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Tulsi Gabbard Defended Russia and Syria. Now She Must Defend Those Views.

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Tulsi Gabbard Defended Russia and Syria. Now She Must Defend Those Views.

Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has made headlines for years with her criticism of what she describes as “regime change” wars and abuses by the nation’s intelligence agencies. On Thursday she will be defending those comments.

At her confirmation hearing, senators are likely to zero in on her sympathy toward Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s arguments for waging war in Ukraine. Her failure to strongly and consistently condemn Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s now-deposed dictator, is likely to be another line of questioning.

Ms. Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who is now a Republican, will undoubtedly be asked about her views on whether the intelligence gathering of federal agencies, which she will oversee if confirmed, needs to be reined in.

She might find herself on the defensive, even in questioning from Republican senators, for her previous championing of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, each of whom were pursued by the American authorities for unlawfully releasing classified documents.

Here are examples of comments she made on podcasts, social media or television interviews:

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Ms. Gabbard has repeatedly voiced views in line with the Kremlin’s. She insisted that the Biden administration, NATO and some European countries had dismissed Russia’s security concerns about Ukraine and that Mr. Putin, who ordered the military invasion, was not solely to blame for the conflict.

“You hear President Biden say, ‘Well, this is Putin’s war, this is Putin’s fault. It’s Putin who’s the one who’s solely responsible.’ Well, the United States and some of these European NATO countries are fueling this war.”

She has also said that the Biden administration was supporting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine not for moral reasons, but rather because the United States wanted to “destroy Russia,” even at the risk of nuclear war.

“This is about regime change in Russia and exploiting this war to strengthen NATO and feed the military-industrial complex. Now, to Joe Biden, it’s even about bringing about ‘a new world order.’”

“Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News, Aug. 12, 2022

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“The warmongers are trying to drag us into WW3, which can only end in one way: nuclear annihilation and the suffering and death of all our loved ones. Zelensky, Biden, NATO, congressional and media neocons are insane. And we are insane if we passively allow them to lead us into this holocaust like sheep to the slaughter.”

@TulsiGabbard post on Twitter, now X, May 21, 2023

Ms. Gabbard has said she opposed U.S. support for armed rebels seeking to overthrow Mr. Assad, partly because it is not in America’s interest to involve itself in wars to topple foreign leaders.

Disputing the Pentagon’s findings in 2017 in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, she questioned whether Mr. al-Assad’s forces had used banned chemical weapons. She refused to pin blame on Mr. Assad, who was supported by Russia, for the multitude of deaths in his nation’s conflict.

“There’s responsibility that goes around, Wolf. Again, my interest is in bringing about peace. Standing here and pointing fingers does not accomplish peace for the Syrian people. It will not bring about an end to this war.”

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Ms. Gabbard has argued for years that U.S. intelligence agencies need to be tempered.

“The security state is real and don’t you dare challenge them or you’ll have a target on your back.”

“Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News, Aug. 12, 2022

She has claimed that the Biden administration weaponized the government to spy on her. After she attended an event organized by someone on an F.B.I. watch list, the Transportation Security Administration briefly assigned undercover air marshals to her flights under its airline security program. Senior U.S. officials denied that the scrutiny was politically motivated.

“I will always be looking over my shoulder wondering if and how our government in any of these different agencies is surveilling me, watching me. Are they reading my text messages? Are they listening to my phone calls?”

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She has described John Brennan, director of the C.I.A. under President Barack Obama, and Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who once led the House intelligence committee, as domestic enemies. Mr. Brennan declined to comment before her hearing.

“The John Brennan’s, Adam Schiffs and oligarchs in Big Tech who are trying to undermine our constitutionally-protected rights and turn our country into a police state with KGB-style ‘surveillance’ are also domestic enemies—and much more powerful, and therefore dangerous, than the mob that stormed the capitol.”

@TulsiGabbard Twitter post, Jan. 26, 2021

Senators from both major parties have sharply criticized Ms. Gabbard’s defense of Mr. Snowden, who in 2013 released reams of classified data from the National Security Agency on American surveillance programs and was charged with violating the Espionage Act. He is now in Russia.

