Rats and mice swarm trenches in Ukraine in grisly echo of World War I
Christian Edwards and Olga Voitovych – January 21, 2024
The frontlines of Russia’s war in Ukraine have become infested with rats and mice, reportedly spreading disease that causes soldiers to vomit and bleed from their eyes, crippling combat capability and recreating the gruesome conditions that plagued troops in the trench warfare of World War I.
A Ukrainian servicewoman, who goes by the call-sign “Kira,” recalled how her battalion was beset last fall by a “mouse epidemic” while fighting in as the southern Zaporizhzhia region.
“Imagine going to bed, and the night begins with a mouse crawling into your pants or sweater, or chewing your fingertips, or biting your hand. You get two or three hours’ sleep, depending on how lucky you are,” Kira told CNN. She estimated there were around 1,000 mice in her dugout of four soldiers. “It was not the mice who were visiting us; we were their guests.”
The infestations are due partly to the change in seasons and mice’s mating cycle, but are also a measure of how the war has become static, after Ukraine’s counteroffensive was largely rebuffed by heavily fortified Russian defenses. Amid another harsh winter, mice are foraging along the nearly 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) frontline, spreading disease and dissatisfaction as they search for food and warmth.
Kira said she tried everything to rid their bunkers of mice: sprinkling poison, spraying ammonia, even praying. Nearby shops stocked up on anti-mouse products and made a killing, she said. But, as the mice kept coming, they tried other methods.
“We had a cat named Busia, and at first she also helped and ate mice. But later there were so many of them that she refused. A cat can catch one or two mice, but if there are 70 of them, it’s unrealistic.”
Videos shared on social media by Ukrainian and Russian soldiers showed the extent of the infestations on the frontlines. Mice and rats are seen scurrying around under beds, in backpacks, power generators,coat pockets and pillowcases. One shows mice pouring forth from a Russian mortar turret like bullets from a Browning.
In another, a cat tries to swipe a mouse on an armchair, before a soldier taps the top of the seat and dozens more cascade down. The cat, hopelessly outnumbered, admits defeat and falls back.
A mousetrap in a garbage can tries to stem the swarm of rodents in a trenches near Bakhmut, Ukraine, in October 2023. – Libkos/Getty Images
Ukraine’s military intelligence in December reported an outbreak of “mouse fever” in many Russian units around Kupiansk in Kharkiv region, which Moscow has been trying to claim for months. The report said the disease is transmitted from mice to humans “by inhaling mouse feces dust or by ingestion of mouse feces in food.”
CNN has not been able to independently verify the report, but according to the Ukrainian military the ghastly symptoms of the disease include fevers, rashes, low blood pressure, hemorrhages in the eyes, vomiting and, because it affects the kidneys, severe back pain and problems urinating.
The result, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence said, is that “‘mouse fever’ has significantly reduced the combat capability of the Russian soldiers.” It did not say whether Ukrainian troops had been similarly affected.
The Ukrainian authorities did not name a specific condition as striking Russian troops, but there are a range of diseases associated with living near rodents that have similar symptoms, including tularemia, leptospirosis and hantavirus.
The report was reminiscent of those from World War I, where the putrid pileup of waste and corpses allowed “trench rats” to breed rapidly. Rats are nocturnal and are often busiest while soldiers are trying to rest, causing huge stress.
Robert Graves, an English poet who fought in the trenches, recalled in his memoirs how rats “came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly.” When a new officer arrived, on his first night he “heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.”
In World War I, the rat population swelled when the conflict stagnated. And there are fears that Russia’s war in Ukraine has done the same. The head of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, told The Economist late last year: “Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”
Three German soldiers display their winnings after a night of rat-catching in a Western Front trench during World War I. – Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical/Getty Images
Ihor Zahorodniuk, a researcher at Ukraine’s National Museum of National History, told CNN the mice infestations were partly because rodent reproduction peaks in the fall, but also because of the effects of the war itself.
“The winter crops sown in the fall of 2021 were not harvested in many places in 2022 and gave generous self-seeding. The mice that bred on it survived the very warm winter and went on to harvest a new crop,” he said. The war has also dispersed natural predators, allowing mice to propagate more freely.
As well as causing anxiety and disease among soldiers, mice also ravage military and electrical equipment. When working as a signalman and living separately from other fighting troops in Zaporizhzhia, Kira said mice “managed to climb into metal boxes and chew through wires,” disrupting communications.
“The mice chewed everything: Radios, repeaters, wires. Mice got into cars and chewed on the electrical wiring, so the cars wouldn’t run, and they also chewed on tanks and wheels,” Kira said. “The losses from the mice in our dugout alone amount to one million hryvnia [$26,500].”
Zahorodniuk stressed the damage can be critical, “as lost communication may cost lives.”
Soldiers sleep in the dugout as they hold their positions in the snow-covered Serebryan Forest in Donetsk region, in January 2024. – Libkos/Getty Images
As Ukraine weathers another winter, the problem will likely get worse before it gets better. “It will get colder and colder, and they will go into the trenches more and more. The situation will not change until they all go through this,” said Zahorodniuk.
In World War I, soldiers could not solve the trench rat problem. Instead, they killed rats for their sport. Trying to spike one on a bayonet became a form of entertainment. The population did not decrease until the war ended. But Zahorodniuk warned Ukraine should not let the same happen again.
“The fight against them should be organized and not rely on soldiers and volunteers who are not imagining ways to fight. This is wrong. After all, this is a matter of the combat capability of the army. We have to take care of our soldiers.”
The Trials Won’t Stop Donald Trump From Becoming President Again. Here’s What Might.
