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Month: September 2018

China and Russia have set a nuclear collision course with the United States

China and Russia have set a nuclear collision course with the United States

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Gordon G. Chang writes: China, the New York Times reported last week, “can now challenge American military supremacy in the places that matter most to it: the waters around Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.” Therefore, Beijing can, in the words of the paper, “make intervention in the region too costly for Washington to contemplate.” Too costly to contemplate? Unfortunately, assessments like these, often heard in U.S. policy circles, can embolden the already arrogant Chinese and make their…

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Why China and Russia are obsessed with vast new war games

Why China and Russia are obsessed with vast new war games

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Peter Apps writes: As the West obsesses over Donald Trump’s legal and political challenges, Brexit and a host of other domestic crises, Chinese troops will join their Russian counterparts for Moscow’s largest military exercises in more than three decades. Coming six months after Beijing’s biggest ever offshore naval drills, the joint war games are another reminder of how central military posturing now is to the world’s two most powerful authoritarian states. While neither likely desires or expects war with the…

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A horrifying and believable path to nuclear war with North Korea

A horrifying and believable path to nuclear war with North Korea

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Robert Jervis writes: Many of us believe that if nuclear missiles were to strike the United States, they would most likely come from North Korea. However, it is hard to dramatize this possibility or to make a convincing case for the exact pathway to a war. Jeffrey Lewis, a respected nuclear analyst, sets this as his task in what he calls a “speculative novel,” The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. This way…

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Trump sees his ability to provoke fear as the foundation of his power

Trump sees his ability to provoke fear as the foundation of his power

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The Washington Post reports: [In his new book, Fear, Bob] Woodward depicts Trump’s anger and paranoia about the Russia inquiry as unrelenting, at times paralyzing the West Wing for entire days. Learning of the appointment of Mueller in May 2017, Trump groused, “Everybody’s trying to get me”— part of a venting period that shellshocked aides compared to Richard Nixon’s final days as president. The 448-page book was obtained by The Washington Post. Woodward, an associate editor at The Post, sought…

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Britain’s shared spaces are vanishing, leaving a nation of cliques

Britain’s shared spaces are vanishing, leaving a nation of cliques

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John Harris writes: In our towns, villages and suburbs, they are now such a common sight as to be mundane: boarded-up pubs, awaiting conversion to some new use or forlornly falling into dereliction. The current rate of closure is put at 18 a week. In rural areas, shuttered hostelries represent something particularly tragic: with churches reduced to silent visitor attractions and shops long since gone, they embody the demise of precious local assets in places where maintaining community life is…

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The effect of music

The effect of music

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Roger Mathew Grant writes: Can a melody provide us with pleasure? Plato certainly thought so, as do many today. But it’s incredibly difficult to discern just how this comes to pass. Is it something about the flow and shape of a tune that encourages you to predict its direction and follow along? Or is it that the lyrics of a certain song describe a scene that reminds you of a joyful time? Perhaps the melody is so familiar that you’ve…

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Arctic permafrost may be thawing much faster than expected

Arctic permafrost may be thawing much faster than expected

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National Geographic reports: Nikita Zimov was teaching students to do ecological fieldwork in northern Siberia when he stumbled on a disturbing clue that the frozen land might be thawing far faster than expected. Zimov, like his father, Sergey Zimov, has spent years running a research station that tracks climate change in the rapidly warming Russian Far East. So when students probed the ground and took soil samples amid the mossy hummocks and larch forests near his home, 200 miles north…

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Climate change is not only hiking up temperatures, but changing the dynamics of weather itself

Climate change is not only hiking up temperatures, but changing the dynamics of weather itself

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Stefan Rahmstorf writes: We’ve all become increasingly used to reports of extreme weather over the past few years. But this summer’s raft of dramatic weather events is significant: Not only does it show what warming can do, it points to the potential large-scale trouble that lurks in the disruption of the planet’s winds and ocean currents. In the past few months alone, we’ve seen extreme heat in Western Europe, Canada, Alaska, the western United States, Texas, Japan and Algeria, which…

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As the world stands by, Assad and Putin are ready to crush the last of the Syrian revolution’s democrats

As the world stands by, Assad and Putin are ready to crush the last of the Syrian revolution’s democrats

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Leila Al-Shami writes: The Syrian regime is determined to reconquer all of the territory it has lost. Aided by Russian bombers and Iranian troops, and emboldened by its success in terrorizing the populations of Ghouta and Daraa into submission, President Bashar al-Assad’s government is now preparing to attack Idlib, the last remaining province outside of his control. Idlib is home to some three million people, about half of them displaced, or forcibly evacuated, to the province from elsewhere. Many are…

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‘Time for this war in Afghanistan to end,’ says departing U.S. commander

‘Time for this war in Afghanistan to end,’ says departing U.S. commander

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The New York Times reports: When American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Lt. Col. John W. Nicholson Jr. survived by chance. That morning, as dozens of his colleagues were killed, he was moving house and wasn’t at his desk — which he said was 100 feet from the nose of the plane. Nearly 17 years to the day, now a four-star general departing as the commander of the American and NATO forces…

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Trump protects profits, not workers

Trump protects profits, not workers

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Politico reports: When President Donald Trump came into office pledging to cut regulations “massively,” he made a point of exempting regulations that protected workers’ health. But almost two years in, the Trump administration has done the opposite, rolling back worker safety protections affecting underground mine safety inspections, offshore oil rigs and line speeds in meat processing plants, among others. Trump’s deregulatory moves on worker safety are at odds with his public stance as a champion of working class Americans, but…

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Microwave weapons are prime suspect in attacks on U.S. embassy staff in Cuba

Microwave weapons are prime suspect in attacks on U.S. embassy staff in Cuba

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The New York Times reports: During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control. More recently, the American military itself sought to develop microwave arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people’s heads. The aims were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare. Now, doctors and scientists say such unconventional weapons may have caused the baffling symptoms and ailments that, starting in late…

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Studying time is like holding a snowflake

Studying time is like holding a snowflake

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Brian Gallagher writes: In April, in the famous Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution in London, Carlo Rovelli gave an hour-long lecture on the nature of time. A red thread spanned the stage, a metaphor for the Italian theoretical physicist’s subject. “Time is a long line,” he said. To the left lies the past—the dinosaurs, the big bang—and to the right, the future—the unknown. “We’re sort of here,” he said, hanging a carabiner on it, as a marker for the…

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Mollie Tibbetts’ father: Don’t distort her death to advance the racism she opposed

Mollie Tibbetts’ father: Don’t distort her death to advance the racism she opposed

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Rob Tibbetts writes: As I write this, I am watching Sen. John McCain lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda and know that evil will succeed only if good people do nothing. Both Mollie and Senator McCain were good people. I know that both would stand up now and do something. The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise…

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