Michigan Republicans want to make it illegal

 to prioritize low-income or minority areas for vaccines: report

Matthew Chapman RAW STORY
February 24, 2021

YouTube/screen grab

On Wednesday, Dave Boucher of the Detroit Free Press reported that Republicans in the Michigan state Senate are advancing an amendment that would bar the state from using a "social vulnerability index" to prioritize distribution of COVID-19 vaccine doses — meaning that it would be illegal to prioritize areas based on race, socioeconomic status, or a number of other factors.

State Sen. Jim Runestad justified the bill by complaining that under the state rules, a 20-year-old with "minority status and you don't speak English that well" would get a vaccine ahead of a 65-year-old. This is false, as 20-year-olds are not yet eligible for vaccines in Michigan.

The amendment ultimately passed the Appropriations Committee, although it still needs approval by the broader legislature.

The issue of how to prioritize vaccines has varied from state to state. In Texas, Dallas County was forced to end a program prioritizing vaccine delivery for high-risk communities of color after the state health officials threatened to cut off their doses altogether.

U.S. communities are heavily segregated by race, and Black and Latino workers account for 43 percent of workers deemed essential in the pandemic, which has raised the urgency among many officials to ensure their communities have adequate vaccine supply.

GOP lawmaker's husband linked to Three Percenter pickup parked outside Capitol during insurrection

Travis Gettys
February 26, 2021

Facebook

A pickup truck bearing a Three Percenter militia sticker that was parked outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 has been traced to the husband of a Hitler-quoting Republican lawmaker.

Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) gained infamy two days after she was sworn in -- and one day before the deadly riot -- by saying Adolf Hitler "was right on one thing," and the militia-endorsing pickup was linked to her husband by the @capitolhunters Twitter account that's crowd-sourcing efforts to identify participants in the insurrection, reported The Daily Beast.

"Army friend gave me decal. Thought it was a cool decal. Took it off because of negative pub," said Chris Miller, the congresswoman's husband and himself a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, in an email statement to The Beast.

Chris Miller insists he was never a member of the loosely organized anti-government militia, and claims he "didn't know anything about 3% till fake news started this fake story and read about them."

The state lawmaker's pickup was photographed outside the Capitol, which is inaccessible to regular vehicle traffic, raised questions about who it belonged to and how it got there.

Online sleuths found a remarkably similar truck with the same Illinois license plate number carrying Mary Miller and Trump-Pence campaign banners in a July 2020 photo, and her Facebook page posted another photo showing what appears to be the same pickup with the same campaign banners.

The Millers have posted other photos of the same type of Ford pickup with stickers promoting other pro-gun groups, and the couple has prominently featured the truck in social media posts and campaign materials.

The license plate seen in photos from the Capitol riot shows it's a design that appears to be reserved for Illinois politicians -- such as Chris Miller, who took office in 2019.

As US mourns 500,000 lives lost, report shows billionaires added $1.3 trillion to their fortunes during pandemic

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
February 24, 2021

PARASITE

FILE PHOTO - Amazon President, Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos speaks at the Business Insider's "Ignition Future of Digital" conference in New York, U.S. on December 2, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo


As the United States this week mourned the devastating milestone of 500,000 lives lost to the coronavirus, a report out Wednesday shows that the nation's billionaires have seen their collective wealth grow by $1.3 trillion since the deadly pandemic began last year.

According to the new analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), America's 664 billionaires now have a combined net worth of $4.2 trillion—a figure that stands in staggering contrast to the economic pain being felt by countless families across the U.S. as joblessness, uninsurance, and hunger remain sky-high.

"Taxing those who have experienced windfall wealth gains to pay for Covid relief and recovery is a matter of equity and justice."

—Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies

"It is unseemly that billionaires have experienced such gains as we mark a half a million lives lost and millions more who have lost their health, wealth and jobs," Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality at IPS, said in a statement. "Taxing those who have experienced windfall wealth gains to pay for Covid relief and recovery is a matter of equity and justice."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—the richest man in the world—and SpaceX founder Elon Musk saw their wealth grow by $76.3 billion and $158 billion respectively between March 18, 2020 and February 19, 2021—bigger gains than any other U.S. billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, saw his net worth jump by $41 billion during that period.

