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Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
The World Population Prospects 2022 report, released on Monday by the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, outlined what countries around the world should expect in the coming years.
The global population is expected to reach 8 billion by Nov. 15, the U.N. predicts, but it won’t stop there. The population could be around 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.4 billion in 2100, meaning Earth could have a 31% increase in human population by the end of the century.
The estimated population growth comes as the world’s average fertility rate continues to decline. In 2020, the global population growth rate fell below 1% for the first time since 1950. Currently, it’s at 2.3 births per woman, down from the average five births per woman in 1950. By 2050, it’s expected to slightly fall to 2.1 births per woman.
Still, factors such as the rise of life expectancy are reasons why the global population continues to rise.
“Globally, life expectancy reached 72.8 years in 2019, an increase of almost 9 years since 1990. Further reductions in mortality are projected to result in an average longevity of around 77.2 years globally in 2050,” the report reads.
“Two-thirds of the projected increase in global population through 2050 will be driven by the momentum of past growth that is embedded in the youthful age structure of the current population. Such growth would occur even if childbearing in today’s high-fertility countries were to fall immediately to around two births per woman.”
People ages 65 and older are expected to account for 16% of the human population by 2050, up from 10% in 2022. Men currently make up 50.3% of the population, but by 2050, there are expected to be just as many women as men.
Indians crowd a market selling marigold flowers early morning on Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, in Mumbai, India, Sunday, Oct. 30, 2016. India is projected to be the most populated country in the world by the end of 2023, the United Nations said.
World’s most populated country soon won’t be China
China has long been the most populous country, but that isn’t expected to last long, with India projected to be the world’s most populous country in 2023. Each country currently has a population over 1.4 billion people, accounting for over 35% of the global population, but China’s population is expected to start declining as early as next year.
By 2050, India is projected to have 1.6 billion people, while China is projected to have 1.3 billion people.
India is just one of eight countries – including the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the United Republic of Tanzania – expected to see major population growth by 2050. The increase in several sub-Saharan countries is expected to result in the population doubling in the area.
On the other side of the population spectrum, 61 countries are expected to have a population decrease of at least 1%. Of that list, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia and Ukraine are projected to lose at least 20% of their population.
What about the United States’ population?
North America is projected by the U.N. to reach its peak population in the late-2030s and then start declining “due to sustained low levels of fertility.” But that won’t affect the population of the U.S.
The U.S. population is currently 337 million people and it is projected to be at 375 million people in 2050, still making it the third most populous country in the world, behind India and China.
Brett Kavanaugh’s Right to Dine Shall Not Be Infringed
Jack Holmes – July 8, 2022
Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to become a member of our nine-person SuperCongress by a president who took office despite earning the votes of millions fewer Americans than his opponent did. That president never enjoyed the support of a majority of citizens and got spanked in the popular vote by an even larger margin—7 million—in the next election. He then tried to overthrow the government to stay in power. Only one of the five other right-wing justices was nominated by a president who took office having secured the support of a majority of actual Americans.
Photo credit: Pool – Getty Images
Brett Kavanaugh was then confirmed by 50 senators who represented just 44 percent of the American population. The 48 senators who voted “nay” represented tens of millions more citizens. Kavanaugh secured the crucial 50th vote of Senator Susan Collins based on her publicly stated belief that he considered Roe v. Wade to be “settled legal precedent.” In the public hearings into the question of his confirmation, where he testified under oath, Kavanaugh said this:
Senator, I said that it is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis. And one of the important things to keep in mind about Roe v. Wade is that it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years, as you know, and most prominently, most importantly, reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.
And as you well recall, senator, I know when that case came up, the Supreme Court did not just reaffirm it in passing. The court specifically went through all the factors of stare decisis in considering whether to overrule it, and the joint opinion of Justice Kennedy, Justice O’Connor and Justice Souter, at great length went through those factors.
And then, a couple of weeks ago, Kavanaugh voted with the five other Republicans on the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
If you have a problem with any of this—unelected judges selected by presidents who got fewer votes and confirmed by senators who represent a minority of citizens making policy without regard for legal precedent or their own previous statements under oath—you don’t seem to have much recourse.
You can’t vote the superlegislators out. It is unreasonable to expect any will be impeached thanks to the entrenched advantages that allow Republicans outsize control of the Senate. Even the House of Representatives is dangerously skewed, thanks to gerrymandered redistricting maps and the hyperpolarization they help to generate. The reason Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and others worked so hard to seize control of the judiciary was precisely because so many other institutions have ceased to function properly. Even if you do succeed in electing representatives to make policy through the legislature—after this same Court savaged the Voting Rights Act and unleashed an avalanche of money in our elections—the courts can throw out whatever they choose.
Photo credit: Bill Clark – Getty Images
You cannot protest at the steps of the Supreme Court, as they’ve walled that shit off. You can’t protest at the justices’ houses, and there’s some merit to the idea that private residences—where spouses and children are in the mix—should be off-limits. (Of course, in the case of Clarence Thomas, his spouse has very much been in the mix.) But you can’t protest in neutral public venues, either, even if you’re on a city street outside a restaurant. We learned that this weekend, when Mr. Kavanaugh was disturbed during a meal at a Washington, D.C. steakhouse, as reported by the Beltway encyclical known as Politico Playbook:
On Wednesday night, D.C. protesters targeting the conservative Supreme Court justices who signed onto the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion got a tip that Justice BRETT KAVANAUGH was dining at Morton’s downtown D.C. location. Protesters soon showed up out front, called the manager to tell him to kick Kavanaugh out and later tweeted that the justice was forced to exit through the rear of the restaurant.
We have returned, inevitably, to Red-Henghazi. Do public figures who make the rules we all have to live by get to do whatever they want at all times without any social repercussions? Do they have some right to privacy in public spaces, despite choosing to wield huge power over others in a democratic republic? Morton’s seems to think so.
“Honorable Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and all of our other patrons at the restaurant were unduly harassed by unruly protestors while eating dinner at our Morton’s restaurant. Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner. There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.”
The right to eat dinner shall not be infringed. (Particularly by the Unduly Unruly.) Which, according to Politico‘s Daniel Lippman, it was not.
While the court had no official comment on Kavanaugh’s behalf and a person familiar with the situation said he did not hear or see the protesters and ate a full meal but left before dessert, Morton’s was outraged about the incident.
The right to tiramisu shall not be infringed. Seriously, though, at this point we’re talking about what appears to be a complete non-incident. He went out the back because he heard secondhand there were some folks out front?
