The military commissar of Russia's Khabarovsk region was removed from his post after half of the newly mobilised personnel were sent home as they did not meet the draft criteria, the region's governor said early on Monday.
Russia's first mobilisation since World War Two, declared by President Vladimir Putin on Sept. 21, has led to widespread discontent among officials and citizens over the way the draft has been handled, including complaints about enlistment officers sending call-up papers to clearly ineligible men.
"In 10 days, several thousand of our countrymen received summons and arrived at the military registration and enlistment offices," Mikhail Degtyarev, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in Russia's Far East, said in a video post on the Telegram messaging app.
The chaotic mobilisation of men to fight in Ukraine has also prompted thousands of fighting-age men to flee from the country to avoid a draft that was billed as enlisting those with military experience and specialities but has often appeared oblivious to service records, health, student status and even age.
"About half of them we returned home as they did not meet the selection criteria for entering the military service." [snip]
Some 2,000 people have been arrested at anti-war protests in more than 30 towns and cities, and some of them promptly given call-up papers - something the Kremlin said was perfectly legal.
Days after Hurricane Ian tore through Florida, wiping out neighborhoods and turning streets into rivers, rescue crews searching for survivors are reporting more deaths as recovery efforts continue.
Officials confirmed Ian has killed at least 76 people in Florida after it made landfall last week as a Category 4 storm, decimating coastal towns, flooding homes, collapsing roofs, flinging boats into buildings and sending cars floating. Four other people died in storm-related incidents as Ian churned into North Carolina.
Now, as blue skies return, Floridians who took shelter while the hurricane raged have emerged to find unrecognizable communities and face the daunting task of rebuilding – many of them still without power or clean drinking water.
More than 628,000 homes, businesses and other customers in Florida still did not have power as of Sunday evening, according to PowerOutage.us. Many are without clean tap water, with well over 100 boil-water advisories in places around the state, according to Florida Health Department data.
Michigan has survived political inexperience, inept leadership and bad policy choices before. What makes [GQP gubernatorial candidate Tudor] Dixon and Co. uniquely dangerous are their persistent efforts to undermine the democratic institutions Michigan voters have historically relied on to expel toxic leaders and correct course when their state loses its bearings.
Dixon is among a half-dozen Republican candidates for governor and U.S. Senate who refuse to promise they will accept this November's election results as the legitimate expression of the voters' will. Like Donald Trump, who began challenging the legitimacy of absentee votes well in advance of the 2020 election, they are priming supporters to believe that whatever political setbacks await them should be attributed to rampant fraud and Democratic corruption.
The danger that skepticism about the elections will prove a self-fulfilling prophecy, destroying both party's claims to legitimacy and providing election-deniers with a renewed rationale for political violence, is not theoretical. Not to the vice president and lawmakers who ran for their lives on Jan. 6, and not to anyone who remembers how close Michigan Republicans came to disenfranchising their state's voters the last time around.
Democracy is in a fight for its life, but so is Michigan's Republican Party. The only option for those who seek to restore its credibility is to renounce the demagogues whose fictions are driving it ever deeper into the political wilderness.
That's the conclusion of the Detroit Free Press' endorsement of the Democratic ticket in Michigan -- urging voters to re- elect Democrats Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney Gen. Dana Nessel, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. The paper makes it clear it has endorsed Republicans for statewide office in about half the elections since 1998, but that this year's crop of ugly Christofascist MAGA morons was more than anyone should swallow.
