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Ukraine confronts tougher fight in push to extend battlefield wins

Ukraine confronts tougher fight in push to extend battlefield wins

The Washington Post reports: Not far from this village on the east bank of the Oskil River, Ukrainian forces have hit a wall of Russian resistance as they try to extend a counteroffensive that just two months ago was sweeping across nearby lands at a stunning clip. Andriy, a soldier with Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade, was not sure what to say on a recent day, when a group of Ukrainian intelligence officers showed up and asked about his unit’s push…

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Why this universe is more likely than any other

Why this universe is more likely than any other

Charlie Wood writes: Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naïve calculations suggest that — coming out of the Big Bang — space should have become crumpled up by gravity and blasted apart by repulsive dark energy. To explain the cosmos’s flatness, physicists have added a dramatic opening chapter to…

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Carvings on Australia’s boab trees reveal a generation’s lost history

Carvings on Australia’s boab trees reveal a generation’s lost history

Freda Kreier writes: Brenda Garstone is on the hunt for her heritage. Parts of her cultural inheritance are scattered across the Tanami desert in northwestern Australia, where dozens of ancient boab trees are engraved with Aboriginal designs. These tree carvings — called dendroglyphs — could be hundreds or even thousands of years old, yet have received almost no attention from western researchers. That is slowly starting to change. In the winter of 2021, Garstone — who is Jaru, an Aboriginal…

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Iranian protesters attack Khomeini’s childhood home as uprising spreads

Iranian protesters attack Khomeini’s childhood home as uprising spreads

The New York Times reports: Three months into a nationwide uprising, Iranian protesters have turned their fury against the founder of the Islamic revolution and of the country’s theocracy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Protesters set ablaze the museum of childhood home of Mr. Khomeini, who died in 1989, in his hometown, Khomein, on Thursday night, videos showed. Crowds of men smashed and stomped on a street sign bearing his name in the town of Khash, according to a video posted online….

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How should we think about the end of the world as we know it?

How should we think about the end of the world as we know it?

Kiley Bense writes: In the 14th century, the Italian poet Petrarch wrote a letter to a friend in Avignon, describing his sense of “foreboding” after an earthquake shook the foundations of Rome’s churches. “What should I do first, lament or be frightened?” he asked. “Everywhere there is cause for fear, everywhere reason for grief.” The earthquake was only one in a series of calamities endured in the poet’s lifetime to that point: floods, storms, fires, wars and finally, “the plague…

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How to pay for climate justice when polluters have all the money

How to pay for climate justice when polluters have all the money

Bill McKibben writes: The climate summit just concluding in Egypt ran hard into one of the world’s greatest structural problems: most of the money is in the Global North, but most of the need is in the Global South. Nearly three hundred years of burning fossil fuels have produced much of that northern wealth, and now the resulting greenhouse gases are heating the planet and producing much of that southern need. So is there some way to mobilize that money…

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‘Vast’ mass of microbes being released by melting glaciers

‘Vast’ mass of microbes being released by melting glaciers

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bacteria are being released by melting glaciers, a study has shown. The microbes being washed downstream could fertilise ecosystems, the researchers said, but needed to be much better studied to identify any potential pathogens. The scientists said the rapid melting of the ice by the climate crisis meant the glaciers and the unique microbial ecosystems they harboured were “dying before our eyes”, leaving researchers racing to understand them before they disappeared….

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Iran will help Russia build drones for Ukraine war, Western officials say

Iran will help Russia build drones for Ukraine war, Western officials say

The Washington Post reports: After weeks of savaging Ukrainian cities with Iranian-made drones, Moscow has quietly reached an agreement with Tehran to begin manufacturing hundreds of unmanned weaponized aircraft on Russian soil, according to new intelligence seen by U.S. and other Western security agencies. Russian and Iranian officials finalized the deal during a meeting in Iran in early November, and the two countries are moving rapidly to transfer designs and key components that could allow production to begin within months,…

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Kherson’s resistance fighters undermined Russian occupying forces

Kherson’s resistance fighters undermined Russian occupying forces

The Washington Post reports: Ihor didn’t even know the first name of the person who contacted him. The man said he was a member of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces and wanted to know if Ihor was interested in helping fight the Russians occupying his city of Kherson. “Sign me up,” Ihor responded. For months, the two kept up a coded communication over the Telegram messaging app. Sometimes Ihor would be asked to help pinpoint locations from which the Russians were…

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This week, billionaires made a strong case for abolishing themselves

This week, billionaires made a strong case for abolishing themselves

Anand Giridharadas writes: In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s bajillionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the bajillionaires themselves. One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class. It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist…

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Ex-Russian spy flees to the NATO country that captured him, delivering another embarrassing blow to Moscow

Ex-Russian spy flees to the NATO country that captured him, delivering another embarrassing blow to Moscow

Michael Weiss reports: “The Russians have no idea,” Alexander Toots, the head of Estonian counterintelligence, tells me, laughing. “They have absolutely no idea he is here. You can be the one to tell them.” Toots was referring to the defection of a Russian spy to Estonia. But Artem Zinchenko isn’t just any spy. He was the first agent of Russia’s military intelligence arrested by Estonia, in 2017, then traded back to Moscow a year later for an Estonian citizen in…

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Jack Smith named special counsel to lead DOJ probes of Donald Trump

Jack Smith named special counsel to lead DOJ probes of Donald Trump

The Wall Street Journal reports: Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a former federal and international war-crimes prosecutor as special counsel on Friday to oversee Justice Department investigations into former President Donald Trump. Jack Smith, who once led the Justice Department unit that investigates public corruption and since 2018 was the chief prosecutor at The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, will be the third special counsel in five years to examine issues involving Mr. Trump. He will lead both the…

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New York Post takes aim at Trump, and hits a nerve

New York Post takes aim at Trump, and hits a nerve

The New York Times reports: Since Election Day last week, The New York Post’s front pages have been merciless to former President Donald J. Trump. First, the paper heralded his political rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, as “DeFUTURE.” A day later, it illustrated Mr. Trump as Humpty Dumpty about to have a great fall. Then, on Wednesday, the paper relegated Mr. Trump’s announcement about his latest run for president to a small headline at the bottom of the page:…

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GOP megadonor Mercer family has no plans to boost Trump’s 2024 campaign as former president loses more allies

GOP megadonor Mercer family has no plans to boost Trump’s 2024 campaign as former president loses more allies

CNBC reports: GOP megadonors Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer have no current plans to help former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. The Mercers, a father and daughter who were among Trump’s major benefactors during his first run for president in 2016, are distancing themselves from the ex-president’s third White House bid and cutting back their overall campaign fundraising, these people said. The people who spoke to CNBC did so…

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