But even if the honorable justice had to hear the urban rabble outside—described by Politico as “D.C. protestors”—tell him to fuck himself while he chowed down on a ribeye, what exactly is the problem here? The protesters are exercising their rights to speech and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Kavanaugh and the others may fashion themselves as blind arbiters of the law, but in reality they are agents of state power, representing the Government. And they have generated some grievances.
Meanwhile, we’re hearing about Brett the Honorable’s right to dine, what we can only assume is an unenumerated one under the Ninth Amendment. It also sounds more than somewhat related to the right to privacy—also rooted in the Ninth—which undergirded Roe and Casey before these six luminaries threw those decisions out. Justice Clarence Thomas has signaled they’re interested in going after the right to privacy itself with a so-called reconsiderationof Griswold v. Connecticut, a move that would go way beyond contraception. Although the prospect of this Republican Court empowering states controlled by their ideological allies to restrict women’s access to the pill in the Year of Our Lord 2022 does have a particular resonance.
And if that happens, you can expect the same bullshit routine from these same people. The work of working the refs is never done, and the self-victimization will never stop. This is the same impulse undergirding much of the Cancel Culture debate: while social-media mobs and a lack of due process are real problems, many of the fiercest Free Speech Warriors actually see free speech as their right to say whatever they want without getting criticized or made fun of. Similarly, these right-wing superlegislators believe they should be able to nakedly advance the policy priorities of the conservative movement by reverse-engineering decisions to meet preordained conclusions, all the while battering the lives of powerless people, without ever getting called an asshole while they drink a $300 bottle of wine. There are consequences for behaving badly in public office, at least until these people are finished savaging the foundations of this democratic republic. Or until the Democratic Party finds the stones to nix the Senate filibuster, expand the Supreme Court, reform the judiciary, and restore the people’s means of translating their will into the law we all are bound to live by.
Sophie Kasakove and Robert Gebeloff – July 7, 2022
A street with a new apartment complex under construction in in the East Nashville neighborhood of Nashville, Tenn., on May 11, 2022. (September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — When Ashley Broadnax thinks of the East Nashville, Tennessee, neighborhood she grew up in during the ’90s, the images that rush in have a modest, middle-class tinge.
After school, she and other neighborhood children bought snacks at the corner store and threw balls on the street as their parents returned home, some in uniform from blue-collar work, others from jobs as teachers or office workers. Neighbors chatted on porches and lawns of unassuming single-story homes. There were some poor families and a few wealthy ones, but more than one-third of her neighbors made between $40,000 and $75,000 in today’s dollars — enough to live comfortably.
But by 2020, the income distribution had tilted so that half the families made $100,000 or more, census data shows. All across the neighborhood, the modest houses of Broadnax’s youth have been replaced by high-end townhomes known informally as “tall skinnies” that tower over the remaining older homes.
So when it was Broadnax’s turn to pay the rent, using her middle-income salary as an educator, the cost was out of reach.
Like many other Americans, Nashville residents are increasingly being buffeted by economic tides that push them into neighborhoods that are either much richer or much poorer than the regional norm, a New York Times analysis has found. A smaller share of families are living in middle-class neighborhoods, places where incomes are typically within 25% of the regional median.
In Nashville, the share of families living in middle-class neighborhoods dropped by 15 percentage points between 1990 and 2020. But the portion of families in wealthy ones jumped by 11 points, and the segment living in poor neighborhoods grew by 4 points.
In some ways, the pattern reflects how wealthy Americans are choosing to live near other wealthy people, and how poorer Americans are struggling to get by.
But the pattern also indicates a broader trend of income inequality in the economy, as the population of families making more than $100,000 has grown much faster than other groups, even after adjusting for inflation, and the number of families earning less than $40,000 has increased at twice the rate as families in the middle.
Broadnax has become part of a great chase nationally for affordable housing. High rents in the city initially sent her to the more affordable Antioch neighborhood in 2011. But home prices nearly doubled there since 2018, so buying a home meant moving farther out to a suburban community called La Vergne.
“The same people that’s working in their city can’t afford to live in their city,” Broadnax said about Nashville.
Nationally, only half of American families living in metropolitan areas can say that their neighborhood income level is within 25% of the regional median. A generation ago, 62% of families lived in these middle-income neighborhoods.
“People are getting pushed out, and that is breaking up some historically sort of working-class neighborhoods,” said Marybeth Shinn, a Vanderbilt University professor who studies homelessness and social exclusion. “You gradually convert a neighborhood from a pretty modest kind of neighborhood that a lot of people could live in to one where only people that have a little more means are able to live in.”
That evolution has mixed consequences for people seeing their neighborhoods change.
When Jim Polk bought his home in East Nashville in 1979, the community left some amenities to be desired. The park near his house was rundown, and the neighborhood had few sidewalks or streetlights.
As the firefighters, nurses and local government employees in the neighborhood were replaced by tech workers, engineers and lawyers, Polk mourned the loss of their old, familiar neighborhood where his four daughters had learned to accept people of diverse backgrounds.
“So many families have moved out over time,” said Polk, who worked for decades as a community education coordinator for the city public schools. “It didn’t remind them of the place they used to live, and it was so expensive to stay.”
But Polk and his wife were able to keep up with the property tax increases on their city pensions, and they could not ignore the improvements to the neighborhood: New sidewalks and streetlights were installed, and the long-neglected park was cleaned up. When his church was destroyed by a tornado in 2020, his new neighbors had the resources to help the congregation buy a new building.
Even more significant has been the rapid price appreciation of homes in the neighborhood.Polk bought his home for $36,000. A home just across the street sold for more than $1.5 million in February, according to Zillow.
“There have been improvements in services available to the people living in the neighborhood,” he said. “But who gets to participate?”
Experts say the changes in housing patterns represent a form of economic segregation, as Americans are less likely to live in neighborhoods with people from other socioeconomic classes. Economic segregation exacerbates the problems often associated with income inequality. There are what researchers call “neighborhood effects,” with studies finding that poor children have better odds of climbing the socioeconomic ladder if they grow up outside of concentrated poverty.
And wealthy neighborhoods tend to command a disproportionate share of resources, such as better schools, more parks and greater access to health professionals.
This economic segregation not only “concentrates low-income families in high poverty neighborhoods, but it concentrates affluent families in affluent neighborhoods, where they can engage in a kind of opportunity hoarding,” said Sean F. Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University. He and another sociologist, Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University, have written several papers on economic segregation.
Consider Durham, North Carolina.
Since 1990, a surge of wealth and investment has poured into the city’s downtown. At the same time, the percentage of families living in lower-income neighborhoods has doubled.
