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Zmeselo
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Posts: 33606
Joined: 30 Jul 2010, 20:43

When shît happens in your backyard, insult an African!

Post by Zmeselo » 21 May 2022, 13:51








Zmeselo
Senior Member+
Posts: 33606
Joined: 30 Jul 2010, 20:43

Re: When shît happens in your backyard, insult an African!

Post by Zmeselo » 21 May 2022, 14:10



Russia claims to have taken full control of Mariupol

ELENA BECATOROS, OLEKSANDR STASHEVSKYI and CIARAN McQUILLAN

https://www.yahoo.com/news/troops-defen ... 40746.html

Fri, May 20, 2022

POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — Russia claimed to have captured Mariupol on Friday in what would be its biggest victory yet in its war with Ukraine, after a nearly three-month siege that reduced much of the strategic port city to a smoking ruin, with over 20,000 civilians feared dead. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukrai ... 8d090e38e3

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to President Vladimir Putin the “complete liberation” of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol — the last stronghold of Ukrainian resistance — and the city as a whole, spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.

There was no immediate confirmation from Ukraine.

Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti quoted the ministry as saying a total of 2,439 Ukrainian fighters who had been holed up at the steelworks had surrendered since Monday, including over 500 on Friday.

As they surrendered, the troops were taken prisoner by the Russians, and at least some were taken to a former penal colony. Others were said to be hospitalized.

The defense of the steel mill had been led by Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, whose far-right origins have been seized on by the Kremlin as part of an effort to cast its invasion as a battle against Nazi influence in Ukraine. Russia said the Azov commander was taken away from the plant in an armored vehicle.

Russian authorities have threatened to investigate some of the steel mill's defenders for war crimes and put them on trial, branding them “Nazis” and criminals. That has stirred international fears about their fate.

The steelworks, which sprawled across 11 square kilometers (4 square miles), had been the site of fierce fighting for weeks. The dwindling group of outgunned fighters had held out, drawing Russian airstrikes, artillery and tank fire, before their government ordered them to abandon the plant's defense and save themselves.

The complete takeover of Mariupol gives Putin a badly needed victory in the war he began on Feb. 24 — a conflict that was supposed to have been a lightning conquest for the Kremlin but instead has seen the failure to take the capital of Kyiv, a pullback of forces to refocus on eastern Ukraine, and the sinking of the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet.

Military analysts said Mariupol's capture at this point is of mostly symbolic importance, since the city was already effectively under Moscow’s control and most of the Russian forces that were tied down by the fighting there had already left.

In other developments Friday, the West moved to pour billions more in aid into Ukraine and fighting raged in the Donbas, the industrial heartland in eastern Ukraine that Putin is bent on capturing.

Russian forces shelled a vital highway and kept up attacks on a key city in the Luhansk region, hitting a school among other sites, Ukrainian authorities said. Luhansk is part of the Donbas.

The Kremlin had sought control of Mariupol to complete a land corridor between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up troops to join the larger battle for the Donbas. The city's loss also deprives Ukraine of a vital seaport.

Mariupol endured some of the worst suffering https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukrai ... 2ca351dede of the war and became a worldwide symbol of defiance. An estimated 100,000 people remained out a prewar population of 450,000, many trapped without food, water, heat or electricity. Relentless bombardment left rows upon rows of shattered or hollowed-out buildings.

A maternity hospital was hit https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukrai ... 9edfca1085 with a lethal Russian airstrike on March 9, producing searing images of pregnant women being evacuated from the place. A week later, about 300 people were reported killed in a bombing of a theater where civilians were taking shelter, although the real death toll could be closer to 600. https://apnews.com/article/Russia-ukrai ... 06afcac7a1

Satellite images in April showed what appeared to be mass graves just outside Mariupol, where local officials accused Russia of concealing the slaughter by burying up to 9,000 civilians.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday the evacuation of his forces from the miles of tunnels and bunkers beneath Azovstal was done to save the lives of the fighters.

Earlier this month, hundreds of civilians were evacuated from the plant during humanitarian cease-fires and spoke of the terror of ceaseless bombardment, the dank conditions underground and the fear that they wouldn't make it out alive.

