then-chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, he bought rights to the anti-parasitic medication Daraprim and then jacked up the price from $17.60 to $750 per pill. At the time, the drug was the only therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for toxoplasmosis, a disease that causes serious illness in people with weak immune systems, including babies born to mothers infected with the parasite and those with HIV.

For Alex Oshmyansky, an emergency radiologist, Shkreli’s move was what tipped him over the edge. Fresh out of his radiology fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, the young doctor had already seen patients grow sicker and even die because they couldn’t afford their medications. He vowed to become the anti-Shkreli by starting a company to sell vital drugs at or near cost.

Three years later, Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals had secured $1 million in funding. Shortly thereafter, Oshmyansky grabbed the attention of billionaire Mark Cuban. The Dallas Mavericks owner and one of the stars of the television show Shark Tank wound up going all in. In January, the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company opened shop online. The lofty aim, Cuban writes on the website, is “to disrupt the drug industry and to do our best to end ridiculous drug prices.”

The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company offers more than 100 generic drugs, which according the company, are priced at the costs of making them, plus a 15 percent markup and a $3 pharmacy fee. For someone without health insurance (which the company does not accept in the first place), or whose plan has high deductibles or copays, the savings can be dramatic. For example, the average wholesale price for a month’s worth of the cancer treatment imatinib (generic Gleevec) is $9,657, which you could cut to $120 with a coupon from the drug-tracking company GoodRx. Meanwhile, Cuban’s company offers a one-month supply for just $47.

Cuban and Oshmyanksy are not the first, nor the only ones taking on Big Pharma. In 2018, a group of health systems and philanthropists launched Civica Rx, a nonprofit that supplies hospitals with essential generic drugs. Today, the company sells about 55 medications to 1,400 hospitals at savings of about 30 percent compared to what they paid previously. The model has been so successful that the company is expanding into the consumer market with a new initiative, CivicaScript, which has partnered with Anthem and some Blue Cross insurance companies and expects to start selling drugs by mail order and through retail pharmacies later this year.

But David isn’t about to slay Goliath — at least not yet. That’s because by and large, name brand medications, not generics, drive high drug costs. While generics comprise 84 percent of the prescription medications sold in the U.S. by volume, they only account for 12 percent of spending, according to a recent report from the RAND corporation, a nonprofit policy think tank.

These new ventures, however innovative, only deal with a small set of generic drugs, said David Mitchell, president and founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, a national nonprofit patient organization. For this reason, Mitchell said, the new companies won’t help people like him. He has multiple myeloma, a sometimes deadly blood cancer, and the four drugs keeping him alive retail for about $935,000 per year. Although Mitchell is covered by Medicare, he still winds up spending $25,000 annually on medications and specialty drug insurance to help pay for them.

“This model is not the comprehensive solution to our drug pricing issues in the country,” said Mitchell.

Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, support the government’s stepping in to contain drug prices, but so far, legislative efforts have stalled. In this vacuum, a new breed of entrepreneurs are betting that free-market strategies that emphasize the public good over profit can make progress where politicians haven’t. While it’s no small thing to make even a small percentage of drugs more affordable for the people who need them, the real disruptive power of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company and Civica Rx is in demonstrating that it’s possible to challenge the health care industrial complex and live to tell the tale.

Americans pay more for brand-name drugs, said Mitchell, because unlike in other developed countries, the U.S. government doesn’t negotiate drug prices. Thanks to patents and exclusivity rights granted by the FDA, drug companies get to sell new products for about 12 to 16 years without competition from generic versions. In principle, this arrangement allows drugmakers to recoup R&D expenses, and sets an incentive for companies to develop new drugs. But during this monopoly period, drug makers are free to name their price, leading to rates that many advocates consider unacceptable. “We are price takers. And the drug industry has the power to be the price setters,” said Mitchell. “That’s why drugs are so expensive.”

In general, once generics hit the market, the competition drives prices down. But it doesn’t always work that way. Drugs for rare conditions such as certain cancers may not have enough of a market to interest many generic makers, for example. And when prices dip too low, some competitors drop out, leading to drug shortages and price hikes by remaining manufacturers.

Drug pricing typically works by using intermediary companies known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, to negotiate rebates for insurers and, in turn, keep a sizeable bounty. So, even though a PBM may negotiate 90 percent off the price of imatinib, employers and people with high-deductible plans still wind up paying about $3,200 monthly until their deductible is met — for a drug that costs about $35 to make, said Oshmyansky. The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company’s strategy is to eliminate these middlemen.

“It seems like a great deal. You got 90 percent off, but the number you got the price off is completely made up. And it’s crazy,” he said of the current system. “So, that’s how we’re able to get the price down to $47 for a month’s supply.”

Like the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, Civica Rx creates a direct route from the manufacturing facility to the customer. The company keeps the supply chain short, sourcing drugs from the U.S. where possible, and it negotiates directly with suppliers. (Both companies are also building their own drug manufacturing plants in the U.S.)

“The generic drug market traditionally functions like a commodity market, with prices fluctuating wildly and with a lot of middlemen entities negotiating prices,” said Allan Coukell, Senior Vice President of Public Policy at Civica Rx. By contrast, he said, Civica Rx’s pricing is transparent and the same for everyone. “There’s no discounts or rebates or negotiation on that; it’s as low as we can sustainably make it.”

However, to work with insurers and sell drugs through pharmacies, the new CivicaScript initiative will have to work through traditional channels, including PBMs, said Coukell. “We’re working with all of those entities, but in a way that will make sure that the drugs are not marked up unreasonably along the chain before they get to the patients.” To test the waters, they are starting small, with six to 10 high-priced generics.

Shannon Rotolo, a clinical pharmacy specialist at the University of Chicago Medicine, points out that neither of these ventures will help her patients who often require expensive specialty therapies for conditions such as cystic fibrosis, asthma, and lupus. And even for generic drugs, there are downsides to having to shop around, she said. “The risk of that is splitting up people’s pharmacies.” You lose the interaction with a pharmacist who knows you, has a list of all your medications, and can, say, call your doctor when you need a refill.

Further, Rotolo pointed out that Cuban’s company doesn’t take insurance, so the cost of the drugs won’t count toward a deductible. That could delay or prevent patients from getting to the point where they have better coverage for all their medications.

Rotolo helps patients find workarounds to try to make drug more affordable such using a drug-company coupon, getting financial assistance through a nonprofit organizations such as the Patient Access Network Foundation, or even bypassing insurance when the cash price is cheaper. “But it’s just an incredible burden on the patient,” she said. Like Oshmyansky, she’s grown tired of watching patients fight insurance companies and do without other necessities to get their medications. In her case, though, her experience has turned her into an advocate for a single-payer system.

In 2020 Rotolo co-founded Pharmacists for Single Payer, and she also works with other advocacy groups at the state and national level. “The appeal of a single-payer system from a pharmacy perspective, would be the idea of no copays, no deductibles, just knowing that the medication that patient needs is going to be covered without them having to worry about the cost,” she said.

Rotolo knows that a single-payer system is a longshot, but nonetheless with stories of people’s struggle to access health care during the pandemic rising up, she feels change coming. Her friends that work for health insurers or PBMs talk about how the status quo is just not a sustainable model, she said. “And they kind of are starting to think of it as like a rush to make all the money before it all crashes.”

“A lot of observers are unhappy with the status quo,” said economist Murray Ross, director for the Institute for Health Policy at Kaiser Permanente. “You know, it would be nice if we could wave a magic wand, fix the patent process, create competitive markets, et cetera.” But that’s just not possible in the short run, he said. Instead, reform may advance incrementally through both the free market and legislation like the Build Back Better Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representative, but is stalled in the U.S. Senate.

Kaiser hospitals have benefited from a cheaper, more consistent supply of generic insulin, blood pressure drugs, and other vital medications after contracting with Civica Rx, Ross said. As for brand-name drugs, reforms such as those in the Build Back Better Act might help — for instance, allowing the federal government to negotiate prices for some high-cost drugs covered under Medicare and limit price increases on some drugs to the rate of inflation.

The reforms currently on the table don’t go as far as patient advocate David Mitchell would like, but he said just giving the government any power to negotiate pricing is an important step. “And that’s frequently the way large reforms happen,” said Mitchell. “They don’t happen all in one fell swoop. You pass a law that makes a change, and then you build on it.”

It’s worth noting that even in the current no-holds-barred market, greed doesn’t always win. In January, a federal court ruled in favor of the Federal Trade Commission and seven states, finding that as head of Vyera Pharmaceuticals (formerly Turing Pharmaceuticals), Martin Shkreli broke state and federal laws in stifling competition to maintain his monopoly on Daraprim. The judge ordered Shkreli, who is currently serving out a seven-year sentence for securities fraud in an unrelated case, to pay the plaintiffs nearly $65 million and banned him from the pharmaceutical industry for life.

Meanwhile, Oshmyanksy is continuing to plunk stones at the pharmaceutical behemoth with his slingshot. While he hasn’t yet caused any real pain, he has revealed the middlemen in the drug pricing scheme as a point of vulnerability. And he plans to take aim at the brand-name market where, as with ultra-high-cost generics, a disproportionate amount of the revenue goes to intermediaries rather than to the people making the drugs. If those stones land, they are likely to hurt.

“I don’t think we’ll have the same order-of-magnitude differences as we go over to those drugs,” he said. “But I think to some extent, we’ll be able to impact those prices as well.”

But can that strategy truly take down an entrenched and extraordinarily profitable market? “People ask me all the time, ‘Well, why are you trying to do all this? Isn’t it better to advocate for policy change?'” said Oshmyansky. As a radiologist from central Montana, he said he has no power to sway Congress. “But I can make cheap medicine. I can just do that.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Confirmed: Russia dropped cluster bombs on Kharkiv

Russian forces used cluster bombs during attacks on Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv in what may amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said Friday.

“Using cluster munitions in populated areas shows a brazen and callous disregard for people’s lives,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.

The new assessment of Monday strikes on Kharkiv, an eastern city home to over 1.4 million people, is based on photos and video evidence verified by the human rights group and was presented as Russia faces increasing global condemnation over its ongoing invasion, which has stoked fears of nuclear disaster and has already forced over one million people to flee Ukraine.

HRW already confirmed last week use of cluster munitions by Russian forces in a February 24 strike just outside a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Vuhledar. The new assessment focuses on munitions that hit the Moskovskyi, Shevchenkivskyi, and Industrialnyi districts of Kharkiv on February 28.

The rights group—which noted the “inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions and their foreseeable effects on civilians”—based its new assessment on interviews with two witnesses and an analysis of 40 videos and photographs, which revealed information on explosion signatures and remnants of the rockets.

The munitions used in the Kharkiv strikes, said HRW, were delivered by Russian-made 9M55K Smerch cluster munition rockets.

NEW: Russian forces fired cluster munitions into at least three residential areas of Kharkiv, #Ukraine’s second largest city, on February 28, 2022. The use of these weapons might constitute a war crime. https://t.co/S7cgZFAifn pic.twitter.com/rMubla6C1a

— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) March 4, 2022

Over 120 nations have signed on to an international treaty banning the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, which can pose deadly harm far beyond initial explosions, as unexploded submitions becoming akin to landmines. The Cluster Munition Caolition describes the weapons as being able to “saturate an area up to the size of several football fields.”

Neither Russia, Ukraine, nor the U.S., however, is state party to the treaty.

“We are seeing mounting evidence of indiscriminate attacks on Kharkiv and the price civilians are paying for these serious violations,” said HRW’s Goose.

“If these deadly acts were carried out either intentionally or recklessly,” he added, “they would be war crimes.”

The head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also said Friday that Russian forces have used cluster bombs in its attacks on Ukraine.

“We have seen the use of cluster bombs and we have seen reports of use of other types of weapons which would be in violation of international law,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters.

Amnesty International has also previously confirmed Russian forces’ use of cluster bombs on Ukraine, and open source investigative outlet Bellingcat has also been tracking Russia’s use of the weapons during the invasion.

In a Wednesday statement, the U.K. presidency of the Convention on Cluster Munitions expressed “grave” concern about reports of Russia using the weapons in strikes on Ukraine, noting that cluster bombs “have had a devastating impact on civilians in many conflict areas.”

The Cluster Munition Coalition, in a Wednesday tweet, said, “We welcome the growing number of states speaking out on—and urge all states to condemn—the unacceptable use of cluster munitions by Russian forces in Ukraine.”

