Easter is a celebration of spring and new life. Eggs and flowers are rather obvious symbols of female fertility, but in European traditions, the bunny, with its amazing reproductive potential, is not far behind.
In European traditions, the Easter bunny is known as the Easter hare. The symbolism of the hare has had many tantalizing ritual and religious roles down through the years.
Hares were given ritual burials alongside humans during the Neolithic age in Europe. Archaeologists have interpreted this as a religious ritual, with hares representing rebirth.
Over a thousand years later, during the Iron Age, ritual burials for hares were common, and in 51 B.C.E., Julius Caesar mentioned that in Britain, hares were not eaten due to their religious significance.
Caesar would likely have known that in the classical Greek tradition, hares were sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Meanwhile, Aphrodite’s son Eros was often depicted carrying a hare as a symbol of unquenchable desire.
From the Greek world through the Renaissance, hares often appear as symbols of sexuality in literature and art. For example, the Virgin Mary is often shown with a white hare or rabbit, symbolizing that she overcame sexual temptation.
But it is in the folk traditions of England and Germany that the figure of the hare is specifically connected to Easter. Accounts from the 1600s in Germany describe children hunting for Easter eggs hidden by the Easter hare, much as in the United States today.
Written accounts from England around the same time also mention the Easter hare, particularly in terms of traditional Easter hare hunts and the eating of hare meat at Easter. One tradition, known as the “Hare Pie Scramble,” was held at Hallaton, a village in Leicestershire, England. It involved eating a pie made with hare meat and people “scrambling” for a slice. In 1790, the local parson tried to stop the custom due to its pagan associations, but he was unsuccessful, and the custom continues in that village until this day.
As for the pagan origins of Easter and the Easter bunny,
In 1835, the folklorist Jacob Grimm, one of the famous team of the fairy tale Brothers Grimm, argued that the Easter hare was connected to a goddess he imagined would have been called “Ostara” in ancient German. He derived this name from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, who Bede, an early medieval monk considered to be the father of English history, mentioned in 731 C.E.
Here in the U.S., there has long been a tradition of an Easter egg roll at the White House. The event will take place this year on Monday, April 18 after a two-year hiatus during the pandemic. CNN: Biden White House hatches plans for return of the Egg Roll.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are taking their first crack at the time-honored Easter tradition on Monday, which will mark the 142nd White House Easter Egg Roll following a two-year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The theme of the event, the first lady’s office says, is “EGGucation,” with the South Lawn being “transformed into a school community” for 30,000 visitors to enjoy, including military families from the USS Delaware.
The American Egg Board is donating 90,000 eggs to the event as part of its longtime partnership with the White House, egg board president and CEO Emily Metz told CNN. That includes approximately 50,000 hard-boiled eggs that will be used for the egg roll races with wooden spoons, the egg hunt, and for dyeing and decorating. Those eggs were hard-boiled, dyed and transported from North Carolina to Washington on a refrigerated truck by Braswell Family Farms’ John Watson, where they will be stored over the weekend ahead of Monday’s festivities.
Forty thousand additional eggs have been donated to be used for food items for guests, Metz said….
The American Egg Board will also present its annual commemorative egg to the first lady, part of a 45-year tradition beginning with the Carter administration. Artist Russ Hagen, a member of the International Egg Art Guild, was selected to paint the 2021 and 2022 commemorative eggs, a months-long undertaking that included a design to match the “EGGucation” theme created by Mary O’Reilly and the inside of a real chicken egg being blown out through a special process, leaving the shell intact, before the decoration could begin.
This year, all 45 eggs that have been presented to first ladies over the years are being displayed together for the first time in a special “Colonnade of Eggs” in the East Wing of the White House for visitors to view on tours.
Since 1878, American presidents and their families have celebrated Easter Monday by hosting an ‘egg roll’ party. Held on the South Lawn, it is one of the oldest annual events in White House history. Some historians note that First Lady Dolley Madison originally suggested the idea of a public egg roll, while others tell stories of informal egg-rolling parties at the White House dating back to President Abraham Lincoln’s administration. Beginning in the 1870s, Washingtonians from all social levels celebrated Easter Monday on the west grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Children rolled brilliantly dyed hard-boiled eggs down the terraced lawn.
However, by 1876, a concern for the landscape led Congress to pass legislation to restrict the public use of the Capitol grounds, effectively prohibiting any future egg rolling. The new edict went unchallenged in 1877, as rain cancelled all the day’s activities, but in 1878 President Rutherford B. Hayes decided to open the South Lawn to egg rollers, as it had previously been reserved for the First Family’s private Easter activities. Thus, a new tradition was born. In 1974, the Nixons hosted egg roll races, an event which has become an Easter Monday favorite.
This morning, historian Michael Bechloss posted a photo of the 1926 egg roll.
The Boston Marathon returns to its traditional April date for the first time in three years on Monday with the fastest field in the race’s history, boasting a star-studded slate of previous champions and Olympic medalists.
Kenya’s Peres Jepchirchir leads the women’s field hot off her Tokyo Olympic gold medal and New York City Marathon victory last year, while local hero Molly Seidel is looking to build off her bronze medal at that Olympics and triumph in her first Boston Marathon.
In the men’s division, Kenya’s Benson Kipruto is looking to repeat just six months after he won at last year’s delayed race, but will face tough competition from last year’s New York winner, compatriot Albert Korir, and 2021 London winner Sisay Lemma of Ethiopia.
“It’s exciting. It’s always cool to feel like you’re coming to your hometown race. I’m really pumped to actually go at it on this course rather than just training on it,” Seidel, an American and a former Boston resident, told Reuters on Friday.
But will the Marathon be a superspreader event? Covid-19 cases are rising rapidly in the Northeast. We’ve had well over 2,000 new cases on each of the past few days here in Massachusetts. New York is seeing more than 5,000 per day. Those are undercounts, of course, because so many people are using home tests now, but wastewater testing reveals high levels of virus in Northeastern states.
