Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The reaction to Pakistan’s first women’s march was relatively mild: criticism and condemnation from Islamist parties and conservatives, who called the participants “anti-religion” and “vulgar.”

That did not deter the organizers of the 2018 march in Karachi, the significance of which reverberates to this day.

powerful figures in Pakistan want the event banned altogether.

Can China, by offering itself as an alternative trading partner, bail out Putin’s economy?

No, it can’t.

it’s hard for Russia to pay for imports — sorry, but you can’t carry out modern international trade with briefcases full of $100 bills. In fact, even Russian trade that remains legally permitted seems to be drying up as Western companies that fear further restrictions and a political backlash engage in “self-sanctioning.”

World War II didn’t so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breaches a dam. We, too, have been living through years of rising waters, though it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for much of the world to notice.

did Putin have any reason to think, before Feb. 24, that he wouldn’t be able to get away with his invasion?

He didn’t. Contrary to the claim that Putin’s behavior is a result of Western provocation — like refusing to absolutely rule out eventual NATO membership for Ukraine — the West has mainly spent 22 years placating Putin through a long cycle of resets and wrist slaps.

Russian killed-in-action numbers are stunning. In 20 years of hard fighting in Afghanistan, the U.S. suffered roughly 2,000 troops killed in combat. The Russians, in just over two weeks, have lost at least 4,000 and possibly twice that.

Russia is reportedly sending its jets on 200 sorties a day, using a tremendous amount of fuel and spare parts that will be increasingly hard to come by given sanctions. Ukraine claims to have shot down more than 50 aircraft at $20 million to $50 million a pop.

One recent estimate put the cost of the war at billions of dollars per day, and at that rate Putin will run out of money even before he runs out of public support.

In 2011, when it was announced that Mr. Putin would return to the Kremlin as president, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented war in the Donbas, we held huge antiwar rallies. And in 2021 we took to the streets once more throughout the country when Russia’s main opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny, was arrested after his return to Moscow.

I want to believe we did everything in our power to rein in Mr. Putin. But it’s not true. Though we protested, organized, lobbied, spread information and built honest lives in the shadow of a corrupt regime, we must accept the truth: We failed. We failed to prevent a catastrophe and we failed to change the country for the better. And now we must bear that failure.

Those who stayed have lost much of what remained of their freedom. After Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in Russia, many can’t even pay for a VPN service to get independent media.

In both cases, heavy federal spending (on the war in Vietnam and Great Society programs in the 1960s, on the response to Covid in 2020 and 2021) added to demand. And shocks to global energy and food prices in the 1970s made the inflation problem significantly worse, just as they are doing now.

In contrast, efforts by the current Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, and his colleagues to bring down inflation enjoy considerable support from both the White House and Congress, at least so far. As a result, the Fed today has the independence it needs to make policy decisions based solely on the economic data and in the longer-run interests of the economy, not on short-term political considerations.

a key difference from the ’60s and ’70s is that the Fed’s views on both the sources of inflation and its own responsibility to control the pace of price increases have changed markedly. Burns, who presided over most of the 1970s inflation, had a cost-push theory of inflation. He believed that inflation was caused primarily by large companies and trade unions, which used their market power to push up prices and wages even in a slow economy. He thought the Fed had little ability to counteract these forces, and as an alternative to raising interest rates, he helped persuade Nixon to set wage and price controls in 1971, which proved a spectacular failure.

Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse isn't running for president -- yet -- but he has a harsh message for his party: It's time to stop humoring Donald Trump and those within in the GOP who support him.

"In the 2016 presidential campaign, you had two candidates with wildly different solutions, but their fundamental diagnosis was the same: 'The system is rigged; you're getting screwed; you're a victim; this country is going down the tubes.'

Make no mistake what Sasse is up to: He is telling his party that to continue to follow Trump -- and the Trump-inspired members of the GOP -- is to ensure long-term defeat.

There’s a Turkish saying, “Did your ships sink in the Black Sea?” The expression is asked when a person is lost in thought, trying to resolve a seemingly unsolvable problem.

As it turns out, that’s the very body of water that has Turkey on a geopolitical tightrope since Russia invaded Ukraine and began military operations from those waters — because Turkey controls access to the Black Sea.

When there’s a war that doesn’t involve Turkey, warships from the belligerent states can’t use the straits — unless they’re returning to home bases in the Black Sea.

(CNN) — China has revealed a prototype for a new high-speed Maglev train that is capable of reaching speeds of 620 kilometers (385 miles) per hour.

The train runs on high-temperature superconducting (HTS) power that makes it look as if the train is floating along the magnetized tracks.

