Putin's Imperial Delirium

When the history of this period is written, Russian President Vladimir Putin will be seen as an unwitting creator of the Ukrainian nation that he wanted so much to destroy. Whether in exile or at home, Ukrainian nationalism is likely to grow even stronger in the long run as a result of Putin's effort to extinguish it.

Feb 25, 2022

CARL BILDT

STOCKHOLM – War has erupted in Europe again, and responsibility rests squarely with one man: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The martial drumbeat had been growing louder for months. But on February 21, Putin staged a remarkable puppet show in the Kremlin. Forcing his entire security council into submission, he delivered a rambling, hour-long televised speech in which he showed himself to be a man consumed by nationalist myths and imperial nostalgia, bent on extinguishing an independent Ukraine. Three days later, Putin launched a full-scale, predawn invasion.

Europe hasn’t seen anything like this since Adolf Hitler attacked and invaded Poland in September 1939. But that is the brutal reality. To see how we got here and what Putin wants, we need to revisit the build-up to his war.
MYTH AND REALITY

The February 21 speech wasn’t the first time Putin had questioned Ukraine’s right to exist independently of Russia – though he did carry this thesis to new heights of delusion. (Clearly, his extreme self-isolation during the COVID years has taken its toll.)

Putin often returns to the fact that Christianity was brought to the Eastern Slavic world with the baptism of Prince Valdemar in the spring of 989, in the city of Chersonesus, the ruins of which can be seen in the outskirts of Sevastopol, in Crimea. That historic event illustrates the complexity of the matter at hand today.


The likely impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine should not be underestimated. The world is now undergoing a geopolitical regime shift that will have profound economic and financial consequences, most of which will be difficult to contain with existing policy tools.0Add to Bookmarks

The prince who is called Vladimir in Russian is called Volodymyr in Ukrainian; but in his childhood, he would probably have answered to Valdemar. He was born of a Scandinavian Viking clan that had come to rule over the cities of Novgorod and Kyiv, along the littoral trading route between the Baltic and Black Seas. By that time, Chersonesus had been a Greek city for about a millennium.

Not until centuries after the Kievan Rus state had been established did the state of Muscovy begin to emerge, with Moscow at its center. For centuries, the area that would become Russia was under the tutelage of the Mongols, and the area that would become Ukraine was largely dominated by Poland and Lithuania, with the open steppes to the south being the domain of the roaming Tatars and Cossacks.

Hence, when Putin, in his rambling speech, referred repeatedly to “historic Russian lands,” he was being not just ahistorical but downright fanciful. To be sure, in later centuries, these lands were conquered by Imperial Russia and included in its domains. But this was not always a harmonious period, because even by then, a Ukrainian national consciousness had begun to emerge, reflecting the area’s unique historical background. Though Ivan Mazepa was eventually defeated by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, his memory lived on as a Ukrainian national hero.

THE PRISON OF NATIONS

Imperial Russia, which seems to figure prominently in Putin’s fevered dreams, was often known as the “prison of nations.” Ruled by the czar and dominated by the Russians, it included numerous nationalities that secretly or openly longed to shape their own futures. And when the empire collapsed, and Russia sank into a brutal civil war, most of them, including Ukraine, declared their independence.

But the Bolsheviks eventually emerged victorious and went on to set up their Soviet state, basing it on the fiction of a union of national republics with various degrees of autonomy. Some non-Russian nations managed to preserve the independence they had declared, and some did not. Ukraine fell into the latter category.

Putin now sees the old Soviet structure as a cardinal sin. By establishing a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Bolsheviks de facto recognized the existence of a Ukrainian nation. Putin thus has attacked Vladimir Lenin for committing a profound error in creating the Ukrainian administrative entity. In Putin’s opinion, it was better when the czar was the source of all power (a tradition reprised by Stalin when he brutally ended any illusion of distributed powers).

When the Soviet state collapsed seven decades later, history repeated itself, with all those captive nations that had not managed to preserve their sovereignty declaring independence once again. In a referendum on December 1, 1991, 90% of Ukrainians – and a majority in every single region of the country – voted for independence. Even in Crimea, where support was lowest, 57% voted for an independent Ukraine. A few weeks later, the Soviet Union dissolved itself.

CATASTROPHES AND FAILURES

Putin, who famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “major geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century,” does not think Ukraine and the other captive nations should have been allowed to become independent. That they were merely reflected the weakness of the Russian state at that time.

Ukrainian independence certainly brought difficult issues to the fore. Nationalists in Russia wanted control of Crimea; there were numerous issues of industrial integration to sort out; and there was the fact that one-third of the old Soviet nuclear arsenal was housed on Ukrainian territory. Most of these problems were resolved through the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Russia pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine relinquishing the entire nuclear arsenal. One side kept its word; the other did not.

The second act of the drama came in 2004, when Ukrainians elected a president with a distinctly pro-Western orientation. Moscow’s preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych – who later did become president – was initially declared the winner and congratulated by Putin. But after evidence of massive electoral fraud was uncovered, large popular protests erupted. When a free and fair election was held, Viktor Yushchenko emerged as the winner. Putin had misjudged Ukraine, and his strategy ultimately alienated many Ukrainians, undercutting his own influence.


The same basic scenario was repeated on an even larger scale a decade later. By then, Yanukovych had been elected president in a free and fair election, and Ukraine had been eagerly knocking on the European Union’s door. In 2014, the EU and Ukraine had concluded an Association Agreement, including a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area. This was not to Putin’s liking. Determined to have Ukraine inside the semi-imperialist Eurasian Union that he intended to create, he pursued a series of measures to pressure Yanukovych not to sign the agreement. But when Yanukovych did as he was told, major popular protests erupted again.

The regime met this uprising with extreme violence, leaving a hundred people dead in the streets of Kyiv. On February 21, 2014, with the help of the German, Polish, and French foreign ministers – but also with a Russian presidential representative as part of the talks – a deal was reached to end the crisis. Under the agreement, the next presidential election would be brought forward, the constitution would assume a more parliamentary orientation, a new coalition government would be set up, and those responsible for the killings would be held accountable.

The crisis seemed to be over. But instead of staying to carry out the agreement, Yanukovych suddenly left Kyiv, and later was smuggled into Russia. In the absence of a president, the Ukrainian parliament proceeded to implement the agreement to the letter. Even a clear majority of Yanukovych’s own party voted to see the measures through. The new coalition government was set up, and another presidential election was called.

