The chancellor’s first year in office has been defined by the consequences of Russia’s war in Ukraine

Last December, on becoming Germany’s first SPD chancellor for 16 years, Olaf Scholz asked aides whether there was a plan B for energy should Russia turn off the gas. The answer, Mr Scholz wrote in an essay published this month, was “no”.

So began a year during which the assumptions underlying decades of German prosperity were tested to destruction. Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, and his weaponisation of energy supplies, obliged Germany to simultaneously end its dependency on Russian gas and rethink a self-consciously low profile as a military power. Given the scale and moral urgency of the challenge – and Germany’s geopolitical importance – Mr Scholz’s sometimes unwieldy three-party coalition government has not got the international credit it deserves for stepping up to the plate.

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A steep slump in average earnings not only affects individuals, but impoverishes literature by dictating which stories get told

News that the average earnings of self-employed writers have slumped to £7,000 in the UK might seem par for the course in the context of a pandemic followed by a cost of living crisis. However, the 38% drop in median earnings since 2018 continues a 16-year downward trend, with the number of authors who earn all their income from writing more than halving since 2006, from 40% to 19%. This phenomenon is not unique to the UK, with similar trends reported in Australia, Canada, the EU and the US, according to the authors of a new report.

The survey, commissioned by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), is not going to set alarm bells ringing like the low pay of nurses or ambulance drivers. These are people in a network of industries, across publishing and the media, that have always rewarded the successful few at the expense of the aspiring many. The full significance of the drop becomes clear when you burrow down into where the authors live and how they manage to survive on such low earnings. Nearly half are based in London and the south of England, and many rely on financial support from partners or family (where they do so, their household earnings average £50,000). One in five primarily support themselves through academic work.

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After her release from a Russian penal colony on Thursday, Brittney Griner didn’t want to decompress or relax upon boarding the plane that would bring her back to the United States. “I have been in prison for 10 months now, listening to Russian,” she said, according to Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens. “I want to talk.” In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, the US diplomat described how the two-time Olympic gold medalist spent 12 hours of the 18-hour flight engaging in conversations. “She moved right past me and went to every member on that crew, looked them in the eyes, shook their hands and asked about them, got their names, making a personal connection with them,” Carstens told Bash. “It was really amazing.”

Griner’s release came after the Biden administration secured a deal with Russia in exchange for freeing Viktor Bout, an infamous arms dealer known as the Merchant of Death who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for charges of conspiring to kill Americans. Griner had been arrested at a Moscow airport in February on accusations that she was carrying vape canisters containing cannabis oil in her luggage. The US government has maintained that the Phoenix Mercury star was wrongfully detained. 

“I was left with the impression this is an intelligent, passionate, compassionate, humble, interesting person, a patriotic person.”

“I was left with the impression this is an intelligent, passionate, compassionate, humble, interesting person, a patriotic person,” Carstens said. “But above all, authentic. I hate the fact that I had to meet her in this manner, but I actually felt blessed having had a chance to get to know her.”

The athlete’s release sparked an outcry from right-wing media and politicians claiming her freedom shouldn’t have been prioritized over other American prisoners. Newsmax and Fox News hosts repeated the same line that Whelan, who has been in Russian custody since 2018 and was sentenced to 16 years in prison over espionage charges. has fallen victim to identity politics for being a white, straight man.

Meanwhile, Whelan’s family members expressed support for Griner’s release. “The Biden Administration made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home, and to make the deal that was possible, rather than waiting for one that wasn’t going to happen,” his brother said in a statement. Speaking to Newsmax, Whelan’s sister Elizabeth lamented her brother being left behind but said “any time a wrongfully detained American comes home that’s a win.” 

On Sunday morning, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the government continues to negotiate Whelan’s release. “As we progressed through this summer and into the fall… it was clear that they were treating Paul very separately, very distinctly because of these sham espionage charges they levied against him,” Kirby told ABC. “It really occurred to us that there was just no chance of doing it last week… we had been trying all the way up until the moment we actually secured the deal that got Brittney home, we were still trying to get Paul out.”