Republican QAnon supporter praises Putin’s decisions

In Delaware, the most famous Democrat is President Joe Biden, who commutes between the White House and his home in that heavily Democratic state. Delaware’s most famous — or infamous — Republican, meanwhile, is far-right Christian nationalist and QAnon supporter Lauren Witzke, who drew widespread condemnation in late February when she praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a symbol of Christian piety. But Witzke’s praise of Putin is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to her extremism and her ability to embarrass the state of Delaware.

During an appearance on the Christian Right program “Cross Talk,” the 34-year-old native of Delmar, Delaware — who suffered a landslide defeat when she ran against Sen. Chris Coons in Delaware’s 2020 U.S. Senate race — made it clear that she supports Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP's candidate for Senate in 2020, has nothing but praise for Putin and "his Christian nationalist nation": "I identify more with Putin's Christian values than I do with Joe Biden." pic.twitter.com/oQ2nhlVGCR

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 24, 2022

The QAnon Republican said, “Russia is a Christian nationalist nation…. I actually support Putin’s right to protect his people and always put his people first, but also, protect our Christian values. I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.”

Witzke went on to say, “Christian nationalist countries also are a threat to the global regime — like, the Luciferian regime that wants to mash everything together. But Putin takes care of his people. He looks out for his people.”

Witzke’s comments were slammed by everyone from Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison to Rep. Eric Swalwell of California to Mother Jones’ David Corn, who pointed out that the Delaware GOP “fully supported” her.

Indeed, Delaware Republicans passionately rallied around Witzke when she received the GOP nomination in the state’s 2020 U.S. Senate race. Democrats had their share of disappointments in 2020, losing U.S. Senate races in Maine, Iowa and North Carolina. But Coons, running against Witzke, was reelected by 22%. Nominating someone as extreme as Witzke did not serve Delaware Republicans well.

"I actually support Putin's right to protect his people."
This bigoted, Christian nationalist backs Putin. It's quite deplorable. And a reminder: the GOP in Delaware fully supported her. https://t.co/9ycDdHZzJs

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) February 24, 2022

.@GOPChairwoman this is your party. Are these the Christian values your Senate candidate apparently identify with? #FraudFearFascism https://t.co/jeyCzvJjGG pic.twitter.com/3Fmfu9cpz8

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) February 25, 2022

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the new Republican Party.

Absolutely appalling. https://t.co/W18TsIjrTe

— Eleven Films (@ElevenFilms) February 25, 2022

More Republicans rooting for Russia. Is there a single Reagan Republican who will denounce this? Or is this the new Republican Party? My comments are open. Courage is welcome. https://t.co/WMrjWoIhyM

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) February 24, 2022

Witzke gave Coons’ reelection campaign a wealth of material to use against her. She happily accepted the endorsement of White nationalist Nick Fuentes, praised the violent Proud Boys as examples of “patriotic masculinity,” called for a ten-year ban on all immigration to the United States, described Black Lives Matter as “violent terrorists,” proudly said she was a “Christian nationalist,” and called Coons a “Christian-hating baby killer.”

Witzke is vehemently anti-gay and anti-trans, and she has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory — which claims that the United States’ federal government has been taken over by an international cabal of pedophiles, child sex traffickers, Satanists and cannibals and that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 to fight the cabal. QAnon also believes that R&B superstar Beyoncé isn’t really Black, but is only pretending to be Black and is really an Italian woman named Ann Marie Lastrassi who works for billionaire Democrat George Soros.

Delaware Republicans had options other than Witzke in 2020, when she ran against former U.S. Marine James DeMartino in the state’s GOP U.S. Senate primary. But Witzke slammed the conservative DeMartino as a RINO (Republican In Name Only). Although the Delaware GOP endorsed DeMartino during the primary, Delaware Republicans gave Witzke the nomination and got behind her in the general election — which wasn’t enough to save her from losing badly to Coons.

In 2022, Witzke continues to make the Delaware Republican Party look bad every chance she gets — and when she praised Putin during its invasion of Ukraine, Witzke did exactly that.

New study reveals that drinking can shrink your brain

Just in time for the weekend, a new study reveals that daily consumption of alcohol can considerably degrade a person’s brain over time. The study, published today in the journal Nature, provides data indicating that people who drank a pint of beer, or a 6-oz glass of wine on a daily basis over a month long sample period had brains that appeared to be two years older than those who only drank half a beer during that time.

“It’s not linear. It gets worse the more you drink,” first author of the study Remi Daviet, an assistant professor of marketing in the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement included in a report by CNN.

Alcohol researcher Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington weighed in on the study saying “a problem in this study is that they only have information on people’s drinking habits for the one year prior to the (brain) imaging,” adding “I think this is a major limitation of the study as it’s likely that the cumulative consumption of alcohol throughout one’s lifetime is associated with the brain, not just the level of consumption right before the images were taken.”

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The study categorizes heavy alcohol consumption as being three or more drinks a day for women, and four or more drinks a day for men, further showing that consumption at these levels caused reductions in both white and gray matter of the brain, essentially giving the appearance of a 3.5 year age acceleration.

The data for the study was pulled from 36,000 people which study coauthor Gideon Nave, an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania commented is “by far the largest investigation of the topic.”

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The mystery behind McDonald’s consistently broken ice cream machines

A small company named Kytch is going toe to toe with McDonald’s in relation to their consistently broken ice cream machines. So now you may find yourself waiting even longer for that ice cream cone you’ve been craving.

On Tuesday the company filed a $900 million lawsuit against the fast-food chain that will play out in a Delaware federal court. In a 133-page court filing, Kytch claims that McDonald’s disparaged them in relation to a device they developed that repairs ice cream machines.

According to a report by The Hill, Jeremy O’Sullivan and Melissa Nelson, founders of Kytch, started the company to “resolve issues with McDonald’s ice cream machines.” Kytch claims that a company called Taylor, which manufactures the ice cream machines used by McDonald’s, have a “lucrative scheme” going for themselves in that they own the exclusive rights to repair the machines. Kytch also believes that the company that makes the ice cream machines profits off of the malfunctions somehow.

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In 2019 Kytch developed a device called the Kytch Solution that allows for remote monitoring and repair of the ice cream machines, and won an endorsement from the National Restaurant Association. But the company’s grievance is that they feel as though McDonald’s and Taylor “ran false advertisements claiming the Kytch Solution was unsafe,” because it was an interest of theirs to eventually develop a similar device of their own, according to the lawsuit document.

“Kytch brings this action to set the record straight, to vindicate the company’s rights under civil law, to curb McDonald’s anti-competitive conduct, to recover compensatory and punitive damages, to protect the consuming public from false and misleading advertisements, and to finally fix McDonald’s broken soft-serve machines,” the company says in the court filing. They further that “the damage to Kytch was instant and monumental,” and that “McDonald’s unlawful conduct had dire financial consequences for Kytch, its founders, investors, and its employees.”

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Sebastian Stan on the twisted psyche of his “Fresh” role: “What he is seeking is a willing partner”

In Hulu’s stylish thriller “Fresh,” Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) meets Steve (Sebastian Stan), a charming reconstructive surgeon, over Cotton Candy grapes in a supermarket one night. They end up going out on a date a few days later and have a wonderful time. So wonderful, in fact, that Noa agrees to go away for the weekend with Steve. However, that night he reveals a secret that puts a damper on their budding relationship.

“Fresh” is about the horrors of modern dating, but to be clear, director Mimi Cave’s debut is a horror film. And it depicts some pretty gruesome stuff in rather vivid ways. It is perhaps best for audiences to discover the gory details. Cave generates some real tension as Noa and Steve negotiate their relationship, which hits a few snags.

Stan and Edgar-Jones chatted with Salon about their new film, their worst dates, and said some things they probably don’t want us to know.

Let’s start with an icebreaker. What was your worst date ever?

Sebastian Stan: Daisy!

Daisy Edgar-Jones: Me! Oh, Gosh. [Laughs] I’m trying to think. I haven’t been on many dates, which is actually quite sad. There was one where it was my fault it was bad. I was trying to be quirky. I suggested we go watch “Puss in Boots,” the “Shrek” spin-off, and we were way too old for that. We didn’t go on a second date.

Stan: I’ve been lucky, or just not gone on a lot of dates. Or been on a date, and discovered mid-date, that it was a date.

Edgar-Jones: I’ve done that!

Sebastian, Steve has charms, looks, and is very seductive. How did you lean into being smoothly sinister? I kept hoping that you aren’t this guy.

Stan: There was a lot to the script that I felt was unpredictable, and when I was reading it, I kept getting mixed feelings about how to feel and particularly what was happening with Steve. I thought that was a good thing. You should have this weird ambivalence at times. The connection at the beginning between him and Noa has to land. It was trying to understand how much of that was a set up, and how much of it was true? The line gets blurry to some extent.

She’s leaving a couple of other experiences behind and that make her vulnerable. But I envision Noa as being aware and intelligent, because those are the qualities that enable her. Because of their genuine connection, that made me wonder how much of this guise is he putting on, and how much truth is behind it? A lot of that makes him vulnerable to her in a way.

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jojo T. Gibbs in “Fresh” (Searchlight Pictures)

Daisy, Noa is vulnerable and yet, determined to survive. We root for you as we feel your pain. Can you talk about playing both the victim and the heroine? How did you calibrate your performance?

Edgar-Jones: I thought that was a really cool part of the film. When we first meet Noa, we might underestimate her. Given the situation she gets into, we might not think she can survive, but she discovers this real inner strength through this experience; perhaps she never knew she had that. I find that a curious thing — this coming-of-age. It is through her friendship with Penny (Andrea Bang) and the strength Mollie (Jojo T. Gibbs) gives her that she overcomes her situation. It was fun to play someone who didn’t know who she was.

Sebastian, what is the appeal of this character? Steve is very different from your more noble work in “The Last Full Measure.”

Stan: I did that film because I don’t often get cast in those [hero] roles. I have something to do with that [image] and should take responsibility for that. I want to explore stories and characters that scare me or that make me uncomfortable or cause me to go research and learn something from. I think all life is complex and flawed, and all humans are, to some extent — obviously in this film, in an extreme way. It’s just that duality that we all can fall for – and this movie shines a light on that – is attractive and scary, and unpacking that is interesting.

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Daisy, do you think “Fresh” is feminist? I find it interesting that films like this and Julia Ducournau‘s “Raw” are made by women! The women in the film have agency, but they are abused physically and verbally. It shows the microaggressions and sexism women experience with dating and in life in general.

Edgar-Jones: The fact that it is a story where women save themselves, is a celebration of female friendship you don’t often see on screen. The true love story of the film is between Mollie and Noa and their collective experience. They give each other the agency to overcome their situation. When Mollie says about [another female character in the film], “It’s women like you who are the problem,” that is because there are so many women who stand by and enable toxic behavior instead of working together to pull each other up. I love that aspect of it, and that female filmmakers are excited to take this genre and tropes that we are used to seeing and tell them from a different angle is really exciting.

Sebastian Stan and Daisy Edgar-Jones in “Fresh” (Searchlight Pictures)Can you both talk about playing the more physical scenes?

Stan: I think the goal was to keep it as grounded as possible. There is humor in the film, and an awareness to the film as well. But that also meant grounding the violence and make it plausible. How would you react in that situation — what would you do? Daisy runs through 17 emotions, a range of disbelief and anger to how is this happening, to denial and eventual acceptance of some sort and then, on the other hand, they are both injured in various ways. It can’t be a full-blown, fast and furious fight scene.

Edgar-Jones: That fight scene with Steve is so brilliantly done because it is so scrappy and messy. None of them have been in this situation before. It was so chaotic and that was fun trying to plot injuries and the stages of healing. That was a challenge for sure.

The film has a metaphor that you give yourself over to someone completely. How do you read the film’s allegory?

Stan: Wrapping my mind around that was very difficult but in context and looking at our story, and the connection between Steve and Noa in the film, what ultimately would make Steve ultimately vulnerable to her? He’s been successful at this for a while. This particular woman cuts through that and sets him off balance. What was it about Noa? What was the connection? Every audience member is going to have a different view of it. I think, to some extent, that she understands that what he is seeking is a willing partner. That is the psychology that allows her to break out.

Edgar-Jones: She sees that is his weak spot and manages to manipulate him with that — it’s her quick thinking — and that’s how she convinces him [to trust her]. The allegory on the way we consume women in society is interesting and that we can be commodities and stripped down to our physical worth and nothing deeper.