Later, the Kremlin would repeatedly describe these events as a coup. It was nothing of the sort. After days of massive protests and brutal killings by the authorities, calm immediately returned to the streets of Kyiv.

But while there was no coup in Kyiv, there was obviously a crisis in the Kremlin. As Putin later admitted, this was when he made the decision to seize Crimea. A week later, a Russian special forces unit took over the regional parliament in Simferopol, and installed a local thug who had garnered only limited support in the previous election. Once this was done, Russia followed through with its annexation of the peninsula.

Not content with this seizure of territory, Putin also continued with an attempt to destabilize, and eventually take over, most of southern Ukraine, establishing an entity called Novorossiya. But once again, he misjudged Ukraine. The Ukrainian army and the police were in shambles, but still they managed to repel Russia’s “little green men” (soldiers with no military insignia). Putin thus was left with no choice but to send in regular Russian army battalions to salvage what he could of the failed effort. In the meantime, Ukraine had elected a new president in an election that international observers deemed free and fair.

It was alongside this earlier Russian invasion that the breakaway “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk were created in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Their governance has been opaque in the extreme, with leaders appointed and demoted (or simply killed) as a consequence of factional fights in Moscow. As for the “people,” the tragic fact is that the majority of them are no longer there, having fled primarily to Ukrainian territories.

Despite annexing Crimea and establishing a pair of vassal statelets, Putin essentially failed in 2014. Ukraine’s democracy survived. It went forward with the EU Association Agreement and started to revive its economy. Ukrainians’ hostility toward Russia deepened only further as small-scale warfare with the gangster republics in the east dragged, leaving some 14,000 dead.

Around the same time, NATO countries recognized that they needed to start increasing their defense spending, and the alliance deployed non-national forces to its eastern member states for the first time. There had been no NATO military presence there before, because the alliance’s attention had been directed elsewhere, on faraway countries like Afghanistan. In fact, in 2013, the US had withdrawn its last tank from Europe.

Through his own aggressive behavior, Putin has almost single-handedly revived NATO. Historians will debate why he launched this fourth, deeply tragic act in the drama between the Kremlin and Ukraine. Perhaps the less-than-glorious US withdrawal from Afghanistan gave him the impression that the US was in retreat and could be pressed to make concessions that could then be imposed on Ukraine and other reluctant Europeans. (Putin’s security adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, hinted as much in statements after the Kabul debacle.)

In any case, Putin threw down the gauntlet against the West with a battery of extreme demands, issued with the threat of a massive military mobilization. Not since the erratic Nikita Khrushchev was in charge in the early 1960s has a Kremlin leader acted in this way. From the beginning, it was obvious that Putin would either have to back down substantially or pursue his aims with military force.
END DAYS

Putin’s objective in Ukraine was never limited to Donbas, or even to blocking NATO membership. Rather, the issue for him has always been Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign country. Putin made his strategic intent clear in a remarkable essay published last July – a document that immediately became required reading for the Russian armed forces. Following his policy debacles in 2004 and 2014, he probably realized that Ukraine would continue turning toward the West, strengthening its democracy and slipping further out of the Kremlin’s reach.

He was right. He was on a losing track, owing to his own mistakes, and he couldn’t stand it. So, he convinced himself that there was an opportunity to turn it all around. And with the West refusing to capitulate, there could be no diplomatic solution. Though it wasn’t wrong to try diplomacy, some of the rhetoric surrounding these attempts seems somewhat naive in retrospect. Putin probably made up his mind months ago.


Either way, the illusion has been dispelled. Putin is now trying to conquer Ukraine and decapitate its government, removing its current leaders by whatever means and installing a puppet regime. With that, Ukrainian independence will be extinguished, as Putin has desired all along.

But Putin cannot extinguish the Ukrainian nation. Whether in exile or at home, Ukraine is likely to grow even stronger in the long run. And when the history of this period is written, Putin will be seen as an unwitting creator of the Ukrainian nation that he wanted so much to destroy. He has united Ukrainians in hatred for the Russia that he represents.

History hasn’t ended. It has entered a new, dangerous phase, in which the future of the current regime in the Kremlin also will be at stake.


CARL BILDT
Writing for PS since 2009
98 Commentaries
Carl Bildt was Sweden’s foreign minister from 2006 to 2014 and prime minister from 1991 to 1994, when he negotiated Sweden’s EU accession. A renowned international diplomat, he served as EU Special Envoy to the Former Yugoslavia, High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, UN Special Envoy to the Balkans, and Co-Chairman of the Dayton Peace Conference. He is Co-Chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

THUMBNAIL ARIS MESSINISAFP via Getty Images

HUBRIS & TANKS

Russia will return to negotiations after Ukraine's surrender: Lavrov

Russian foreign minister says: 'Ukrainian people must be independent, must have government representing all its diversity, free of external management'

Elena Teslova |25.02.2022


MOSCOW

Russia will return to negotiations with Ukraine as soon as the Ukrainian armed forces surrender and lay down their weapons, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday, day two of Russia's military intervention in its smaller western neighbor.

Russia's goal is to free Ukraine of "external management" carried out by the US and "Nazis," Lavrov told a news conference in Moscow, echoing President Vladimir Putin’s earlier statement saying the attack aimed at the “denazification” of Ukraine.

"We’re ready for negotiations at any moment as soon as the armed forces of Ukraine respond to our proposal, stop resisting, lay down their weapons, -- nobody is going to abuse them, nobody is going to oppress them – let's return to our families and allow the Ukrainian people to decide their fate themselves," he said.

Explaining Russia's motives, Lavrov said Moscow had tried for eight years to address the Ukrainian crisis peacefully, through promoting implementation of the 2014 Minsk agreement while, in his words, Kyiv "sabotaged the process with the support of the West."

Lavrov said nobody even verbally called on Kyiv to fulfill the Minsk agreement but instead put pressure on Russia, and "motivated the Ukrainian government to persecute everything Russian in Ukraine."

"If the English language was prohibited in Ireland or the French language in Belgium, what would be the reaction?" he asked, accusing the West of double standards over what Moscow has called Ukraine’s persecution of local ethnic Russians.

"The Ukrainian people must be independent, must have a government representing all its diversity, free of external management, and in addition free of such a management that encourages genocide, and uses Ukraine as a tool to contain Russia," he stressed.


