Latest news with #authoritarianism
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Kyiv mayor accuses Zelenskyy of authoritarianism amid corruption scandal
Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko has accused President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of power centralisation, claiming that Ukraine now "stinks of authoritarianism". Source: Klitschko in a comment to the Times Details: The Times posted a comprehensive article about "the most famous Ukrainian politicians in the international arena", noting that at the outset of the war, Zelenskyy, leveraging martial law, appointed a military administration in Kyiv, which overlaps with the mayor's authority. Meanwhile, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), through its Clean City operation, uncovered widespread corruption within Klitschko's circle, leading to the arrest of seven of his subordinates. Klitschko stated that the Kyiv City Council's operations have been disrupted by "raids, interrogations and threats of fabricated criminal cases", preventing councillors from achieving a quorum for decision-making. Quote from Klitschko: "This is a purge of democratic principles and institutions under the guise of war. I said once that it smells of authoritarianism in our country. Now it stinks." The Times reports that this conflict is not only political but also personal. Klitschko portrays the situation as an attempt by the president to centralise power, reflecting growing concerns that Zelenskyy's consolidation of authority during the war is undermining democracy. He accused the president of using military administrations to strip powers from democratically elected mayors. Quote from Klitschko: "Many of the mayors are intimidated, but my celebrity status is a protection. You can fire the mayor of Chernihiv, but it is very difficult to fire the mayor of the capital who the whole world knows." Background: On 6 February 2025, it was revealed that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau was investigating businessman and former Kyiv city councillor Denys Komarnytskyi. Later, the NABU press office announced that the Bureau and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office "are conducting a large-scale operation" called Clean City "to expose a criminal organisation involved in land corruption in the Kyiv City Council". As part of the case, Ukraine's High Anti-Corruption Court ordered the two-month detention of Petro Olenych, Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration, setting his bail at UAH 15 million (approx. US$361,300). A similar preventive measure was imposed on Mykhailo Terentiev, Head of the Land Commission, who was also placed in custody for two months with bail set at nearly UAH 20 million (around US$481,700). Komarnytskyi was discovered abroad by Ukrainska Pravda. On 26 March, it was reported that three police officers had been fired in connection with Komarnytskyi's departure from the country. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
The Sun
2 days ago
- Business
- The Sun
Boxer turned Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko lands major blow as he blasts ‘authoritarian' Zelensky
KYIV's mayor and former world champion boxer Vitali Klitschko stepped into the ring with Volodymyr Zelensky - accusing him of "authoritarianism". The former heavyweight blasted the Ukrainian wartime leader for paralysing his city with "raids, interrogations and threats of fabricated criminal cases". 8 8 8 Klitschko said the president's decision to use martial law to appoint a rival military administration in Kyiv stopped his city from making progress. The 53-year-old mayor's claims come after ex-comedian Zelensky was taunted earlier this year by Donald Trump and his right-hand-man JD Vance. The Don tripled down on his criticism of Zelensky in a blistering Truth Social rampage in February, branding the Ukrainian President a "dictator" and a "moderately successful" comedian. And just days after that, a furious Trump dramatically booted Zelensky out of the White House amid a seething row over US backing of the Ukraine war, sparking global chaos. Trump has also accused wartime hero Zelensky of "refusing to have elections" - despite this being normal protocol under martial law. Klitschko's allegations towards Zelensky of authoritarianism come as his Kyiv administration faces a string of arrests. Some of Klitschko's deputies have been purged by the national anti-corruption bureau under an operation called Clean City. The probe has exposed widespread corruption under the mayor's watch - and seven of his subordinates have so far been arrested, with another three under investigation. The former athlete has now lashed out at Zelensky, saying that the work of his city council has been plagued by fake criminal cases and threats. He says that these hampered the ability of Kyiv authorities to make key decisions. Kyiv's mayor told The Times: 'This is a purge of democratic principles and institutions under the guise of war. Sky documentary reveals feud between Ukraine's president and Kyiv's mayor over child's death 'I said once that it smells of authoritarianism in our country. Now it stinks.' He also accused President Zelensky of using military administrations across the country to take power from elected mayors. This is not the first time ex-sportsman Klitschko - who is also said to have presidential ambitions - has called out his rival Zelensky. The Kyiv mayor called out the Ukrainian President in February amid stalling peace negotiations. Zelensky then hit back at the boxing champ, saying: "Klitschko is a great athlete, but I didn't know he was a great speaker." 