As the end drew near at Azovstal, wives of fighters who held out at the steelworks told of what they feared would be their last contact with their husbands.

Olga Boiko, wife of a marine, wiped away tears as she said that her husband had written her on Thursday:
Hello. We surrender, I don’t know when I will get in touch with you and if I will at all. Love you. Kiss you. Bye.
Natalia Zaritskaya, wife of another fighter at Azovstal, said that based on the messages she had seen over the past two days,
Now they are on the path from hell to hell. Every inch of this path is deadly.
She said that two days ago, her husband reported that of the 32 soldiers with whom he had served, only eight survived, most of them seriously wounded.

While Russia described the troops leaving the steel plant as a mass surrender, the Ukrainians called it a mission fulfilled. They said the fighters had tied down Moscow's forces and hindered their bid to seize the east.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, described the defense of Mariupol as
the Thermopylae of the 21st century
— a reference to one of history’s most glorious defeats, in which 300 Spartans held off a much larger Persian force in 480 B.C. before finally succumbing.

In other developments Friday:

— Zelenskyy said Russia should be made to pay for every home, school, hospital and business it destroys. He called on Ukraine’s partners to seize Russian funds and property under their jurisdiction and use them to create a fund to compensate those who suffered.

Russia
would feel the true weight of every missile, every bomb, every shell that it has fired at us,
he said in his nightly video address.

— The Group of Seven major economies and global financial institutions agreed to provide more money to bolster Ukraine’s finances, bringing the total to $19.8 billion. In the U.S., President Joe Biden was expected to sign a $40 billion package of military and economic aid to Ukraine and its allies.

— Russia will cut off natural gas to Finland on Saturday, the Finnish state energy company said, just days after Finland applied to join NATO. Finland had refused Moscow’s demand that it pay for gas in rubles. The cutoff is not expected to have any major immediate effect. Natural gas accounted for just 6% of Finland’s total energy consumption in 2020, Finnish broadcaster YLE said.

— A captured Russian soldier accused of killing a civilian awaited his fate in Ukraine’s first war crimes trial. Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, 21, could get life in prison.

— Russian lawmakers proposed a bill to lift the age limit of 40 for Russians volunteering for military service. Currently, all Russian men 18 to 27 must undergo a year of service, though many get college deferments and other exemptions.

Heavy fighting was reported Friday in the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking expanse of coal mines and factories.

Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk, said Russian forces shelled the Lysychansk-Bakhmut highway from multiple directions, taking aim at the only road for evacuating people and delivering humanitarian supplies.
The Russians are trying to cut us off from it, to encircle the Luhansk region,
he said via email.

Moscow’s troops have also been trying for weeks to seize Severodonetsk, a key city in the Donbas, and at least 12 people were killed there on Friday, Haidai said. A school that was sheltering more than 200 people, many of them children, was hit, and more than 60 houses were destroyed across the region, he added.

But he said the Russians took losses in the attack on Severodonetsk and were forced to retreat. His account could not be independently verified.

Another city, Rubizhne, has been “completely destroyed,” Haidai said.
Its fate can be compared to that of Mariupol.
___

McQuillan reported from Lviv. Stashevskyi reported from Kyiv. Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Jamey Keaten in Geneva and other AP staffers around the world contributed.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Zmeselo
Senior Member+
Posts: 33606
Joined: 30 Jul 2010, 20:43

Re: When shît happens in your backyard, insult an African!

Post by Zmeselo » 21 May 2022, 15:01



Biden's approval dips to lowest of presidency: AP-NORC poll

NICHOLAS RICCARDI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-approv ... 24439.html

Fri, May 20, 2022

President Joe Biden’s approval rating dipped to the lowest point of his presidency in May, a new poll shows, with deepening pessimism emerging among members of his own Democratic Party.

Only 39% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s performance as president, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research, dipping from already negative ratings a month earlier.

Overall, only about 2 in 10 adults say the U.S. is heading in the right direction or the economy is good, both down from about 3 in 10 a month earlier. Those drops were concentrated among Democrats, with just 33% within the president’s party saying the country is headed in the right direction, down from 49% in April.