Stan: And the entitlement on the men’s part, and the expectation. A lot of it has to with our upbringing in a societal narrative that has been told for far too long. This blind idealism of “I’m the knight in shining armor, so I can get away with things.” It flips that on its head. I responded to that. I think that’s a flawed narrative, the idea of wrapping things up in a bow. Don’t get me wrong, I love romantic comedies, so it’s not to take away from that at all. We need rom-coms for hope — but at the same time as we have hope, we should also have other stories, that continue to challenge, that offer another perspective, so we don’t just get one version of things.

To ask a question asked in the film: Can you tell me something you don’t want me to know?

Edgar-Jones: [Laughs] I like what you did there! Oh, my goodness. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.

Stan: None of us put on deodorant this morning and we’re quietly regretting it. Ok? That actually came from me asking someone I was into one time that question. Again, we put such versions of ourselves forward at the beginning. What don’t I want you to know? I have fasted all day and I’m not sure why. I just realized I haven’t eaten anything. I’m just thinking of having this great banana almond butter honey sandwich. I just didn’t want to appear hungry, but I am.

Edgar-Jones: I did just eat a Snickers. [brandishes wrapper and smiles].

Are you a vegetarian, or were you during the film?

Stan: Ironically, during the film I didn’t really eat meat and I didn’t for a while after the film.

“Fresh” is now available on Hulu. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

More stories to check out

Do I need to store grapes in the fridge?

When you want a refreshing snack, grab a bunch of grapes. When you need to dress up a cheese board with something full and fancy, grab a bunch of grapes. When you’re staging your house and need to fill a fruit bowl on your kitchen island because that’s what the Property Brothers do, grab a bunch of grapes. Needless to say, table grapes are always good to have on hand. But what’s the best way to store grapes so that they stay plump and are ready to eat at a moment’s notice?

Pick up a big bunch of grapes — red or green, seedless or not — from the grocery store and you’ll find that they generally come in a perforated plastic bag. Handy for toting in and out of your cart? Yes. Environmentally friendly? Not so much. Despite the fact that grapes are often displayed on tiered shelves, or in a big basket, they should be refrigerated in the crisper drawer to extend their shelf life. You can keep the grapes in the original plastic packaging or ditch it if you happen to own a fancy porcelain fruit basket (let me know if you do, I’m on the hunt).

Whereas my skin only looks better with a thick layer of overpriced gel moisturizer, that’s not exactly true of fruit. Like other types of berries, any excess moisture can cause table grapes to get moldy and deteriorate more quickly so store them unwashed. When you’re ready for a juicy snack, wash your grapes and pop ’em in your mouth, one right after the other.

To avoid odor absorption, do not store grapes next to onions or leeks or garlic or your three-day-old General Tso’s chicken. And it may seem obvious, but the California Table Grape Commission, which yes, is a real society that exists, reminds grape lovers to avoid storing these precious gems with plenty of room to space. That means not squishing them in your crisper drawer with a bunch of celery, a few pounds of apples, a bushel of carrots, and a vine full of tomatoes.

How to store broccoli so it actually stays crisp

A firm, vibrant head of broccoli is a thing of beauty. Just looking at it in my fridge makes me feel like my hair is shinier, skin is glowier, and my gut is healthier. (That’s how vegetable consumption works, right?). But a limp bunch of fresh broccoli is me on my worst day — dull, tangled hair, dry skin, stained grey sweatsuit, the whole nine yards. Which is to say, no one should have to interact with sad, soft broccoli.

So how do you avoid the latter? It’s as simple as storing fresh broccoli properly! This means that when you bring fresh broccoli home from the farmers’ market or grocery store, don’t just throw it in the back of your fridge, no matter how tired and desperate you are to just collapse on the couch and turn on Netflix. Treat broccoli like a beautiful bouquet of flowers sent from a secret admirer. Fill a glass or small pitcher with ice water and place the entire stalk of broccoli in the water. There’s no need to cover it — broccoli requires air circulation so that it can breathe, so let it all hang out.

The other way to store broccoli is by loosely wrapping the broccoli stems in damp paper towels. Although this method is slightly less eco-friendly, it helps to ensure that the dark green veggie is getting the hydration it needs. Just be sure that the paper towels aren’t soaking wet; any excess moisture will cause the broccoli to get moldy quickly. Consume fresh broccoli within three days; after that, it’ll start to become limp and no one wants that.

How to store frozen broccoli

To extend the shelf life even further, freeze broccoli. To do this, cut the broccoli into florets and quickly blanch it in a pot of boiling water. After a couple of minutes, transfer the broccoli to a prepared ice bath, which will immediately stop the cooking and preserve the dark green color. Pat the cooked broccoli dry with a paper towel or dish towel to absorb the excess water. Transfer the broccoli to an airtight container or sealed bag and lay it flat on a shelf in the freezer for up to three months. While it’s not unsafe to eat frozen broccoli after a few months, its quality will start to deteriorate a bit and it may get freezer burn.

Gun deaths increased 11% as a result of “Stand Your Ground” laws, study finds

So-called “stand your ground” laws are associated with hundreds of additional homicides each year in the United States, according to new research conducted by public health scholars, who say that these laws “should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths.”

Published Monday in “JAMA Network Open,” a peer-reviewed medical journal, the study compares homicide trends in roughly two dozen states that enacted stand-your-ground (SYG) laws between 2000 and 2016 with patterns from 18 states that didn’t have such laws during the study period.

Researchers found that SYG laws were associated with an “abrupt and sustained” 8% to 11% national increase in monthly firearm homicide rates, causing an extra 58 to 72 deaths per month. “This monthly increase alone exceeds total rates of homicides in most Northern and Western European countries today,” wrote the authors.

The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws, with upticks ranging from 16.2% to 33.5% in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Missouri.

However, SYG laws were not associated with significant changes in firearm homicide rates in Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia.

Researchers acknowledged that “SYG laws alone may not be sufficient in explaining increases in homicide.”

“Understanding the factors shaping these differential associations between states, such as regions endorsing the use of self-protective violence, existing state firearm legislation, and firearm availability, is key to understanding how and why legally expanding the right to use deadly violence in public is associated with increases in homicides in some states but not others,” they continued.

According to the study:

“Stand your ground” (SYG) laws, also known as shoot first laws, overwrite the common law principle of a “duty to retreat,” creating the possibility for individuals to use deadly force in self-defense in public as a first, rather than last, resort. Florida was the first state to enact an SYG law by statute in 2005, and then 23 states enacted SYG laws soon after, between 2006 and 2008.

Advocates claim that SYG laws enhance public safety by deterring predatory crime through an increased threat of retaliatory violence. Critics, on the other hand, argue that the laws are unnecessary, and may threaten public safety by emboldening the use of deadly violence in public encounters in which violence and injury that could have safely been avoided. There are also concerns that the laws exacerbate social inequalities in experiencing violent crime, since implicit and explicit biases of threat perception discriminate against and cause disproportionate harms among minority groups, such as Black people. Anecdotally, critics’ concerns have been realized in an increasing number of shootings of young Black men (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Markeis McGlockton) where self-defense has been claimed. These high-profile incidents underline the controversy surrounding SYG laws and have served to galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement.

David Humphreys, an associate professor at the University of Oxford and one of the paper’s authors, told the “Washington Post” that proponents of SYG laws argue that they have “some protective effect on public safety and deterring violence.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any evidence to show that and, you know, we only seem to see the opposite effect,” he added.

The paper states that even though “the enactment of SYG laws was not associated with significant change in violent deaths in all states, there was no evidence that SYG laws were associated with decreases in homicide or firearm homicide.”

“The accumulation of evidence established in this and other studies point to harmful outcomes associated with SYG laws,” researchers pointed out. “Despite this, SYG laws have now been enacted in most states, and the uptake of new SYG bills continues to be popular, unnecessarily risking lives.”

“Although the uptake was initially concentrated in the South, by 2021, 30 states had enacted SYG laws, and this number continues to increase as a raft of ongoing bills make their way through state legislatures,” noted the authors. “Fourteen states currently having SYG bills under active consideration.”

Trump judge saves Madison Cawthorn, strikes down challenge against his election eligibility

A federal judge on Friday struck down a legal challenge against Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., who a group of North Carolina voters argued was ineligible for re-election due to his apparent role in fomenting the January 6 Capitol riot.

The decision was handed down by Judge Richard Myers, a Trump-appointee in the eastern district of North Carolina, who rubber stamped Cawthorn’s request for a preliminary injunction against the petitioners.

Myers is a member of two conservative advocacy groups, including the Federalist Society and the National Rifle Association. He also serves as a faculty advisor for the Christian Legal Society, whose members profess to be “dedicated to serving Jesus Christ through the practice and study of law.”

The case originally stems from a lawsuit filed by a group of voters and advocacy groups back in January, alleging that Cawthorn should be disqualified from re-election over his conduct before and during the Capitol insurrection.

In the leadup to the insurrection, Cawthorn encouraged his followers to “lightly threaten” their representatives if they didn’t validate Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. The conservative firebrand also made an appearance at the “Stop the Steal” rally, held just hours before the riot, where he blasted Republicans for “not fighting” hard enough. When the rioters had finally made their way inside the House chamber, Cawthorn appeared to be brimming with pride over Twitter, writing gleefully that “the battle is on the house floor.”

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The lawsuit, now all but dead, hangs its hat on the 14th Amendment’s “disqualification clause,” which prohibits any officeholders who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” from holding a seat in government.

I’m fighting a battle for our Constitution on the house floor with other patriots. The battle is on the house floor, not in the streets of D.C.

— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) January 6, 2021

But in a countersuit filed in February, Cawthorn’s lawyers argued that the Amnesty Act of 1872 – which allowed ex-Confederates to serve in office after the Civil War – effectively validates Cawthorn’s re-election bid. In fact, that law only applied to ex-Confederates – not future insurrectionists, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern noted.

Still, Myers sided with Cawthorn’s abstruse logic, claiming that “we are at a moment in which interest in free and fair elections is at its peak.” The judge added that he felt too responsible for protecting “the soapbox … the ballot box … and the jury box … And when those fail, that’s when people proceed to the ammunition box.”

Rob Fein, the legal director of Free Speech For People, which is representing the voters who filed the suit against Cawthorn, has called for the decision to be appealed.

“This ruling, by Chief Judge Richard Myers II, a Trump appointee, is wrong on the law and would block the State Board of Elections from determining whether Cawthorn is ineligible under the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause of the US Constitution,” he said in a statement. “The ruling must be reversed on appeal, and the right of voters to bring this challenge to Cawthorn’s eligibility must be preserved.

How sunflowers became a symbol of resistance across Ukraine and its allies

Before February, not many of us have thought much about the sunflower, with its broad head and vibrant petals, despite its appealing and yes, “sunny” appearance. As part of flower arrangements, they add a pop of brightness and can stand tall. We use its seeds as a healthy snack, to top our salads for a bit of protein-rich crunch or to make a creamy “sunshine sauce.” But now, the humble daisy has taken on new meaning.

But as Ukraine’s national flower, the sunflower has turned into a symbol of resistance amongst Ukrainians and their allies amid Russia’s full-scale military invasion. Rows of sunflowers line barricades at the Russian embassy in London. Protesters worldwide hold the flower’s long stems in their hands, add them to lapels, even decorate their dog’s collars. Packets of sunflower seeds are being distributed for free at Beaver Dam Farms in Virginia.

Along with Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag, the sunflower emoji is now a common sight across social media, notably accompanying Twitter handles and personal bios to show support.

The first lady Jill Biden has also made her solidarity with the unitary republic clear. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Biden wore a mask adorned with a sunflower on Monday and later sported a sunflower on the sleeve of her dress during President Biden’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday.

Sunflowers are widely adored in Ukraine, but the newfound meaning behind them arose after a viral video showcased the sheer courage of one Ukrainian civilian. Salon takes a closer look at the video and the flower’s historical significance to explain how a national flower transformed into a symbol of protest.

The origins of sunflowers in Ukraine

Sunflowers were cultivated in North America around 3000 BC and then were introduced to Eastern Europe much later, around the 1500s. Tsar Peter the Great is credited for the popular cultivation of the plant in the 18th century, according to the National Sunflower Association. The “sunny” cultivars found a new home in Ukraine and flourished in the country’s hot-dry climate and nutrient dense soil. The locals were also quite fond of the flowers after learning that the Orthodox Church permitted sunflower oil during Lent.