Turquoise LeJeune Parker, an elementary school technology instructor, said the split reality of rich and poor neighborhoods did her low-income students no good. Describing what she saw as the prevailing mindset of people flocking to prosperous parts of town, she said, “We won’t push for resources for our schools, we won’t push for any of that because ‘I’ve got what I need on my side of the city, so I’m good.’ ”
To some degree, economic segregation has gone hand in hand with the hollowing out of the middle class in general.
At the same time, local governments across the country have done little to maintain or expand affordable housing, instead investing in attracting highly paid workers, which drives up prices and displaces lower-income residents.
And exclusionary zoning laws often prevent denser, lower-cost housing from being built in high-end enclaves — Tennessee has even barred cities from putting zoning laws into place that would protect affordability. Property taxes on many homes have spiked, pushing longtime residents to sell to investors.
But whatever the cause, similar trends can be seen across the country.
In the Boston metropolitan area, middle class neighborhoods have shifted in both directions. In the 1990s and 2000s, many fell behind economically. In the past decade, because of widespread gentrification in the city, many modest neighborhoods have been transformed into much wealthier ones.
A generation ago, Seattle’s tech industry was starting to boom, but the area also was a major manufacturing hub, and 7 out of 10 families lived in middle-class neighborhoods. Today, only 5 out of 10 do. Nearly one-third live in wealthy enclaves.
In the Midwest, the share of families living in middle-class neighborhoods fell by 13 percentage points in Columbus, Ohio, since 1990, by 12 in Chicago, and by nine in Indianapolis.
And in Orlando, nearly 70% of area residents lived in “average” neighborhoods in 1990, according to census data. In 2020, the same was true for just 46%.
That leaves a lot of people feeling like they’re on the outside looking in.
Michael Street is a union electrician who moved from Nashville to Goodlettsville, Tennessee, about 25 minutes away. He said he spent his days driving around Nashville, working on houses that have all been rehabbed, rebuilt or rendered unrecognizable in neighborhoods he can no longer afford.
“Either you’re poor, or you’re rich,” he said. “Middle class is kind of phasing out. Either you have a lot of money, or you’re just barely getting by.”
—
Methodology
To measure the growing level of economic segregation in the U.S., the Times used census data to compare the median family income of every census tract with the median for the surrounding metropolitan area for the years 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020. The analysis counted how many families lived in middle-class tracts, where the median family income was within 25% of the regional median, and how many lived in tracts where the income level was 25% or more above or below the regional median. All figures were inflation-adjusted to 2020 values.
Source data and maps were from socialexplorer.com and nhgis.org.
SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe
Kara Voght and Tim Dickinson – July6, 2022
Reverend Rob Schenck (C) from Faith and – Credit: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.
This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.
In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.
Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”
Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.
The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”
But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.
Louis Virelli is a professor at Stetson University College of Law who wrote a book about Supreme Court recusals. He’s blunt in his assessment: “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court,” he says, “is a problem.”
Peggy Nienaber, right, at an event outside the Supreme Court led by Christian faith organizations on the eve of the Supreme Court arguments on President Obama’s health care legislation in 2012. – Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images
In the shadow of the high court, across the street from its chambers, sits a cluster of unassuming row houses known only to the initiated as “Ministry Row.” The strip is host to evangelical political groups that have spent the past several decades pushing Beltway conservatives to embrace the religious right’s political causes — and, most of all, reverse Roe v. Wade. The street view offers few clues as to what transpires behind the painted brick facades, save for a granite slab inscribed with the Ten Commandments planted in the grassy patch before a modest cream-colored Victorian with maroon trim.
The home serves as Faith & Liberty’s headquarters. The Ten Commandments statue had been placed there by Schenck, an evangelical minister famous for orchestrating high-profile anti-abortion stunts, such as shoving an aborted fetus in a plastic container into the face of former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. Schenck had opened the ministry in the 1990s as Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, a nonprofit dedicated to ending federal abortion rights. The organization operated on a “utopian ‘trickle-up’ theory” of influence: building access “higher and higher up within the government, until we got to the top, my ultimate target — members of Congress, U.S. senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices — even presidents,” Schenck wrote in his 2018 autobiography.
The group established a strong foothold in both chambers of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But Faith and Action ultimately directed its energies toward the judicial branch. “There were no pro-life groups directly approaching the judges and justices, who shaped abortion law simply by their precedent-setting decisions,” Schenck wrote. “We knew we were stuck with members of the federal bench — they were appointed for life — so why not convert them while in office?” (Schenck has since reversed course: He is now a fierce critic of evangelical politicking and says Liberty Counsel assumed Faith and Action’s operations in 2018. He says he has no knowledge of the group’s inner workings after he left.)
At first, the high court regarded Faith and Action and its peer organizations as nuisances, according to Schenck. “Justice Thomas would say to me, ‘You know those groups outside? Are they crazy or are they good people?’” Schenck recalls in an interview with Rolling Stone. When Schenck first began his approach in 1994, prayer activities on the Supreme Court’s property was considered an act of demonstration, and therefore illegal. Eventually, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would embrace Schenck, he says, and pray with him in various corners of the high court’s grounds — including, occasionally, in their chambers. (Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, remained more guarded and skeptical of such groups’ influence.)
To pray with the justices was to perform a sort of “spiritual conditioning,” Schenck explains. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” Prayer is a powerful communication tool in the evangelical tradition: The speaker assumes the mantle of the divine, and to disagree with an offered prayer is akin to sin. “It’s just not common to interrupt or challenge a prayer,” Schenck explains. “That’s not something a devout Supreme Court justice would ever consider doing.” That was true even for the devout Catholic justices, such as Scalia, who joined the evangelical Faith and Action members in prayer, Schenck says.
Sometimes the prayers would be general; other times, on specific subjects, such as ending abortion, according to Schenck. He says Faith and Action took assiduous care to avoid speaking blatantly about cases in the Supreme Court’s pipeline, discussing the political agenda only in broad strokes. Even so, under the time period Schenck describes, prayers with the justices occurred as Faith and Action signed onto several amicus briefs for landmark SCOTUS cases such as Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, which ultimately upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.
Schenck walked away from his life on the Hill after receiving a late-career doctorate on the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who questioned the collaborative relationship between Adolf Hitler and 1930s German evangelicals. He drew parallels between the Republican Party and American evangelicalism, concerned that he’d weaponized worship to fuel a hate-filled agenda. No longer an anti-abortion activist, Schenck views his past efforts with regret. “Prayer is a positive exercise, until it’s politicized — and too many prayers that I and my colleagues offered in the presence of the justices were political prayers,” he explains. He also believes the work “contributed to the internal moral and ethical corruption of the justices at the court,” he says.
