Author: usaeverydaylife

For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he’d gone missing on Nov. 1 — from a Telegram channel that helps military families.“We lost your son,” Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in Rafael’s unit in charge of family liaison, told her when she traveled to its headquarters in western Russia.“Lost him how?” she says she responded, alarmed and…

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China is the world’s second-largest economy and second-largest importer of U.S. goods. Entities in China hold at least $784 billion in U.S. federal debt. The country also controls much of the world’s rare element supply, which is vital for manufacturing technology. China could weaponize these assets if an all-out trade war breaks out, to the detriment of U.S. consumers and businesses.”China is actually a bigger financial power than it looks like on the surface,” said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Since 2018, China has developed regulatory tools, including export controls, that could be used to pressure…

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The walls surrounding Ghana’s national cathedral are aging plywood. Its spires are yellow construction cranes, which have not moved in years. It frequently reverberates with singing — the singing of a choir of frogs that moves in whenever the cathedral’s half-finished foundations fill with rainwater.Ghana’s former president, Nana Akufo-Addo, spent around $58 million of public money on the $400 million cathedral project — a huge sum in this debt-saddled West African country. The new finance minister said in March that Ghana’s economy was in “severe distress.”The cathedral was designed by the celebrity architect David Adjaye. But beyond the blueprints, there…

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Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., arrives in the Capitol for a vote on Wednesday, February 26, 2024. Bill Clark | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty ImagesWASHINGTON — Some Senate Republicans are raising concerns about an exclusive dinner and White House tour President Donald Trump is offering top investors in his $TRUMP meme token.”This is my president that we’re talking about, but I am willing to say that this gives me pause,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, of Wyoming, who has been spearheading a legislative push on cryptocurrency regulation in the Senate. The official website for Trump’s meme coin announced last week that the…

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The two largest U.S. oil companies reported their lowest first-quarter profits in years on Friday as they braced for the economic fallout from President Trump’s trade war, which has weakened consumer confidence and pushed oil prices down.U.S. crude prices slipped under $60 a barrel this week, a threshold below which many companies cannot make money drilling new wells. Crude oil is now about $20 a barrel cheaper than it was just before Mr. Trump took office. Not only is oil fetching less, companies are paying more for steel and other materials because of tariffs the president has imposed.There are signs…

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Thursday to end public funding of National Public Radio and PBS to stop what he called “biased and partisan news coverage.”The order directs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS” to the extent allowed by law. The order could be challenged in court.The White House said in a Friday statement that both organizations had received “tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.'””Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled…

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Germany’s domestic intelligence service has classified the far-right Alternative for Germany, which some polls show as the most popular in the country, as an extremist party, the German authorities announced on Friday.The decision intensifies a quandary for Germany about what to do about the party, known as the AfD, whose leaders have trivialized the Holocaust, revived Nazi slogans and denigrated foreigners, all the while expanding their political base.The designation is certain to inflame a long-running debate over whether German lawmakers should move to ban the party altogether. Such a step could cast Germany into a political crisis, without necessarily resolving…

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