Missouri lawmakers move to strip public library funding in retaliation over book ban lawsuit
March 24, 2023, 1:01 PM ET
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The head of Russia’s premium news channel has called for the assassination of Lindsey Graham after the Republican met with Ukraine’s president in Kiev Friday.
A spliced video of Graham speaking to Volodymyr Zelensky showed the senator saying that the fact “Russians are dying” is “the best money we’ve ever spent,” according to a report by the Daily Beast.
The out-of-context recording – he actually called U.S. investment in Ukraine important for global security – was broadcast in Russia, and caused outrage.
The head of the news channel RT, Margarita Simonyan, said: “If Lady Graham really said that the money for the killing of Russians is the best money the U.S. ever spent... I hope that in our country, the sons or grandchildren of Sudoplatov are alive, his pupils, or the descendants of his pupils. It’s not even hard. We have his address.”
READ MORE: 'Nice to see': Lauren Boebert praises man for shouting expletives at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Sudoplatov was a Soviet Lieutenant General who was involved in several intelligence operations during Joseph Stalin’s reign, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
“I have no ill will towards anyone and our religion tells us to forgive, but no one tells us to reward these types of things," said Simonyan. "When we don’t act in response to these things, it is the same as encouraging them. It causes them to become increasingly more brazen.”
Graham was also hit by fury from other prominent Russians. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “Senator [Lindsey] Graham has something to compare with. One of their [US] investments led to World War II and the Holocaust.”
And State TV host Vladimir Solovyov said on his Sunday night show, “Your dirty American money also fully supported the Nazi regime in Germany! You are a Nazi beast and you’re following in the footsteps of your predecessors. I’ll repeat it once again: you will croak, but the Russian people will live forever!”
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on his Telegram account: “In his beloved America, not only ordinary people are regularly killed, but dirty money is also being spent on killing senators. He should recall the sad fate of Robert Kennedy, Huey Long, Clementa Carlos Pinckney, John Milton Elliott, Wayne Owens and other American politicians.”
Graham later told Reuters, “It has been a good investment by the United States to help liberate Ukraine from Russian war criminals... Mr. Medvedev, if you want Russians to stop dying in Ukraine, withdraw. Stop the invasion. Stop the war crimes. The truth is that you and (President Vladimir) Putin could care less about Russian soldiers.”
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The scaling of the 8,849-meter (29,032-foot) peak on May 29, 1953, changed mountaineering forever and made the New Zealander and his Nepalese guide household names.
"In a whole lot of ways, it was not just Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay that reached the summit of Mount Everest, it was all of humanity," Peter Hillary said at a school founded by his father in the remote village of Khumjung at 3,790 metres.
"Suddenly, all of us could go," he said.
And gone they have. In the past seven decades, more than 6,000 climbers have climbed the world's highest mountain, according to the Himalayan Database.
It remains dangerous, with more than 300 losing their lives in the same period, including 12 this year. Five others are missing, putting 2023 on course to be a record deadly year.
As well as supporting tourism, the rapid growth in the climbing industry has raised revenue for Nepal, which today charges foreigners an Everest permit fee of $11,000.
Family members of both the climbers joined locals and officials at the school on Monday morning to inaugurate the Sir Edmund Hillary Visitors Centre, housed in the original building that opened in 1961.
Butter lamps were lit in front of a photograph of Hillary and Tenzing, and their sons, Peter Hillary and Jamling Norgay, cut a red ribbon to open the doors to the centre.
A renovated museum is also being opened in Tenzing Norgay's name in Namche Bazaar, the largest tourist hub in the trek to the Everest base camp.
In Kathmandu, officials and hundreds from the mountaineering community joined a rally with celebratory banners.
Top Nepali climbers, including the record holder for most Everest ascents Kami Rita Sherpa, were honored in a ceremony.
Sanu Sherpa, the only person to climb the world’s 14 highest peaks twice, called on the government to support the Nepali guides, who bear huge risks to carry equipment and food, fix ropes and repair ladders.
"The government has not done much for the Sherpa. I think it would be of great help and we would be happy if the government helps educate children of those climbers who died on mountains," Sherpa told AFP.