“If it wasn’t for Snowden the American people would never have learned the NSA was collecting phone records and spying on Americans.”

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@TulsiGabbard Twitter post, June 3, 2019

“I remember the very day that I woke up in D.C., looked at my phone, started looking through the headlines and saw those headlines about how the N.S.A. was mass surveilling all of us and collecting our phone records, collecting our cellphone records — Verizon, AT&T, T Mobile — and I was shocked. So that was something that Snowden uncovered and released, something that I don’t know that even as members of Congress we would have been aware of.”

She said criminal charges should be dropped against not just Mr. Snowden, but also Mr. Assange, reasoning that he had also informed the American people about their government’s actions. Mr. Assange pleaded guilty to violating the U.S. Espionage Act last year.

“The increasingly authoritarian Biden-Garland administration is doubling down on its crusade against our constitutionally protected rights, our freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, by continuing their vindictive retaliatory crusade against Julian Assange. If they succeed in this, this will be yet another nail in the coffin of democracy, here in our country and around the world.”

@TulsiGabbard Twitter post, Oct. 28, 2021

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Video production by Chevaz Clarke.

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The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself

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The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself

In the Wichita courtroom, Hanes offered his only public reflection on the bank collapse. Wearing a gray suit, he walked up to the lectern, glancing nervously at his former friends in the gallery. “I’m sorry,” he told the judge. Until the very end, he explained, he thought he was involved in a legitimate business deal. In January 2024, he told the court, he made a futile attempt to recoup the lost money, flying to Perth, Australia, where some of his nonexistent business partners had supposedly been based. He was in touch with them until the moment he landed at the airport. But no bailout materialized. It was only then, months after the bank shuttered, that he accepted he had been tricked. “I’ll forever struggle understanding how I was duped,” Hanes said. “I should have caught it, but I didn’t.”

After Hanes finished speaking, Judge Broomes rocked backward in his chair and turned to face the shareholders. “The best thing for you is to forgive this man,” he said. “Leave matters of retribution to me. That’s my job, and I’ll see that it’s done.” He sentenced Hanes to 24 years and 5 months in prison, a punishment even greater than federal prosecutors had requested. A chorus of yeses echoed from the shareholders.

Hanes’s shoulders slumped. As two U.S. marshals approached him, he undid his tie, slipped off his suit jacket and emptied his pockets. Behind him, the shareholders went quiet. Hanes’ sister and one of his daughters clung to each other, their sobs breaking the silence. Hanes looked at them once, quickly, before the marshals handcuffed him and led him out of the room.

One day last October, Tucker got a call from an investigator at the F.B.I. It was good news: Federal officials had recovered $8 million of the stolen funds, which had been hidden in an account full of Tether, a popular cryptocurrency. The stash was a small fraction of what Hanes stole, but it would be enough to reimburse the shareholders for nearly all the money they had invested in the bank.

The jubilation Tucker might have expected to feel was tempered by sadness. His father had been in and out of the hospital, and a doctor warned that he had only days left to live. That night, Tucker went to his father’s hospital room and shared what he had heard. Bill Tucker blinked a few times and then said, “Oh, my.” He died a week later.

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L.A. fast food workers call on city officials to approve 'fair work week' law

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L.A. fast food workers call on city officials to approve 'fair work week' law

A group of Los Angeles fast food workers walked off the job Tuesday to urge city officials to approve a law that would give them more control over their work schedules.

Fast food workers have long complained of unstable schedules that make it difficult to plan their finances, child care, medical appointments and other obligations.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez introduced an ordinance last year that aims to give these workers more stability and consistency in scheduling, but the council has yet to vote on the measure.

The proposal would expand the reach of the city’s existing Fair Work Week law — which requires that employers give retail workers their schedules in advance — to include some 2,500 large chain fast food restaurants that employ roughly 50,000 workers.

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More than 60 fast food workers rallied outside City Hall at around 11 a.m. Tuesday sporting purple union T-shirts and carrying “on strike” signs printed in Spanish and English.

The rally was planned by California’s statewide union of fast food workers, which formed last year. The California Fast Food Workers Union is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, which for years has helped to organize fast food employee walkouts over wage theft, safety and pay.

