Less than a week ago, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a fifth term with his highest-ever share of the vote, using a stage-managed election to show the nation and the world that he was firmly in control. Just days later came a searing counterpoint: His vaunted security apparatus failed to prevent Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years. The assault on Friday, which killed at least 133 people at a concert hall in suburban Moscow, was a blow to Mr. Putin’s aura as a leader for whom national security is paramount. That is especially true after two years of a war in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he cast as his top priority after the election last Sunday.

…The fact that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the United States about a potential terrorist attack is likely to deepen the skepticism. Instead of acting on the warnings and tightening security, he dismissed them as “provocative statements…All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr. Putin said on Tuesday in a speech to the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, referring to the Western warnings. After the attack on Friday, some of his exiled critics have cited his response as evidence of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true security concerns.

Rather than keeping society safe from actual, violent terrorists, those critics say, Mr. Putin has directed his sprawling security services to pursue dissidents, journalists and anyone deemed a threat to the Kremlin’s definition of “traditional values.” A case in point: Just hours before the attack, state media reported that the Russian authorities had added “the L.G.B.T. movement” to an official list of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the gay rights movement last year. Terrorism was also among the many charges prosecutors leveled against Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who died last month.

“In a country in which counterterrorism special forces chase after online commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian military analyst, wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “terrorists will always feel free.” Even as the Islamic State repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attack and Ukraine denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s messengers pushed into overdrive to try to persuade the Russian public that this was merely a ruse…

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Speculation about who carried out the shooting at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow has quickly indicated that the terror attack will have outsized political implications in Russia and abroad. A claim has surfaced that the attack was carried out by Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) a regional affiliate of the IS terrorist organisation. IS has been implicated in some of Russia’s largest recent terror attacks, including the 2017 bombing in the St Petersburg metro that killed 15 and injured 45. US intelligence told American news agencies that there’s “no reason to doubt” the IS claims of responsibility.

The group, which is a branch of IS mainly based in Afghanistan, has increasingly focused its attention on Russia since the United States left Afghanistan in 2021. The group was formed in 2015 by members of militant groups, including those from Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and is active in central Asia and Russia. It carried out twin bombings in January in Iran that killed nearly 100 people.

…CNN reporters said they had been told that “since November there has been ‘fairly specific’ intelligence that Isis-K wanted to carry out attacks in Russia…US intelligence warned Russia about it”. Putin changed the course of the Syrian civil war by intervening in 2015, supporting President Bashar al-Assad against the opposition and Islamic State. “Isis-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years, frequently criticising Putin in its propaganda,” said Colin Clarke of the Soufan Center, according to Reuters. The claim by the group will largely divert attention by Russian officials that the attack may have originated in Ukraine.

…Ukrainian officials had insisted that they had no link to the attack. “Ukraine certainly has nothing to do with the shooting/explosions in the Crocus City Hall (Moscow Region, Russia). It makes no sense whatsoever,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidential administration. “Ukraine has never resorted to the use of terrorist methods,” he said. “It is always pointless.”

More at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/23/theres-little-reason-to-doubt-attack-on-moscow-venue-was-by-islamic-state?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

A branch of the Islamic State claimed responsibility on Friday for the attack in Moscow that killed at least 40 people and injured about 100 others, and U.S. officials confirmed the claim shortly afterward.

The United States collected intelligence in March that Islamic State-Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, the branch of the group based in Afghanistan, had been planning an attack on Moscow, according to officials. ISIS members have been active in Russia, one U.S. official said. After a period of relative quiet, the Islamic State has been trying to increase its external attacks, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials. Most of those plots in Europe have been thwarted, prompting assessments that the group had diminished capabilities.

“ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years,” frequently criticizing President Vladimir V. Putin in its propaganda, said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York. “ISIS-K accuses the Kremlin of having Muslim blood in its hands, referencing Moscow’s interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.”

The attack on Friday in Moscow, like a January assault in Iran claimed by the group, could prompt a reassessment of its ability to strike outside its home territory. In addition to publicly warning on March 7 about a possible attack, U.S. officials said they had privately told Russian officials about the intelligence pointing to an impending attack. It is not clear how much information the United States gave Russian officials beyond what was in the public warning. American intelligence agencies have a “duty to warn” potential targets of dangers when they learn of them.

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After being sworn in as attorney general in March 2021, Merrick B. Garland gathered his closest aides to discuss a topic too sensitive to broach in bigger groups: the possibility that evidence from the far-ranging Jan. 6 investigation could quickly lead to former President Donald J. Trump and his inner circle.

At the time, some in the Justice Department were pushing for the chance to look at ties between pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his allies who had camped out at the Willard Hotel, and possibly Mr. Trump himself. Mr. Garland said he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the “evidence leads to Trump,” according to people with knowledge of several conversations held over his first months in office.

“Follow the connective tissue upward,” said Mr. Garland, adding a directive that would eventually lead to a dead end: “Follow the money.” With that, he set the course of a determined and methodical, if at times dysfunctional and maddeningly slow, investigation that would yield the indictment of Mr. Trump on four counts of election interference in August 2023.

In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court. In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.

In the aftermath of a landmark ruling that mandated former President Donald Trump to pay $355 million for fraudulently augmenting the values of his properties — a judgment that prohibits him from assuming the role of director in any New York-based company for three years — the Warren Buffett's insights during a series of lectures at Notre Dame in 1991 are uncannily accurate.

Buffett, whose reputation as a legendary investor and the guiding force behind Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is well-established, used the lectures to articulate a critical examination of Trump’s business methodologies, specifically targeting his penchant for leveraging debt.

His analysis, preserved on TilsonFunds.com, pointed to Trump’s overreliance on leverage as a fundamental flaw. “The big problem with Donald Trump was he never went right,” Buffett said, adding that Trump’s strategy of heavily borrowing money to finance acquisitions was flawed from the start.

According to Buffett, Trump managed to secure loans for properties at prices well above their value, creating a significant disparity between his assets’ actual worth and the debt incurred to acquire them. “He was terrific at borrowing money. If you look at his assets and what he paid for them and what he borrowed to get them, there was never any real equity there,” Buffett said, highlighting the precarious financial foundation on which Trump built his empire.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-exposed-reason-trumps-174241835.html

Young people are becoming less happy than older generations as they suffer “the equivalent of a midlife crisis”, global research has revealed as America’s top doctor warned that “young people are really struggling”.

Dr Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, said allowing children to use social media was like giving them medicine that is not proven to be safe. He said the failure of governments to better regulate social media in recent years was “insane”.

… After 12 years in which people aged 15 to 24 were measured as being happier than older generations in the US, the trend appears to have flipped in 2017. The gap has also narrowed in western Europe and the same change could happen in the coming year or two, it is thought. Murthy described the report findings as a “red flag that young people are really struggling in the US and now increasingly around the world”. He said he was still waiting to see data that proved social media platforms were safe for children and adolescents, and called for international action to improve real-life social connections for young people.

… World Happiness Report, an annual barometer of wellbeing in 140 nations coordinated by Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre, Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, showed “disconcerting drops [in youth happiness] especially in North America and western Europe,” said Prof Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre and editor of the study. “To think that in some parts of the world children are already experiencing the equivalent of a midlife crisis, demands immediate policy action,” he said.

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