Pro-Kremlin Telegram channels on Friday circulated a New Year’s video depicting Russian air defense systems shooting down Santa Claus’ reindeer sleigh.
The video, first shared by the Pul N3 Telegram channel, begins with Santa flying over central Moscow to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
“Hi, Russians! Here are your presents,” says Santa Claus, sipping a Coca-Cola as the camera zooms in on his sleigh, which is loaded with rockets bearing NATO logos.
“Happy New Year,” Santa says before a missile shoots into his sleigh, causing it to explode mid-air.
Ded Moroz and Russian airpower. Image courtesy of Moscow Times
The scene then shifts to a military control room where a Russian serviceman and Ded Moroz — Russia’s version of Santa Claus — monitor the action on a screen as a traditional Russian folk tune plays.
“Is it done?” Ded Moroz asks the headset-wearing serviceman.
“Yes, it’s done. The target was destroyed,” the serviceman replies.
“Good. We don’t need any kind of foreign stuff [in our skies],” Ded Moroz says, embracing the serviceman. “Happy New Year!”
The video’s release comes just days after an Azerbaijani passenger plane crashed in western Kazakhstan, with reports suggesting it was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile.
Social anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova conducted an investigation and concluded that Anna Korobkova, renowned for her numerous denunciations of people advocating anti-war stances, is probably a pseudonym of Ivan Abaturov, a journalist from Yekaterinburg. The BBC Russian Service has published the results of Arkhipova’s research.
Arkhipova assembled more than seventy letters, addressed to various institutions and agencies, in which Korobkova accused doctors, teachers, human rights activists, and journalists of “discrediting” the Russian army and called for them to be brought to justice. Among the denouncer’s victims are a doctor at a clinic who made a comment to [banned opposition channel] TV Rain, the mother of an enlisted soldier killed in the war, and Arkhipova herself. In one case, a student was expelled from a university after it received a denunciation alleging that he had been involved in “unauthorized protest rallies.”
In early December 2024, Arkhipova found a page about Korobkova on Wikipedia. With the assistance of linguists, she did a comparative analysis and found that the author of the Wikipedia article was probably the same person who had written the denunciations signed by Korobkova.
Arkhipova and the investigative journalists were able to identify the author of the Wikipedia article. It turned out to be a journalist from Yekaterinburg, Ivan Abaturov.
Abaturov, as the article points out, had already been at the center of a whistleblowing scandal. In the summer of 2022, Sergei Erlich, director of the publishing house Nestor History, said that Abaturov had allegedly detected “false information about the USSR’s actions during the Second World War” in one of his company’s books. Consequently, law enforcement officials visited Nestor History’s offices.
Abaturov himself has never concealed his attitude to denunciations. In 2019, he wrote on social media that “a journalist under Stalin was a walking prosecutor’s office” and that he wanted to be one too.
When asked by a BBC correspondent whether he had been writing denunciations under the name “Korobkova,” Abaturov replied on VKontakte: “Hello. You are mistaken.” Consequently, he stopped replying to messages, and the BBC was unable to reach him by phone.
Since the beginning of their country’s full-scale war with Ukraine, Russians have filed 2,623 complaints with law enforcement agencies about anti-war statements made by their fellow citizens, the investigative journalism website Important Stories (iStories) calculated in June on the basis of open source data. So-called LGBT propaganda (487 complaints) and Russophobia (250 complaints) ranked second and third, respectively, as grounds for denunciations.
According to Important Stories, seventy percent of the complaints were written by subscribers of the anonymous Telegram channel Mrakoborets, which specializes in tracking down anti-war activists. The channel’s daily norm is a minimum of three complaints on its pages on the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki (“Classmates”). Yekaterina Mizulina, head of the Safe Internet League, had personally written 148 denunciations, while sixty were penned by pro-Kremlin activist Vitaly Borodin.
In the autumn of 2022, executives at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) received a letter signed “Anna Vasilievna Korobkova.” It began as follows: “I fully support the special operation of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory. I am against all violations of the law.”
The letter concerned an interview that Alexandra Arkhipova, who had worked for many years as a senior research fellow at RANEPA, had given to the channel TV Rain, which had been designated a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities. (At the time of the interview, the TV channel had not yet been designated an “undesirable organization.”)
In her denunciation, “Korobkova” asked the university to dismiss Arkhipova for “immoral misconduct,” which, in her opinion, consisted in the fact that in the interview with TV Rain she had “disseminated false information discrediting the Special Military Operation [sic] on Ukrainian territory.” Korobkova also suggested that the university send the evidence against Arkhipova to the prosecutor’s office.
“Korobkova” was outraged that Arkhipova did not interrupt TV Rain presenter Anna Nemzer when the latter had called the “special military operation” a “war” (“thus showing she agreed with Nemzer’s false opinion”), mentioned Facebook without mentioning that it had been designated an “extremist organization” in Russia, and uttered the phrase “before the war I would ask.”