8 8 8 Klitschko said that his recent criticism of Zelensky has been protected by his celebrity status. 'Many of the mayors are intimidated, but my celebrity status is a protection," he explained. "You can fire the mayor of Chernihiv, but it is very difficult to fire the mayor of the capital who the whole world knows." He added: 'That is why everything is being done to discredit and ruin my reputation.' Political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko said that the conflict betwene the two rivals goes deeper. The expert said it reflected concern about abuse of city funds in wartime, calling it a "response to manifestations of corruption in the Kyiv city administration". He told The Times: 'During the war money should go primarily to defence, to protect the country, yet there is all this construction." Questioning the corruption in Kyiv, he added: "In some other cities, even stadiums are being built. "In the Donbas there are large landscaping projects. The frontline is near by, and the money is not going to defensive structures, but to greenery." Kyiv locals have been baffled as luxury flats keep popping up instead of shelters or schools — often built on public land using a dodgy 'toilet loophole'. This starts with setting up a par-per-use toilet for example, to then receive something similar to squatters' rights. Many of the ten Kyiv officials under investigation have been charged with corruption relating to the approval of these land permits. Klitschko's ex-deputy has been charged with taking bribes to help war conscripts escape, while a former city councillor accused of embezzlement has fled to Austria. He responded to claims of corruption under his watch, saying that he had sacked eight of the officials being investigated. "I have 4,500 employees in this building alone and about 300,000 employees working for the city," he said. "Corruption cases sometimes happen, but we react harshly and quickly." He added: "We co-operate with law enforcement, provide all the necessary information and hope for an impartial investigation of all cases." Klitshcko's main rival in Kyiv, Tymur Tkachenko, has slated the mayor for showing 'weakness' during wartime. Tkachenko told The Times: 'Mr Klitschko could not close the brothel in the basement of the same building where he lives." He was referring to Tootsies, a notorious strip club raided and shut down by the security service last month as part of an investigation into sex trafficking. Klitschko hit back at claims he was tied to the strip club which is near a hotel complex he owns, calling it a 'lie' meant to smear him. 8 8
Washington Post
3 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
How voting for judges erodes democracy
Throughout history, authoritarian rulers have done all they can to bring judiciaries to heel. In Latin America, the governments of El Salvador, Bolivia and Nicaragua have moved to take over the courts. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has purged thousands of judges and prosecutors. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines removed his country's chief justice and packed the Supreme Court with his allies. President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe gave himself unchecked authority to appoint the most senior judges in the country. In Hungary, Viktor Orban took control over judicial appointments.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Will Donald Trump defy the US supreme court?
With the most authoritarian and lawless president in history sitting in the White House, the US supreme court is no doubt worried about looking weak in one of two ways. First, the court fears it will look pathetically weak if it becomes the first supreme court in history to have a president defy its rulings in a wholesale way. With that in mind, the court seems to be taking pains to avoid provoking Donald Trump's defiance – it has issued several decisions upholding the president's actions while in other cases, it has given him lots of wiggle room even as it objected to his administration's moves. Then there's the court's second, big worry – that it will look pathetically weak if it doesn't stand up to the most authoritarian president in US history. Many legal experts criticize the court for not standing up more to Trump, even though he has brazenly attacked the court and many lower-court judges, has defied several judicial orders and has, according to numerous judges, repeatedly violated the law – whether by deporting immigrants without due process or by freezing funds approved by Congress. The court's six conservative justices have let themselves seem like Trump's chumps because they've often bowed to him instead of standing up and ruling against him. The foremost example is last year's supreme court ruling giving Trump astonishingly broad immunity from criminal prosecution. The image-conscious chief justice, John Roberts, and his court have to decide which of two paths to take. One path – which the court's conservative supermajority seems to be following – is to issue pro-Trump rulings to avoid inciting his ire and defiance. That approach might spare the court the Maga movement's anger, but historians will look dimly on the court for bending in Trump's favor – they'll accuse it of complicity and sacrificing principle for not blocking Trump moves that, many legal experts, conservative, centrist and progressive, say, violate federal law and the constitution. The court can choose a more courageous path: stick to principle and not shrink from ruling against Trump. That might spur the bull-headed president to defy the court, but under that scenario, historians would praise the