About 30,000 marathoners from 122 countries and all 50 U.S. states will hit the streets on Monday in and around Boston, where the city’s Public Health Commission reports that the Covid positivity rate has risen to 6.6 percent, passing its “threshold of concern” of 5 percent.
The agency urged residents to mask, to test before joining indoor gatherings, to gather outdoors if possible, and to get booster shots to protect themselves and others in the coming days as Easter, Passover, Ramadan and public school vacations converge. The city’s positivity rate has risen by 4 percentage points since early March, it noted.
This month the Omicron BA.2 subvariant has flattened the steep downward glide in official case counts that Boston and the rest of the country had been on after the BA.1 surge in the winter. The turn is not unexpected, but it comes as in-person gatherings have resumed, vaccinations have flatlined, officially reported tests are falling and politicians and many Americans want an end to most restrictions.
And while hospitalizations and deaths remain on the decline nationally, concerns are rising for unvaccinated and unboosted people, who remain more vulnerable to serious illness and death.
I was a real sucker for the balloon drops at the ends of the Republican and Democratic parties’ National Conventions as a kid. Dad used to pop popcorn for us when we finally got a color TV so we could see the funny hats and all the hoopla. We even got to drink a Coca-Cola!
I think the first presidential debate I remember was between Nixon and Kennedy but it might be because it was shown a lot in history and journalism classes. Nixon was all sweaty and tricky dickyish and Kennedy looked like the dashing newcomer. I also saw the Checkers speech when TV and video reels became a thing in the classrooms. Debates are a staple of American democracy.
I always watch the debates now but not with popcorn and Coke. My friend from Connecticut –a hard-core daughter of labor unions who voted strictly for Democrats–turned me on to a new tradition as we watched the debates in the Carter and Reagan years. I always have a big old pot of New England-Style Crab boil that’s morphed into a big old pot of New Orleans-Style seafood boil and the local brew. I also have started the tradition of throwing out the first nerf ball at the screen for the debate season. It’s saved for the first really, really stupid remark. I ran out of them during the Trump Debates.
I’ll say one thing about today’s Trumpist Republican Party. They sure know how to ruin a party and yes, I meant that as a double entendre.
The Republican National Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying the group that has run the debates for decades was biased and refused to enact reforms.
“We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people,” the committee’s chairperson, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement.
The RNC’s action requires Republican candidates to agree in writing to appear only in primary and general election debates sanctioned by the committee.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the entire GOP is apparently behind this embarrassing turn of the tail. After all, the Republicans had no platform in 2020, and they’ll have none in 2024. They have no real policies save shoving the nation’s wealth upwards and ginned-up moral panics for the rubes. Mitch McConnell is already on record saying that he has no intention of talking about what he plans to do with a Senate majority if the country happens to hand it to him next fall. Why should we know? We’re not the people to whom he’s sublet himself for his entire adult life. This is a party that has very few ideas, and the ones they have are massively unpopular and increasingly detached from the reality of the country’s problems. And even if that were not the case, their putative 2024 frontrunner thinks windmills cause cancer. What came first, the chicken or the…chicken?
But did you know that in Ukraine, Easter egg decorating is an important art form that dates back centuries? Known as pysanky, these Ukrainian Easter eggs are decorated using the wax-resist (batik) method. Covered in stunning motifs often taken from Slavic folk art, you’ll also find these decorated eggs in many parts of eastern Europe.
Creating these precious eggs takes focus and attention to detail, but the results are stunning works of art that are traditionally given as gifts to family members and community leaders. In fact, pysanka is so important to the culture that it’s thought that it was even produced in prehistoric Ukraine. Archaeologists have found decorated ceramic eggs to back up this theory and, according to folklore, pysanky can help ward off evil from overtaking the world. Later, this blended with Christian beliefs, though many people still feel that the decorative eggs work to scare off bad spirits from the home.
For many Americans, presidential debates are a staple of the political process. Every four years, an independent commission arranges a series of public events for the electorate, giving voters a chance to see those seeking national power field questions and explain their governing visions.
But as regular readers may recall, these quadrennial debates are a relatively modern phenomenon. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon participated in a historic discussion in 1960, but there were no such events in 1964, 1968, and 1972.
In recent decades, political norms and Americans’ expectations have changed, and many simply assume that presidential hopefuls will take part in debates, but it appears that the Republican National Committee has effectively ended the modern era of debates for national candidates.
In the weeks between the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, almost 100 text messages from two staunch GOP allies of then-President Donald Trump reveal an aggressive attempt to lobby, encourage and eventually warn the White House over its efforts to overturn the election, according to messages obtained by the House select committee and reviewed by CNN.
The texts, which have not been previously reported, were sent by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The text exchanges show that both members of Congress initially supported legal challenges to the election but ultimately came to sour on the effort and the tactics deployed by Trump and his team.
“We’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic,” Roy texted Meadows on January 1. That text was first released in December by the House select committee and described as being written by a House Freedom Caucus member. Roy’s authorship has not been previously reported.
When situated in the overall timeline of events between the election and January 6, the series of texts from Lee and Roy provide new details about how two Trump allies went from fierce advocates of the former President’s push to overturn Joe Biden’s win to disheartened bystanders. By January 3, Lee was texting Meadows that the effort “could all backfire badly.”
But shortly after the election, both men were encouraging Trump to keep fighting.
Now we know who we have to thank for the Kraken: Sen. Lee lobbied Meadows to get attorney Sidney Powell access to Trump. "Sydney Powell is saying that she needs to get in to see the president, but she's being kept away from him," Lee wrote on 11/7. https://t.co/VlaL2RUn8w
Twitter adopted a limited duration shareholder rights plan, often called a “poison pill,” a day after billionaire Elon Musk offered to buy the company for $43 billion, the company announced Friday.
The board voted unanimously to adopt the plan.
Under the new structure, if any person or group acquires beneficial ownership of at least 15% of Twitter’s outstanding common stock without the board’s approval, other shareholders will be allowed to purchase additional shares at a discount.