“This is a lie, as there is no war,” the letter said.
Upon seeing the text of the denunciation, Arkhipova was surprised by how long and detailed it was. Korobkova’s letter took up two pages, and even the time codes for the points in the interview at which Arkhipova had said certain things that angered Korobkova were noted. As a folklorist and social anthropologist who works extensively with different texts, Arkhipova was struck by the structure of the denunciation and the specific language in which it was written.
“I was reading this denunciation to friends, discussing it as a phenomenon of contemporary political culture, when one of my colleagues looked at me sadly and took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. He unfolded it and read aloud a denunciation. It had the same wording, and was also signed ‘Anna Vasilievna Korobkova,'” Arkhipova tells the BBC.
Petersburg police have arrested a 24-year-old freight handler who threw a Molotov cocktail at a military recruitment office (voenkomat). He had been hoodwinked by scammers whom he had contacted himself.
The Petrograd District Court remanded Daniil Pavlov in custody to a pretrial detention center, Rotunda’s correspondent reports. Pavlov faces ten to twenty years’ imprisonment on charges of “terrorism” (per Article 205 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code). The pretrial restrictions hearing took place in closed chambers.
Baza writes that in early December Pavlov had been unable to log onto the Gosuslugi (municipal and state services) app, and instead of the number for customer support he found the scammers’ number on the internet. They asked him to move the conversation to Telegram and told him that they had hacked the young man’s account. According to RIA Novosti, Pavlov then wired 800,000 rubles [approx. 7,400 euros] to these persons unknown.
“Customer service” told Pavlov that he had to throw a Molotov cocktail at the military recruitment office on Tchaikovsky Street* [in Petersburg’s Liteiny District]. He thus intended to assist in the apprehension of certain “bad guys,” journalists explain.
RIA Novosti writes that he was promised a payment of two million rubles [approx. 18,500 euros] for the job. As soon as the young man threw the flammable mixture, he was detained by police.
📌 Daniil Pavlov lived in [the Petersburg suburb of] Sestroretsk and was employed as a freight handler. Judging by his subscriptions on VKontakte, the young man enjoyed anime and computer games. His girlfriend told Rotunda that they had been planning to get married.
* Tchaikovsky Street in Petersburg is named after the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Tchaikovsky, not the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
🍍🍍🍍🍍 WOW News: the number of pineapples needed to enter prize drawings has dropped! Hurry up and hunt for pineapples and get closer to winning! You still have time to take part in drawings for a flat in Moscow, cars and tours abroad.
√ Search for pineapples on the product pages in the Ozon app.* The products marked with pineapples change daily. You can also get pineapples for purchases of 500 rubles or more. Pineapples are awarded for redeemed items.
√ Double your pineapples when paying for purchases outside Ozon with the Ozon Bank card (more details in the terms and conditions of the promotion).
*The promotion is available only in app versions 17.40 and up.
Source: Email flyer from news@news.ozon.ru, 18 December 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader
Alleged video footage of the arson attack in Bolshoi Kamen, Maritime Territory, Russia
A resident of Bolshoy Kamen (Maritime Territory) attempted to torch a building after he fell prey to scammers, writes the Telegram channel Mash.
After the 23-year-old male was detained, he told police that telephone scammers from Ukraine had persuaded him to take out a bank loan. He later realized he had been conned.
Sometime later the con men again telephoned the local resident. Identifying themselves as members of the secret services, they asked the young man to torch town hall and a bank branch, saying these actions would allegedly repay the detained man’s [sic] debt.
“They sent him instructions on how to assemble a Molotov cocktail and gave him subsequent orders over the telephone,” Mash writes.
Heeding these recommendations [sic], the young man broke a window in the bank branch and set fire to it. According to Telegram channels, he also attempted to torch town hall. The flames also engulfed fire department vehicles.
The fire in the first building was extinguished quickly, but what happened at the other two locations [lokatsii] is not reported.
Earlier in Blagoveshchensk, four people attempted to torch a military recruitment office and were handed prison sentences of up to seventeen years.
REMEMBER RUSSIAN ‘GUN-RIGHTS ADVOCATE’ [ ] AND CONVICTED FELON MARIA BUTINA? Who doesn’t? Welp, here she is w/ your Daily Irony Supplement — and it’s a massive dose! See, as of Jan. 20 she’ll likely get a pardon and move back Stateside to improve on her spying career (hey, how could she do worse?); but in the meantime, she’s trying to get *Americans* (et al.) to go the *other* way, i.e. move to Moscow — y’know, like Our Guy Ed Snowden & his new roommate, Bashar al-Assad, who just *love* it there, right?
