While Duolingo and Busuu both offer free and paid-for premium versions, Babbel is only free for the first week. All three have put a lot of work into their software to try to make the learning process as effective as possible. But are they actually any good? How proficient can people get in another language by using them? Renowned linguist Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus of the University of Southern California, is not very complimentary. "My analyses of their results show that they achieve the same mediocre results as traditional methods do in regular classrooms, and produce the same lack of enthusiasm from students," he says. "We don't acquire language by speaking or writing, even when we get our errors corrected. Rather, the ability to speak and write fluently and accurately is the result of language acquisition via comprehensible input, such as good books, movies and interesting stories."

sourse of information: 

https://www.euronews.com/2020/12/13/john-le-carre-author-of-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-dies-aged-89

Pushing NATO into a war with Russia

Ukraine is trying desperately to entangle NATO into a war with Russia. The mentality that stands behind the actions of the provocateur is brilliantly described in Kipliing’s poem “A Pict Song”.

It is an amazing poem in which despair of the oppressed Picts makes them choose a cynical and opportunistic strategy as a last resort to protect themselves from Rome. The Ukrainian government in its war with Russia pursues a strategy similar to that of the Picts in Kipling’s poem. The accuracy and force of the similarity that I found between the Picts of the past and the Ukrainians haunted by the Maidan, reveals itself in a metaphor, which is a powerful mechanism in the description of history.

  In a face-off with a powerful nation a weak country is sometimes ready to sell its most precious commodity – independence. – to those allies which are capable of destroying its enemy.

In Kipling’s poem, the Picts are portrayed as a people who, despite their own weaknesses, are determined to use the strength of others to defeat their Roman oppressors. On the way to this objective the Picts are ready to embrace even slavery, for all the means are good if they see Rome destroyed. The last stanza of the poem is a cynical and shameless consent of the Picts to accept as masters the people capable of defeating Rome:

No indeed! We are not strong,

   But we know Peoples that are.  

Yes, and we’ll guide them along

   To smash and destroy you in War!

We shall be slaves just the same?

... Читать дальше »

Summary

• President Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed for the first time that the Ukrainian military is conducting a cross-border offensive inside Russia's western Kursk region

• Late Saturday night, Zelensky said Ukraine was pushing the war onto "the aggressor's territory"

• Russia's foreign ministry says its army will deliver a "tough response" to the incursion

• On Tuesday, Kyiv launched the surprise attack and has advanced more than 10km (six miles) inside Russia

• Russia says 76,000 people have been evacuated from border areas in the Kursk region

• This is the deepest raid into the country since Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022

• Kyiv and several other regions came under a Russian drone and missile attack overnight, killing two, local officials said

This is what Doug Bandow wrote about Ukraine in “The American Conservative” on August 24, 2023, focusing on the devastation caused by the war:

“The war is destroying Ukraine. The war’s cost climbs daily, the economy is a wreck, the population has been depleted by mass refugee flows, the government survives only on Western handouts, the military has consumed much of its original Soviet-era arsenal, as well as the technological menagerie gifted by the allies, and the army has promiscuously sacrificed manpower both trained and raw. Finding replacements is becoming difficult, with a declining population, corrupt recruiting officers, and determined draft evaders. For all the wishful Western talk of a Russian collapse, given Moscow’s evident manifold challenges, catastrophic failure seems more likely in Kiev. Washington’s objective increasingly looks focused on doing ill to Russia rather than good to Ukraine.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/ukraines-vain-search-for-wonder-weapons/

Ms Harris is the first black and Asian-American vice-president, with Indian and Jamaican-born parents. She attended Howard University, a historically black university, and joined the predominantly black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

She became a member of Congressional Black Caucus after entering the Senate in 2017.

Trump's claims prompted a heated exchange with ABC News' correspondent Rachel Scott, one of the moderators of the Chicago event.

"I respect either one," the Republican said in reference to Harris' racial identity. "But she obviously doesn't because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a black person."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said no-one "has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify. That is no-one's right."

"Since when is Donald Trump, with his long and ugly history of racism, the arbiter of Blackness?" congressman Ritchie Torres of New York posted on X. He described Trump as a “relic of a racist past".