Asked if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had sought talks and security guarantees, Lavrov said Zelenskyy only requested meetings in the Normandy Four format and security guarantees from NATO.

"The chance to negotiate was on the table until the last, (and) Russia will return to the negotiations after the military operation," he said.

Lavrov said Russia does not recognize Zelenskyy's government as Ukraine's legitimate authority.

In Moscow’s eyes, he said, it is "a regime under two external mechanisms of control, the US and Nazis."

Lavrov argued that "nobody is going to occupy Ukraine," insisting that Russia's goal is "to demilitarize" and free the country of the "Nazi ideology that flourished in Ukraine in recent years."

"Nobody is going to attack the Ukrainian people or treat in a humiliating way the Ukrainian military ... No strikes are being carried out on civil infrastructure or personnel of the armed forces of Ukraine," he claimed.

Donbas crisis and Russia’s military intervention

The February 2014 “Maidan revolution” in Ukraine led to former President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing the country and a pro-Western government coming to power.

This was followed by Russia illegally annexing the Crimea region and separatists declaring independence in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, both of which have large ethnic Russian populations.

As clashes erupted between Russian-backed separatist forces and the Ukrainian army, the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements were signed in Moscow after the intervention of Western powers.

The conflict, however, simmered for years with persistent cease-fire violations. As of February 2022, some 14,000 people have been killed in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Tensions started escalating late last year when Ukraine, the US and its allies accused Russia of amassing tens of thousands of troops on the border with Ukraine.

They claimed Russia was preparing to invade its western neighbor, claims consistently rejected by Moscow.

Defying threats of sanctions by the West, Moscow earlier this week officially recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, followed by the start of a military operation in Ukraine on Thursday.

Putin said the operation aims to protect people “subjected to genocide” by Kyiv and to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine, while calling on the Ukrainian army to lay down its arms.

• 
  

Putin Huddles With Tycoons and Promises Banks Bulk of State Aid

Yuliya Fedorinova, Bloomberg News

BC-Putin-Huddles-With-Tycoons-and-Promises-Banks-Bulk-of-State-Aid , Yuliya Fedorinova

(Bloomberg) -- Banks are taking precedence for President Vladimir Putin as Russia devises a domestic response to sanctions rolled out by western governments over the invasion of Ukraine.

Russian state aid will initially focus on assisting lenders hit with penalties, according to two people who attended a closed meeting with Putin to address the impact of the conflict on big business. 

First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov asked the gathered billionaires and corporate titans to keep working with sanctioned banks, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the meeting was private. The remarks came after the public part of the Thursday event, in which Putin warned that the west shouldn’t seek to push Russia out of the global economy. 

The message underscores the urgency facing the government at home while the showdown in Ukraine intensifies. Retaining depositor confidence is crucial in a country where bouts of economic turmoil have in the past wiped out savings and prompted bank runs. 

Belousov didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The promise of aid came in the hours before the U.S. announced it would sanction many of Russia’s biggest lenders, including state-owned Sberbank PJSC and VTB Group, targeting nearly 80% of Russian banking assets. President Joe Biden said the measures “exceed anything that’s ever been done” and will hamper Russia’s ability to do business in foreign currency. 

VTB was also hit with full blocking sanctions, while the U.K. announced an asset freeze against major Russian banks, including an immediate freeze against VTB.

Sberbank head Herman Gref and VTB chief Andrey Kostin attended the meeting in the Kremlin’s St. Catherine Hall, the same room where Putin convened his security council two days earlier in a staged event to weigh the invasion of Ukraine. Gazprom’s Alexey Miller and Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft who was sanctioned Thursday by the U.S., were also in attendance.

Details of the U.S., EU and U.K. Sanctions Against Russia

The measures by western governments came as Russian forces push deeper into Ukraine in a three-pronged attack and move closer to the capital, Kyiv. The European Union also backed a broad sanctions package to limit Russia’s access to Europe’s financial sector and restricting key technologies. 

But the penalties also included carve-outs for energy payments, a crucial source of revenue for Moscow, and held off from barring Russia from the Swift international banking network.

Despite isolated reports of Russians queuing to withdraw cash, calm has largely prevailed so far and markets stabilized on Friday. Sberbank shares rallied Friday 4.6% as of 3:00 p.m. in Moscow but are down by more than half this week. Shares in VTB were down 4.7% after falling 42% Thursday. 

The U.S. sanctions do not come into force for a month, which could help explain the relative calm. In December 2014, plunging oil prices sent the ruble crashing and led to clients withdrawing 1.3 trillion rubles ($15 billion) in a single week from Sberbank.   

Business as Usual?

Sberbank said its branches continue to function as usual and clients are not facing any restrictions, including on currency exchange. Before the sanctions were announced on Thursday, it published a statement that it later retracted about how a ban on foreign exchange operations would affect corporate customers. 

VTB responded with a statement saying the “sanctions came as no surprise” and that it has several plans to counter the measures to minimize the impact on its clients. It also sold its stakes in Pochta Bank and Cyprus-based RCB Bank. 

Cards from banks hit with the U.S. sanctions won’t be usable for payment systems like ApplePay and GooglePay, according to a central bank statement Friday. 

Many Russian lenders have scaled back their international ambitions since being hit sectoral sanctions since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. VTB maintains offices in London and Zug, Switzerland, as well as China, Angola and some post-Soviet states. 

State-owned banks have been bracing for more sanctions as relations with the West deteriorated. Russia has built up its financial reserves to over $600 billion, developed a domestic payments system, Mir, and steadily reduced reliance on foreign currency. 

The central bank said early Friday it would support sanctioned banks and noted that about 80% of the balances at the affected lenders are in rubles. It offered help with rubles and foreign currency.

A day earlier, the Bank of Russia announced it will intervene in the foreign exchange market for the first time in years, expand its Lombard list of securities accepted as collateral and provide additional liquidity to lenders in repo auctions.  

“After 2014, Russia has been preparing for a dark day,” said Anton Tabakh, chief economist at Moscow-based credit assessor Expert RA. “The banking system is well capitalized, there are reserves and capabilities. The central bank is acting very reasonably.”

