Why Putin wants Alexei Navalny dead

Navalny’s movement is unlike any in recent history.

In August 2020, Russian politician Alexei Navalny was campaigning in Siberia when he suddenly fell ill. He collapsed, was rushed to a hospital, then evacuated to Berlin, Germany, where doctors concluded that he had been poisoned with a lethal nerve agent called Novichok.

It was not completely unexpected. In recent years, a number of Russian dissidents and defectors have been poisoned. And Navalny is the most outspoken critic of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin. In less than 10 years, Navalny has risen from blogging about corruption to being the face of Russia’s opposition movement. When he was poisoned, he was organizing a campaign that threatened Putin’s party in elections across the country.

Watch the video above to find out how Alexei Navalny built a movement unlike any in recent Russian history, and how he became Putin’s greatest threat.

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Eviction moratorium struck down by a Trump judge in a poorly reasoned opinion – Vox

On Thursday evening, a Trump-appointed judge on a federal court in Texas handed down a decision that calls into question the legality of these moratoriums. Currently, there is no congressional moratorium on evictions in place, only the CDC moratorium, although it is likely that the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill currently being negotiated in Congress will implement a new statutory moratorium.

Though Judge J. Campbell Barker’s order in Terkel v. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only explicitly strikes down the CDC’s moratorium, Barker’s opinion is fairly broad and suggests that congressional regulation of evictions may also be unconstitutional. His opinion, if embraced by higher courts, could endanger any federal regulation of the housing market, including bans on discrimination in housing.

The implications of Barker’s opinion, explained

The opinion is a mélange of libertarian tropes, long-discarded constitutional theory, and statements that are entirely at odds with binding Supreme Court decisions.

The thrust of Barker’s Terkel opinion is that the Constitution’s commerce clause, which provides that Congress may “regulate commerce … among the several states,” is not broad enough to permit federal regulation of evictions.

But, as the Supreme Court explained in United States v. Lopez (1995), the commerce clause gives Congress broad authority to regulate the national economy — including any activity that “‘substantially affects’ interstate commerce.” Though Lopez struck down a federal law prohibiting individuals from bringing guns near school zones, the Lopez opinion emphasizes the breadth of Congress’s power to regulate the economy. “Where economic activity substantially affects interstate commerce,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the Court, “legislation regulating that activity will be sustained.”

Source: Eviction moratorium struck down by a Trump judge in a poorly reasoned opinion – Vox

US intel: Saudi crown prince approved Khashoggi killing | TheHill

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the October 2018 killing of U.S.-based journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, according to a declassified report released by the Biden administration on Friday.

The report, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the Crown Prince “approved an operation… to capture or kill” the Saudi journalist.

“We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decisionmaking in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi,” the report said.

Source: US intel: Saudi crown prince approved Khashoggi killing | TheHill

COVID-19: Morocco Vaccinated 3,327,858 People

COVID-19-vaccinated-in-Morocco.jpg

Rabat – Health authorities in Morocco have vaccinated 3,327,858 Moroccan citizens and residents against COVID-19 as of Friday, February 26 at 6 p.m.

The campaign seeks to cover 33 million Moroccans in order to achieve collective immunity in the country.

In the past 24 hours, health authorities recorded 480 new COVID-19 cases.

The figure brings the total number of Morocco’s confirmed COVID-19 cases to 482,994. 

In the past 24 hours, the health ministry also announced 846 new recoveries from COVID-19 and 10 coronavirus-related deaths.

The total number of recovered COVID-19 patients in Morocco currently stands at 468,387, marking a 97% national recovery rate. The number of deaths, meanwhile, reached 8,608, maintaining a national fatality rate of 1.8%.

Morocco now counts 5,999 active COVID-19 cases, including 463 patients in severe or critical condition. 

Regional distribution of new COVID-19 cases

Casablanca-Settat remains the region with the most COVID-19 cases. It recorded 284 new cases in the past 24 hours and five deaths.

