Texas Republicans endorse legislation to allow vote on secession from US

They have shown true traitorous colors.

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State’s part chairman, Allen West, is latest Republican to come out in support of declaring Texas an independent nation

The Texas Republican party has endorsed legislation that would allow state residents to vote whether to secede from the United States.

In a talk show interview, party chair Allen West argued that: “Texans have a right to voice their opinions on [this] critical issue”.

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The school reopening debate, explained in 600 words

A public school classroom in Bruz, France, on May 12, 2020.
A public school classroom in Bruz, France, on May 12, 2020. | Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images

Here’s what it would take to finally reopen schools.

If there’s one thing everyone seems to agree about during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s that we have to eventually reopen schools for in-person teaching. Where there’s less agreement is what, exactly, is required to make that possible.

Some of that disagreement bubbled up in the past few weeks, as some teachers unions across the country argued that vaccinating teachers and other school staff isn’t by itself enough to safely reopen.

When I first heard about this, I was a little annoyed. One of the reasons teachers are, at least in some states, getting priority for vaccines is to reopen schools. So it felt like a bit of a bait-and-switch.

But as I talked to teachers unions in California and Virginia (where some of these battles have spilled over to public forums), I had to admit they have a point: Union leaders noted the evidence from vaccine trials so far only shows that Covid-19 vaccines stop the patient from getting sick and dying, but we don’t know yet if vaccines stop the spread of the disease.

The concern, then, is that a teacher could get vaccinated, pick up the coronavirus while teaching in-person, then carry the pathogen home — infecting their own family or other people they interact with.

That’s not to say we should give up and keep schools closed until the pandemic is over. It’s instead a matter of adopting other precautions, along with vaccines: reduced community spread, consistent masking and use of other protective equipment, better ventilation, social distancing in classrooms, aggressive testing, and so on. “That’s what we’ve been talking about all along,” E. Toby Boyd, president of the California Teachers Association, told me.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reinforced part of this view last week with an article in JAMA: There’s now solid evidence that schools can safely reopen — but with the right precautions. In one study of 17 K-12 schools in rural Wisconsin with strong adherence to masking and other steps, there were only seven cases of Covid-19 due to in-school transmission over 13 weeks. Other research found K-12 schools don’t seem to be superspreading sites or cause community-wide surges of Covid-19 on their own.

In fact, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said the research is so strong that schools can safely reopen before vaccinating all teachers.

Even once school staff are vaccinated, it makes sense to adopt the other Covid-19 precautions, John Brooks at the CDC told me. While some experts expect vaccines will offer protection from transmission, we just don’t know that yet. “I think we err on the side of caution,” Brooks said.

One hitch here is resources. Protective equipment, improving ventilation, and more testing can cost money — and as they deal with a recession, local and state governments may not have the budget for all of that. That’s where President Joe Biden and Congress, with the federal government’s deep pockets, can help, if they overcome concerns about too much spending.

Still, Brooks noted there are several things schools could do on the cheap. Cloth masks aren’t very expensive. Neither is leaving doors open or cracking a window to improve ventilation. Foregoing some extracurricular activities, especially those indoors, could save money and avoid superspreading events.

All of this requires prioritizing reopening schools. America has not done that so far, as it’s reopened bars and indoor dining before in-person teaching — fueling outbreaks in actually risky spaces that then forced more caution around reopening schools, because community spread was so out of control.

To reopen schools, then, officials will need to adopt the precautions that have long been recommended for Covid-19. They might want to vaccinate teachers and other staff as an added safeguard. But above all they’ll have to truly prioritize reopening schools, even if it means spending more money and keeping bars closed.

For more on reopening schools, read Anna North’s explainer for Vox.

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Twilight of the Russian gods?

Alexey Navalny’s three and a half years sentence in a penal colony is supposed to be a punishment for having violated his parole conditions on a trumped-up conviction from 2014. He’s been found guilty of not reporting to Russian police on time in the weeks and months he was evacuated to Germany while in a coma after having been poisoned with the chemical nerve agent Novichok by the FSB, Russia’s secret intelligence service and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB. 

The absurd sentence that has been handed down on Navalny suggests that Russia under Vladimir Putin is on an unstoppable path back to the old authoritarian ways of the Soviet Union, the country where  Putin began his career in the KGB.

This fact has become increasingly obvious for years, starting from the 2006 murder of prominent investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya; the manipulation of the Russian Constitution after 2008, which helped cement Putin’s grip on power and made him the ruler of the country for all eternity; the imprisonment of the activists from Pussy Riot; the annexation of Crimea; the murder of former Deputy Prime Minister and democratic opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015; the mysterious deaths of activists and the poisoning of leading opposition figures; the Novichok attack on former spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter in the UK; now the latest case involving Navalny.

Furthermore, more and more incontrovertible evidence of FSB hit squads involved in the killings of human rights activists have been uncovered, according to the investigative journalists at Bellingcat. 

A woman takes part in a protest in support of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny in front of the Russian embassy in Prague, January 23, 2021. EPA-EFE//MARTIN DIVISEK

All of this is occurring at the same time when Russia’s biggest corruption scandal to date, Putin’s $1 billion “Palace on the Black Sea” has come to the public’s attention. 70 million Russians, roughly half of the population, have now watched the two-hour documentary. An unmistakable feeling of “enough is enough” is spreading throughout Russia as outraged citizens wave gilded toilet brushes at the recent round of anti-Putin protests in reference to those €700 brushes in the palace, with its nightclub and its own underground hockey stadium. Meanwhile, Russia’s pensioners struggle to pay their rent.

By imprisoning Navalny, Putin risks turning the opposition leader into a martyr – a Russian Nelson Mandela. Putin’s approval ratings have, nonetheless, been over 50 percent, due to the controlled state media. The two assassination attempts against Navalny, the arbitrary waves of arrests, and the exposure of insane levels of corruption have changed all of that. More people are now against Putin than they are for him. What is remarkable, however, is that despite an unbelievable wave of arrests and police brutality, people continue to demonstrate. Even drivers of passing trains and cars signal their solidarity by honking and signalling.

One of Putin’s pet projects, the Nord Stream II gas pipeline linking Russia to Europe via the Baltic Sea, can no longer, in any good conscience, be justified as eight people close to Putin now face sanctions following the Navalny ruling.

With each arrest, Putin becomes more like Erich Honecker – the longtime leader of East Germany, the same German Democratic Republic (GDR) where Putin served as a KGB officer in Dresden – in that he is rapidly approaching the abyss and initiating his own damnation. When Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev opened the door to democracy and freedom in the Soviet Union, a first in Russia’s more than 1,000-year history, the old Soviet nomenklatura tried to undo it all in the botched August 1991 coup. By that time, average Soviet citizens had tasted the type of freedoms that they did not want to give up. The result was that they stood up to the tanks sent by the Communist hardliners with their bare hands and defended Moscow’s White House, the seat of the Russian parliament at the time.

The US, Germany, France and other countries have denounced Putin and Russia’s courts after the ruling on the Navalny case. Will the Russian people soon follow? As Navalny said in his fiery court speech: “You can’t lock up millions or hundreds of thousands of people. I very much hope that people will realize this. And they will.”