"Even as congressional Republicans try to nickel-and-dime suffering Americans by opposing President Biden's American Rescue Plan, including its $1,400 relief checks, American billionaires have reaped $1.3 trillion in pandemic profits," said ATF executive director Frank Clemente. "The need for the kind of fair-share tax program Biden ran and won on becomes clearer every day, as billionaire wealth balloons while working-family hopes deflate."

The U.S., which has the highest coronavirus death toll in the world, reached 500,000 lives lost to Covid-19 on Monday. "About one in 670 Americans has died of Covid-19, which has become a leading cause of death in the country, along with heart disease and cancer, and has driven down life expectancy more sharply than in decades," the New York Times noted.

While declining cases and an improving vaccine rollout have prompted some optimism, the grim milestone and still-rising death toll served as urgent reminders of how much work remains to be done to bring the catastrophic pandemic under control.

"We are still at about 100,000 cases a day. We are still at around 1,500 to 3,500 deaths per day. The cases are more than two-and-a-half-fold times what we saw over the summer," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NBC earlier this month. "It's encouraging to see these trends coming down, but they're coming down from an extraordinarily high place."

Furious conservatives lose their minds over gender-neutral Mr. Potato Head and demand Republicans secede

Sarah K. Burris
February 25, 2021


Photo: Wally Gobetz/Flickr


Hasbro announced this week that it's giving Mr. Potato Head a 21st Century upgrade with a whole potato family, including a gender-neutral potato.

The news prompted a meltdown among conservative culture warriors who have issues with anything gender-neutral. Potatoes don't have a gender.

YouTube conspiracy theorist Mark Dice replied to an Associated Press report about it saying, "It's time for Republican states to secede."

It prompted questions about the next steps in secession and whether Republican states would mandate checkpoints to ensure no gender-neutral potatoes were brought into their country or whether no modern potato heads would be sold in the Republican states.

Others, like Piers Morgan, took issue with Hasbro continuing their toy business amid the pandemic.

The reality to the Potato Head story is far less controversial, Politico's Chris Suellentrop noted with the statement from Hasbro.

"Looking ahead to 2021, Hasbro is making sure all feel welcome in the Potato Head world by officially dropping the 'Mr.' from the Mr Potato Head brand name. The new branding and logo bring a fresh look with a whimsical color palette and will introduce new product, including Create Your Own Potato Head Family, to appeal to the modern consumer.

"The Create Your Own Potato Head Family, launching this Fall, is a celebration of the many faces of families, allowing kids to imagine and create their own Potato Head family with 2 large potato bodies, 1 small potato body, and 42 accessories, their potato family can have up to 2 parents, and a baby."

See the full statement below:

Mr. Poato Head will not undergo gender 

reassignment surgery he never had genitals,

 because he is a potato.

You can see other conservative anger below:

The conservative outrage quickly drew mockery from the left, which you can see in tweets below:

 

Republicans scramble to blame green energy as Texas freeze leaves their social Darwinist ideology in tatters

Robert Reich

February 26, 2021

Gov. Greg Abbott prays with event organizer Evelyn Davison at the 66th annual Texas State Prayer Breakfast in Austin on May 1, 2017. Davison has organized the event for the last 43 years. (Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune)

Texas's prevailing social Darwinism was expressed most succinctly last week by the mayor of Colorado City, who accused his constituents – trapped in near sub-zero temperatures and complaining about lack of heat, electricity, and drinkable water – of being the "lazy" products of a "socialist government," adding "I'm sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!" and predicting "only the strong will survive and the weak will perish."

Texas has the third-highest number of billionaires in America, most of them oil tycoons. Its laissez-faire state energy market delivered a bonanza to oil and gas producers that managed to keep production going during the freeze. It was "like hitting the jackpot," boasted president of Comstock Resources on an earnings call. Jerry Jones, billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, holds a majority of Comstock's shares.

But most other Texans were marooned. Some did perish.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the flow of electric power, exempted affluent downtowns from outages – leaving the thriving parts of Austin, Dallas, and Houston brightly lit while pushing less affluent precincts into the dark and cold.