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

AMERIKAN RIGHT WING INTELLIGENCIA 

CPAC opens and immediately devolves into GOP dissent over Ukraine

Kathryn Joyce, Salon
February 25, 2022

Charlie Kirk speaking with attendees at the 2020 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Ahead of Donald Trump's address at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) members of the audience were memorably, if accidentally, given tiny red, white and blue flags to wave. The problem? Except for the word "Trump" printed across the middle of each tiny banner, they were waving an exact replica of the Russian flag. Today, that embarrassing slip-up seems relevant again as CPAC 2022 speakers navigate how to address the unfolding crisis in Ukraine, with Russian combat forces invading the same day that America's preeminent conservative conference began.

On Thursday morning, American Conservative Union president Matt Schlapp told The Independent that Russia's invasion of Ukraine — likely to be one of the worst conflicts in recent European history — won't alter the program CPAC has planned in Orlando for the next four days. With more than a dozen former Trump staffers on hand as speakers, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Intelligence director Richard Grinnell and former Trump national security advisor Robert O'Brien, Schlapp reasoned, the issue would be organically covered through their expertise. Still, Schlapp did indulge in a jab at U.S. President Joe Biden, saying, "What happens when you're not projecting strength? What happens when you're projecting confusion, a weakness? Well, you probably get a lot more conflicts like Ukraine."

Within its first few hours of opening, a number of CPAC speakers echoed Schlapp's sentiments.

Talk show host Ben Ferguson implicitly blamed Russia's attack on Ukraine on Biden, opening his talk with a joking reference to a 2020 Biden campaign tweet, in which the then-candidate said he was the only Democrat in the field who'd "gone toe to toe" with Putin. Instead, Ferguson argued, under Biden's leadership, "America is incompetent right now," and that's why Putin had felt emboldened to attack.


GOP consultant Alex Bruesewitz similarly said what was happening in Russia was thanks to Biden.

"Unconstitutional elections have consequences, and we can never all this" — by which Bruesewitz didn't mean Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but rather Trump's defeat — "to happen again."

"Trump was right about everything. One thing he was right about was that Biden's weakness would invite Putin's aggression," agreed former Trump advisor and Ohio congressional candidate Max Miller. "None of this had to happen, and with President Trump, none of it would have."

K.T. McFarland, Trump's former deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn, both of whom left the Trump administration disgraced, described the consequences of Russia's invasion in stark terms: as the most significant threat that the U.S. has faced since the end of World War II.

The attack, "has changed the complex, generational struggle that we have been in with the forces of darkness against forces of light," McFarland said. "We have national leadership that I think at a certain point is probably criminally incompetent," she said, placing blame on Biden. "They are unable to stop what Vladimir Putin could do and now they don't know what to do."

McFarland then went on to urge CPAC attendees to consider Russia's incursion a serious matter.

"It's important to understand that in this generational struggle, it's not just about Europe. Vladimir Putin doesn't just stop with Ukraine. He has put himself in a position, thanks to a feckless American administration, where he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants with Ukraine. …My concern is it doesn't just stop with Ukraine. It goes on. Will he next threaten NATO? His lifelong objective has been to dismantle NATO, to separate the United States from Europe and then to recreate the Soviet Union."

But not all attendees agreed with such a call to action.

In a panel on the power of conservative memes, Rogan O'Handley, a conservative Instagram influencer better known as "DC Draino," struck the opposite note, saying, "With all this Ukraine stuff going on, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of establishment, military-industrial complex GOP people up on stage saying it's in our national interest to fight that war. It is not. It is not. Burisma! Hunter Biden was taking money. They impeached President Trump over a phone call to Ukraine. Biden has instigated this …there is massive deep state corruption in that regime. We should not send our American sons and daughters to cover up the Biden crime family's corruption."

A similar note was sounded by Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA.

"I want to be part of an extinction event for the political woke left to put them into complete and total irrelevancy for the next 20 or 30 years," he said. But to get there though, he continued, conservatives have to be clear about priorities.

In recent years, both Kirk and TPUSA have been attacked from the right by the likes of the America First "groyper" movement, which pushes for far more hardline, openly white nationalist positions on a range of issues. Now, as though channeling his critics, Kirk said he didn't want to see U.S. armed forces deployed to defend Ukraine's border when the Biden administration was ignoring the supposed breach of the U.S. Southern border by migrants.

"For example, the U.S. Southern border matters a lot more than the Ukrainian border. In fact, I want every Republican leader who comes onto this stage the next couple days to say that what's happening on the Southern border is an invasion because 2 million people waltzed into our country in the last year. I'm more concerned about how the cartels are trying to infiltrate our country than a dispute 5,000 miles away in cities we can't even pronounce, places most Americans can't find on a map. Now I'm not defending dictators halfway around the world, but when your own country is falling apart, I don't want to hear lectures about why we have to send our troops halfway around the world when we are being invaded!"

On Saturday night, CPAC will also host former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who recently argued that NATO, rather than Russia, is to blame for the conflict.

Meanwhile, if CPAC's collective response to the invasion has so far been a shrug, a competing right-wing conference being held tomorrow, America First PAC or AFPAC, also in Orlando this weekend, is in open celebration mode.

As Political Research Associate researcher Ben Lorber noted on Twitter, America First founder, the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, cheered on social media, "I am totally rooting for Russia," and "this is the coolest thing to happen since 1/6." Andrew Torba, CEO of the right-wing social media company Gab, which is sponsoring AFPAC, praised Putin as "brilliant," writing, "I hope the Globalist American Empire gets humiliated from all angles," and "Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the degeneracy of the secular western globalist empire." Another AFPAC speaker, Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers cheered, "More tanks less trannies" — a close echo of right-wing narratives from the likes of Steve Bannon, that Putin, commendably, "ain't woke," and thus deserves U.S. conservatives' support. (That sort of talk is also happening among conservatives closer to the center than Bannon, as with The American Conservative's Rod Dreher, who wrote this week, "I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants.")

While AFPAC sets itself up in explicit contrast to what it considers the milquetoast conservatives at CPAC, it's not unthinkable that, as with Kirk's jump to the right, other CPAC speakers won't soon follow suit.

Ancient DNA helps reveal social changes in Africa 50,000 years ago that shaped the human story

The Conversation
February 25, 2022

Together with artifacts from the past, ancient DNA can fill in details about our ancient ancestors.

Nina R/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Every person alive on the planet today is descended from people who lived as hunter-gatherers in Africa

The continent is the cradle of human origins and ingenuity, and with each new fossil and archaeological discovery, we learn more about our shared African past. Such research tends to focus on when our species, Homo sapiens, spread out to other landmasses 80,000-60,000 years ago. But what happened in Africa after that, and why don’t we know more about the people who remained?