According to a blog post published by the MIR tour-company, sunflowers “in folk imagery represent the warmth and power of the sun, which was worshipped by pre-Christian Slavs.” The flowers celebrated “energy, life and well-being” and stood for “fertility and unity.” Sunflowers were oftentimes woven into wreaths for girls during celebrations and embroidered on fabric and clothes. This is because the flowers were believed to protect “the wearer against evil spirits, bad fortune and illness,” per the Russian Flora Blog.

The sunflower became further embedded in Ukraine’s identity when the Church didn’t ban its oil for Lent.During the early 19th century, sunflowers were mass produced across the country, primarily for consumption. Sunflower seeds fried in oil and coated with salt were — and still are — a popular snack along with halwa, a soft confection made with the plant’s seed and oil.

The flowers also tout incredible scientific properties. According to the Athens Science Observer, sunflowers are “a hyperaccumulator of dangerous heavy metals,” which means they can draw out metal toxins from the soil and clear up environmental contamination. Shortly after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, sunflowers were widely grown to extract cesium-137 and strontium-90, the two most common toxins found at the site.

In 1996, top defense officials from the U.S., Russia and Ukraine scattered sunflower seeds in a field at the Pervomaysk missile base in southern Ukraine to mark the country’s complete nuclear disarmament.

“It is altogether fitting that we plant sunflowers here at Pervomaysk to symbolize the hope we all feel at seeing the sun shine through again,” said Defense Secretary William J. Perry that day.

That viral video about sunflower seeds

On Feb. 24, sunflowers entered the world’s consciousness thanks to a video clip first posted by Ukraine World. In the brief clip, a Ukrainian woman is seen challenging a heavily armed Russian soldier, insisting he pocket a handful of sunflower seeds so that they’ll grow when he’s killed on Ukrainian terrain.

Ukrainian woman confronts Russian soldiers in Henychesk, Kherson region. Asks them why they came to our land and urges to put sunflower seeds in their pockets [so that flowers would grow when they die on the Ukrainian land] pic.twitter.com/ztTx2qK7kB

— UkraineWorld (@ukraine_world) February 24, 2022

According to translations provided by BBC News, the woman is told to go away after she asked the soldier who he was. She doesn’t stop there however and asks the soldier if he was Russian, to which he replies with a simple “yes.”

“So what the f**k are you doing here?” she asks furiously. The soldier dismisses her question once again.

“You are occupants, you are fascists!,” she says. “What the f**k are you doing on our land with all these guns? Take these seeds and put them in your pockets, so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”

The soldier warns her to not escalate the situation.

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“What situation? Guys, guys. Put the sunflower seeds in your pockets, please,” she repeated. “You will lie down here with the seeds. You came to my land. Do you understand? You are occupiers. You are enemies. And from this moment, you are cursed. I’m telling you.”

“Last Week Tonight” revisted the video on Sunday’s episode, earning words of support from John Oliver:

“Good for her! Good for her! Let’s just recognize for a second how ice cold that insult is. That is f**king brutal. That woman brought seeds to a gunfight and somehow still comfortably won.”

[CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly compressed the timeline of cultivation for the sunflower. This has been corrected.]

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A bizarre Martian rock looks just like coral — but formed geologically. Here’s how

It looks like a flower, or maybe a chunk of undersea coral — but scientists assert it is not, nor has ever been, alive.

NASA’s Curiosity rover, currently cruising around Mars, captured an image of this tiny red “crystal” mineral deposit, which is just two-fifths of an inch wide. Though shaped like a sea sponge or fungus, the newly-dubbed Blackthorn Salt is comprised of minerals that exist after Martian rocks interacted with water long ago. By definition, this makes the Blackthorn Salt a diagenetic feature, or one that occurs after sediment is turned sedimentary rock. These which can be round or dendritic (branched) like the Blackthorn Salt.

“We’ve seen diagenetic features with similar shapes before,” Dr. Abigail Fraeman, a planetary scientist and deputy project scientist for the Curiosity rover, told Live Science, “but this dendritic shape is particularly beautiful.”

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Curiosity itself is a car-size rover more than six feet tall and with a seven foot arm that stretches toward rocks with the tools NASA scientists need in order to examine them. It can also bring rocks, soil and even air on board and study them directly on the rover itself. Curiosity is currently exploring Gale crater, which is 96 miles wide in diameter and can be found on the southeastern section of the planet. The central peak of Gale is Aeolis Mons, an 18,000 foot mountain. Curiosity is going to explore both that mountain and the nearby region.

Martian geology has surprised scientists before. Last year the scientists behind the Perseverance rover were baffled when they use a drill to extract rock samples and came back empty-handed. Although they could confirm that they had indeed drilled into the rock, they could not figure out why samples had not been collected — until they determined that their drilling had likely caused the rock to crumble into “small fragments.” In other words, they had unintentionally pulverized the very materials they had hoped to study until they became an essentially useless powder.

As for people hoping that the Blackthorn Salt was actually proof of Martian life: Scientists now believe that if life does exist on Mars (or if it did previously), it would almost certainly be microscopic — no land-roving, multicellular Martian dinosaurs.

“I think the first thing to keep in mind in our expectations for life on Mars is that it’s probably microbial,” Dr. Woodward Fischer, a professor of geobiology at Caltech, told Salon last year. While they might have left a fossil record, it will not be as easy to detect as the existence of dinosaurs on Earth. Indeed, two NASA scientists claimed in 1996 that they accidentally found a fossilize microbe while looking through a Martian rock at over 100,000 time magnification. Although their assertion is controversial, it remains the most concrete case for life on Mars ever discovered. The fossilized object had many structures that indicate it came from a once-living microorganism. These include grains formed by pyrite, made from iron and sulfur, and which were nearly pure. The only known way to produce such pure crystals is through the biological processes inside the bodies of bacteria.

“When it comes to microbes, there is a fossil record, but it’s much more subtle and it’s much more nuanced,” Fischer explained, since microbes express their diversity through their metabolism rather than their shape or form. As such, scientists seeking proof that life once existed on Mars are not going to seek out the same things as someone trying to find trilobite fossils. They will instead look for “certain minerals that the environment doesn’t otherwise want to make, but the presence of biology there helps make those minerals,” Fischer told Salon, such as certain iron oxide minerals. They might also look for microscopic preservation of parts of cells themselves” such as little filaments and little rods and balls that would actually reflect their former cells.”

Unfortunately, because the Martian soil is so unpredictable — indeed, so literally alien — it is likely going to present more features like canals and flowers that could be mistaken as proof of life.

For more Salon articles about Mars:

How climate-monitoring satellites are exposing Russian military movements

As a 40-mile long Russian military convoy approaches Kyiv, the world has been watching in horror via high-resolution satellite imagery which leaves little to the imagination. As the images from space show in great detail, Russian troops are bearing down on the Ukrainian capital with tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, and supplies in an unparalleled public spectacle. Rapid dissemination of information to the public has quickly become a defining facet of the Russian invasion.

Unclassified images of the unfolding conflict from Earth-observing satellites inundate the media. Oddly enough, their origin is not military — not exactly. Private intelligence companies like Maxar Technologies contract with government agencies to keep tabs on national security threats.

Often marketed for environmental monitoring, Maxar’s satellites actually track everything from greenhouse gas emissions to moisture in the soil and the spread of wildfires. They even freely release images of fallout from natural disasters. This pro bono work does little for their revenue stream, but military contracts with the US and its allies foot the bill for their more altruistic work.

“The primary source of funding for nearly all of these, all of the commercial satellite imagery sector at the moment is the national security community,” Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation told Axios. “Now the hope has always been that other sources of funding would materialize, but I think that’s still a work in progress.”

Mounting tension in Europe provided a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the growing capabilities of the commercial space sector.

“The conflict in Ukraine and its global implications create an opportunity for the new Earth observation space companies to demonstrate their capabilities,” said Scott Herman, CEO of Cognitive Space to SpaceNews. “You don’t get a better opportunity than this to show how remote sensing can support media storytelling and help with the general public’s understanding of a crisis like Ukraine.”

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Tracking military movements revealed the dissonance between Russian claims of withdrawal and mounting presence on the border. As a private entity, Maxar can make satellite imagery publicly available. The US National Reconnaissance Office just pays a hefty $300 million premium for their images and “preemption rights” to train the satellites on whatever they deem necessary for intelligence.

When President Biden warned that the threat of Russian invasion remained imminent the satellite imagery provided by Maxar managed to quell uncertainty in the media.

“Indeed our analysts indicate that they remain very much in a threatening position,” Biden said. “And the fact remains, right now Russia has more than 150,000 troops encircling Ukraine and Belarus and along Ukraine’s border. An invasion remains distinctly possible.”

Their ability to shape a narrative in the public sphere has actually proven enormously beneficial. Images from Maxar’s satellite constellation already released to the media clearly showed the recent construction of a bridge near the Belarus and Ukraine border as well as the arrival of new military forces and equipment.

Doing so supports global transparency and combats the spread of disinformation — misinformation deliberately deceptive — deployed by Russia to bolster justification for the unprovoked onslaught.

“We don’t know what form the false pretext will take, but we hope the world is ready,” said a senior White House official in a press call. “Just as Russia’s claims about withdrawing troops were false, so will be whatever pretext they invent to justify this war of choice.”

Geospatial intelligence provided key insights early on in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and continues to demonstrate its value as the war continues.

“The world is rejecting Russia’s lies,” pronounced President of the United Nations General Assembly Abdulla Shahid. “We can all see what is happening in Ukraine with our own eyes. Russia is responsible for the devastating abuses of human rights and the international humanitarian crisis that we are watching unfold in Ukraine in real time. There is no room for excuses or equivocation. Russia is to blame.”

Read more on the invasion of Ukraine:

Netflix’s “The Sandman” is “all about surprising you”

There are a lot of exciting TV shows on the horizon for 2022: “House of the Dragon,” “The Rings of Power,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. . . but the one I may be most curious about is Netflix’s “The Sandman.”

Why am I so intrigued? Because Neil Gaiman’s comic book “The Sandman” is a fascinating, layered piece of work that’s stood the test of time, and I’m eager to see if finally come to the small screen.

I’m also wondering how Netflix can possibly pull it off, because the story is weird and wild. It’s about Dream, one of several immortal siblings who are anthropomorphic personifications of different aspects of the human condition. As if that summary weren’t odd enough, the comic goes to a lot of strange places: in one stretch Dream goes to Hell to get back something he lost, in another we visit a serial killer convention, at another point we check in on William Shakespeare at the debut performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” . . . it’s just all over the place, and I wonder if the bounds of a Netflix TV show will be too constrictive.

Neil Gaiman compares “The Sandman” to “Game of Thrones”

According to Gaiman himself, that variety is the show’s strength. “You watch Episode 1 and think, ‘Oh, I get this thing: it’s like “Downton Abbey,” but with magic,'” he told Empire. “Then you’ll be wondering, ‘What the hell is this?’ by Episode 2, when you’re meeting Gregory The Gargoyle in The Dreaming. Episode 5 is about as dark and traumatic as anything is ever gonna get, then you’ve got Episode 6, which is probably the most feel-good of all the episodes.”

For the record, I’m guessing that Episode 5 adapts the horrifying “24 Hour Diner” storyline and that Episode 6 is about Dream hanging out with his sister Death, who’s the most well-adjusted, chill character in the series.

But anyway, back to variety: “If you didn’t like an episode of ‘Game Of Thrones,’ you probably won’t like any other episode of ‘Game Of Thrones,'” Gaiman continued. “With ‘Sandman,’ it’s all about surprising you. It’s all about reinventing itself. It’s all about taking you on a journey you’ve not been on before.”

See Tom Sturridge as Dream in Netflix’s “The Sandman”

All that and Empire debuted a new image from the show featuring Tom Sturridge as Dream and Vivienne Acheampong as Lucienne, the librarian of the Dreaming:

FIRST LOOK 🚨 Netflix's #TheSandman series is "all about surprising you", Neil Gaiman tells Empire.

Read more and see this exclusive new image in full: https://t.co/6eFyOwopW9 pic.twitter.com/6HHUxwW28M

— Empire (@empiremagazine) February 16, 2022

Dream looks like the mopiest emo sadboi in the universe. It’s perfect.

We don’t have a release date for “The Sandman” yet, but we know it’s coming sometime this year.