The plan is set to expire on April 14, 2023.
Such a move is a common way to fend off a potential hostile takeover by diluting the stake of the entity eying the takeover.
“The Rights Plan will reduce the likelihood that any entity, person or group gains control of Twitter through open market accumulation without paying all shareholders an appropriate control premium or without providing the Board sufficient time to make informed judgments and take actions that are in the best interests of shareholders,” the company said in a press release.
Twitter noted that the rights plan would not prevent the board from accepting an acquisition offer if the board deems it in the best interests of the company and its shareholders.
Economic fallout worsened Thursday evenas Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) moved incrementally to roll back newinspection rules for commercial trucks entering from Mexico, with some companies saying they aren’t able to fulfill orders because trucks are stuck in multi-mile backups at a number of entry points.
Little Bear Produce is a Texas-based grower-packer-shipper, farming 6,000 acres in Texas and supplementing its inventory with Mexican-grown produce so it can be a year-round supplier to major grocery chains such as Wegmans, H-E-B, Publix, Albertsons and Kroger.
Bret Erickson, senior vice president of business affairs for Little Bear, says the added inspections have cost it “hundreds of thousands of dollars” already, not to mention the reduced paychecks for many loaders who have had no work as trucks fail to show up.
“This has directly impacted our business since late last week. We would typically be receiving 10 to 12 loads of watermelon per day from Mexico, as well as different kinds of herbs and greens. Since the middle of last week, we have received zero of those shipments of watermelon,” Erickson said. That means the company did not meet its business obligations with major retailers, which have in turn had to find Mexican melons from farther away, such as from Arizona. Added distance means added fuel costs.
Kentucky ended virtually all in-state abortions on Wednesday, enacting a sweeping law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, restricts minors’ access to the procedure, and cracks down on medication abortions. It’s now the state with the harshest abortion restrictions in the United States.
The new law, which goes into effect immediately, will force the state’s two remaining abortion clinics in Louisville to close due to onerous new requirements on doctors, forcing Kentuckians to look elsewhere for abortion care.
And it comes as Republican-led legislatures across the country are passing seemingly unconstitutional, draconian anti-abortion laws in anticipation of a coming Supreme Court decision widely expected to eliminate Americans’ right to an abortion.Oklahoma, for example, recently passed a law similar to Kentucky’s that imposes a near-total ban on abortions except in cases where the pregnant person’s life is in danger — though it isn’t slated to go into effect for another few months.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, vetoed the bill last week, arguing that it’s likely unconstitutional, due to the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which recognized a pregnant person’s fundamental right to seek an abortion. The Court also found, however, that states could still impose restrictions on the procedure in the service of protecting the pregnant person’s health and the potential life of a fetus once it can survive outside the womb.
Beshear also argued that Kentucky’s bill should have included exclusions for victims of rape and incest, and that the law can’t be enforced without additional state-allocated funding. But the state House and Senate, which are both controlled by Republicans, overrode his veto on Wednesday evening.
“The Kentucky legislature was emboldened by a similar 15-week ban pending before the Supreme Court and other states passing abortion bans, including in Florida and Oklahoma, but this law and others like it remain unconstitutional,” Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement.
That’s it for me! “Chag Pesach Sameach!” (Happy Passover Holiday) to our Jewish Sky Dancers! Blessed Good Friday and Easter! to our Christian Sky Dancers!
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There are some unusual stories in the news today. Suddenly the advanced age of many U.S. lawmakers may finally be a subject for public debate. Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter after declining to join the board because of a background check. It seems that there are quite a few biological males being housed in women’s prisons, and now two woman inmates in New Jersey are pregnant. Another killing of a Black man by police is in the the news. And of course Putin’s war on Ukraine continues as does the January 6 Committee investigation.
When a California Democrat in Congress recently engaged in an extended conversation with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, they prepared for a rigorous policy discussion like those they’d had with her many times over the last 15 years.
Instead, the lawmaker said, they had to reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours.
Rather than delve into policy, Feinstein, 88, repeated the same small-talk questions, like asking the lawmaker what mattered to voters in their district, they said, with no apparent recognition the two had already had a similar conversation.
The episode was so unnerving that the lawmaker — who spoke to The Chronicle on condition they not be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic — began raising concerns with colleagues to see if some kind of intervention to persuade Feinstein to retire was possible. Feinstein’s term runs through the end of 2024. The conversation occurred several weeks before the death of her husband in February.
“I have worked with her for a long time and long enough to know what she was like just a few years ago: always in command, always in charge, on top of the details, basically couldn’t resist a conversation where she was driving some bill or some idea. All of that is gone,” the lawmaker said. “She was an intellectual and political force not that long ago, and that’s why my encounter with her was so jarring. Because there was just no trace of that.”
Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffers and the California Democratic member of Congress told The Chronicle in recent interviews that her memory is rapidly deteriorating. They said it appears she can no longer fulfill her job duties without her staff doing much of the work required to represent the nearly 40 million people of California….
Adding urgency to the recent concerns: If Democrats retain control of the Senate next year, Feinstein will succeed retiring Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy as the Senate’s president pro tem — putting her third in line for the presidency. Feinstein has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission that would allow her to run in 2024, a formality that lets her keep her fundraising accounts active, though she has not yet declared whether she intends to run.
Emphasis added. Read more details at the link.
Early Spring, by Gustav Klimt
Now can we ask questions about Chuck Grassley, James Inhofe, and Richard Shelby? It’s not just age that is the problem though. Nancy Pelosi at 82 still seems sharp. Patrick Leahy is also 82, and he has decided to retire. I think this is an important topic for public discussion. Should there be an age limit for members of Congress?
Elon Musk has made a controversial offer to buy Twitter Inc., saying the company has extraordinary potential and he is the person to unlock it.
The world’s richest person will offer $54.20 per share in cash, valuing Twitter at about $43 billion. The social media company’s shares rose just 5.3% to $48.27 at the market open in New York as investors began to assess how one of the platform’s most outspoken users will succeed in his takeover attempt.
