John Ross, Globetrotter:

Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, accounting for almost three times as much of world exports as Ukraine, 18 percent compared to 7 percent.

Second, and even more important, is the situation with fertilizers. Russia is the world’s largest fertilizer exporter, and Belarus, which is also facing Western sanctions, is also a major supplier—together they account for more than 20 percent of the global supply. Fertilizer prices were already rising before the Ukraine war due to high fuel prices—fertilizer production relies heavily on natural gas—but sanctions by the West, which prevent Russia from exporting fertilizers, have made the situation worse.

David Laborde, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, pointed out that “the biggest threat the food system is facing is the disruption of the fertilizer trade.” This is because, he said: “Wheat will impact a few countries. The fertilizer issue can impact every farmer everywhere in the world, and cause declines in the production of all food, not just wheat.”

Most British diplomats and Foreign Office experts could not see the Soviets as fully European—it was customary to suggest that they displayed Oriental features, torn between extremes of humanity and cruelty. They presumably inclined toward tyranny, possessed a peasant mentality, were disorganized, and could work only in short bursts of frantic activity. “The Russian temperament,” wrote Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador in Moscow, “still finds sustained exertion distasteful.” Occasionally the treatment of the Soviets as inferior Slavs gave way to their castigation as Jews, resulting in a curious blend of Orientalism, anticommunism, and anti-Semitism. Alexander Cadogan, for example, offended by Soviet accusations that the British were involved in secret negotiations with Germany, noted in his diary in January 1944: “This is quite monstrous. We tell the Russians everything and play square with them. They are the most stinking creepy set of Jews I’ve ever come across.”

—Serhii Plokhy, Yalta, (London: Penguin, 2010), 63.

Baxley teacher to run as Republican candidate for Ga. governor

Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, was also waiting outside for her children. She said she was one of numerous parents who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner. After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.

Ms. Gomez said she convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free.

…

Ms. Gomez described the scene as frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.

Tribune:

30th January 1972: An armed soldier attacks a protestor on Bloody Sunday when British Paratroopers shot dead 13 civilians on a civil rights march in Derry City. (Photo by Frederick Hoare/Central Press/Getty Images)

Unlike most years, the recent Queen’s Speech did not pass without remark in Ireland. Delivered by the colonel-in-chief of the Parachute Regiment, whose soldiers killed fourteen on Bloody Sunday and nine in the Ballymurphy Massacre, Prince Charles ventriloquised a Tory ultimatum: the Troubles are over, and our geriatric troops will be protected from ‘vexatious’ claims alleging illegality and war crimes.

This ultimatum came in the form of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill which, promising conditional amnesty for crimes committed during the period known euphemistically as the ‘Troubles’, cleared its first House of Commons hurdle yesterday by 285 votes to 208, sans support from all the parties based in the North of Ireland.

The day after the Queen’s Speech, the bereaved families of the Ballymurphy Massacre quietly marked the one-year anniversary of a landmark inquest which found all victims ‘entirely innocent’—more than fifty years after the British media ran credulous stories, fed by the British army, which cast civilian victims as death-deserving IRA gunmen.

What does this bill mean, then, to victims’ families, who protested yesterday—in Derry, Belfast and London—against what they are calling Britain’s ‘Bill Of Shame’?

‘It’s very disturbing,’ John Teggart, who was 11 when his father was shot 14 times by the Parachute Regiment during the Ballymurphy Massacre, tells Tribune. ‘They’ve made it quite blatant that they’re trying to black out the war crimes committed by state actors like the British Army and those involved in running paramilitaries who were state agents.’

Guardian:

The historian Adam Tooze said: “The war dominates everything. The nuclear escalation risk is not being priced in. This doesn’t feel like cold war. It’s hard to think of a time during the cold war when the US openly announced its policy was to eliminate the capacity of Russia to take independent military action.”

Lieutenant Chris Olivarez, spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety:

„What we do know, at that point, the shooter was able to make entry into a classroom, barricaded himself inside that classroom. And again, just begin shooting numerous children and teachers that were in that classroom. Having no regard for human life, just a complete evil person, by not having any regard for children, anyone that’s inside that classroom, just began shooting anyone that was in his way.“

Uvalde, Texas, gunman was increasingly troubled and violent, friends say – The Washington Post 

Guardian:

Speaking to the press at the Cannes film festival premiere of his new film Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg referred specifically to attempts to overturn Roe v Wade. “In Canada … we think everyone in the US is completely insane. I think the US has gone completely bananas, and I can’t believe what the elected officials are saying, not just about Roe v Wade, so it is strange times.”

Cronenberg then suggested a parallel to attitudes in Russia towards Ukraine. “We talk about Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, but then south of the border in Canada we feel the vibrations that are weirdly similar.”