Music: Paolo Fresu — ‘Obscene Boundaries’
Putin’s existential fear
Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people – and said he was forced to take into account NATO’s nuclear capabilities. A year since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Putin is increasingly presenting the war as a make-or-break moment in Russian history – and saying that he believes the very future of Russia and its people is in peril. “They…
Iranian women defiantly assert, ‘the era of the forced hijab is over’
The New York Times reports: An engineer strode onstage at an event in Tehran, wearing tight pants and a stylish shirt, and clutching a microphone in one hand. Her long brown hair, tied in a ponytail, swung freely behind her, uncovered, in open defiance of Iran’s strict hijab law. “I am Zeinab Kazempour,” she told the convention of Iran’s professional association of engineers. She condemned the group for supporting the hijab rules, and then she marched offstage, removing a scarf…
Accidental lab leak more likely than other possible causes of Covid pandemic, Energy Department now says
The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office. The new report highlights how different parts of the…
Elon Musk defends Scott Adams’ racism
The Washington Post reports: Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.” Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people…
In rural America, right-to-repair laws are the leading edge of a pushback against growing corporate power
Waiting for repairs can cost farmers time and money. VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images By Leland Glenna, Penn State As tractors became more sophisticated over the past two decades, the big manufacturers allowed farmers fewer options for repairs. Rather than hiring independent repair shops, farmers have increasingly had to wait for company-authorized dealers to arrive. Getting repairs could take days, often leading to lost time and high costs. A new memorandum of understanding between the country’s largest farm…
All living cells could have the molecular machinery for a magnetic ‘sixth sense’
Science Alert reports: Every animal on Earth may house the molecular machinery to sense magnetic fields, even those organisms that don’t navigate or migrate using this mysterious ‘sixth sense’. Scientists working on fruit flies have now identified a ubiquitous molecule in all living cells that can respond to magnetic sensitivity if it is present in high enough amounts or if other molecules assist it. The new findings suggest that magnetoreception could be much more common in the animal kingdom than…
Fossils upend conventional wisdom about evolution of human bipedalism
Jeremy DeSilva writes: Long before our ancestors evolved large brains and language, even before they tamed fire or made stone tools, they started doing something no mammal had done before: walking on two legs. Skeletal adaptations for traveling upright are evident in fossils of the very oldest hominins—members of the human family—which date to between seven million and five million years ago. Moving on two legs rather than four set the stage for subsequent evolutionary changes in our lineage. It…
Music: Hvalfugl — ‘Novemberhymne’
Ukraine is the West’s war now
Yaroslav Trofimov writes: Two days before the Russian invasion of his country, on Feb. 22, 2022, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was welcomed to the White House. As he greeted President Biden and senior administration officials, Mr. Kuleba later recalled, he felt like a patient surrounded by doctors presenting him with a diagnosis of stage-four cancer. The consensus among the U.S. and its European allies was that there was nothing they could do to prevent the inevitable. Their intelligence services…
My year of living under constant attack in Kyiv
Mariia Shuvalova writes: At 5 a.m. on February 24, 2022, my husband woke me up in our Kyiv apartment. He had heard explosions. In complete darkness, I tried to dress and pack documents, a laptop, and cash into a backpack. Immediately I started experiencing nausea, diarrhea, and pain in the bottom of my stomach. My period began three weeks earlier than it normally would (something that also happened to many Ukrainian women with whom I’ve spoken). And I also had…
China considers sending Russia artillery shells, U.S. officials say
The Washington Post reports: China is considering sending Russia lethal military aid in the form of artillery shells as President Vladimir Putin’s army rapidly depletes its supply of ammunition a year into his invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials said, a prospect that has alarmed those in the Biden administration who believe Beijing has the ability to transform the war’s trajectory. There is no evidence that any weapons transfers have occurred, these officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to…
Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like Trump and Putin
Rebecca Solnit writes: As the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded, I was reminded over and over again of the behaviour of abusive ex-husbands and boyfriends. At first he thinks that he can simply bully her into returning. When it turns out she has no desire to return, he shifts to vengeance. Putin insisted that Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia and didn’t have a separate existence. He expected his army to grab and subjugate with ease, even be welcomed. Now…
Alone and exploited, migrant children work brutal jobs across the U.S.
The New York Times reports: It was almost midnight in Grand Rapids, Mich., but inside the factory everything was bright. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios past a cluster of young workers. One was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met. About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be dangerous work,…
What Denmark’s North Sea coast can teach us about the virtues of respecting the planet
Kiley Bense writes: When the writer Dorthe Nors was a little girl in Denmark, she had a formative encounter with the North Sea, a moment that would stay with her for the rest of her life. “I was holding my mother’s hand,” she writes, in “A Line in the World,” her book of essays about the North Sea coast that was published in English in November. “As we walked along the beach, letting the waves splash around our ankles, one…
Neutron stars: A form of matter like no other
Katia Moskvitch writes: On Aug. 6, 1967, Jocelyn Bell was looking at the squiggles drawn by a red pen on moving rolls of chart paper—the data from a radio telescope she was using to do her Ph.D. research on distant galaxies. She noticed one squiggle that looked odd. It was a “a bit of scruff,” she tells me from her office at Oxford University, where she’s now a visiting professor of astrophysics. The “scruff” was a series of sharp pulses…