Music: Bugge Wesseltoft — ‘Singing’
Should either of these people have the power to end the world?
W.J. Hennigan writes: Forty-five feet underground in a command center near Omaha, there’s an encrypted communications line that goes directly to the American president. To get to it, you need to pass through a guarded turnstile, two reinforced steel doors and a twisting hallway that leads to an ultra-secure room called The Battle Deck. It’s here, below the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, where military personnel stand by 24 hours a day awaiting a call the world…
Inside the Qatar hospital treating some of Gaza’s most severely wounded children
We hear Abdullah a few moments before we see him. His distant screams are echoing down the corridor at the Turkish hospital in downtown Doha. “I am in pain” he shouts, in Arabic from afar. “I need painkillers.” We travelled with him to Qatar from Egypt’s border with Gaza four days earlier. It’s hard to comprehend the deaths of 12,800 children. We put up figures of children on our studio walls – one for each child killed in Gaza…
Immigrants are more law-abiding and show more entrepreneurship than U.S.-born Americans, studies show
NPR reports: [R]esearch indicates that immigrants commit less crimes than U.S.-born people. Much of the available data focuses on incarceration rates because that’s where immigration status is recorded. Some of the most extensive research comes from Stanford University. Economist Ran Abramitzky found that since the 1960s, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born people. There is also state level research, that shows similar results: researchers at the CATO Institute, a Libertarian think tank, looked into Texas in…
Trump praises ‘fantastic’ Viktor Orbán while hosting Hungarian autocrat for meeting and concert
CNN reports: Donald Trump heaped praise on Viktor Orbán while hosting the Hungarian prime minister at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” the former president told a crowd gathered for a concert at the Florida resort, as shown in a series of videos posted to Orbán’s Instagram account. Trump added that the European autocrat is “a noncontroversial figure because he said, ‘This is the way it’s going to…
U.S. prepared ‘rigorously’ for potential Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine in late 2022, officials say
CNN’s Jim Sciutto reports: In late 2022, the US began “preparing rigorously” for Russia potentially striking Ukraine with a nuclear weapon, in what would have been the first nuclear attack in war since the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly eighty years before, two senior administration officials told CNN. The Biden administration was specifically concerned Russia might use a tactical or battlefield nuclear weapon, the officials said. I first reported US officials were worried about Russia using…
U.S. ‘prepper’ culture diversifies amid fear of disaster and political unrest
Reuters reports: Brook Morgan surveyed booths at the “Survival & Prepper Show” in Colorado that were stocked with boxes of ammunition, mounds of trauma medical kits, and every type of knife imaginable. A self-described “30-year-old lesbian from Indiana,” Morgan is one of a new breed of Americans getting ready to survive political upheaval and natural catastrophes, a pursuit that until recently was largely associated with far-right movements such as white nationalists since the 1980s. Researchers say the number of preppers…
Why hunter-gatherers value their mobility
Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias writes: New research among hunter-gatherer societies is revealing that the social networks these populations create through mobility might be larger than ever expected. These networks, defined by movement, may also be responsible for the emergence of some characteristics thought to set humans apart from our closest nonhuman primate relatives. The movement of hunter-gatherers may explain the emergence of complex, cumulative culture and our ability to maintain high levels of genetic diversity, even when population sizes drop to very,…
Music: Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft — ‘Out Here, In There’
Senator Chris Van Hollen explains why the U.S. is legally required to suspend military aid to Israel
Isaac Chotiner interviewed Senator Chris Van Hollen: Am I correct that there is a law on the books in America which says that “funds appropriated or otherwise made available for United States assistance may not be made available for any country whose government prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance?” You cited that exactly right, and the President, just within the last couple of days, said, and I’m quoting, “We’re going…
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wants to crackdown on the next ‘Hamas sympathiser Aaron Bushnell’
The New Arab reports: US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) has unveiled two new pieces of legislation aimed at restricting security clearances and demonstration rights for pro-Palestinian government workers and contractors, following the self-immolation of US airman Aaron Bushnell outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. on February 25th. The announcement was made on Thursday in a statement posted to Cotton’s website, in which he suggested the actions of Bushnell and others who rallied in his memory as sympathetic with ‘terrorists’…
Insure Our Future: A global movement says the insurance industry could be the key to ending fossil fuels
Inside Climate News reports: Roishetta Ozane would have rather been sitting in a rocking chair at home in Louisiana with her seven-month old grandbaby than standing outside of a multinational insurance company’s office in New York City, surrounded by dozens of police officers, speaking to a rally. But she’d traveled to New York City to fight for the future of her new grandchild and six children. “I came here because decisions being made in this building impact my community miles…
Leaked audio shows No Labels has no idea if it’ll find a candidate
Greg Sargent writes: The centrist group No Labels held a vote of delegates Friday and announced plans to move forward in seeking candidates for a third-party presidential run. Multiple news organizations have treated this as a significant event, reporting that the group’s intent to run a third-party ticket is very much alive and forging ahead. But audio of the call on which the vote was held suggests another interpretation may be more accurate: The group really has no idea whether…
Our brains take rhythmic snapshots of the world as we walk – and we never knew
Blazej Lyjak/Shutterstock By Matthew Davidson, University of Sydney For decades, psychology departments around the world have studied human behaviour in darkened laboratories that restrict natural movement. Our new study, published today in Nature Communications, challenges the wisdom of this approach. With the help of virtual reality (VR), we have revealed previously hidden aspects of perception that happen during a simple everyday action – walking. We found the rhythmic movement of walking changes how sensitive we are to the surrounding environment….
The first Europeans reached Ukraine 1.4 million years ago – new research
Remains of the castle in Korolevo, close to the site. Катерина Байдужа/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA By John Jansen, Czech Academy of Sciences During warm periods in Earth’s history, known as interglacials, glaciers the size of continents pulled back to reveal new landscapes. These were new worlds for early humans to explore and exploit, and 1.4 million years ago this was Europe: a Terra nullius unoccupied by humans. Long before it emerged as the epicentre of global colonialism, Europe was itself…
Music: Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft — ‘River’