Dahlia Lithwick – January 19, 2024
Any conversation currently happening around legal accountability for Donald Trump is quickly caught up in the riptide of a very different sort of conversation about electoral strategy: Should states be allowed to remove Donald Trump from the ballot, as the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment suggests that it was designed to do? Or will that drive his supporters to commit further acts of vigilante justice in response to being disenfranchised? Should we run our democracy based on such potential threats, and more abstractly: Should judges presiding over the myriad Trump trials that the former president uses to incite stochastic terror and demean the judicial system allow him to speak freely? Or should they make every effort to limit his use of their courtrooms as campaign stops and hate rallies? Should prosecutors in these cases make every effort to have them done and dusted before the presidential election? Or is there something unseemly in the haste to bring about accountability timed to some external political event? Should the judicial system proceed at its own pace, or should it find a way to move faster, with the recognition that it might (only might) be able to do what the other branches of government have chosen not to do, in glacial legal units of time?
The biggest brains in both the legal and political spheres are currently engaged in a near-daily exploration of questions that posit law and the rule of law not so much as ends in themselves, but as tactics—often Hail Mary, last-ditch, desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures tactics in a presidential contest. We are in an existential battle to save democracy from the single most profound threat it has faced since at least the Civil War. And Americans who have become all too familiar with opening arguments and jury selection and civil fraud and conspiracy law have somehow convinced themselves that the justice system alone can somehow be deployed—or, in the parlance of the insurrectionists, “weaponized”—into becoming the shiny entity that could preserve democracy as we know it. Principally, because nothing else seems positioned to do the trick.
The asymmetry here is that of course the American legal system is not a tactic, or a strategy, or a party trick, although, sure, any one trial is built on tactical decisions. The American legal system, indeed any legal system, is a search for truth, facticity, conclusion, and resolution. When legal systems are working, they are largely backward-looking excavations of what happened and why. One of the reasons Donald J. Trump has managed to evade legal accountability throughout his lifetime is that this is not his objective: He doesn’t allow the legal system to look backward at facts—indeed, he disputes facts literally as they are happening, and even adjudicated facts, including his sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll, are perpetually reopened for public appeal. His objective is to use the mechanisms of the legal process as tactics toward a larger end—to make himself richer or more famous, or to vanquish his opponents. And we all know that should he get himself elected as president in 10 months, he will use the law to prosecute Joe Biden, stay in office indefinitely, strip non-Americans of their rights, and do almost anything he wishes to remain in power. For Trump, law isn’t the endgame—it’s just the ladder that gets him somewhere better.
Here is the problem: When we engage in tactical intramural debates about about how best to deploy the American legal system to stop Trump, we are in a sense engaging in a mirror image of that same Trumpist project. We say we want accountability and findings of fact and conclusions of law and injunctions and gag orders and, ultimately, convictions. But above all, what we want is for him to go away, to stop, to unravel all the harm he has done to the myriad institutions and principles upon which the rule of law once relied. The purists among us argue that in so doing, we will at least have given it a shot. The worriers fret that in so doing, we further rip the country asunder because, uh, what if it doesn’t work out the way the purists had hoped?
For my part, I worry that we have imported far too much force into the idea that the law itself and law alone will curb Trump’s lawlessness, because no amount of gag orders and conclusions of law and even criminal convictions can stop someone hellbent on using those things as tactics on a tear toward fascism. As Jeff Sharlet put it on last week’s Amicus podcast, “The one thing Trump has made clear is we don’t know yet how to stop Trumpism.” The rule of law may be a component in the war against Trumpism, but if it isn’t plain by now, I will say it here: The rule of law exists not to stop Trumpism. It exists to promote the rule of law.
For those who note that Trump has the ability to delay, drag out, undermine, and even capitalize on his legal troubles but can’t escape the voting booth, the very existence of the Colorado 14th Amendment appeal at the Supreme Court shows the extent to which the law and the voting both are bound up together, and the degree to which both may be profoundly incapacitated when we expect either to create Cold, Hard Facts in a world that has fundamentally put truth out with the recyclables. Trump’s supporters in the conservative legal movement have been using the law to suppress and subvert elections for years, and they have already amassed literally billions of dollars to do so again. Subverting the vote is a tactic. It is also the single most effective way to subvert the rule of law.
This is by no means a call to abandon the pursuit of legal accountability for Trump and his supporters in every single forum possible. Of course the law should attempt to impose every last consequence this man deserves, and of course the fact that this makes his cultists angry is never a reason to stop. It is simply a caution to those who have convinced themselves that the law exists to keep Trump from winning the 2024 election. Because the law alone may not suffice.
Paradoxically, to the extent the law can be usefully deployed as a tactic, the 14th Amendment itself is a tactical enterprise that exists to protect us from tyranny. But we tie ourselves in knots deploring how slow and technical and mincing legal accountability can be. (Consider emoluments! It took eight years to get those numbers reported out! But there is still no accountability!) The challenge isn’t exclusively that law takes too long. The challenge is that, unfortunately for all current citizens of America and quite frankly the world, the law can’t be boiled down to a distillate, reconstituted as a vitamin, then chugged down with a Gatorade to save us from an authoritarian strongman.
Donald Trump is nothing but an amalgam of tactics with hair. Purposive lying is a tactic, distraction is a tactic, bullying is a tactic, threats of violence is a tactic, running out the clock is a tactic, all with the incredibly simple objective of amassing power. And Trump’s promise to use the law to terrorize and jail political adversaries, to further immiserate those he dislikes, to suppress speech and protest? All of this is about using the law to further an authoritarian agenda.
