Trump has ratcheted-up his juvenile name-calling and unhinged rants regarding Special Counsel Jack Smith and District Attorney Fani Willis. Trump's attacks will not chill the investigations being conducted by Smith and Willis. So the question becomes - what is Trump really trying to accomplish? This video takes on that question.
Anti-drag Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Lee is confronted with pictures of himself dressed in drag
During a hearing Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin destroyed Rep. Lauren Boebert using Trump's own words. Francis Maxwell reports.
Michael Popok of LegalAF analyzes DeSantis retaliating against Disney for speaking out about Don’t Say Gay by signing into law a bill that takes away aspects of Disney’s 50 year self-governance in Central Florida, while at the same time comparing himself favorably to China’s communist regime as he launches his new book.
On today’s episode of The MeidasTouch Podcast, we break down the latest breaking stories that you need to hear. We discuss the new bombshell legal filing in Dominion’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox, which exposes even more of the internal communications at Fox in the days and weeks following the 2020 election and includes transcripts of Rupert Murdoch’s deposition. Additionally, we cover Trump’s latest attacks on Jack Smith and Ron DeSantis, new polls from Fox that show their culture war nonsense is backfiring and much more! New full-length episodes of the MeidasTouch Podcast featuring the brothers are released every Tuesday & Friday morning. The rest of the week, enjoy our short-form content we call ‘The Mighty.’ If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to rate, review and subscribe.
28 February 23
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Each new revelation is a reminder of how little is actually known.
Then again, the new assessment does not match up with findings from elsewhere in the federal government. In mid-2021, when President Joe Biden asked the U.S. intelligence community for a 90-day review of the pandemic’s origins, the response came back divided: Four agencies, plus the National Intelligence Council, guessed that COVID started (as nearly all pandemics do) with a natural exposure to an infected animal; three agencies couldn’t decide on an answer; and one blamed a laboratory accident. DOE’s revision, revealed this week, means that a single undecided vote has flipped into the lab-leak camp. If you’re keeping count—and, really, what else can one do?—the matter still appears to be decided in favor of a zoonotic origin, by an updated score of 5–2. The lab-leak theory remains the outlier position.
Are we done? No, we aren’t done. None of these assessments carries much conviction: Only one, from the FBI, was made with “moderate” confidence; the rest are rated “low,” as in, Hmm, we’re not so sure. This lack of confidence—as compared with the overbearing certainty of the scientists and journalists who rejected the possibility of a lab leak in 2020—will now be fodder for what could be months of congressional hearings, as House Republicans pursue evidence of a possible “cover-up.” But for all the Sturm und Drang that’s sure to come, the fundamental state of knowledge on COVID’s origins remains more or less unchanged from where it was a year ago. The story of a market origin matches up with recent history and an array of well-established facts. But the lab-leak theory also fits in certain ways, and—at least for now—it cannot be ruled out. Putting all of this another way: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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28 February 23
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Peace is only possible if Ukraine keeps Crimea. Here's why.
Whenever genuine peace talks begin, there’s little doubt that Crimea will feature high on the agenda. Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula is the ground zero of Russia’s current war of aggression. Since its seizure by Vladimir Putin’s troops in 2014, Crimea has been flooded with weapons, disinformation and fear. Its residents have been cut off from the rest of Ukraine and the wider world.
There had been a tendency in the West to look away from this Russian occupation of Crimea and shrug our shoulders. But with Ukrainian forces now staging a dogged counteroffensive and striking military targets inside Crimea, there seems to be precious little indifference today. Some pundits are calling on Kyiv to back down and dangle Crimea as a pawn in a future settlement with Russia. Amateur mediators like Elon Musk casually ponder surrendering the peninsula to Putin and calling it a day.
Such overtures are too quick to reward Russian aggression, which has razed entire cities and slaughtered thousands of Ukrainian civilians over the last year alone. And they are too slow to recognize that returning Crimea to Ukrainian control is not only a matter of moral and legal principle that would restore rights and freedoms to millions of people under the Kremlin’s occupation. It is also the only practical way any peace plan could succeed.
The truth is Crimea has no natural physical connection to Russia. Crimea is an extension of the Ukrainian mainland, and as such, it has been deeply connected to and dependent on Ukraine’s resources and trade for centuries.
Crimea’s historical experience of Russian and Soviet rule, meanwhile, has been one of persistent ethnic cleansing, violence and trauma. This helps explain why a majority of Crimea’s residents voted for Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It also helps explain why in 2013, prior to Russia’s invasion of the peninsula, a large majority of poll respondents in Crimea expressed the view that Crimea should be a part of Ukraine.
If the past teaches us anything, it is that Crimea suffers decline when separated from Ukraine, and that Crimea triggers conflict when occupied by Russia. Failing to understand this history is to sleepwalk into a future of more military escalation from the Kremlin.
In the spring of 2014, as Vladimir Putin’s “little green men” were invading Crimea, a Russian meme went viral on social media: KrymNash, or “Crimea Is Ours.” It was a classic imperialist message. Brash, insistent claims to conquered territory are what empires do to mask anxieties about their own political legitimacy. As Edward Said once remarked about empires and their colonies, “If you belong in a place, you do not have to keep saying and showing it.”
Russia is an expansionist land empire, and Crimea is one of its most prized colonies. The strategic port of Sevastopol is home to the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet, while resort towns like Yalta on the mountainous southern coast offer Russian vacationers a rocky Riviera, an exotic playground of warm water beaches.
