-Donald Trump with a rare astute observation

Another round of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine went nowhere on Thursday, as Russia intensified its attacks on Ukrainian civilians, eliciting further accusations of war crimes. 
 

• Top Ukrainian and Russian diplomats met in Turkey, but were unable to make progress toward an end to the war, a temporary ceasefire, or even a humanitarian corridor to allow the besieged civilians in Mariupol to safely evacuate. Russian forces launched fresh strikes on Mariupol, where residents have had no heat, electricity, or water for over a week in freezing temperatures. City workers have begun burying bodies in a mass grave. 
   
• International outrage continued to grow over Wednesday’s strike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, which killed three civilians, including a child. The U.K. condemned the strike as a “war crime.” At a press conference in Warsaw, Vice President Kamala Harris said that the world was witnessing “atrocities of unimaginable proportions in Ukraine,” and embraced calls for a war-crimes investigation of Russia. The U.N. said Thursday that Russia’s invasion had killed at least 549 civilians, 41 of whom were children, but noted that the actual death toll is likely “considerably higher.”
   
• Meanwhile stateside, the House passed a government-funding bill that includes $13.6 billion in humanitarian and defense aid to Ukraine, which the Senate could pass as soon as tonight, as well as a measure to ban the import of Russian oil, natural gas, and coal. Fifteen House Republicans voted against the oil ban, including Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who recently told supporters at an event in North Carolina that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “thug,” and that the Ukrainian government “is incredibly corrupt, and it is incredibly evil, and it has been pushing woke ideologies.” For sure!

While Kremlin propaganda channels have kicked into overdrive over the war in Ukraine, not all Russian pundits have stayed as on-message as certain House Republicans or Fox News hosts.
 

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday claimed that Russia had never attacked Ukraine, and falsely insisted that the maternity hospital that Russia bombed had been taken over by a neo-Nazi militia and emptied of patients. But even state-TV pundits dutifully scramble to distort the truth of the invasion, some of them have begun calling for Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the “military operation,” warning that “public opinion within Russia is changing” and that Western sanctions will continue to devastate the economy. 
   
• Unfortunately, some of those sanctions appear to have Mark-Zuckerberg-shaped holes in them. Pro-Russian rebels that have been on the U.S. sanctions list for years have been permitted to continue using their Facebook accounts to recruit fighters and spread propaganda about the war in Ukraine, according to a pair of whistleblower complaints filed to the Justice and Treasury Departments. “Facebook is knowingly aiding and abetting in the information war that Russia is waging,” said whistleblower Joohn Choe, a Facebook contractor hired to study extremism on the platform. 
   

Russia’s increasingly indiscriminate assaults on Ukrainian cities have left little hope of a speedy end to the crisis, but they’ve also left Kremlin propagandists to explain away an unending stream of horrific images and international outcry to the Russian people. The longer the invasion continues, the harder the reality of it becomes to hide.

This week on Hysteria, Erin and Alyssa break down the unprecedented amount of education bills targeting teachers and students. Plus, Ai-jen Poo joins to discuss the National Domestic Workers Alliance push to bring fairness and dignity to domestic workers, and touch base on the state of the care agenda in Congress. Then Rheeqrheeq Chainey and Jill Gutowitz stop by to discuss the evolution of queer culture in film and television and how pop culture helps shape our identity. New episodes of Hysteria drop every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.

Florida Republicans have approved the elections police force of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s fascist dreams, pioneering a new frontier of voter suppression. The new “Office of Election Crimes and Security,” which will answer to DeSantis, will be watered down from the original plan: DeSantis asked for nearly $6 million to hire 52 people, and will instead get about $2.5 million for a staff of 25. It could’ve been worse, but the unprecedented formation of a new police force to crack down on imaginary voter fraud isn’t great! The bill also includes harsher penalties for voting practices that were legal in Florida until recently. After Florida’s 2021 voter-suppression law made “ballot harvesting” a misdemeanor, targeting Black communities in particular, the new bill raised it to a felony, punishable with a fine of up to $50,000 and five years in prison.

• The Oklahoma Senate has passed a vigilante-enforced six-week abortion ban modeled after the Texas law, and a bill banning abortion after 30 days. Missouri Republicans have introduced a bill that would make it illegal to abort ectopic pregnancies, which are not viable, and which regularly kill patients when left untreated. A big old “what the fuck” from your friends here at What A Day. 
   
• Year-on-year inflation climbed to 7.9 percent in February, a new 40-year high.
   
• The Biden administration will extend the federal public-transportation mask mandate through April 18. The mandate was previously set to expire on March 19. 
   
• A mother who invited Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) to dinner with her trans son in 2016 is now facing a child-abuse investigation under the state’s new directive equating gender-affirming care with child abuse. Texas has opened at least five investigations into the families of trans kids. 
   
• Conservative Yoon Suk-yeol won South Korea's presidential election on Thursday, with a razor-thin margin. Yoon courted disgruntled, anti-feminist young men, and has promised to take a more hawkish stance toward North Korea. 
   
• A nonprofit founded by Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell has been covering the full legal expenses of at least one Oath Keeper charged with seditious conspiracy.
   
• Victims of opioid abuse publicly confronted members of the Sackler family for the first time, in an emotional Thursday court hearing. This thread has more quotes from their testimony.
   
• A grand jury in Colorado has indicted Tina Peters, a Trumpy Mesa County election clerk, alleging that she was part of a scheme to breach voting systems technology after the 2020 election.
   
• A Wyoming bill aimed at ending same-day party-affiliation changes bit the dust on Tuesday, after Donald Trump urged Republicans to pass it in a bid to weaken Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) chances of re-election. 
   
• Disgraced former president Donald Trump refinanced Trump Tower in February, taking out a $100 million loan from Axos Bank of San Diego, whose CEO is a Trump donor. 
   
• In other spectacular grifts, Trump has asked his supporters to buy him a new plane after his private jet suffered engine failure and had to make an emergency landing on Saturday. 
   
• A Vanity Fair reporter accidentally discovered that Elon Musk and Grimes have a secret second baby, a girl named (exhausted sigh) Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. Time to stock up on more NFTs of diapers or whatever.

The 2020 Census seriously undercounted Black, Latino, and Native American residents, the Census Bureau said in a report released Thursday, overlooking them at higher rates than a decade earlier. At the same time, the Census overcounted white and Asian people. You may recall that the Trump administration abruptly cut Census field operations short by a month, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, and attempted to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count altogether. That political interference seems to have accomplished much of what Trump set out to do, weakening the political power of some minority groups and directing less federal funding toward their communities, for at least a decade.

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Javier Silva and Jaime Nazar have become the first same-sex couple to marry in Chile after a new marriage equality law went into effect.

The New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed that conversion therapy is fraudulent, declining to hear an appeal of a ruling that barred an organization from offering it. 

The DC Council unanimously voted to permanently bar landlords from evicting tenants who owe less than $600. 

Starbucks workers at three more Buffalo-area locations have voted to unionize.