Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

U.S.-Israel relations are becoming increasingly frayed

U.S.-Israel relations are becoming increasingly frayed

Politico reports: When American and Israeli warplanes struck Iran on Feb. 28, Israeli officials let themselves believe the alliance was entering a golden age. Four months later, they are bracing for a future where Israel stands more alone than ever. The vice president of the United States set the stage last week, telling Israel it has almost no friends left in the world, and that it should think hard before turning on the one it has. But the problem for…

Read More Read More

Bill Pulte picks equally inexperienced GOP election operative for powerful spy agency job

Bill Pulte picks equally inexperienced GOP election operative for powerful spy agency job

The New York Times reports: Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, has installed as his chief of staff a woman who worked on election-related issues for the Republican National Committee, according to former U.S. officials. Christina Norton, the former R.N.C. official, has also served as Bill Pulte’s chief of staff at the federal housing agency he leads. But much of her recent work for the G.O.P. has centered on election issues, including efforts to monitor voting sites during…

Read More Read More

Trump cut a billion-dollar mining deal. His and Lutnick’s family stand to profit

Trump cut a billion-dollar mining deal. His and Lutnick’s family stand to profit

The New York Times reports: When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington. During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States…

Read More Read More

The National Design Studio, staffed by DOGE veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal websites

The National Design Studio, staffed by DOGE veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal websites

The Guardian reports: An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites – for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings – in ways critics say appear to violate federal law. The National Design Studio (NDS) was established by a Donald Trump executive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge…

Read More Read More

Neanderthals in Western Europe were doing well right before they went extinct

Neanderthals in Western Europe were doing well right before they went extinct

UCLA: Neanderthals thrived across Europe and the Middle East for hundreds of thousands of years. They occupied vast distances, ranging from Europe through the Altai Mountains in Central Asia. They survived large variations in climate and the arrival of modern humans until around 40,000 years ago, when they died out. The exact factors that resulted in their disappearance remain unknown, with possible explanations including climate change, resource competition and interbreeding with anatomically modern humans. A new study published in Nature…

Read More Read More

Pope Leo all but rules out war’s legitimacy

Pope Leo all but rules out war’s legitimacy

James V. Grimaldi writes: It isn’t every day that a pope calls for an overhaul of a more than 1,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church, but that’s exactly what Pope Leo XIV did last month. In his inaugural encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was mainly an exploration of how to protect human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence, Leo devoted a brief but critical passage to just war theory. In a break with a foundational principle of Catholic thought on…

Read More Read More

Unease deepens in Russia as Ukraine steps up long-range strikes

Unease deepens in Russia as Ukraine steps up long-range strikes

The Washington Post reports: The Kremlin is scrambling to respond to an intensifying campaign of Ukrainian drone attacks reaching ever deeper into Russia, hitting key arms production facilities, destroying an ever-greater share of oil-refining capacity, and causing fuel shortages across the country. This week alone, swarms of Ukrainian drones hit oil facilities across Russia as well as the VZPP-S semiconductor devices plant, a major producer of components for Russian ballistic missiles in Voronezh, the Dubna Satellite Communications Center near Moscow,…

Read More Read More

Sanctioned ICC judges sue Trump over ‘attack on judicial independence’

Sanctioned ICC judges sue Trump over ‘attack on judicial independence’

Middle East Eye reports: A federal court in New York has summoned US President Donald Trump to respond to a lawsuit brought by three sitting judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who accuse his administration of punishing them with sweeping sanctions for their work on investigations involving Israel and the United States. The summons, issued on Thursday by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, requires the government to respond within 60 days to a…

Read More Read More

What is Peter Thiel up to in Argentina?

What is Peter Thiel up to in Argentina?

Pablo Alabarces writes: Javier Milei’s rise to power in Argentina has transformed the country into a laboratory for the global far right and tech capital. At the center of this convergence stands Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, who has been living in Buenos Aires for just over a month. Some commentators in the press and on social media have claimed that Thiel’s relocation represents a new flight of defeated Nazis to South America (though Thiel is…

Read More Read More

Zuckerberg looks for new way to profit from addiction: a prediction markets app

Zuckerberg looks for new way to profit from addiction: a prediction markets app

The New York Times reports: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has urged his lieutenants to explore partnerships with the popular prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi as his company builds a similar app, three employees with knowledge of the matter said. The app that Meta is creating, called Arena, could allow people to make bets on practically anything, aiming to capitalize on how prediction markets have become an increasingly big business. Internally, Meta’s executives have said Arena is different from Polymarket…

Read More Read More

‘The decision is sickening’: MAHA leaders feel betrayed by Supreme Court ruling on Roundup weed killer

‘The decision is sickening’: MAHA leaders feel betrayed by Supreme Court ruling on Roundup weed killer

NBC News reports: Many prominent figures in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement said they felt betrayed Thursday after the Supreme Court ruled that Bayer, the manufacturer of Roundup, did not need to warn consumers of a potential cancer risk associated with its weed killer. The ruling is likely to prevent thousands of lawsuits from arguing in state courts that Roundup should come with a cancer warning. Worries about chemicals in the food supply have long animated a subset of…

Read More Read More

Reading is the ultimate cognitive enhancer

Reading is the ultimate cognitive enhancer

Neuroscience News reports: In his new book, Falk Huettig, Senior Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, brings together research spanning psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and education to answer that question. The result is a systematic account of how literacy reshapes memory, attention, language processing, and reasoning – and even abilities readers might not expect, like face recognition. Cognitive enhancement is having a moment, with people turning to better sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management, and tools like caffeine or neurostimulation…

Read More Read More

How Iran devastated an American naval base — and caused a U.S. recalculation

How Iran devastated an American naval base — and caused a U.S. recalculation

The Wall Street Journal reports: When the Iranian missiles and drones came for the nerve center of America’s naval operations in the Middle East, some of them hit their mark. The U.S. Navy base in Bahrain was repeatedly targeted between late February and June. Strikes that got through caused extensive damage, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite imagery, social-media footage and interviews with current and former servicemembers—damage that the Pentagon hasn’t publicly acknowledged. Hit hard were the…

Read More Read More

Ukraine’s growing drone armada is overwhelming Russia’s air defenses

Ukraine’s growing drone armada is overwhelming Russia’s air defenses

The Wall Street Journal reports: Denys Shtylerman was surprised how many of his company’s drones were getting through as he watched footage of them slamming into an oil refinery on the edge of Moscow last week, sending plumes of black smoke billowing over the Russian capital. “We just used a big bunch of drones and they overwhelmed the Russian air-defense systems,” Shtylerman, the head designer at Fire Point, one of Ukraine’s largest defense manufacturers, said in an interview. Ukraine is…

Read More Read More