Me? Me? Me?... Yeah yeah yeah amigo... What can me say about me-self?... me-self...me-self... Ole ole ole... me me me... I'm a young banana shoot... My dad is Banana Pa... My mom is Banana Ma... I am happy happy happy... I run around... oops... I can't run... I sing aloud... all day long... I sing in the rain... I sing in the shine... I sing day and night... I sing all the time...
I watch the butterflies and the bees... and the cranes and the geese...
Aha aha aha... here we go again... this little swallow circling on my head... the little swallow on my head... is about to poop on me... Hey, little fella, don't cha know where to unload ya poopa?... But, that's alright... I can swallow my pride to befriend a swallow... Yup yup yup... swallow my pride to befriend a swallow...
The United States is committed to strengthening global resiliency and democratic renewal, and promoting peaceful, self-reliant nations that become strong economic and security partners capable of addressing shared challenges. To that end, the U.S. Government is moving forward in the spirit of partnership with Haiti, Libya, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, and five countries in the Coastal West Africa region (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, and Togo) to implement the ten-year U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability.
Most of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled abroad in the past weeks have passed through the Lviv train station. Photograph by Andres Gutierrez / Anadolu Agency / Getty
In Lviv, on the western edge of Ukraine, most of the time the war felt very far away. Its shadow appeared, fleetingly, in the beautiful old cavernous Greek Catholic churches throughout the city, where people filled the pews and wept, and the priests, who perform the Byzantine liturgy in Ukrainian, called for God to protect the nation from its enemies; and in the basements and hallways and underground parking garages where people sheltered during the frequent air-raid sirens, most often at night; and in the old city after 8 p.m., when the curfew was approaching and all the many small restaurants and cafés closed; and in the many schools and nonprofits that had been turned into shelters for the people fleeing the bombing in the east of the country; but, still, most of the time, during the fourth week of the war, people in Lviv followed the bloodshed in the same way that everyone else in the world did: on television.
The one place in Lviv where the war was never far away was the train station. Built in the early twentieth century, when Lviv was a cosmopolitan, multiethnic city called Lemberg and was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it is a grand, attractive building two miles from the old town. It has also been, since the start of the invasion, as the Lviv-based sociologist Alona Liasheva put it to me, “a hell on earth.” It was the westernmost hub of the Ukrainian train system, in a country that still relies primarily on trains; most of the three million people who had fled abroad in the past weeks had passed through it, as did the hundreds of thousands who had fled westward but remained in Ukraine, including in Lviv.
A VietJet Air Airbus A320(SL) departs from Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Thailand, on September 18, 2017.Credit: Flickr/Alec Wilson
The low-cost carrier Thai VietJet Air has been forced to make a public apology after an April Fool’s tweet prompted a flood of criticism in Thailand, one of its major markets, for making fun of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn. The post described the creation of a fake new route between the city of Nan in northern Thailand and Munich, Germany, where the king has for many years spent considerable amounts of time.
The larger reality is that the world has never before been confronted by a genocidal war waged by a man brandishing nuclear weapons.P hotograph by Dan Kitwood / Getty
“We have to call this what it is,” Volodymyr Zelensky said, late last month, a few days after Vladimir Putin had ordered the invasion and conquest of Ukraine. “Russia’s criminal actions against Ukraine show signs of genocide.” President Zelensky, who lost family members during the Holocaust, and who also happens to have a law degree, sounded suitably cautious about invoking genocide, and he called for the International Criminal Court in The Hague to send war-crimes investigators as a first step. But such investigations take years, and rarely result in convictions. (Since the I.C.C. was established in 1998, it has indicted only Africans; and Russia, like the United States, refuses its jurisdiction.) The only court that Zelensky can make his case in for now is the court of global public opinion, where his instincts, drawing on deep wells of courage and conviction, have been unerring. And by the end of the invasion’s second week—with Putin’s indiscriminate bombardment of civilian targets intensifying, and the death toll mounting rapidly; with more than two and a half million Ukrainians having fled the country, and millions more under relentless attack in besieged cities and towns; and with no end in sight—Zelensky no longer deferred to outside experts to describe what Ukrainians face in the most absolute terms. “I will appeal directly to the nations of the world if the leaders of the world do not make every effort to stop this war,” he said in a video message on Tuesday. He paused, and looking directly into the camera, added, “This genocide.”