Musk, 50, announced the potential deal in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, after turning down a potential board seat at the company. The billionaire, who also controls Tesla Inc., first disclosed a stake of about 9% on April 4. Tesla shares fell about 1.8% on the news.
Twitter said that its board would review the proposal and any response would be in the best interests of “all Twitter stockholders.”
The bid is the most high-stakes clash yet between Musk and the social media platform. The executive is one of Twitter’s most-watched firebrands, often tweeting out memes and taunts to @elonmusk’s more than 80 million followers. He has been vociferous about changes he’d like to consider imposing at the social media platform…
“I am not playing the back-and-forth game. I have moved straight to the end. It’s a high price and your shareholders will love it,” Musk is said to have told the social media giant, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.
Musk, whose fortune is estimated at about $260 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, said Twitter “needs to be transformed as a private company,” and vowed to “unlock” its “extraordinary potential” if the bid is successful.
“If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” he said in the filing….
The move comes after the Tesla CEO disclosed a stake of about 9 percent in Twitter last week. That disclosure is reportedly already at the center of a lawsuit filed this week by another Twitter shareholder who alleges Musk made “materially false and misleading statements and omissions by failing to disclose to investors” that he owned a stake in the company.
His delay in disclosing the stake, the lawsuit claims, led to “artificially deflated prices.”
With more than 80 million followers on the platform, Musk has sparked speculation in recent weeks with frequent tweets calling for drastic changes in the company and questioning whether it is really a “free speech” site. Earlier this week, he floated the idea of turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter, calling it a “great idea.”
Musk, who last week took to the platform to ask, “Is Twitter dying?” wrote in the filing that he believes it can “neither thrive nor serve” its purpose of promoting free speech if it remains as it is now.
It appears the women became pregnant from “consensual sexual relationships with another incarcerated person,” Dan Sperrazza, the Department of Corrections’s external affairs executive director, told NJ.com.
The prisoners are held at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Clinton, which has faced a long string of sex assault scandals….
There are 27 inmates who identify as transgender currently housed at the facility, according to NJ.com. New Jersey’s policy does not require trans women inmates to undergo gender-reassignment surgery to be held in the facility.
“While DOC cannot comment on any specific disciplinary or housing decisions that may be considered in light of these events, the Department always reserves all options to ensure the health and safety of the individuals in its custody,” Sperrazza told the Daily Mail.
Two Edna Mahan prisoners filed a lawsuit last year seeking to end New Jersey’s gender identity policy for prisons, claiming they were harassed by trans inmates and that transgender inmates were having sex with female prisoners.
ACLU legal director Jeanne LoCicero defended the policy of allowing transgender inmates in a women’s prison as one that protects the rights of transgender women.
Apparently the rights of women (“people with vaginas”) are secondary, as usual.
The vegetable garden with trees in blossom Spring Pontoise, 1877, by Camille Pissarro
A Black man facedown on the ground was fatally shot in the back of the head by a Grand Rapids police officer, the violent climax of a traffic stop, brief foot chase and struggle over a stun gun, according to videos of the April 4 incident released Wednesday.
The release by Grand Rapids police sparked renewed protests and calls for justice Wednesday, and state officials promised a full investigation.
It comes in the wake of other police-involved shootings in Grand Rapids.
The video released Wednesday includes footage from the unnamed officer’s body camera, which was deactivated shortly after the officer told the suspect, 26-year-old Congolese refugee Patrick Lyoya, to “let go of the Taser.”
The video, a collection of dashcam footage, body cam footage, a home security camera, and a cellphone video, shows the unnamed officer pulling over Lyoya and a passenger for a “license plate that doesn’t match the car.”
Was the deactivation of the body cam deliberate?
Lyoya gets out of the car, and the officer gets out and tells him to get back in the car. The officer asks for his driver’s license and then asks whether Lyoya speaks English.
Lyoya then appears to run around the car, and the officer chases and tackles him to the ground on the front lawn of a house.
They struggle, and the officer can be heard telling Lyoya to “stop” and to “let go of the Taser.”
After about 90 seconds, the officer is lying on top of Lyoya, who is facedown on the ground. The officer, still yelling for Lyoya to “let go of the Taser,” proceeds to shoot him.
Lyoya was shot in the head, police Chief Eric Winstrom confirmed.
A traffic stop should not be a death sentence. Driving without a license shouldn’t lead to death either.
One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies warned NATO on Thursday that if Sweden and Finland joined the U.S.-led military alliance then Russia would deploy nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles in an exclave in the heart of Europe.
Bluebonnets and Mesquite, Early Spring, by Texas artist Julian-Onderdonk
Finland, which shares a 1,300-km (810-mile) border with Russia, and Sweden are considering joining the NATO alliance. Finland will decide in the next few weeks, Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Wednesday.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said that should Sweden and Finland join NATO then Russia would have to strengthen its land, naval and air forces in the Baltic Sea.
Medvedev also explicitly raised the nuclear threat by saying that there could be no more talk of a “nuclear free” Baltic – where Russia has its Kaliningrad exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania….
Medvedev said he hoped Finland and Sweden would see sense. If not, he said, they would have to live with nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles close to home.
Ukrainian officials said their forces launched a successful missile attack on the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, forcing the crew to evacuate the vessel.
The Russian defense ministry said the Moskva warship had been “seriously damaged,” but blamed the incident on a fire. NBC News has been unable to verify what happened on the ship, but its loss could prove a significant setback in Russian forces’ efforts in Ukraine’s south and east, where a fierce battle for Mariupol is ongoing….
Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said the damaged Russian flagship is the same one that infamously demanded the surrender of Ukrainian forces on Snake Island early in the invasion.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Stephen Miller, who served as a top aide to President Donald Trump, will appear Thursday before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Miller was a senior adviser for policy during the Trump administration and a central figure in many of the Republican’s policy decisions. He had resisted previous efforts by the committee, filing a lawsuit last month seeking to quash a committee subpoena for his phone records.
