Two months after the Berlin Wall fell, another powerful symbol opened its doors in the middle of Moscow: a gleaming new McDonald’s.

It was the first American fast-food restaurant to enter the Soviet Union, reflecting the new political openness of the era. For Vlad Vexler, who as a 9-year-old waited in a two-hour line to enter the restaurant near Moscow’s Pushkin Square on its opening day in January 1990, it was a gateway to the utopia he imagined the West to be.

“We thought that life there was magical and there were no problems,” Vexler said.

So it was all the more poignant for Vexler when McDonald’s announced it would temporarily close that store and nearly 850 others in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. McDonald’s Russian website on Monday read: “Due to operational, technical and logistical difficulties, McDonald’s will temporarily suspend service at its network enterprises from March 14.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is planning trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., is considering a rough timeline for a potential presidential announcement. And allies of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., are openly talking up her White House prospects.

More than two years before the next presidential election, a shadow primary is already beginning to take shape among at least three fierce Republican critics of former President Donald Trump to determine who is best positioned to occupy the anti-Trump lane in 2024.

Their apparent willingness to run — even if Trump does, as is widely expected — represents a shift from previous years when “Never Trump” operatives failed to recruit any GOP officeholders to challenge the incumbent president. But with the 2024 contest almost in view, the question is no longer whether one of Trump’s prominent Republican critics will run, but how many will mount a campaign and how soon they will announce.

Sen. Joe Manchin will oppose Sarah Bloom Raskin’s nomination to the Federal Reserve’s top job overseeing banks, imperiling her already stalled bid to win confirmation.

Raskin’s nomination has been stuck in the Senate Banking Committee amid a GOP boycott of a committee vote on her nomination, effectively blocking her confirmation from advancing to the Senate floor. Now even if her nomination is able to get out of committee, Raskin would need at least one Republican to support her to be confirmed as vice chair for supervision.

Manchin (D-W.Va.) signaled his discomfort with Raskin last week, advising the Banking Committee to move the rest of President Joe Biden’s Fed nominees, including Chair Jerome Powell, without her. In announcing his opposition on Monday, Manchin said Raskin has “failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nation’s critical energy needs.”

In the span of just two weeks, millions of Ukrainian refugees have been forced to flee as the brutal Russian invasion of their homeland continues.
The amount of people on the move constitutes “the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II,” UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Commissioner Filippo Grandi said Sunday, and is reminiscent of the 2015 migrant crisis spurred by the war in Syria which resulted in an estimated 1 million asylum-seekers.
While many residents in the central and eastern portions of the country have relocated to western Ukraine and away from the front lines, more than 2.5 million Ukrainians have left entirely following Russia’s invasion on February 24, according to the latest United Nations refugee estimates.

The US has information suggesting China has expressed some openness to providing Russia with requested military and financial assistance as part of its war on Ukraine, a Western official and a US diplomat told CNN, and is conveying what it knows to its NATO allies.
It is not yet clear whether China intends to provide Russia with that assistance, US officials familiar with the intelligence tell CNN. But during an intense, seven-hour meeting in Rome, a top aide to President Joe Biden warned his Chinese counterpart of “potential implications and consequences” for China should support for Russia be forthcoming, a senior administration official said.
The series of events underscored the growing concern among American officials at the budding partnership between Moscow and Beijing as Biden works to isolate and punish Russia for its aggression in Ukraine. While officials have said the Chinese President was alarmed at what has taken place since Russia invaded, there is little to indicate China is prepared to cut off its support entirely.

A pivotal chapter in Russia’s recent history is coming to an end as many of the world’s largest and best-known companies abandon Russia after the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

It started in part with BP announcing late last month that it would end its multi-billion dollar relationship with Rosneft, the Russian oil giant.

But what started as a trickle has become a corporate exodus. This week alone, companies ranging from Coca-Cola to Goldman Sachs have announced they are cutting their ties with Russia.

BUSINESS
McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Starbucks join a corporate exodus from Russia
Perhaps no decision to leave had more symbolic significance than one McDonald’s made. This week, it decided to pause its operations in Russia. The company will temporarily close its restaurants in 850 locations across the country.

Gas prices hit new record of .43 per gallon, up 79 cents in two weeksFive key developments in Russia’s invasion of UkraineBiden’s CIA head leads the charge against Putin’s information warMORE’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has played well with voters, but he’s yet to see a major boost in the polls as domestic issues like inflation continue to hold him back from a big political bounce.

Recent polls have shown Biden getting generally strong ratings on his handling of the crisis in Ukraine, and the steps he’s taken to squeeze the Russian economy have garnered bipartisan support.

But those successes have yet to translate to stronger overall approval ratings, and uncertainty about party messaging at last week’s House Democratic retreat underscored how concerns about inflation domestically are still wreaking havoc on the party’s efforts to hold narrow majorities in each chamber of Congress in November.

Laws mean nothing if they cannot be enforced against people who violate them, which is why there is an entire branch of government — the judiciary — whose job is supposed to be applying the law to individual cases. But at least when it comes to employment law, the Supreme Court has spent the last two decades permitting most employers to immunize themselves from lawsuits through a practice known as “forced arbitration.”

Forced arbitration allows an employer to order its workers to sign away their right to sue the company, or lose their jobs. Instead, any disputes must be resolved in a private arbitration process that gives extraordinary advantages to corporate parties over individuals. (Forced arbitration is also very common in ordinary consumer transactions, but your bank or cellphone company can only refuse to do business with you if you refuse arbitration. Your boss can most likely fire you.)

In the final two weeks of March, the Supreme Court will hear three cases asking just how much power companies have to force their workers into arbitration.

The first two, Morgan v. Sundance and Viking River Cruises v. Moriana, are fairly narrow. But the third case, Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, involves one of the original sins of the Court’s forced arbitration jurisprudence. The Federal Arbitration Act of 1925, the statute the Court relies on in forced arbitration cases, explicitly exempts “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” But, in Circuit City v. Adams (2001), a 5-4 Court held that most workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce can be forced into arbitration.