TTCT – Để hiểu được cuộc xung đột ở Ukraine hiện tại, không thể không nhìn lại một lịch sử rất dài, ít ra là từ những ngày ngay sau cuộc chiến lớn gần nhất ở châu Âu.
Việc mở rộng NATO là một trong những vướng mắc lớn nhất của quan hệ Nga – Mỹ suốt thời gian ông Putin cầm quyền, trải 5 đời tổng thống Mỹ. Ảnh: The New York Times
Ngày 5-3-1946, trong bài phát biểu tại Đại học Westminster, bang Missouri, Mỹ, Thủ tướng Anh Winston Churchill, người kiên định sự nghi kỵ không giới hạn với nhà lãnh đạo Liên Xô Joseph Stalin (ngược lại cũng thế), tuyên bố: “Từ Stettin ở Baltic tới Trieste ở Adriatic, một bức màn sắt đã buông xuống trên khắp lục địa”.
TTCT – Dân Mỹ nói riêng và dân tình cả thế giới nói chung đều hoang mang trước cơn bão giá đang ập đến. Dù chỉ số giá cả chính thức ở Mỹ tăng 7,9% vào tháng 2 so với cùng kỳ năm ngoái, giá cả thực tế tăng cao hơn thế nhiều lần: giá xăng đã tăng chừng 40%, giá món nào trong siêu thị cũng tăng vài ba chục phần trăm.
Trong bối cảnh đó, Cục Dự trữ liên bang (FED) nước này chỉ nâng lãi suất điều hành thêm 0,25 điểm phần trăm vào tuần trước, làm sao thuyết phục thị trường họ đang sử dụng vũ khí hạng nặng để chống lạm phát?
Lạm phát 14,8%, lãi suất phải trên 20%
Nếu đơn giản hóa mọi yếu tố khác chỉ còn tiền với hàng, sẽ dễ thấy nếu tiền nhiều lên mà hàng giữ nguyên, ắt hẳn giá sẽ tăng. Giá còn tăng mạnh hơn nữa nếu cùng lúc đó hàng giảm xuống.
Americans are used to wars against people who don’t so casually speak our language. Zelensky can respond to Russian propaganda by directly addressing the Russian people — in Russian.
Photo illustration by Vanessa Saba
By Keith Gessen
NYtime – Published March 11, 2022Updated March 13, 2022
The thing about the videos from the war in Ukraine in 2014 was that there were very few war videos. It was, at least at first, a small-arms war. Fighting, when it erupted, happened on city streets. As soon as shots were fired, whoever was making the video would put away the phone and run.
The videos that characterized the conflict were not of rifle fire but of protests: riot police beating demonstrators as people shouted, “What are you doing?”; later, young men on the same square, outfitted in motley assortments of helmets and kneepads, counterattacking; videos of people arguing; videos of people being forced, in eastern Ukraine, to get on their knees. After pro-Russian forces took over cities in the east and the Ukrainian Army finally moved to restore its authority, there were videos of pro-Russian protesters trying to prevent tanks from entering their towns. These were the images of a country falling apart.
As Russian forces withdraw from the areas around the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, some of the horrors of what they have done are being revealed with bodies being discovered littering the streets of towns
A Ukrainian soldier walks past the body of a civilian, who according to residents was killed by Russian army soldiers, as it lies on the street in Bucha (Image: REUTERS)
Consistent with Sections 205 and 301 of the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992 (the “Act”) (22 U.S.C. §§ 5725 and 5731) and section 7043(f)(3)(C) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2022 (Div. K, P.L. 117-103), the Department submits this report and the enclosed certification on conditions in Hong Kong from March 2021 through March 2022 (“covered period”).
Summary
The Department of State assesses that during the covered period, the central government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) took new actions directly threatening U.S. interests in Hong Kong and that are inconsistent with the Basic Law and the PRC’s obligation pursuant to the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 (Sino-British Joint Declaration) to allow Hong Kong to enjoy a high degree of autonomy. In the Certification of Hong Kong’s Treatment under United States Laws, the Secretary of State certified Hong Kong does not warrant treatment under U.S. law in the same manner as U.S. laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1, 1997.
This week, as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine, we revisit this piece by Oliver Bullough from 2018. For decades, politicians have welcomed the super-rich with open arms. Now they’re finally having second thoughts. But is it too late?