Like the poor across America and much of the world, poor Texans are getting hammered by climate change. Many inhabit substandard homes, lacking proper insulation. The very poor occupy trailers or tents, or camp out in their cars. Lower-income communities also are located close to refineries and other industrial sites that release added pollutants when they shut or restart.

In Texas, for-profit energy companies have no incentive to prepare for extreme weather or maintain spare capacity. Even when they're able to handle surges in demand, prices go through the roof and poorer households are hit hard. That's what's happened in the wake of the deep freeze. If they can't pay, they're cut off.

Rich Texans take spikes in energy prices in their stride. If the electric grid goes down, private generators kick in. In a pinch – as last week – they check into hotels or leave town. As millions of his constituents remained without power and heat, Senator Ted Cruz flew to Cancun, Mexico for a family vacation. Their Houston home was "FREEZING," as his wife put it.

Climate change and income are together splitting Americans by class more profoundly than Americans are split by politics. Yet the white working class has been seduced by conservative Republicans and Trump cultists, of which Texas has an abundance, into believing that what's good for Black and Latino people is bad for them, and that whites are, or should be, on the winning side of the social Darwinian contest.

White grievance helps keep Republicans in power, protecting their rich patrons from a majority that might otherwise join together to demand what they need – such heat and drinking water.

Lower-income Texans, white as well as Black and Latino, are taking it on the chin in many other ways. Texas is one of the few states that hasn't expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving the share of Texans without health insurance twice the national average, the largest uninsured population of any state. Texas has double the national average of children in poverty and a higher rate of unemployment than the nation's average.

And although Texans have suffered multiple natural disasters stemming from climate change, Texas Republicans are dead set against a Green New Deal that would help reduce the horrific impacts.

Last Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott went on Fox News to proclaim, absurdly, that what happened to his state "shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States." Abbott blamed the power failure on the fact that "wind and solar got shut down."

Rubbish. The loss of power from frozen coal-fired and natural gas plants was six times larger than the dent caused by frozen wind turbines. Texans froze because deregulation and a profit-driven free market created an electric grid utterly unprepared for climate change.

In Texas, tycoons are the only winners from climate change. Everyone else is losing badly. Adapting to extreme weather is necessary but it's no substitute for cutting emissions, which Texas is loath to do. Not even the Lone Star State should protect the freedom to freeze.

This article was originally published at RobertReich.org

Conservatives are the new 'good Germans' -- enabling and defending Trump's crimes

Chauncey Devega, Salon
February 26, 2021

President Donald J. Trump greets U.S. Sen. Ted

 Cruzduring a rally at the Toyota Center in Houston

 on Oct. 22, 2018.

 Marjorie Kamys Cotera for The Texas Tribune

Let me pose a riddle of sorts.

Donald Trump is a force of political, human, moral and economic destruction. He is the leader of an American neofascist and white supremacist movement. Today's Republican Party has fully become an extension of his political cult and crime family.

Trump incited a lethal attack on the Capitol as part of a larger plot to overthrow American democracy. Although Trump was defeated by Joe Biden at the polls, he actually received 10 million more votes than he did in 2016. This is a historic level of support, only surpassed by the 81 million votes Biden received in the same election. Biden may be president of the United States now, but Donald Trump is now positioning himself as a shadow president.

Moreover, public opinion polls show that Trump himself is more popular than the Republican Party as a whole. White right-wing evangelicals worship Trump like he is a god. Sen. Mitt Romney has warned that Trump will likely win the 2024 Republican nomination if he chooses to run a second time.

Contrary to the media narrative that there is a "civil war" within the Republican Party, a new public opinion poll from Gallup shows that 40 percent of Republicans want the post-Trump Republican Party to become "more conservative," while 34 percent want it to "stay the same" and only 24 percent want the GOP to become "more moderate."

TrumpWorld endures. It has shown itself, at least for now, to be indomitable.

Hence, the riddle: What then does "conservative" really mean for today's Republicans?

The most benign and generous understanding of "conservative," in the traditional context of American politics, is drawn (however loosely) from the 18th-century Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke. It signifies an aversion to change, or perhaps even a belief that change, when necessary, should be gradual. "Conservative," at least in that conventional context, denotes a respect for stability, tradition and existing societal norms and institutions.