Ensuring that Trump is driven from public life requires tactical thinking and execution that involves so much more than the tactical use of legal remedies. It involves structural election reform, expanded voting rights, democracy building, rethinking the way the media covers elections, and a thousand other tactics that protect constitutional democracy and free and fair elections. Law can be weaponized to do all of these things, by the way. But this would require the work of millions of people for thousands of days, pushing every lever. It cannot be readily swapped out for a single victory in a civil fraud trial, as important as such victories may be toward the greater end.
If the rise of authoritarian strongmen around the planet in recent years proves anything, it’s that the law alone was not designed to restrain authoritarian strongmen. What we grouse about as the slowness of the law is in fact the absence of the fast fix to fascism.
The relevant legal question in the coming months cannot be limited to How do we best use the law to hold Donald Trump to account? Even holding Donald Trump to account will not necessarily save us from electing Donald Trump the dictator—it could be too slow, or too unpersuasive, or totally steamrolled by his own destruction tactics. The relevant question is: Whether we realize in time that the law alone cannot save us, are we directing all our efforts, right now, to doing everything and anything else that will?
The Supreme Court looks set to make Steve Bannon’s dream come true
Conor Lynch – January 20, 2024
Steve Bannon; Donald Trump; Clarence Thomas Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images
Not long after Donald Trump was sworn in as president back in 2017, his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, made an incendiary statement vowing that the new administration would fight an unending battle for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” raising fears that the new president would carry out a blitzkrieg assault on the federal bureaucracy. While the former TV host likely had no inkling of what his more ideological strategist meant by the “administrative state,” it would not be long before Trump himself would embrace similar rhetoric aimed at what he derisively coined the “deep state.” Unlike his advisor (and many libertarian-leaning Republicans), Trump’s hostility towards the federal government stems less from any ideological opposition to “big government” than from his own personal resentment and paranoia. With his agenda stalled early on his term, the president came to blame all of his woes on this supposedly omnipotent deep state, which denoted a quasi-invisible and demonic cabal of entrenched bureaucrats allegedly sabotaging his presidency.
Fortunately for those who believe in a strong and independent federal bureaucracy, the Trump administration largely failed to follow through on these early threats. Within six months of his inflammatory remark, Bannon was out of a job in the White House, while the embattled president had more pressing concerns than attempting to dismantle the federal bureaucracy. By the time he left office, Trump had done irreparable damage to American democracy and its institutions, but the so-called “administrative state” — an ideological shorthand for the numerous departments and independent agencies inside the federal government, from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — remained standing, if not mostly unscathed.
Still, more than three years after Trump left the White House, the so-called administrative state is under assault like never before — in large part due to the enduring legacy of the Trump administration. This was evident this week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that challenged a forty-year-old case that had established judicial deference to federal agencies like the EPA in their implementation of “ambiguous statutes.” In other words, the philosophy that it is best for judges who know little about environmental standards or the derivatives market or drug development to defer to the “reasonable interpretation” of statutes by experts in their respective agencies. If this challenge to what is known as the Chevron Doctrine is successful, it would open up a floodgate of potential legal challenges to regulations across the federal government, crippling the ability of agencies like the SEC or the EPA to carry out their missions. Not surprisingly, it currently looks like at least two of the three Supreme Court justices nominated by Trump will help to repeal this doctrine and open up the anti-regulatory floodgates. It’s Steve Bannon’s dream come true.
Trump’s toxic legacy is not only felt in the judiciary. Indeed, it is clear from the Republican primaries that the entire GOP is now fully devoted to the once-fringe cause of dismantling the administrative state. Recall Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ vow to “start slitting throats on day one.”
While Trump largely failed to carry out his own threats against the “deep state” as president, his final year in office offered a dress rehearsal for what to expect if he — or any Republican — returns to the White House next year. Over the course of his term, Trump’s obsession with the “deep state” intensified, as did his Nixonian quest to root out his enemies. Shortly after his first impeachment trial, the president tapped loyalists to carry out a purge of any officials who displayed even the slightest hint of dissent. Spearheading the effort was Trump’s former body man, 29-year old Johnny McEntee, who the president appointed to run the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). Overseeing the hiring and vetting of the roughly 4,000 political appointments in the executive branch, McEntee quickly pushed out officials deemed disloyal and earned the moniker of Trump’s “loyalty cop.”
This purge was only a preview of what the administration had planned for his second term. Weeks before the 2020 election, the president signed an executive order known as “Schedule F,” which would have stripped civil service protections from tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees had it been implemented. Though promoted as a measure to enforce accountability, Schedule F was an overt attempt to politicize the bureaucracy. It would have empowered the president to easily purge the civil service of any senior or mid-level officials deemed politically suspect or insufficiently loyal.
Today Schedule F has more or less become doctrine on the right. Donald Trump’s rise thus ushered in a more radical and dangerous phase in the conservative movement’s decades-long struggle against the federal government. All the major Republican presidential candidates have promised to reinstate some version of the executive order, which President Biden rescinded upon entering office. Indeed, most candidates have even tried to outdo Trump in both their policies and rhetoric. \ The supposed “moderate” in the race, former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador under Trump, Nikki Haley, has put forward an even more radical plan than Schedule F that would not just strip civil service protections but introduce five-year term limits for all positions in the federal workforce — from air traffic controllers and public health inspectors to park rangers and Social Security administrators. As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell notes, this would effectively “destroy the basic machinery of government” — which might just be the point.
Across the board, then, Republicans have embraced the Trumpian vow to “destroy the deep state.” They have also adopted the former president’s conspiratorial rhetoric about the federal bureaucracy and civil service, which is now depicted as a national fifth column. The traditional Reaganite critiques of big government waste, inefficiency and onerous regulations have been increasingly supplanted by radical fulminations against the “deep state” that sound more like The Turner Diaries than The Road to Serfdom.