[WARNING: Do not watch this video immediately after a meal.]
Lawyer Dmitry Talantov has been sentenced to seven years in a penal colony on charges of disseminating “fake news” about the Russian army and inciting hatred in connection with several social media posts about the war. Talantov had been on the defense team of journalist Ivan Safronov, who was sentenced to twenty-two years in a penal colony for high treason. Talantov had also served for many years as the head of the Udmurtia bar association, so it is likely that both the judge who sentenced Talantov and the prosecutor who petitioned the judge to sentence the respected 64-year-old defense lawyer to twelve years in prison knew him personally.
Talantov delivered a memorable closing statement today in court.
Dmitry Talantov, sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for antiwar social media posts:
Brodsky once said that “prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time.” I didn’t completely understand this phrase. I didn’t get it. I’m certain that none of you totally understands it, because it is the surplus of time which is frightening about this situation, not the lack of space. It is the time during which you suffer, and the time that tries to kill you. Every minute tries to kill you, and every minute in there [in prison] is equal to an hour.
[…]
People often ask for forgiveness during their closing statement. I also want to ask for it. I’m saying this to my wife. Forgive me, Olga. I love you. If this is overdoing it emotionally, then I’ll put it this way. Olya, if you’re ever sent to prison for twelve years for some reason, I’ll wait for you to get out. Take it easy.
Sasha Skochilenko, the Petersburg artist and musician sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for posting antiwar price tags in a supermarket and released as part of a prisoner swap in August 2024:
Alexei Gorinov, the Moscow municipal district council member who was initially sentenced to seven years in prison for “disseminating fake news” during an argument about whether it was appropriate to hold celebrations for children during a war, and who is now on trial a second time for allegedly “condoning terrorism” in conversations with cellmates:
I was also a municipal council member during the August 1991 coup. I stood with other defenders outside the Russian Supreme Soviet, the so-called White House. We were defending our freedom, our right to live freely and, thus, to speak freely, voice our thoughts, gather information, and share it. If they had told me then that thirty years later I would be tried by a criminal court for my words, for my opinion, I wouldn’t have believed them.
Nadezhda Buyanova, a pediatrician, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for “disseminating fake news,” after she was denounced by the widow of an army officer killed in Ukraine: the doctor had allegedly said to the woman’s seven-year-old son that his father had been a “legitimate target”:
If there used to were doctors and patients, nowadays there are providers and clients. That’s what we were told at the planning meetings: “Humiliate yourself. And us.” We medics can be slandered, we can be insulted, we can be called every name in the book. We can’t defend ourselves, our explanations are not heard by our superiors, and conflicts are not resolved.
There was no interrogation and the child had nothing to say. “At the end of the appointment, he walked out of the office.” You cannot believe such a tale. You cannot lie like that: it’s a disgrace. How can you accuse a person without evidence, on the basis of a false accusation? Where is the logic? Where is the justice? Earlier, in ancient times, there were wise men. They would have said: “Well, what do you expect from a person without proof?”
Roman Ivanov, a journalist for RusNews, was sentenced to seven years in prison for three social media posts. During his closing statement in court, he knelt down to apologize to Ukrainians:
What can we do in this situation? I honestly don’t even know anymore. But I want to ask for forgiveness from all the citizens of Ukraine, to whom our country has brought grief, whom our country has robbed of their relatives, their loved ones, and their friends, who will never come back.
And [I ask for forgiveness] not for the whole country, but for me personally, for Roman Viktorovich Ivanov, a citizen of the Russian Federation. I would like to get down on my knees before the relatives of the people who were murdered in Bucha, although I don’t know who murdered them. But they are the consequences of what our country has become.
The politician Alexei Navalny was repeatedly tried on trumped-up charges before he was murdered in a penal colony on 16 February 2024. Perhaps it was Navalny, during his endless trials, who revived the closing statement in court as a literary genre. Here is an excerpt from his speech at his trial for “extremism” in July 2023:
Former Moscow politician Alexei Gorinov, the first known Russian to be imprisoned for denouncing the invasion of Ukraine, was sentenced to three more years on Friday on charges of “justifying terrorism” that he says he was framed for.
Ahead of his sentencing, he read the following statement to the court and the press:
Imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Gorinov, sits in a cage of the courtroom as his second trial for criticizing Russia’s actions in Ukraine swiftly nears its conclusion in Vladimir, Russia, Friday, Nov. 29, 2024. Photo: Dmitry Serebryakov/AP
“All my life I have been an opponent of aggression, violence and war, and devoted myself exclusively to peaceful activities: science, teaching, education, governance and public activities as a deputy, human rights activist, member of election commissions and controller of the electoral process. I never thought that I would live to see such a level of degradation of my country’s political system and its foreign policy, when ordinary citizens who favor peace and are against war, who number in the thousands, would be accused of slandering the Armed Forces and justifying terrorism, and would be put on trial.