Donald Trump, his movement and its allies have almost no relationship to that tradition, and overwhelmingly reject such values. In the Age of Trump, American democracy is under assault by neofascism, white supremacy, authoritarianism, gangster capitalism and other antisocial values and beliefs.

Trump and his Republican Party and their followers have no respect for the rule of law, and have consistently sought to undermine it.

Basic and common understandings of truth and consensus reality have been discarded or ignored by Trump and his movement in favor of the Big Lie — and the innumerable small lies that sustain it. Contrary to widely-held folk theories of democracy, which presume a shared commitment to consensus politics, Trump and his movement have now normalized right-wing terrorism and political violence directed against liberals, progressives, nonwhites, Jews, Muslims and others deemed to be "the enemy."

Public opinion polls and other research show that Republican and Trump voters embrace such values and beliefs, and now believe that political violence (on the order of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack) may be necessary as a way of protecting their power and privilege in American society.

At Vox, Zack Beauchamp echoes these concerns:

From top to bottom, the [Republican] party has stoked the embers of extremism. They have worked to convince their supporters that Democrats are monsters, they have to delegitimize the mainstream press and replace it with fact-free alternatives, and they have embraced extremist politicians and commentators who have condoned violence in the name of putting down the Democratic "threat."
This is not just a question of "that's how we got Trump" (though this is in fact how we got Trump). It's that the party leadership has knowingly and willfully created an entire segment of the electorate that is prone to violent and dangerous conspiratorial thinking.

The version of conservatism that Trump and his voters and followers have embraced is "conservative" politics as destruction. Its goal is to return the United States to a mythic (and largely imaginary) past of complete white — and male and "Christian" — dominance over every area of American life.

Such a plan is made possible through a radical, extremist right-wing politics in which "conservatism" and an appeal to "traditional values" are used to mask or camouflage an assault on multiracial democracy and a more cosmopolitan, inclusive, democratic and humane American society.

There are many examples of this rhetorical strategy and its relationship to right-wing power.

For several decades, the Republican Party has targeted the Democrats as being "radical" and "too liberal," as veering into "socialism" and being "out of touch" with "everyday Americans." In reality, the Republican Party has deployed a strategy of asymmetrical polarization, in which it has consistently dragged the Democrats farther and farther to the right.

The mainstream news media has largely been cowed into enabling the Republicans' turn to extremism, for fear of being slurred as "too liberal" and "biased" — thus the defensive compulsion towards "both-sides-ism" and a bogus "neutrality," rather than objective truth-telling and a spirited and resolute defense of American democracy.

The outcome of asymmetrical politics and other forms of right-wing polarization is a Republican Party that looks more like a European neofascist political party than a traditional center-right party that supports democracy. The resulting "middle ground" thus artificially created exists between the two parties in a space far to the right of most Americans' policy preferences.

The recent weather disaster in Texas is another example of how the Republican Party's turn to right-wing extremism and its anti-human and anti-life policies have been normalized under the cover of "freedom" and "conservative" economic policies. In practice, these allow the "free market" to decide what is supposedly best for American society, on the pretext of maximizing individual freedom and "liberty."

Naomi Klein recently explored this at the New York Times:
Blame right-wing panic. For decades, the Republicans have met every disaster with a credo I have described as "the shock doctrine." When disaster strikes, people are frightened and dislocated. They focus on handling the emergencies of daily life, like boiling snow for drinking water. They have less time to engage in politics and a reduced capacity to protect their rights. They often regress, deferring to strong and decisive leaders — think of New York's ill-fated love affairs with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11 attacks and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Large-scale shocks — natural disasters, economic collapse, terrorist attacks — become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else's expense. Crucially, the shock doctrine is not about solving underlying drivers of crises: It's about exploiting those crises to ram through your wish list even if it exacerbates the crisis.

Ultimately, when today's Republicans and their voters and other followers say that they want the party to become "more conservative," what is really being communicated is a desire for "friendly fascism." This is in no way a rejection of Trumpism — indeed, most Republican elected officials, as well as "traditional" Republican voters, supported (and continue to support) almost all of Trump's policies. Rather, this desire to become "more conservative" represents a yearning for a more polite, less crude leader to complete Trump's resurrection of a new American apartheid where "those people" know their proper place and stay in it.