“I was sure, while we were doing it, it would be a positive contribution to our public life,” Schenck says. “It didn’t have the effect I thought it would. In some ways, it set the stage for the reversal of Roe, which I now think of as a social catastrophe.
When Liberty Counsel absorbed Faith and Action in 2018, Peggy Nienaber, who had worked alongside Schenck since at least 2005, continued with the group. In a July 2021 conversation with Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder, Nienaber described the group’s new incarnation as similar to Faith and Action’s mission. It’s “the ministry right here on Capitol Hill,” she said, devoted to “changing the hearts and minds of not only our elected officials, but the staffers all the way down.” Nienaber highlighted Faith & Liberty’s proximity to the court by pointing to the window of the conference room where the justices decide their cases. ”When you’re sitting in that conference room, you cannot miss those Ten Commandments,” she said. (Faith & Liberty sits so close to the Supreme Court, in fact, that it has been included in the “buffer zone” surrounding the high court, shut off to protesters and the public. There’s irony here, given that Liberty Counsel has for decades litigated to abolish buffer zones near abortion clinics.)
“There’s a lot of things that Faith & Liberty does — and that you do — that obviously we can’t put in an email, can’t put in a newsletter, can’t put in a press release,” Staver said to Nienaber during their chat, “because it’s private relationships that are spiritually transformative.” Nienaber’s social media accounts show her hobnobbing with high-profile Republicans such as Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and former Vice President Mike Pence. She hung close to the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018: She posted photographs from inside the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, as well as a screenshot of her invitation to Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony.
Nienaber told Rolling Stone, “I do not socialize with the justices.” Yet she has posed for photos with Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, calling the latter a “friend” in a Facebook post, praising him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”
In addition to her proximity to conservative power players, Nienaber has championed the plaintiffs who have brought right-wing religious causes before the Supreme Court. Ahead of oral arguments, she prayed with Joe Kennedy, the football coach who recently succeeded in his suit to allow prayer during football games. Liberty Counsel also filed an amicus brief in that case, calling on the court to rule that the school district “engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Coach Kennedy’s private speech.”
Nienaber was recorded telling the livestreamer that she prayed with Supreme Court justices on June 27, the Monday after the high court issued the Dobbs ruling. She was at a celebration she helped organize with Sean Feucht, a prominent Christian-worship musician. Nienaber identifies herself only as “Peggy” in the footage, but she references the ministry she runs behind the court and its 850-pound replica of the Ten Commandments. For most of the interview, Nienaber is not on camera. But when the video pans on her briefly, she can be seen wearing the same dress and necklace she has on in a selfie with Feucht posted to Faith & Liberty’s website.
Last week, Rolling Stone spoke to Patty Bills, the director of constituency affairs at Faith & Liberty. Bills did not want to discuss Faith & Liberty’s ministry practices, citing privacy concerns. Bills would not, however, deny that Faith & Liberty ministers to Supreme Court justices. “I never said we didn’t — I just said we provide privacy,” she said.
Staver, in denying that members of Faith & Liberty prayed with Supreme Court justices, says that such prayers would have been inappropriate, especially given Liberty Counsel’s litigation efforts. “That’s why we wouldn’t do that,” he says. “And especially on cases that are pending before the Supreme Court, we would make a very clear firewall. We just would never do something like that.”
In a written statement to Rolling Stone, Nienaber says of her hot-mic comments: “I do not recall making such a statement. I listened to the livestream, and I did not hear such a statement.” She adds that Covid restrictions have limited public access to the Supreme Court: “The public has not been allowed access, and I am no different.” When she has had access to public areas of the court, she says, “I will generally silently pray for the justices, their staff, and the Court.”
But after this story was published, Nienaber acknowledged her remarks and conceded she has prayed personally with Supreme Court justices. Despite speaking in the present tense on the livestream, Nienaber asserted, “My comment was referring to past history and not practice of the past several years.” Nienaber added: “During most of the history up to early 2020, I met with many people who wanted or needed prayer. Since early 2020, access to the Supreme Court has been restricted due to COVID. It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”
Liberty Counsel was founded in 1989 by Staver. The organization is an uncommon hybrid of religious ministry and legal practice, dedicated to “advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the family through strategic litigation.” Staver is the organization’s senior pastor as well as its top litigator. This mix of law and religion is central to Staver’s career; he previously served as dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Staver has argued numerous cases in front of the Supreme Court. He started in 1994 in a case that struck a blow against protest-limiting buffer zones near abortion clinics. In the court’s most recent term, Staver argued and won a 9-0 judgment in Shurtleff v. Boston, a case in which the court ruled a Christian flag couldn’t be excluded from a public flagpole that displayed a rotating assortment of secular flags.
Staver also wrote an amicus brief in the Dobbs case that purports to tie abortion and birth control to eugenics. Calling Roe “the low watermark in this Court’s history,” it argued that Dobbs was ”an ideal vehicle for the Court to finally overrule Roe v. Wade and its progeny, which have constitutionalized eugenic abortions as a fundamental right.”
In the Dobbs majority opinion written by Justice Alito, he cited this brief to impugn the motives of pro-abortion-rights advocates, arguing that “some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” adding, “it is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” because “a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black.”
When Roe v. Wade was reversed, Staver was triumphant: “I have dedicated my life to defend life and overturn the bloody decisions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” he wrote. “This global earthquake will impact the world.”
Prayer unto itself in no way presents a conflict of interest for the justices, says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, not even with a group like Faith & Liberty that has business before the court. Justices are allowed to visit there with whomever they’d like in their private chambers, and have socialized with interested parties throughout the court’s history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, routinely played cards with the high court’s magistrates, and Scalia went duck hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney. What would amount to an ethical concern would be if they’re discussing those cases as they pray — “or if the prayer sessions would influence how justices rule in a particular case,” says Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles.
But even among legal experts troubled by the court’s ties, they acknowledge there are few remedies to address ethical conflicts. A federal statute governs when judges and justices should step away from cases, but the Constitution leaves questions of partiality to the justices themselves. Their general unwillingness to step aside isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Virelli, the Stetson law professor, says: When justices recuse themselves from a case, no one replaces them, a scenario that can create more problems than it solves. “The court changes shape,” he explains. “That makes the decision to recuse difficult.”
That the justices are their own keepers in regard to those rules creates complications, however, says Steve Vladeck, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Texas Law School. The relationship between Faith & Liberty and Liberty Counsel, as described by Rolling Stone, “could make a reasonable observer worry about the appearance of partiality,” he says. But the concerns the scenario raised shouldn’t be about recusal. “What that really reveals is how problematic it is that there isn’t an objective mechanism to resolve these sorts of questions.”
