The snarled up 65km Russian convoy that was stuck for days outside Kyiv neatly illustrated Moscow’s misplaced belief that it could achieve a lightning-fast victory in Ukraine. Western military analysts say Russia’s leadership initially thought its “special military operation” would reach the capital and other big Ukrainian cities in days, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to capitulate and allow a puppet administration to be installed. “It’s clear that Russia was pursuing regime change in Ukraine,” said Michael Kofman, Russia studies director at CNA, a US think-tank. “Regime change operations are often derived of hubris and bad assumptions — and they usually go terribly wrong.”

Russian businessman Roman Abramovich transferred a company he controlled with tens of millions of dollars of investments to a director of English soccer club Chelsea on the day Russia invaded Ukraine, UK corporate filings showed.

Josh Hawley made a Twitter thread about Ketanji Brown Jackson being lax on child porn convictions. It's red meat to the QAnon crowd.

Three asset managers now collectively own a big chunk of nearly every corporation. As a result, capitalism no longer works as advertised.

A highway is speeding the destruction of the Amazon. Along this stretch, the killings have already begun.

His words would help make Putin gone-o

Michael Shellenberger applies conservative culture war clichés to the housing problem.

A pair of Ohio men with ties to the extremist militant movement traveled to Ukraine to fight until “the job was finished.” It’s not going so well.

HONG KONG (AP) — As a COVID-19 outbreak overwhelms Hong Kong, it’s hard for its 7.4 million residents to know what’s next. Uncertainty is the only certainty as store shelves are stripped of goods, mainland Chinese companies throw up sprawling isolation and testing centers and the government sends mixed messages on whether it will lock down the population for a citywide mass testing.

Would-be treasure hunters flock to an uninhabitable town at the top of the world – but the lure of riches comes with a heavy price tag You smell La Rinconada before you see it. The final approach to this gold mining town is along a road bordered on both sides by decades of accumulated waste and rubbish. Only a colony of vultures and seagulls are unfazed by the stench. The town – perched 5,285 metres above sea level in the freezing air of the Peruvian Andes – is like no other. It is a teeming, medieval nightmare, with little infrastructure. There is no plumbing or running water so residents empty chamber pots directly onto the streets and melt snow to drink. The extreme altitude leaves its mark on the town’s residents in the form of discolouration of the lips and fingertips – a response to the body producing a large amount of red blood cells to compensate for a lack of oxygen. At night, La Rinconada descends into a lawless chaos – criminality and violence are rife and the miners have little to spend their money on except drink and sex.

Tiny cells, lacking medical treatment and sweltering conditions cited by judge who blocked extradition. Late last year, a Scottish court quietly refused what seemed like a routine extradition. It wasn’t that of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose drawn-out efforts to avoid the American prison system have grabbed international headlines for years. Instead, it was that of a relatively unknown Scottish man, Daniel Magee, who’d allegedly shot a security guard in Austin, Texas, in 2016 before fleeing to his native country. The refusal to send a prisoner back is not unprecedented — but what has raised eyebrows in the legal community is the reason: An Edinburgh judge decided that poor conditions in Texas prisons might constitute an international human rights violation. “This is the first case I know of where this specific argument about prison conditions has succeeded — normally, the courts are very sympathetic to deporting people,” said University of Nottingham criminologist Dirk van Zyl Smit. “It is a vote of no confidence in a country if you won’t send someone back.”

A 25-year-old from Kiev is saying the same thing as other asylum seekers and advocates: Border officials continue to deny asylum to people of color.

A Thursday Federalist Society event featuring the general counsel of a hate group sparked protest at the Law School.

What Adrian Lyne’s first film in two decades tells us about the future of a quintessential ’80s genre

A New York Police Department officer who gained national attention in 2019 after buying groceries for a hungry shoplifter filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the NYPD, claiming he was harassed by a superior officer over the incident. Louis Sojo, who is Hispanic, filed a federal complaint accusing Capt. Julio Delgado of "repeated insults and race disparaging remarks" while overseeing the Strategic Response Group. The lawsuit, which was also filed at the state level in August with the Supreme Court of New York, names the city of New York, the NYPD and Delgado as defendants and cites violations of federal and state civil rights laws preventing racial discrimination and hostile environments in the workplace.

