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‘Putin Killed Navalny’: World Leaders, Experts ‘Crystal Clear’ on Kremlin Critic’s Death

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Political leaders in the U.S. and around the world are expressing outrage at the death of Alexei Navalny, the 47-year old top Kremlin critic widely regarded as a Russian political prisoner who died just one day after appearing on camera from an Arctic Circle jail, reportedly “looking well and laughing during a court hearing.”

“Navalny was serving a 19-year jail term on charges widely considered politically motivated,” the BBC reports. “He was moved to one of Russia’s toughest penal colonies late last year.”

“Within minutes of Navalny’s death being announced by the prison service, the international community hailed the courage of Vladimir Putin’s biggest domestic adversary,” BBC added.

World leaders and political experts are placing the blame for Navalny’s death on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin killed Navalny,” declared former U.S Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday morning, speaking from Munich.

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“I don’t know what to say. I’m gonna try to be analytic but I want you to know Alexei Navalny was my friend. I was with his wife last night. I’m here in Munich talking to her. His daughter Dasha goes to school at Stanford,” said McFaul, a professor of political science and the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

“So this is a pretty emotional time for me. Putin killed Navalny, let’s be crystal clear about that.”

“I don’t care about any investigation,” he continued, saying Putin had Navalny arrested and had him in solitary confinement and “put him in a cell … and today he is dead. Putin killed Navalny. And why did he? Because Putin is weak. You don’t kill people if you’re strong. Putin killed because Navalny was the one opposition leader in Russia that Putin feared the most.”

“So this is a really tragic day for me and it should be a tragic day for anybody who cares about democracy,” McFaul added. “Navalny, in my view, was … in the category of brave, courageous leaders that – you know, remember, he went back to Russia, he didn’t have to go back. He went back for his country because he was a Patriot that believed that his country could be different.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking from the Munich Security Conference, called Navalny’s death “terrible news,” and told attendees “Russia is responsible.”

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“My prayers are with his family, including his wife, Yulia, who is with us today. And if confirmed, this would be a further sign of Putin’s brutality. Whatever story they tell, let us be clear, Russia is responsible and we will have more to say on this later.”

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “It is obvious to me: He was killed — like other thousands who were tortured to death because of this one man,” Politico reported, noting that “Zelenskyy’s voice was part of a global wave of outrage following the announcement that Navalny had died in a Russian prison colony.”

Politico also reported that “Businessman Bill Browder, who was himself targeted by the Putin regime, told POLITICO at the Munich summit: ‘This is not a death, this is a murder.'”

“This was a murder that was orchestrated by Vladimir Putin,” Browder added. “Putin tried to kill him in 2020. He failed. He succeeded today. Putin cannot tolerate any kind of dissent. He cannot tolerate any kind of opposition. This is a message to everybody else in Russia, that you die if you stand up to him.”

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, also from Munich, said: “I am deeply saddened and concerned about the reports coming from Russia that Alexei Navalny is dead. All the facts have to be established … Russia has serious questions to answer.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: House Republicans Flee DC for Early Vacation Amid National Security ‘Crisis’

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Carville Says There’s Only ‘One Thing’ Trump Is Thinking About on His China Trip

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Democratic strategist and political commentator James Carville is blasting what he says is the “one thing” President Donald Trump is thinking about on his trip to China, and it has nothing to do with diplomacy, the U.S. economy, or the war in Iran.

Carville told Al Hunt on their Politicon podcast that it was “really interesting” that all the people he took to China were essentially the people who were in the “first three rows” from his inaugural address. He “put them on Air Force One, and he took Eric — who handles the business end of his business.”

“You’re going to watch a grift and graft over there, like you can’t imagine,” Carville continued. “That’s all this trip is about, and I got news for you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack, or whoever you are out there, he doesn’t give a s—— about you, your future, your finances, your retirement, your anything.”

“He just cares about making all the money he can as fast as he can, and people [who] don’t realize that are just, just woefully stupid.”

Hunt reminded Carville that earlier this week Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

“Oh, you don’t, Donald,” Hunt responded. “Well, you know something? I think a lot of Americans think about their financial situation, and I’m sure those billionaire oligarchs you’re traveling with don’t, but a lot of voters do, and, uh, you’re gonna pay, you’re gonna pay a price.”

Carville added that Trump also said that he doesn’t even think of Iran.