For Winkler, the greater concern is not prayers, but the “religious-themed” decisions he’s seen come down from the high court this term, pointing to not only the Roe reversal but also opinions that permit unchecked free exercise of First Amendment rights. “The problematic aspect isn’t whether they’re praying,” Winkler says, “but that several justices seem committed to reading their religion into the Constitution.”
Putin’s Big Turning Point in the War Could Finally Be Here
Shannon Vavra – July 6, 2022
Russian forces took a key region in eastern Ukraine over the weekend, thanks in part to Moscow stepping up its coordination and war planning, according to a British intelligence assessment released on Tuesday.
This change in Russian forces’ approach to fighting in Eastern Ukraine could be the early signs of a brand new—and worrying—phase in Russia’s devastating war in Ukraine.
While Ukrainian officials first denied that they had lost Lysychansk, one of the last strongholds in Eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk, Ukrainian forces confirmed Sunday they withdrew from the area. Russian forces took over Sunday and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared victory on Monday.
Russia’s success in Luhansk wasn’t an accident. While Russian forces have been bogged down by previous missteps in the war for months, Russian forces are getting better at executing their war plans and operating across teams. Putin has likely achieved effective coordination between two major fighting groups in the Donbas, according to the intelligence assessment.
“Unlike in previous phases of the war, Russia has probably achieved reasonably effective coordination between at least two Groupings of Forces, the Central Grouping likely commanded by General-Colonel Alexandr Lapin and the Southern Grouping probably under the recently appointed General Sergei Surovikin,” the assessment states.
That’s a world of difference from the previous four months of war, during which Russian forces haven’t coordinated well, have faltered in their logistics and planning, and have been actively trying to sabotage their own attack plans rather than fight like a well-oiled machine.
It’s a particularly alarming development given that Russia likely won’t stop in Luhansk. The current U.S. assessment is that Russia still maintains plans to take all of Ukraine, not just eastern Ukrainian territories, a U.S. ambassador told The Daily Beast.
And in the coming days, Russian forces could be turning their attention to other territories in the east of Ukraine, including in neighboring Donetsk.
Putin urged Russian forces to continue through the region “as has happened in Luhansk” and said they “must carry out their tasks according to previously approved plans.”
Watch: Russia fires rockets at Ukraine mall with over 1,000 inside
Russia fires rockets at Ukraine mall with over 1,000 inside
On Monday, Russia fired a series of rockets at a crowded shopping center in Kremenchuk, Ukraine. The assault raised concerns that Russian President Vladimir Putin is stepping up its attacks on civilian structures regardless of the loss of life.
Already, Russian forces are focusing on Siversk, Fedorivka, and Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, according to the Ukrainian General Staff. In just the last several days Russian forces have also been focused on attacking multiple cities and regions shelling the Donetsk region, as well as Dnipropetrovsk and the regions of Mykolaiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Chernihiv, and Khmelnytskyi, according to the regional military administrations.
“In the Bakhmut direction, the enemy shelled our troops with mortars, barrel and rocket artillery in the areas of Kodema, Pokrovske, Zaytseve, Zalizne and Novoselivka settlements,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Tuesday.
This doesn’t mean Russia is going to coast toward victory, though, according to Michael Kofman, the Russia Studies Program research program director at CNA, a national security research organization.
“This is a critical time for the Ukrainian military because these are the few months during which they’re very low on artillery ammo, they’re trying to transition to Western systems. They don’t have many of them yet, or they don’t have them fully deployed and they’re still training up on them,” Kofman told The Daily Beast. “This current phase is mostly one for Ukraine of survival and trying to take back what territory they can on the battlefield. What people have not really seen what Ukraine might be able to do with a somewhat recapitalized military and the benefit of Western weapons.”
And although Russia could be on the verge of taking even more of the Donbas, the win in Luhansk could serve a purpose all by itself that has nothing to do with taking more territory: Putin now has a message he can blast out domestically about successes in the so-called “special military operation,” which he claimed Russia was undertaking to help eastern Ukraine, including Luhansk.
“Russia’s relatively rapid capture of Lysychansk extends its control across virtually all of the territory of Luhansk Oblast, allowing it to claim substantive progress against the policy objective it presented as the immediate purpose of the war, namely ‘liberating’ the Donbas,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense said Tuesday.
Already, Putin met with military leadership to celebrate a “major victory,” and awarded Major General Esedulla Abachev and Colonel General Alexander Lapin with “Hero of Russia” awards for taking Luhansk.
For Russia and Ukraine, the battle for Luhansk is not the end, Kofman said.
“The battle for Severodonetsk and Lysychansk may be over but we are currently in what is essentially the buildup to what will eventually be the battle for Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and the big question is whether or not the Russian military can take those cities,” Kofman said.
Putin has ordered an operational pause for Russian forces in the region, according to the Institute for the Study of War, and Ukrainian officials said they doubted the Luhansk win meant Russia was on track to win the war.
The petition description cited Thomas’s vote to overturn Roe v. Wade as reasoning for his removal.
“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—who sided with the majority on overturning Roe—made it clear what’s next: to overturn high court rulings that establish gay rights and contraception rights,” the petition read.
The description also mentioned Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, and her role in encouraging members of the Trump administration to continue to challenge the 2020 election results.
The Supreme Court earlier this year rejected a request by former President Trump to prevent the release of documents related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Thomas was the only justice to dissent on the matter.
“He has shown he cannot be an impartial justice and is more concerned with covering up his wife’s coup attempts than the health of the Supreme Court.”
“He must resign — or Congress must immediately investigate and impeach,” the petition concluded.
The petition garnered more than 1.1 million signatures and urges Congress to either investigate or impeach Thomas for his actions.
The MoveOn petition follows a similar one created by George Washington University students last week in an effort to remove Thomas from his teaching position with the Washington, D.C., university.
The student-led petition came after the high court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1973 ruling that determined a woman’s right to abortion was constitutional.
In a school-wide letter, GWU officials said they don’t have plans to remove Thomas as an adjunct instructor in their law school, stating that he did not violate the school’s policy on academic freedom.
“Just as we affirm our commitment to academic freedom, we affirm the right of all members of our community to voice their opinions and contribute to the critical discussion that is foundational to our academic mission,” school officials wrote in their letter.
The desperate new recruiting drive has been reported in St. Petersburg, where the families of inmates at two prisons say the Wagner Group—a private Russian military force that has been tied to the Kremlin—is offering prisoners money and a get-out-of-jail-free card to go “search for Nazis” in Ukraine, according to the independent Russian news outlet iStories.