Lizzet Aguilar, 44, a cashier at a McDonald’s in the downtown L.A. area, said she was scheduled for a three-hour shift Tuesday that she skipped to join the rally.

Aguilar said she was scheduled to work only two days this week, with each shift just three hours long.

Having so few hours, she said, makes it difficult to contribute to her household finances and care for her 10-year-old son, whom she brought with her to the rally.

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“This isn’t fair. We can’t survive on this,” she said.

Several workers from a Wingstop in Westwood also participated in the rally.

Edgar Recinos, 32, a cook at the Wingstop who earns $20 an hour, said he struggles to pay his rent when his schedule and hours change weekly.

Recinos said he was scheduled last week for 30 hours, but this week he’s scheduled for 17 hours, he said, adding that he works a second job at a smoothie store.

“It makes no sense,” Recinos said. “It’s an unstable situation.”

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The tentative ordinance also includes an annual mandatory six-hour paid training to help educate workers on their rights. And it would require that fast food workers accrue an hour of paid time off for every 30 hours they work — on top of paid sick leave to which they are already entitled.

The Fast Food Workers Union cited a recent report published by labor researchers at Northwestern and Rutgers that found 1 in 4 fast food workers were illegally paid below the minimum wage. Additionally, these workers lose almost $3,500 a year, or about 16% of their income, because of this persistent wage theft in the industry, the report said.

Legislation related to boosting worker protections typically doesn’t face substantial opposition from the L.A. City Council. However, the process can take time and the matter must first be heard by the council’s economic development and jobs committee before going to the full city council for a vote.

A measure to boost wages for hotel and airport workers, for example, was introduced by city councilmembers in April 2023 and was finally approved more than a year and a half later, in December 2024.

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Why Everyone Is Still Talking About ‘Paddington 2’

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Why Everyone Is Still Talking About ‘Paddington 2’

“Paddington 2 is the greatest film ever made,” one user posted on X in 2022.

This tweet was not ironic.

In the seven years since its release in January 2018, the film about a marmalade-loving bear’s quest to find the perfect gift for his beloved aunt has become an internet phenomenon, spawning memes, think pieces and an endorsement from Nicolas Cage. For a time, it was the best-reviewed film ever on the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

“A very eclectic group of people respond to it in the way that they do,” David Heyman, a producer on “Paddington 2” and its 2015 predecessor, “Paddington,” said in a recent phone conversation from his home in London. The Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, for example, confessed to Heyman he was a fan.

Now with the third feature-length installment in the franchise, “Paddington in Peru,” in theaters — and already having passed the $100 million milestone at the international box office — it is hard to imagine that when “Paddington 2” first arrived in theaters stateside, it was only a modest box office success. Since its DVD and streaming releases, a devoted community of online fans has sprung up around it, evangelizing about the outsider bear who brought joy to their lives.

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“There’s humor in it for adults; there’s humor for children,” said Heyman, who grew up reading the Paddington books, written by the British author Michael Bond. “It never feels patronizing or like it’s talking down to its audience. It has a big, beating heart.”

All three films are based on the children’s books about the duffle-coated, hard-staring bear, first published in 1958. In the first movie, Paddington emigrates from Peru to London in a story inspired by the World War II rescue operation that brought nearly 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied Europe to England. The second film, directed by Paul King, who wrote the script with Simon Farnaby, is an action adventure with stunning set sequences, following Paddington through a court trial, a prison escape and a daring pursuit by train.

Securing the return of the original film’s cast members — the gentle-voiced Ben Whishaw as Paddington, Hugh Bonneville as the hapless but well-meaning Mr. Brown and Sally Hawkins as the openhearted Mrs. Brown — was easy, Heyman said. And bringing in a dream team of new ones — Hugh Grant as the ridiculously campy villain, Phoenix Buchanan — was also a breeze.

“Hugh knows a good part,” he said, laughing.

King’s confidence as a director grew from the first film to the second, Heyman said, as he became more comfortable with the bevy of visual effects required to create the C.G.I. bear, who was represented during filming by a toy bear head on a stick.