Of particular concern for Biden ahead of the midterm elections, his approval among Democrats stands at 73%, a substantial drop since earlier in his presidency. In AP-NORC polls conducted in 2021, Biden’s approval rating among Democrats never dropped below 82%.

The findings reflect a widespread sense of exasperation in a country facing a cascade of challenges ranging from inflation, gun violence, and a sudden shortage of baby formula to a persistent pandemic. https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pand ... m=featured
I don’t know how much worse it can get,
said Milan Ramsey, a 29-year-old high school counselor and Democrat in Santa Monica, California, who with her husband had to move into her parents’ house to raise their infant son.

Ramsey thinks the economic dysfunction that's led to her being unable to afford the place where she grew up isn't Biden's fault. But she's alarmed he hasn't implemented ambitious plans for fighting climate change or fixing health care.
He hasn't delivered on any of the promises. I feel like the stimulus checks came out and that was the last win of his administration,
Ramsey said of Biden.
I think he's tired — and I don't blame him, I'd be tired too at his age with the career he's had.
Republicans have not been warm to Biden for a while. Less than 1 in 10 approve of the president or his handling of the economy, but that's no different from last month.

Gerry Toranzo, a nurse and a Republican in Chicago, blames Biden for being forced to pinch pennies by taking steps like driving slower to conserve gas after prices have skyrocketed during his administration.
His policies are destroying the economy,
Toranzo, 46, said of Biden, blaming him for stopping the Keystone XL fuel pipeline to Canada and hamstringing domestic energy production.
It's a vicious cycle of price increases.
Overall, two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy. That rating is largely unchanged over the last few months, though elevated slightly since the first two months of the year.

But there are signs that the dissatisfaction with Biden on the economy has deepened. Just 18% of Americans say Biden’s policies have done more to help than hurt the economy, down slightly from 24% in March. Fifty-one percent say they’ve done more to hurt than help, while 30% say they haven’t made much difference either way.

The percentage of Democrats who say Biden’s policies have done more to help dipped from 45% to 37%, though just 18% say they’ve done more to hurt; 44% say they’ve made no difference.

Some Democrats blame other forces for inflation.

Manuel Morales, an internet service technician in Moline, Illinois, thinks the pandemic and war in Ukraine https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine?u ... m=featured have had a far bigger impact than Biden's decisions. But the 58-year-old Democrat is now questioning the benefits of Biden's biggest legislative achievement, the American Rescue Plan, and its stimulus checks.
It helped a lot of people, but,
Morales said,
people did not want to go back to work.
Morales faults Biden on another area of persistent vulnerability to the president — immigration.

Only 38% back Biden on immigration, and Morales is disappointed at the scenes of migrants continuing to cross the southern border. Though he himself is a Mexican immigrant, Morales thinks the U.S. needs to more stringently control its border to have a hope of legalizing deserving migrants who are in the country illegally.

Also, Morales said, there have to be limits.
It's impossible to bring the whole of Central America and Mexico into this country,
he said.

Another area where Morales faults Biden, albeit mildly, is the war with Ukraine.
We are spending a lot of money going to the Ukraine and all that is going to the deficit,
Morales said.

Overall, 45% of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Russia, while 54% disapprove. That’s held steady each month since the war in Ukraine began. Seventy-three percent of Democrats and 15% of Republicans approve.

The new poll shows just 21% of Americans say they have
a great deal of confidence
in Biden’s ability to handle the situation in Ukraine; 39% say they have some confidence and 39% say they have hardly any.

Charles Penn, a retired factory worker in Huntington, Indiana, is satisfied with Biden's performance on Ukraine.
I think he's done alright,
Penn, 68, said of the president.

But overall Penn, an independent who leans Republican, is disappointed with Biden, and blames him for rising prices that have squeezed him in his retirement.
The Democrats in the long run have screwed up things by pushing for higher wages, like going from $7 an hour to $15 an hour,
Penn said, citing the push for a sharp increase in the federal minimum wage that Biden has embraced.
The other side of it is that if you had Republicans, they'd cut my Social Security.
Still, Penn thinks Biden should pay the political price.
He's captain of the ship, so he's responsible,
Penn said of the president.

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,172 adults was conducted May 12-16 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.

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