Our new study, conducted by an interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers based in 12 countries, helps answer these questions. By sequencing and analyzing ancient DNA (aDNA) from people who lived as long ago as 18,000 years, we roughly doubled the age of sequenced aDNA from sub-Saharan Africa. And this genetic information helps anthropologists like us understand more about how modern humans were moving and mingling in Africa long ago.


People took shelter in natural rock overhangs, leaving behind an archaeological record of their daily activities – and sometimes their graves. By digging carefully, archaeologists can connect information from aDNA to information about the social lives of these people.
Jacob Davis, CC BY-ND

Tracing our human past in Africa

Beginning about 300,000 years ago, people in Africa who looked like us – the earliest anatomically modern humans – also started behaving in ways that seem very human. They made new kinds of stone tools and began transporting raw materials up to 250 miles (400 kilometers), likely through trade networks. By 140,000-120,000 years ago, people made clothing from animal skins and began to decorate themselves with pierced marine shell beads.


While early innovations appeared in a patchwork fashion, a more widespread shift happened around 50,000 years ago – around the same time that people started moving into places as distant as Australia. New types of stone and bone tools became common, and people began fashioning and exchanging ostrich eggshell beads. And while most rock art in Africa is undated and badly weathered, an increase in ochre pigment at archaeological sites hints at an explosion of art.

What caused this shift, known as the Later Stone Age transition, has been a longstanding archaeological mystery. Why would certain tools and behaviors, which up until that point had appeared in a piecemeal way across Africa, suddenly become widespread? Did it have something to do with changes in the number of people, or how they interacted?


Beads made from ostrich eggshell were hot trade items and can show the extent of ancient social networks.
Jennifer Miller, CC BY-ND

The challenge of accessing the deep past

Archaeologists reconstruct human behavior in the past mainly through things people left behind – remains of their meals, tools, ornaments and sometimes even their bodies. These records may accumulate over thousands of years, creating views of daily livelihoods that are really averages over long periods of time. However, it’s hard to study ancient demography, or how populations changed, from the archaeological record alone.

This is where DNA can help. When combined with evidence from archaeology, linguistics and oral and written history, scientists can piece together how people moved and interacted based on which groups share genetic similarities.

But DNA from living people can’t tell the whole story. African populations have been transformed over the past 5,000 years by the spread of herding and farming, the development of cities, ancient pandemics and the ravages of colonialism and slavery. These processes caused some lineages to vanish and brought others together, forming new populations.

Using present-day DNA to reconstruct ancient genetic landscapes is like reading a letter that was left out in the rain: some words are there but blurred, and some are gone completely. Researchers need ancient DNA from archaeological human remains to explore human diversity in different places and times and to understand what factors shaped it.

Unfortunately, aDNA from Africa is particularly hard to recover because the continent straddles the equator and heat and humidity degrade DNA. While the oldest aDNA from Eurasia is roughly 400,000 years old, all sequences from sub-Saharan Africa to date have been younger than around 9,000 years.


Map of all published ancient genomes, with black dots scaled to the number of individuals’ genomes. Blue dots indicate Later Stone Age foragers comparable to those in our study. Red stars indicate individuals reported for the first time in our study. Inset map underscores the gap between Africa and other parts of the world in terms of published ancient genomes. Ancient DNA preserved between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn is rare.
Mary Prendergast; basemaps by Natural Earth, CC BY-ND

Breaking the ‘tropical ceiling’

Because each person carries genetic legacies inherited from generations of their ancestors, our team was able to use DNA from individuals who lived between 18,000-400 years ago to explore how people interacted as far back as the last 80,000-50,000 years. This allowed us, for the first time, to test whether demographic change played a role in the Later Stone Age transition.

Our team sequenced aDNA from six individuals buried in what are now Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia. We compared these sequences to previously studied aDNA from 28 individuals buried at sites stretching from Cameroon to Ethiopia and down to South Africa. We also generated new and improved DNA data for 15 of these people, trying to extract as much information as possible from the small handful of ancient African individuals whose DNA is preserved well enough to study.

This created the largest genetic dataset so far for studying the population history of ancient African foragers – people who hunted, gathered or fished. We used it to explore population structures that existed prior to the sweeping changes of the past few thousand years.


National Museum of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam. Ancient DNA studies in Africa are made possible by the efforts of curators to protect and preserve remains in tropical conditions.
Mary Prendergast, CC BY-ND

DNA weighs in on a longstanding debate

We found that people did in fact change how they moved and interacted around the Later Stone Age transition.

Despite being separated by thousands of miles and years, all the ancient individuals in this study were descended from the same three populations related to ancient and present-day eastern, southern and central Africans. The presence of eastern African ancestry as far south as Zambia, and southern African ancestry as far north as Kenya, indicates that people were moving long distances and having children with people located far away from where they were born. The only way this population structure could have emerged is if people were moving long distances over many millennia.


Genetic data now suggests that people moved and mingled across the eastern African Rift Valley during the Ice Ages.
Elizabeth Sawchuk, CC BY-ND

Additionally, our research showed that almost all ancient eastern Africans shared an unexpectedly high number of genetic variations with hunter-gatherers who today live in central African rainforests, making ancient eastern Africa truly a genetic melting pot. We could tell that this mixing and moving happened after about 50,000 years ago, when there was a major split in central African forager populations.

We also noted that the individuals in our study were genetically most like only their closest geographic neighbors. This tells us that after around 20,000 years ago, the foragers in some African regions were almost exclusively finding their partners locally. This practice must have been extremely strong and persisted for a very long time, as our results show that some groups remained genetically independent of their neighbors over several thousand years. It was especially clear in Malawi and Zambia, where the only close relationships we detected were between people buried around the same time at the same sites.

We don’t know why people began “living locally” again. Changing environments as the last Ice Age peaked and waned between about 26,000-11,500 years ago may have made it more economical to forage closer to home, or perhaps elaborate exchange networks reduced the need for people to travel with objects.

Alternatively, new group identities may have emerged, restructuring marriage rules. If so, we would expect to see artifacts and other traditions like rock art diversify, with specific types clumped into different regions. Indeed, this is exactly what archaeologists find – a trend known as regionalization. Now we know that this phenomenon not only affected cultural traditions, but also the flow of genes.