But behind Crimea’s postcard image lie much deeper realities of demography, history and geography that Russia has anxiously tried to conceal and erase for a long time. One of them is the Crimea of the Crimean Tatars, who are recognized as an indigenous people of Ukraine.
For centuries Crimea was the dominion of the Crimean Tatar khanate, a Sunni Muslim Turkic-speaking state aligned with the Ottoman Empire. Only after invading Crimea four different times did Catherine II succeed in dismantling the khanate in 1783 and in absorbing its territory into a Russian Empire on the march.
But what Catherine acquired in 1783 was not what Putin grabbed in 2014. The territory of the Crimean Tatar khanate she annexed included both the Crimean peninsula and the adjacent steppeland of today’s southern Ukraine, which stretches along the shores of the Black Sea and Azov Sea. In fact, much of the frontline of today’s war follows the contours of what were once the northern reaches of the Crimean Tatar khanate.
Decades after Catherine’s death, this Russian expansion came to a halt. In the mid-19th century, Crimea became the site of an imperial clash of the titans, with British, Ottoman and European allies facing off against Russia over control of the Black Sea region. The Crimean War was the world’s “first armchair war,” a drama and spectacle that reached audiences around the world in something akin to “real time” by way of new technologies like the telegraph. It ended with Russia’s defeat, but in the Western popular imagination, the war served to mingle Crimea and Russia on our mental maps. The effect has been lasting.
Despite defeat, the tsars held on to Crimea. But they never let go of anxieties about their control of the territory of the former Crimean Tatar khanate. In 1857, Tsar Aleksandr II took drastic measures to tighten his grip and explicitly ordered “the cleansing of the Tatars from the entire Crimean peninsula” and their replacement by Slavic “peasants from internal provinces” of the empire. At this time Crimean Tatars constituted nearly 80 percent of Crimea’s inhabitants. By 1900 they plummeted to roughly 25 percent of the population.
In the 20th century, Stalin sought to finish what Aleksandr II started. In May 1944, after the Nazis had retreated, Stalin deported the remaining Crimean Tatar population — approximately 200,000 people — to Central Asia and other far-flung parts of the Soviet Union. The sick and injured not fit for transit on train cars originally meant for livestock were “liquidated.” Those who openly defied the deportation order were shot. Stalin’s Crimean atrocity ultimately claimed tens of thousands of lives. Survivors spent the next half century in places like Uzbekistan fighting for the right to return to their homeland, which they won in the twilight of the Soviet period.
Stalin turned what had been a rudimentary system of ethnic cleansing under the tsars into a brutally efficient machine aimed at decimating the past as well as the present. Our maps today bear evidence of this destruction. Before 1944 there were around 2,000 towns and villages in Crimea bearing Crimean Tatar names. After the deportation, only a relative handful remained. Stalin consigned traces of the legacy of the Crimean Tatars to what Orwell would call a “memory hole.”
These changes took place with great speed. After demoting Crimea from the status of an Autonomous Republic to a mere oblast or “province” of Soviet Russia, Communist Party authorities ordered that Crimean Tatar names of cities, towns and villages be replaced with Russian ones. The daunting task fell to one man, the executive secretary of the newspaper Red Crimea, who had to rename a territory roughly the size of Massachusetts virtually overnight. For ideas, he flipped through a 19th-century fruiticulture book, on the one hand, and an account of the Red Army’s Crimean offensive against the Nazi Wehrmacht on the other.
That is why the names of so many places in Crimea strike visitors as bland and unimaginative today. Kiçkene, a village near Simferopol with only 156 recorded residents in 1939, became Malenkoe, “Smallville.” Qutlaq, a village in the Sudak region first cited in historical records in the 15th century, had a majority population of 1,636 Crimean Tatars in 1939. For assisting the Soviet partisan movement during the war, its residents had to watch as Nazi occupiers retaliated by burning the village to the ground. Qutlaq was renamed Veseloe, “Happytown.”
This campaign to efface the Crimean Tatar people from Crimea — both physically and symbolically — intersected with a campaign to replace them. Between 1944 and 1946 alone, the Kremlin distributed stolen Crimean Tatar homes and property to roughly 64,000 settlers who arrived from other Soviet oblasts. Tens of thousands more arrived in the 1950s. Stalinist officials explicitly described this project in revealing terms. It was an initiative “to make Crimea a new Crimea with its own Russian form.”
Such statements from Soviet authorities implicitly acknowledge that, prior to the 1940s, Crimea did not have a “Russian form.” They give the lie to claims that Crimea is “primordial” Russian territory, as Putin likes to insist. In the 1950s, the poet Boris Chichibabin walked through Crimea’s old Tatar streets and put it bluntly: “This is not Russia at all.”
Another truth about Crimea that Russians work hard to dismiss and conceal today is the peninsula’s dependence on the Ukrainian mainland.
But Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, learned the lesson up close and personal. In 1953 he travelled to Crimea with his son-in-law, the prominent Soviet journalist Aleksei Adzhubei. The trip was no vacation. According to Adzhubei, Khrushchev had a series of awkward encounters with crowds of post-war Soviet settlers, who made desperate pleas for more material assistance. Khrushchev was frustrated by all the complaints. “Why did you come here anyway?” Adzhubei recalls Khrushchev asking the settlers. “We were tricked!” they replied.
Adzhubei described Crimea at the time as a deeply “desolate” region still struggling to rebound from Nazi occupation and what he called Stalin’s “Tatar genocide,” which had not only depopulated the peninsula but deprived it of agricultural know-how in the cultivation of vineyards and tobacco fields.
