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‘A tragedy for us all’: Supreme Court Justice Jackson blasts majority’s affirmative action ruling

‘A tragedy for us all’: Supreme Court Justice Jackson blasts majority’s affirmative action ruling

CNBC reports: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson excoriated her colleagues who voted to strike down race-conscious college admissions policies, accusing the majority of “turning back the clock” on affirmative action. “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote in a thundering dissent to the major court ruling Thursday. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” she wrote. “History speaks. In some form,…

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Neutrinos build a ghostly map of the Milky Way

Neutrinos build a ghostly map of the Milky Way

The New York Times reports: From ghostlike particles, astrophysicists have pieced together a new map of the galaxy we live in. For now, that map of the Milky Way is blurry and incomplete. But as more data is gathered, it will become clearer and will help illuminate galactic convulsions like the expanding remnants of exploded stars, providing clues to mysteries that are difficult to solve with only observations from conventional telescopes. “This is the first time we’ve seen our own…

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Our simple magic-free recipe for quantum entanglement

Our simple magic-free recipe for quantum entanglement

Huw Price and Ken Wharton write: Almost a century ago, physics produced a problem child, astonishingly successful yet profoundly puzzling. Now, just in time for its 100th birthday, we think we’ve found a simple diagnosis of its central eccentricity. This weird wunderkind was ‘quantum mechanics’ (QM), a new theory of how matter and light behave at the submicroscopic level. Through the 1920s, QM’s components were assembled by physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Alongside Albert Einstein’s relativity theory,…

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Wagner’s Prigozhin planned to capture Russian military leaders

Wagner’s Prigozhin planned to capture Russian military leaders

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin planned to capture Russia’s military leadership as part of last weekend’s mutiny, Western officials said, and he accelerated his plans after the country’s domestic intelligence agency became aware of the plot. The plot’s premature launch was among the factors that could explain its ultimate failure after 36 hours, when Prigozhin called off an armed march on Moscow that had initially faced little resistance. Prigozhin originally intended to capture Defense Minister Sergei…

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Russian general knew about mercenary chief’s rebellion plans, U.S. officials say

Russian general knew about mercenary chief’s rebellion plans, U.S. officials say

The New York Times reports: A senior Russian general had advance knowledge of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to rebel against Russia’s military leadership, according to U.S. officials briefed on American intelligence on the matter, which has prompted questions about what support the mercenary leader had inside the top ranks. The officials said they are trying to learn if Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the former top Russian commander in Ukraine, helped plan Mr. Prigozhin’s actions last weekend, which posed the most dramatic threat…

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Putin moves to seize control of Wagner’s global empire

Putin moves to seize control of Wagner’s global empire

The Wall Street Journal reports: In the hours after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s army of ex-convicts and mercenaries halted their advance on Moscow, the Kremlin set out to seize full control of the global empire built by the notorious military entrepreneur. Russia’s deputy foreign minister flew to Damascus to personally deliver a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: Wagner Group forces would no longer operate there independently. Senior Russian foreign ministry officials phoned the president of the Central African Republic, whose personal…

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Most Americans support U.S. arming Ukraine, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows

Most Americans support U.S. arming Ukraine, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows

Reuters reports: Solid majorities of Americans support providing weaponry to Ukraine to defend itself against Russia and believe that such aid demonstrates to China and other U.S. rivals a will to protect U.S. interests and allies, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey. The two-day poll that was concluded on Tuesday charted a sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine, with 65% of the respondents approving of the shipments compared with 46% in a May poll. Eighty-one percent of Democrats, 56% of…

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The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous

The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous

David Frum writes: War with Mexico? It’s on the 2024 ballot, at least if you believe the campaign rhetoric of more and more Republican candidates. In January, two Republican House members introduced a bill to authorize the use of military force inside Mexico. They were not know-nothings from the fringes of the MAGA caucus. One was Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy Seal who received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The other was Mike Waltz…

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Lecherous president: Trump talked about having sex with his daughter, Ivanka

Lecherous president: Trump talked about having sex with his daughter, Ivanka

Newsweek reports: Donald Trump’s “naked sexism,” including toward his own daughter, is described in a new book by Miles Taylor, the former Trump administration official who famously wrote a scathing op-ed about the former president under the pen name “Anonymous.” Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, describes several incidents that made women in the Trump administration uncomfortable in his upcoming book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, an extract of…

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Scientists thrill at first hints of cosmic ‘hum’ from giant gravitational waves

Scientists thrill at first hints of cosmic ‘hum’ from giant gravitational waves

Scientific American reports: After nearly two decades of listening, astronomers are finally starting to “hear” the rumbles of gravitational waves they believe emanate from the behemoths of our universe: supermassive black holes. The result comes from a National Science Foundation–sponsored initiative known as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). Since 2004 NANOGrav has monitored metronomelike flashes of light from a Milky Way–spanning network of dead stars known as pulsars. Forged from the hearts of exploding massive stars,…

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The con artists, such as Glenn Greenwald, who blame Ukraine aid for America’s social problems

The con artists, such as Glenn Greenwald, who blame Ukraine aid for America’s social problems

Alaric DeArment writes: A scene of squalor unfolds as the camera moves along a city street lined with apparent drug addicts to the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A caption reads, “While American citizens live on the streets and take drugs not to feel the pain, the United States would rather finance a proxy war against Russia,” while a bar graph says the U.S. has sent $46.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine. The video, on TikTok, is but…

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Ukraine stands to gain from Wagner Group revolt in Russia, experts say

Ukraine stands to gain from Wagner Group revolt in Russia, experts say

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Two days after the Wagner Group’s stunning, short-lived rebellion inside Russia seemingly ended in a deal that saw the mercenaries’ boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, fly to exile in Belarus, more questions than answers remain. According to Russian state media, all charges against those involved in the uprising have now been dropped. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who delivered a brief, combative speech Monday, called Wagner militants “patriots,” and said they were led by the nose into…

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Prigozhin’s rebellion raises questions about Wagner’s African footprint

Prigozhin’s rebellion raises questions about Wagner’s African footprint

The Washington Post reports: The aborted rebellion in Russia has brought unease to large swaths of Africa where leaders who have turned to the Wagner mercenary group to bolster their hold on power now face the prospect that the private paramilitary organization could be weakened or even dismantled, according to experts on the region as well as Western officials and analysts. The world’s attention has largely focused on the turbulence within Russia, where the aura of President Vladimir Putin is…

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There’s a time bomb in progressives’ big Supreme Court voting case win

There’s a time bomb in progressives’ big Supreme Court voting case win

Richard L. Hasen writes: It is indeed a cause for celebration that the United States Supreme Court, on a 6-3 vote in Moore v. Harper, rejected an extreme version of the “independent state legislature” theory that could have upended the conduct of elections around the country and paved the way for state legislatures to engage in election subversion. But after the celebration comes the inevitable hangover, and with all the hoopla it is easy to miss that the Supreme Court…

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