Recovering and sorting archaeological remains is a slow and laborious process, where even small fragments can tell big stories.
Chelsea Smith, CC BY-ND

New data, new questions

As always, aDNA research raises as many questions as answers. Finding central African ancestry throughout eastern and southern Africa prompts anthropologists to reconsider how interconnected these regions were in the distant past. This is important because central Africa has remained archaeologically understudied, in part because of political, economic and logistical challenges that make research there difficult.

Additionally, while genetic evidence supports a major demographic transition in Africa after 50,000 years ago, we still don’t know the key drivers. Determining what triggered the Later Stone Age transition will require closer examination of regional environmental, archaeological and genetic records to understand how this process unfolded across sub-Saharan Africa.

Finally, this study is a stark reminder that researchers still have much to learn from ancient individuals and artifacts held in African museums, and highlights the critical role of the curators who steward these collections. While some human remains in this study were recovered within the past decade, others have been in museums for a half-century.

Even though technological advances are pushing back the time limits for aDNA, it is important to remember that scientists have only just begun to understand human diversity in Africa, past and present.



Elizabeth Sawchuk, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Alberta; 

Jessica Thompson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University,

Mary Prendergast, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Rice University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Listening to everything: How sound reveals an unseen world

The Conversation
February 25, 2022

Lawrence English, Author provided

Vision is often regarded as first among the human senses, as our eyes are the way most of us come to know the world. However, vision has its limits.

Even now, as you use your eyes to read this, other senses are in operation that open up a greater appreciation of the world. Perhaps the most powerful of these is listening - audition.

Sound carries cues about the world we might otherwise miss. And with the development of new technologies and the work of dedicated scientists and artists, we can today listen to what was previously unimaginable, from the inner workings of plants to catastrophes in distant galaxies.

In my own work, currently exhibited at the Museum of Brisbane, I have made field recordings of environments and creatures around the world. These works take their place alongside an ever-growing collection of recordings revealing the unheard sounds of our world.

The limits of the ear

Humans can only hear a limited range of sounds: those with frequencies between about 20 hertz (low sounds like thunder) and 20 kilohertz (very high sounds like some species of bats). Other sounds exist outside the scope of our auditory capacities.

“Infrasonic” sounds such as the rumble of earthquakes have frequencies too low for us to perceive, although other animals can detect them. There are “ultrasonic” sounds too, with frequencies above the threshold of human hearing.

Strictly speaking, a sound is a vibration in air. But we can also think of other kinds of vibrations, such as electromagnetic waves, as having the potential to be registered as sounds.

With the right kind of technological translation tools, you can hear the electromagnetic sounds emitted by devices like the one on which you are reading this right now.

The ‘Stereo Bugscope’ created by the artist Haco amplifies the sounds of electronic circuitry.

Why should we listen?

Listening is a different way of knowing the world that expands our understanding. Sound travels around corners and through walls, from places that are out of sight.

Our ears are a gateway to a deeper sensing of the world. Take bird calls, for example.

For most, even those of us living in densely populated urban centres, dawn’s arrival is trumpeted by a chorus of bird calls. These voices, that seemingly splay out in all directions suggest acts of territorial dominance, of the seeking and discovery of food and other fundamental activities of animal species. A variation of the chorus occurs again, as the sun vanishes over the horizon.

These daily occurrences are so commonplace as to not draw themselves to attention. But on closer examination, we are discovering they reveal much about habitat health, seasonality and other environmental markers.

Listening longer, listening deeper, listening wider

Today we are listening to more of the world, and beyond, than ever before, with the growth of disciplines such as bio-acoustics, radio telescopy, and more philosophical fields such as sound studies.

The proliferation of technologies such as hydrophones (underwater microphones) and electromagnetic receivers has also increased the reach of our ears.

It’s this combination of intellectual, scientific and artistic curiosity, matched with technological developments and availability that have resulted in the capture of some incredible sound events that exist well beyond the visual plane.

Just a quarter of a century ago it seemed like science fiction that we might be able to capture the sound of two black holes colliding in space – but scientists did it in 2015.

The sound of black holes colliding: gravitational waves converted to sound waves. Caltech / MIT / LIGO Lab163 KB (download)

These discoveries and others like them have fostered new research programs that aim to undertake the deepest and most concentrated galactic listening to date.

As above, so below

We have made many discoveries closer to home, too.

We have known for a long time that the underwater world is rich in sounds, but it has been underrepresented in dedicated research. This trend is changing, with numerous studies highlighting the rich acoustic diversity of rivers, oceans and reefs.


Plants may use the sound of water to guide the growth of their roots.
Shutterstock

On land, the Australian researcher Monica Gagliano has explored plant audition. She demonstrated how plants can use sound to find water – so next time your plumbing is blocked by a plant’s roots, keep in mind they have been listening to the water flowing through the pipes.

Equally profound are the studies of bioelectrical sounds emitted by plants carried out by artists such as the Irish “sound ecologist” Michael Prime. For several decades, Prime has catalogued various bioelectric emissions from plants. At times they resemble unsettled but rhythmic avant-garde music.

Field recording

This curiosity for listening into places and those that inhabit them, has also spawned a zone of creative sound practice called field recording. A field recordist is a listener who is primarily focused on capturing the sonic aspects of environments that captivate them.

Once a marginal part of the sound arts canon, field recording has come to be regarded as a critical field of creative engagement. This year artists such as Philip Samartzis have been memorialised in a series of Australian Antarctic postage stamps.

Even if you don’t want to make your own field recordings, you might be interested in listening to the sound walks of Canadian artist Hildegard Westerkamp, or experiencing the situational listening of Japanese artist Akio Suzuki’s Oto Date project.

These works, like my own Site Listening at the Museum Of Brisbane, recognise that the more we listen into the world around us, the more we realise we are yet to hear its true resonances.

Lawrence English, Adjunct Research Fellow, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

Nuclear fusion record broken – what will it take to start generating electricity?

ANOTHER FIFTY YEARS
The Conversation
February 25, 2022

Nuclear fusion is what generates the energy of the sun: scientists are getting closer to controlling a sustained fusion reaction on Earth. Marko Aliaksandr/Shutterstock

Scientists at a nuclear fusion lab in the UK just broke the world record for the amount of energy produced in a single fusion reaction. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we ask two experts what this means, and how long it’ll take before we can switch on the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant.

And we talk to a social psychologist about new research into the societal pressure some people feel to be happy.