By all accounts, the bleak conditions in Crimea shocked Khrushchev. According to Dmitrii Polianskii, who served as head of the Communist Party in Crimea between 1953 and 1954, Khrushchev came to the conclusion that “Russia had paid little attention to Crimea’s development” and that “Ukraine could handle it more concertedly.”
Khrushchev and other Soviet authorities learned the hard way that Crimea is not an “island” or a “jewel,” as Russian metaphors would have it, a beautiful but self-sufficient swath of territory. Instead, to reach for another metaphor, Crimea is a flower whose blossom floats in the Black Sea and whose stem reaches deep into the Ukrainian steppe, into the territory around today’s frontline cities of Kherson, Melitopol’, and Mariupol’.
The Crimean Tatars used to refer to this steppeland as the Özü qırları or Özü çölleri, the “Dnipro fields.” The reference to the Dnipro (or Dnieper), Ukraine’s largest river, was not ornamental. The Crimean peninsula is largely arid and warm, lacking abundant fresh water of its own. For centuries it has thirsted for the Dnipro’s water and relied on resource flows from mainland Ukraine.
In February 1954, Khrushchev’s regime took action to rejoin the blossom to its stem, announcing the formal transfer of the Crimean oblast from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine. During the formal Politburo proceedings, Soviet Russian politician Mikhail Tarasov justified the transfer by describing Crimea in the way we should understand it today: as “a natural continuation of Ukraine’s southern steppe.”
Adzhubei called the transfer a “business transaction” directed toward Crimea’s economic development. It produced quick dividends. In 1957, Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv oversaw the launch of what had been decades earlier merely a Russian pipedream: the construction of the North Crimean Canal, which expedited flows from the Dnipro river near Kherson to irrigate the entire peninsula. Crimea’s economy, particularly its agricultural sector, improved dramatically. So did its tourism industry. High-rise sanatoria for the Soviet elite popped up along the southern coast, driving the image of a Soviet Shangri-La along the Black Sea.
Only in later years would Ukraine’s success in developing Crimea be denigrated and mythologized as Khrushchev’s “gift” of Crimea to Ukraine – or worse, as Khrushchev’s “mistake.” The transfer of Crimea to Ukraine was no mistake. It was a rescue.
Connecting the dots between Crimea’s geography, history and scarred demography helps explain some of the trajectories of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. It also illustrates the need for Ukraine’s absolute victory.
Putin’s 2014 annexation operation ended up disconnecting Crimea from resource flows from Ukraine, including the North Crimean Canal, which still supplied 85 percent of fresh water to the peninsula. His massive vanity bridge, stretching 12 miles over the Kerch Strait from the eastern edge of Crimea to mainland Russia, was completed in 2018 but could not come close to compensating for these losses. That’s why in February 2022 — on the very first day of the full-scale invasion — Putin’s forces used Crimea as a launchpad to tear into Ukraine’s Kherson oblast and seize control of this critical water and resource supply. The move was an implicit recognition of a fundamental reality: Crimea needs to be connected to the Ukrainian mainland to thrive or even survive.
Russia’s hold on Crimea is, therefore tenuous. Any proposed peace settlement that codifies its occupation in exchange for a cessation of hostilities would be a ticking time bomb. The truth is that Ukraine will never be stable and peaceful with a Russian-occupied Crimea, and a Russian-occupied Crimea will never be resource-secure without Ukraine.
Crimean Tatar activist and Amnesty International prisoner of conscience Emir-Usein Kuku frames the problem with a sardonic question that refers to the Russian security and intelligence agency, the FSB.
“Doesn’t it seem strange,” he asked during his illegal trial in Russia in 2019, “that in the 23 years under Ukrainian authority in Crimea there were no ‘extremists,’ no ‘terrorists,’ and no ‘acts of terror’ for that matter? But then Russia arrived with its FSB, and suddenly all of these things appeared together?”
The track record is clear. Ukraine stabilized Crimea; Russia has turned it into a hinge of expansionist aggression. In 2014 the world stood by and let it happen in the vain hope of easy peace.
We cannot afford to make the same mistake now. Half-measures and short-sighted compromises are a recipe for endless war against a state bent on savage imperialist conquest. The difficult path to lasting peace is Ukraine’s de-occupation of Crimea and an unmistakable defeat of Russian aggression.
Europe and the United States should know well the urgency of a total defeat of the aggressor. In his address to Congress in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged that, “no matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
Now as then, only absolute victory will do. Only a defeated, demilitarized Russia and a fully liberated Ukraine — whole and integral within its internationally recognised borders — can promise long-term stability and an enduring peace.
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"I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight," Rupert Murdoch said of the election fraud narrative. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul, spoke under oath last month in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems.
“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.
Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”
Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.
Proof to that effect would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.
The new documents and a similar batch released this month provide a dramatic account from inside the network, depicting a frantic scramble as Fox tried to woo back its large conservative audience after ratings collapsed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss. Fox had been the first network to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden on election night — essentially declaring him the next president. When Mr. Trump refused to concede and started attacking Fox as disloyal and dishonest, viewers began to change the channel.
The filings also revealed that top executives and on-air hosts had reacted with incredulity bordering on contempt to various fictitious allegations about Dominion. These included unsubstantiated rumors — repeatedly uttered by guests and hosts of Fox programs — that its voting machines could run a secret algorithm that switched votes from one candidate to another, and that the company was founded in Venezuela to help that country’s longtime leader, Hugo Chávez, fix elections.