This is evident throughout Mandate for Leadership, the 920-page manifesto published earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation-led 2025 Presidential Transition Project (or Project 2025), which aims to recruit and vet up to 20,000 potential staffers for a future Republican administration after the anticipated purge. Writing in the book’s introduction, project director Paul Dans, who served in Trump’s Office of Personnel Management during his final year, breathlessly proclaims that the “long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” giving credence to a notoriousconspiracy theory that has long floated around white supremacist circles. With the federal government ostensibly captured by “cultural Marxists” and “globalists,” Dans frantically proclaims that it has been “weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”
This kind of siege mentality has become the official posture of the right since the rise of Trump. “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” proclaimed the Republican frontrunner last March at his first campaign rally, which he symbolically held in the city of Waco, Texas, just seventeen miles from where the FBI got into a deadly standoff with the apocalyptic Branch Davidians cult almost three decades before. Besides inspiring the far-right terrorist Timothy McVeigh in his bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, the “Waco siege” also galvanized various anti-government militia movements that would ultimately contribute to the storming of the capital more than a quarter century later. The symbolism of holding his opening rally in Waco was not lost on Trump’s allies. “We’re the Trump Davidians,” Bannon quipped to ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl when asked why the Trump campaign would choose Waco for its opening act. The rhetoric of both Trump and his “Davidians” leaves little room for doubt about their intentions if he wins in November.
For the millions of MAGA zealots, Trump’s election is less about achieving specific ideological aims than about satisfying their thirst for revenge. On the other hand, the authors of Project 2025’s manifesto have more concrete ideological goals that happen to align with Trump’s revenge fantasy. In his forward to Mandate for Leadership, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts alludes to the unifying goal when he states that the “top priority” for the next Republican president must be to “dismantle” the “administrative state.” Or as Dans puts it, the goal is to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
Republicans have been harboring fantasies about gutting the federal government since the Reagan era. But what distinguishes today’s right from the past is its greater willingness to employ explicitly authoritarian means to achieve their ends. Indeed, a growing number of conservatives now appear convinced that the next Republican president must be granted something close to dictatorial power if their movement is to stand a chance against the “cultural Marxists” who allegedly control the state.
To legitimize an autocratic power grab by Trump or any other Republican president, many conservatives will no doubt employ the dubious legal theory of the “unitary executive,” which was first popularized during the George W. Bush administration to justify the president’s illegal policies in the war on terror. The unitary executive theory asserts that the president is effectively above the law and has absolute control over all departments and agencies in the federal government (including independent and quasi-legislative agencies like the EPA or the NLRB). This controversial interpretation of Article II grants the president something close to dictatorial power, giving him or her total control over the hiring and firing of two million federal employees and “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding,” as one of the theories leading proponents, Bill Barr, wrote in a memo shortly before Trump appointed him attorney general.
While most conservatives continue to cloak their vision of a strongman executive in contentious legal theories, a growing contingent on the right has more or less abandoned such pretenses. Since Trump’s defeat, the idea of a so-called “Red Caesar” coming to rescue the beleaguered republic has caught on in more reactionary milieus. “Red Caesar” was first coined by conservative author and former national security official in the Trump administration, Michael Anton, who in a 2020 book predicted that a “red America that feels sufficiently imperiled by the leftist coalition might well look to unify behind one man with authority.” For Anton, the coming of Caesarism — defined as “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity” — appears almost historically determined. “Just as tyrannies give way to aristocracies and republics on the upswing, so do democracies collapse into decadence, anarchy, and back to tyranny on the downswing,” he writes. In Anton’s telling, the cyclical historical forces at work in America today are no different than those in ancient Rome, where Caesar and his successors restored order and — for a time — greatness to a decadent republic. “When and where Caesarism comes, it arises only because liberty is already gone,” writes Anton, offering a preemptive justification of a Trumpian assault on the country’s exhausted democratic institutions.
With the now widespread acceptance among conservatives that the federal government and other major institutions have been captured by “cultural Marxists,” “globalists,” and “wokeists,” Republicans are now pre-programmed to accept more authoritarian leadership. This is especially the case among a younger coterie of Republicans who have come to prominence in the post-Trump era. Unlike some of their older Republican colleagues, these young Trumpians are more open to employing post-Constitutional or “extra-Constitutional” means to achieve their reactionary goals.
Consider Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a Trump supporter who echoed Anton’s analysis of contemporary America on a far-right podcast in late 2021, noting that “we don’t have a real constitutional republic anymore” but rather an unaccountable “administrative state.” With America currently in its “late republican period,” Vance suggested that resisting woke tyranny will require Republicans to get “pretty wild” and go in “directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” While sympathetic to the cause of “deconstructing” the administrative state, Vance offered a more Caesarist alternative: “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left…and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.” If Trump is wins this fall Vance suggested that he immediately fire “every single mid-level bureaucrat” and “civil servant in the administrative state” and replace them with “our people.”
Ultimately, the point of the planned purge is not to replace every civil servant who is forced out but to derail the federal government before stripping it down and selling it for parts, like private equity vultures fresh after a hostile takeover. In the words of the authors at Project 2025, the “only real solution is for the national government to do less: to decentralize and privatize as much as possible…” The Trumpian innovation comes in the effort to weaponize the agencies and departments that remain after the right-wing assault on regulatory agencies like the EPA and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Republican frontrunner has already promised to weaponize the justice department and is reportedly mulling over deploying troops against domestic protests on day one. Trump would return to Washington with more experience and an entire team of “loyalty cops” working to enforce fealty across the executive branch. And as recent hearings at the Supreme Court have shown, he would also return with increasingly politicized courts that are sympathetic to both his assault on the “administrative state” as well as his quest for more “unitary power” over the executive branch.
