Music: Jaga Jazzist — ‘Shinkansen’
Ukraine sees ‘year of victory,’ but decisive defeat of Russia won’t be easy
The Washington Post reports: With upgraded weaponry on the way, Western resolve holding firm, and the Ukrainian army continuing to outmaneuver and outwit Russia’s flailing military, Ukraine’s promised “year of victory” is off to a good start. If 2023 continues as it began, there is a good chance Ukraine will be able to fulfill President Volodymyr Zelensky’s New Year’s pledge to retake all of Ukraine by the end of the year — or at least enough territory to definitively end…
Russia and Belarus extend military drills amid fears of new push into Ukraine
The Guardian reports: Russia and Belarus have expanded their joint military training exercises in Belarus, the country’s defence TV channel said on Sunday, as concern grows that Moscow is pressuring its closest ally to join the war in Ukraine. The two countries added weapons, soldiers and specialised equipment to the exercises and were doing drills drawing on Russian experience in Ukraine, Reuters reported. On Friday the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, visited a military base where Russian troops are stationed to…
Now fighting for Ukraine: Volunteers seeking revenge against Russia
The New York Times reports: The sharp crack of sniper fire rang out across the snowbound valley. Soldiers in white camouflage crouched low, shooting at the hill opposite to provide cover as four men evacuated a casualty. The action was part of a live-fire training exercise for new recruits on a recent morning outside the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. But there was an unusual element to the event. While a Ukrainian Army officer was giving the orders, the trainees were members…
Turkey supports Ukraine without alienating Russia
Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: On Dec. 20, two Turkish air force A400M transport aircraft that had been stranded at an airfield just outside of Kyiv for 299 days took off and returned home. The planes, believed to have been used to shuttle Turkish drones and other weapons to Ukraine, had been grounded by Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion. The airspace between Ukraine and Turkey since has remained contested by Russia and too dangerous to risk the return journey. What…
Brazil is having its own Jan. 6
Rollng Stone reports: Images eerily evocative of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol are coming out of Brazil as thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro storm government buildings in the capital of Brasília. According to The New York Times, protesters have breached Brazil’s Congress, presidential offices, and Supreme Court believing Bolsonaro’s baseless claims that the recent presidential election was stolen from him. President Joe Biden condemned the attacks as an “assault on democracy and on…
From Gingrich to McCarthy, the roots of governance by chaos
Robert Draper writes: Newt Gingrich was disdainful. After watching days of House Republicans failing to elect a speaker, Mr. Gingrich, the most famous of all recent G.O.P. House speakers, vented about the hard-right holdouts, among them Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. “There’s no deal you can make with Gaetz,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview Thursday night. “He’s essentially bringing ‘Lord of the Flies’ to the House of Representatives.” In contrast, Mr. Gingrich said of his own speakership, which sought…
Human and Neanderthal brains have a surprising ‘youthful’ quality in common, new research finds
Neanderthal skull. Petr Student/Shutterstock By Stephen Wroe, University of New England; Gabriele Sansalone, Institute of Marine Sciences, and Pasquale Raia, University of Naples Federico II Many believe our particularly large brain is what makes us human – but is there more to it? The brain’s shape, as well as the shapes of its component parts (lobes) may also be important. Results of a study we published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution show that the way the different parts of…
Music: by.ALEXANDER — ‘TRUMPETS’ ft. 070 Shake
Inside the right’s plans to seize power in the new Congress
The Grid reports: A week after the midterm elections in November, a small group of far-right GOP lawmakers and activists gathered on K Street in Washington, D.C., to discuss strategies to use their narrow majority to extract power in the House. The next Congress, influential activist Ed Corrigan said, could be a “European-style coalition government” run by three groups: “The Democrats, the Republicans and the Freedom Caucus.” The forum was convened by Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and attended by several…
Enablers, line-straddlers and quiet resisters: How GOP lawmakers contributed to Jan. 6
Politico reports: A handful of Republicans who remained in the Jan. 6 committee’s sights throughout its investigation are now leading the effort to deny Kevin McCarthy the speakership — using their power to bring the House to a standstill. During its last days of existence, the Capitol riot panel unleashed a massive trove of evidence with an unmistakable conclusion: At every stage of former President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election results, a phalanx of hardline GOP lawmakers…
How Trump’s missing call logs could become his Nixon tapes
The Daily Beast reports: During the nearly nine hours that Congress was under attack on Jan. 6, 2021, the official White House call logs show former President Donald Trump not placing a single phone call. And while historians may consider the missing call logs a crime of inaccurately memorializing history, it may also actually bolster the expected criminal case against Trump. “The first thing one thinks of is the Nixon tapes, the missing 18 minutes. It’s never been resolved,” said…
Historical perspectives on Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine
Uilleam Blacker writes: In the 2007 film “Katyn,” directed by Poland’s acclaimed Andrzej Wajda, a young woman in wartime Krakow tries to sell her hair to raise money for a headstone for her brother, who has been murdered and buried in an unmarked grave by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. She finds a buyer in a local theater, an actress who survived Auschwitz and lost her own hair. The actress watches as the woman’s long braids are cut off…
Energy firms’ fossil fuel investments radically conflict with climate change obligations
Byline Times reports: The world’s largest fossil fuel firms are spending huge sums of money on new projects that will accelerate the likelihood of climate catastrophe, according to a new report released by the financial think tank, Carbon Tracker Initiative. The report examined the future investment plans of major fossil fuel companies, assessing their compatibility with international climate obligations set at the 2015 Paris Agreement – finding that future investments were significantly misaligned with the 1.5°C target. Under the net…
Scientists report a dramatic drop in the extent of Antarctic sea ice
Inside Climate News reports: The new year started with the familiar refrain of climate extremes, as scientists with the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Jan. 3 that the sea ice around Antarctica dropped to its lowest extent on record for early January. “The current low sea ice extent … is extreme, and frankly we are working to understand it,” said Antarctica expert Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist with the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University…
‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why
Nature reports: The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature. Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis…