-Donald Trump, in a lengthy formal statement about his hole-in-one
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Tuesday’s peace talks in Turkey between Ukraine and Russia seemed to produce hopeful signs of progress, but U.S. officials and other Western leaders said they’ll need to see Russia back up its pledges with action before cracking open the celebratory borscht.
- During the first in-person peace talks in two weeks, Ukrainian negotiators said they had offered a detailed peace framework under which Ukraine would declare itself neutral in exchange for security guarantees, while Russia’s deputy defense minister said that Moscow had decided to “fundamentally cut back military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv” in order to “increase mutual trust and create conditions for future negotiations.” Sounds constructive, yes?
- Well, maybe. “There is what Russia says and there is what Russia does, and we’re focused on the latter,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday. “And what Russia is doing is the continued brutalization of Ukraine.” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that while the U.S. had detected some Russian ground forces moving away from Kyiv, it looked more like a repositioning than a real withdrawal, and airstrikes against the city continued. “We’re not convinced that the threat to the capital city has been radically diminished,” Kirby said.
- Russia’s pledge to pull its troops away from Kyiv could be a ploy to buy time to regroup; it could also just be a face-saving effort to reframe an embarrassing retreat from an area it failed to capture as a gesture of goodwill. (The invasion has been so dogshit that the U.S. is now reviewing its own intelligence-gathering to see how its assessments of Russia’s strength could’ve been so off.) In any case, Russia had continued to bomb Mariupol and other cities into oblivion as it seeks to gain control of the eastern Donbas region, a goal that isn’t super compatible with an imminent ceasefire.
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Russia also signaled that it was ready to set a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which Zelensky has been requesting since before the invasion began.
- Ukrainian officials will similarly believe all of this when they see it. Zelensky said in a video address that while the reports from the negotiations were “positive,” they “can’t silence explosions of Russian shells.” White House officials have told reporters that Moscow would need to take much more substantial steps toward ending the war before Biden would agree to meet directly with Putin.
- Meanwhile, disgraced former President Donald Trump has finally met the moment by publicly calling on Putin to, let’s see here, release some dirt on Hunter Biden. It would appear that after facing no consequences for colluding with Russia in 2016 or trying to strong-arm Ukraine into damaging his political rivals, the de facto leader of the GOP feels emboldened to ask the dictator now murdering that country’s people to (once again) damage his political rivals. If anyone runs into Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) this week, find out if she still thinks Trump learned his lesson?
Russia’s promises to scale back its attacks on Kyiv and pursue a peace deal are big if true, but could easily be a ruse to resupply troops or redeploy them for heavier attacks in other areas of Ukraine. As one U.S. official put it, “They have lied about everything else, why should we start believing them now?”
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Shut Down ICE Detention Sites Now
Since March 2020, COVID-19 has posed an unprecedented threat to people locked up in ICE detention facilities – where they're routinely denied access to timely and adequate medical care and forced to live in crowded housing units. It’s time to shut down ICE detention centers. Are you with us?
With COVID-19 still posing a major threat within ICE detention centers, immigrants detained in these facilities are increasingly afraid for their health and lives. That's why the ACLU recently filed another lawsuit against ICE. Here's what to know:
- Our lawsuit is the second we’ve filed on behalf of medically vulnerable people detained by ICE, who have requested and been denied their COVID-19 vaccine booster shots. These individuals have been diagnosed with medical conditions such as HIV, chronic kidney infections, and PTSD, and are vulnerable to severe illness and death in the event of infection.
- Over four months between November 2021 and Feb. 21, 2022, ICE has provided only a total of 1,436 boosters to people detained in ICE detention facilities, despite holding between 18,800 to 22,000 people on average daily.
- ICE also currently has no policies or procedures in place to ensure that eligible people held in its detention facilities are identified or are provided a booster shot. Failing to provide booster shots is irresponsible, cruel, and a violation of people's rights.
Our government should be releasing people right now, but instead, the number of people held in immigrant detention has increased by over 50% since President Biden took office – the majority in prisons run by private corporations that are profiting from human misery. Take action with the ACLU today. Demand that the ICE detention machine be shut down once and for all.
In solidarity,
The ACLU Team
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The White House records that the National Archives turned over to the January 6 committee show an odd little gap of seven hours and 37 minutes in disgraced former President Donald Trump’s phone logs during the insurrection, almost as if he was knowingly hiding criminal activity. Since Trump is known to have had plenty of phone conversations with GOP lawmakers and other allies within those hours, the January 6 committee is reportedly now investigating whether Trump used backchannels, aides’ phones, or personal burner phones to cover his tracks that day. “I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term,” said Trump in a Monday night statement. (The lifelong pathological liar is lying, according to former national security advisor John Bolton.) Meanwhile, members of the committee have grown publicly frustrated with the Justice Department’s slow-walking of its criminal-contempt referrals. Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) said on Monday, “Attorney General Garland, do your job so we can do ours.”
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- A group of House and Senate Democrats has called on Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from future cases related to the insurrection or 2020 election, and explain why he’s previously failed to do so. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Tuesday went a step further and called for his resignation.
- The FDA has authorized a second booster shot of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for people over 50, and immunocompromised Americans are now eligible for a fifth shot.
- The BA.2 variant is now the dominant COVID strain in the U.S., according to new CDC data. With additional pandemic-relief funding still stalled in Congress, COVID tests for uninsured patients are no longer free in some places, and the funds to provide free vaccines to the uninsured will dry up next week.
- The GOP majority of a South Dakota House investigative committee has recommended against impeaching Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg (R-SD), who killed a man with his car and then lied to investigators about it.
- Ohio Republicans have selected a legislative map nearly identical to one that the Ohio Supreme Court already rejected as unconstitutional, abandoning an unfinished bipartisan plan.
- CBS has hired Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump’s acting chief of staff, as a contributor. To be fair, it’s tough to find folks with the credibility and insight of the guy who, after the world learned that Trump had withheld military aid to Ukraine for political gain, told reporters to “get over it.”
- A GOP Nebraska state lawmaker has apologized after spreading the right-wing lie that children who identified as cats were using litter boxes in school bathrooms. The unchecked flood of online disinformation has its perks.
- Archaeologists have found prehistoric human remains at the site of a planned condo tower in Miami, to the delight of building developers, who famously treasure history and preservation above all else.
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Exciting news for the small subset of freaks who are sick of worrying about inflation but love worrying about the economy: The bond market has started sending up warning flares about a possible recession. When all is well, yields are higher for long-term Treasury bonds than short-term bonds, since an investor’s money is committed for longer and risks become less predictable. On Tuesday, a closely watched part of the “yield curve” inverted for the first time since 2019, with short-term bonds paying a higher yield than longer-term ones, an indication that investors are nervous about the economy’s long-term prospects. That distortion doesn’t trigger a recession, but an inverted yield curve has preceded every American recession since 1955. If a recession is incoming, it’s likely still months or years away. The yield curve isn’t a perfect indicator, and this could be a false alarm—or a signal that the Federal Reserve needs to calibrate the aggressive steps it’s taking to fight inflation.
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Whether it’s for the office, the gym, or lounging around the house, Bombas has socks that your feet will fall in love with. They also match each pair of socks purchased with a donation of a pair to someone in need.
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President Biden has once again proposed historic hikes in education funding in this year’s budget proposal.
Biden has signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, making lynching a federal hate crime.
Ukrainian celebrity chef Ievgen Klopotenko has been providing free meals to refugees at his newly established restaurant in Lviv.
The gene-editing technology CRISPR is on the cusp of bringing us hypoallergenic cats.
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