Amid a bombastic proposal from a Russian lawmaker, Fort Ross, a former Russian settlement, has become more grist in the renewed standoff between two superpowers as Vladimir Putin conducts an increasingly brutal war on Ukraine.

Jim Hourdequin is one of the planet’s biggest sellers of carbon offsets—the widely used instruments that are supposed to act as a balm for the rapidly overheating climate. His company earned $53 million from these environmental transactions over the past two years. But now the 47-year-old timber executive is calling out the entire system, including some of his own projects, as broken and shortchanging the climate. Although critics for years have revealed how carbon markets fail to deliver their intended climate benefits, Hourdequin is likely the first major industry participant to admonish the market from the inside. By speaking out, he says, he hopes he can help repair the flawed system: “We don’t think that forest carbon markets can survive and grow if they do not deliver real climate value.”

A former southern Oregon resident plead guilty on Monday of violating The Lacey Act by illegally importing and exporting hundreds of live scorpions. According to court documents, between Sept. 4, 2017 and March 21, 2018, Drake imported and exported dozens of live scorpions to and from contacts in Germany without obtaining an import-export license from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. On one parcel intercepted by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Drake falsely labeled the scorpion package contents as ‘chocolates.’

A Portland church that kicked a preschool out of its building last year wants to put a Catholic all-boys middle school in its place. Last spring, WW reported that St. Stephen Catholic Church, located in the Sunnyside neighborhood, had terminated its lease with Childswork Learning Center, the largest preschool in Portland. Childswork vacated the building July 1, 2021. At issue, the preschool’s operators thought, was parking. The church tore down the playground and replaced it with freshly striped parking spaces. At the time, the parish’s attorney told WW the parish had plans for the space “more directly connected to its core ministry.” That replacement is the rare item that might prove even more contentious in Portland than parking: a religious school with hardline views on gender identity. “We plan for this school to be a force for good against evil, right against wrong, and in a local but significant way, the betterment of boys in the continuing national boys crisis,” the Columbia Boys School website reads. “Boys have been under attack from the broader American culture for quite some time.” The all-boys Catholic middle school will be run by Brian Burby, the president of the school’s board of directors. He says it will be independent of the Archdiocese of Portland, meaning it can’t call itself Catholic but can operate “in the Catholic tradition”—a move, Burby tells WW, that will shield the school’s values from any archbishop’s influence, either present or future. That’s because he believes Portland’s Catholic schools have become too progressive.

Attempting to defend Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, House Bill 1557, Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, accused the bill’s opponents of preying on children. “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Pushaw wrote on Twitter, ahead of a vote in the state Senate. If you are against the bill, she added, “you are probably a groomer.” Those opponents would include gay Florida state Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith, who called this out as a “bigoted attack,” to which Pushaw replied, “A hit dog hollers.” Last week, H.B. 1557 passed the state legislature and headed to DeSantis’s desk (where he will most likely—but hasn’t yet—signed it into law). The resulting scramble to defend the Florida bill to a national audience has led the “grooming” charge to circulate more widely and perhaps more explicitly than it has before. On Fox last week, Laura Ingraham threw in behind DeSantis and the bill, scolding Democrats for calling the bill “bigoted” when “the real controversy” is “schools peddling gender ideology,” and calling schools “grooming centers.” In the Fox pantheon, “grooming” is being teed up as the next “critical race theory.” The following day, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel noted that a repurposed clip from a 2019 Pete Buttigieg documentary was “being passed around like samizdat” on right-wing social media, and commented, “I’m seeing the term ‘grooming’ thrown around more and more frequently to describe stuff like this: Adult gay teachers talking about sexuality to teens.” A few days after that, columnist Monica Hesse ran down these recent examples and asked, “Do people​ really​ believe talking about gayness and LGBTQ topics in any way​​ constitutes ‘grooming’ behavior​​?” That’s certainly part of it, but with legislation like the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the imagined bogeyman threatening kids is more specific. Ingraham nailed it: The “real controversy” is what the right calls “gender ideology,” a term itself borrowed from “gender critical” anti-trans activists, who—it turns out—also helped popularize the specifically anti-trans “grooming” claim years before “Don’t Say Gay” made headlines.