Oreintal comes second (45 cases), followed by Rabat-Sale-Kenitra (45 cases), Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima (38 cases, two deaths), Marrakech-Safi (27 cases, one death), Souss-Massa (12 cases), Beni Mellal-Khenifra (eight cases), Dakhla-Oued Eddahab (six cases), and Fez-Meknes (five cases).

The region of Laayoune-Sakia El Hamra recorded five cases, followed by Draa-Tafilalet (four cases) and Guelmim-Oued Noun (one case).

The post COVID-19: Morocco Vaccinated 3,327,858 People appeared first on Morocco World News.

Download 280 Pictographs That Put Japanese Culture Into a New Visual Language: They’re Free for the Public to Use

“One of the biggest considerations when traveling to Japan is its inscrutable language,” writes Designboom’s Juliana Neira. But then, one might also consider making that language more scrutable — and making one’s experience in Japan much richer — by learning some of it. Kanji, the Chinese characters used in the written Japanese language, may at first look like small, often bewilderingly complex pictures, and many assume they visually evoke the meanings they express. In fact, to use the linguistic terms, they’re not pictograms, representations of thoughts or ideas, but logograms, representations of words or parts of words.

Resemble miniature works of art though they often do, kanji aren’t entirely unsystematic. This helps beginning learners get a handle on the first and most essential characters of the thousands they’ll eventually need to know.


So does the fact that some of them, in origin, really are pictographic — that is, they look like the meaning of the word they represent — or at least pictographic enough to make them teachable through images. The Japanese word for “mountain,” to cite an elementary example, is 山; “river” is 川; “tree” is 木. Alas, most of us who enjoy the 山, 川, and 木 of Japan — to say nothing of the 書店 and 喫茶店 in its cities — haven’t been able to visit them at all in this past pandemic year.

“After experiencing years of tourism growth, tourists to Japan are down over 95% due to the pandemic,” writes Spoon & Tamago’s Johnny Waldman. “Graphic designer Kenya Hara and his firm Nippon Design Center have self-initiated a project to release over 250 pictograms — free for anyone to use — in support of tourism in Japan from a visual design perspective.” Collectively bannered the Experience Japan Pictograms, these clear and evocative icons represent a wide range of the places and activities one can enjoy in the Land of the Rising Sun: skiing and surfing, calligraphy and open-air hot-spring bathing, Ginza and Asakusa, Tokyo’s Skytree and Osaka’s Tsūtenkaku Tower.

The Experience Japan Pictograms hardly fail to include the glories of Japanese cuisine — sushi, tempura, soba, and even the Japanified hanbāgā — which piques so many foreigners’ interest in Japan to begin with. Click on any of them and you’ll see a brief cultural and historical explanation of the item, activity, place, or concept in question, along with the relevant Japanese term (in kanji where applicable) and its pronunciation. You can also download them in the color scheme of your choice and use them for any purposes you like, including commercial ones. The more widely adopted they are, the more convenient Japanese tourism will become for those who don’t read Japanese. Those who do can hardly deny the pleasure of having another Japanese language to learn — and a truly pictographic one at that.

via Spoon & Tamago

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Download 280 Pictographs That Put Japanese Culture Into a New Visual Language: They’re Free for the Public to Use is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

26th Day of February – Fatcowco –  1909 – First successful colour motion picture process, is first shown to the general public

1909 – First successful colour motion picture process, is first shown to the general public

Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to 1914.

On 26 February 1909, the general public first saw Kinemacolor in a programme of twenty-one short films shown at the Palace Theatre in London.

1909 – First successful colour motion picture process, is first shown to the general public

The process was known and trademarked as Kinemacolor and was a two-colour additive colour process, photographing and projecting a black-and-white film behind alternating red and green filters.

It was invented by George Albert Smith in 1906, who was influenced by the work of William Norman Lascelles Davidson and, more directly, Edward Raymond Turner.

Source: 26th Day of February – Fatcowco

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