Scientists first demonstrated the ability to fuse two atoms in lab experiments in the 1930s. Nuclear science has come a long way since then, but we still haven’t managed to harness the energy produced by nuclear fusion to generate electricity.

In early February, scientists at the Joint European Torus (JET) lab in Oxfordshire in the UK announced they’d broken the world record for the amount of energy produced in a nuclear fusion experiment. They produced 59 megajoules of heat energy in a single fusion “shot” that lasted for five seconds. This doubled the previous world record set by JET in 1997, but was still only enough to heat about 60 kettles of water.

So how excited should we be about the latest news? How much closer does this world record take us to getting electricity from fusion power – and what would success mean for the planet’s future energy mix?

The JET experiment is the world’s biggest nuclear fusion device. It uses an approach called magnetic confinement to fuse nuclei at very high speeds and temperatures inside a doughnut-shaped container called a tokomak.

Livia Casali, assistant professor in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the US, says the latest result from JET confirms some of the choices made for the fusion reactors of the future – particularly around the materials used to line the inside walls of the tokomak. “These results also confirm that we can achieve fusion energy using a deuterium and tritium fuel mix, which is the same fuel mix that we are planning to use for future fusion devices,” she says.

In particular, JET’s results are a proof of concept for ITER, a huge fusion reactor under construction in southern France and due to be ready by 2026.

“To make a fusion reaction is very easy, but that doesn’t mean that we’re able to produce energy,” says Angel Ibarra Sanchez, a research professor in fusion technology at the Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research in Madrid, Spain’s national fusion laboratory.

Like JET, ITER won’t produce electricity – that will only happen once a demonstration reactor is built. Ibarra says the hope is that the first demo fusion reactor in Europe will be available around 2050. If these demo reactors are shown to work, he predicts the first generation of fusion power reactors could arrive in the 2060s or 2070s. “It will probably not be much faster than this,” he says.

Once fusion power arrives, Ibarra believes the energy it will generate – which releases no carbon dioxide and is dubbed “clean energy” – will be transformational. But he warns us not to pin all our hopes on fusion. “To think that the energy production in the future will be based in a single type of energy sources is not feasible. It’s not realistic,” he says. Instead, Ibarra thinks the energy mix of the future should be “a mix of solar energy, wind energy, and hopefully fusion energy”.

In our second story in this episode, we find out that living in a country that scores highly on global happiness rankings might not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Brock Bastian, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Melbourne in Australia, just co-authored new research showing increased social pressure to feel happy in countries that come top of these rankings. And for some people, this social pressure can be linked to poor mental health. “When a lot of people seem to be doing well and happy, it can exacerbate for some people those feeling of low mood,” says Bastian. (Listen from 27m)

And finally, Eric Smalley, science and technology editor at The Conversation in Boston, recommends some recent analysis on the technology dimensions of the unfolding Ukraine war. (Listen from 37m20)

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Newsclips in this episode are from BBC News and the UK Atomic Energy Agency/Culham Center for Fusion Energy.

Daniel Merino, Assistant Science Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation and Gemma Ware, Editor and Co-Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

How new microalgae technologies can hasten the end of our reliance on oil

The Conversation
February 25, 2022

Chokniti Khongchum/Shutterstock


Microalgae have been used by the Chinese for medicinal and nutritional purposes for thousands of years in the belief they could cure almost any health condition. The idea that microalgae have extraordinary healing powers isn’t as far-fetched as some might think. Though the ancient Chinese believed the microalgae was responsible for health-improving benefits, we now know that it was in fact the biochemical compounds produced by these microscopic creatures that provided the “magic”.

There are approximately 100,000 species of microalgae, each with their own distinct set of properties. This diversity allows microalgae to flourish in almost every environment on Earth. Mostly they exist in aquatic habitats such as fresh or wastewater, but they have been found in moist soil – and even snowbanks too.

Microalgae are usually described as being green, and this is true for species such as B. braunii and C. vulgaris. But there are other species, such as C. officinalis, which is red or F. spiralis, which is brown. Each classification produces different types or quantities of biochemical compounds, making some more useful for certain applications than others.

Over the past few decades research has demonstrated the huge potential of microalgae, especially in the production of biofuel – fuel that is created from plant material or animal waste. I wanted to review this research to provide a framework to establish the most suitable microalgae species for large-scale biofuel production that can ultimately rival oil and gas giants and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

The magic of micoalgae

Microalgae have a unique ability to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into a wide range of biochemical compounds. Despite being classed as animals, they metabolise the same way as plants, producing oxygen to replenish what we humans consume. This cycle acts as a carbon capture system, whereby harmful CO₂ in the atmosphere is converted to useful oxygen. Microalgae also produce a wide range of other compounds found inside the cells, and these are what make microalgae so good at combating the effects of global warming.

Generally, the products from microalgae can be grouped into three classes: proteins, carbohydrates and lipids (fats). But research has found that there are several other high-value biochemical compounds that have significant applications in a wide range of different industries. For example, microalgae produce compounds known as carotenoids, more commonly known as dyes or pigments. These compounds are responsible for giving salmon its pink colour, as the food they eat contains high quantities of carotenoids.

Another high-value class of compounds are polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA). These compounds are part of the lipid family and play a vital role in supplying the cells with energy. Microalgae have been deemed one of the richest sources of these compounds, which help treat the effects of diabetes and arthritis.

But how is it possible for these organisms to produce oil that can be used in cars? The petrol and diesel currently used is derived from crude oil that was formed millions of years ago from dead sea creatures. But modern biofuel is produced from living organisms on a real-time basis.

How biofuel is produced

Biofuel made from microalgae is currently one of the most promising fossil fuel alternatives to sustain the world’s energy demand. This is no easy task, especially having to compete with a highly profitable industry that has been established for more than a century. But unlike oil, which is non-renewable, biofuel is a renewable and sustainable source of fuel. Unfortunately, the economics of biofuel can’t yet compete with traditional fossil fuels. It all boils down to the bottom line, and currently the scale-up technology required isn’t here yet.

Microalgae don’t directly produce biofuel – they produce lipids (fats). To make biofuel these fats must be converted through a process known as transesterification. The process involves removing as much water as possible, known as dewatering, but this requires significant amounts of energy, resulting in high operating costs. As a result, the overall process becomes too expensive to compete with the oil and gas industry, despite its positive environmental impact.