Today's Republicans love Donald Trump and his policies. Most of them, however, do not want the shame, stink, blood and filth of his neofascist project on their hands. Like the "good Germans" of the Nazi era, Republicans want to believe that they are good and decent people who can hide behind fictions of plausible deniability for the evils committed by their leader. Calling themselves "conservatives" is an effort to shield themselves from responsibility and complicity. Will this subterfuge succeed? The American people and the world will found out soon.

Here's how white evangelicals found themselves worshipping a golden Trump

John Stoehr, The Editorial Board RAW STORY
February 26, 2021



Social media was ablaze this morning with a video taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington of a golden statue in the image of Donald Trump. People right away associated the graven image with the golden calf of the Bible—when Moses took so long bringing Yahweh's Law down from Mt. Sinai that his brother succumbed to pressure to erect an idol to a competing god. "Mentioned in Exodus 32 and I Kings 12 in the Old Testament, worship of the golden calf is seen as a supreme act of apostasy, the rejection of a faith once confessed," according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. "The figure is probably a representation of the Egyptian bull god Apis in the earlier period and of the Canaanite fertility god Baal in the latter.

Now, there's more important stuff going on right now. The parliamentarian of the United States Senate, for instance, ruled last night that the provision in the president's covid relief package that raises the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour cannot pass by way of "reconciliation," which is a special budget rule requiring a simple majority instead of the usual 60 votes. That, plus the reluctance of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to monkey with the rule, means the hard work of governance is becoming visible. By comparison, a statue of "the Golden Ass," as someone quipped, seems rather petty. I disagree. This image captures something important and dire about the forces that still threaten our republic. It's worth our time thinking about them.

Why are white evangelical Protestants so obedient to authority? 

I think because it's literally beaten into them.

Let's start with the obvious. Trump's most reliable supporters are white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). These are the people who are most likely to attend this weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference. You'd think, given how devoutly religious the former president's supporters claim to be, that they would be outraged by the sight of a golden statue in Trump's image, an idol akin to the golden calf, a graven image for worshipping a competing god. You'd think WEPs would be discomfited even by the appearance of elevating a mere mortal (Donald Trump) to the level of the Almighty.

I've explained many times before how two things that should not co-exist find a way of co-existing. But I have not explained one of the psychological roots of this cognitive dissonance. The reason WEPs can look at a statue of Donald Trump and not be overly vexed with worry that they might be worshipping a competing God is because their leaders said it was OK. What Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr and others say matters a lot to these people, because for nearly all of them obedience to authority is the same thing as morality. Whose authority? That of the leaders of the One Truth Faith, of course. Why are WEPs so obedient? I think because it's literally beaten into them.



Violence is what I'm talking about. Specifically, violence committed against children for the purpose of breaking their wills in order to save their souls from an eternity of burning in a Lake of Fire. This is often called "spanking," but spanking sounds almost fun. (For some people, it is fun!) "Spanking" or its clinical counterpart, "corporal punishment," do not capture fully a child's experience of enduring pain at the hands of someone whom they cannot stop loving. Trust me when I say the unconditional love of a child for a parent means the child will surrender his will for the sake of that love. There is no alternative in a violent setting, except the alternative of psychic death.

With the understanding that violence is the same thing as love, the child is ready to accept anything—and I really mean anything. Critics of white evangelical Protestants do not, and perhaps cannot, appreciate how bottomless the desire is among WEPs to believe anything, even when it profoundly conflicts with their own stated religious convictions. If a WEP leader says it's OK to have around a golden statue of a former president venerated by their community, then it's OK. Full stop. There is no discussion among the vast majority of the tens of millions of WEPs who idolize Donald Trump.

I do not mean to portray these people as monolithic or as robots. There is plenty of disagreement within the WEP community. And I do not mean to portray these people as savaging their own kids. There are plenty of ways of "disciplining" children without violating the letter of laws that prohibit child abuse. I do mean, however, to convey the imminent danger we face. It's too easy to ghettoize WEPs—to say they are a cult separate from the larger body of believers. "Cult" strains credulity when we're talking about tens of millions primed from a young age to believe that the reality they inhabit is a shadow of a "real" reality and that access to that "real" reality requires that they repudiate the reality that everyone outside of their community actually inhabits.