“The third year of the war is coming to an end. The third year of casualties and destruction on European territory, of deprivation and suffering of millions of people on a level unprecedented since World War II. We cannot remain silent about this.
“Back in late April, our former defense minister announced the losses of the Ukrainian side in the armed conflict – 500,000 people. Think about this number! And what losses have been suffered by Russia, which, according to official information, is constantly successfully advancing along the entire front? We still do not know. And who will be responsible for this? What is all this for?
“Our authorities and those who support them in their militaristic aspirations wanted this war so much — and now it has come to our land.
“I would like to ask them: has our life become better? Is this how you understand the well-being and security of our country and its population? Or did you not envision these developments in your calculations?
“But for now we have to answer not to those who organized the war, continue to kill, propagandize the war and engage in mercenarism. Rather, we ordinary citizens of Russia, who raise our voices against war and for peace, have to answer, paying with our freedom and, for some, with our lives.
“I belong to the outgoing generation of people whose parents took part in World War II or survived it with all its hardships. The generation that has already passed away entrusted us with preserving peace with all our might as the most precious thing on Earth for all its inhabitants. But we have neglected these principles and devalued our memory of these people and the victims of that war.
“My guilt is that I, as a citizen of my country, allowed this war to happen and failed to stop it. And I ask you to note this in the verdict. But I would like my guilt and responsibility to be shared with me by the organizers, participants and supporters of the war, as well as the persecutors of those who advocate peace.
“I continue to live with the hope that someday it will be so. In the meantime, I ask the people of Ukraine and my fellow citizens affected by the war to forgive me.
“Within the framework of the case in which I was accused and tried for my opinion that we need to seek an end to the war, I have expressed my attitude fully to this abominable human endeavor. I can only say that violence and aggression breed nothing but reciprocal violence. This is the true cause of our troubles, our suffering, our senseless sacrifices, the destruction of civilian and industrial infrastructure and our homes.
“Let us stop this bloody, needless slaughter — neither for us nor the inhabitants of Ukraine. Isn’t it time to leave our neighbors alone and deal with our own snowballing domestic problems? Long ago we proved to the world how brave, resilient and peace-loving we are. So, maybe enough is enough?
“Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy — from a letter to his son (1904): ‘For me, the madness and criminality of war is so clear that I can see nothing in it except for this madness and criminality.’
“I too join and subscribe to these words of our great compatriot.
“You can join too!”
SOTAVision reported that Judge Vladimirov interrupted Gorinov when he started to talk about losses in the war in Ukraine and called a 15-minute break so Gorinov could “think over his speech again.”
When you woke up yesterday the idea that Pete Hegseth—a philandering morning TV host who has never run anything bigger than a frozen banana stand—could serve as the secretary of defense was the most preposterous idea in the history of the federal government.
By the dinner time Trump issued two nominations that made Hegseth look like Bobby Gates.
The Matt Gaetz appointment is getting most of the attention because of the irony. The DoJ being controlled by a man who was recently investigated by the same department for having an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, whom he (allegedly) paid to travel with him? It’s too good.
Also, in the near term, the attorney general can a lot of damage to America. The AG has the power both to turn the state against its citizens and to shield wrongdoers from accountability.
But it’s the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence that worries me more. Because for a decade Gabbard has looked and behaved like a Russian asset.
In four terms as a congresswoman her most notable actions were ongoing defenses of two war criminals: Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.
Racist text messages invoking slavery raised alarm across the country this week after they were sent to Black men, women and students, including middle schoolers, prompting inquiries by the FBI and other agencies.
The messages, sent anonymously, were reported in several states, including New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. They generally used a similar tone but varied in wording.
Some instructed the recipient to show up at an address at a particular time “with your belongings,” while others didn’t include a location. Some of them mentioned the incoming presidential administration.
It wasn’t yet clear who was behind the messages and there was no comprehensive list of where they were sent, but high school and college students were among the recipients.
The FBI said it was in touch with the Justice Department on the messages, and the Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating the texts “alongside federal and state law enforcement.” The Ohio Attorney General’s office also said it was looking into the matter.
Tasha Dunham of Lodi, California, said her 16-year-old daughter showed her one of the messages Wednesday evening before her basketball practice.
The text not only used her daughter’s name, but it directed her to report to a “plantation” in North Carolina, where Dunham said they’ve never lived. When they looked up the address, it was the location of a museum.
“It was very disturbing,” Dunham said. “Everybody’s just trying to figure out what does this all mean for me? So, I definitely had a lot of fear and concern.”
Her daughter initially thought it was a prank, but emotions are high following Tuesday’s presidential election. Dunham and her family thought it could be more nefarious and reported it to local law enforcement.
