“It is very difficult for me to talk about that time because she was dying,” Victoria said from her daughter’s bedside as the thud of artillery echoed in the background. “I’ve got used to the bombing now, it’s not scary after what I’ve lived through. I watched my child almost die.

“I’m just very happy she is alive, she lived, and she understands everything. Her brain could have been damaged. It is a miracle.”

Source: ‘I can’t tell him his mother has died’: the cost of Russia’s assault on Kharkiv | Ukraine | The Guardian

Source: Putin has a 21st-century digital battle plan, so why is he fighting like it’s 1939? | John Naughton | The Guardian

Source: Mexican muralists call for peace in Ukraine | Euronews

Patriotism, lately, for me and (I think) others like me, feels wrong and embarrassing, because I associate it with the worst kinds of racists and reactionaries. I could not—or at least did not bother to—imagine earnestly being a patriot, when the people who most loudly identified as patriots were people whose behavior I found abhorrent. But Booker’s speech raised an unspoken question: What else are we letting be stolen by people who are by admission of their own side “demagogic?” By its end, I was reconsidering a recent idea I’d had to put a Black Lives Matter sign up in my apartment window in the small, politically purple, rural town where I live. I am now thinking I might also put up an American flag.

I do not feel what I would consider a flag-waving kind of patriotism. Yet I do care for this country, and I am a citizen of this country. I helped start an antiracism project at my local library, and I meet with my neighbors to read books about community and against tyranny, because of something not wholly unrelated to patriotism that is absolutely rooted in love of country. What if refusing to allow the American flag to be a hate symbol is part of the active citizenship, the critical patriotism, that I am compelled by? What if it could represent not something angry and antiquated and obsessed with an old way of power, but an active, living thing that we tend and grow?

All three of us were crying, and the two staffers behind Booker, as he stared at Jackson and told her, “You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.”

Source: Patriotism Felt Wrong and Embarrassing Until I Refused to Let It

Source: Massive Ice Shelf Collapses in Antarctica – Slashdot

Source: Creative Commons Opposes Piracy-Combatting ‘SMART’ Copyright Act – Slashdot

Russian soldiers have been targeting activists, journalists and local politicians in all towns and cities they have seized, with the latest victim Kostiantyn Ovsiannikov, a civic activist and journalist from Prymorsk in the Zaporizhya oblast.  Ovsiannikov, the head of two local civic initiatives, had been active in the peaceful protests since Russia occupied Prymorsk on 1 March, and the invaders almost certainly knew this when they turned up at his home in the morning of 26 March.  Ovsinnikov was, at least, released that evening, though the invaders have removed his computer, etc., and very likely tortured him.  Other public figures, including Viktor Maruniak, Head of the Stara Zburivka Council in the Kherson oblast, Dmytro Vasyliev, Secretary of the Nova Kakhovka City Council, and 23-year-old Ihor Prusayev have not been seen since they were abducted several days ago.  There are particularly grave concerns for the life and safety of Maruniak, who is being deprived of vital medication.

Source: Russian invaders intensify abductions and terror against Ukrainian civic activists and journalists