After Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, ended a decades-long border conflict, he was heralded as a unifier. Now critics accuse him of tearing the country apart.
In “Crabs in a Bucket,” a forthcoming book, the Somali author Nuruddin Farah likens Ethiopian politics to a destructive Groundhog Day. Farah, who is seventy-six, grew up in a part of Somalia that was ceded to Ethiopia by the colonial British after they ousted the Italians in the Second World War. “Think of a demolition site when you think about Ethiopia, a country under constant rebuilding, one whose laws are often dismantled to accommodate the new ruler, and whose peoples’ nerves are frequently shredded before another regime gains power, only to demolish what has gone on before,” Farah writes. “Ethiopian leaders are famous for telling big and small porky pies to their fellow citizens and to the rest of the world; they know how to start conflicts that lead to wars, not how to resolve conflicts.”
In phone calls to friends and relatives at home, Russian soldiers gave damning insider accounts of battlefield failures and civilian executions, excoriating their leaders just weeks into the campaign to take Kyiv.
As you become more practiced in the power of positive declassifying, you will acquire the ability to declassify entire tranches of documents in a single go. At first, even one document containing the address and spouse’s and children’s names of a spy will feel like a lot. But, in time, you will be able to think of a foreign country and, just by remembering what people from there smell like, declassify all files relating to it.
The push to claim new territory and mobilize more troops is unlikely to reverse Russia’s losses on the battlefield—but it could move the war into its most dangerous phase yet.
We are fighting alone, whereas Ukraine has many allies. And, as the fight goes on, we will have less and less modern weapons, but Ukraine will only receive more
The Breitbart film is an amateurish, often batshit satire-cum-thriller-cum-melodrama-cum-propaganda-organ, which switches between modes with the unexpectedness of a Surrealist cutup.
The movie promises to include, among its revelations, “Sex, Prostitution, Drugs, Cronyism, Money Laundering, More Sex, a Laptop from Hell,” not to mention “Chinese Spies, Ukrainian ‘Businessmen,’ ” and “the Selling Out of America.” As they say, don’t threaten me with a good time!
The last surviving leader of the regime that killed 1.7 million Cambodians lost his appeal on Thursday. Some victims think the long, expensive tribunal was a hollow exercise.
Unlike more technologically savvy counterparts in China, where internet surveillance is more automated, much of the work of Russian censors is done manually, the documents show. But what Russia lacks in sophistication it has made up for in determination
“I have superhuman strength,” said McInnes, who publicly resigned from the Proud Boys in late 2018. “I’m smarter than ever before. I also crave my wife in a way that’s unprecedented.”
At a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday night, for the Republican Senate candidate J. D. Vance, Trump played background music that the Times described as “all but identical” to a song associated with the QAnon right-wing conspiracy movement. Many people in the crowd responded with a one-armed salute, with their index finger raised, that reminded some observers of Nazi rallies
By January, the commissioners court had voted to dissolve the library board and appointed a new one, which included those who had originally advocated for restricting the butt books. Community members and librarians began attending the new meetings, taking notes and asking to make public statements about the bans. The county then decided the meetings would no longer be open to the public.
The attention commanded by the W.N.B.A. star, detained by Russia on a minor drug charge, could improve things for other Americans wrongfully detained around the world.
Brittney Yevette Griner grew up in Houston, Texas, the daughter of a homemaker and a cop. It was a fairly ordinary upbringing, except that it quickly became clear to Griner, and to everyone else, that she was not ordinary. “I guess I started feeling different when everybody started telling me I was,” she writes in her memoir, “In My Skin.” “At home, I was a carefree, curious, mischievous little girl. At school, I was a freak.”
“We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” a man yelled over him. “With a lot bigger rounds!” Another added, “If we have to tool up, it’s gonna be over! We’re coming heavy!” I also overheard a woman talking on her phone. “We need to come back with guns,” she said. “One time with guns, and then we’ll never have to do this again.”
Encountering Crumb today feels like being in a staring match with an artist who’s still almost daring the culture to eject him. “The average people out there,” he tells me, “what they know of my work … either they love it because they are degenerates themselves or they hate it because they stand with the forces of political correctness.” His iconography includes every taboo imaginable: not only incest and racism but also sexual assault, castration, self-mutilation and murder.
A new report from the Human Rights Office found “widespread arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Uyghyrs and other predominantly Muslim communities.” Some activists think it didn’t go far enough.
The most important element of the report is that the violations in Xinjiang and the policies carried out in Xinjiang may amount to crimes against humanity under international human-rights law. This means that China is committing atrocities in Xinjiang, which is extraordinarily significant.
I was surprised by how frightened many Americans on the far right are. I was prepared for the anger, but I hadn’t really understood the extent to which fear precedes it. I was in Nashville on Christmas when Anthony Warner, who believed that alien lizards disguised as human beings roamed the planet, blew himself up downtown. That’s an extreme example, but so many people I met at anti-lockdown protests, pro-Trump events, and Stop the Steal rallies told me that they were genuinely terrified of their fellow-citizens on the left, especially after the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
I first heard about the video from a colleague and friend at my university as we waited in line to pick up our kids after school in late September 2021. One of her students was in the video, and it had gone viral, she said. She’d posted something in support of that student, but then she also started getting attacked. Another professor at our university, Arizona State, would later call the attackers “vultures,” the kind of people who feed off moments of everyday life that morph into spectacle after an article or tweet or video goes viral. But at the time, I didn’t have that analogy. My friend told me she was scared, and I said I was sorry. By that point, she had already taken down her post.
Frank told me that, after building an audience of covid skeptics with his revisionist statistics, he was invited by several politicians to examine their 2020 election results. “I noticed a pattern,” Frank said. “And the pattern enables me to go into any state and look at one county. And, once I’ve looked at one county, I can predict all of the other counties to preposterous accuracy.”
At one point during the service, Leonid Slutsky, who leads the (misnamed) Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, called out, “One country, one President, one victory”—an almost exact translation of the German Nazi Party’s slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. The historian Timothy Snyder has coined the term “schizofascism” to describe this sort of rhetoric: people acting like fascists while calling their enemies fascists, as the Russian propaganda machine continues to do with Ukraine