Azerbaijan is sending soldiers that pretend to be "environmental activists" to blockade the road between Nagorno-Karabakh and the main territory of Armenia. (The idea that "environmental activists" can take any sort of initiative in an oil-funded dictatorship is bullshit.) Russian peacekeepers that under the treaty that ended the last war there are not authorized to fight a war, so they cannot in practice make those "activists" leave.

*Concerned teachers and employees warned administrators at a Virginia elementary school three times that a six-year-old boy had a gun and was threatening other students in the hours before he shot and wounded a teacher, "but the administration could not be bothered"*.

Ukraine has pulled its forces out of Soledar.

There is nothing particularly important about Soledar, nor Bakhmut, nor the towns behind them. The rational thing for Ukraine to do is to retreat slowly and steadily, so as to maximize the cost to Wagner while limiting Ukrainian casualties.

The Wagner army of ex-convicts has become effective at taking small areas of territory, at the cost of very high casualties.

Wagner doesn't care about the casualties, because its soldiers came from prison, released to be cannon fodder. Russians don't care how many ex-convicts get killed this way.

I wonder, how many convicts does Russia have that Putin could send to Wagner? How long before he uses them up?

Putin could force any Russians into Wagner, including those who are not convicts. But if he does that, Russians will care whether they live or die.

Tory plans to authorize uniformed thugs to attack protests can create a dynamic in which protesters know that the thugs are their enemies, and expect a fight from the beginning. That will means a lot of fights.

It may also drive those who don't want a fight to give up on protesting and wait despondently for global heating to kill them.