“If I do this, what do I have to lose?”: New documents show Trump feared no consequences for a coup

There is one simple reason why Donald Trump orchestrated his coup — one which led to a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021: He didn’t think he’d ever face consequences for doing so.

A document filed by the January 6 committee with a California federal court on Wednesday confirmed it. The document is filed on a narrow question about obtaining documents from likely Trump co-conspirator John Eastman, who is claiming attorney-client privilege. But that privilege doesn’t give lawyers the right to conspire to commit crimes with their clients, which is exactly what the committee alleges Eastman and Trump were doing.

“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

Late Thursday, the New York Times published an analysis of the evidence for this claim presented in the filing, and unsurprisingly, it’s damning and extensive. Through multiple witnesses and documents, the Times shows that Trump was repeatedly informed that his election loss was real. It also shows that Trump’s claims of “fraud” were based on nothing. When advisors shot down his conspiracy theories, he just kept making up new ones. This is not the behavior of someone who has sincere reason to believe that an election was fraudulent. This is a person perpetuating a lie and trying to falsify evidence to support it.

But the most chilling detail in the New York Times breakdown is what former Justice Department official Richard Donoghue described as Trump’s rationale for attempting to overthrow democracy. “The president said something to the effect of: ‘What do I have to lose?'”

“‘If I do this, what do I have to lose?'” Donoghue told the committee Trump asked.

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Donoghue further says he pleaded with Trump not to “hurt the country,” but of course, that plea fell on deaf ears. Trump is a sociopathic narcissist. Of course, he wasn’t going to be affected by appeals to the greater good, or feel compelled by his own oath to uphold democracy. Trump cares about one thing and one thing only — always has and always will: Donald J. Trump. At this late date, anyone who denies this is a liar or delusional to the point of madness.

What matters here, however, is the deep assurance Trump had that he would never face a real consequence — neither politically, nor legally, and certainly not criminally — for perpetuating a massive crime against democracy.

And why shouldn’t he think that?

Trump has been criming his entire life, and never faced anything like a serious consequence. As the New York Times has repeatedly shown in its reporting, Trump has been a massive tax fraud his whole career. He doesn’t even bother to deny it, but brags about how defrauding the government and other taxpayers is a “sport” and makes him “smart.” He’s been accused of sexual harassment, assault, and rape by over two dozen women. But we don’t have just their testimony to rely on to believe them, because Trump himself bragged about it on the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” tape. Even when one of his illegal schemes comes back to bite him — as happened when he was forced to settle out of court with defrauded customers of his “Trump University” grift — the consequences are insufficient to actually be felt. Hell, he’s even managed to get the Republican National Committee to pay his legal bills so that he can keep wasting his money on golf courses.

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It’s not just that Trump commits crimes because he knows he’ll get away with them. I’d argue that getting away with it is a big part of what motivates him to commit crimes. It’s the thrill of getting one over on everyone else. It’s the feeling of power it gives him, realizing that he can get away with stuff anyone else would go to jail for. He doesn’t even hide that, as all the bragging about tax fraud and sexual assault shows. And he will not stop committing crimes — including re-attempting a coup — unless someone actually stops him.

As the New York Times analysis shows, one of the biggest obstacles in prosecuting Trump will be “the question of his state of mind at the time.” Obviously, Trump knew full well that he lost the election and his claims otherwise are just the latest in a lifetime of lying. But he also has the instinct of self-preservation that flows from a lifelong habit of committing crimes. It appears he was careful never to tip his hand to the fact that he knew he was lying to anyone who could be a criminal witness against him. Instead, he would just keep reiterating his claim that the election was a “fraud” and expect the person he was badgering to pick up on his underlying wish, which was for someone to falsify the evidence to support his lies.

It’s the same strategy Trump used in trying to exhort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into faking evidence to smear Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign. He never directly asked Zelenskyy to counterfeit evidence, but instead says, “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation.” Similarly, when Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to falsify votes, he never directly demands it. Instead, he asked Raffensperger to “find” the votes. The meaning of the ask is clear, but Trump always carefully uses language that lawyers can later use to quibble over his intent.

As law professor Alan Rozenshtein told the New York Times, “A finder of fact could conclude that Trump is so uniquely narcissistic and self-absorbed that he actually thought the election had been stolen.” Which was no doubt the defense Trump had in mind when he carefully made sure to talk in that sideways way he loves to use when engaging in one of his many conspiracies and frauds. But we can know from context that lying and not delusion is the explanation for Trump’s claims of a “stolen” election. Trump was claiming that the election was “rigged” for months before the election even happened. That is not the behavior of a man who saw evidence of fraud and is raising the alarm. That’s the behavior of a man who plans to commit fraud and is laying the groundwork for his lies.

In February, Trump let the mask slip a little, by releasing a statement asserting that his former vice president “Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome.” That is, of course, another lie. But in lying about the law, he let slip the truth about his state of mind when he revealed that he intended to “change the outcome.” His lawyers likely panicked, because Trump released another statement insisting what he meant was that Pence could “send back the votes for recertification or approval.” But no one of good faith believes this. He just got over his skis in his dashed-off statement, and the truth about his intent slipped out, which thankfully the Jan. 6 committee is seizing on.

Still, Trump is a slippery mofo who has a lifetime of experience getting away with crime. That is likely fueling what increasingly looks like a troubling reluctance on the part of Attorney General Merrick Garland to actually prosecute Trump. If so, that’s a massive mistake.

It’s abundantly clear that nothing will stop Trump but a threat of consequences, one that has teeth. He is not constrained by morality, as he has none. He is not constrained by the Republican Party, which has made it clear they will assist Trump in his anti-democratic efforts and cover up for any crimes he commits along the way. It may be hard to prosecute him, but it is literally the only hope we have of stopping him from attempting another coup. With the full support of the GOP behind him next time he tries to overthrow democracy, he’ll likely succeed.

“What do I have to lose?” is basically Trump’s motto. If he never gets an answer, he will never stop.

CDC director rebukes Ron DeSantis for scolding high school students over masks

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tore into Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday after the Republican scolded a group of high school students wearing masks at a press conference.

“Those students should have been comfortable wearing a mask,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in an MSNBC interview. “It is absolutely their choice.”

I asked CDC Director Rochelle Walensky today about now-viral moment of Gov DeSantis scolding students wearing masks: “Those students should have been comfortable wearing a mask if it makes them more comfortable…It's absolutely their choice.” @Miguelnbc has more @NBCNightlyNews pic.twitter.com/aOGEw714qe

— Kate Snow (@tvkatesnow) March 3, 2022

Walensky’s comments come just a day after a Wednesday press conference held by DeSantis, who berated a group of high school students standing behind him for wearing face masks.

“You do not have to wear those masks,” DeSantis told them. “Please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve gotta stop with this COVID theater. So if you wanna wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous.”

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The students were reportedly from the Hillsborough County School District, which according to CDC data, is seeing a higher COVID-19 case rate than the national average.

Throughout most of the pandemic, DeSantis has been a fierce opponent of just about every common sense COVID health measure, striking down mask and vaccine mandates for schools and businesses, even when the coronavirus ran rampant through the Sunshine State. Even the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who was appointed by DeSantis, is an adamant objector to masks.

This week, Ladapo claimed that masks offer “zero benefit” when it comes to public health, accusing the CDC of using “shaky studies” and “shaky methods” to demonstrate their efficacy.

“[Masks] are not saving lives,” he told reporters. “What saves lives, frankly, is freedom to speak, freedom to find truth. What saves lives is immunity, early treatment. Early treatment saves lives. And being as healthy as you can.”

Following DeSantis’ Wednesday presser, the governor defended his choice to publicly chide the group of teenagers, attacking the “corrupt and biased legacy media” for accusing him of bullying.

“While in Tampa, I told a group of students masks were ridiculous, and they didn’t have to wear them if they didn’t want to,” he wrote in an email. “Predictably, the leftist propagandists in our media had a meltdown and called me a ‘bully’ for allowing children to breathe fresh air.”

In response, Nikki Fried, Florida’s Democratic agriculture commissioner who is also running for governor, said that “Ron doesn’t realize it’s not about the masks, it’s about him being an a**hole.”

Ignore the GOP’s sudden pivot, Republicans have long worked to undermine Ukraine

In light of the brutal carnage being perpetrated by the Russian army on Ukraine this week, it’s good to see that most Republicans have found it in themselves to finally condemn the invasion. It obviously wasn’t easy for them. As we’ve just witnessed with the pandemic, they hate to be on the same side as a Democratic president for any reason, no matter how high the body count is. But they have come around, with even the most reluctant Republican now rallying to the side of the Ukrainian people. In fact, some of them have gone so far in the opposite direction that they have become reckless and dangerous:

Massie response to Graham’s tweet: I think it’s insane. Did he suggest it should be secret plot and tweet that out as well? pic.twitter.com/ywj8BRGUL1

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 4, 2022

That may be one of the most irresponsible comments by a sitting U.S. senator in modern memory. When Graham repeated it on Fox News, even Laura Ingraham was left bewildered.

Of course, many Republicans still blame President Joe Biden for failing to prevent the crisis.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declared that Vladimir Putin didn’t invade while Donald Trump was in office because Trump was so tough on him, which is, of course, laughable. Cruz’s evidence is the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (which Trump didn’t even sign into law until the end of his term.) But former national security adviser John Bolton claimed that Trump actually fought all of the sanctions every step of the way, adding, “the fact is that he barely knew where Ukraine was. He once asked John Kelly, his second chief of staff, if Finland were a part of Russia.”

And in a stunning reversal, after boldly insisting for months that he supported Russia over Ukraine, even extolling the virtues of Vladimir Putin, last night Fox News host Tucker Carlson even admitted he was wrong … sort of.

Tucker says he was wrong about Ukraine and blames Biden and Harris for him being wrong pic.twitter.com/Eal5p8hdMu

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 4, 2022

He claimed that he didn’t think the threat was real because Joe Biden had allegedly sent Vice President Kamala Harris to “fix” it so it couldn’t have been that serious. (The president did not send Harris to fix it.) Nobody does smug, unctuous trolling quite like Tucker Carlson.

Nonetheless, it does appear that Republicans have finally recognized that their admiration for the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin may have been a bit of a bad look. And I’m sure they are hoping that no one will remember the last few years of smears and false charges against Ukraine, all designed to create the false narrative that it was Ukraine that interfered in the 2016 election rather than Russia, on behalf of Hillary Clinton instead of Trump.

Recall that Trump said something very specific on that “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky that had nothing to do with Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. It came right after the “I’d like you to do us a favor, though.”

I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine.

Trump was pushing a convoluted lie that the alleged “missing DNC server” (which was not missing) was in Ukraine and he seemed to suggest that Zelensky could do him a solid by producing “evidence” that would suggest that Russia was framed for hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016. As for the reference to Crowdstrike, the internet security company which was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack, Trump was convinced that the company was based in Ukraine and owned by a wealthy Ukrainian Oligarch, none of which was true. (The company’s headquarters is in Sunnyvale, California, and the company’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a Russian-born U.S. citizen who emigrated as a child.

Nonetheless, this and other bogus conspiracy theories were all over the right-wing fever swamp and gained even more currency when the impeachment battles over Trump’s call commenced. One of the most prominent was the idea that the Ukraine government had actually interfered in the 2016 election because a prominent official and some others had made public statements critical of Donald Trump, which a group of right-wing journalists ginned up into a convoluted conspiracy. That opened the door to a full-blown narrative that Ukraine framed Russia for the hacks with the help of Democratic operatives in order to take down Trump — and naturally, it was anti-Trump Deep State actors saying that Russia was behind the 2016 election interference.

In reality, intelligence officials had concluded that this entire Ukraine storyline had been concocted by Russia. Putin even joked at one point that he was glad the world was finally blaming Ukraine instead of him.

And then there was Rudy Giuliani, working ostensibly on behalf of the president in a private capacity, pressuring Ukrainian officials, working with every unsavory character in the region and constantly appearing on television spreading progressively more baroque conspiracy theories.