justices for upholding the law and the court's constitutional role and for not letting themselves become stooges for a power-hungry president. The Roberts court has given us some hope, but not much. In a surprise ruling at 1am one April night, it seemed to develop a few inches of backbone by ordering the Trump administration not to deport several dozen Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador without first giving them due process. That was a promising ruling, but on the other side of the ledger, the court has often bowed to Trump, for instance, by overturning a lower court ruling and letting Trump fire 16,000 probationary federal employees and by letting his administration suspend $65m in teacher-training grants. Moreover, the rightwing supermajority did Trump a big favor by letting him provisionally remove the heads of two independent agencies, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protections Board. That hurried ruling, made without full briefing or arguments, indicated that the court's conservatives are eager to overturn a unanimous, 90-year-old supreme court decision that limits presidents' ability to fire officials at independent agencies. In this way, the Roberts court is giving more power to our dangerously authoritarian president. Let's not forget how weak the court has looked for failing to act firmly to assure the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, an immigrant from El Salvador who even Trump administration officials acknowledged was deported illegally. On 10 April, the court issued a wimpy decision that called on the Trump administration to 'facilitate' Ábrego Garcia's return – it stopped short of using the district court's more muscular language to 'effectuate' his return. More than six weeks have passed since the high court called on Trump to bring back Ábrego García, but Trump hasn't done so. His administration has sidestepped outright defiance by pretending that it is seeking to facilitate Ábrego García's return. Not only that, Trump has smeared the justices by saying: 'THE SUPREME COURT WON'T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!' Trump has also savaged several federal district court judges, calling one a 'radical left lunatic' and denouncing others as 'monsters who want our country to go to hell'. With their hard-right ideology, the court's supermajority evidently sympathizes with many of Trump's moves and has blessed such moves far more often than many legal scholars would like. In doing so, the court has emboldened Trump to take even more actions that push – and often overstep – the boundaries of what is legal. In a worrisome development, the court has, at least thus far, shown surprisingly little concern about Trump's defiance of district court judges' orders and his authoritarian effort to assert his dominance over the two, other theoretically co-equal branches of government: the judiciary and Congress. For its own good and for the nation's good, the supreme court needs to step up and do its utmost to stop Trump's lawlessness and his unprecedented efforts to defy district court rulings and lash out against the judiciary. Trump has called for impeaching judges who ruled against him, and as his tirades against judges have increased, the number of judges who have received threats has soared. The court needs to issue some strong, clarion decisions that make clear to the nation that Trump has shown repeated contempt for the constitution, the rule of law and the judiciary. The justices should move quickly to issue an outrage-filled ruling that finds that Trump violated law firms' free speech rights by punishing several firms for taking cases he didn't like or employing lawyers he didn't like. The justices should also move swiftly to issue a strong ruling in favor of Harvard University and against Trump's vindictive assault – an assault that violated Harvard's first amendment rights by seeking to suppress speech and ideas that Trump doesn't like and by trying to dictate much of Harvard's hiring, curriculum and admissions policies. The court should also issue a forceful ruling that demolishes Trump's arguments that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members en masse without due process. The court should trumpet the absurdity of Trump's claim that Venezuelan immigrants constitute an invasion force the way, for instance, British troops constituted an invasion force during the war of 1812. The court should also shoot down Trump's efforts to gut federal agencies and freeze funding by making it emphatically clear that those efforts violate Congress's article I spending power. The conservative supermajority should also rethink its intention to overturn the 1935 ruling that limits presidents' ability to fire members of independent agencies. That ruling sought to ensure that those agencies didn't become partisan puppets that do whatever a president wants – something that no one should want when the nation has such a vengeful and capricious president. With the Roberts court slated to issue a flood of rulings by early July, the justices have an important choice: to bend to Trump or to grow a real backbone. Does the Roberts court want to be remembered as cowardly enablers who helped the most authoritarian and lawless president in history consolidate power? Or do the justices want to be remembered as determined defenders who stood up to an authoritarian bully to protect our laws, our constitution and our democracy? Steve Greenhouse is a labor reporter
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
How the word ‘womyn' dragged the National Spelling Bee into the US culture wars
