Russia outlaws Amnesty International in latest crackdown on dissent and activists
The decision by the Russian Prosecutor General's office, announced in an online statement, is the latest in the unrelenting crackdown on Kremlin critics, journalists and activists that intensified to unprecedented levels after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
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Fox News
30 minutes ago
- Fox News
From Washington: President Trump's Historic Alaska Summit
President Trump declared his Alaskan summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin 'extremely productive,' but says no deal or ceasefire has been reached yet. Giving few details about the tentative agreement, Trump said he first had to speak to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and our European allies about what transpired. FOX News Radio's Eben Brown discusses the no-deal result, the Trump administration's objectives for negotiating an end to the war on Ukraine, and the challenges the President will confront in a possible second meeting with Putin. The Trump administration is cracking down on crime in the nation's capital. City leaders in Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit Friday, ultimately challenging the administration's takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department. Republicans have praised the move, arguing that crime has gotten out of control. However, others are arguing that the city has seen record-low crime this year. Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker joined the FOX News Rundown earlier this week to discuss the president's decision. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
New York Times
32 minutes ago
- New York Times
‘War Is Too Serious to Take Seriously All the Time,' So He Wrote a Comic Novel
'We go to war because of stories,' said the novelist Elliot Ackerman, who tells stories because he went to war. He was thinking of Vladimir Putin redrafting history to justify Russia's actions in Ukraine. But also of Iraq and Afghanistan, where he served five tours of duty as a Marine and C.I.A. paramilitary officer, awarded a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a Silver Star with a citation for 'heroic actions' during the second battle for Falluja in 2004. In his 2019 memoir 'Places and Names,' Ackerman offered eviscerating details underlying that commendation, mindful of the men he had lost, the abandoned allies and missions gone wrong. He chose not to deploy a sixth time. 'You have to declare for yourself a separate peace,' he said recently. The writer that the wars made of him has now taken an unexpectedly comic turn with his new novel, 'Sheepdogs,' published by Knopf on Aug. 5. In two memoirs and seven novels he has been reflective, elegiac, often ruefully nostalgic, at times quietly angry, always sternly principled, and analytical to the point of prophetic about what he considers pernicious developments at home and abroad. Many of his fictional subjects, like the orphaned Afghan boys in 'Green on Blue,' his 2015 debut, have tended to be caught in the roil of warfare and the fallout of ethnic, religious and cultural clashes. 'Sheepdogs' is a gear shift into deceptively rip-roaring caper mode. 'When I get together with guys I served with,' Ackerman said, 'we tell funny stories, even about serious stuff. War is too serious to take seriously all the time, and absurd because it flips norms — like 'Thou shalt not kill' — on their heads. Because I love heist books and buddy comedies, I wanted to tell a story in that register, about the economy that exists around war after it ends.' Ackerman keeps his medals in a bedroom drawer in the Fifth Avenue apartment he shares with his second wife, the novelist and screenwriter Lea Carpenter. (He spends half his time in Washington, D.C., with his daughter and son from his first marriage.) On a sizzling day in July he was sitting in the velvety cool of his Manhattan living room, one large wall covered with a mural-size lithograph of the 1792 storming of the Tuileries Palace, created by Ashley Hicks, a family friend. The French Revolution is one sly subtext to Ackerman's twisty who-stole-it. Disney's 'Robin Hood,' and 'great two-handers' like 'Lethal Weapon,' he said, are two others. (Still, he doesn't want it forgotten that Mel Gibson's Los Angeles police detective in the movie franchise is 'also a suicidal Vietnam vet.') In 'Sheepdogs,' two down-on-their-luck ex-military pals (think Robin Hood and Little John) accept a lucrative assignment from an online source known only as Sheep Dog: to repossess a private jet with a mysterious cargo held hostage on an airstrip in swampy Uganda. Cheese (as in 'Big Cheese Aziz') is a former flying ace with the Afghan Air Force, reduced to working nights at a Texas gas station. His American counterpart, discharged for conduct unbecoming of a member of a C.I.A. division so clandestine it's known only as the Office, goes by Skwerl, because, like a squirrel, he 'could get you anything you needed' and 'because Marines can't spell for [expletive].' Apart from the G.I. Joes and model fighter