Music: Jaco Pastorius — ‘John and Mary’
China has more ICBM launchers than U.S., American military reports
The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. military has notified Congress that China now has more land-based intercontinental-range missile launchers than the U.S., fueling the debate about how Washington should respond to Beijing’s nuclear buildup. “The number of land-based fixed and mobile ICBM launchers in China exceeds the number of ICBM launchers in the United States,” the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees nuclear forces, wrote the Senate’s and House’s Armed Services Committees on Jan. 26. The notification…
Chinese balloon part of vast aerial surveillance program, U.S. says
The Washington Post reports: The U.S. intelligence community has linked the Chinese spy balloon shot down on Saturday to a vast surveillance program run by the People’s Liberation Army, and U.S. officials have begun to brief allies and partners who have been similarly targeted. The surveillance balloon effort, which has operated for several years partly out of Hainan province off China’s south coast, has collected information on military assets in countries and areas of emerging strategic interest to China including…
Trump’s hush money is news again. Here’s why we should care
Norman L. Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Fred Wertheimer write: A criminal investigation of former president Donald Trump now being restarted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and also discussed in a new book by one of his former prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz, raises vital issues of both election integrity and accountability. Both the investigation and the book address Trump’s hush money payments in the last days of his 2016 campaign and related matters. His personal attorney went to jail for campaign finance…
Jim Jordan is about to lead Republicans into a dangerous trap
Greg Sargent writes: House Republicans are planning a long-running extravaganza of hearings designed to dramatize the notion that the “deep state” is persecuting conservatives. In one sense, this will find a receptive audience: A new Post-ABC News poll finds that 55 percent of conservative respondents believe federal agencies are “biased against conservatives.” But among all American adults, only a measly 28 percent believe this, and solid majorities of independents and moderates do not. Therein lies a trap that could prove…
Conservatives want to control what kids learn, but it may backfire
Adam Laats writes: When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) blocked the first draft of an Advanced Placement African American studies course, he insisted he did not want to eliminate Black history, but only to control it. It might seem that his campaign has succeeded: The College Board announced a new watered-down curriculum that transformed resistance figures such as Frederick Douglass into “Black Conservatives,” even as they insisted the changes had nothing to do with political blowback. Yet history tells us…
A pitiless catastrophe devastates Turkey and Syria
Kareem Shaheen writes: Last night, as my wife and I were getting ready for bed, she started receiving voice messages from her family back in Aleppo, Syria. It was just after 3 a.m. their time, so it could not have been good news, and it wasn’t. They were out on the street, woken up in the middle of the night to their home swaying and the glass of the windows shattering under a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. The fear in their…
What ChatGPT and generative AI mean for science
Nature reports: In December, computational biologists Casey Greene and Milton Pividori embarked on an unusual experiment: they asked an assistant who was not a scientist to help them improve three of their research papers. Their assiduous aide suggested revisions to sections of documents in seconds; each manuscript took about five minutes to review. In one biology manuscript, their helper even spotted a mistake in a reference to an equation. The trial didn’t always run smoothly, but the final manuscripts were…
Music: Jaco Pastorius — ‘Liberty City’ ft. Herbie Hancock
Outnumbered and worn out, Ukrainians in east brace for Russian assault
The New York Times reports: In a tiny village in eastern Ukraine at the epicenter of the next phase of the war, Lyudmila Degtyaryova measures the Russian advance by listening to the boom of incoming artillery shells. There are more and more of them now. And they are coming more frequently, as Russian troops grind their way forward. “You should see the fireworks here,” said Ms. Degtyaryova, 61, as the sounds of artillery howled all around. “It is like New…
The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut
David Patrikarakos reports: “The objective for today is to come back alive.” Yevgeny is a young commando from the “Mad Pack”, a special forces unit that has been fighting in Bakhmut since November. His words are familiar — lacquered with that mix of emotions common to almost all soldiers fighting on the frontlines of war: laughter and unease. We clamber into a Land Cruiser and head toward the city. “The situation is always changing,” he continues. “But one thing remains…
Federal judge says constitutional right to abortion may still exist, despite Dobbs
Politico reports: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., suggested Monday that there may be a constitutional right to abortion baked into the 13th Amendment — an area she said went unexplored by the Supreme Court in its momentous decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade. In a pending criminal case against several anti-abortion activists, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion but stopped…
Suspects arrested in plot to attack power stations, destroy Baltimore
ABC News reports: A Florida man and a Maryland woman have been arrested on federal charges of plotting to attack multiple energy substation with the goal of destroying Baltimore, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday. The suspects, Sarah Clendaniel of Catonsville, Maryland, and Brandon Russell of Orlando, Florida, were allegedly fueled by a racist extremist ideology as they “conspired to inflict maximum harm” on the power grid with the aim to “completely destroy” Baltimore, U.S. Attorney Erek Barron and…
How quickly does Covid immunity fade? What scientists know
Nature reports: Three years into the pandemic, the immune systems of the vast majority of humans have learnt to recognize SARS-CoV-2 through vaccination, infection or, in many cases, both. But just how quickly do these types of immunity fade? New evidence suggests that ‘hybrid’ immunity, the result of both vaccination and a bout of COVID-19, can provide partial protection against reinfection for at least eight months1. It also offers greater than 95% protection against severe disease or hospitalization for between…
The defiance of Salman Rushdie
David Remnick writes: When Salman Rushdie turned seventy-five, last summer, he had every reason to believe that he had outlasted the threat of assassination. A long time ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering the execution of its author and “all those involved in its publication.” Rushdie, a resident of London, spent the next decade in a fugitive existence, under constant police protection. But…
What happens when Israel’s lawbreakers become lawmakers
Yair Rosenberg writes: It’s a little after 8 p.m. on a frigid hill in the West Bank village of Beita, and Sa’ed Hamayyel is sitting in front of a crackling outdoor fire, his face framed by smoke, telling me how his son was killed. “He was 16 years old,” the Palestinian father says. “He was a student.” On June 11, 2021, Israeli soldiers “shot him from afar … He couldn’t have posed any threat to them.” Hamayyel is intimately familiar…