The Observer reports: Ukraine is in a race against time to save the eastern Donbas region as relentless Russian artillery and air strikes threaten to turn the tide of the war, and support for Kyiv’s continued defiance among some west European allies appears to be slipping. Ukrainian officials say they urgently need advanced US-made mobile… Read More »
The Washington Post reports: Russia is responsible for inciting genocide and perpetrating atrocities that show an “intent to destroy” the Ukrainian people, a new legal analysis signed by more than 30 independent experts concluded. The report, published Friday by the Washington-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for… Read More »
Alejandra Mancilla and Peder Roberts write: For more than 2,000 years, Antarctica existed only as a landscape of the imagination. If there was an Arctic continent, Aristotle reasoned in his treatise Meteorology, there ought to be an antipode, an ‘ant-Arctic’. For centuries, scientists, explorers and cartographers speculated about this antipodean Terra nondum cognita, a southern… Read More »
Vox reports: The Supreme Court decided on May 26 to allow President Joe Biden’s administration to continue using a key metric in the fight against climate change. The court’s order, in refusing to put back an order from a federal judge in Louisiana that had blocked the administration, is just one line long. But it… Read More »
Science News reports: On May 24, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 19 children and two teachers were killed by a shooter. Just 10 days earlier, a white gunman was accused of a racially motivated shooting in a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., that left 10 Black people dead. These tragic incidents are among… Read More »
Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff writes: Growing up in a Jewish household means engaging in a lot of political discourse: discussions about oppression, death, injustice, guilt. In some Jewish households, we discuss social justice, the need to fight for the rights of the oppressed, taking a lesson from the pain of our own history as a “homeless” and… Read More »
Science Daily reports: Humans are the only species on earth known to use language. We do this by combining sounds to form words and words to form hierarchically structured sentences. The question, where this extraordinary capacity originates from, still remains to be answered. In order to retrace the evolutionary origins of human language, researchers often… Read More »
The Guardian reports: The besieged Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk appears to be almost completely surrounded by attacking Russian forces, as the Kremlin continued to make incremental gains in its offensive in the Donbas region, backed by withering shell fire. “The Russians are pounding residential neighbourhoods relentlessly,” regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, wrote in a Telegram post… Read More »
CNN reports: Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been processed through a series of Russian “filtration camps” in Eastern Ukraine and sent into Russia as part of a systemized program of forced removal, according to four sources familiar with the latest Western intelligence — an estimate far higher than US officials have publicly disclosed. After… Read More »
The New York Times reports: Three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America and its allies are quietly debating the inevitable question: How does this end? In recent days, presidents and prime ministers as well as the Democratic and Republican Party leaders in the United States have called for victory in Ukraine. But just beneath… Read More »
David Ignatius writes: The first instruction that Secretary of State Antony Blinken got from President Biden was to “reset” America’s alliances and partnerships abroad so that the United States could deal with the challenges ahead. That strategy would prove decisive in combating Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Blinken and other officials gave me new details this… Read More »
George Strobel writes: On March 28, in a decision that would put the U.S. solar industry on hold, the U.S. Department of Commerce initiated an anti-dumping investigation into imports of solar cells and modules from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam in response to a petition from a small California solar panel manufacturer, Auxin Solar. The… Read More »
The New York Times reports: In West Virginia, the state treasurer has pulled money from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, because the Wall Street firm has flagged climate change as an economic risk. In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller… Read More »
Shutterstock By Timothée Bonnet, Australian National University How fast is evolution? In adaptive evolution, natural selection causes genetic changes in traits that favour the survival and reproduction of individual organisms. Although Charles Darwin thought the process occurred over geological timescales, we have seen examples of dramatic adaptive evolution over only a handful of generations. The… Read More »