“They told my relative, ‘It’s very hard to find the Nazis there, and they are very well-prepared. You will be at the forefront in helping to detect Nazis, so not everyone will return.’ At first they said about 20 percent would come back. Then that ‘almost nobody will return.’ Those who survive are promised 200,000 rubles and amnesty. And if someone dies, they promise to pay their family 5 million rubles. This is all only in words, nothing is fixed on paper,” an unnamed relative of one of the inmates told the outlet.
At least 40 inmates signed up to join the war at that prison, the relative said. The inmates, after being urged to “defend the motherland,” were reportedly told it would look like they were being transferred but they’d be dropped off at the border with Ukraine.
“Wagner is recruiting people. No one is hiding that, the [prison foremen] are saying that directly,” the inmate’s relative said.
Family members of another inmate who agreed to join the war told iStories he’d done so because he genuinely believed he’d have his conviction expunged and be free upon his return. But it seems the recruiters aren’t really expecting any of the inmates to make it back alive: Relatives of an inmate at a separate prison said the men were told they’d be sent into the war without any identification documents.
Workers at two St. Petersburg shipyards managed by the state-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation and sanctioned oligarch Alisher Usmanov’s Metalloinvest have also reportedly been targeted as part of a recruiting drive by Russia’s Defense Ministry.
The Moscow Times’ Russian service reported Tuesday that workers at the Admiralty and the Baltic shipyards were offered contracts with monthly salaries of 300,000 rubles ($5,300) to go fight in Ukraine.
“They offered it to those with good experience, age has nothing to do with it. For example, they gave a call-up notice to one older employee who went through the Second Chechen War,” one of the employees told the Times.
Workers at Lebedinsky mining and processing works in Belgorod, owned by Usmanov’s Metalloinvest, described similar efforts, though the company has denied that.
High cost of Russian gains in Ukraine may limit new advance
The Associated Press – July 5, 2022
After more than four months of ferocious fighting, Russia claimed a key victory: full control over one of the two provinces in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland.
But Moscow’s seizure of the last major stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in Luhansk province came at a steep price. The critical question now is whether Russia can muster enough strength for a new offensive to complete its capture of the Donbas and make gains elsewhere in Ukraine.
“Yes, the Russians have seized the Luhansk region, but at what price?” asked Oleh Zhdanov, a military analyst in Ukraine, noting that some Russian units involved in the battle lost up to a half their soldiers.
Even President Vladimir Putin acknowledged Monday that Russian troops involved in action in Luhansk need to “take some rest and beef up their combat capability.”
That raises doubts about whether Moscow’s forces and their separatist allies are ready to quickly thrust deeper into Donetsk, the other province that makes up the Donbas. Observers estimated in recent weeks that Russia controlled about half of Donetsk, and battle lines have changed little since then.
What happens in the Donbas could determine the course of the war. If Russia succeeds there, it could free up its forces to grab even more land and dictate the terms of any peace agreement. If Ukraine, on the other hand, manages to pin the Russians down for a protracted period, it could build up the resources for a counteroffensive.
Exhausting the Russians has long been part of the plan for the Ukrainians, who began the conflict outgunned — but hoped Western weapons could eventually tip the scales in their favor.
They are already effectively using heavy howitzers and advanced rocket systems sent by the U.S. and other Western allies, and more is on the way. But Ukrainian forces have said they remain badly outmatched.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said recently that Russian forces were firing 10 times more ammunition than the Ukrainian military.
After a failed attempt at a lightning advance on the capital of Kyiv in the opening weeks of the war, Russian forces withdrew from many parts of northern and central Ukraine and turned their attention to the Donbas, a region of mines and factories where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainians since 2014.
Since then, Russia has adopted a slow-and-steady approach that allowed it to seize several remaining Ukrainian strongholds in Luhansk over the course of recent weeks.
While Ukrainian officials have acknowledged that their troops have withdrawn from the city of Lysychansk, the last bulwark of their resistance in Luhansk, the presidential office said Tuesday the military was still defending small areas in the province.
Zhdanov, the analyst, predicted that the Russians would likely rely on their edge in firepower to “apply the same scorched earth tactics and blast entire cities away” in Donetsk. The same day that Russia claimed it had taken Lysychansk, new artillery attacks were reported in Donetsk.
But Russia’s approach is not without drawbacks. Moscow has not given a casualty count since it said some 1,300 troops were killed in the first month of fighting, but Western officials have said that was just a fraction of real losses. Since then, Western observers have noted that the number of Russian troops involved in combat in Ukraine has dwindled, reflecting both heavy attrition and the Kremlin’s failure to fill up the ranks.
The limited manpower has forced Russian commanders to avoid ambitious attempts to encircle large areas in the Donbas, opting for smaller maneuvers and relying on heavy artillery barrages to slowly force the Ukrainians to retreat.
The military has also relied heavily on separatists, who have conducted several rounds of mobilization, and Western officials and analysts have said Moscow has increasingly engaged private military contractors. It has also tried to encourage Russian men who have done their tour of duty to sign up again, though it’s is unclear how successful that has been.
While Putin so far has refrained from declaring a broad mobilization that might foment social discontent, recently proposed legislation suggested that Moscow was looking for other ways to replenish the ranks. The bill would have allowed young conscripts, who are drafted into the army for a year and barred from fighting, to immediately switch their status and sign contracts to become full professional soldiers. The draft was shelved amid strong criticism.
Some Western officials and analysts have argued that attrition is so heavy that it could force Moscow to suspend its offensive at some point later in the summer, but the Pentagon has cautioned that even though Russia has been churning through troops and supplies at rapid rates it still has abundant resources.
U.S. director of national intelligence Avril Haines said Putin appeared to accept the slow pace of the advance in the Donbas and now hoped to win by crushing Ukraine’s most battle-hardened forces.
“We believe that Russia thinks that if they are able to crush really one of the most capable and well-equipped forces in the east of Ukraine … that will lead to a slump basically in the Ukrainian resistance and that that may give them greater opportunities,” Haines said.
If Russia wins in the Donbas, it could build on its seizure of the southern Kherson region and part of neighboring Zaporizhzhia to try to eventually cut Ukraine off from its Black Sea coast all the way to the Romanian border. If that succeeded, it would deal a crushing blow to the Ukrainian economy and also create a corridor to Moldova’s separatist region of Transnistria that hosts a Russian military base.
But that is far from assured. Mykola Sunhurovsky, of the Razumkov Center, a Kyiv-based think tank, predicted that growing supplies of heavy Western weapons, including HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, will help Ukraine turn the tide of the war.
“The supplies of weapons will allow Ukraine to start a counteroffensive in the south and fight for Kherson and other cities,” Sunhurovsky said.
