Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Could the GOP divide over Ukraine become a lasting split?

Could the GOP divide over Ukraine become a lasting split?

Amanda Carpenter writes: The great hope among many Republicans is that Ron DeSantis will run for president in 2024 as a smarter version of former President Donald Trump. But DeSantis’s stance on the U.S. interest in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is proving unfortunate for anyone harboring that hope. In the past, the Florida governor’s backers may have been able to explain away his more controversial decisions—to align himself with election deniers, say, or use false pretenses to send migrants to…

Read More Read More

The Ordovician mass extinction: Our planet’s first brush with death

The Ordovician mass extinction: Our planet’s first brush with death

Cody Cottier writes: Some mass extinctions unfold like a sloppy murder, leaving clear fingerprints for the keen investigator to uncover. (Asteroids are no masters of subtlety.) The Late Ordovician mass extinction, the oldest of all and the second most lethal, isn’t one of them. Though there is a standard explanation for this granddaddy of death — involving an ancient ice age — the evidence is cryptic enough that experts are still submitting new theories for how 85 percent of all…

Read More Read More

The unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

The unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models

Stephen Ornes writes: What movie do these emojis describe? That prompt was one of 204 tasks chosen last year to test the ability of various large language models (LLMs) — the computational engines behind AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. The simplest LLMs produced surreal responses. “The movie is a movie about a man who is a man who is a man,” one began. Medium-complexity models came closer, guessing The Emoji Movie. But the most complex model nailed it in one guess: Finding Nemo….

Read More Read More

Chinese companies are shipping rifles, body armor to Russia

Chinese companies are shipping rifles, body armor to Russia

Politico reports: Chinese companies, including one connected to the government in Beijing, have sent Russian entities 1,000 assault rifles and other equipment that could be used for military purposes, including drone parts and body armor, according to trade and customs data obtained by POLITICO. The shipments took place between June and December 2022, according to the data provided by ImportGenius, a customs data aggregator. China North Industries Group Corporation Limited, one of the country’s largest state-owned defense contractors, sent the…

Read More Read More

Fighter jets coming ASAP, Poland tells Ukraine

Fighter jets coming ASAP, Poland tells Ukraine

Politico reports: Poland will deliver four Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine “in the next few days,” President Andrzej Duda said Thursday. Poland is the first country to formally commit to sending combat planes to Ukraine, which Kyiv says it urgently needs to repel the Russian invasion, which has become a brutal war of attrition in the eastern Donbas region. “We will be handing over four fully operational planes,” Duda said at a joint press conference with Czech President Petr…

Read More Read More

Pentagon analyst kept intel job after joining January 6 mob, planned to kidnap Jewish leaders

Pentagon analyst kept intel job after joining January 6 mob, planned to kidnap Jewish leaders

James Risen reports: In 2018, a newly hired software engineer at a defense and intelligence contractor in the Washington, D.C., suburbs was assigned to a team led by a senior developer named Hatchet Speed. At first, the new engineer, Richard Ngo, got along well with Speed. They sometimes went out to lunch together and socialized away from the office. “Speed was my mentor at Novetta as the software lead,” Ngo later said in court testimony. “We worked together every day.”…

Read More Read More

More than a quarter of Republicans approve of Capitol attack, poll shows

More than a quarter of Republicans approve of Capitol attack, poll shows

The Guardian reports: More than a quarter of Republicans approve of the January 6 Capitol attack, according to a new poll. More than half think the deadly riot was a form of legitimate political discourse. The Economist and YouGov survey said 27% of Republicans either strongly or somewhat approved of the riot on 6 January 2021, which Donald Trump incited in an attempt to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden. Nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides, have been linked…

Read More Read More

New analysis of genetic samples from China appears to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs

New analysis of genetic samples from China appears to link the pandemic’s origin to raccoon dogs

Katherine J. Wu writes: For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab. Through a swirl of data obfuscation by Chinese authorities and politicalization within the United States, and rampant speculation from all corners of the world, many scientists have stood by the notion that this outbreak—like most others—had purely natural…

Read More Read More

Global microbiome study gives new view of shared health risks

Global microbiome study gives new view of shared health risks

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Our bodies consist of about 30 trillion human cells, but they also host about 39 trillion microbial cells. These teeming communities of bacteria, viruses, protozoa and fungi in our guts, in our mouths, on our skin and elsewhere — collectively called the human microbiome — don’t only consist of freeloaders and lurking pathogens. Instead, as scientists increasingly appreciate, these microbes form ecosystems essential to our health. A growing body of research aims to understand how disruptions of…

Read More Read More

The multiverse: Our universe is suspiciously unlikely to exist – unless it is one of many

The multiverse: Our universe is suspiciously unlikely to exist – unless it is one of many

Do universes pop up as bubbles from a multiverse? arda savasciogullari/Shutterstock By Martin Rees, University of Cambridge It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed any kind of organised complex systems, could arise. Should we therefore be surprised that a universe exists in which we were able to emerge? That’s a question physicists including me have tried to answer for decades. But it is proving difficult. Although we…

Read More Read More

The Ukraine untruths of disingenuous DeSantis

The Ukraine untruths of disingenuous DeSantis

William Saletan writes: Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, bills himself as an enforcer. Speaking in Iowa last Friday as he prepared to run for president, DeSantis bragged about capturing Haitian migrants and sending the National Guard to control “BLM riots.” “There’s a new sheriff in town,” he told an audience in Des Moines. He boasted that Sheriff DeSantis was finally taking on one of America’s worst villains: the Walt Disney Company. He proudly informed the crowd that he was…

Read More Read More

Trump’s nomination would blow up Republican support for Ukraine, says former NATO chief

Trump’s nomination would blow up Republican support for Ukraine, says former NATO chief

Politico reports: Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former secretary-general of NATO, packs his prognosis for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign into one loaded word. “I think President Trump will be a loser,” he tells me. It is a notoriously triggering term for the former president, evoking deep humiliation. Rasmussen uses it casually. “His baggage is too heavy, too controversial,” says Rasmussen, 70, who was Denmark’s prime minister for most of this century’s first decade. Yet Rasmussen, a right-of-center politician who is now…

Read More Read More

Tucker Carlson parroting Vladimir Putin

Tucker Carlson parroting Vladimir Putin

HuffPost reports: A conservative group has highlighted Tucker Carlson’s affinity for spreading Russian propaganda in a new video. The Fox News host has made a habit of leaning into Kremlin talking points and conspiracy theories since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Days before the war began, Carlson infamously defended Putin and said that Ukraine was “not a democracy.” Carlson’s mimicry has been so on point that on multiple occasions excerpts from his broadcasts have ended up on Russian state-sponsored TV. The Republican Accountability Project put Carlson on blast…

Read More Read More

The Republican ‘civil war’ on foreign policy

The Republican ‘civil war’ on foreign policy

The Washington Post reports: When Ronald Reagan addressed a brand new organization of upstart conservatives nearly five decades ago, he cast U.S. entanglements abroad as part of the nation’s destiny to take on “leadership of the free world” and to serve as a shining “city on the hill” that inspired other countries, sparking thunderous applause. At a dinner named after the former president at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering earlier this month, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari…

Read More Read More