The people familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private testimony. It’s unclear whether Miller will appear in person or virtually. A spokesperson for the committee said the panel had no comment, and Miller did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
President Biden has authorized the National Archives and Records Administration to hand over a new tranche of Trump White House documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
In a letter released Wednesday by the archives, Biden declined to assert executive privilege over the records — the latest batch sought by the committee after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s bid to block such releases.
The new letter is in line with the Biden administration’s decision to err on the side of disclosure, given the gravity of the events in the Jan. 6 attack. The archives has already turned over hundreds of pages of documents to the committee.
“As to the remaining prioritized records, President Biden has considered the former President’s claims, and I have engaged in consultations with the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice,” White House counsel Dana Remus writes. “The President has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified.”
That’s what’s happening in the news today, as I see it. What about you? What stories have caught your attention?
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There was a mass shooting inside a subway station in New York this morning. Five people were shot and thirteen were injured. There also were IED’s found that didn’t detonate. The suspect was wearing a gas mask and some type of construction worker’s vest.
Multiple people were shot in the subway system in Brooklyn during the Tuesday morning rush, officials said, a violent episode that came amid fears about public safety as New York City struggles to recover from the pandemic.
Police officers were called to the 36th Street station, where the D, N and Rlines pass through the Sunset Park neighborhood, around 8:30 a.m., the Police Department said. The Fire Department said that 13 people were injured, several by gunfire. Police officials said that preliminary reports suggested that five people were shot.
A senior law enforcement official said that the police were seeking a heavyset man with a gas mask and an orange construction vest who had been wearing a dark blue outfit that appeared to resemble that of a transit worker.
The official said that investigators believed that a smoke bomb went off and that the gunman had shot from inside a subway train. Videos posted on social media showed panicked riders pouring from a train and onto a platform at 36th Street as smoke billowed through the station.
See footage from inside the train car where at least 13 people were injured and five were shot in an NYC subway shooting in Brooklyn, New York. Sources are reporting a possible smoke device was detonated during the incident. https://t.co/s7flP955tupic.twitter.com/v9zaycOHcc
The US and Britain say they are looking into reports that chemical weapons have been used by Russian forces attacking the Ukrainian port of Mariupol.
Ukraine’s Azov regiment said three soldiers were injured by “a poisonous substance” in an attack on Monday.
However, no evidence has been presented to confirm the use of chemical weapons.
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said officials were working to “urgently” investigate what she called “a callous escalation” of the war.
The Pentagon called the potential use of the weapons “deeply concerning”.
Western nations have warned that the use of chemical weapons would mark a dangerous escalation of the conflict and have pledged to take firm action if Russia carries out such attacks.
Ukraine’s Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said the government was investigating the allegations, adding that early assumptions suggested phosphorous ammunition had been used.
Phosphorus is not classed as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention, but using it as an incendiary weapon near civilians would be illegal.
Did Russia really use chemical weapons in Ukraine? Experts remain sceptical https://t.co/ZiLfuYl52G
President Vladimir Putin vowed Tuesday that Russia’s bloody offensive in Ukraine would continue until its goals are fulfilled, and insisted the campaign was going as planned, despite a major withdrawal in the face of stiff Ukrainian opposition and significant losses.
Russian troops, thwarted in their push toward Ukraine’s capital, are now focusing on the eastern Donbas region, where Ukraine said Tuesday it was investigating a claim that a poisonous substance had been dropped on its troops. It was not clear what the substance might be, but Western officials warned that any use of chemical weapons by Russia would be a serious escalation of the already devastating war.
Russia invaded on Feb. 24, with the goal, according to Western officials, of taking Kyiv, toppling the government and installing a Moscow-friendly one. In the six weeks since, Russia’s ground campaign stalled, its forces suffered losses that may number in the thousands and it stands accused of killing civilians and other atrocities.
Putin insisted Tuesday that his military action aimed to protect people in areas in eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed rebels and to “ensure Russia’s own security.”
He said Russia “had no other choice” but to launch what he calls a “special military operation,” and vowed it would “continue until its full completion and the fulfillment of the tasks that have been set.”
The article says that the Russian forces are hoping he will get popular support from Ukrainians when he attacks the Donbas region.
Video of kids near Kyiv:
💔Children in #Kyiv region villages, liberated by #Ukrainian army
"If you don't leave our land, I'll shoot you all," boys have vivid memories about #RussianInvasion
Russia is receiving munitions and military hardware sourced from Iraq for its war effort in Ukraine with the help of Iranian weapons smuggling networks, according to members of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and regional intelligence services with knowledge of the process.
RPGs and anti-tank missiles, as well as Brazilian-designed rocket launcher systems, have been dispatched to Russia from Iraq as Moscow’s campaign has faltered in the last month, the Guardian has learned.
An Iranian-made Bavar 373 missile system, similar to the Russian S-300, has also been donated to Moscow by the authorities in Tehran, who also returned an S-300, according to a source who helped organise the transport.
Using the weapons-trafficking underworld would signal a dramatic shift in Russian strategy, as Moscow is forced to lean on Iran, its military ally in Syria, following new sanctions triggered by the invasion of Ukraine.
The developments also have huge implications for the direction and volume of trade in the international weapons trafficking business.
Iraq has hosted US and western troops since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the US has trained and supplied various Iraqi army and special forces units to defend the Baghdad government against insurgencies. After two decades of war, the country is awash with weaponry.
Putin is feeling the sting of failure.
Thousands of Russian battlefield deaths. Three front-line retreats by the Russian military. Millions of Ukrainians who will never forgive Moscow. More isolation than ever — and perilously few goals achieved.https://t.co/JEBWzB17Ut
More than six weeks into his war against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is feeling the sting of failure.
Thousands of Russian battlefield deaths. Three front-line retreats by the Russian military. Millions of Ukrainians who will never forgive Moscow. More isolation than ever — and perilously few goals achieved.
