Motherboard: The Russian Embassy Is Asking People to Become Twitter Bots

Oh boy. What a day for Twitter. First we have thousands of accounts, including those belonging to the BBC, Amnesty International, and Forbes, compromised by a third-party app forcing them to tweet pro-Erdoğan propaganda and swastikas, and now we have this.

The Russian Embassy in the UK, which previously made headlines for its stint in the President Trump Meme War, has concocted an innovative method to garner social media support: it's turning its Twitter followers into automated news bots. [...]

Once a user's credentials are registered with Tweetsquad, that user will automatically follow the Twitter account of UK Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko, and automatically retweet one of his "most important" tweets each week. Essentially, users willingly sign up to become a Twitter bot for the Russian Embassy. [...]

In a time of politically motivated Twitter bots, fake news accusations, and a smart deployment of meme warfare, the Russian Embassy's Tweetsquads are an inventive new weapon as the war for political credibility navigates its way through the kingdom of social media. Motherboard contacted the Embassy to learn more about its social media strategy, but was simply encouraged to sign up to the service.

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Politico: Why Kaczyński sent the Polish government on a suicide mission

Detached as he may be from political reality outside Poland, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) must have known he had no chance of blocking the pro-European former prime minister’s path to a second term, least of all by putting forward a bruising MEP who has never been a head of government or even a full minister. [...]

This might have been an attempt to split the EU and pull it in a more nationalist direction after Britain’s vote to leave the union. Kaczyński has had some success in reviving the Visegrad Four group of central European countries — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia — as a vehicle to rebuff Germany on the issue of migration and to resist censure from Brussels over his government’s emasculation of the constitutional court. [...]

But even some right-wing commentators usually sympathetic to PiS criticized the government for waging a hopeless fight, arguing it had damaged the prospect of building an axis of eastern countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Adriatic under Polish-Hungarian leadership as a counter-weight to the Franco-German dominance of the EU. Some also argued that the debacle showed Kaczyński’s ineffectiveness outside Poland.

If Kaczyński were a more skilled player of the EU political game, he might have used opposition to Tusk’s reappointment to extract concessions from Germany on issues of money or power. But German officials say the way the Poles handled the matter, despite Merkel’s political gesture of going to meet Kaczyński, who holds no official government position, when she visited Warsaw last month, has removed any inclination in Berlin to take a conciliatory line towards Poland.

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Politico: Ukraine blocks road and rail links with breakaway regions

Rebels said last week that they had “nationalized” holdings owned by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, and other oligarchs. On Wednesday, Akhmetov’s DTEK energy company said it had lost control of its main assets in the insurgent-held territories in the east. [...]

Dozens of activists have been blocking four railroad junctions since the end of January, preventing coal from the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” from traveling west into government-controlled areas, and, at the same time, stopping iron ore and other inputs for the steel industry from reaching factories in rebel-controlled territory. [...]

Wednesday’s announcement appears to show a shift in government policy, but the blockade leadership greeted the news cautiously. “I will propose to the blockaders that we supervise the implementation of the government’s decision,” Iegor Soboliev, an organizer, told POLITICO. “But until the blockade is fully established by the police and national guard, it’s too risky and not efficient to [dismantle our camps].” [...]

Ukraine buys no gas directly from Russia, relying for its energy on nuclear power and on coal. But the blockade now threatens access to coal, accounting for about a third of Ukraine’s energy mix, most of which comes from separatist-controlled regions.

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America Magazine: Marie Collins challenges top Vatican cardinal and sexual abuse commission

The clash between a former member of Pope Francis' sex abuse advisory commission and the Vatican heated up on Tuesday, as prominent Irish abuse survivor Marie Collins challenged a top Vatican cardinal over his claims that his office had cooperated with the commission.

In an open letter, Collins pressed her case that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had ignored or scuttled commission proposals to protect children and care for abuse victims that had been approved by the pope. [...]

Collins resigned from the commission on March 1 citing the "unacceptable" lack of cooperation from Mueller's office, which processes canonical cases against pedophile priests. Her departure left the commission without any abuse survivors and dealt another blow to Francis' record on combatting sex abuse. [...]

In her reply published in the National Catholic Reporter, Collins expressed shock that Mueller considered the tribunal a mere proposal, noting that when the Vatican announced that the pope had approved it on June 10, 2015, the official statement said Francis had already authorized resources to fund it and that adequate personnel and a secretary would be appointed.

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The Guardian: Brexit was an English vote for independence – you can’t begrudge the Scots the same

It has been hard to talk about Englishness except through the prism of Scottish independence or through extreme rightwing, racist groups such as the EDL. Englishness then becomes entirely negative and not worth owning. But it doesn’t go away. The result is that we wake up on the morning of the Brexit vote with half the population saying they don’t recognise the country they live in. I hear this said all the time. There is no question that the Brexit vote is an expression of an English nationalism that many have regarded as a kind of embarrassment, as an identity in decline. This identity is English, not British, because it cares not what happens to Scotland – indeed, there is open hostility to Scotland now. It also appears to have no knowledge or care of Wales or, especially, Northern Ireland. The news that there will be a border there to be policed is a trifle to many. This England may be small, but it sees itself as exceptional, as both neglected and swashbuckling.

These feelings have been swilling around for years and were mopped up by Ukip and others on the right. Most of the left sees them as entirely retrograde; nationalism brings up questions about ethnicity and is best avoided. Isn’t it better to have bigger identities? British, European, global? To talk of England in all its complexity has been to veer into the territory of racists. To not talk of it has meant we have ended up where we are now, in the grip of a delusion of English exceptionalism, a turbo-charged nationalism loose from any moorings.

There is almost no purchase on this from progressives beyond telling Brexiters that their feelings are the wrong feelings. Parts of the left have tried over the years to talk of a sense of Englishness, or of belonging, or of a civic identity, or of what a post-imperial country may be, or how Englishness has changed. The talk has been sneered at because patriotism is déclassé, and to enter this territory is “rightwing”. Thus the right has come to absolutely own it.

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