Bridge collapse derailed a train in Russia and at least some passengers injured, officials say
MOSCOW (AP) — A passenger train derailed in western Russia late Saturday after a bridge collapsed because of what local officials described as 'illegal interference.' Officials said at least some passengers were injured.
The train came off its tracks in Russia's Bryansk region en route from the Russian capital of Moscow to Klimov in the country's west, Moscow Railways said in a statement. It said the bridge had been damaged 'as a result of illegal interference in transport operations' without elaborating.
Bryansk regional Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said some passengers were injured but did not give further details.
'Emergency services and government officials are working at the scene,' he said. 'Everything is being done to provide all necessary assistance to the victims.'
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
How progressive critics paved the way for Trump's attack on judicial supremacy
One of the key axioms of politics in our, and any other, era is that nothing lasts forever. Today's seemingly new political arguments, almost certainly, will find their way into an opponent's arsenal. Evidence of that axiom is abundant. Where once Republicans were rapidly anti-Russia and anti-Putin, today they favor accommodation. Where once Democrats were suspicious of free trade, today they embrace it as part of their criticism of the president's protectionism. The most consequential of those inversions involves attitudes toward courts and judges. Where once progressive critics called the rule of law a myth and worked to expose the politics of law, today the president mobilizes that argument to accuse judges of being driven by partisan motivations. In the first Trump administration, as the president stacked the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary with MAGA-allied judges, progressives eagerly denounced those judges and what they labelled 'judicial supremacy.' They argued that the authority to interpret the Constitution was not lodged solely in the judicial branch. It was, they contended, also the work of the other branches, and the American people themselves, to say what the law is. Now, they are appalled when members of the Trump Administration take up those arguments and offer constitutional arguments of their own. Before saying more about the source of attacks on the courts and positions now being appropriated by the Trump administration, let me cite a few examples of its escalating critiques of judicial supremacy. On May 20, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered his own rendition of the powers and jurisdiction of the federal courts. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation case, and the administration's reluctance to 'facilitate' his return, Rubio insisted that he does not have to obey court orders when they touch on the foreign policy of the United States. 'There is,' Rubio said, 'a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge, and the judicial branch, cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy.' The Secretary of State insisted that 'No judge can tell how I have to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them. And if I do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch.' Rubio is not the only one in the administration to act as if they get to define what the Constitution means or what authority courts have. Two months ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed Federal District Judge James Boasberg, who, as NBC News noted 'is presiding over the case involving the administration's use of the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act to deport what officials claim are gang members to El Salvador' was 'trying to control our entire foreign policy,' and that under the Constitution, he 'cannot do it.' And then there is the recent insistence of White House staffer Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that the president has the right to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. Some might call these comments unconstitutional or anti-constitutional, but I suspect they would say that they have as much right to interpret the Constitution as the judicial branch. That is the position of conservative allies of the administration. Adrian Vermeule, for example, Professor of Law at Harvard, argues that the law 'is to a large degree what the President and the agencies say it is.' And 'The President, as a key figure in the republic, has a responsibility to interpret the Constitution in a way that promotes the common good and effective governance.' This brings us back to the fact that arguments made with the goal of advancing one political program may be flipped and turned to another purpose. It was not so long ago that progressives chaffing under the rulings of the Roberts Court called for the same kind of diffusion of the authority to interpret the Constitution that we are now seeing from the Trump Administration. In September 2020, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie quoted with approval the following: ''The judiciary is not the sole guardian of our constitutional inheritance and interpretive authority under the Constitution has varied over time.'' In his own voice, he said: '(I)f protecting the right of the people to govern for themselves means curbing judicial power and the Supreme Court's claim to judicial supremacy, then Democrats should act without hesitation.' Twenty years earlier, two progressive constitutional law scholars reacted to an increasingly conservative Supreme Court's erosion of the Warren Court's pro-criminal defendant Miranda v. Arizona decision by calling for what they called 'shared constitutional experimentation.' 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That is why, if the Constitution survives this moment, we should be cautious about calling for the dismantling of the courts' ultimate authority to advance the political cause of the moment. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall got it right when, more than two centuries ago, he wrote, 'It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.' All of this is a reminder that in a constitutional republic, officials, citizens, and commentators need to take a long view and think not just of what will advance their immediate interest. Prudence requires considering what things would look like if, and when, their opponents come to power. Patience and foresight are underappreciated, but indispensable virtues of constitutional government.
Bloomberg
2 hours ago
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New York Times
3 hours ago
- New York Times
The Man Putin Couldn't Kill
Supported by Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. Grozev had become expert at following all but invisible digital trails — black-market cellphone data, passenger manifests, immigration records — in order to unmask Russian spies. These were the sleeper cells living in Western countries and passing as natives, or the people dispatched to hunt down dissidents around the world. He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. That revelation put Grozev in President Vladimir Putin's cross hairs. He wanted Grozev killed, and to make it happen the Kremlin turned to none other than the fugitive financier, who, it turns out, had been recruited by Russian intelligence. Now the man that Grozev had been tracking began tracking him. The fugitive enlisted a team to begin the surveillance. The members of that team are behind bars now. The financier lives in Moscow, where several times a week he makes visits to the headquarters of the Russian secret police. Grozev — still very much alive — imagines the man trying to explain to his supervisors why he failed in his mission. This gives Grozev a small measure of satisfaction. On May 12, after a lengthy trial, Justice Nicholas Hilliard of the Central Criminal Court in London sentenced six people, all of them Bulgarian nationals, to prison terms between five and almost 11 years for their involvement in the plot to kill Grozev, among other operations. The group had spent more than two years working out of England, where the ringleader maintained rooms full of false identity documents and what the prosecution called law-enforcement-grade surveillance equipment. In addition to spying on Grozev and his writing partner, the Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, the Bulgarians spied on a U.S. military base in Germany where Ukrainian soldiers were being trained; they trailed a former Russian law enforcement officer who had fled to Europe; and most embarrassingly for Moscow, they planned a false flag operation against Kazakhstan, a Russian ally. In the past two decades England has been the site of at least two high-profile deadly operations and more than a dozen other suspicious deaths that have been linked to Russia. Yet the trial of this six-person cell appears to be the first time in recent history that authorities have successfully investigated and prosecuted Russian agents operating on British soil. The trial and its outcome, then, are victories. They are small ones, however, relative to the scope of the threat. The Bulgarians seem to be only one part of a multiyear, multicountry operation to kill Grozev. That in turn is only a small part of what appears to be an ever-broadening campaign by the Kremlin, including kidnappings, poisonings, arson and terrorist attacks, to silence its opponents and sow fear abroad. The story of the resources that were marshaled to silence a single inconvenient voice is a terrifying reminder of what Putin, and beyond him the rising generation of autocratic rulers, are capable of. The story of how that single voice refused to be silenced — in fact redoubled his determination to tell the truth, regardless of the very real consequences — serves as a reminder that it's possible to continue to speak and act in the face of mortal danger. But the damage that was done to Grozev's own life and the lives of the people around him is a warning of how vulnerable we are in the face of unchecked, murderous power. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
