Meeting Mikhail: Who is Putin’s immediate successor? And is he a nice guy? Slow Horses

"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The Totalitarian is the enemy 

From the Archives, 1982 the year Imrich became a Crown Employee: Thousands march in rain against nuclear weapons

Werner Herzog meeting Mikhail Gorbachev opens a fresh door to some of the most significant happenings of the late 20th Century from nuclear disarmament to the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War. It also puts into perspective today’s era of populist political leadership.

Meeting Gorbachev

Russia’s top independent newspaper, co-founded by Gorbachev, ceases operations after warnings

Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s leading independent newspapers and whose editor Dmitry Muratov was a co-awarded last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, has suspended its operations until the end of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Hungary's Pro-Putin PM Orban Claims Victory In National Vote

Rape as a weapon: huge scale of sexual violence endured in Ukraine emerges Women and girls have recounted the abuse they have suffered at the hands of Russian soldiers

NY Times: IRS Seeks $5 Billion To Fund 40% Increase In Criminal Investigations Unit To Target Russian Oligarchs

Winnebago RV and boat maker has a $4.4 billion backlog Business Insider 

Satellite spots stranded container ship Ever Forward, a year after Suez’s Ever Given Space 

Hackers steal more than $600 million from maker of Axie Infinity NBC. “Lordy….can’t they track the hackers via the ethereum wallet, as it is part of a blockchain?”

 Who is Putin’s immediate successor?  And is he a nice guy?

US, Australia concerned at proposed sanction-skirting Russia-India banking scheme Sydney Morning Herald

The Workaday Life of the World’s Most Dangerous Ransomware Gang Wired 

How Your Shadow Credit Score Could Decide Whether You Get an Apartment ProPublica 

US yield curve inverts in possible recession signalFinancial Times 

Roman Abramovich suffered suspected poisoning at talks BBC. Russia wants a resolutoin sooner rather than later. The ones opposed to the negotiations are the neo-Nazis (and to a lesser degree the US), who are believed to be behind the killing of another negotiator who was rumored to be close to Russia.

‘Russian Agent!’ McCarthyite Attacks on Anti-Imperialists, w/ Justin Podur & Rania KhalekYouTube

 

War Is No Solution American Conservative (resilc). Um, depends on your problem definition…

 

Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers on International Relations Gilbert Doctorow

Imaging the Brain: What Brain Scans Reveal About the Consequences of Covid-19 Forbes 

"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight," Dr. Johnson opined, "it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

Succession But It’s Arrested Development

As anyone who’s even fleetingly dipped into the vast, storied genre of the British spy thriller can attest, there are a few different games afoot in “Slow Horses.” What looks at first like a story of restless, demoted spies finding their purpose gets quickly twisted up in MI5 politics. Then, a couple of hours into the six-episode season, the show tries to turn everything we thought we knew inside out.

Slow Horses,’ Starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, Is a Spy Thriller That’s Best As a Spy Comedy: TV Review

Invasion of the Fact-Checkers The Tablet. On the terrain of the platforms

Why humour and power have more to do with each other than you think

ATO puts 50,000 directors on notice The ATO is sending its strongest message on debt enforcement since the pandemic, says Grant Thornton.

Pete Recommends Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 26, 2022 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: How to secure your home and office network: FBI: Americans lost $7B in 2021 to Internet crime; The best DNS blockers and firewalls; Bank’s Machine Learning Systems Are Ripe for Sabotage; Blockchain: Financial and Non-Financial Uses and Challenges; and DHS seeks to automate video surveillance on ‘soft targets’ like transit systems, schools.

TechRepublic: “Encryption is the process of securing information by translating it into a sort of computer code that is unreadable to anyone not possessing the right credentials, passwords or other authentication means to access this information. 

This code can theoretically be cracked or broken but strong encryption methods are nearly impervious to such manipulation. Encryption of data not only entails securing it on local workstations or remote servers, but it must also protect the data when in transit meaning being accessed or transmitted from one party or entity to another. Learn about the best encryption software and techniques…”

Russia sanctions threaten to chip away at dominance of US dollar, says IMF FT

Sloppy sanctions will blunt themselves Reuters

Russia-West: Is It Possible to Lift the Sanctions?Valdai Discussion Club

Russians expect Western businesses to returnBNE Intellinews

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 31 Institute for the Study of War

Ukraine strikes fuel depot in Russia’s Belgorod: Regional governor Al Arabiya. Cheeky! Maybe somebody wants the peace talks to fail?

NATO ‘has been DEFEATED’ by Putin calling the alliance’s bluff and should be replaced with a smaller coalition of nations prepared to be more offensive, says Britain’s former army commanderDaily Mail

The Ukraine War Is Over But the Biden Administration Hasn’t Noticed William Arkin, Newsweek

MWinners and Losers in Putin’s War Richard Haass, Council on Foreign Relations