The growing belief in the necessity of “authoritarian one-man rule” on the right stems from the fact that their ideological project is broadly unpopular with the American people. The majority of Americans do not support dismantling environmental protections or criminalizing abortion or eliminating child labor laws or registering teachers and librarians as sex offenders for espousing so-called “transgender ideology.” Neither do they support the modern right’s crusade to “dismantle” or “deconstruct” the “administrative state.”
While it is true that public trust in the government is currently close to an all-time low, conservative critics tend to greatly exaggerate how much of this stems from disapproval for career civil servants and government agencies. In reality, low ratings for the “federal government” tend to reflect the population’s disdain for Congress and national politicians from both parties. Conversely, most individual departments and federal agencies receive favorable ratings from Americans, whether it’s the National Park Service (+74%), the U.S. Postal Service (+57%), NASA (+65%), the Social Security Administration (+33%), the EPA (+24%), or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS, +25%). The same is generally true for federal employees. A 2022 survey by the Partnership for Public Service found that while only 30 percent of people view members of Congress favorably, more than 6-in-10 have a favorable view of civil servants.
Dismantling the “administrative state,” then, is not a goal that most Americans or even most Republican voters would knowingly support. For Trump, destroying the nebulous “deep state” is part of a personal crusade. In all likelihood, he would be satisfied if he could simply weaponize the justice and defense departments to go after his enemies. But for the ideologues who have hitched themselves to his star, the mission is far more ambitious. In the event of a Trump victory in 2024, one can expect the worst of both worlds: an assault on essential agencies that would recall the worst neoliberal policies of the Reagan years, and the weaponization of those “deep state” agencies that would recall the worst abuses of the Nixon and Bush years.
Thousands without heating as Russian infrastructure buckles amid winter freeze
James Kilner – January 20, 2024
People gather round a mobile kitchen after dozens of residential buildings were left without central heating due to a housing service accident caused by a cold snap in the town of Klimovsk near Moscow – Reuters/EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA
Thousands of Russians are living without heating through a freezing winter that is breaking the country’s fragile Soviet-era infrastructure.
Hot water pipes are bursting, electricity is failing and radiators are freezing across Russia, triggering complaints from angry locals who have accused officials of incompetence two months before a presidential election.
In videos posted this week from Nizhny Novgorod, 265 miles east of Moscow, residents were evacuating apartments flooded with steaming boiling water.
“The apartment is completely destroyed. The apartment is uninhabitable,” said one man as he filmed water pouring through the ceiling.
In Novosibirsk, Siberia, a major pipe burst on Wednesday, projecting a spout of boiling water high into the air which burnt 13 people and left entire apartment blocks without heating during one of Russia’s coldest winters for decades.
A resident of Novosibirsk said she was upset but was not surprised.
“Of course people are upset. They have been in the cold, with children, since January 11,” she said, declining to give her name. “I wasn’t surprised at all. It would have happened at some point because the pipes that burst were laid back in 1973 and 1963.”
Municipal officials have admitted that the burst pipe in Novosibirsk was laid in 1963 and was last repaired in 1990, a year before the Soviet Union collapsed.
In Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, freezing residents have taken to huddling around a fire on the street to keep warm in temperatures of -25C.
“We haven’t had any heating since January 2. The authorities are aware of the problem,” said a woman in a video of several people holding up ‘SOS’ signs. “Please help us, we are desperate.”
A municipal worker removes snow during snowfall and cold weather in Moscow – YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA
Campaigners have said that chronic underfunding has undermined civilian infrastructure in Russia.
Russia’s centrally controlled hot water systems were built in the Soviet Union and struggle under extreme temperature changes which have been harsh this year.
Analysts said that with an election in mid-March, these failures undermine the Kremlin’s message that Vladimir Putin is the tough and competent leader that ordinary Russians need, although he is still guaranteed to win.
“The heating emergencies around Russia, the result of long-term underinvestment in public utilities infrastructure, complicate that narrative,” said Ben Noble, assistant professor of Russian Politics at UCL.
And civilians’ gripes are unlikely to be smoothed out any time soon.
A couple stands on the Komendantskaya pier of the Peter and Paul Fortress and looks at the frozen Neva River during abnormal frosts in St. Petersburg – Zuma Press / eyevine/Artem Priakhin
Putin has prioritised his army over civilian demands, approving a massive boost in military funding and co-opting everything from shopping malls to bakeries to produce weapons for the war effort in Ukraine.
But fracturing infrastructure is not the only internal problem facing Putin. Although protests are effectively banned, demonstrations in Bashkortostan, a region with a large Muslim population that lies south of the Ural Mountains, against mobilisation have been growing.
People in Dagestan, in southern Russia on the Caspian Sea, have also been protesting since the summer about failing infrastructure and the wives and mothers of mobilized men have been campaigning for the return of their men from frontlines in Ukraine.
Former President Trump, the current GOP frontrunner, pushed back on claims of mental missteps during his Saturday rally in New Hampshire, after his main rival in the state, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, raised concerns about his mental fitness.
Trump deflected the criticism that arose after he appeared to mix up Haley and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday while talking about Jan. 6, 2021, stating his reliance on sarcasm during speeches and emphasizing that he aced a cognitive test that he claimed he took “a few months ago.”
“A lot of times I’ll say that President Obama is doing a lousy job, meaning that Obama is running the show,” Trump said during his rally. “They’ll say, Donald Trump doesn’t know who our president is. No, no. A few months ago I took a cognitive test my doctor gave me, I said give me a cognitive test just we can, you know, and I aced it. I also took one when I was in the White House.”
The 45th president has often raised concerns over President Biden’s age, claiming he is “cognitively impaired” and “in no condition to lead” the country.