planes Ackerman single-mindedly collected as a boy, landing in the military scarcely seemed in the cards. He was raised in Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and London, a son of the Wall Street investor Peter Ackerman, a co-founder of FreshDirect and a prominent proponent of international nonviolent conflict resolution. His mother, the novelist Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, has long been active in PEN International. Aimless as a teenager, Ackerman said he found his first sense of meritocratic community and competitive drive among the 'skater rats' of the as-yet-ungentrified South Bank in London. He 'joined R.O.T.C. in college, graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 2003, was first in his class at Quantico and, at 24, was among the youngest commissioned officers in charge of a platoon in Iraq. A few years later he traded his Marine Corps body armor for Pashtun mountain garb, working covertly as a paramilitary adviser to Afghan troops battling the Taliban. He remains bitter over 'the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan' in 2021, when, as chronicled in his second memoir, 'The Fifth Act,' he participated long-distance in an effort to evacuate as many Afghan allies as possible from Kabul. Ackerman said he has never been required to vet his writing with the Marine Corps or the C.I.A. This leaves open to conjecture what Langley would make, in 'Sheepdogs,' of Knotty Pleasures, a rope-manufacturing business run by Skwerl's dominatrix girlfriend that is markedly more solvent than his security company; of her excommunicated Amish client's unforeseen skills; or of the White Russian, a female mastermind from the South Bronx with ultimate authority over 'America's off-the-books armies.' The book is being developed as a streaming series by Tom Hanks's production company, and Ackerman is at work on a sequel. Despite its zany elements, 'Sheepdogs' turns somber in its apparent allusions to a disastrous 2008 U.S. military raid on the village of Azizabad that left some 90 civilians dead, including about 60 children. (The Pentagon disputed this figure.) Ackerman, who was the Marine Special Operations Officer in charge of ground operations for the strike, has not spoken publicly about it. Asked about how the attack reverberates in the novel, which locates it in a place called Now Zad, and its psychic toll on Skwerl, he said, 'My fiction is my way of writing about war in its totality, and the degrees of complexity around it, whether in Falluja, Haditha, Helmand Province or Azizabad. 'Now Zad is not a stand-in for Azizabad, no more than Sperkai is in 'Green on Blue,'' he added. 'My job was raids for years, and I saw a lot, some of it good and some of it horrible. All the books I've written engage with that.' He is proud to have served in 2005 as commander of a Marine infantry battalion aiding in relief operations in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. But he feels just as strongly, in view of the ongoing Marine and National Guard presence in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., that 'sending Federal troops on what increasingly feels like a politically motivated deployment is toxic to our society and to our military.' Ackerman credits his military and intelligence-gathering experiences for his ability to hone his characters psychologically. 'Living inside your characters' heads is like leading a platoon or, in special ops, figuring out what makes your adversaries tick,' he said. He now co-teaches a course at Yale, 'Field Operations in Global Affairs,' with Matt Trevithick, the C.E.O. of Blank Slate Technologies, which works with the defense, aviation and security industries. They became friends at the start of Ackerman's writing career, while Trevithick was a consultant to humanitarian and development organizations in the volatile borderlands of southern Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. 'Sheepdogs' leans more into 'the eccentric and absurdist' than other Ackerman books, Trevithick said, but it's not a complete change of direction. 'Both of us agreed a long time ago that the truest way to write about our complicated experiences was through fiction, which can capture what's true even if the stories aren't,' he added. Or, as Ackerman sees it, 'Times of great upheaval are vital for fiction.'
38 minutes ago
Trump-Putin meeting live updates: Zelenskyy to travel to DC on Monday to meet with President Trump
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Alaska on Friday in their high-stakes summit seeking a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war, but while Putin mentioned an "agreement" in the post-meeting news conference and Trump said "great progress" was made, there was no mention of a ceasefire. One key party not be in attendance Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump said after his meeting with the Russian president that he would call Zelenskyy and update him on the talks. Neither Putin nor Trump took questions from the hundreds of reporters gathered for their news conference, instead quickly shaking hands before leaving the stage.