Despite those misgivings, little changed about the content on shows like Mr. Dobbs’s and Ms. Bartiromo’s. For weeks after the election, viewers of Fox News and Fox Business heard a far different story from the one that Fox executives privately conceded was real.
Lawyers for Fox News, which filed a response to Dominion in court on Monday, argued that its commentary and reporting after the election did not amount to defamation because its hosts had not endorsed the falsehoods about Dominion, even if Mr. Murdoch stated otherwise in his deposition. As such, the network’s lawyers argued, Fox’s coverage was protected under the First Amendment.
“Far from reporting the allegations as true, hosts informed their audiences at every turn that the allegations were just allegations that would need to be proven in court in short order if they were going to impact the outcome of the election,” Fox lawyers said in their filing. “And to the extent some hosts commented on the allegations, that commentary is independently protected opinion.”
A Fox News spokeswoman said on Monday in response to the filing that Dominion’s case “has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal scrutiny.” She added that the company had taken “an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting.”
In certain instances, Fox hosts did present the allegations as unproven and offered their opinions. And Fox lawyers have pointed to exchanges on the air when hosts challenged these claims and pressed Mr. Trump’s lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani to present evidence that never materialized.
But the case is also likely to revolve around questions about what people with the power to shape Fox’s on-air content knew about the validity of the fraud allegations as they gave pro-Trump election deniers a platform — often in front of hosts who mustered no pushback.
“There appears to be a pretty good argument that Fox endorsed the accuracy of what was being said,” said Lee Levine, a veteran First Amendment lawyer who has defended major media organizations in defamation cases. He added that Fox’s arguments were stronger against some of Dominion’s claims than others. But based on what he has seen of the case so far, Mr. Levine said, “I’d much rather be in Dominion’s shoes than Fox’s right now.”
Dominion’s filing casts Mr. Murdoch as a chairman who was both deeply engaged with his senior leadership about coverage of the election and operating at somewhat of a remove, unwilling to interfere. Asked by Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, whether he could have ordered Fox News to keep Trump lawyers like Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani off the air, Mr. Murdoch responded: “I could have. But I didn’t.”
The document also described how Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House and current member of the Fox Corporation board of directors, said in his deposition that he had implored Mr. Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the chief executive officer, “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” Mr. Ryan suggested instead that the network pivot and “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.”
There was some discussion at the highest levels of the company about how to make that pivot, Dominion said.
On Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the attack at the Capitol, Mr. Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, talked about whether Mr. Hannity and his fellow prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, should make it clear to viewers that Mr. Biden had won the election. Mr. Murdoch said in his deposition that he had hoped such a statement “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen.”
According to the filing, Ms. Scott said of the hosts, “Privately they are all there,” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” No statement of that kind was made on the air.
Dominion details the close relationship that Fox hosts and executives enjoyed with senior Republican Party officials and members of the Trump inner circle, revealing how at times Fox was shaping the very story it was covering. It describes how Mr. Murdoch placed a call to the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, immediately after the election. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch testified that during that call he likely urged Mr. McConnell to “ask other senior Republicans to refuse to endorse Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and baseless claims of fraud.”
Dominion also describes how Mr. Murdoch provided Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, with confidential information about ads that the Biden campaign would be running on Fox.
At one point, Dominion’s lawyers accuse Ms. Pirro, who hosted a Saturday evening talk show, of “laundering her own conspiracy theories through Powell.” The filing goes on to say Ms. Pirro bragged to her friends “that she was the source for Powell’s claims.” Dominion notes that this was “something she never shared with her audience.”
The filing on Monday included a deposition by Viet Dinh, Fox Corporation’s chief legal officer, who was one of the many senior executive cautioning about the content of Fox’s coverage. After Mr. Hannity told his audience on Nov. 5, 2020, that it would be “impossible to ever know the true, fair, accurate election results,” Mr. Dinh told a group of senior executives including Lachlan Murdoch and Ms. Scott: “Hannity is getting awfully close to the line with his commentary and guests tonight.”
When asked in his deposition if Fox executives had an obligation to stop hosts of shows from broadcasting lies, Mr. Dinh said: “Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.”
In their filing on Monday, Fox’s lawyers accused Dominion of cherry-picking evidence that some at Fox News knew the allegations against Dominion were not true and, therefore, acted out of actual malice, the legal standard required to prove defamation.
“The vast majority of Dominion’s evidence comes from individuals who had zero responsibility for the statements Dominion challenges,” the lawyers said.
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At least 7,343 children have been deported to Russia and another 236 are still missing since the start of its invasion of Ukraine. (photo: Sergey Chuzavkov/AFP)
During the trip, she met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, among other officials.
Yellen conveyed that the U.S. will stand with Ukraine "for as long as it takes," and "highlighted the efforts of the U.S. and its global coalition to impose severe sanctions on Russia to degrade its war machine and limit the revenue it has to fund its brutal war," according to the U.S. Department of Treasury.
"The United States has been powerfully supporting us since the first days of this war not only with weapons, but also on the financial front," Zelensky wrote on his Telegram following his meeting with Yellen. "We really appreciate it."
"It is necessary to further strengthen sanctions to deprive Russia of the ability to finance the war," Zelensky added.