During his rally on Friday, Trump appeared to have mixed up Haley and Pelosi while talking about the insurrection on the Capitol, to which the former U.N. Ambassador responded by saying that she was concerned to have somebody whose “mental fitness” is questioned while serving in the Oval Office.
“The concern I have is, I’m not saying anything derogatory, but when you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this,” Haley said.
During the Saturday rally, Trump continued the defense of his mental acuity, stating that he will let people know when he “goes bad.”
“I’ll let you know when I go bad,” Trump said. “I really [don’t] think I will be able to tell you because someday we go bad.”
He also refuted Haley’s claims, saying he does not mind being his age, possibly referencing when the former South Carolina governor called for “mandatory competency” tests for politicians over 75.
“They always say, like Haley, she talks about, ‘yeah, we don’t need 80-year-old,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t mind being 80, but I am 77, that’s a big difference.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who has endorsed the former president and is rumored to be in circulation for a potential vice president pick, pushed back on Haley’s claims, stating that “the reality is Nikki Haley is relying on Democrats, just like Nancy Pelosi, to try to have a desperate showing.”
In November, Forbes noted that Trump mixed up Biden and Obama at least seven times in recent months.
Russia’s elite paratroopers and marines are refusing orders to launch ‘human wave attacks,’ Ukraine official says
Nathan Rennolds – January 20, 2024
Russia’s elite paratroopers and marines are refusing orders to launch ‘human wave attacks,’ Ukraine official says. Marines march past an honor-guard soldier during a Naval parade rehearsal in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2022.AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky
Elite Russian troops are refusing to launch “human-wave attacks,” a Ukrainian official said.
Nataliya Humenyuk said marines and paratroopers are concerned over huge losses in the assaults.
She said former prisoners and poorly trained reservists typically carry out costly frontal assaults.
Russian marines and paratroopers are refusing to launch certain types of assaults due to concerns over the huge losses other troops are suffering, a Ukrainian official said, the Kyiv Post reported.
Nataliya Humenyuk, a press secretary for the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s Joint Command South, said that the soldiers considered “themselves ‘elite troops'” and did not “want to go into frontal assaults” that former felons and reservists typically carry out, the outlet reported.
Throughout the Russian invasion, Russia has become increasingly reliant on high-risk frontal assaults involving waves of attacks that probe Ukrainian positions and seize small portions of territory at the cost of substantial casualties.
Humenyuk cited Russian attacks on Krynky in the Kherson Oblast in southern Ukraine, saying that Russian troops assaulting Ukrainian marine positions there were being hit with losses of more than 50%.
“At present in our sector the number of units of the type ‘Shtorm-Z’ [low-grade Russian units made of up older reservists and former felons, often committed to carry out human wave attacks] is falling and we are seeing more naval infantry and paratroopers,” Humenyuk said.
“But they consider themselves ‘elite troops,’ and they don’t want to go into frontal assaults like that,” she added.
One of Russia’s newly formed paratrooper units, the 104th Guards Airborne Division, appeared to be hit particularly hard in its combat debut in the Kherson region late last year, the UK Ministry of Defence said in an update on the conflict in December.
It said the unit “highly likely suffered exceptionally heavy losses and failed to achieve its objectives during its combat debut in Kherson Oblast,” aimed at dislodging Ukrainian positions near Krynky.
Krynky has been the scene of heavy fighting over the past few months as Ukrainian forces have attempted to recapture ground across the Dnipro River.
A group of Ukrainian marines sail from the riverbank of Dnipro at the frontline near Kherson, Ukraine, in 2023.AP Photo/Alex Babenko
Conditions in the region have made fighting difficult for both sides, with marshes, water-filled bomb craters, and mud making it almost impossible for troops to dig in, The New York Times reported.
Despite Ukrainian officials’ claims that the country’s marines had gained ground on the eastern side of the river, soldiers and marines told The Times that this was an exaggeration.
“There are no positions. There is no such thing as an observation post or position,” Oleksiy, a soldier who fought in Krynky and only gave his first name, said. “It is impossible to gain a foothold there. It’s impossible to move equipment there.”
“It’s not even a fight for survival,” he added. “It’s a suicide mission.”
But its success in the skies above the Dnipro bolstered Ukraine’s difficult position on the ground.
Russia appears to be struggling to defend against Ukraine’s drone attacks because of a shortage of electronic-warfare capability in the area, the UK’s Ministry of Defence said.
Ukraine’s forces have been using first-person-view drones to strike Russian vehicles, the UK Ministry of Defence said in an intelligence update.
The ministry said that a Russian military blogger estimated that 90% of Russian military equipment deployed around Krynky has been destroyed.
Send Channel migrant boats to Ukraine to help war effort, Government urged
Danielle Sheridan – January 19, 2024
Since October, British and Ukrainian volunteers have delivered 15 inflatable dinghies and rigid inflatable boats to soldiers fighting along the Dnipro River – Alex Kruglyak/MissionUkraine UK
Boats used by migrants to cross the Channel to the UK should be sent to Ukraine to help the war effort, a volunteer organisation has told the Government.
Since October, British and Ukrainian volunteers have delivered 15 inflatable dinghies and rigid inflatable boats to soldiers fighting along the Dnipro River.
The small boats, which were in relatively poor condition, were driven from the UK to the south of Ukraine, where they were refurbished. This included the installation of new engines and painting the vessels khaki.
They have provided a lifeline to the Ukrainian soldiers holding three established bridgeheads on the occupied eastern side of the river, by carrying vital supplies and evacuating wounded soldiers.