Putin is now regrouping to focus his military campaign on Ukraine’s east in what is widely seen as “Plan B,” after his forces failed to topple Ukraine’s government or wrest control of its biggest cities. All the while, questions are mounting about how a Russian leader steeped in security policy and known for railing against the folly of regime-change wars could have sleepwalked into a such a strategic morass.
At issue is a broader quandary that will occupy historians for years: How could Russia — a country with such deep familial, cultural and historic ties to its western neighbor — get Ukraine so wrong?
Officials in the United States and Europe are piecing together the answer to that question. What emerges, those officials say, is a picture of a hubristic and isolated leader, beset by biases and skewed information, pressing forward with a calamitous decision without consulting his full cohort of advisers. Putin rushed headlong into Ukraine, confident in his ability to secure a quick victory and weather any blowback within the authoritarian system he erected at home, they said. Underpinning his assumptions: misconceptions about Ukraine fundamentally rooted in Moscow’s colonial past.
“Historically, there just hasn’t been expertise on Ukraine in Russia at all,” said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis. “When you don’t believe a country’s a real country and a people’s a real people, why would you invest any expertise in a thing you don’t think exists?”
Read the rest of this interesting piece at the WaPo.
Dozens of politicians running for state or federal officeare aligning themselves with the right-wing, conspiracy-rich, sometimes-violent movement known as QAnon. They’re drawing tens of millions of dollars in donations as the movement’s popularity stays strong among voters, a Grid investigation has found.
And despite the movement’s penchant for lies and violence, key Republicans — from influential megadonors to prominent elected officials — are welcoming the QAnon movement into the party, Grid found. In sum: QAnon appears to be a growing political movement with increasing clout and significant mainstream appeal.
Grid reviewed public records and reporting, social media posts, and campaign materials and events to identify and confirm at least 78 QAnon-aligned candidates running for office in 26 states in 2022. They’re running for governorships, secretaries of state, seats in the Senate and House, and in state legislatures. They have raised over $20 million this cycle — and over $30 million since 2018.
David Reinert holds up a large “Q” sign while waiting in line to see President Donald J. Trump at his rally on August 2, 2018 at the Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
All but six of the QAnon-aligned candidates Grid examined are Republican. Over a dozen are incumbents: Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) serve in the House of Representatives, while another 14 serve at the state level, mostly legislatures. Most are running against fellow Republicans in primaries, which will take place throughout the spring and summer.
Arizona has the highest number of QAnon-aligned candidates running in 2022, at 13. Other states with high numbers of QAnon candidates include Florida (12), California (10) and Texas (six)….
While some Republican elites were circumspect about aligning themselves explicitly with the movement, their reluctance has ebbed as the popularity of QAnon’s theories have grown.
QAnon candidates receive support from GOP megadonors like Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, casino mogul Steve Wynn and San Francisco Giants owner Charles Johnson, as well as from party-affiliated fundraising machines. They have enjoyed exposure on right-wing outlets from Fox News to OANN. The movement’s causes and themes are echoed by prominent elected officials like Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.), and by former president Donald Trump himself.
Which raises a related riddle: What to call the influx of QAnon messages and candidates into the political mainstream? The movement has no apparent party structure or central organization, yet it appears stronger than any third party. The community doesn’t appear to have a candidate recruitment strategy but fielded dozens of federal and state candidates in over half of U.S. states this cycle.
There’s much more at the link. This is part one of a two-part investigation.
For more than a year now, Fox News star Tucker Carlsonhas gone out of his way to avoid confirming whether or not he’s vaccinated. This month, however, he bragged about having not gotten a single jab.
While speaking at Awaken Church earlier this month, the primetime star heaped praise on the San Diego megachurch for defying COVID-19 restrictions throughout the pandemic before mocking the need for additional booster shots.
“I skipped the first three, I’m not getting that one either,” Carlson said, to rapturous applause from the crowd, Voice of San Diego first reported.
Additional audio provided to Source Material by the nonprofit investigative outfit confirmed Carlson’s remarks, which further included him citing his having grown up “next to the Salk Institute in La Jolla” as evidence that he is “obviously” not opposed to vaccines.
“I’ve had like a million of them,” he said, but regarding the COVID shots, Carlson added of its proponents: “I look at these people, like, this just does not make sense at all. And I have no idea what’s up here, but whatever you’re telling me it’s just not true.”
The loudest anti-vax voice among a plethora of Fox News cranks, Carlson had repeatedly leaned on privacy rights to justify not providing his vax status when asked. “When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position? We can trade intimate details,” Carlson texted The New York Times last year when asked.
Supposedly Fox News requires all its employees to be vaccinated. I’m waiting to see what Carlson’s bosses have to say about this.
When I was 19, I had surgery for sex reassignment, or what is now called gender affirmation surgery. The callow young man who was obsessed with transitioning to womanhood could not have imagined reaching middle age. But now I’m closer to 50, keeping a watchful eye on my 401(k), and dieting and exercising in the hope that I’ll have a healthy retirement.
In terms of my priorities and interests today, that younger incarnation of myself might as well have been a different person — yet that was the person who committed me to a lifetime set apart from my peers.
There is much debate today about transgender treatment, especially for young people. Others might feel differently about their choices, but I know now that I wasn’t old enough to make that decision. Given the strong cultural forces today casting a benign light on these matters, I thought it might be helpful for young people, and their parents, to hear what I wish I had known.
I once believed that I would be more successful finding love as a woman than as a man, but in truth, few straight men are interested in having a physical relationship with a person who was born the same sex as them. In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed that the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body.
It turned out that several of those crushes were also gay. If I had confessed my interest, what might have developed? Alas, the rampant homophobia in my school during the AIDS crisis smothered any such notions. Today, I have resigned myself to never finding a partner. That’s tough to admit, but it’s the healthiest thing I can do.
