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Putin staged an elaborate election charade. So why did some Western media outlets play along?

Putin staged an elaborate election charade. So why did some Western media outlets play along?

Anne Applebaum writes: There was no election in Russia last weekend. There was no campaign. There were no debates, which was unsurprising, because no issues could be debated. Above all, there were no real candidates, bar one: the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the man who has just started his fifth, unconstitutional term in office. Russians did line up at polling stations, but these were not actually polling stations. They were props in an elaborate piece of political theater, a…

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Planet-eating stars hint at hidden chaos in the Milky Way

Planet-eating stars hint at hidden chaos in the Milky Way

Nature reports: Stellar detectives have identified seven stars that recently dined on a rocky planet. The study doubles the number of binary stars known to have consumed a planet, and questions the perception that mature solar systems harbouring Earth-like planets are usually stable. The findings, published in Nature on 20 March, show “strong evidence of planet ingestion”, says Jianrong Shi, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing. The planets seem to have been eaten during their stars’ relatively…

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U.S. and U.K. doctors in Washington to warn of IDF’s ‘appalling atrocities’ in Gaza

U.S. and U.K. doctors in Washington to warn of IDF’s ‘appalling atrocities’ in Gaza

The Guardian reports: A delegation of American and British doctors is in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration the Israeli military is systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes. The doctors, who have recently returned from volunteering at Gaza’s besieged hospitals, are expected to meet White House officials and senior members of Congress this week to warn that pledges of increased aid to Palestinians under bombardment are largely meaningless without an immediate…

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A statement from Jewish Americans opposing AIPAC

A statement from Jewish Americans opposing AIPAC

A statement from Jewish Americans opposing AIPAC says: We are Jewish Americans who have varying perspectives. We’ve come together to highlight and oppose the unprecedented and damaging role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allied groups in US elections, especially within Democratic Party primaries. We recognize that the purpose of AIPAC’s interventions in electoral politics is to defeat any critics of Israeli government policy and to support candidates who vow unwavering loyalty to Israel, thereby ensuring…

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How the unedifying ‘lessons of Iraq’ reappraisals obscure the war’s real lessons

How the unedifying ‘lessons of Iraq’ reappraisals obscure the war’s real lessons

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, Democratic Party candidate Bill Clinton distinguished himself from the Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush with regard to Bosnia by supporting a “lift and strike” policy. Armed with weapons from the old Yugoslav Army, Bosnian Serbs were on a rampage, and a United Nations embargo was preventing Muslim Bosniaks from being able to defend themselves, even as the Bush administration looked on. Clinton’s proposal would lift the arms blockade and…

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Former Giuliani associate names names in shocking video that Fox News won’t air

Former Giuliani associate names names in shocking video that Fox News won’t air

HuffPost reports: Former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas made some startling accusations during a House Oversight Committee impeachment inquiry hearing on Wednesday, but don’t expect to see it air on Fox News. Parnas, who helped Donald Trump by attempting to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, told the committee that various GOP politicians and members of the conservative media purposely spread disinformation about the current president. And he named names, including Fox News host Sean Hannity and Rep. Pete Sessions,…

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Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

Gavin Schmidt writes: When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has. For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records…

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Ancient viruses helped speedy nerves evolve

Ancient viruses helped speedy nerves evolve

Science News reports: Ancient viruses have really gotten on our nerves, but in the best of ways. One particular retrovirus — embedded in the DNA of jawed vertebrates — helps turn on production of a protein needed to insulate nerve fibers, researchers report February 15 in Cell. Such insulation, called myelin, may have helped make speedy thoughts and complex brains possible. The retrovirus trick was so handy, in fact, that it showed up many times in the evolution of vertebrates…

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Gaza: ‘highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded… anywhere, anytime,’ new report warns

Gaza: ‘highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded… anywhere, anytime,’ new report warns

CNN reports: Famine is imminent in northern Gaza where 70% of the population are already suffering with catastrophic levels of hunger, a UN-backed report said Monday, as the EU’s top diplomat accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon of war.” All 2.2 million people in Gaza do not have enough food to eat, with half of the population on the brink of starvation and famine projected to arrive in the north “anytime between mid-March and May 2024,” according to…

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Jared Kushner: Palestinians should be moved to the Negev desert to ‘clean up’ Gaza’s ‘valuable’ waterfront

Jared Kushner: Palestinians should be moved to the Negev desert to ‘clean up’ Gaza’s ‘valuable’ waterfront

The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has offered his own solution to the mass bloodshed and displacement in Gaza: some good, old-fashioned real estate development. During an interview with Tarek Masoud, the faculty chair of Harvard’s Middle East Initiative, Kushner proposed moving Palestinians to Israel’s arid desert region to “clean up” Gaza’s “valuable” waterfront. “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable to—if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner said, without clarifying who exactly would profit…

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Why won’t rich Republicans loan money to upstanding businessman Donald Trump?

Why won’t rich Republicans loan money to upstanding businessman Donald Trump?

Jonathan Chait writes: The Republican Party is united in its belief that Donald Trump’s court-ordered financial distress is the product of Democratic Party “lawfare.” Liberal prosecutors and courts have set out to persecute an upstanding businessman, hounding him over minor or nonexistent financial discrepancies. He is being forced to liquidate his extremely solid business to pay trumped-up fines. The conservative talk-show host Mark Levin has absorbed these complaints and earnestly raises a natural follow-up question: Why aren’t any patriotic conservative…

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Judge Aileen Cannon could get herself booted from Trump’s classified documents case

Judge Aileen Cannon could get herself booted from Trump’s classified documents case

Ray Brescia writes: For the last few weeks, the legal and political world had its eyes on the spectacle of an effort to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the prosecution of former President Donald Trump, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Yet over the last six months, a slow-moving car-crash of a case has been unfolding, with a judge who seems committed to protecting the former president at every turn of the…

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Outside groups pledge over $1 billion to aid Biden’s re-election effort

Outside groups pledge over $1 billion to aid Biden’s re-election effort

The New York Times reports: A new $120 million pledge to lift President Biden and his allies will push the total expected spending from outside groups working to re-elect Mr. Biden to $1 billion this year. The League of Conservation Voters, a leading climate organization that is among the biggest spenders on progressive causes, announced its plans for backing Mr. Biden on Tuesday, at a moment when his Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, is struggling to raise funds….

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