“I wasn’t in slavery. My mother wasn’t in slavery. But we’re a couple of generations away. So, when you think about how brutal and awful slavery was for our people, it’s awful and concerning,” Dunham said.
About six middle school students in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, received the messages too, said Megan Shafer, acting superintendent of the Lower Merion School District.
“The racist nature of these text messages is extremely disturbing, made even more so by the fact that children have been targeted,” she wrote in a letter to parents.
Students at some major universities, including Clemson in South Carolina and the University of Alabama, said they received the messages. The Clemson Police Department said in a statement that it been notified of the “deplorable racially motivated text and email messages” and encouraged anyone who received one to report it.
University of Alabama freshman Alyse McCall told sister station WVTMM that she was in class when she got the text, and it brought her to tears.
“I can say, ‘Oh, it’s a spoof message, oh, it’s a spam message,’ but that’s truly scary,” McCall said. “These messages are going out to thousands of young African-American students who fought just as hard to get into college as everybody else did and make opportunities for themselves to thrive, and getting those messages and then walking around or not even going to class because you’re scared to walk on your own campus. It’s not fair.”
Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee, issued a statement calling the messages that targeted some of its students “deeply unsettling.” It urged calm and assured students that the texts likely were from bots or malicious actors with “no real intentions or credibility.”
Nick Ludlum, a senior vice president for the wireless industry trade group CTIA, said “wireless providers are aware of these threatening spam messages and are aggressively working to block them and the numbers that they are coming from.”
David Brody, director of the Digital Justice Initiative at The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that they aren’t sure who is behind the messages but estimated they had been sent to more than 10 states, including most Southern states, Maryland, Oklahoma and even the District of Columbia. The district’s Metropolitan Police force said in a statement that its intelligence unit was investigating the origins of the message.
Brody said a number of civil rights laws can be applied to hate-related incidents. The leaders of several other civil rights organizations condemned the messages, including Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who said, “Hate speech has no place in the South or our nation.”
“The threat — and the mention of slavery in 2024 — is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness,” said NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson. “These actions are not normal. And we refuse to let them be normalized.”
Aside from occasionally noting that Russian serfs and American slaves were emancipated within less than two years of each other, historians — especially American historians — have made little effort to compare the development, treatment and status of the two servile labor groups. It apparently has been concluded a priori that there was no solid basis for such a comparison. American slaves were, after all, a race apart — Africans who had been uprooted from their homeland and brought to the New World in chains where they were systematically exploited and degraded in a peculiarly vicious form of involuntary servitude. Conversely, Russian serfdom has been generally accepted as an anachronistic legacy of medieval Europe that had finally run its course by the mid nineteenth century.
Thus the assumption that there was no common ground for a useful comparison of the two labor systems has meant the absence of any such comparative study. What follows is a preliminary and brief attempt to take the first steps toward filling that historical void.
Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, billed as a triumphant homecoming, instead turned into a political fiasco on Sunday night as a pro-Trump comedian’s racist diatribe drew furious condemnation, including from prominent Republicans.
The rally, held just more than a week before Election Day, was intended to serve as a platform for Trump to make his closing argument but sparked backlash for racial slurs and vulgarity.
The first speaker of the evening, Tony Hinchcliffe, the host of “Kill Tony” podcast, began the rally with slurs about Latinos and African Americans.
Latinos “love making babies. There’s no pulling out. They come inside, just like they do to our country,” Hinchcliffe said to laughter inside the arena. He added: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks drew swift rebuke from a pair of congressional Republicans from Florida. GOP Rep. María Salazar wrote on X that she was “disgusted” by his “racist” rhetoric that “does not reflect GOP values.” Sen. Rick Scott denounced the “joke” as “not funny” and “not true.”
[…]
But his derogatory comments and the slew of offensive remarks offered up by the pillars of Trump’s political movement throughout the hours-long program quickly overshadowed the spectacle of the event that drew thousands of MAGA faithful to the heart of Manhattan and was designed to serve as a capstone to the former president’s two-year attempt at a political comeback.
Trump supporter David Rem called Harris the “anti-Christ.” Businessman Grant Cardone claimed Harris has “pimp handlers.” Radio host Sid Rosenberg called Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 rival and a former secretary of state, a “sick son of a bitch” and cast Democrats more broadly as “Jew-haters and lowlives.”
A Trump adviser said the speakers’ remarks weren’t vetted by the campaign.
In his own speech, Trump reprised some of his harshest remarks about immigration, with his calls to weed out “the enemy from within.”
Trump, who has demonized migrants, called for the death penalty for “any migrant who kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer,” and at one point stopped to show a video about Venezuelan migrants and gang activity in New York.
The crowd responded by chanting: “Send them back.”
