Spain beat England 2-1 in a dramatic Euro 2024 final on Sunday, standing up to the tournament's comeback kings and rising back to the top of European soccer in style.
Mikel Oyarzabal, off the bench as a second-half substitute, scored the decisive goal in the 86th minute, knifing between English defenders and sliding a fine finish past goalkeeper Jordan Pickford.
And the Spaniards, the undisputed best team of the tournament, the toast of soccer purists, the chief storytellers, the top goalscorers, roared to their fourth European title.
They had already knocked off Germany and France. They had won six of six, and arrived in Berlin favored to win a seventh match in a row, this blockbuster final against an underperforming England team overflowing with talent...
We're generally Anglophiles, but yesterday was a day when Spain's athletes ruled both the soccer (fútbol!) pitch as well as the tennis court at Wimbledon, where Carlos Alcaraz won his second straight Wimbledon and his fourth Grand Slam title. So, good for them. Viva España!
... It is hardly surprising that a political movement that has as its godhead a convicted felon and inveterate liar who attempted to overturn an election and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to retain power would within nanoseconds exploit the assassination attempt at a Donald Trump rally that left one attendee dead. But the utter brazenness of this effort has been stunning. Before crucial details were known—who’s the shooter? why did he do this?—MAGA was out in full-force to blame President Joe Biden, Democrats, and progressives for this shooting by stirring up anti-Trump sentiment. Leading the way in unhinged right-wing responses, Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) called for Biden to be arrested for “inciting an assassination.”
Even after it emerged that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the alleged shooter, was a registered Republican (who apparently made a $15 donation to a liberal political action committee in 2021), the crap kept coming. Sean Parnell, a right-wing commentator who in 2021 suspended his Senate campaign in Pennsylvania after his wife accused him of spousal and child abuse, tweeted at Biden: “It happened because of this sort of BS rhetoric from you & the rest of your party. It’s sickening. It needs to stop.” [snip]
The attempted assassination of Trump was a horrific event that claimed the life of one person and further traumatized American politics. It also triggered a flood of bullshit. The MAGA world rushed to take advantage of the shooting to remake Trump, who has essentially condoned political violence by vowing to pardon January 6 rioters, into a martyr of political violence and to portray Democrats as the perpetrators of such violence. It is a foul act but a true reflection of the black-is-white reality-denialism of Trump and and his MAGA following.
The cause of this tragic shooting has yet to be determined. But one thing is certain: Only one of the candidates in the 2024 contest incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to overturn an election and still threatens American democracy. What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, does not change that.
It's hard to remember a worse time in our nation's political history. We have to work even harder now for redemption in November.
Treason cases were rare in Russia 30 years ago, with only a handful brought annually. In the past decade and especially since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, however, the number has soared, along with espionage prosecutions.
They are ensnaring citizens and foreigners alike. Recent victims range from Kremlin critics and independent journalists to veteran scientists working with countries that Moscow considers friendly.
One rights group counted over 100 known treason cases in 2023, with probably another 100 that nobody knows about.
The prosecutions have raised comparisons to the show trials and purges under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s.
They are usually held in strict isolation in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, their trials are held behind closed doors and almost always result in convictions and long prison terms. They are investigated almost exclusively by the powerful Federal Security Service, or FSB, with specific charges and evidence shrouded in secrecy.
These cases stand apart from the unprecedented crackdown on dissent under President Vladimir Putin, who in 2022 urged security services to “harshly suppress the actions of foreign intelligence services (and) promptly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs.”...
This is war criminal Putin's repressive Russian state so admired by the MAGAts. We also must remember the Americans being held as hostages: Paul Whelan (arrested in 2018) and Evan Gershkovich (arrested in 2023).
