Let’s Get This Party (Divide) Started
May 31, 2022
- Montreal non-profits are buying up apartments to keep rents low (CBC)
- 1st pride parade held in Akita to show support for sexual minorities (Asahi Shimbun)
- EU leaders agreed on Monday to cut 90% of oil imports from Russia by the end of 2022. The agreement resolves a deadlock with Hungary over the bloc’s toughest sanction yet on Moscow since its invasion of Ukraine. Diplomats said the agreement clears the way for other elements of a sixth package of EU sanctions on Russia to take effect, including cutting Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, from the SWIFT messaging system.
- The embargo on seaborne oil imports would apply to two thirds of all EU imports of Russian oil. The remaining third comes via the Druzhba pipeline, which runs through Ukraine to Hungary. Once Poland and Germany, which are also connected to the pipeline, stop buying Russian oil by year’s end, 90% of all imports from Russia will have ceased. The remaining 10% will be temporarily exempt from the embargo, so that landlocked Hungary, along with Slovakia and the Czech Republic, all connected to the southern leg of the pipeline, can feel confident they won’t have any “sudden interruptions of supply.” (Reuters)
- A French journalist was killed Monday while traveling in a convoy to rescue civilians in Sievierodonetsk, the epicenter of Russia’s push to capture the entire Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. French broadcasters said Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff, 32, was fatally hit by shrapnel “covering a humanitarian operation in an armored vehicle.”
- His colleague Maxime Brandstaetter was wounded. Leclerc-Imhoff worked at BFM TV for six years and was on his second trip to Ukraine since the start of the war almost 100 days ago. Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk, announced the journalist’s death and blamed Russian forces for firing at the vehicle that was traveling to pick up people for evacuation.
- Because of the attack, Haidai said the evacuation was called off. A spokesperson for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, said the “list of Russian crimes against media workers in Ukraine keeps expanding.” Among the dead are a Fox News cameraman and a local producer working for the network, who were killed in the same attack that left network correspondent Benjamin Hall injured in March. (CBS News)
- For NATO, Turkey Is a Disruptive Ally (NYT, $)
- What Happened on Day 95 of the War in Ukraine (NYT, $)
- Man arrested after Mona Lisa smeared with cake (Guardian)
- More than 4,000 arrested in Amhara as Ethiopia cracks down on militia (Guardian)
- ‘TikTok King’, 77, challenges ex-rebel for Colombia’s top job (BBC)
- Canada’s Military, Where Sexual Misconduct Went to the Top, Looks for a New Path (NYT, $)
- Donald Trump has been making rounds, repeating lies and fanning flames at conservative venues. After firing up the crowd of gun enthusiasts at the NRA Convention in Houston last week, Trump headed to Wyoming on Saturday, where he spoke in support of Harriet Hageman, whom he endorsed to be the Republican primary challenger to Congresswoman Liz Cheney in the state’s midterm elections next year. Cheney, of course, is part of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capital by extremist followers of the former president.
- Addressing the sub-capacity crowd in Casper at a rally for Harriet Hageman, Trump slammed Cheney, accusing her in his typical hyperbolic fashion of doing the very things he does himself. “As one of the nation’s leading proponents of the insurrection hoax, Liz Cheney has pushed a grotesquely false, fabricated, hysterical partisan narrative,” Trump exclaimed. In case anyone missed his point, he added: “Look at the so-called word insurrection, January 6 — what a load of crap.” The committee will hold a series of high-profile public hearings starting June 9. (Politico, Guardian)
- Irma Garcia was one of two teachers killed in last Tuesday’s Texas school shooting. The fourth grade teacher taught at Robb Elementary in Uvalde for 23 years. Two days after Irma’s death, her husband, Joe, collapsed and died at home after taking flowers to a memorial in his wife’s honor. The couple were high school sweethearts and married over 25 years; they left four children behind.
- Debra Austin, Irma’s cousin, started a GoFundMe campaign in Irma’s honor; it was covered by several national outlets and quickly surpassed its initial goal of $10,000. Austin’s campaign was combined with another campaign set up by John Martinez, Irma’s nephew, which raised over $550,000 with a boost from philanthropist Bill Pulte, who encouraged his 3.2 million Twitter followers to donate to it. Four days and more than 46,000 donations later, the campaign has raised over $2.6 million, 100% of which will go to the Garcia family. Additional GoFundMe campaigns have been started to raise money for victims, including Irma’s co-teacher Eva Mireles and others who survived the shooting. (NBC News)
- The Men Lost to 20 Bruckner Boulevard (NYT, $)
- Progressives take aim at Democratic leadership over support for centrist candidates (Guardian)
- Why Trump Isn’t to Blame for the Nation’s Toxic Political Tribalism (Politico)
- ‘Do something!’: Biden visits Uvalde after mass shooting as onlookers urge him to take action (Guardian)
- Locking People Up Is No Way to Treat Mental Illness (Atlantic, $)
- Pelosi’s Husband Faces Drunken Driving Charge in California (NYT, $)
- Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic. In one section from her forthcoming book Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, Tiffany describes a 16-year-old girl who arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center on August 25, 2014, in baffling condition. “She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition, and no abnormal sounds in her breathing. But when the emergency-room doctor on duty pressed on her neck and chest, he heard noises like Rice Krispies crackling in a bowl of milk—spaces behind her throat, around her heart, and between her lungs and chest wall were studded with pockets of air, an X-ray confirmed, and her lungs were very slightly collapsed.”
- The girl told the doctors she’d been screaming for hours the night before at the Dallas stop of One Direction’s Where We Are Tour. The physicians hypothesized that exertion had forced open a small hole in her respiratory tract. She was given extra oxygen and kept overnight for observation, and required no follow-up treatment. Three years later, the incident was described in all its absurd, gory detail in a paper published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine. While doctors were familiar with military pilots, scuba divers, and weightlifters straining their respiratory tract, this case presented the first evidence that “forceful screaming during pop concerts” could have the same physical toll.
- Tiffany, herself a superfan, takes the reader through the online world of fans, stans, and boybands. She introduces girls who damage their lungs from screaming too loud, fans rallying together to manipulate chart numbers using complex digital subversion, and an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories surrounding band members’ allergies, internet typos, and hairstyles. Along the way she makes a convincing and often moving argument that fangirls, in their ingenuity and collaboration, created the social internet we know today. “Before most people were using the internet for anything,” Tiffany writes, “fans were using it for everything.” (Atlantic)
- Circling Sicily on Its Regional Trains (NYT, $)
- The animals with an artistic eye (BBC)
- Bedbugs, anxiety and friendships: the ups and downs of life on tennis’ lower rungs (Guardian)
- The big idea: could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered? (Guardian)
- Seeking a Cure in France’s Waters (New Yorker)