Editor’s note: This report has been updated to correct the number of physicians who have called for former President Trump to release his medical records.
Former President Trump joined “Fox & Friends” on Friday for an in-person interview where he told a 6-year-old child the U.S. “won’t have any cows” if Vice President Harris is elected.
In a recorded video, the child asked the Republican candidate about his favorite farm animal.
“I’ll tell you what I love, I love cows, but if we go with Kamala, you won’t have any cows anymore,” the former president responded to the child’s question. “I don’t want to ruin this kid’s day.”
He then called Harris a “radical left lunatic.”
This is not the first time the Republican nominee made this claim about cows. Trump made similar remarks at a North Carolina campaign event in July and during a Nevada rally with Hispanic voters this past Saturday. While speaking to voters, Trump said Democrats wanted to remove windows from buildings and get rid of cows.
“They just come up, they want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings. They have some wonderful plans for this country, honestly they’re crazy,” he stated.
In North Carolina, he added that Harris would “outlaw red meat.”
The Harris-Walz team hit back by calling the claims a “delusional rant,” questioning the former president’s mental capacity. After the vice president released a medical report from her doctor, she and 230 physicians asked Trump to do the same.
The Trump campaign released two letters from doctors who have evaluated the former president’s health and cited his busy schedule as a reason for not releasing his medical history or formal medical report.
During his “Fox & Friends” appearance, Trump also fielded questions about whether he will include former Republican candidate Nikki Haley in his administration and about his support for school choice.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Friday called for an investigation into a Wall Street Journal report that SpaceX founder and Donald Trump ally Elon Musk and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been in “regular contact” since late 2022.
The report, which said the SpaceX founder has discussed “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions” with the Russian leader, raises national security concerns as SpaceX’s relationships with NASA and the US military may have granted Musk access to sensitive government information and US intelligence.
“I don’t know that that story is true. I think it should be investigated,” Nelson told Semafor’s Burgess Everett. “If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia, then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
Some US officials have raised counterintelligence concerns in the last year about Musk’s interactions with US adversaries like Russia, but the US intelligence community is wary of looking into those interactions because Musk is an American citizen, an official familiar with the matter told CNN.
Several White House officials told the Journal they weren’t aware of the contact between Musk and Putin, and the paper said knowledge of the discussions “appears to be a closely held secret in government.” The discussions were confirmed to the Journal by several current and former US, European and Russian officials.
In one instance, the newspaper cited a request from Putin to Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan “as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”
Musk did not respond to the Journal’s requests for comment.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Friday that he had seen the reporting but the White House is “not in a position to corroborate” it and deferred questions to Musk. A Pentagon spokesman told the Journal that the Defense Department does not comment on “any individual’s security clearance, review or status, or about personnel security policy matters in the context of reports about any individual’s actions.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the newspaper that Musk and Putin have only had one telephone call in which they discussed “space as well as current and future technologies.”
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Musk’s support for Ukraine — exemplified by SpaceX’s provision of Starlink services — has diminished as his public statements about the conflict have become further aligned with those of Trump, who has said he would negotiate an end to the war quickly. The satellite internet terminals provided by Musk’s company have been a vital source of communication for Ukraine’s military, allowing it to fight and stay connected even as cellular and internet networks have been destroyed.
Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russia and cybersecurity expert, told CNN’s Alex Marquardt Friday on “CNN News Central” that Musk’s Starlink is “essential to Ukraine in particular because they really could not prosecute this war without” its services.
After Musk trumpeted his early support for Ukraine, SpaceX then abruptly asked the Pentagon to pay tens of millions of dollars per month to fund Starlink in Ukraine and take the burden off SpaceX. In response to that reporting, Musk then abruptly announced on Twitter that he had withdrawn the funding request. Around the same time, Musk used a poll on X to suggest a “Ukraine-Russia Peace” plan that included re-doing elections “under UN supervision” in the regions of the country recently annexed illegally by Russia. After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky questioned Musk’s preference in the war, the tech entrepreneur responded that he “still very much support(s) Ukraine” but feared “massive escalation.”
SpaceX had previously limited its Starlink signal to areas controlled by Ukrainian forces, hampering potential advances that would have relied on Starlink communications. SpaceX then enlarged it to the rest of the country, and earlier this year, Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence claimed it has confirmed the use of Starlink satellite communications by Russian forces in occupied areas. Russia appeared to be buying the terminals from third parties; SpaceX said it did not do business of any kind with the Russian government or its military and that its service would not work in Russia. The statement didn’t address whether it would work in occupied Ukraine.
Ukraine’s claim followed revelations in a biography of Musk, written by Walter Isaacson, about the satellite system’s use in the war. According to an excerpt from the book, Musk did not grant a Ukrainian request to turn on his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.
Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials, according to Isaacson.
