Новости за 07.03.2022

Proposals to ban Russian oil imports are beginning to garner bipartisan momentum, with the White House slowly warming up to the idea despite concerns about rapidly rising oil prices.

I keep worrying that we’re going to get sucked into a war with Russia. We should all worry about that. Why? Because let’s face it, there is every possibility that Russia is going to win this war—at least in the short term. Russia has the troops, the tanks, the firepower. God bless the Ukrainians. Their courage is a beautiful thing to see. I’m grateful to be alive to witness it. But Putin seems willing to escalate until the country comes under his control.

Thanks to the intransigence of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the legislative filibuster, any notion of Congress making a sustained push for democratic reforms is functionally dead. Voting rights advocates had hoped Democrats would go into the midterm elections having passed a comprehensive reform package, or at least an uncontroversial update to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that might turn the tide against the voting restrictions being implemented in Republican states.

As the Cold War sputtered to an end and the Soviet Union imploded, American policymakers were concerned with one thing above all others: securing the giant arsenal of nuclear weapons that Moscow controlled. The Bush administration’s biggest fear was that control over the stockpile would become a casualty of a disintegrating empire defined by national and ethnic feuds. It was terrified of “Yugoslavia with nuclear weapons,” as one official put it.

Among the deluge of sanctions and boycotts imposed on Russia over the past two weeks, one in particular stood out to me: an announcement by EA Sports that it would remove the Russian national team and Russian clubs from its popular FIFA video game series. “EA Sports stands in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and like so many voices across the world of football, calls for peace and an end to the invasion of Ukraine,” the company said in a statement on Twitter on Wednesday.

In the fall of 1962, William F. Buckley Jr. befriended a convicted killer. Seven years earlier, Buckley had founded National Review. He and its editors—an idiosyncratic coterie of hypergraphic libertarians, ex-Communists, and Christian traditionalists—had succeeded in reinvesting the hoary, quietist, vaguely continental term “conservative” with American vim, vigor, and revolutionary flair. But Buckley, a few years shy of his run for mayor of New York City and the debut of his television program Firing Line, was not yet a household name. Читать дальше...

Who’s blocking progress on climate change? Fossil fuel companies and politicians in rich, high-emitting countries are the biggest obstructionists—the ones climate activists are rightly targeting with political campaigns, investigations, and direct actions. But as two recent reports have made clear, there’s another group climate watchers need to consider if the world is to avoid catastrophe: asset managers.

Not so long ago, Chelsea Football Club’s biggest problem was that the team’s marquee addition, striker Romelu Lukaku, who was acquired from Inter Milan for $135 million over the summer, hadn’t quite panned out. Lukaku, who plays a bit like Michael Owen if Owen was also built like a tank, was something of an odd fit in manager Thomas Tuchel’s system and had begun to publicly pine for a move back to Italy. The Chelsea boss responded by benching him; it could be argued that, as good as Lukaku is... Читать дальше...

Seventy-year-old Vladimir Georgivich arrived in Poland from southern Ukraine and decided to return the same day. “It’s cold here,” he said, walking with a cane and carrying two suitcases. “Nowhere is safe from Putin and those bastards.”