ICYMI: Chris Cuomo, Ukraine war diaries and more
It's Saturday, which means it's time for the round-up of this week's top premium columns.
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1. Chris Cuomo is burning down CNN. And he's taking Don Lemon with him.
By Tim Swarens
Chris Cuomo is burning down the house. Perhaps we should stand back simply to admire the flames.
On Wednesday, Cuomo asked for an arbitrator to award him $125 million because CNN fired him for what even a first-year journalism student would have understood to be egregious ethical violations.
Cuomo's Trumpian-style lack of ethics is old news. But his rationale for demanding enough money to make a tech exec envious is truly novel: I wasn't the only dishonest journalist on CNN's payroll.
2. Ukraine war becomes media obsession while other wars are ignored
By Shmuel Lederman
While the world community is not sending troops to defend Ukraine, it has united impressively to condemn Vladimir Putin and moved to isolate his kleptocrat regime. There’s no guarantee that this will work, but at least it’s made clear to the Russian dictator that a big price is attached to his murderous aggression.
But why does the world let other miscreants run wild? If we are willing to pay a price to deter and punish an international rogue like Putin, why coddle his fellow travelers?
3. Kyiv not Kiev: How we refer to Ukraine's capital matters
By Steven Petrow
Have you noticed that TV anchors, diplomats and – hold onto your blue and yellow flags – even American politicians on both sides of the aisle say "Kyiv" (pronounced "KEEV") and not "Kiev" (KEE-ev)? In this day of deep divides on almost every topic, it's sobering to see such agreement when it comes to how we pronounce the name of Ukraine's capital city.
This isn't a "you like tomato, I like tomahto" situation. How to pronounce and spell Kyiv is not a matter of personal choice. It’s political, and it matters. By adopting "Kyiv" we're siding with Ukraine – the country known as the "breadbasket of Europe" – against Russia.
4. Daylight saving time bill tramples our right to decide what time it is
By Rex Huppke
So if I’m hearing this right, the grand American tradition of having eight months of daylight saving time per year – losing an hour in the spring and gaining an hour in the fall – is about to be abolished by the federal government because some political muckety-mucks decided they have a right to mess with time.
Well guess what? I don’t want Big Government’s hands all over my clock.
On Tuesday, our new time lords in the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a thing called the Sunshine Protection Act. This sickening display of government overreach would make daylight saving time a year-round thing, meaning clocks would never have to be adjusted.
5. Russian aggression is making nuclear threats a reality in Europe
By Alexandra Vacroux
Russia’s war in Ukraine has raised the specter of a nuclear incident in Europe. Two disastrous scenarios could result from Russian attacks on Ukraine.
First, Russian attacks on nuclear power plants could have devastating consequences.
Ukraine has five nuclear power plants, including the decommissioned Chernobyl complex that was destroyed by an accident in 1986 and now occupied by the Russians early in the invasion. The Zaporizhzhia plant, which was on fire last week, is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.
Authorities in Ukraine said that Russian forces shelled the Zaporizhzhia plant, hitting one of the six reactors and setting an administrative building on fire. No radioactive material was released. The Ukrainian managers of the power plant are still on the job, but the plant is occupied by Russian military forces, and the specialists could be under duress.
6. World War III will happen on the internet. We need better cybersecurity.
By Shlomo Kramer
Is World War III just around the corner? It depends on what you imagine when you think about an all-out global conflagration. If the image that comes to mind is one out of a bad 1980s Hollywood movie – with Russian tanks charging down Broadway or American boys in uniform flying Old Glory on top of the Kremlin, you can probably relax. But if you know anything about the way we wage war in the 21st century, you realize that World War III isn’t just around the corner – it’s already here.
Increasingly, both Russia and Ukraine are recruiting shadowy armies of volunteer hackers, proxy foreign fighters on keyboards for either side, using encrypted apps like Telegram to distribute lists of targets and encourage attacks. Recently, pro-Ukrainian activists managed to jam the broadcast of several Russian television channels, airing instead gruesome footage from the front lines, alongside messages urging Russian citizens to stand up to their government and oppose the war.
7. Republicans can't erase diversity or history, but they're trying so hard it hurts
By Jill Lawrence
Once upon a time there was a pretend country where pretty much everyone was Christian, heterosexual and healthy. Nobody needed to worry about catching a disease like COVID-19 or spreading it to someone it might kill. Nobody had a transgender child who needed medical treatment. And nobody ever needed or wanted an abortion – not even for a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy.
No children had to put up with unpleasant history lessons, nobody had trouble voting, nobody unarmed got shot by police, and nobody needed protests or science.
Sounds crazy, right? But it’s clear from proposals many conservatives are pushing that this is the kind of country a lot of Americans want. It’s as if they’re trying to erase entire groups of people, big chunks of history and reality itself.
8. Even if Florida teachers don't say gay, science does
By Eliot Schrefer
Many assume – because why should they not? – that the intended state for human beings is heterosexuality. Any other state is the sign of a human culture that has gone off the rails. Creatures wouldn’t evolve to desire creatures of the same sex. Otherwise they’d go extinct!
This is a case, though, in which culture has lagged behind science. Most animals are sexually monomorphic, meaning males and females are identical to human eyes, so we assumed that centuries of observed matings were all heterosexual. Now that sexing animals is more common practice in the wild, scientists have found same-sex pairings throughout the animal kingdom. The number of animal species with confirmed substantial same-sex sexual behaviors, a recent study in the journal Nature reports, is 1,500 and growing.
9. Ukraine war diary: I grew up in Russia. Now I fight in Kyiv for Ukraine
By Carli Pierson and Illarion Pavliuk
There have been so many men wanting to enlist in Ukraine's civilian volunteer army that our contact, Illarion Pavliuk, has not been able to join active fighting yet. Instead, he has been helping train and organize other volunteers, as he and other citizen volunteers work to fortify the capital city of Kyiv.
I wake up every morning to check if I have messages from Illarion and my other sources in Ukraine. Thank God, so far everyone is safe.
And I take advantage of his downtime to ask about his remarkable personal story of exile in Russia and his return to Ukraine at the age of 16.
10. Ukraine war drives cycle of fear. How to protect kids' mental health
By Dr. Marc Siegel
Two years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, a new Harris Poll conducted on behalf of the American Psychological Association found that 63% of American adults said their lives have been forever changed. Loss of life, economic hardship and cultural changes have been pervasive.
The survey revealed widespread grief and worry about children’s development. Almost half of those surveyed reported a big increase in sedentary behavior, which will be difficult to reverse, and a majority revealed significant unwanted weight changes. Drinking and substance abuse have been on the rise because of the stress of the pandemic and its restrictions.
And just when it appeared that stress and fear were finally giving way to a feeling of liberation as the number of cases and hospitalizations and associated mandates from COVID dropped dramatically, along came the war in Ukraine.