Yellen’s trip comes a week after U.S. President Joe Biden paid a historic surprise visit to the Ukrainian capital in a show of "unwavering" support to Ukraine, and the introduction of Washington’s new sanctions against Russia, targeting over 200 individuals and entities within Russia and worldwide, including banks and key suppliers of the Russian military.
The U.S. also announced an additional $10 billion aid package for Ukraine on Feb. 24, which includes budgetary support to the Ukrainian government and energy assistance to help support Ukrainians "suffering from Russia's attacks."
Russia's war caused 'the most massive violations of human rights,' says UN
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Feb. 27 that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had triggered "the most massive violations of human rights we are living (through) today."
"It has unleashed widespread death, destruction, and displacement. Attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure have caused many casualties and terrible suffering," the UN chief said.
According to the United Nations human rights agency most recent data, Russia's war against Ukraine has killed at least 8,101 civilians and wounded at least 13,479 since the beginning of the full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
The actual figures are likely significantly higher since data from occupied territories or areas with ongoing hostilities either can’t be confirmed or is inaccessible.
According to Children of War, a website created by the Ukrainian government, 16,221 children have been abducted by Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
In a joint effort on Feb. 27, the European Commission and Poland announced an initiative aimed at locating Ukrainian children who have been abducted by the Russian troops from occupied territories. This initiative has received support from the UN and aims to gather evidence that will assist in locating these Ukrainian children who were illegally taken to Russia, as well as to bring charges against those who abducted them.
Guterres also said the agency has documented dozens of cases of the war-related sexual violence against men, women, and girls in Ukraine.
"Serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law against prisoners of war, and hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances, and arbitrary detentions of civilians were also documented," he said.
Russian-organized torture chambers that held both Ukrainian civilians and soldiers have been found in numerous villages, towns, and cities liberated by the Ukrainian army.
Attacks and casualties
Russia continued to launch its attacks across Ukraine on Feb. 27.
In a morning update, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces said that the Ukrainian military successfully repelled 81 Russian attacks over the past 24 hours in northeastern and eastern Ukraine. The attacks occurred near Kupiansk in the northeastern Kharkiv Oblast as well as Lyman, Bakhmut, Adviika, and Shakhtarsk in the eastern Donetsk Oblast.
Russia is focusing its main offensive efforts in these areas, according to the report.
Russian troops launched eight missile attacks and 28 air strikes against Ukraine, including 12 strikes using Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones, on Feb. 27, the General Staff said.
Overnight on Feb. 27, Russia launched 14 drones to attack Ukrainian cities, but 11 of them were shot down by Ukraine's Air Force. Explosions were reported in Khmelnytskyi Oblast and Kyiv during the night.
According to local authorities, three people were killed, and eight were wounded due to the Russian attacks on Feb. 27.
One person was killed and four were injured as the Russian forces hit the western city of Khmelnytskyi with the drones, Mayor Oleksandr Symchyshyn reported. Later Governor Serhii Hamalii said that one of the wounded had died in the hospital.
The attacks killed one person and wounded two more in the southern Kherson Oblast, which the Russian troops struck 97 times using multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), mortars, tanks, drones, and artillery, Kherson Oblast Military Administration reported.
Moscow is still pursuing plans to destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate.
The directorate reported that in addition to targeting the electricity grid, Russia is also seeking to disrupt the country's fuel and energy complex in order to cut off the supply of petroleum products.
Moscow has been launching missile and drone attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure since October, resulting in numerous casualties and significant damage to the country's energy system.
Despite this, state-owned power grid operator Ukrenergo reported in late February that the situation with Ukraine's energy infrastructure has become more stable.
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Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Getty Images)
A decision against the bureau could cast doubt on every rule and enforcement action the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken.
A ruling against the bureau, created as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act after the financial crisis, could cast doubt on every regulation and enforcement action it took in the dozen years of its existence. That includes extensive rules — and punishments against companies that flout them — that the agency has written to govern mortgages, credit cards, consumer loans and banking.
The central question in the case, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America, No. 22-448, is whether the way Congress chose to fund the agency violated the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution, which says that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, ruled in October that the bureau’s funding mechanism ran afoul of that clause.
“Wherever the line between a constitutionally and unconstitutionally funded agency may be, this unprecedented arrangement crosses it,” Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote in an opinion joined by Judges Don R. Willett and Kurt D. Engelhardt in the ruling. President Donald J. Trump appointed all three judges on the panel.
The bureau is funded by the Federal Reserve System, in an amount determined by the bureau so long as it does not exceed 12 percent of the system’s operating expenses. In the 2022 fiscal year, the agency requested and received $641.5 million of the $734 million available. The 2010 law said the bureau’s funding requests “shall not be subject to review by” the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.
The Fifth Circuit’s decision was at odds with ones from other courts. In 2018, for instance, the District of Columbia Circuit said there was nothing unusual about the funding mechanism.
In urging the Supreme Court to hear the Biden administration’s appeal, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar said the ruling “threatens to inflict immense legal and practical harms on the C.F.P.B., consumers and the nation’s financial sector.”
A decision against the consumer bureau could imperil other agencies.
“If the Supreme Court accepts this deeply flawed argument against C.F.P.B. funding, it would set a dangerous precedent that would be used to challenge agencies with legally indistinguishable funding, including the Federal Reserve, F.D.I.C., Medicare and Social Security,” said Nadine Chabrier, a senior policy and litigation counsel at the nonpartisan research group Center for Responsible Lending.