There is something sad, verging on tragic, about the Jewish need for validation from people outside the tribe – like the proverbial playground outcast who smiles shyly when the class bully gives him the time of day.  

This attitude is manifested in the unctuous delight that is taken when a celebrity or politician or artist is discovered to be Jewish or even half-Jewish — whether it is Madeline Albright, Paul Newman, or Cardinal John O’Connor, the late Archbishop of New York, whose mother was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism. That Jews revel in this slightly puerile sense of pride, after centuries of being discriminated against in both subtle and extreme ways, is not surprising. But the fact remains that it is hard to know what to call this other than an exercise in collective self-abasement.   

I have been thinking about this phenomenon for a long time, and it was underscored in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago deplorable dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. The dinner came a week after Trump got a standing ovation at the gala of the Zionist Organization of America, which awarded him its Theodore Herzl Gold Medallion – an honor previously bestowed upon Winston Churchill, David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. It is impossible to imagine any of them breaking bread with West, the rapper-turned-philosopher who has made a habit of spouting antisemitic remarks (“death con 3 on Jewish people”) and recently allowed that he sees “good things about Hitler;” or Fuentes, a right-wing white supremacist and Holocaust-denier.  

Over the years, some Jews had mistaken Trump’s daughter Ivanka’s marriage to Jared Kushner and conversion to Judaism or his largely  transactional and, in some cases, purely gestural relationship with Israel — moving the embassy to Jerusalem —  as evidence of philosemitism. For them, his embrace of these two openly antisemitic characters felt like a shocking betrayal. When asked to apologize, an aide responded that Trump “didn’t care.” Jewish Republicans, including several former officials in the Trump White House and the head of the very ZOA that had just given him its highest honor, have been running in the other direction.

The truth, of course, is that Trump will do business with whoever serves his larger purpose, in this case to gain popularity and win votes for his 2024 bid to return to the presidency. And the truth also is that antisemitism, as ever, lurks just beneath the surface – and its cloaked quality makes it even more insidious.  

As we have seen over the last decade, the further away we get from the Holocaust, the more brazenly antisemitism shows itself, such that that cloak has finally been thrown off to reveal an abiding hatred that has never gone away. One can speculate about the reasons for this abject reality — envy, an ingrained disdain, an allergy to what is perceived as a Jewish style of communication – but its roots lie deep in history and have culminated in genocide.

The Jewish response until now has been to appease the cultural hatred aimed at us – or to kowtow to anyone, however problematic, perceived as being on our side — instead of fighting it head on. Even Benjamin Netanyahu, the former and future prime minister of Israel — who has positioned himself as the great protector of the Jewish people inside and outside of the Jewish state, and is, whatever his shortcomings, a verbal straight shooter known to call it as he sees it  — had only the meekest reaction to Trump’s dinner, referring to it as “a mistake.”  

I would suggest that it’s high time for us Jews to stop turning the other cheek in a desperate attempt to be accepted in a world club that does not want us as members. Just as mainstream discourse no longer tolerates racist expressions or tropes, we should demand that same level of scrutiny be applied to the use of Jewish stereotypes with rigorous consistency and force.  

We have slid by on a certain attitude of pacific accommodation for far too long, as though a combination of righteous fury and indifference to the reactions of others were too rich a brew for our blood. It’s not as though we’re incapable of putting up a powerful defense: it took the Nazis longer to overcome the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto than it took them to conquer France.

Then, too, we Jews would be wise to stop pinning our hopes on the by-now hackneyed phrase “Never again.” The bravado that lies behind this rallying cry is thin and, in the worst instance, can only lead to a naïve conviction that we are safe. The message Tom Stoppard conveyed in Leopoldstadt was that the very act of assimilation — of trying to “pass” — is a delusional one, a temporary resolution of an age-old enmity at best. 