When MissionUkraine, the organisation leading the small boats initiative, initially appealed to the Government for boats used by migrants to cross the Channel to be sent to Ukraine, it was informed by Border Force that this would not be possible.
Officials said: “The majority of boats are not fit for re-sale or to ever go to sea again, because they arrive in very poor condition. These boats also deteriorate and perish over the period, and are therefore often destined for recycling.
“The boat engines might also be sold at auction, but again, over time, they are no longer operational, or require additional funds to bring their condition back to normal.”
A small boat that was taken from the UK to Ukraine, repaired and then delivered to the front line – Alex Kruglyak/MissionUkraine UK
A government spokesman told The Telegraph that while it was “committed to supporting Ukraine” it “cannot donate unsafe and dangerous small boats which will put more lives at risk”.
However, Alex Kruglyak, one of the leaders of MissionUkraine, said poor quality boats were still useful to troops because marine engineers in Ukraine were able to refurbish them to a decent operating standard, meaning they were seaworthy again.
“All of the boats we deliver go through a boat maintenance procedure which is done by marine experts and all the engines go through an engine testing and maintenance procedure done by guys with decades of experience,” he told The Telegraph. “We will pay for all transport and maintenance costs – we are not asking for a penny.”
In June last year, the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine was breached, causing widespread flooding that stopped Ukrainian troops advancing via the Dnipro River.
By October, troops had started to cross the Dnipro, but were using rowing boats in order not to attract attention from the Russians.
There are now three established bridgeheads on the occupied eastern side of the river, with the Ukrainian troops at those secured areas dependent on small boats.https://www.youtube.com/embed/viYOh8tkwJY?enablejsapi=1&modestbranding=1&origin=http://www.telegraph.co.uk&rel=0
To date, MissionUkraine has delivered second hand boats to Kharkiv, Zaporizha, and Dnipro, which have then been transported to soldiers on the frontlines.
Mr Kruglyak, 35, originally from Odesa but living in London, added that it “made sense” for the Government to donate the boats confiscated from migrants, which are currently in a pound in Dover.
His calls were echoed by Paul Watson, 69, from Bridgend, Wales, who has driven to Ukraine’s front line numerous times with his friend Martin Blackwell, 70, to deliver both 4x4s and small boats.
Mr Watson said that the rigid inflatable boats they had transported so far were purchased from private owners for prices ranging between £1,500 and £4,000, with money raised through their local church.
Some of them were “in a very bad state when we first took them out,” he said, adding: “In any time of crisis, people can be very versatile and alter things to become usable. If one boat saved one life it was worth it.”
The US is struggling to handle an immigration surge – here’s how Europe is dealing with its own influx
Tara Sonenshine, Tufts University – January 19, 2024
Workers from the Spanish nonprofit Open Waters rescue 178 migrants from different countries, off the coast of Italy in September 2023. Jose Colon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
As record-high numbers of undocumented migrants cross the United States-Mexico border illegally, one key question is how the U.S. got into this situation, and what lessons can be learned from how other countries respond to border security and immigration problems.
Having worked both inside the U.S. government and in the private sector, I have observed the growing importance of welcoming foreign citizens to one’s country for improving economic growth, scientific advancement, labor supply and cultural awareness.
But migrants entering and staying in the U.S. without visas or proper documentation can create problems – for the migrants themselves, and for overtaxed governments that lack the ability to quickly process asylum cases in immigration courts, for example, or to provide temporary shelter and other basic services for large numbers of arriving migrants. These strains are happening now in many places in the U.S.
In 1924, after decades of the U.S. welcoming foreign-born citizens to its shores, Congress passed the Immigration Act, restricting the numbers and types of people who could legally enter and stay in the U.S.
That legislation ushered in even more xenophobia and division in the U.S. over the ethnic origins of immigrants – cutting off large-scale immigration, especially from Europe and Asia, until jobs needed to be filled – and there weren’t enough people in the U.S. to fill them.
In the 1960s, immigration laws were reformed again, ushering in waves of immigration from Asia because the U.S. needed people to work at unfilled jobs.
Today, once again, some U.S. politicians are pushing for new ways to restrict immigration. Much of their work focuses on making it harder for migrants to get asylum – meaning legal permission to remain in the U.S. if they have a legitimate fear of persecution in their home countries.
Overall, U.S. border officials encountered more than 1.1 million people illegally crossing the U.S. border from April 2022 through March 2023 – a sharp rise from previous years, when the number of people illegally crossing each year hovered at less than 300,000.
U.S. authorities are now stepping up deportations, quickly sending more undocumented people back to their home countries.
Germany deported close to 8,000 people, many of them fleeing the war in Ukraine, in the first part of 2023. In total, an estimated 92,119 immigrants entered Germany illegally from January through September 2023.
New German government reforms will increase that figure and no longer require officials to announce deportations in advance.
Italy, which is also battling a huge influx of undocumented migrants from North Africa, recently doubled the amount of time that it can detain undocumented migrants, rising from three months to at least six months. This decision is seen as an effort to deter more migrants from illegally entering Italy.
This allows Italy to skirt a European Union policy that requires its member countries to consider and process all asylum applicants’ requests within a year of their arrival. Since Albania is not part of the European Union, it could quickly deport the migrants that Italy sends there.
In December 2023, the European Union’s 27 countries also voted on a major overhaul of asylum laws. These changes will make it easier for countries to deport migrants who fail to get asylum. They also direct the European Union to give money to countries that allow more asylum seekers to stay in those countries.
Other approaches
Right now, Italy and Greece bear much of the brunt of migration in the EU.
More than 31,000 undocumented migrants, mainly from Syria, crossed into Greece in 2023, up from 18,000 undocumented people who entered the country in 2022.