As a teenager, I was repelled by the thought of having biological children, but in my vision of the adult future, I imagined marrying a man and adopting a child. It was easy to sacrifice my ability to reproduce in pursuit of fulfilling my dream. Years later, I was surprised by the pangs I felt as my friends and younger sister started families of their own.
Sadly, because of his early decision, Cohn is sterile and apparently unable to enjoy sex.
Surgery unshackled me from my body’s urges, but the destruction of my gonads introduced a different type of bondage. From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life. I must choose between the risks of taking exogenous estrogen, which include venous thromboembolism and stroke, or the risks of taking nothing, which includes degeneration of bone health. In either case, my risk of dementia is higher, a side effect of eschewing testosterone.
What was I seeking for my sacrifice? A feeling of wholeness and perfection. I was still a virgin when I went in for surgery. I mistakenly believed that this made my choice more serious and authentic. I chose an irreversible change before I’d even begun to understand my sexuality. The surgeon deemed my operation a good outcome, but intercourse never became pleasurable. When I tell friends, they’re saddened by the loss, but it’s abstract to me — I cannot grieve the absence of a thing I’ve never had.
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The Huntley-Brinkley Report with Chet Huntley anchoring in New York and David Brinkley manning the desk in Washington, D.C., began on NBC on this date in 1956. The news series continued through July 1970. Photo from the L.A. Times files.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
I find myself keeping the TV off these days. I never watch any shows or things but I do indulge in the nightly news a habit long practiced in my home. This dates back to the Huntley-Brinkly Report. We also had morning and evening newspapers. My Nana ensured the arrival of the National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. Dad always got the big weekly magazines which eventually wound up in the waiting room of the service shop in our little eastern Iowa town. That’s where someone dropped off the John Birch Society’s newsletter one time and I became aware of those right-wing conspiracy theories so prevalent today. My Dad was a Goldwater/Reagan Republican and immediately told me to trash it. I never had to be told again.
That’s one of the reasons I was really sad when my dad got addicted to Fox News and my sister and I had to find ways to keep him away from the TV. My trick was to call him up during football season or baseball season and have him call the game for me which is also something he did when I was a kid. I’m glad my parents never had to live those horrid 4 years of the previous guy. The TV news has become an hourly horror show of human atrocities and crimes.
It impacted sentiment against the Vietnam War and eventually the Afghanistan/Iraq Invasions. What are we to make of what’s going on in Ukraine? What did and can we do?
The New York Times Magazine has a podcast by Robert Draper up today with the transcript that’s got me realizing how important it is to have professional diplomats that stay out of the political arena once again. Here’s the headline: “‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin’. Amid the current crisis, Fiona Hill and other former advisers are connecting President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to Jan. 6. And they’re ready to talk.”
In the Oval Office, Hill recalls, describing a scene that has not been previously reported, she told Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that offering a membership path to Ukraine and Georgia could be problematic. While Bush’s appetite for promoting the spread of democracy had not been dampened by the Iraq war, President Vladimir Putin of Russia viewed NATO with suspicion and was vehemently opposed to neighboring countries joining its ranks. He would regard it as a provocation, which was one reason the United States’ key NATO allies opposed the idea. Cheney took umbrage at Hill’s assessment. “So, you’re telling me you’re opposed to freedom and democracy,” she says he snapped. According to Hill, he abruptly gathered his materials and walked out of the Oval Office.
“He’s just yanking your chain,” she remembers Bush telling her. “Go on with what you were saying.” But the president seemed confident that he could win over the other NATO leaders, saying, “I like it when diplomacy is tough.” Ignoring the advice of Hill and the U.S. intelligence community, Bush announced in Bucharest that “NATO should welcome Georgia and Ukraine into the Membership Action Plan.” Hill’s prediction came true: Several other leaders at the summit objected to Bush’s recommendation. NATO ultimately issued a compromise declaration that would prove unsatisfying to nearly everyone, stating that the two countries “will become members” without specifying how and when they would do so — and still in defiance of Putin’s wishes. (They still have not become members.)
“It was the worst of all possible worlds,” Hill said to me in her austere English accent as she recalled the episode over lunch this March. As one of the foremost experts on Putin and a current unofficial adviser to the Biden administration on the Russia-Ukraine war, Hill, 56, has already made a specialty of issuing warnings about the Russian leader that have gone unheeded by American presidents. As she feared, the carrot dangled by Bush to two countries — each of which gained independence in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and afterward espoused democratic ambitions — did not sit well with Putin. Four months after the 2008 NATO summit, Russian troops crossed the border and launched an attack on the South Ossetia region of Georgia. Though the war lasted only five days, a Russian military presence would continue in nearly 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. And after the West’s weak pushback against his aggression, Putin then set his sights on Ukraine — a sovereign nation that, Putin claimed to Bush at the Bucharest summit, “is not a country.”
You may continue to read more of Hill’s recollections as she served in the next two administrations before Trump came after her.
Her assessment of the former president has new resonance in the current moment: “In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.”
The big three network news anchors in 1968 — Huntley, Brinkley (NBC), Cronkite (CBS), and Frank Reynolds (ABC). Definitely, it was a small cadre of white men.
Charles Kupperman told the New York Times Magazine that the former president, who was impeached over his alleged 2019 extortion scheme against Ukraine, flew into a rage on May 23 of that year at the mention of the country’s name.
“He just let loose,” Kupperman recalled. “‘They’re [expletive] corrupt. They [expletive] tried to screw me.’”
Kupperman knew there was no chance that Trump understood the value of a good relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine after seeing the way he treated other allies, including France, Britain and South Korea, and he said the former president basically was not capable of making foreign policy because he didn’t even understand the concept on the most basic level.
“He felt like our allies were screwing us, and he had no sense as to why these alliances benefited us or why you need a global footprint for military and strategic capabilities,” Kupperman said. “If one were to ask him to define ‘balance of power,’ he wouldn’t know what that concept was. He’d have no idea about the history of Ukraine and why it’s in the front pages today. He wouldn’t know that Stalin starved that country. Those are the contextual points one has to take into account in the making of foreign policy.”