Rudy pushed Ukraine conspiracy theories so breathlessly that Fox & Friends hosts couldn't even get a word in. Beyond parody. He then called for an investigation into Joe Biden. pic.twitter.com/tQIkvPlpnh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 24, 2020

He was not the only one:

Here's Mark Meadows telling Face the Nation that he thinks Congress should investigate Giuliani's Ukraine-sourced Biden conspiracy theories b/c "I would trust any information that comes to Congress to be evaluated in a neutral manner … Congress has an obligation to look at it" pic.twitter.com/l8gNb25zo7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 8, 2019

Mike Pompeo says he thinks the US and Ukraine should investigate Trump's baseless conspiracy theories about Ukrainian election interference pic.twitter.com/ayl0MUM0Sn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 26, 2019

When the House held its first impeachment hearings, the Republicans on the committee, led by Trump henchman then-congressman Devin Nunes (now CEO of Trump’s fledgling social media platform), went full bore with this alleged conspiracy that Ukraine was the real culprit. The Washington Post described it as the “central point of focus” in their defense of Trump’s actions, with Republicans like John Kennedy of Louisiana and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin repeating the same charges over on the Senate side.

So, this was not a fringe theory nor Trump and Rudy getting a wild hair. And it wasn’t just a way to hurt Joe Biden. The entire GOP establishment went along with this inane, phony charge that a corrupt Ukrainian government had conspired with Hillary Clinton to interfere in the 2016 election and they defended Trump withholding vital military aid to the country in service of his conspiracy-addled political goals. They all (with a small handful of exceptions) actively undermined the security of a small nation that was trying desperately to defend itself against a very aggressive adversary — an aggressive adversary that was manipulating the very foolish, very unfit US president.

They are now praising Ukraine and pledging to help, which is important in this moment of crisis. But it’s hard to imagine how they sleep at night or look at themselves in the mirror in the morning after what they did.

Genomics’ ethical gray areas are harming the developing world

Since the first human genome was sequenced in the early 2000s, scientists have touted the breakthrough as a blessing to humanity — one that holds promise to promote human health and enhance medical treatment the world over. But around two decades later, the benefits of that scientific advancement have barely rippled out beyond Europe and North America. As of 2018, people of European ancestry —who represented approximately 16 percent of the world population at the time — made up 78 percent of all individuals whose genomes have ever been collected and studied.

Over the last decade or so, international studies on human population genetics have begun to expand genomic libraries to encompass regions of the Global South — including Southeast Asia, where I am a science reporter, and the Pacific islands. These international studies, often led by Western scientists, have contributed to a more global understanding of ancient patterns of human migration and evolution. But on some occasions, they’ve also sidestepped local regulatory agencies in the developing world, and ventured into murky research ethics terrain as a result.

A recent example — a case that simultaneously illustrates the promise, pitfalls, and pressure points of international genomics research — comes from the largest genetic study ever conducted in the Philippines, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team led by Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden and Maximilian Larena, who was a researcher in Jakobsson’s lab at the time, collected and analyzed DNA samples from more than 1,000 Filipinos representing 115 Indigenous groups. The study determined that today’s Filipino population descends from at least five distinct waves of human migration, spanning thousands of years — a finding that they said contradicted the prevailing theory of how humans populated the islands.

One could see the Uppsala study as a model of international collaboration. The project was endorsed by the Philippines’ National Commission for Culture and the Arts, a government body that coordinates, funds, and makes policy for the preservation, development, and promotion of Philippine arts and culture. It was also done in partnership with more than a dozen local Indigenous and cultural groups in the Philippines; the paper’s appendix acknowledges more than 100 Filipinos who assisted with the study in some way, and Larena is himself Filipino. And key portions of the research plan were approved by an ethics review board in Sweden.

But many bioethicists would argue that it is not enough for researchers who do a human genomic study on foreign soil to merely collaborate with local groups. Various ethics guidelines on health-related research — including UNESCO’s International Declaration on Human Genetic Data and international ethical guidelines published by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, or CIOMS, in collaboration with the World Health Organization — advise researchers to seek approval from an ethics committee in the host country. Such reviews are critical, bioethicists say, because cultural and social considerations of research ethics might vary between countries. In low-resource countries especially, ethics reviews are essential to protect the interests of participants and ensure that data are used in ways that benefit local communities.

Nowhere in Larena and Jakobsson’s paper, or in any of the subsequent publications based on the Philippines study, does the Uppsala team mention obtaining such an ethics approval in the Philippines — and Philippines officials say they never granted the team such an approval. Asked whether his group had obtained a formal ethics clearance in the Philippines, Jakobsson pointed to the project’s endorsement from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and wrote that part of the commission’s mandate is to ensure that the research they support is “in accordance with the ethical principles of research involving participants from the Indigenous communities.” But the NCCA primarily supports research that is cultural, not scientific, in nature, and a government website outlining the commission’s mandate, powers, and functions makes no mention of any duties related to research ethics. In a 2021 letter, the commission’s executive director wrote that the agency “has no mandate or authority to give ethical clearance” and did not give ethical clearance for the Uppsala study. (I reached out to the commission for this story but did not receive a response.)

A failure to secure formal ethics clearance might be understandable if there were simply no official Filipino agencies equipped to provide that clearance. But the Philippines has such a body — the National Ethics Committee, or NEC, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Philippine Health Research Ethics Board — and the Uppsala researchers were no doubt aware of this. In 2014, as the researchers were laying the groundwork to begin collecting human samples, they actively sought the NEC’s approval.

That approval was never granted. Marita Reyes, then the chair of the NEC, said she noticed problems with the initial Uppsala application. For instance, it did not clearly describe how research participants would be recruited, and it lacked the proper paperwork for researchers who intend to ship genetic materials overseas, she told Undark in an email. Reyes asked the Uppsala team to fix the issues and also recommended that they collaborate with local researchers who were doing similar work at the Philippine Genome Center.

According to Jakobsson, the Uppsala researchers took issue with the stipulations levelled at their application, and they say the prospective collaborators at the Philippine Genome Center made troubling demands regarding control of the collected samples. Ultimately, the researchers withdrew their application altogether. Their rationale: They say their population genetics study was not health related, and therefore did not fall under the jurisdiction of the NEC or the Philippine Health Research Ethics Board. “Given that your good office does not have regulatory mandate on the nature of our study,” Larena wrote to Reyes in an email, “we humbly withdraw our application.” In the ensuing months, the Uppsala team would go on to collect DNA from more than 1,000 Filipinos without ever receiving express ethics approval from the NEC.

The case created an uproar in the Philippines. In a public statement, Allen Capuyan, chairperson of the Philippines’ National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, condemned the study, saying the researchers showed a “blatant disregard of critical policies governing scientific research in the Philippines.” Leonardo de Castro, a Filipino bioethicist who now chairs Philippine Health Research Ethics Board, asserted that the Uppsala study did fall under the NEC’s jurisdiction, and he called on the journal that published the Uppsala work to issue a retraction. (I first learned of the controversy in 2018 from officials at the Philippine Health Research Ethics Board; Maria Corazon De Ungria, a laboratory director at the Philippine Genome Center, later contacted me about the matter as well.)

Meanwhile, the Uppsala researchers have maintained that they “are absolutely certain” that they abided by basic ethical principles of research involving humans, and they say that investigations by a Swedish ethics review board, by Uppsala University itself, and by scientific journals have cleared them of any wrongdoing.

Nevertheless, I believe the case exposes a glaring shortcoming in the regulation of international genomics research: Even if bypassing a formal ethics review does not violate the letter of the law on human genomic research, it at least seems to go against the spirit of trust and transparency that are the foundation for healthy international scientific collaboration — principles enshrined in the UNESCO and CIOMS guidelines. The Uppsala team is hardly the first to wade into this gray area of research ethics. In 2018, I wrote about a team of mostly Danish and American scientists who conducted a genetic study of Bajau traditional divers in Indonesia and also failed to obtain ethics approval from a local review board.

Was the Uppsala team right to conclude that their study fell outside the jurisdiction of the Philippines’ health research regulatory framework? Some people seem to think so. In a letter of support to the researchers, an attorney with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts — the Philippines group that supported the study — affirmed that the nature of the Uppsala project was “exclusively cultural” and fell under NCAA’s jurisdiction, rather than that of the National Ethics Committee or the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples. Hank Greely, a professor of law at Stanford University who specializes in biosciences, including bioethics, said that the study published in PNAS didn’t appear to be health related and suggested it’s reasonable to argue that health research guidelines shouldn’t apply in this case, although that wouldn’t mean that no ethical standards should apply.

But other bioethics experts — including Triono Soendoro, the chair of the Indonesian Society of Ethics Committee for Research and Services — say that ethics standards like those developed by CIOMS and enforced by the Philippine Health Research Ethics Board were clearly meant to apply broadly to research involving human biological samples, even studies that have non-medical purposes. Population genetics research that identifies subjects by social or ethnic group, as the Uppsala study does, “is certainly covered by CIOMS,” said Eric Juengst, a bioethicist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Human genomic science is too important, too consequential, to allow this precarious state of affairs to persist. If we want science to serve the whole of humanity, we need a strong set of universally binding rules on research ethics — rules that clearly give local authorities a voice on matters of research ethics in all studies involving human genetic sampling, not just those that are obviously medical in nature.

In the Uppsala case, for instance, a formal ethics review might have offered important safeguards to ensure participants were fully aware of how their samples would be used and stored. Although participants signed informed consent forms that laid out many details of the research, a copy of the form obtained by Undark did not mention that samples would be shipped out of the country, to Sweden, for sequencing and analysis. This information could conceivably have influenced a subject’s decision to participate. (In a follow up email after publication, the Uppsala researchers provided seven letters — dated after the publication of this essay — signed by individuals attesting that they were involved in the sampling process and affirming that participants were aware their samples would be shipped to Sweden.)

Formal ethics reviews are also crucial for ensuring that low-resource countries can freely and independently access data that might benefit the health and wellbeing of their people. Even genetic data obtained for purposes unrelated to health may later prove beneficial for medical purposes. Data generated from more than 1,000 samples collected in the Uppsala study is now stored in the European Genome-Phenome Archive, where a Data Access Committee now has sole power to determine who can use it for future studies — although one condition must be that such research is in accordance with consent provided by study participants. (The archive’s website doesn’t specify the members of the Data Access Committee assigned to the Philippines data set, but it lists Larena as the contact person.) Research institutions in the Philippines are not guaranteed to be able to make use of data from the largest human genetic sampling ever conducted on its own soil (though Larena and Jakobsson indicated in an email after this essay’s publication that some researchers in the Philippines have been granted access through a data sharing consortium).

The international scientific community must be proactive in raising the standards of global research ethics. Prestigious journals, the gatekeepers of science, should ensure that researchers who collect human DNA samples make every effort to secure formal ethics approvals in the countries where the sample collection is performed. They should also be transparent about investigations of ethics misconduct and involve ethicists from developing countries in those investigations whenever possible.

Human genomic science should not stop at merely satisfying our curiosity. It should also serve the poor and the marginalized. Otherwise, if history is any guide, it will lead only to increasingly extreme disparities between the Global North and the Global South.

UPDATE: A previous version of this piece stated that a group of Uppsala researchers had initially withdrawn their application to a Philippines research ethics authority because their proposed study “was cultural, not health related.” While the Philippines National Commission for Culture and the Arts described the work as cultural, the researchers themselves describe the work as a study of “heritage.” The piece has been edited to remove this error. The piece also imprecisely described the data stored in the European Genome-Phenome Archive. It is data generated from the more than 1,000 genetic samples collected. The 1,000 samples themselves are not stored in the archive.

This piece has also been updated to clarify whether participants in the study knew that their DNA samples would be shipped to Sweden for analysis. As the piece originally stated, consent forms signed by study participants did not mention this transfer. Following publication of this essay, however, the researchers produced statements — dated March 2, 2022 — from seven individuals involved in the sampling process attesting that study participants were informed of the shipment plans. The essay has been updated to reflect this.

The piece also questioned whether institutions in the Philippines would be able to make use of the data collected by the Uppsala team. In an email sent to Undark after publication, Larena and Jakobsson indicated that some researchers in the Philippines have already been granted access through a data sharing consortium.

Dyna Rochmyaningsih is a science journalist based in South Sumatra, Indonesia.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Dear Joe Biden: We don’t want “unity” with fascists — that’s why Democrats lose

I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. He was the best option available for defeating Donald Trump and buying time to organize a defense of American democracy against the neofascist assault. More than a year into Biden’s first term in office, I have no regrets. I’d make that same decision again.

Despite tremendous obstruction from the Republican fascists (and their “centrist” allies embedded within the Democratic Party) — a group of sadists determined to cause maximum harm to the American people as a way of obtaining, keeping and expanding political power — Biden has accomplished a great deal as president. This includes slowing down the coronavirus plague, resuscitating the economy, taking long-overdue steps to fix the country’s infrastructure and restoring America’s leadership role in the world.