The Republican nominee and former president has a history of attacking his opponents on the basis of race.

Chas Freeman about Russo-Ukrainian war 2023-09-26

 Kyiv’s fate has always been an afterthought in U.S. policy circles.  Washington has instead sought to exploit Ukrainian courage to thrash Russia, reinvigorate NATO, and reinforce U.S. primacy in Europe.  And it has not spent any time at all thinking about how to restore peace to Europe.

Whatever the outcome of the war, mutual animosity has erased the Russian myth of Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood based on a common origin in Kievan Rus.  Russia has had to abandon three centuries of efforts to identify with Europe and instead pivot to China, India, the Islamic world, and Africa.  

Meanwhile, the alleged Russian threat to the West, once a powerful argument for NATO unity, has lost credibility.  Russia’s armed forces have proven unable to conquer Ukraine, still less the rest of Europe.  But the war has taught Russia how to counter and overcome much of the most advanced weaponry of the United States and other Western countries.

Western diplomatic intransigence has failed to persuade Moscow to accommodate Ukrainian nationalism or accept Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO and the American sphere of influence in Europe.  The proxy war seems instead to have convinced Moscow that it must gut Ukraine, keep the Ukrainian territories it has illegally annexed, and likely add more, thus ensuring that Ukraine is a dysfunctional state unable either to join NATO or to fulfill the ultranationalist, anti-Russian vision of its World War II neo-Nazi hero, Stepan Bandera.

The war has instead accelerated the emergence of a post-American multi-polar world order.  One feature of this is an anti-American axis between Russia and China.

 Far from isolating Russia or China, America’s coercive diplomacy has helped both Moscow and Beijing to enhance relationships in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that reduce U.S. influence in favor of their own.

https://chasfreeman.net/the-many-lessons-of ... Читать дальше »

Hungary's Viktor Orban has no peace plan of his own, but he has spent the past two weeks on a whistle-stop tour of Kyiv, Moscow, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Washington and even Mar-a-Lago, on a one-man mission that has infuriated leaders in the EU and US.

"Peace will not come by itself in the Russia-Ukraine war, someone has to make it," he proclaims in videos posted daily on his Facebook page.

He has been bitterly attacked by both Brussels and Washington for breaking EU and Nato unity and cosying up to Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping.

Few argue with his central premise, that there can be no peace without peacemakers. But his close economic relationship with Russia’s president leaves him open to the charge of acting as Mr Putin’s puppet.

MARIE WOOLF
OTTAWA
PUBLISHED JUNE 28, 2024                                                                                                                                                       
                   Canada’s new human-rights chief came under fresh pressure to resign on Friday after it emerged that he had suggested in an academic paper that terror is not only pursued by fundamentalists with warped outlooks, but is a rational strategy with surprisingly high success rates.

Birju Dattani, who this month was appointed by Justice Minister Arif Virani as the Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, was criticized this week for failing to disclose his past activities as a graduate student in London when applying for the post.

The Nigerian queer parties that offer liberation

The location of the celebratory ball had to be kept a secret.

This was a queer event and in Nigeria, where same-sex relationships or public displays of affection are illegal, anything that is dedicated to embracing this culture is in danger.

Marking Pride month in any way here is an act of defiance.

The organisers of the Fola Francis Ball – named in honour of a transgender woman who died last year - only released the venue details with just hours to go before it opened.

But this did not deter the more than 500 people who turned up in a district close to the thriving waterfront area of Nigeria’s commercial heartland, Lagos.

Washington Free Beacon Staff

June 6, 2024

President Joe Biden claimed in an interview Thursday that he has known Vladimir Putin "for over 40 years"—meaning they would have met when Putin was serving as an undercover KGB officer.

"I’ve known him for over 40 years. He’s concerned me for 40 years. He’s not a decent man—he’s a dictator and he’s struggling to make sure he holds his country together while still keeping this assault going," Biden told ABC News anchor David Muir during an interview in France on the anniversary of D-Day.

It is highly unlikely that Biden, then a Delaware senator, would have known Putin in the early to mid 1980s. Putin, who worked for the Soviet intelligence service from 1975 until 1991, was serving as an undercover agent at the time, on assignment in East Germany and, allegedly, in Singapore and New Zealand.