Violence begets lies begets attempts to not only compete with reality but replace it. Violence begets lies begets attempts to force the rest of us to surrender our wills and our understanding of the reality we inhabit and live inside their lie. That's what I see when I see WEPs taking selfies next to a new Golden Calf. You should see it, too.

Donald Trump Jr. is the CPAC warm-up act for a speaker from a cult that believes its leader is a reincarnated alien

NOT DAVID ICKE

Brad Reed
February 26, 2021

Screen cap/YouTube

One speaker at this weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference belongs to a Japanese cult that believes its leader is a reincarnated alien from Venus who was responsible for creating all life on Earth.

Vice News reports that Jikido "Jay" Aeba, a regular speaker at CPAC events, is a major figure in an organization called Happy Science that has a series of bizarre beliefs and is notorious for peddling "miracle cures" for the novel coronavirus.

Sarah Hightower, a cult researcher who has studied Happy Science, describes it to Vice as a "cult run by a man who claims to be the incarnation of multiple Gods while pretending to channel the psychic spirits of anyone from Quetzalcoatl to Bashar al-Assad to Natalie Portman."

Although Aeba is not the founder of Happy Science, he did found its political branch, a Japanese Party called Happiness Realization Party (HRP), which is a far-right nationalist party akin to the Brexit Party formed by Trump ally Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom.

"In the 12 years since it was formed, the HRP has failed to get a single candidate elected to Japan's parliament," reports Vice. "But in recent years, under Aeba's leadership, the group has gained more political legitimacy back home by aligning itself with right-wing U.S. figures like Steve Bannon and Matt Schlapp."

Turkmen leader recognizes dog breed 

with state holiday

Agence France-Presse

February 26, 2021
DRESSED BY FABIO OF MILAN

Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov holds a Turkmen shepherd dog, locally known as alabai Igor SASIN AFP/File

Turkmenistan's authoritarian ruler has recognised a national dog breed with a state holiday, government media reported Friday, elevating the canine to the same status as the gas-rich country's beloved horses.

The alabai shepherd dog has inspired presidential poetry and an ostentatious gold statue under the leadership of strongman Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who gave Russian President Vladimir Putin a puppy for his 65th birthday in 2017.

Now, thanks to Berdymukhamedov's decree, the dog will share a holiday on the last Sunday of April with the Akhal-Teke horse, an animal long heralded by state propaganda.
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The holiday will "increase the world fame of the Turkmen alabai", said the decree published in the Neutral Turkmenistan state newspaper.

The newspaper said the alabai would also have its own national beauty contest for the first time this year.

Historically prized by Turkmen pastoralists for its protective qualities, the robust breed is also used by border patrols and police.

Outside Turkmenistan, the alabai is more commonly known as a Central Asian Shepherd Dog, but Turkmen authorities are promoting the breed as a core element of national heritage.

In November, the authorities unveiled a golden statue honouring the alabai and featuring a wraparound screen displaying footage of the dogs.

In a book published in 2019, Berdymukhamedov wrote that bygone generations of Turkmen saw "in the Akhal-Teke (horse) their dreams and in the alabai their happiness".

Berdymukhamedov's 39-year-old son Serdar, who is often viewed as his future successor, combines three powerful government posts with the leadership of the national alabai association.

The alabai is trained to fight from a young age and breeders clip the dogs' ears and cut their tails down to stumps in preparation for battle.

A cartoon version of the dog whose design was personally overseen by Berdymukhamedov served as the mascot for the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games -- a tournament that Turkmenistan hosted with great pomp in 2017.

Berdymukhamedov, known by fawning state media as Arkadag, or "protector", has ruled ex-Soviet Turkmenistan with no opposition since the death of first leader Saparmurat Niyazov in 2006.

Both men have their own golden statues in the capital Ashgabat, with Berdymukhamedov's likeness cast in the saddle of an Akhal-Teke horse.