But opponents of the bureau, including Republican lawmakers, countered that the agency was uniquely problematic and hoped the case would resolve a recurring question.
In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that a different part of the law creating the consumer bureau was unconstitutional, saying that Congress could not insulate the bureau’s director from presidential oversight given the scope of the job’s authority.
“The director has the sole responsibility to administer 19 separate consumer-protection statutes that cover everything from credit cards and car payments to mortgages and student loans,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
He mentioned the bureau’s funding in passing, noting that its budget had exceeded half a billion dollars in recent years.
“Unlike most other agencies,” the chief justice wrote, “the C.F.P.B. does not rely on the annual appropriations process for funding. Instead, the C.F.P.B. receives funding directly from the Federal Reserve, which is itself funded outside the appropriations process through bank assessments.”
Chief Justice Roberts made the same point when the case was argued. “They don’t even have to go to Congress to get their money,” he said.
In the administration’s petition seeking review, Ms. Prelogar wrote that “the C.F.P.B.’s funding mechanism is entirely consistent with the text of the Appropriations Clause, with longstanding practice and with this court’s precedent.”
She added that barring congressional committees from reviewing the funding “simply allocates authority among different congressional bodies” and that “the Appropriations Clause is not concerned with such matters of internal congressional housekeeping.”
The case was brought by two trade groups representing payday lenders. They challenged a regulation limiting the number of times lenders can try to withdraw funds from borrowers’ bank accounts. The Fifth Circuit struck down the regulation, saying it was “wholly drawn through the agency’s unconstitutional funding scheme.”
The Supreme Court turned down a request from the Biden administration to decide the case in its current term, which ends in late June or early July. The justices will instead hear arguments in the fall and probably not issue a decision until 2024.
That could complicate the agency’s operations as other challenges mount. More than a dozen companies have cited the Fifth Circuit ruling in seeking to have lawsuits or penalties the bureau has filed against them thrown out.
“A delay in hearing this case only hurts consumers, as this is an urgent issue that has horrifying implications for consumers and our entire financial system,” Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio and the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement.
House Republicans have previously introduced legislation that would bring the C.F.P.B. into the traditional appropriations process and remain committed to passing such a bill, Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said in a statement.
A healthcare worker and a patient. (photo: ABC News)
Small shift in favor of ‘lab leak’ theory was prompted by new data and group of weapons-lab scientists
An analysis by experts from the U.S. national laboratory complex — including members of a storied team known as Z-Division — prompted the Energy Department to change its view earlier this year about the likely cause of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak, the officials said. Though initially undecided about covid-19’s origins, Energy officials concluded as part of a new government-wide intelligence assessment that a lab accident was most likely the triggering event for the world’s worst pandemic in a century.
But other intelligence agencies involved in the classified update — completed in the past few weeks and kept under wraps — were divided on the question of covid-19’s origins, with most still maintaining that a natural, evolutionary “spillover” from animals was the most likely explanation. Even the Energy Department’s analysis was carefully hedged, as the officials expressed only “low confidence” in their conclusion, according to U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a classified report.
The overall view — that there is as yet no definitive conclusion on the virus’s origin — has not changed since the release of an earlier version of the report by the Biden administration in 2021, according to the officials.
“The bottom line remains the same: Basically no one really knows,” one of the officials said.
Still, the news that Energy had shifted its view reignited what was already an intense debate on social media and in Washington, where members of Congress are preparing for hearings — some as early as Tuesday — exploring the circumstances behind the outbreak.
“To prevent the next pandemic, we need to know how this one began,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in response to news of the updated assessment, first reported Sunday by the Wall Street Journal. “The administration must move with a sense of urgency and use every tool at its disposal to ensure that we understand the origins of covid-19.”
U.S. officials confirmed that an updated assessment of covid-19’s origins was completed this year, and said the document was based on fresh data as well as new analysis by experts from eight intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council.
But the agencies are united, the official said, in the view that the virus was not man-made or developed as a bioweapon.
“‘Lab’ does not equal ‘man-made,’ the official said. “Even if it was a leak from a lab, they still think it would be a naturally occurring virus.”
Among the nine intelligence entities involved in the assessment, only the FBI had previously concluded, with “moderate” confidence, that covid-19 started with a lab accident. The Energy Department was the only agency that changed its view, while the CIA and one other agency remained undecided, lacking enough compelling evidence to support one conclusion over the other, officials said.
Even at low confidence, however, the Energy Department’s analysis carries weight. For its assessment, the department drew on the expertise of a team assembled from the U.S. national laboratory complex, which employs tens of thousands of scientists representing many technical specialties, from physics and data analysis to genomics and molecular biology.
The labs were established as part of the U.S. nuclear weapons program and operate largely in the classified realm. The department’s cadre of technical experts includes members of the Energy Department’s Z-Division, which since the 1960s has been involved in secretive investigations of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threats by U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia.
The Energy Department is “a technical organization with tens of thousands of scientists,” said a former energy official. “It’s more than just physics. It’s chemical and biological expertise. And they have a unique opportunity to look at intelligence from the technical aspect.”
Both the Energy Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the revised assessment. It was unclear what, precisely, prompted officials at Energy to see a lab leak as the more probable explanation for how covid-19 began.
Neither of the leading theories — a natural spillover or a lab leak — have been conclusively validated, in part because of China’s refusal to allow independent investigators access to environmental samples and other raw data from the earliest weeks of the outbreak.