In October 2022, Musk denied a claim by American political scientist Ian Bremmer that he had spoken with Putin about the war and a proposed “peace plan” to end the conflict.
Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, has emerged as a major financial figure in this year’s presidential election. He plowed nearly $44 million in October into a super PAC working to restore Trump to the White House — pushing the billionaire’s total donations to the group to nearly $119 million — and he appeared with Trump on the campaign trail earlier this month in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Musk also held his own town halls last week in Pennsylvania, where he urged voters to support Trump and promoted several debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The two have publicly discussed a potential government role for Musk.
In recent days, Musk also offered splashy, $1 million daily sweepstakes for swing-state voters that has drawn scrutiny from the US Justice Department. Despite a warning from the Justice Department that the payments might be illegal, Musk’s super PAC awarded two $1 million prizes to registered voters in Michigan and Wisconsin on Thursday.
I wouldn’t want Navalny to be remembered the way he has been remembered this past year.
I haven’t read the book Patriot yet, but I was quite upset by Mikhail Zygar’s review of it. Zygar compares Navalny to Jesus and concludes that by dying, Navalny bequeathed us an idea that would rid future generations of cynicism and teach them to believe.
This is feeble sentimentalization, in my opinion. Navalny didn’t not dream up any particular ideas. He called for action, not faith. The meaning of his sacrifice, in my mind, is practical and political, not abstract and ideological. It can and should benefit the current generation, not some future generation.
Navalny didn’t dream up a new ideal. The “beautiful Russia of the future” is a feeble image, but Navalny understood better than anyone how tyranny operates on the mechanical level. I often complain that the FSB understands better how Russian society functions than do opposition politicians, sociologists and psychologists. Navalny couldn’t be accused of this shortcoming.
He was the only person in Russian politics who talked about power relations as a two-way street. He didn’t talk about the enormous resources Putin has, but about the fact that we give Putin power. It is not the security services, the army and the tanks that give Putin power. We give Putin power.
This view evolved over the course of Navalny’s career, becoming more and more central. As time went by, it separated Alexei more and more from his colleagues in the opposition. Toward the end of his life, Navalny’s writings centered on the idea that power consists in consenting to obedience, in “obeying in advance.” We say to ourselves: I cannot disobey, because if I don’t obey, they will (notice me/file administrative charges against me/fire me/banish me from my profession/send me to jail/kill me).
Only by obeying in advance can governing by unfulfilled threat be scaled up indefinitely, to a country of 140 million people, because this means of governing doesn’t require any resources. We obey without taking resources from the state. Putin’s estimates for the war in Ukraine include every dollar, euro, and pound spent on Ukraine’s defense. They are what counts against Russian budgets, not “faith in democracy” or “anti-war sentiment.” I understand Alexei’s decision to return to Russia in this sense; I see it as logical and unusually tenderhearted on the personal level. By returning to Russia, Alexei was able to provide Russians with one more example of tyranny’s limits: Putin never had power over Alexei. Had he stayed in Germany, Putin’s power would have extended to Navalny.
Navalny was concerned not with the thoughts in our heads, but with whether our deeds matched our thoughts. I appreciate Christian philosophy, but I could never accept the postulate that a second of faith can save a person, no matter their actions — “Now thou shalt be with me in paradise,” and so forth. The Russian opposition, for as long as I’ve been watching it, wants to get to democracy approximately the same way the thief gets to paradise — by believing in it. The notion that we are democrats and decent because we believe in democracy while all remaining Russians are slaves and awful because they don’t believe in it is the main obstacle to democracy in Russia, in my mind, and the Koshchei’s egg of tyranny. A “democracy” in which only “democrats” have a stake and which only they want is an oxymoron that makes democracy impossible and tyranny in Russia perennial. Democracy cannot be for Muscovites alone. It cannot be built via media outlets in which only Petersburg and Moscow have a voice. It cannot be built without equal representation of activists, issues, and interests from other regions and ethnicities.
Late in life, Navalny hated talk about the “freewheeling ’90s” and the good Chekists/bad democrats dichotomy, which doesn’t prevent his supporters from remaining stuck in this selfsame paradigm.
Alexei started his career in Russia’s faux democracy project, which was unfair from the get-go. He entered politics as a “democratic nationalist,” desiring greatness and a better elite for Russia. It was within this same paradigm that he pursued the most successful project of his life: “fighting the regime by legal means.” By the end of his life, however, he came to realize that Russian power is held by a hypocritical elite which justifies its obedience by talking about white coats, and is not willing to share power. It is not even willing to think about being the equals of other Russians, let alone the equals of Ukrainians, for example.