© 2023 AFP
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The ultimate political survivor, Erdogan, 69, has overcome jail and a bloody 2016 coup attempt to steer his country through an era of diplomatic clout, economic development and political strife.
An unprecedented opposition coalition, galvanized by a biting economic crisis and fury over calamitous February earthquakes, represented the toughest national electoral challenge for the Islamic-rooted conservative.
But while polling forecast he was closer to defeat than ever, Erdogan beat the odds yet again to come within a whisker of winning in the first round before clinching victory on Sunday.
He defeated his secular opposition rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, by four percentage points—closer than any other election, but enough to end his political career undefeated in national polls.
His aura of invincibility reaffirmed, none can deny Turkey’s longest-serving leader is the country’s most consequential since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of the post-Ottoman republic.
Admirers laud Erdogan for unshackling religious restrictions in the officially secular but mostly Muslim state, overseeing ambitious infrastructure projects and turning Turkey into a geopolitical force.
Detractors accuse him of slipping into authoritarianism reminiscent of the Ottoman sultans, shaking Turkey’s democratic foundations and impoverishing millions through misguided beliefs that contradict conventional economics.
Rewriting the rules
Although the runoff provided his rule with a fresh mandate, the nation of 85 million is likely to remain sharply polarized.
Known to his inner circle as “beyefendi” (sir) and to admirers as “reis” (the chief), Erdogan prides himself on being able to woo doubters through tireless campaigning.
This passion has helped him and his party win more than a dozen local and national votes, allowing Erdogan to claim a people’s mandate for his foreign military adventures and domestic clampdowns on dissent.
Erdogan risked his political domination on a 2017 referendum on abolishing the office of prime minister and handing greater powers to the president.
He eked out a narrow win then, enfeebling parliament and enabling him to effectively rule by decree. It also gave him the constitutional loophole needed to run for two more terms in office—an outcome set to be fulfilled.
Power and protests
Born in a working-class harbor district of Istanbul, Erdogan made his name in nascent Islamic movements that were challenging secular domination, becoming the city’s mayor in 1994.
His mayoral term was cut short when he was convicted and jailed for four months for inciting religious hatred when he recited a fiery poem that compared mosques to army barracks and called minarets “our bayonets”.
Among supporters, this only seemed to magnify his appeal.
Founding the AKP after an earlier Islamic party was banned, Erdogan spearheaded its 2002 landslide election victory and became premier less than six months later.
Erdogan’s signature early achievements included a series of reforms that gladdened the European Union, including abolishing the death penalty and beginning a peace process with Kurdish militants.
Mass protests in 2013 over plans to turn an Istanbul park into a shopping mall marked the start of a more divisive era that included corruption allegations leveled against his inner circle.
Turkey’s bid to join the EU faltered and peace talks with the Kurds imploded in 2015, when a Kurdish opposition party helped to wrest control of parliament from Erdogan for the first time.
Turkish military operations against Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq soon followed, creating new tensions with the West.
Abandoned by allies
In its early days the AKP, lacking allies and experience, forged an alliance with Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who moved to permanent US exile in 1999 but retained strong influence in Turkish society and government.
Erdogan blamed Gulen for masterminding a bloody coup bid by a renegade army faction in July 2016 -- charges he denies.
The president, on holiday in the Aegean, appeared on the FaceTime app on live TV to urge supporters out onto the streets.
It became the defining moment of his subsequent rule.
Erdogan fought back with sweeping purges that led to 80,000 arrests, brought most media under government influence and created a sense of looming peril among those opposed to his rule.
Washington and the EU’s hesitation to openly support Erdogan in the first hours of the coup bid eroded his trust in the West and created diplomatic frictions that linger to this day.
Unorthodox economic policies, including lowering interest rates to fight soaring inflation that officially reached 85 percent in 2022, erasing some gains of his more prosperous first decade of rule.
Opponents accused him of turning a blind eye to corruption and lax building standards that allowed entire cities to crumble in this year’s earthquake.
Despite the widespread loss and anger, Erdogan’s popularity held up in parts of southeastern Turkey laid to waste by the disaster—a testament to a loyal bedrock of support.
(AFP)
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