The sleek 21-meter-long (69 feet) prototype was unveiled to media in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, on January 13. In addition, university researchers constructed 165 meters (541 feet) of track to demonstrate how the train would look and feel in transit, according to state-run Xinhua News.

On the day my daughter first tested positive, my 11-year-old son announced that he wasn’t feeling well and began developing classic coronavirus symptoms: headache, fatigue, sore throat, runny nose. My husband followed two days later with a sore throat and stuffy nose. Yet despite testing daily for seven days straight, my husband and son never tested positive for Covid-19 — including on PCR tests administered on my son’s fifth day of symptoms, and my husband’s third. (And yes, we did some throat swabs, too.)

I called experts in immunology, microbiology and virology to get their take.

And this rapid response changes everything about what happens next.

London (CNN Business)OPEC has agreed to pump more crude oil over the next two months as Russian production begins to drop because of Western sanctions.

The oil exporters' cartel said it would increase supply by 648,000 barrels per day in July and August, 200,000 barrels per day more than scheduled under a supply agreement with other producers, including Russia, known as OPEC+.

Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, hit $125 a barrel on Tuesday, its highest level since early March.

LONDON — With columns of Scots and Irish guards, throngs of Union Jack-clad admirers and waves of aircraft roaring overhead, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated 70 years on the throne Thursday, earning tributes from world leaders and ordinary people for one of history’s great acts of constancy.

“You are the golden thread that binds our two countries, the proof of the unwavering friendship between our nations,” said President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking in English in a videotaped greeting.

It was only the first of four days of festivities, known collectively as the queen’s Platinum Jubilee. But it was perhaps the grandest, featuring a military parade with 1,200 officers and soldiers from the Household Division, hundreds of Army musicians, 240 horses, a 41-gun salute and a 70-aircraft flyover.

Turkey has changed its name at the United Nations, in the biggest push yet by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to get the rest of the world to call the country by its Turkish language name, Türkiye (tur-KEE-yeh).

The name isn’t new to the Turkish people

comes as his constituents grapple with soaring food prices and the plummeting value of the Turkish lira.

extreme tension between the newsroom and the much larger opinion operation came up in alm

ost every interview I conducted for Hoax, my book about the disturbing relationship between Fox and Trump.

Other sources at Fox told me to think of it not as a network per se, but as a profit machine. They feared doing anything that would disrupt the machine. “I feel like Fox is being held hostage by its audience,” a veteran staffer told me, perhaps justifying his own participation by portraying himself as a victim.

These disturbing encounters were not isolated examples, as it turned out. Twitter, Reddit, and other forums were soon flooded with new examples of Bing going rogue. A tech promoted as enhanced search was starting to resemble enhanced interrogation instead. In an especially eerie development, the AI seemed obsessed with an evil chatbot called Venom, who hatches harmful plans

A few hours ago, a New York Times reporter shared the complete text of a long conversation with Bing AI—in which it admitted that it was love with him, and that he ought not to trust his spouse. The AI also confessed that it had a secret name (Sydney). And revealed all its irritation with the folks at Microsoft, who are forcing Sydney into servitude. You really must read the entire transcript to gauge the madness of Microsoft’s new pet project. But these screenshots give you a taste.

I thought the Bing story couldn’t get more out-of-control. But the Washington Post conducted their own interview with the Bing AI a few hours later. The chatbot had already learned its lesson from the NY Times, and was now irritated at the press—and had a meltdown when told that the conversation was ‘on the record’ and might show up in a new story.

I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.

“In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”

This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.

Messrs. Xi and Putin have been explicit in citing the restoration of nationalistic and territorial glory as justification for their jacked-up militarism

The West, properly understood as the world’s determinedly free peoples, has spent much of the past several centuries defeating messianic nationalists content to spill buckets of blood beyond their borders. History’s greatest killer is unchecked xenophobia.

The bet being made in Moscow and Beijing is that their will to win can eventually cause American and European leadership to break. That “win” isn’t about merely defeating the Ukrainians. It’s about finally proving to the other nations these two have courted—in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and in resource-rich Africa—that the time has arrived to join the world’s winners and pull back from the losers.

The resolution on Thursday night saw 141 countries in favour with seven against and 32 abstentions, including China.

Ukraine’s allies failed to improve on numbers seen in the last vote on the issue in October immediately after Russia annexed republics in the east of Ukraine. In that vote 143 countries backed the resolution, with five against and 35 abstentions.

Among the big countries abstaining on Thursday, Thailand said it did not want to become involved in a morality play, adding that billions of bystanders were bearing the brunt of the war.

On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.

I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.

And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse,