https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/25/tucker-carlson-takes-dubbing-debut-russia-show/
Gift Link: https://wapo.st/3PPlu2O



RIGA, Latvia — The blustering American TV personality Tucker Carlson has lambasted the United States for sending too much aid to Ukraine, called Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky “sweaty and rat-like” and given credence to Russia’s baseless justifications for its invasion.

The former Fox News host’s rhetoric on the war — he has called it a U.S.-led “regime-change war” against Russia — and his attacks on Zelensky’s government — “a pure client state of the United States State Department” — aligns so well with the major propaganda points of Russian state television that one channel has decided to broadcast Carlson’s new show on X, formerly Twitter, to millions of Russians, though apparently without Carlson’s permission.

The channel, Rossiya 24, had recently been teasing a new show “Tucker,” and the first episode aired over the weekend. But rather than a voiced-over ensemble of Carlson’s greatest hits against Ukraine — effectively throwing raw meat to the pro-war hawks in its audience — the show turned out to be a puzzling, roughly 20-minute excerpt of his recent interview of embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, an official virtually unknown to Russian viewers.

Rossiya 24 is Russia’s leading news channel, and the hosts of its political talk shows spend hours drumming into their audiences that Kyiv, not Moscow, is to blame for the brutal war, and that U.S. military aid will accomplish nothing other than helping “neo-Nazi Zelensky” fight “until the last Ukrainian.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/interactive/2023/rat-hunters-dc-dogs/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f005

Gift Link: https://wapo.st/3r95lvD

Washington has a rat problem. During the earliest months of the pandemic, the rodent population dispersed as restaurants shut down and office workers stayed home. But when people and their trash came back into the public sphere, so did the rats — with a vengeance. As of July, there had been nearly 11,000 service-request calls to the city this year regarding rat infestations, according to the D.C. Department of Health. There were approximately 13,000 calls for the entirety of 2022.

The city does not provide rat-abatement measures inside businesses or private property. But when someone reports an outdoor infestation, workers try to address it using two methods, says Gerard Brown, who oversees rodent control at D.C. Health: They will fill their burrows with carbon monoxide to suffocate them, and they will spray a poisonous tracking powder that gets on a rat’s fur and is ingested when they groom themselves.

The dogs are not a part of its rat regiment, says Brown, adding: “The department does not support, participate in or endorse the hunting and killing of rats with dogs.”

Most of the Ratscallions own terriers, a category of dogs that was historically bred to hunt small mammals. Freeman, the ringleader, is a breeder of Bedlingtons, and her dogs are immaculately groomed and have won prizes at major dog shows. She started letting them hunt rats as a test of their abilities.