Jews, lest we forget, are a tiny minority, despite our relative influence and power (which is usually attributed to devious and suspect means). We are a minority that has been vulnerable to a galling prejudice and animus that has thrived for centuries and is re-emerging with ever-growing boldness. When Ken Burns spoke at the 92nd Street Y about his reasons for creating a docuseries about the U.S. response to the Holocaust, he said that he and his team had worked overtime to rush the project out in response to the antisemitic tenor of the times.

“Never again” is, indeed, hollow to the point of meaninglessness if we continue to politely sit on our hands in the face of an alarming rise in overt antisemitism rather than dare to risk public disfavor by raising our fists. Put plainly, history has shown us that it is dangerous to do otherwise.

The post ‘Never again’ means actually demanding zero tolerance of antisemitic stereotypes appeared first on The Forward.

An international team of legal advisers has been working with local prosecutors in Ukraine’s recaptured city of Kherson in recent days as they began gathering evidence of alleged sexual crimes by Russian forces as part of a full-scale investigation.

The visit by a team from Global Rights Compliance, an international legal practice headquartered in The Hague, has not previously been reported.

Their efforts are part of a broader international effort to support overwhelmed Ukrainian authorities as they seek to hold Russians accountable for crimes they allegedly committed during the conflict, now nearly 10 months old.

Accusations surfaced soon after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of rape and other abuses across the country, according to accounts Reuters gathered and the U.N. investigative body.

Moscow, which says it is conducting a “special military operation” in Ukraine, has denied committing war crimes or targeting civilians, and the Kremlin denies allegations of sexual violence by the Russian military in Ukraine.

The Russian defence ministry did not immediately respond to questions for this article.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Dec. 9 that a UN Human Rights report about Russian attacks on civilians was based on “rumours and gossip”, and Moscow has accused Ukrainian forces of brutal reprisals against civilians who cooperated with Russian forces.

The scale of the Ukrainian prosecution’s task is daunting, with the number of alleged international crimes running into tens of thousands and as war in the east and south of the country makes already complex work more difficult and dangerous.

“We’ve come down here for a three-day mission to support the Office of the Prosecutor General (OPG), and specifically the team investigating conflict-related sexual violence,” said Julian Elderfield, one of the legal advisers who took part in the Kherson visit that ran from Thursday to Saturday.

“(It’s about) asking the right questions, pursuing unique or different lines of investigation that might otherwise not have been pursued by local investigators,” he told Reuters in Kherson on Saturday.

Kherson was occupied by Russian forces for months before Ukrainian troops recaptured it in early November, in one of Moscow’s biggest military defeats of the war so far.

Some residents who remained during the occupation have described being detained and tortured, repeating allegations made by Ukrainians across territory that has been reclaimed by local forces in recent months.

More than 50,000 alleged incidents of international crimes have been reported by Ukraine’s prosecutor general since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

They include hundreds of potential cases of alleged war crimes, genocide and crimes of aggression, some of which could be escalated to overseas tribunals like the International Criminal Court (ICC) if they are deemed sufficiently serious.

In June, Ukraine held a preliminary hearing in its first trial of a Russian soldier charged with raping a Ukrainian woman during Russia’s invasion. The suspect was not in Ukrainian custody and was tried in absentia.

Elderfield and Olha Kotlyarska, a legal adviser also working for Global Rights Compliance, together make up the mobile justice team supporting the Ukrainian prosecutors’ fact-finding mission in Kherson.

They joined Ukrainian prosecutors visiting hospitals, a local aid distribution centre and other sites to pursue lines of investigation and interview victims of alleged abuses, including sexual violence.

Ukraine’s special war crimes unit for conflict-related sexual violence is also collecting video and photographic evidence that could help them identify perpetrators for future prosecutions.

Whether Russian commanding officers are to blame, or subordinates who carry out their orders, is one of many thorny issues to be resolved in the future, local investigators said.