Economics aside, the future for microalgae cultivation and lipid extraction is extremely promising. The development of hybrid technologies will accelerate the global shift to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. These include cell factories that use gold nanoparticles – subatomic particles similar to atoms that form the building blocks of physical matter – to increase production rates and increase efficiencies.

Another potential solution is a process known as “milking”. Traditional cultivation methods for microalgae mean they are destroyed after the cultivation period has ended, which limits the full potential of what each cell can offer. Just like milking a cow, the process can be repeated without killing the cow, and the same goes for microalgae. By repeatedly removing high-value compounds from the same culture of microalgae, the high production cost issues can be removed, resulting in a sustainable and scalable process for the future.

This would result in biofuel becoming cost competitive with current fossil fuels, helping to accelerate the shift towards alternative energy sources. Unfortunately, the prospect of competitive biofuel production has some way to go before it can rival fossil fuel prices and quantities. But these developing technologies have the potential to speed up the transition needed to help the world reach its 2050 emissions targets.

Callum Russell, Chemical Engineering PhD, University of the West of Scotland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

PROTESTS AGAINST GILDEN SWEATSHOPS

A journalist covering a protest in Haiti is dead. Now police are investigating their own

2022/2/24 
© Miami Herald

A journalist is escorted after being hit by a stone during a protest by factory workers demanding pay increase, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022. - 

RICHARD PIERRIN/AFP/Getty Images North America/TNS

The Haiti National Police force has begun an internal investigation into allegations that officers shot and killed a local photojournalist and seriously injured two others who were covering a garment workers protest in the capital over higher wages on Wednesday.

Police spokesman Garry Desrosiers said the internal investigation into the shooting that led to the death of Maxiben Lazarre, who also went by Maxihen, will be conducted by both the inspector general’s office, which investigates accusations against police officers, and the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police.

Witnesses are accusing Haitian police of firing the fatal shot that led to Lazarre’s death.

Lazarre, who worked for the online media outlet Rois des infos, or Kings of Info, was killed when men wearing police uniforms drove by the protest and fired into the crowd of protesters. They were traveling in a white, unmarked vehicle with a “government service” license plate, said Robest Dimanche, spokesman for an online journalists association, CMEL, who was at the protest. Two other journalists were also injured as well as a factory worker, he said.

“Everything unfolded before my eyes,” said Dimanche, who noted that right before the shooting police had broken up the protest by firing tear gas. “Of the three journalists who were shot, one died on the scene, Lazarre.”

On Friday, Lazarre’s family and Dimanche, speaking on behalf of the association, condemned the killing and demanded justice.

Lazarre is the third journalist killed in Haiti in two months. In January, John Wesley Amady and Wilguens Louis-Saint were fatally shot by suspected gang members while they were reporting a story on the country’s gang problems. The killing was immediately condemned by the international watchdog group Committee to Protect Journalists.

Haiti has been seeing an increase in the slaying of journalists, none of which have been solved. In 2018, photojournalist Vladjimir Legagneur went missing while working on an independent project inside the Port-au-Prince slum of Grand Ravine. The following year radio journalists Pétion Rospide and Néhémie Joseph were killed. Last June, Diego Charles, of Radio Vision 2000, was gunned down along with human rights advocate Antoinette “Netty” Duclaire.

“Every time a journalist is killed, the police says the same thing, ‘An investigation has been opened,’ “ Dimanche said. “Since Jean Dominique there has been an investigation opened and since then, there has never been any progress with the investigation. We have no choice but to put pressure ... and ask all journalists’ associations, local and international, to take a stance to end the impunity.”

Jean Dominique was a Haitian journalist, agronomist and human rights advocate in Haiti. His April 3, 2000, assassination remains unsolved, and has served as a symbol of the country’s ongoing problem bringing the killers of journalists to justice.

In a message on his Twitter account, Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry said he deplored Lazarre’s death and condemned the violence. “I offer my sympathies to the family of the deceased, as well as to the other victims of these brutal acts,” he wrote.

The incident was also condemned by the monitoring office of the Montana Accord, a group that seeks to take charge of the country and lead a two-year transition to elections. A tweet from the group referred to Lazarre’s death as “murder” and condemned “all acts of repression against workers.”

“The de facto power cannot continue to allow the police to shoot at Haitians like all of us who are claiming for a better life,” the tweet said.

The protests for higher wages by garment workers have been ongoing for several weeks. On Monday, the government announced a hike in the daily minimum wage by as much as 54%.

The hike would take the minimum salary for factory workers from $5 a day to just under $7.50 a day. The main union representing factory workers has said the increase is not enough and has called for continued demonstrations. The unions are demanding a minimum of $15 a day.

On Thursday, factories throughout Port-au-Prince shut down in protest of the violence that has accompanied the strike. Some factory owners say buildings have been attacked with rocks, and that workers who have joined the protests have been violently dragged from their working stations.

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Texas teacher on leave after video shows woman criticizing conservative Christians

2022/2/25
© Fort Worth Star-Telegram

A video captured an educator in a hallway at Colleyville Middle School saying that conservative Christians needed' to get COVID and die.' She was immediately placed on administrative leave. - Lori Martin/Dreamstime/TNS

A Colleyville Middle School teacher has been placed on administrative leave after a video captured an educator in the school hallway saying conservative Christians needed "to get COVID and die."

The description of a video posted by an account called CriticalRaceTheory to the Canadian video platform Rumble claims it was taken at Colleyville Middle School in Texas.

In the video, a woman is seen chatting with two other women in a hallway about vaccines and her frustration with how they've become political.

The woman said COVID vaccines were being given out the same way flu vaccines are, and said that if they had been given out immediately, the virus would be gone.

"The rest of my life is impacted because of politics?" she said. "Because of conservative Christian crap?

"I'm telling you, those conservative Christian people, they need to die, they need to get COVID and die."

In a note to parents Wednesday, the Grapevine-Colleyville school district said the teacher's statements don't reflect the views of the school district or middle school. The district said it will continue to investigate what happened.

School board president Jorge Rodriguez said in a statement sent by the school district that the board rejected the teacher's statements and that they supported the decision to place her on administrative leave until the investigation is complete.

In November, former Colleyville Heritage High School principal James Whitfield came under criticism after he was accused of teaching and promoting Critical Race Theory. Whitfield, hired in 2020, was the school's first Black principal and left the school district in November after reaching a settlement with the school district.