But Ukraine has also faced massive personnel losses: up to 200 soldiers a day in recent weeks of ferocious fighting in the east, according to officials.
“Overall, local military balance in Donbas favors Russia, but long term trends still favor Ukraine,” wrote Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and program director at the Virginia-based CNA think tank. “However, that estimate is conditional on sustained Western military assistance, and is not necessarily predictive of outcomes. This is likely to be a protracted war.”
Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
In Putin’s Russia, the Arrests Are Spreading Quickly and Widely
Anton Troianovski – July 5, 2022
The Federal Security Service building in Moscow, Aug. 29, 2018. (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times)
They came for Dmitry Kolker, an ailing physicist, in the intensive care ward. They came for Ivan Fedotov, a hockey star, as he was leaving practice with a film crew in tow. They came for Vladimir Mau, a state university rector, the week he was reelected to the board of Gazprom.
The message sent by these high-profile detentions: Nearly anyone is now punishable in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The flurry of arrests across the country in recent days has signaled that the Kremlin is intent on tightening the noose around Russian society even further. It appears to be a manifestation of Putin’s declaration in the early weeks of his war in Ukraine that Russia needed to cleanse itself of pro-Western “scum and traitors,” and it is creating an unmistakable chill.
“Every day feels like it could be the last,” Leonid Gozman, 71, a commentator who continues to speak out against Putin and the war, said in a phone interview from Moscow, acknowledging the fear that he, too, could be arrested.
None of the targets of the recent crackdown was an outspoken Kremlin critic; many of the loudest Putin opponents who chose to stay in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, like politicians Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, were already in jail. But each of the recent crackdown targets represented an outward-looking Russia that Putin increasingly describes as an existential threat. And the ways they were taken into custody appeared designed to make waves.
Kolker, the physicist, entered the hospital in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk last week for treatment for late-stage cancer, so weak that he was unable to eat. The next day, agents for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, arrived and, accusing him of treason, flew him to a Moscow jail. Over the weekend, he died in custody.
“The FSB killed my father,” his son Maxim, 21, wrote in all capitals on social media alongside an image of the three-line telegram sent by the authorities to notify the family of the death. “They didn’t even let our family say goodbye.”
Maxim Kolker, who is following in his father’s footsteps as a physicist in Novosibirsk, said Dmitry Kolker had been known for hiring students to work in his laboratory, helping persuade some budding Russian scientists not to seek work abroad.
Now, he said in a phone interview, the family has to return Kolker’s body from Moscow at their own cost.
It was unclear why the FSB targeted Dmitry Kolker, 54, a specialist in quantum optics. State media reported that he had been jailed on suspicion of passing secrets abroad. But critics of the Kremlin say it is part of a widening campaign by the FSB to crack down on freedom of thought in the academic world. Another Novosibirsk physicist who was also arrested on suspicion of treason last week, Anatoly Maslov, remains in custody.
The arrests came at the same time as the arrest on fraud charges of Mau, a leading Russian economist who is the head of a sprawling state university, the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
Mau, 62, was in no way a public critic of the Kremlin. He had joined more than 300 senior academic officials in signing a March open letter calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “necessary decision,” and he was reelected to the board of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, just last week. But he also had a reputation as what scholars of Russian politics call a “systemic liberal,” someone who was working within Putin’s system to try to nudge it in a more open and pro-Western direction.
His Kremlin ties were not enough, it turned out, to save Mau from a fraud case that has already ensnared the rector of another leading university and that critics said appeared designed to snuff out remaining pockets of dissent in Russian academia.
“A big enemy of the government and the stability of the government are people who carry knowledge,” said Gozman, who worked with Mau as a government adviser in the 1990s. “Truth is an enemy here.”
Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist who taught at Mau’s academy until April, called the institution “the educational hub for most of the country’s civic bureaucracy” and described his arrest as Russia’s highest-level criminal prosecution since 2016. It indicated, she said, that ideological purity was becoming an ever more important priority for Russian authorities, especially in education.
“In education, it is important that a person actively profess and share the values that he has to implant in the heads of his students,” said Schulmann, now a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. “Here, ambiguous loyalty may not be permitted.”
Putin has said as much himself. In the speech in March in which he railed about the traitors in Russia’s midst, he called out those who physically reside in Russia but live in the West “in their thoughts, in their slave-like consciousness.”
He is also increasingly asserting that truly patriotic Russians must be committed to living and working in Russia. He told an economic conference in St. Petersburg last month that “real, solid success and a feeling of dignity and self-respect only occurs when you tie your future and your children’s future to your Motherland.”
In that context, the news that Fedotov, the goalie of Russia’s silver-medal national hockey team at the Beijing Olympics in February, signed a contract in May with the Philadelphia Flyers was likely to have been seen as a challenge.
Fedotov, 25, one the hockey world’s up-and-coming stars, was planning to leave for the United States this month, according to Russian media reports.
Instead, on Friday, as he was leaving a practice session in St. Petersburg, he was stopped by a group of men, some in masks and camouflage, and taken away in a van, according to a television journalist who was filming a special report about him and saw the incident.
Fedotov’s alleged crime, according to Russian news agencies: evading military service. Russian men under 27 are required to serve for one year, although sports stars are typically able to avoid conscription. On Monday, the RIA Novosti state news agency reported that Fedotov had been taken to an unnamed Russian navy training base.
The elaborate detention was widely perceived as punishment for his having chosen to play in the United States rather than stay in Russia. “I won’t be surprised if they put him on some submarine and send him out to sea,” RIA Novosti quoted a Soviet sports veteran as saying. “He won’t go anywhere after that.”
To Gozman, the liberal commentator who remains in Moscow, a common thread running through the recent arrests was their seemingly gratuitous cruelty. In Putin’s system, he said, such behavior is more likely to be rewarded than censured by the state.
“The system is built in such a way that excessive cruelty by an official is rarely punished,” Gozman said. “But excessive softness can be. So any given official seeks to exhibit great toughness.”
Putin is threatening poor countries with starvation as the ‘next stage’ in his ruthless Ukraine war, experts warn
John Haltiwanger – July 5, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting with farmers on July, 28, 2016.Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images Putin is threatening poor countries with starvation as the ‘next stage’ in his ruthless Ukraine war, experts warn
Russia’s war in Ukraine is fueling a global food crisis, which experts say is a deliberate tactic.
Ukraine is one of Europe’s biggest wheat producers, but the war has made exporting extremely difficult.
Experts say Putin is willing to starve poorer countries to create a crisis that paves the way for Russia’s victory in Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is exacerbating a global food crisis, and experts say this is part of a deliberate effort by the Kremlin to stoke famine and pressure the Western coalition that’s supporting Ukraine’s government, an effort the EU has decried as a war crime.
