-State Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH), author of Ohio’s Don’t Say Gay LGBT-harassment bill

Russia continues to sow a heap of symbolic and substantive consequences for recently revealed war crimes in Ukraine; it also continues to benefit from the effective blessing of the world’s biggest country, and a major authoritarian movement within the U.S. Win some, lose some, as they say. 
 

• In announcing new sanctions, President Biden once again denounced “major war crimes” Russia has committed. He also commended "responsible nations,” which he said “have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable." The new sanctions ban new investment in Russia, impose full blocking sanctions on Russia’s largest financial institutions (preventing Americans anywhere in the world from doing business with them), prohibit Russia from servicing its debt in dollars, and even target Vladimir Putin’s daughters, Donna and Erica Mariya Putina and Katerina Tikhonova.
   
• The U.K. and E.U. will also impose new sanctions, including a ban on Russian coal imports, and a total asset freeze on major Russian financial institutions. Though the sanctions will target Russia’s energy sector, they likely won’t follow the U.S. in banning Russian oil imports, because, according to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, “we’re likely to see skyrocketing prices, if we did put a complete ban on oil.”
   
• In a sign of how even those most vulnerable to Russian aggression increasingly DGAF, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said, "Kazakhstan respects the territorial integrity of Ukraine, as the vast majority of countries in the world do," while antiwar protesters in Vilnius, Lithuania used dye to turn the pond outside the Russian embassy blood red, and invited Lithuania’s Olympic gold-medal swimmer Rūta Meilutytė to take a lap in it.

Unfortunately, Putin also has terrible friends in high places. 
 

• After a summit last week with Chairman Xi Jinping, the vice president of the European Commission concluded that China has adopted a position of “pro-Russia neutrality,” based on a shared belief “that great powers are entitled to a zone of influence in their respective neighbourhoods.” To wit: “China does not condone Russia’s behaviour…but it does support Russia’s justifications of the war, i.e. the claim that the root causes lie in ‘Cold War thinking’ and especially NATO enlargement. China does not use the term war, preferring euphemisms like issue, crisis or conflict. It rejects the use of sanctions. And it likes to apportion equal blame rather than call out Russian aggression, pleading for ‘all sides’ to find an end to the bloodshed.” And just like that U.S. media’s #bothsides ethic becomes America’s worst export. 
   
• Over stateside, a bunch of House Republicans voted against a resolution supporting NATO as “an alliance founded on democratic principles.” Meanwhile, CPAC—a real-life manifestation of Madison Cawthorn’s multiday fascist-coke-orgy daydreams—will convene in Budapest next month to celebrate Viktor Orban, a Putin loyalist who has crushed democracy in Hungary in exactly the same way Republicans would like to do here and in Ukraine.

Check out the latest episodes of Stuck With Damon Young! In “Stuck on Whooping Some Ass (in My Head),” Damon explains why he wants all the smoke —specifically, why he needs to know if he’s capable of smoke— with Darnell Moore and Hannah Giorgis. And on “Stuck on Blacking While Black,” Damon examines the idea of performing Blackness around other Black people with Lauren Michele Jackson and Terence Nance. Follow Stuck with Damon Young, only on Spotify, to get new episodes every Tuesday.

The five most conservative Republican Supreme Court justices—acting without explanation—reimposed a Trump-era rule that gutted the Clean Water Act, unilaterally making new law in America in abuse of the infamous Shadow Docket so galling that even Chief Justice John Roberts dissented. Specifically, a district court judge voided that Trump-era policy, which undid Clean Water Act precedent that had for 50 years given states and tribes leeway to block interstate projects like pipelines that threatened to pollute their water supplies. In an extreme break from normal practice, the right-wing five (including all three Trump-appointed justices) stepped in to block enforcement of that judge’s decision, in effect requiring the federal government to continue to impose an unlawful Trump rule on states. Just two days ago, one of those justices, Amy Coney Barrett, urged people worried that the court has gone rogue to “read the opinion,” before gutting the Clean Water Act without offering any legal rationale whatsoever.

• In other parts of the environment, the world needs to spend three to six times more money than currently allocated to mitigate climate change if it wants to limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, according to the latest cheery Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. 
   
• The House has voted to hold former Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino in criminal contempt of Congress; Ivanka Trump, by contrast, testified to the January 6 committee for eight hours Tuesday.
   
• Trump-appointed Judge Trevor McFadden has acquitted an insurrectionist of misdemeanor, trespassing-like charges on the grounds that he—a federal defense contractor with a security clearance who had to cross police lines and walk over broken glass through the sound of blaring alarms to invade the Capitol—didn’t know he wasn’t allowed in. 
   
• The Biden administration has officially extended the student-loan payment moratorium through August 31, and will expunge default statuses of millions of student-loan borrowers.
   
• The Treasury Department in the Trump era failed to follow proper rulemaking procedures when it tried to plug a loophole in the GOP’s enormous corporate tax cuts, and now huge international corporations stand to reap a gigantic windfall (which was the point of those tax cuts to begin with).
   
• The party led by Jeffrey Epstein-associate Donald Trump, where Jim Jordan is a superstar, and which rallied behind Roy Moore, is America’s “anti-grooming” party, and to prove it, Republicans will eliminate age requirements for marriage in Tennessee, where one of their elected officials married a girl he “coached” in high school when he was in his 40s. 
   
• The Super PAC supporting Rep. Conor Lam (D-PA) for Pennsylvania Senate had to pull the dishonest ad it ran (and heavily promoted) against John Fetterman from the Philadelphia media market because it falsely called him a “self-described socialist,” which is, again, false. 
   
• It looks like Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded Secret Service detail may be helping him avoid process servers tasked with presenting him with subpoenas in civil lawsuits, something Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas should look into and nip in the bud. 
   
• A lawyer who represents a bunch of January 6 defendants just got disbarred for violating “professional rules that govern safekeeping property; meritorious claims and contentions; candor toward the tribunal; fairness to opposing party and counsel; unauthorized practice of law, multijurisdictional practice of law; bar admission and disciplinary matters…and misconduct.”
   
• Attorney General Merrick Garland has COVID.
   
• Mike Tyson can’t sell gummies shaped like Evander Holyfield’s ear with a bite taken out of it in Colorado, because the law there forbids selling marijuana edibles shaped like human parts. 
   
• Charles Darwin’s missing diaries have been returned, our long international nightmare is over.

What was supposed to be a moonshot-like effort by the National Institutes of Health to understand and find treatments for long COVID seems to have all but stalled out. In late 2020, Congress allocated NIH over $1 billion, but almost a year and a half later, the agency has only recruited three percent of the patients it needs to undertake its research. The ultimate hope of the study is to shed light not just on long COVID, but on a whole host of post-viral syndromes. If the study can pick up steam, it could provide a source of hope to millions of sufferers of those syndromes who are often dismissed by medical practitioners, because their conditions are so poorly understood. But critics (both experts and patients) aren’t just dismayed by the slow pace of the study, but by its design, which they liken to data collection, rather than clinical trials for treatments.

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President Biden aligned himself with workers trying to unionize Amazon warehouses: “Amazon, here we come.”

Milwaukee, WI, elected its first black mayor. 

Waukesha, WI, re-elected its mayor, who left the GOP after the insurrection, in a rebuke to the Big Lie candidate who ran against him.

A fake Trump elector running for re-election to local office lost her seat, and Three Eau Claire, WI, school board candidates who ran on anti-LGBT platforms lost their races, too.