New York Times: Last Wednesday, a few hours before Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine, alarms went off inside Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center, warning of a never-before-seen piece of “wiper” malware that appeared aimed at the country’s government ministries and financial institutions.
Within three hours, Microsoft threw itself into the middle of a ground war in Europe — from 5,500 miles away. . . . Continue reading War Notes — March 1, 2022
BY DASHA LITVINOVA
Late Sunday Feb. 27, 2022
MOSCOW (AP) — From Moscow to Siberia, Russian anti-war activists took to the streets again Sunday to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite the arrests of hundreds of protesters each day by police.
Demonstrators held pickets and marched in city centers, chanting “No to war!” as President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian nuclear deterrent to be put on high alert, upping the ante in the Kremlin’s standoff with the West and stoking fears of a nuclear war.
“I have two sons and I don’t want to give them to that bloody monster. War is a tragedy for all of us,” 48-year-old Dmitry Maltsev, who joined the rally in St. Petersburg, told The Associated Press. Continue reading Update: Russian Antiwar Protesters & Arrests Continue
“The conflict in Ukraine is all about religion and what kind of Orthodoxy will shape Eastern Europe and other Orthodox communities around the world (especially in Africa). Religion.
This is a crusade, recapturing the Holy Land of Russian Orthodoxy, and defeating the Westernized (and decadent) heretics who do not bend the knee to Moscow’s spiritual authority.
If you don’t get that, you don’t get it.
That’s Diana Butler Bass. She’s a distinguished scholar and analyst of religion, and a modern progressive Christian — raised Methodist, slid through a fundamentalist phase, snagged a church history PhD at Duke, and is now a sort-of Episcopalian. Continue reading The Invasion of Ukraine is Also a Religious Crusade
Someday, I’m thinking, there will be a historic marker on (or near) the campus of Friends University in Wichita, Kansas.
And if I last long enough to see it go up, I gotta take a selfie standing next to it. And if I’m really lucky, maybe Caitlyn Fox will take one with me.
I’ll get to Caitlyn in a minute. That Wichita historic marker won’t be about me, but it will point to where my Quaker journalistic “career” started, in late June of 1977. I lived a year there one week, four and a half decades ago, and from recent reports it seems some things there haven’t changed a bit in those 45 years. Continue reading Well, FU to Friends University: you Flunked the Freedom of Expression Exam Big Time.
Quick takes on the Ukraine Invasion, by New York Times opinion writers: “The World Has Changed Overnight”
Farah Stockman, Editorial Board member: “A lot of people consider this to be a personal obsession of [Putin’s.] He has a personal obsession with Ukraine. It has a lot of historical meaning to him. But I also see this as a bigger deal. It’s bigger than Ukraine because he’s been watching for the last, I don’t know, 20 years — he’s been watching the United States do things like this, in his mind. He hated what we did in Libya. He was furious. He hated the Iraq war invasion. He has been seeing us throw our might around and call it international law.
And I think he’s just saying, well, I can play that game, too. And this is really about telling the United States that it’s no longer the sole superpower and showing that we are weak. . . .” Continue reading What? Did You Really Mean That What Goes Around Is Actually Coming Around?