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“There was a lot more time to focus on the script and on working with the actors,” Heyman said. “It was really fun. The spirit of the film was reflected on set.”

That was maybe most evident in the rollicking Busby Berkeley-style dance number that unspools inside the prison as the end credits begin to roll. Locked up for 10 years for his scheme to frame Paddington for stealing a pop-up book, Phoenix, a former actor, finally gets his star turn. He leads the roughly 300 other prisoners in a tap number set to “Rain on the Roof” from Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Follies.”

“Hugh was all in,” said the choreographer Craig Revel Horwood, who created the 90-second number, which was shot in sections over 19 hours the day before the set was to be demolished. He recruited 300 of his tattooed, heavyset professional dancer friends to make up the corps.

“Anyone that looked rough, we were putting in,” said Horwood, who spent about a month planning the number, including three weeks teaching Grant to tap dance. “I had no problem getting anyone for the gig. Not one person turned me down.”

He outfitted the scruffy-looking extras with pastel umbrellas and size XXL bedazzled pink-striped uniforms — “when I saw everyone in costume, I was killing myself laughing,” he said — then shot from sunup to sundown, squeezing in the last few takes as a midnight deadline approached.

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“It’s sort of a Momma Rose in ‘Gypsy’ moment,” he said. “‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses,’ that type of number.”

The same could not be said for the film’s initial U.S. box office receipts. Though “Paddington 2” had been a big success in Britain, it struggled to separate itself from the pack over a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, grossing a modest $15 million on a $40 million budget, according to the data site Box Office Mojo.

One challenge, Heyman explained, was that the Weinstein Company, which initially held partial North American distribution rights for the film, was in a fiscal crisis exacerbated by the numerous sexual assault allegations leveled against Harvey Weinstein, its co-founder and former co-chairman. On the verge of filing for bankruptcy, the company did not sell the rights to Warner Bros. until less than two months before the film’s release date.

“So Warners had one hand tied behind their back in terms of marketing,” Heyman said.

Eventually, strong reviews, including from this newspaper, and word-of-mouth praise helped the film in the United States, but it never attained the success that it had in Britain, where it would go on to become the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2017, according to Box Office Mojo.

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That is, until “Paddington 2” became available to watch on Amazon Prime Video in March 2018 and then became a streaming hit in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The film shows what can be if people have more empathy towards one another,” said Jason Chou, 28, a Los-Angeles-based visual effects artist.

But not everyone saw a generous spirit in King and Farnaby’s version of the classic bear.

One odd footnote to the reputation of “Paddington 2” appeared in a blog a few years after the film came out. The movie had a solid perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. Suddenly, in 2021, it dropped to 99 percent after a freelance film critic wrote on his blog that he had given “Paddington 2” a negative review on BBC Radio in 2017 (no one has been able to find that review).

The blogger, Eddie Harrison, wrote that he had grown up reading the Bond books, and that in “Paddington 2,” the bear’s “charm is entirely missing,” and he has “evil, beady eyes and ratty fur.”

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“This is not my Paddington Bear,” he added, “but a sinister, malevolent imposter who should be shot into space, or nuked from space at the first opportunity.”

Within twelve hours of his blog post in May 2021, he became Public Enemy No. 1 for the Paddington hive. And hours after the score dropped, The Hollywood Reporter published an article about the downgrade, with dozens of news outlets following.

Why did Harrison bother?

“I recognised that a revised critique would knock Paddington off a perfect RT score,” Harrison wrote on his blog, the Film Authority, in an account of the fallout. But he hadn’t, he noted, anticipated the intensity of the vitriol, which, he said, included doxxing and vandalism, as well as death threats.

“It’s just an opinion, man,” said Harrison, who labeled “Paddington in Peru” “passable but rather ordinary.”

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Heyman certainly maintains a different take on “Paddington 2,” one shared across the internet, even as the third film, which follows the bear back to Peru, has garnered lukewarm reviews.

“The second one is about looking for the good in people,” Heyman said, “because if people find it, then they’ll be able to find it in themselves.”

“In a time of life with cynicism, Paddington is a remarkably generous-spirited, uncynical character,” he added. “And the film reflects that.”

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