Stephan: This is another example of what is happening. I could do a dozen stories like this and the previous one. Every Red state has one. Our democracy grows more fractured and threatened day by day, and this will come to a crescendo this November. Only you can stop this trend.
Idaho State Capitol building | Pride flag Photo illustration by Salon/Getty
The Idaho House of Representative approved a bill on Monday that could fine and jail the staff of school libraries, universities, and museums if they provide “harmful” material to children, a development critics say is designed to prevent kids from having access to books about the LGBTQ+ experience.
The measure, House Bill 666, would subject employees of schools, museums and libraries to a maximum fine of $1,000 as well as up to a year in jail.
While the bill moved through the chamber along a 51-14 vote, its passage was met with impassioned debate on both sides of the aisle, with Republicans decrying the effects of what they deemed to be “pornography” on young children.
“For many years, I as a parent have been concerned about the obscene and pornographic materials that find their way into our schools and public libraries,” state Rep. Gayann DeMordaunt, the bill’s sponsor, said in an hour-long debate. “We are simply asking that those that are responsible for the materials in our libraries or in museums […]
Stephan: For several years now I have been following what I consider an important social trend, the rise of wellbeing focused democracies to bring women into the leadership and what occurs when that happens. It's good news.
Finland’s Prime Minister Sann Marin
Finland’s 36-year-old female Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, heads a governing coalition of five political parties – all led by women and almost all aged in their 30s. It is a nation largely run by women.
This is the culmination of a national push for gender equity that started even before Finland’s independence in 1917.
In 1906, Finland, then a duchy of Russia, was the first country to give women full political rights to both vote and run for office. A year later, the 19 women elected to the Finnish parliament were the first female parliamentarians in the world.
Indeed, Finland has much to be proud of this International Women’s Day, ranking second in last year’s World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap report, just behind fellow Nordic country Iceland.
In the same report meanwhile, our own birth nations of the United States and Japan held the positions of No. 30 and No. 120 […]
Caroline Kitchener, Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: I want my readers to be clear what is happening to America as the Republican christofascists try to destroy our democracy. This is all straight out of Hitler's christofascist Nazis playbook of the 1930s. Control people, particularly women, and whitewash the whole thing with a distortion of nationalistic Christianity. The modern twist is that this legislation is propossed by a woman.
Republican Missouri state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman Credit: Neeta Satam / The Washington Post
The pattern emerges whenever a Republican-led state imposes new restrictions on abortion: People seeking the procedure cross state lines to find treatment in places with less-restrictive laws.
Now, a prominent antiabortion lawmaker in Missouri, from where thousands of residents have traveled to next-door Illinois to receive abortions since Missouri passed one of the country’s strictest abortion laws in 2019, believes she has found a solution.
An unusual new provision, introduced by state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R), would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a Missouri resident obtain an abortion out of state, using the novel legal strategy behind the restrictive law in Texas that since September has banned abortions in that state after six weeks of pregnancy.
Coleman has attached the measure as an amendment to several abortion-related bills that have made it through committee and are waiting to be heard on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Abortion rights advocates say the measure is unconstitutional because it would effectively allow […]
Stephan: The media spends a great deal of time and energy covering the Russian oligarchs but, in my opinion, far too little focusing on American oligarchs, perhaps because most of the American media is owned by oligarchs. This absence of coverage is a major failing, I think, because the American oligarchs, many of them, as seen by which Congressmembers they rent and support do not really favor democracy. This article in The New Yorker is one of the few I have seen that looks at this issue in a fact-based manner.
The yacht Amore Vero is docked at La Ciotat harbor, in the South of France, after being seized by French authorities earlier this month.Credit: Florian Escoffier / Alamy
Late on the night of March 2nd, the Amore Vero, a two-hundred-and-ninety-foot-long yacht that French officials trace to Igor Sechin, the C.E.O. of the Russian oil giant Rosneft and a confidant of Vladimir Putin’s, was in the Mediterranean port of La Ciotat. As news spread of sweeping new sanctions on Russian élites, the crew of the Amore Vero tried to “sail off urgently,” according to the French government. But customs officers seized the yacht before it could depart. Observers of the luxury-yachting world have reported that several other vessels connected to Putin’s favored élite appear to be dashing toward friendlier ports in the Indian Ocean.
To a degree that has startled experts in the opaque byways of international finance, the invasion of Ukraine has engendered a systematic campaign to sever Russia from the global banking system, and to sunder the Russian élite from their estates, vessels, and fortunes […]
Stephan: The confiscation of Russian oligarchs' real estate, yachts and planes is a great idea, but the reality of how this is working out is rather different than the idea sounds, as this story describes.
A few of the Russian oligarchs also powers in the country’s political structure
For years, Russian oligarchs have prepared for the possibility that Western governments might try to come after their wealth. Thanks to decades of relatively lax regulations on plane registration and boat ownership, many of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies are now rushing their most valuable assets to safety.
It shouldn’t be difficult to seize—or at least freeze and hang onto—the wealth Russian oligarchs have deposited in the West. After all, a mega-yacht is hard to miss, and private jets, some of the most valuable assets that can be purchased, can barely move across an airport taxiway without being directed and tracked by air traffic controllers. Earlier this week, France did manage to seize the 290-foot Amore Vero, owned by close Putin associate Igor Sechin, but it was one of the few oligarch-linked items taken since the war started.
But, as the Washington Post reported on Friday, American and European governments are finding their hands tied in actually taking control of the assets.
Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.) said the FAA’s aircraft registration system […]