“I think there’s only one thing that he’s thinking about in his trip to China. And that is a big grift,” Carville said. “Look at who he’s taking with him.”

Carville said there would be “economic exchanges” and “investment opportunities” during the China trip.

“You can see, this is where this is going,” he continued. “They just buy him off. He does not care.”

“He doesn’t care if he, as long as he can go there and make as much money, as fast as he can make it, that’s all what he cares about.”

READ MORE: ‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

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Christian Content Creator Fighting Sin Is Teaching Others How to Eat Biblically: NYT

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27-year-old Michigan-raised Kayla Bundy is a Christian content creator who turned to the Bible for ways to eat healthy — but her lifestyle is also part of a “higher calling,” The New York Times reports, explaining that she is “a biblical eater, someone who consumes mostly foods mentioned in the Bible.”

“Sin entered into the world through food,” Bundy told the Times, “and Satan doesn’t stop there. Food, for me, is really like a weapon of how I can fight back.”

According to the Times, a “diet inspired by the Bible has found new audiences online in the Make America Healthy Again era.”

Bundy, who has over 500,000 followers on TikTok, and has been eating biblically for eight years, “claims that her diet ‘fixed’ her skin, her hair and her depression, and she sells coaching sessions to help others with their diets,” The Times reports. She “is open about not having nutrition credentials, but she sells a $28 digital guide to biblical superfoods, as well as coaching sessions that start around $700 for a month, she said.”

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She buys raw milk, eats sardines and authentic sourdough bread without commercial yeast, and tries to cook with locally sourced foods.

“I had never really thought to look to the Bible for a recipe book,” said Bundy, who now lives in Bali. Cutting out refined sugar made her feel good, and she started “studying scripture from that lens of noticing what they are eating.”

32-year old Georgia stay-at-home mom Annalies Xaviera “posts biblical eating tips,” and “said her Facebook following had jumped from scant thousands to over 300,000 in just a few weeks this spring. She sells a digital cookbook.”

“The Bible says that God appreciates and celebrates small steps of obedience,” Xaviera told the Times.

“When you’re in a craving,” she said, “have you ever thought to stop and pray?”

READ MORE: ‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

 

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‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

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The Trump White House is hosting an unprecedented Christian prayer festival Sunday on the National Mall — a nine-hour event that a Trump advisor describes as “rededicating the country to God.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson are all expected to appear.

The funding for “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” comes in part from taxpayer dollars earmarked for America’s 250th birthday celebration, organizers say, according to The Washington Post.

The speakers are almost all Christian, and expected to largely be evangelical Protestant leaders and members of the Trump administration, “many of whom have embraced the message that America’s founders wanted the country to be explicitly Christian,” the Post reports. The event will have a “focus on American identity as aligned with a specific slice of conservative Protestantism.”

Pastor Paula White-Cain, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office who delivered the invocation at President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, said the Jubilee “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.”

“This is really truly rededicating the country to God,” she added.

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According to The Guardian, the invited speakers include those who experts have been “characterized as Christian nationalist or extremist.”

Among them, a pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic,” the Guardian says, along with “a rabbi who has defended the use of torture,” and “a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.”

Scholars have deemed the event unprecedented in the modern era.

“I’m unaware of anything like this, with this involvement of senior government officials, on this scale, trying to paint this false picture of the United States as a quote unquote Christian nation,” Amanda Tyler told the Post. Tyler is executive director of BJC, a Baptist group that promotes religious liberty through church-state separation. “Trump’s rhetoric in the past 18 months is how he’s ‘going to make America Christian again,’ that it’s his job to push religion. This is all part of that piece.”

Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse told the Post, “There’s a difference between saying America is a nation with many Christians in it and that America is a nation dedicated to Christianity and defined by it.”

“Those are very different things,” he said.

Kruse also noted that the only rules about religion that the framers of the Constitution wrote “were ones that keep religion at arm’s length. No establishment, no limits on free exercise, no religious test for office.”

But the Trump White House defended the event, its focus, and its list of speakers.

Brittany Baldwin, executive director of the White House’s 250 Task Force, in an April webinar, said: “We worked very hard with the faith leaders we trust … to ensure that we hear their concerns and we have the right focus for our community of believers, across the country. So I think if you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way.”

Paula White-Cain went even further, saying that the jubilee would not include leaders “praying to all these different Gods.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Using a Secret Super PAC to Pour $1 Million Into Democratic Primaries

 

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