Across more than two decades in power, President Vladimir Putin has worked to turn Russia's historic World War II memorial event into a celebration of future military glory and global clout.
But this year's Victory Day jamboree only underscores his failure to deliver.
The pared-back festivities on May 9 " commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany at the cost of an estimated 27 million Soviet lives " is the clearest sign yet that the Kremlin's war in Ukraine is taking its toll.
Pastor leads wild dedication ceremony for Trump's giant gold statue at his own golf course
The president himself called into the ceremony to thank the religious leader and guests in attendance read more
Donald Trump is not much of a reader. But there's a book in the White House that " if he cracked it open " could change the course of his presidency and of America itself.
Three years ago, in the pages of Vanity Fair, I wrote about a manual that almost no one in America has ever seen. Inside the White House complex, in a secure location known to only a handful of people, sits an instruction book informally called the "Doomsday Book".
Its contents are formally known by an anodyne acronym " PEADs, or Presidential Emergency Action Documents. read more
WASHINGTON ' The Pentagon released "never-before-seen" files on unidentified flying objects, and armchair investigators are furiously combing through them for evidence of "smoking gun" information that some believe the government may have been withholding in the 80-plus years it's been investigating reports of such sightings.
Iran says a US proposal to end the war is "still being considered", after reports the two sides could be close to an agreement. read more
"The President himself " although I once heard him refer to his "magical authorities" to bypass legal constraints " did not fully understand the powers he possessed, I was told.
Some of those who did understand were terrified he might use those authorities.
One such official, who once held the keys to the Doomsday Book, warned me back then that if Trump returned to office, he feared those powers being turned not outward at America's enemies but inward at citizens.
He imagined federal forces ringing polling places in opposition states, intimidation dressed up as election security, and the architecture of homeland defense aimed at the homeland itself."
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Much more at the link... It's also a paywalled Daily Beast story, but here's a video version of that:
Insiders SOUND THE ALARM On Trump's DOOMSDAY PLAN
Occupy Democrats
www.youtube.com
@ 5 mins
- American society in need of a sustained and comprehensive overhaul
Which should be obvious, even to a blind Chinese squirrel.