This, in my opinion, is what Navalny left behind. It pains me to see how the legacy he left at such a high cost is being frittered away by films about traitors, stupid speeches, and sentimental religious comparisons.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story” (TED, YouTube, 7 October 2009)
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What can I say to the question, how are we? I was at my Arabic lesson, while Natan, Dan and our nanny Vika were at home. Usually, Natan and I would have been returning from the beach right at this time. Everyone was expecting Iranian missiles, so some of the students were looking at their phones during the lesson. In Hebrew, which we are forbidden to speak in class, there is no word for “terrorist attack”; the word used is פיגוע — “assault,” “infliction of harm.” We hadn’t had time to learn it in Arabic. When the woman sitting next to me uttered it in conjunction with the name of our street, we decided to take a five-minute break to make sure everyone was okay. Dan said they were fine, but that there was the corpse of a very young guy lying outside the house and that he was afraid it was someone from the neighborhood. (We moved in three months ago and haven’t met everyone yet.) Itai, Dan’s son, could not reach him and texted me to lock all the doors urgently, as the chase was still on. So I started calling Dan and Vika again, but couldn’t get through right away. Then the siren went off and we had to go to the bomb shelter in the upscale building next door. Normally, sitting in a bomb shelter in Israel is pretty fun and privileged, but when your child and loved one are sitting in an old building with huge windows on all sides and you don’t really know when it’s going to end, it spoils the fun a bit. When the sirens stopped, I jumped on my bike as quickly as I could and raced home. The whole neighborhood was cordoned off, and no argument that I lived there and that my child was there had any effect. The back entrance from the street parallel to ours came to my rescue. The next corner was also cordoned off, and chockablock with cops and ambulances. While I was fiddling with my bike, a woman said, “That’s the second terrorist,” pointing to a long black rubbish bag in the middle of the block, which several people were lifting and packing into another rubbish bag. I glimpsed it all very quickly, and I was in a hurry to get home, to pack Natan’s things in case we had to go to the bomb shelter on the next block. But then it was sort of over, and the phones started ringing off the hook.
This morning was quiet and so idyllically beautiful, as it almost always is here, that I felt like getting out of bed and just living. The entire street in front of our building and the building next door was still splattered with blood. I ran to find out from the neighbors if everyone was alive. They said they were. They had rescued a few people from the bus stop by dragging them into their yard. (Yes, these are the same neighbors who yell at each other in the evenings in such a way that it looks like a murderous rampage is about to kick off.) The woman from the supermarket opposite said that her nephew and niece and their mom had been on that tram. The three- and six-and-a-half-year-old children saw a head shot through, and blood and brains pouring out of it onto the floor. The boy vomited all night, while the younger girl panics when she sees a tram and screams רכבת שרמוטה (“Fucking tram!”) at it.
The murdered mom with the baby in the sling turned out to be the wife of Dan’s colleague. He visited us a couple of months ago, and we talked about whether AI can assist non-verbal children in communicating. He and his family had recently gone on holiday somewhere in Asia. Dan says that the last time they had met, he was beaming with happiness.
Now there are flowers, candles, notes, and (for some reason) an Israeli flag draped over the bus stop. There are many journalists on hand, but most people refuse to be interviewed.
For the second time in the last year and a half, death had missed us by about a quarter of an hour. I couldn’t say I have any strong feelings about it. I had no time to be scared for myself or even for Natan. It was either that there is so much anxiety in a mother’s everyday life that there are no reserves of fear when it would be warranted, or the realization that for almost a year now the enormous number of murders, deaths from malnutrition and other savage things happening every day has dulled the feeling that the disaster happening on your doorstep is one of a kind.
Apparently, the very young man who was lying outside the building had been one of the shooters. Dan saw them cut his shirt open. I don’t know the proper word for what happened. An act of terror? An act of desperation? An act of stupidity? An act of struggle? Revenge? Madness? An attack? A suicide?
Remembering the acute orphan-like longing when your mom leaves you to sleep at someone’s house and goes away. Fearing that a nine-month-old baby will live his whole life with that feeling — along with tens of thousands of other children.
Source: Olga Jitlina (Facebook), 2 October 2024. Translated by Thomas Campbell. Ms. Jitlina is a friend of mine whose artwork and writings have been featured on this website on several occasions.
Western leaders and politicians are calling for an end to the airstrikes in the Middle East. Do they even want to know and understand what is going on here?
Israel is the only country of freedom and democracy in this part of the planet. It has made serious progress.
] AND CONVICTED FELON MARIA BUTINA? Who doesn’t? Welp, here she is w/ your Daily Irony Supplement — and it’s a massive dose! See, as of Jan. 20 she’ll likely get a pardon and move back Stateside to improve on her spying career (hey, how could she do worse?); but in the meantime, she’s trying to get *Americans* (et al.) to go the *other* way, i.e. move to Moscow — y’know, like Our Guy Ed Snowden & his new roommate, Bashar al-Assad, who just *love* it there, right?