Anna Sosonska, deputy head of Ukraine’s eight-member war crimes unit for sexual violence, told Reuters she would supervise the investigation and look into the possible role of Russian political and military leaders in any crimes.

“Everywhere where Russian soldiers were based they committed war crimes, they committed sexual violence and they tortured, they murdered,” she said.

“Аccording to the results of this trip, we discovered the facts of conflict-related sexual violence and the information has been entered into the unified register of pre-trial investigations.”

Rape can constitute a war crime under the Geneva Conventions that establish international legal standards for conduct of armed conflicts. Widespread or systematic sexual violence could amount to crimes against humanity, generally seen as more serious, legal specialists said.

Serhii Doroshyn, deputy head of the national police’s Investigation Department in Crimea and Sevastopol, told Reuters the unit had questioned about 70 people so far. Many of them said they had been held at up to 10 detention centres in the Kherson region during Russia’s occupation.

He added that more than half said they had been subjected to various forms of sexual violence. There are likely to be many more witnesses, he added.

“We find someone, conduct investigative actions, question, find information and then look for other people … We conduct them despite the situation, despite the shelling,” he said.

Doroshyn added that Kherson differed from the capital Kyiv, where investigators had been most active until now, because it had been occupied by Russian forces for so long.

“There were well-established temporary detention facilities, the so-called ‘torture chambers’, where up to 30-40 people could be brought daily,” he said.

“That is, massive work was carried out here. Of course, they did not observe any laws, conventions and statutes.”

Elderfield said sexual violence was not always given the prominence it should have in national and international investigations. Social stigma and shame contributed to under-reporting, he added.

“So a specialised team can really help to bring to light the information about these crimes and evidence about these crimes, so they’re given the priority that they deserve.”

A further challenge lies in the fast-shifting dynamics of the war.

Teams like his are likely to have to move in and out of contested areas quickly, and the sound of distant explosions while Reuters reporters accompanied investigators in Kherson last week were a reminder of the ongoing fighting.

Witnesses have fled the area and need to be found, and people may also be nervous about speaking out when it is unclear whether Ukrainian troops will be able to hold the territory they have recaptured for long.

“The proximity of the ongoing conflict has really impacted the Ukrainian prosecution office’s investigation in Kherson,” Elderfield said.

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Here’s the plan: Select 100 companies whose business burdens nature. Then, offer advice on how to lighten their impact and monitor their progress.

Such is the vision of a campaign called “Nature Action 100” launched on Sunday by 11 investment firms hoping to encourage companies to help preserve ecosystems that support more than half the world’s economic output.

Protecting supply chains that rely on natural resources is just good business, said Claudia Wearmouth, global head of responsible investment at Columbia Threadneedle Investments.

“The aim of Nature Action 100 is to engage those companies that have the highest impact on nature, not only to protect the natural environment but also to mitigate the risks these companies face from mounting pressure to effectively address biodiversity issues,” Wearmouth said in a statement.

The list of 100 companies will be published next year.

Government officials at the U.N. nature summit in Montreal are working to strike a global agreement by Dec. 19 on ways to protect the world’s threatened species and dwindling wild spaces.

A draft of the hoped-for final agreement would see companies asked to assess and report any harm to nature from their businesses and investments, which could encompass their supply chains and portfolios.

Such reporting requirements could be a burden for some companies, analysts say.

Nature Action 100 would seek to select 100 companies for investors to focus on in suggesting how the private sector can navigate any new rules and monitoring their progress, the group said.

“The impact that companies have on nature is currently not easy to quantify, and this limits the extent to which investors can engage with them on this key issue,” said Stephanie Pfeifer, CEO of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which is among the leaders of the new initiative.

The other investment firms behind the plan are AXA Investment Managers, BNP Paribas Asset Management, Church Commissioners for England, Domini Impact Investments, Federated Hermes Limited, Karner Blue Capital, Robeco, Storebrand Asset Management, Christian Brothers Investment Services and Vancity Investment Management.

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