Many scientists — and, at least for now, the majority of U.S. intelligence agencies — favor the spillover hypothesis, which holds that the virus jumped from bats to humans, perhaps at a Chinese market, and presumably after passing through a third species that had come to harbor what became known as the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Yet, three years after the outbreak began, the search for the elusive “carrier” species has produced no firm leads. The bats that naturally harbor viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 are native to Southeast Asia and southern China, about 1,000 miles from Wuhan, where the first cases of covid-19 were reported.
Likewise, no hard evidence of a lab leak has emerged. Supporters of the leak theory note that the outbreak began in a city that happens to be the world’s leading center for research on coronaviruses. China has had previous lab accidents, including an incident in 2004 in which lab workers were inadvertently exposed to the original SARS virus, and subsequently spread the pathogen outside the lab, resulting in multiple illnesses and at least one death, according to a World Health Organization probe.
China has repeatedly denied that an accident occurred. On Monday, Beijing denounced the new report linking Chinese labs to the pandemic, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning demanding that the United States “stop defaming China.”
“Covid tracing is a scientific issue that should not be politicized,” she said.
The Biden administration on Monday emphasized the inclusive nature of the evidence so far. National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby, speaking at a White House briefing, said the new intelligence assessment was part of an ongoing “whole of government” effort to investigate how covid-19 began, although he acknowledged that firm conclusions have remained elusive.
“There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how covid started,” Kirby told reporters. “That work is still ongoing, but the president believes it’s really important that we continue that work and that we find out as best we can how it started so that we can better prevent a future pandemic.”
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines is scheduled to testify at a Senate worldwide threats hearing next week and probably will be asked to address the matter. The House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic was set to hold a roundtable exploring early covid-19 policy decisions on Tuesday.
Scott Adams. (photo: CNN)
"I'm proud and happy to see publishers, magazines, and newspapers are dropping him because there should be no tolerance for that kind of language," said Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, a cartoonist for The New Yorker.
"It's a relief to see him held accountable," she added.
Hundreds of newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, announced they will no longer carry Adams' work. On Monday, Adams' distributor, Andrews McMeel Universal, said they are severing ties with the cartoonist because the company does not support "any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate."
The Penguin Random House imprint, Portfolio, also will no longer publish Adams' upcoming book, Reframe Your Brain, which was set to release in September, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The fallout was sparked by a YouTube livestream posted Feb. 22, where Adams referenced a Rasmussen poll that found only a slim majority of Black Americans agreed with the statement "It's okay to be white." Adams went on to accuse Black Americans of being "a hate group" and advised white people to "get the hell away" from them.
But cartoonists say Adams has a long history of spewing problematic views. In the past, Adams has inaccurately described people who are not vaccinated against COVID as the real "winners" of the pandemic. He also questioned the accuracy of the Holocaust death toll. Another of Adams' claims is that he had lost multiple job opportunities for "being white."
"It begs the question, now that everyone is piling on him, what took so long?" said Keith Knight, an illustrator known for his comic strips The Knight Life, (th)ink and The K Chronicles. He is also a co-creator of the Hulu comedy show Woke, which chronicles the life of a Black cartoonist.
Adams says he's been "canceled" but cartoonists disagree
After receiving widespread pushback for his offensive rant, Adams described himself as getting canceled. But cartoonists argue that he is simply being held accountable for his remarks.
"By Adams saying he's been canceled, its him not owning up to his own responsibility for the things he said and the effect they have on other people," said Ward Sutton, who has contributed illustrations to The New York Times, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone.
"He's trying to turn himself into a victim when he himself has been a perpetrator of hate," Sutton added.
He said newspapers are not obligated to run Dilbert, and they have the editorial right to cut ties with Adams if they no longer want him as a voice in their paper.
Similarly, Hector Cantú, best known for his Latino-American comic Baldo, said he believes in freedom of speech, but not freedom from repercussions.
"Don't gloss this over by saying it's politics or it's cancel culture," he said. "If you're going to offend people, you risk paying the price."
Artists look to the future of cartooning for encouragement
In the wake of his controversial video, Adams has stood by what he said and even received support from people who are frustrated by what they call "cancel culture," including billionaire Elon Musk.
Despite Adams' unapologetic stance, Knight hopes that the Dilbert creator's departure from newspapers will be an opportunity for a more diverse group of artists to share their work, adding that the industry can be tough for artists of color to break into.
"I say it all the time: Cats have better representation on the comics page than people of color," Knight said. "Maybe this is an opportunity to diversify the comics page."
READ MORE 
A man takes photos as a black plume rises over East Palestine, Ohio, as a result of a controlled detonation after a train derailment. (photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP)
It’s the beginning of a years-long effort to clean up and track the effects of chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio.
The towering smoke cloud from the burning vinyl chloride has drifted away, and the track has been cleared. Trains are now running again through the town. But the 4,700 residents of East Palestine say they still smell chemical residue in the air, see an oily sheen in the water, and are suffering from headaches and nausea. Concern is mounting about the long-term effects of the disaster.
It’s also become a political football. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited East Palestine this week and apologized for not speaking about the derailment sooner. Former President Donald Trump also visited the town and criticized President Joe Biden for going to Ukraine this week instead of Ohio. (Trump himself has faced criticism for rolling back train safety rules.)
Other government officials are trying to assure residents that much of the risk has faded. This week, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan both visited East Palestine and drank tap water in a resident’s home.
“You don’t know who to trust. That’s a big part of it — the uncertainty. You don’t know if you’re going to have to move,” one resident, Carolyn Brown, told ABC News. “We need to feel that we’re safe.”