Barbara Walters became the first female co-anchor of an evening news program in 1976; co-anchor Harry Reasoner wasn’t happy.
I’ve had a lot to say about Joe Biden starting with what he did while I was in high school and the Supreme Court decision’ to integrate schools included bussing. Most of it is not all that complimentary. He lost me completely during the Anita Hill testimony during the Thomas hearings. Thomas’ tenure on the court has been thorny at best. President Biden has foreign policy chops. Obama’s treatment of Putin does not fare well in the podcast above. Alexander Vindman and John Bolton had this to say about Trump’s treatment of Ukraine also from the New York Times Magazine podcast..
Instead, Vindman said, the opposite occurred: “Ukraine became radioactive for the duration of the Trump administration. There wasn’t serious engagement. Putin had been wanting to reclaim Ukraine for eight years, but he was trying to gauge when was the right time to do it. Starting just months after Jan. 6, Putin began building up forces on the border. He saw the discord here. He saw the huge opportunity presented by Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys. I’m not pulling any punches here. I’m not using diplomatic niceties. These folks sent the signal Putin was waiting for.”
Bolton, a renowned foreign-policy hawk who also served in the administrations of Reagan and George W. Bush, also told me that Trump’s behavior had dealt damage to both Ukraine and America. The refusal to lend aid to Ukraine, the subsequent disclosure of the heavy-handed conversation with Zelensky and then the impeachment hearing all served to undermine Ukraine’s new president, Bolton told me. “It made it impossible for Zelensky to establish any kind of relationship with the president of the United States — who, faced with a Russian Army on his eastern border, any Ukrainian president would have as his highest priority. So basically that means Ukraine loses a year and a half of contact with the president.”
Max Robinson in 1978 became the first Black person to anchor the nightly network news.
You may listen to or read more at the link above.
There are still many useful fools in the Republican Party and Right-Wing Media that make it hard to believe that the John Birch society was once fiercely anti-communist. They have to be ignoring the fact that Putin really wants a renewed Soviet Union with its former satellite states in place. John Mearsheimer is a political science professor at the University of Chicago who blames the Western intervention for Putin’s hostilities. He argues the Russians see us as Nation-building in their backyard.
I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the nato Summit in Bucharest, where afterward nato issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of nato. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just nato expansion. nato expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.
You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy?
If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of nato, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no nato expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, nato expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.
You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,” and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. nato can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a liberal democracy.
It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.
The Monroe Doctrine, essentially.
Of course. There’s no country in the Western hemisphere that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces into that country.
Meanwhile, huge military operations in the Donetsk Oblast by the Russians prove that they still seriously want Ukraine.
More than 10,000 civilians have died in the Russian siege of Mariupol, the city's mayor tells @AP. Mayor Vadym Boychenko said bodies “carpeted” the streets of the Ukrainian port city and he fears the actual death toll could be double that figure. https://t.co/Hm5WoWYvVS
The mayor of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol tells The Associated Press that more than 10,000 civilians have died in the southeastern city since the Russian invasion in February.
Mayor Vadym Boychenko told The Associated Press by telephone Monday that corpses were “carpeted through the streets of our city” and that the death toll could be more than 20,000.
Boychenko also said Russian forces have brought mobile crematoria to the city to dispose of the bodies and accused Russian forces of refusing to allow humanitarian convoys into the city in an attempt to disguise the carnage.
Simpson broke barriers in 1988 as the first Black woman anchor and then again in 1992 as the first Black woman to moderate a presidential debate.
So, as foretold, the Russians regrouped. They will have some new NATO allies and they are already harping about it. This is from the BBC. “Ukraine War: Russia warns Sweden and Finland against Nato membership.” Mother Russia appears to be frightened by its neighbors.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that “the alliance remains a tool geared towards confrontation”.
It comes as US defence officials said Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine has been a “massive strategic blunder” which is likely to bring Nato enlargement.
US officials expect the Nordic neighbours to bid for membership of the alliance, potentially as early as June.
Washington is believed to support the move which would see the Western alliance grow to 32 members. US State Department officials said last week that discussions had taken place between Nato leaders and foreign ministers from Helsinki and Stockholm.
Before it launched its invasion, Russia demanded that the alliance agree to halt any future enlargement, but the war has led to the deployment of more Nato troops on its eastern flank and a rise in public support for Swedish and Finnish membership.
All is not quiet on the Western Front.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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But it is in the folk traditions of England and Germany that the figure of the hare is specifically connected to Easter. Accounts from the 1600s in Germany 
The American Egg Board is donating 90,000 eggs to the event as part of its longtime partnership with the White House, egg board president and CEO Emily Metz told CNN. That includes approximately 50,000 hard-boiled eggs that will be used for the egg roll races with wooden spoons, the egg hunt, and for dyeing and decorating. Those eggs were hard-boiled, dyed and transported from North Carolina to Washington on a refrigerated truck by Braswell Family Farms’ John Watson, where they will be stored over the weekend ahead of Monday’s festivities.
The New York Times: 
I’m going to post more stories as links only because I just don’t want to think about bad news today. Here’s what’s happening:
Oh, before I get ahead of the chickens, let me introduce you to 
Read Mark Meadows’ texts with Mike Lee and Chip Roy at this 
I’m still trying to make sense of the Texas Governor’s truck stoppage at the Mexico/Texas border. It doesn’t do anything to check trucks for anything else but bad tires and other safety features. And, it’s screwing the state’s economy royally. 
And don’t even get me started with Kentucky. They’re gearing up to ensure women die from pregnancies and backstreet abortions. This is from VOX: 
“If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” he said in the filing….
While speaking at Awaken Church earlier this month, the primetime star heaped praise on the San Diego megachurch for 
I once believed that I would be more successful finding love as a woman than as a man, but in truth, few straight men are interested in having a physical relationship with a person who was born the same sex as them. In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed that the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body.
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