The parliament in Greece is considering new laws that would enable the country to issue tens of thousands of undocumented migrants residence and work permits to address labor shortages.
Greece is also pushing the European Union to slap economic sanctions on countries, like Pakistan, that refuse to take back the undocumented migrants that Greece deports to their home countries.
Closer to home, Canada is also experiencing a surge of undocumented migration into Quebec and other places, prompting some Canadians to feel growing anxiety, in part because of perceptions that the sudden population growth is also raising the country’s already-high housing costs. Canada deported 7,232 undocumented people in the first six months of 2023 – a rise compared to the 7,635 deportations Canada carried out in the entire year of 2021.
Canada also announced in December 2023 that it is planning to allow people who entered the country with valid, short-term visas, and who continue living in Canada after these visas expire, to apply for permanent residency. This would mainly affect foreign students and temporary workers.
Back in the U.S., the fight over immigration continues, with Republicans eager to crack down and Democrats who generally want to avoid harsh new standards that could lead to more deportations and mass roundups of undocumented immigrants.
Traditionally, Democrats have been supportive of immigration and the rights of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
But the wave of migrants who arrive in cities like New York and Chicago without any money, jobs or places to live is severely straining city governments’ capacity and budgets. Local leaders like New York Mayor Eric Adams are pleading with the federal government to help with a crisis that, as Adams said in September 2023, has no clear end in sight.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.
Tara Sonenshine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
During a campaign stop in New Hampshire Wednesday night, the former president touted his ability to correctly identify animals of different shapes. “I took it, and I aced it,” he told the crowd of supporters. “I think it was 35… 30 questions. And let me tell you, you know, they always show you the first one: a giraffe, a tiger or a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’”
Trump then proceeded to weaponize his very average performance against President Joe Biden, saying he was sure Biden wouldn’t get far on the test — a tactic Trump has leaned into since bragging about the results of his annual physical while still in office. Spawning countless memes, the former president touted back in 2020 how well he had done on a 10-minute assessment designed to detect mild cognitive impairment (such as early-onset dementia) during an interview with Fox News.
“The first questions are very easy, the last questions are much more difficult. Like a memory question,” Trump preened in the interview. “It’s like, you’ll go, ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’ So they’d say, ‘Could you repeat that.’ So I said, ‘Yeah. So it’s person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’”
As Trump supporters stood in the cold waiting for the ex-president to take the stage on Wednesday, the scene echoed his visit to the state just a day before in southern New Hampshire where fans waited in the snow for the presumptive Republican nominee. When speaking Tuesday at the Atkinson Resort & Country Club, Trump lamented that he had to leave the White House after losing the 2020 election and said it “was ridiculous that we had to leave, but we had to leave, we have to follow the laws of our land.”
He quickly doubled down on his 2020 election lies: “They don’t investigate the people that cheated in the election. They investigate the people that understand they cheated and go after them. But they don’t investigate the people who cheated like hell. We have to have fair and free elections.”
Trump, who has achieved the feat of being the only (four-time) indicted former or current president, was charged for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which his own officials at the time claimed was the most secure in U.S. history. As the former president prepared for legal proceedings in ongoing cases against him, Trump swooped a historic win in Iowa on Monday with 51 percent of the caucus vote, defeating former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by dozens of percentage points.
Pastor Mock: In 2024, democracy is on the ballot, choose the democracy candidate – Biden
Charles Mock – January 17, 2024
According to The Washington Post, and I quote, “A Post-University of Maryland poll published this week shows a sizable share of Americans accept lies about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed on Jan. 6, 2021. Only 62 percent say Joe Biden‘s victory was legitimate, down from 69 percent two years ago, and far lower than after the contested 2000 election. One-third of U.S. adults say they believe there’s ‘solid evidence’ of ‘widespread voter fraud’ in the 2020 election. Regarding Jan. 6 itself, 28 percent say former president Donald Trump bears no responsibility, 21 percent say the people who stormed the Capitol were ‘mostly peaceful’ and 25 percent say the FBI probably or definitely instigated the attack.”
With each presidential election, comes opportunities to vote for the person whose policies best represent the best values, principles, processes and practices of a constitutional democracy. If we are not careful as citizens, we will be voting for a person’s policies rather than voting for democracy.
Democracy is far more important than the policies that constitute it. It is not policies that sustain democracy. It is democracy that sustain policies.
If we do not like a president whose personal policies are pro-abortion, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-transgender, etc., we can always use our vote to vote him or her out of office because the power of democracy rests on the freedom to vote and freedom of choice.
It has become obvious there is no pure democracy. Democracy is always an experimental work in progress. Some decades require much more work than others. For example, we read of present egregious challenges such as growing disparities of wealth and autocratic tendencies within our democracy. These autocratic tendencies are driven by multinational corporations that continue placing democracy at risk.
Insurrections loyal to President Donald Trump try to break through a police barrier, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington. The Department of Justice is prosecuting those who violently stormed the Capitol.
If we want to kill the democracy that makes autocratic, financially oppressive mega-corporations normalize greed, all we have to do is change our form of government from a democracy to pure dictatorship or a king-centered monarchy. In dictatorships the dictator determines the means of corporate capitalism. I pray we choose otherwise.
In a real sense, democracy is being voted for or against in 2024. We cannot afford to vote for candidates based on three or four particular policies we might find immoral. We must vote for candidates who will be governed by a constitution that upholds and sustains democracy as the chosen form of governance. For better or for worse, democracy is still the best form of governance. I have heard it said and believe it true that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest.
Without democracy there’s no genuine freedom to vote or freedom to choose.
Choose today which government you will serve. As for me and my house, I choose democracy. The Rev. Dr. Charles Mock is the interim pastor at Second Baptist Church in Erie.