We're living through turbulent times, to say the least. Authoritarianism and fascism threaten the United States. The conspiracy thinking, paranoia and manufactured outrage so characteristic of QAnon and the big lie about the 2020 election have colonized our political discourse like a fungus. Even the National Spelling Bee, a cultural institution which will be celebrating its centennial this year and which is generally exempted from the far right's paranoid vitriol, hasn't been immune. Earlier this year, a foofaraw erupted when right-wing outlets reported on the acceptance of 'womyn' as an alternate spelling of 'women' in the regional-level wordlist which the National Spelling Bee issues each year. The reason 'womyn' was included in the wordlist wasn't some shadowy feminist plot by the Bee's organizers. The competition simply allows any word in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary, unless it is obsolete. 'Womyn' is in the dictionary, along with tens of thousands of other words, such as 'pointless', 'culture' and 'war'. With zero self-awareness, an anti-trans podcast host raged that the Bee's uncontroversial decision to allow 'womyn' was a manifestation of 'fabricated issues' and 'totally manufactured outrage.' On Fox News, she snarled, 'How lucky are we to live in the United States of America, where the spelling of women, never mind the definition, has become a national debate.' Samantha Poetter-Parshall, a Kansas state representative, joined in the criticism, calling the inclusion of womyn an instance of 'crazy indoctrination of our children.' A parent quoted in reportage on the faux scandal shared Poetter-Parshall's concern, asserting, 'This is supposed to be about spelling and language, not ideology.' George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm, 1984, and the essay Politics and the English Language, would be startled to hear such a complaint. Orwell deeply understood the intimate relationship between language, thought, and politics. He keenly observed how 'in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.' In our time, imprisoning and attempting to deport legal residents of the US for their political views and sending legal residents and gay people fleeing persecution in Venezuela – and potentially US citizens – to prisons in El Salvador where torture is widespread based on flimsy evidence from disgraced police officers is called 'securing our homeland'. The announcement of economically ruinous tariffs which have wiped trillions off the stock market is called 'liberation day.' Orwell believed that 'to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.' To combat the creep of Orwellian language, he argued that we should 'recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end,' aiming to always use 'language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought'. In its emphasis on linguistic precision and its heartfelt delight in words, the National Spelling Bee is already political in Orwell's sense. The Bee also has an implicit politics of appreciation for cultural and linguistic diversity. Though most spellers are American, the competition has an international flavor: it regularly features participants from Ghana, Canada, Jamaica, South Korea, China, and Nigeria, and spelling bees have sprung up in countries like Zimbabwe too. The welcome which the Bee extends to logophiles from all over the world inculcates in kids an appreciation of other cultures and promotes a cosmopolitan worldview. Spellers study words from Latin, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and German; this cultivates their love of linguistic variety. What's more, the fact that the South Asian community regularly dominates the upper echelons of the competition reaffirms the importance of immigration to our society. These days, even if many Americans reject the Trump regime's ugly attitudes and practices, xenophobia and racism are rampant, hearkening back to the bad old days of the Know-Nothing Party and the Chinese Exclusion Act. The US government has become increasingly hostile to international travelers: there have been a spate of horrific stories of tourists, visitors, and legal residents from Germany, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere who have done nothing wrong being arrested, detained, and held for weeks by Ice, or being refused entry to the US and deported. In such a context, the National Spelling Bee's steadfast commitment to multiculturalism is all the more essential. Despite its unfortunate Covid-induced cancellation in 2020 and some turbulence from rule changes and regional sponsor attrition in 2021 and 2022, the National Spelling Bee has been a relative constant for students in an age of extreme dislocation and upheaval. In these politically polarized times, it offers Americans an opportunity for joy and collective uplift. It celebrates education, attention, focus, dedication, and quiet, patient effort. It teaches students grit, discipline, and linguistics. It reminds us of the importance of the human in an age of AI. It reinforces the importance of good sportsmanship and fair play. It promotes respect and friendship towards humanity at large. It invites us to honor and remember the values that ought to unite us all. The National Spelling Bee is a reminder of what America has been – and what it must continue to be. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Scott Remer is a professional spelling bee tutor, freelance writer, and the author of the textbooks Words of Wisdom: Keys to Success in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Sesquipedalia!: A Rigorous Vocabulary Study Guide, Regional Bee Ready!, and A Few Final Words of Wisdom.