But “safe” may be more than anyone can promise.
“‘Safe’ is one of those four-letter words in a [disaster] response you just don’t use,” said Stan Meiburg, executive director of the Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability at Wake Forest University and a former career EPA official who worked on toxic waste cleanup. “What people consider ‘safe’ is highly variable ... plus, EPA just can’t answer that question.”
Instead, agencies like the EPA try to measure what they can and extrapolate from past research. They compare the concentrations of pollutants they measure to limits established by health departments, which don’t always reflect the dangers an individual will face. Children, for example, breathe in more air proportionate to their body size and thus are more vulnerable to airborne toxic chemicals. And scientists aren’t clear how the health effects of the specific toxic chemical brew that shrouded East Palestine will play out over time.
Authorities nevertheless told residents they could return home. In doing so, the people of East Palestine may face low levels of exposure to some of the dangerous chemicals from the derailment, with uncertain health effects.
So now begins a years-long effort to track the effects of the leaked chemicals, to mitigate their harms, to analyze why the train derailed, and to prevent the next spill. While this is uncharted territory for health and environment agencies, experts say there are some best practices to better understand the disaster and to protect residents. But they require continued attention and resources long after media coverage fades and political wrangling stops.
The next steps in the response to the East Palestine chemical spill
Of the 38 cars that derailed on February 3, 11 were known to hold hazardous chemicals, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. These included chemicals like vinyl chloride, a flammable carcinogenic gas, and butyl acrylate, a toxic flammable liquid. Some leaked, some were vented, and some burned, further complicating the picture.
“Each of the chemicals that leaked are respiratory irritants, and some of their breakdown products are also irritants,” said Marilyn Howarth, an environmental toxicologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in an email. “This is part of what is unclear: How much of each was experienced by each person and for how long?”
Occupational health researchers have found that workers who are regularly exposed to chemicals like vinyl chloride have higher rates of liver cancer. It’s a signal that can take 20 years or more to emerge, Howarth said. However, these workers were exposed to higher doses and in enclosed spaces, unlike the residents of East Palestine. It’s not clear how exposures from the train derailment will play out, but the long latency of vinyl chloride’s worst effects means that it’s critical to track its concentrations in the community for years to come.
Meanwhile, residues from burning vinyl chloride, like dioxin, and other leaked chemicals, like butyl acrylate, can haunt water supplies for years and spread through watersheds and underground aquifers that provide drinking water.
“The aquifer may remain contaminated for years, even a decade, despite best clean-up efforts in the short and long term,” Abinash Agrawal, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wright State University, said in an email. “This may not be a threat to breathable air quality, but definitely toxic in drinking water as it can migrate and move/travel in a groundwater plume of contamination to the pumping wells nearby up to several thousand feet.”
So state and federal environmental agencies will also need to check water and soil samples regularly for contamination for years.
Parts of East Palestine and the surrounding region will also have to be decontaminated, cleaned up, and remediated. The water used to extinguish the train fire is now toxic, and 2 million gallons of it are being sent to Texas, where it will be injected underground for disposal. The contaminated soil around the train tracks is being excavated and sent to a toxic waste disposal site in Michigan. The community may also have to look for a new drinking water source, Agrawal said.
The National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation of the root causes of the train wreck. Federal regulators will have to consider whether to impose new safety regulations on the rail industry.
The residents of East Palestine will also have to keep tabs on their health. Philip Landrigan, director of the public health program at Boston College, studied 20,000 first responders and rescue workers in New York City after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He said one of the key lessons learned from that study was that in addition to figuring out exactly what was in the dust that people were breathing in, it was also important to conduct regular health assessments to catch problems that emerged over time.
“A program has to be put in place to get baseline health evaluations of people in the town, even people that appear to be okay, and follow them up periodically over the next decade or more,” Landrigan said.
Norfolk Southern will have to pay
All these measures, however, will cost a lot of money. “You can’t expect the people who were the victims of this catastrophe to pay for that themselves,” Landrigan said.
To that end, the EPA has ordered Norfolk Southern to pay for the cleanup of the train derailment and the response. If they fall short, the rail operator could face a fine of $70,000 per day according to EPA administrator Regan. “Norfolk Southern will pay for the mess that they created and the trauma that they inflicted on this community,” he said during a press conference this week.
But that doesn’t account for the ongoing health needs of East Palestine, and the total medical bill could be massive. A number of residents are now looking to sue the railroad company. Norfolk Southern has also committed $5.6 million in financial assistance and support to the town.
One of the biggest challenges, however, will be rebuilding trust between the community and the government. A half-dozen federal offices along with local authorities are playing roles in the disaster response, which is making it difficult for some residents to figure out who should be held accountable.
And agencies like the EPA are struggling to communicate how to interpret their measurements of chemical exposures and how residents should respond to their findings. Things like quantifying the toxic chemicals in the air, soil, and water and determining that they’re below reference levels don’t address the anxiety that the people of East Palestine may feel.
“One thing that I hope we will see the agency doing is recognizing that assurances to people are not just giving them numbers but rather helping them have access to resources that will help them discuss their feeling about the matter,” said Meiburg.
“This has been a traumatizing event for the community,” he added. “To think about this as a ‘one and done’ experience is probably a mistake.”
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57 House Dems Call On Biden to Prevent Israeli Assault on Rafah "An offensive invasion into Rafah by Israel in the upcoming days is w...