“Russia has a hunger plan. [Russian President] Vladimir Putin is preparing to starve much of the developing world as the next stage in his war in Europe,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian and expert on authoritarianism, tweeted on Saturday, adding that Moscow is “planning to starve Asians and Africans in order to win its war in Europe.”
“This is a new level of colonialism,” Snyder added.
Ukraine, widely described as Europe’s breadbasket, is a major exporter of wheat, sunflower oil, and corn. It provides roughly 10% of the globe’s wheat exports, 15% of corn exports, and close to half of the world’s sunflower oil. But the war in Ukraine — particularly Russia’s blockade of Black Sea ports — has thrown a wrench in its export business. This is leading to a shortage in food supply and skyrocketing prices in many countries that could plunge tens of millions more people into starvation, experts are warning.
Roughly 18 million tons of grain are sitting in storage in Ukraine as a result, and the country’s farmers are expected to harvest 60 million additional tons by the fall, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Ukraine’s farmers are feeding themselves and millions more people around the world,” Rein Paulsen, director of the FAO’s emergencies and resilience office, said this week, per Reuters. “Ensuring they can continue production, safely store and access alternative markets is vital to strengthen food security within Ukraine and ensure other import-dependent countries have sufficient supply of grain at a manageable cost,” Paulsen added.
The UN has warned that the conflict in Ukraine could make an additional 47 million people food insecure in 2022. Countries in Africa and the Middle East that rely heavily on Ukrainian grain are especially at risk. Together, Russia and Ukraine provide over 40% of Africa’s wheat supply.
Indeed, Russia also accounts for a massive portion of the world’s wheat and sunflower oil. Russia continues to export wheat and other commodities despite the Ukraine war, but has signaled it’s being selective about who will receive its supply. “We will only be supplying food and agriculture products to our friends,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a close ally of Putin and deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said April 1 on Telegram. Similarly, Putin in early April said, “We will have to be more careful about food supplies abroad, especially carefully monitor the exports to countries which are hostile to us.”
Snyder said Putin’s “hunger plan” is designed to work on three levels, including as a larger effort to “destroy the Ukrainian state” by cutting off exports. It’s also an attempt to foment instability in the EU by generating “refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, areas usually fed by Ukraine.”
“Finally, and most horribly, a world famine is a necessary backdrop for a Russian propaganda campaign against Ukraine. Actual mass death is needed as the backdrop for a propaganda contest,” Snyder said. “When the food riots begin, and as starvation spreads, Russian propaganda will blame Ukraine, and call for Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine to be recognized, and for all sanctions to be lifted.”
Rita Konaev, a Russian military expert, told Insider that Russia employed similar tactics in the war in Syria. “They’ve openly sought to destabilize Syria, neighbors, and Europe through the outpour of refugees — knowing that they would push the envelope towards ending the war in Syria and accepting the future of Syria with Assad. It’s part of their playbook,” Konaev said of the Russians.
‘The Russian invasion into Ukraine exacerbated an already bad situation’
A farm implement harvests grain in the field, as Russian-Ukrainian war continues in Odessa, Ukraine on July 04, 2022.Metin Aktas/Getty Images
Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine began as the global economy was still dealing with the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted supply chains and raised fuel prices. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, as many as 811 million people globally faced hunger.
“The Russian invasion into Ukraine exacerbated an already bad situation” and it’s “affecting the entire global community,” Ertharin Cousin, who served as executive director of the UN World Food Programme from 2012 to 2017, told Insider.
“There are some countries that are more affected than others, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa, where they are net importers from Ukraine. So, this has a direct effect on their ability to purchase food — where their source of commodities is no longer available to them. But because of the effect that the lack of those grains in the global food system has on the escalating prices of food for the entire world, it affects us all,” Cousin said.
In lower-income countries like Somalia, the effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine on the food supply are already being felt. Skyrocketing prices for grain and other commodities are pushing Somalia to the brink of famine.
“The crisis is worse now than anytime in my lifetime working in Somalia for the last 20 years, and it is because of the compounded effect of the war in Ukraine,” Mohamud Mohamed Hassan, Somalia country director for the charity Save the Children, recently told the Washington Post. “Communities are at a breaking point.”
“Many people would have survived if the Ukrainian crisis was not there and food was coming in,” Hassan told the Post, adding, “At least food prices would have been stable, and food would have been available.”
‘Russia attacked Ukraine…that is what created this problem’
A view of the beach as authorities ban swimming in the sea due to naval mines in Odessa, Ukraine on July 03, 2022.Metin Aktas/Getty Images
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has explicitly blamed the growing food crisis on Russia. “If it was not for the Russian war against Ukraine, there simply would be no shortage in the food market,” Zelenskyy said in a remote address to the African Union in June. “If it was not for the Russian war, our farmers and agricultural companies could have ensured record harvests this year.”
Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has described Russia’s blockade on Ukrainian food exports as a “real war crime.”
“You cannot use the hunger of people as a weapon of war,” Borrell said last month in Luxembourg.
As Kyiv and its Western allies accuse the Kremlin of weaponizing food and stealing Ukrainian grain, Putin has denied that Russia is blocking grain exports from Ukraine.
The Kremlin has blamed the brewing food crisis on the West, pointing to the harsh sanctions it’s imposed on Moscow over the war. The Russian government has offered safe passage to ships carrying grain in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Meanwhile, Russia has also blamed Ukrainian naval mines in the Black Sea for the situation, which Kyiv is reluctant to remove because it would make Ukraine’s ports more vulnerable as the Russian onslaught continues.
When it comes down to it “the war is to blame” for the escalating food crisis, Cousin said, adding, “Russia’s occupation of the Black Sea has a direct effect on the ability to move food.”
“Russia’s arguing that they can’t move their fertilizer or grain because of the sanctions. If you listen to the parties involved in this — and I’m your audience — I can see where there are challenges from all sides. But we can’t ignore the fact that it’s not about whether the grain is moving — it’s about the fact that Russia attacked Ukraine. And that is what created this problem overall,” Cousin said.
At the recent G7 summit, leaders pledged $4.5 billion to help address the global food crisis linked to Russia’s invasion. As countries move to address the situation, Cousin said it’s important for governments “to avoid the mistake of thinking they can protect their own populations from food insecurity by implementing export bans or export restrictions — that only further exacerbates the challenges on the global food system, particularly for net importing countries during a time when they are so dependent on that global food system.”
Cousin underscored that it’s key for the global community to take “preemptive actions” now, warning that “what is today an accessibility problem could become an availability problem by this time next year.”