In a moment of great crisis when Vladimir Putin and Russia are waging war on Ukraine, to know that America has a leader who, unlike his predecessor, is intelligent, experienced and patriotic, as well as mentally and emotionally stable, brings no small amount of relief. Moreover, one does not have to ask the obvious questions that circled around Trump like flies around manure on a summer’s day: “Is the president of the United States merely a useful idiot and stooge for Russia, or is he actually an agent and saboteur?” That too brings considerable peace of mind.

By all accounts Joe Biden is a humble, honorable and decent man who loves his family, has experienced great challenges and losses in life but has not succumbed to bitterness. That also signals to a type of wisdom demanded by the many crises facing the United States and the world.

To see Joe Biden, who overcame a significant speech impediment as a child, give the State of the Union address while millions of people around the world watched — and to watch him stammer occasionally while doing so — shows him to be a role model of perseverance, humanity, and vulnerability. He has been weathered by life, sometimes badly beaten down, and is still standing.

But there has always been a lingering doubt that gnaws at me as I watch Biden’s presidency unfold in a time of plague and political crisis, and in a moment where America’s present and future are nebulous and greatly in doubt. Unfortunately, his State of the Union address only served to reinforce my anxiety.

Joe Biden is a career politician who is now the leader of the free world and arguably the most powerful person on the planet. And like all politicians, he is a disappointment. Biden is far too quick to seek “compromise” with the Republican fascists — which mostly means outright capitulation. He represents the interests of big corporations at least as much as those of the American people. He is a professional centrist. He will in all likelihood never cancel student loan debt or make other efforts at great and lasting economic relief. Although driven by circumstance to embrace more progressive policies, Biden was one of the Clinton-era “New Democrats” who helped unleash neoliberalism and gangster capitalism on American society, greatly damaging the middle class he claims to care so much about.

My greatest worry about Biden is simple: America needs a fighting champion if its democracy is to be saved. To this point, as this week’s State of the Union address made clear once again, he does not appear to be up to that challenge.

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In total, Biden’s speech was an attempt to claim credit for his administration’s many successes and to soothe an anxious American public that is deeply worried about the war in Ukraine, the economy and the pandemic. On that account, public opinion polls show that the speech was successful.

At the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein offers this generous summary, arguing that Biden’s speech “portrayed him as a resolute champion of financially squeezed families at home and freedom abroad”:

Repeatedly through the speech, Biden rejected stark political choices. Vigorous at points, meandering at others, the speech was neither a full-scale course correction, like Bill Clinton’s 1996 declaration that “the era of big government is over,” nor a stubborn reaffirmation of the strategies Biden employed during his trying first year in office. The president at times gave each faction in his party reasons to cheer, but did not align entirely with either liberals or centrists.

Instead, the address showed Biden and his advisers trying to define a distinctive political space centered on providing kitchen-table assistance to average families, encouraging greater national unity, and reasserting America’s role as the leader of the small-d democratic world against challenges from aggressive autocracies symbolized by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The speech was the performance of a president who remains confident in his political compass, even as the steep and persistent decline in his job-approval ratings since last summer has caused many people in both parties to question it. Throughout, Biden underscored his determination to combine positions often considered incompatible…

Biden also, as Brownstein observes, reverted to his habit of seeking to placate Republicans and to distance himself from Democratic progressives:

Toward Republicans, Biden was alternately conciliatory (proposing “a unity agenda” and praising their involvement in the bipartisan infrastructure bill) and confrontational (denouncing Donald Trump’s tax cuts and the surge of red-state laws rolling back civil rights and liberties). He pointedly renounced one of the most polarizing battle cries of his own party’s liberal vanguard, calling to “fund the police” rather than “defund the police,” while reasserting his commitment to criminal-justice reform and gun control, both enduring priorities for the left.

What was most notably absent from Biden’s speech was any forceful and sustained discussion of the country’s democracy crisis, the role of the Republicans in creating and amplifying it, and the fact that we now face a moment where the voting rights and civil rights — indeed, the fundamental human rights — of Black and brown people (along with members of other marginalized groups) are under existential threat from a new Jim Crow system.

Black Americans are among the Democratic Party’s most important constituencies, and its most loyal voters. Without the support of Black people in both the Democratic primaries and the general election, and especially the support of Black women, Joe Biden would not be president today.

During Biden’s victory speech in November 2020, he said: “Especially at those moments when this campaign was at its lowest ebb, the African American community stood up again for me. You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.” Those are fine words, but in terms of protecting Black America’s voting rights and civil rights, Biden and his administration have not lived up to them.

His State of the Union speech was one more example of that failure. In several key moments, Biden signaled that he is temperamentally unable to do what is necessary to stop the Republican fascists’ attempt(s) to end multiracial democracy.

Biden repeatedly spoke of the need to “unify” Democrats and Republicans. That means seeking “unity” with those who actively tried to nullify the 2020 election and supported a violent coup to prevent him from becoming president. Moreover, the Republican fascists have in no way ended their campaign to end American democracy and terminate Biden’s presidency.

Biden often speaks boldly about American democracy being in crisis, and draws eloquently upon the images and legacy of the civil rights movement and Black Freedom Struggle while doing so. But he does not act with the “urgency of now” in seeking to defend that democracy.

The reasons for Biden’s behavior are not mysterious. He is the product of an American political regime that is dying, but whose leaders and principal figures have, for the most part, not realized that fact. Biden genuinely believes that as a leading member of the American political caste he can somehow save the country’s obsolescent political order. He is a Washington insider, an older white man and a “moderate”. Once upon a time that might have meant that Republican leaders would work with him in good faith to find solutions to the country’s many problems.

But in believing that is still true, Biden has committed a grievous error: Today’s Republican Party and “conservative” movement comprise a revolutionary force, which seeks to destroy American democracy and replace it with fascism or some other form of authoritarianism.

When Biden speaks of “unity” or “compromise” with the Republicans he is giving aid and comfort to the neofascist movement –if not surrendering to it altogether. In a recent essay for the New York Times, Charles Blow echoes these concerns as embodied by Joe Biden’s description of Mitch McConnell as his friend:

So, how can Biden maintain that McConnell is an honest, honorable friend?

It seems that Biden suffers from the same blind spot as other white liberal leaders throughout history: looking past the oppressive impulses of other white men to see kinship and commonality. Where the oppressed see an existential threat, men like Biden only seem to see a disagreement among decent men on a political issue. They see them as simply on the “other side” rather than “other than.”…

But this version of politics is an extension of the Looney Tunes cartoon of Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog, where they are enemies on the clock but are friends off the clock, and is offensive to the people whose very lives are at stake. And yet Biden continues to proclaim his affections for those supporting oppression.

These bonds across bigotry smack of the insecurity of allies. They smack of a privilege of which only white men can boast, because the threat is almost always aimed away for them and at others.

When it comes to the issue of power and politics, the Bidens and McConnells of the world maintain their own affinity group.

In an essay for the Guardian, Thomas Zimmer expands on this:

Over the past few weeks, President Joe Biden has repeatedly emphasized his friendship with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. At the National Prayer Breakfast in early February, for instance, he praised McConnell as “a man of your word. And you’re a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.”

Biden’s publicly professed affinity is weirdly at odds with the political situation. Going back to the Obama era, McConnell has led the Republican Party in a strategy of near-total obstruction which he has pursued with ruthless cynicism. It is true that he has, at times, signaled distance to Donald Trump and condemned the January 6 insurrection. But McConnell is also sabotaging any effort to counter the Republican party’s ongoing authoritarian assault on the political system.

The distinct asymmetry in the way the two sides treat each other extends well beyond Biden and McConnell. …

Republicans could not be clearer about the fact that they consider Democratic governance fundamentally illegitimate, yet some establishment Democrats act as if politics as usual is still an option and a return to “normalcy” imminent.

“I actually like Mitch McConnell,” Biden said during a press conference a few weeks ago, providing a window into what he sees in Republicans: No matter what they do, underneath they’re good guys, they’ll snap out of it. Promise. It’s the manifestation of a specific worldview that makes it nearly impossible to acknowledge the depths of Republican radicalization — a perspective that severely hampers the fight for the survival of American democracy….

Some weeks ago, a prominent Black comedian asked on Twitter if Joe Biden thought that, because he’s a white man, it meant Republicans would work with him in ways they refused to with Barack Obama? The answer to that question appears to be yes.

Whiteness is almost never a liability in American society. But when it comes to the Republican fascists, Joe Biden’s skin color may not be helping him much. The Republicans, their followers and their media sycophants view Biden as the white leader of a predominantly Black and brown political party. (That is of course false, but the truth is irrelevant to the Republican fascists and larger white right.) In their eyes, Biden is a “race traitor,” even if they do not use that exact term. For the Republican fascists and larger white right, no compromise is possible: Their almost-explicit goal is to create a 21st-century Herrenvolk society in which Black and brown people, to quote the infamous words of Chief Justice Roger Taney, have no rights the white man is bound to respect.

Biden and too many other white liberals and moderates continue to believe that compromise with the Republicans is still possible, and that finding “common ground” can redeem this moment of democratic crisis. That kind of white racial innocence may well be America’s undoing.

The Trump-Putin killer weed has deep roots — in New Jersey’s swamp of corruption

When we see the tanks roll into Ukraine, it’s easy to feel it’s a world away.

Yet, as we saw with the Jan. 6 insurrection in our nation’s capital, the Trump-Putin style of authoritarianism got traction because we were unable to hold bullies accountable in Atlantic City, Trenton, Washington or Moscow.

Let’s call it TrumPutin, an invasive predator weed that thrives in a compost of fear, greed and corruption — always a blend in ample supply in the Garden State.

We have an ambivalent affection for bullies, the killer weed’s colorful flower. Chris Christie and Donald Trump can be entertaining. And then they go too far, and it’s a lot harder to reclaim the ground you have ceded to them.

Yet thanks to the bravery of the Ukrainian people standing up to Vladimir Putin’s onslaught, the era of the bully may be waning. There’s a new “united we stand” cohesion across our nation and around the world. After years of building up Putin, even Donald Trump had to scramble to express support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Christie took to Twitter to thump Trump. “How can anyone with any understanding of the world call Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine ‘genius’ and ‘very savvy’ as we watch him unite the rest of the world against Russia in nearly an instant?” the former New Jersey governor — and the first member of the GOP establishment to back Trump for president — tweeted.

While there’s much to criticize about transnational corporations, such as their ability to evade taxes, when they act ethically, as the energy giants have done in pulling out of Russia, they can sometimes have a greater impact than diplomats.

For some reason, a broad swath of Americans can see totalitarianism on the march in the Ukraine, but an insufficient number yet grasp how intertwined operationally the white supremacist anti-immigrant Trump movement is with Putin’s push to restore the Soviet Union.

It’s important not to forget that the Trump junta actually tried a geopolitical squeeze play directed at Ukraine. The Trump White House delayed a $400 million weapons shipment that Zelensky’s struggling democracy was counting on to fend off Russia in hopes of forcing his government to launch an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

Trump was impeached for that criminal act, but the vast majority of Republicans in the U.S. Senate protected the TrumPutin axis by voting against conviction. Similarly, here in New Jersey, we went through a show-trial prosecution in the Bridgegate scandal, in which the list of powerful players involved remained concealed despite the news media’s best legal efforts to have that list unsealed.

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To this day, Christie, the man whose bullying style paved the way stylistically and tactically for TrumPutin, has managed to reinvent himself after successfully using the levers of power to deflect a deeper dive into his brand of transactional politics.

There’s a continuum, starting with the use of the Port Authority Police on the George Washington Bridge for Bridgegate, through the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to the tanks that rolled into Ukraine. It’s not merely the authoritarian ethic of “I can do this because I am above the law.” It’s even the same cast of characters, spawned in the swamp of our state, where we have long struggled to hold the powerful accountable.

Just as New Jersey casino regulators rolled over for Trump decades ago in Atlantic City, the world looked the other way when it failed to hold Putin accountable for invading Crimea in 2014 or for his 2008 incursion into Georgia. New Jersey’s power elite saw Trump’s economic “success” in Atlantic City as their own. Up until this latest move into Ukraine, the world’s wealthiest nations didn’t want to hold Putin accountable and risk disrupting their relationship with a powerful nation they relied on for energy.