© 2021 AFP

Myanmar police deploy early to crank up pressure on protests

1 of 13

Buddhist monks lead an anti-coup protest march in Mandalay, Myanmar, Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021. Myanmar security forces cracked down on anti-coup protesters in the country's second-largest city Mandalay on Friday, injuring at least three people, two of whom were shot in the chest by rubber bullets and another who suffered a wound on his leg. "CRPH" in the placards stand for "Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw." (AP Photo)

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Police in Myanmar escalated their crackdown on demonstrators against this month’s military takeover, deploying early and in force on Saturday as protesters sought to assemble in the country’s two biggest cities and elsewhere.

Security forces in some areas appeared to become more aggressive in using force and making arrests, utilizing more plainclothes officers than had previously revealed themselves. Photos posted on social media showed that residents of at least two cities, Yangon and Monywa, resisted by erecting makeshift street barricades to try to hinder the advance of the police.

Myanmar’s crisis took a dramatic turn on the international stage at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on Friday when the country’s U.N. ambassador declared his loyalty to the ousted civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi and called on the world to pressure the military to cede power.

There were arrests Saturday in Myanmar’s two biggest cities, Yangon and Mandalay, where demonstrators have been hitting the streets daily to peacefully demand the restoration of the government of Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party won a landslide election victory in November. Police have increasingly been enforcing an order by the junta banning gatherings of five or more people.

Many other cities and towns have also hosted large protests against the Feb. 1 coup.

Police in Dawei, in the southeast, and Monywa, 135 kilometers (85 miles) northwest of Mandalay, used force against protesters. Both cities, with populations of less then 200,000 each, have been seeing large demonstrations.

Social media carried unconfirmed reports of a protester shot dead in Monywa. The reports could not immediately be independently confirmed but appeared credible, with both photos and identification of the victim, though later accounts said the woman had not died. The reports from Monywa also said dozens or more people were arrested.

The military takeover reversed years of slow progress toward democracy after five decades of military rule. Suu Kyi’s party would have been installed for a second five-year term in office, but the army blocked Parliament from convening and detained her and President Win Myint, as well as other top members of her government.

At the General Assembly in New York, Myanmar’s U.N. ambassador, Kyaw Moe Tun, declared in an emotional speech to fellow delegates that he represented Suu Kyi’s “civilian government elected by the people” and supported the fight against military rule.

MRTV, a Myanmar state-run television channel, broadcast an announcement Saturday from the Foreign Ministry that Kyaw Moe Tun has been dismissed from his post because he had abused his power and misbehaved by failing to follow the instructions of the government and betraying it.

Kyaw Moe Tun had urged all countries to issue public statements strongly condemning the coup, and to refuse to recognize the military regime. He also called for stronger international measures to stop violence by security forces against peaceful demonstrators.

He drew loud applause from many diplomats in the 193-nation global body, as well as effusive praise from other Burmese on social media, who described him as a hero. The ambassador flashed a three-finger salute that has been adopted by the civil disobedience movement at the end of his speech in which he addressed people back home in Burmese.

In Yangon on Saturday morning, police began arrests early at the Hledan Center intersection, which has become the gathering point for protesters who then fan out to other parts of the city. Police took similar action in residential neighborhoods.

Security forces also tried to thwart protests in Mandalay, where roadblocks were set up at several key intersections and the regular venues for rallies were flooded with police.

Buddhist monks were prominent in Saturday’s march in Mandalay, as they have been regularly, lending moral authority to the civil disobedience movement that is challenging the military rulers.

Mandalay has been the scene of several violent confrontations, and at least four of eight confirmed deaths linked to the protests, according to the independent Assistance Association of Political Prisoners. On Friday, at least three people there were injured, including two who were shot in the chest by rubber bullets and another who suffered what appeared to be a bullet wound to his leg.

According to the association, as of Friday, 771 people had been arrested, charged or sentenced at one point in relation to the coup, and 689 were being detained or sought for arrest.

The junta said it took power because last year’s polls were marred by massive irregularities. The election commission before the military seized power coup had refuted the allegation of widespread fraud. The junta dismissed the old commission’s members and appointed new ones, who on Friday annulled the election results.

___

Associated Press writer Edith Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.