TrumPutins thrive in a realm where cash is king and everybody has their price, and where politics is reduced to a series of economic transactions, with self-interest the only imperative. It was American fecklessness during Trump’s tenure that benefited not only Putin, but Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

Even now, in places like London where Putin’s oligarch posse owns so much real estate, there’s a reluctance to seize their properties for fear of worrying the rogues of the world whose investment of ill-gotten gains is the foundation for luxury property markets.

Our flinching from deep-pocketed bullies has real consequences: When accountability evaporates so does the societal cohesion that comes from subscribing to a common set of values. This societal fiber is further weakened when we permit the wealthy to break the law with impunity, but throw the book at the poor for “quality of life” offenses.

This crisis in legitimacy that comes from everyone knowing that the fix is in undermines our ability to respond to major global challenges, like climate change or a once-in-a-century mass death event that’s killed close to a million Americans. We felt it even here in blue New Jersey, with our population’s fractured response to the COVID public health challenge, which resulted in one of the highest per capita death rates on the planet.

Every public health measure put in place to combat COVID became subject to a near-call to arms because societal trust had so thoroughly eroded. Decades of letting Big Pharma settle corruption cases as civil matters, in which they admitted no guilt but paid huge fines, didn’t give confidence to millions of Americans who doubted that the same sector of the economy that had cut so many corners would save the day with a COVID vaccine.

This fracturing of the public trust was well underway before Donald Trump exploited it to rise to power. He harnessed the kinetic power of this unraveling, which was born of the great selfishness behind the widespread ethical failures of just about every foundational institution, including the media, the church and our corporate boardrooms.

As a result, the United States faced COVID fractured along its red-blue fault lines, drawn in Sharpie by Trump as he described blue states as overrun by undocumented immigrants, who he claimed were violent criminals preying on the native-born. Using fear and hatred as his fuel, he sent the signal that America was under attack from within and only he could “fix it” by restoring order.

Amid this mass death event an unprecedented number of Americans came out to vote in 2020 and elected Joe Biden president. Yet just a week later, then-New Jersey GOP chairman Doug Steinhardt convened a broadcast conference call headlined by Bill Stepien, the former Christie operative who was Trump’s 2020 campaign manager. They rallied the troops to raise funds around the “Stop the Steal” cause that highlighted “various instances of alleged voter fraud, none of which have panned out,” according to InsiderNJ reporter Fred Snowflack.

Stepien had also been a key member of Chris Christie’s Bridgegate brigade. This year he faced a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“As manager of the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, you oversaw all aspects of the campaign,” wrote committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., in a letter to Stepien. “You then supervised the conversion of the Trump presidential campaign to an effort focused on ‘Stop the Steal’ messaging and related fundraising. That message included the promotion of certain false claims related to voting machines despite an internal campaign memo in which campaign staff determined that such claims were false.”

As Thompson’s letter further noted, that “Stop the Steal” messaging was embraced and echoed by those who attacked the Capitol “in an attempt to interfere with the peaceful and orderly transfer of power.” In addition, the Trump campaign “reportedly urged state and party officials to affect the outcome of the November 2020 election by, among other things, asking states to delay or deny certification of electoral votes and by sending slates of electoral votes to the United States Congress.“

While the eyes of the world may be on Ukraine, those of us from New Jersey also need to take a deep look into our own garden to find and pull out the rootstock of the TrumPutin killer weed. We owe it to democracy, America and the planet.

Read more on the aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021:

FIFA’s suspension of Russia makes one thing clear: Sports is political

The decision by FIFA on Feb. 28 to suspend Russia from international competition — a move that could see the national team excluded from the 2022 FIFA World Cup — breaks with a tradition of inaction by soccer’s world governing body over the ethical failings of member states.

Other than the exclusion of South Africa and Rhodesia during the apartheid era, examples of preventing national teams from competing are hard to come by. Nazi Germany took part in the 1938 World Cup, as did France in the World Cups of the 1950s despite that country’s bloody wars against independence movements in Algeria and Indochina.

No sporting sanctions were placed on the Argentinian junta, which detained and executed its own population inside football stadiums that went on to host the 1978 World Cup finals, and Nigeria was allowed to compete in the 1970 World Cup qualifiers despite its government waging a war against Biafrans, which resulted in up to 2 million deaths by starvation.

The list goes on. But the point is FIFA does not usually punish national teams for the actions of the country’s government. Even in the instances where authoritarian countries have been banned by FIFA, it hasn’t been because of the actions of the state. Myanmar was excluded from the 2006 World Cup not because of the country’s brutal military dictatorship, but for failing to play a World Cup qualifying game against Iran four years earlier. Syria was not allowed to qualify for the World Cup in 2014 for fielding an unqualified player rather than because of the atrocities committed by the government of Bashir al-Assad.

Exceptional circumstances

FIFA’s rationale stems from a desire that sports should not be political. It is a fig leaf that generations of FIFA administrators have hidden behind.

But as a scholar who has written extensively about sport and politics, I believe it is absurd to claim that world soccer can be apolitical. International sport is organized around the concept of a nation state. Governments have been quick to celebrate any triumph of their nation’s sporting teams as evidence of their own greatness — or even punish a team for a poor performance.

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So what is different in the case of Russia?

There are several reasons why the Ukraine invasion has served to break FIFA’s policy of viewing national teams apolitically. The brutality of the Russian aggression is one, the self-evident innocence of Ukraine is another.

It has led to an outpouring of sympathy shared among fans and players across Europe. Aiding this is the fact that Ukraine’s elite soccer players are scattered across some of the most high-profile teams in Europe.

It should also be acknowledged that this sympathy in Europe appears to be related to what at best you can call cultural proximity. Palestinians, Yemenis, Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians must wonder what they have to do to make their sufferings as immediate as those of the Ukrainians. Indeed, persistent calls on FIFA to suspend Israel over its treatment of Palestinians have fallen on deaf ears. Similarly, soccer protests over China’s treatment of its Uyghur population are unlikely to result in censure of the Chinese national team.

Nonetheless, sporting bodies, including FIFA, have become a little more welcoming of protest by players of late. The willingness of at least some sporting authorities to condone players’ public protest of racial discrimination — taking a knee before the start of a game has become a common sight in Europe’s top soccer leagues — has paved the way for further acknowledgment of sport’s political dimension.

The “Olympic truce”

Very few outside Russia will be doing anything other than applauding FIFA’s decision. However, I believe it’s time for FIFA and other sports leagues to develop long-term policies, rather than an ad hoc reaction under public pressure.

Sporting bodies can begin by considering the legal basis for the current decision, which looks set to be challenged by the Russian Football Union.

FIFA’s decision took its cue from the International Olympic Committee, which called on other sporting bodies to act after Russia was deemed to have breached the “Olympic Truce.”

This marks a recent revival of an ancient Greek concept in which city-states were required to halt any hostilities to allow athletes safe passage to compete during the games. City-states that did not honor the truce faced sanctions.

Since the 1990s, there have been several attempts to revive this tradition, and the U.K. succeeded in persuading all United Nations members to sign an Olympic truce for the 2012 Games in London. A similar truce was endorsed by the UN for the recent Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Beijing and was due to expire on March 20, 2022. It is for breaching this truce that Russia was sanctioned by the world’s sporting bodies.

Of course, FIFA would have faced the same pressure to act even if Putin had waited for the truce to expire before invading Ukraine. And it is worth noting that several large sporting nations — Australia, the U.S. and India among them — refused to sign up for the truce because of China’s alleged human rights abuses.

A new set of ethical principles?

If sports are to be organized around ethical principles rather than knee-jerk reactions to current events, I believe some kind of consensus about ethical standards and participation is required.

Such a consensus could include banning nations that invade sovereign nations, commit human rights abuses at home or fail to ensure equality before the law — the last of which provided the ethical basis for banning South African teams over apartheid.

Strict enforcement under these terms would have required frequent exclusions in the past. As well as excluding Russia and China, a case could have been made to sanction the U.S. and U.K. for their actions in Iraq; likewise Saudi Arabia for its intervention in Yemen, Turkey for its treatment of Kurds and Brazil for its treatment of indigenous populations, to name but a few.

RELATED: Will sports get over Trumpism?

The reality is that FIFA administrators have always considered sports to be “realpolitikal,” which meant that no national team could be excluded for fear of diminishing the standing of the sporting competition itself.

As a result, bodies like FIFA and the IOC have largely embraced the good, the bad and the ugly.

With Russia’s suspension, sporting bodies may now find it more difficult to turn a blind eye to ethical concerns. The idea that international sport is apolitical has, I believe, finally been stripped of what little credibility it ever had. And if the notion that sports are necessarily political now gains wider acceptance, administrators will be forced to define exactly what they mean by “ethical.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Russian state TV uses Tucker Carlson to “demoralize” Ukraine

Although Fox News host Tucker Carlson briefly condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week, he once again started pushing the Kremlin’s narratives about the conflict on Tuesday night when he talked with Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor, who has consistently urged Ukrainians to surrender to Russian forces.

As The Daily Beast’s Julia Davis reports, Russian state TV on Wednesday jumped at the clips of Macgregor talking with Carlson, and broadcast them widely as a tactic to “demoralize” Ukrainians.

In particular, Davis writes that Russian state TV shows have been particularly enamored with a clip of Macgregor predicting certain death for Ukrainians who don’t lay down their arms.

“What is happening now is the battle in Eastern Ukraine is really almost over, all the Ukrainian troops there have been largely surrounded and cut off… and if they don’t surrender in next 24 hours, I suspect the Russians will ultimately annihilate them,” Macgregor said this week. “The game is over.”

Russian TV host Vladimir Soloviev, who lost access to two Italian villas as a result of the massive sanctions leveled against the country, praised Macgregor for toeing the Kremlin’s line.

“Macgregor is expressing his tough position on Ukraine, will he also be sanctioned by the European Union?” he asked rhetorically. “He is de facto justifying Russia’s actions.”

“Village idiot” Trump would have let Putin take Ukraine “no questions asked”: journalist

One of the ludicrous MAGA talking points being parroted in right-wing media outlets is that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine were Donald Trump still president because Putin feared Trump more than he fears President Joe Biden. Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin tears that argument to pieces in a scathing March 1 column, noting some of the things that former National Security Adviser John Bolton had to say about Trump’s foreign policy during a February 28 appearance on Newsmax.

When Bolton appeared on Rob Schmitt’s show, the Newsmax host claimed that Trump, as president, had a “very tough stance against Russia.” But Bolton, as Levin notes in her column, refused to go along with that nonsense and made it painfully clear that Trump was an absolute train wreck on foreign policy.

John Bolton pushes back on Newsmax host: "[Trump] barely knew where Ukraine was…It's just not accurate to say that Trump's behavior somehow deterred the Russians" pic.twitter.com/ICRmmeJ8C3

— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 1, 2022

Summarizing Bolton’s Newsmax appearance, Levin writes, “For those of you who prefer CliffsNotes, the takeaways here are that: (1) Any sanctions that were placed on Russians during Trump’s time in office were in spite of Trump, who thought they were too mean. (2) Russia didn’t not invade Ukraine while Trump was in office because it was scared of him, but because it wasn’t ready — meaning it might very well have done so in Trump’s second term. (3) Trump is a village idiot who couldn’t find Ukraine on a map…. (4) Trump — and here, we’re just going to quote Bolton because it bears repeating — once asked if Finland were a part of Russia.'”

Levin adds, “But hey, if Trump literally not knowing that Finland is its own country doesn’t drive home the point that he would have let Putin take Ukraine no questions asked, please note that just this past weekend, he was praising Putin’s savvy and calling the U.S. a ‘stupid country.'”

Trump and his sycophants, Levin stresses, have been “rewriting history when it comes to his relationship with Russia, Ukraine and NATO.”

“Among other things,” Levin writes, “the former president has claimed that Vladimir Putin ‘never would have’ invaded Ukraine on his watch; that there ‘would be no NATO’ if it wasn’t for him; and that he generously armed Ukraine ‘when the previous administration was sending blankets.’ These statements, of course, are lies.”

Levin adds, “When it comes to NATO, Trump had to be convinced not to destroy the organization. With regard to Ukraine, the former president conveniently leaves out the part about how he famously tried to extort the country and make U.S. aid conditional on President Volodymyr Zelensky agreeing to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. As for the idea that Trump was so tough on Russia that Putin feared him, and wouldn’t have dared to attack Ukraine if the 45th president had gotten a second term, well, please enjoy (the) exchange between former Trump Administration official John Bolton and Newsmax.”