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Ukrainian adviser warns progress will be slow as southern counterattack begins

Ukrainian adviser warns progress will be slow as southern counterattack begins

The Guardian reports: A senior presidential adviser has told Ukrainians not to expect rapid gains, after his country began what it said was a long-awaited counteroffensive aiming to retake the southern province of Kherson from Russian forces. Ukrainian troops had broken through Russian defences in several areas of the frontline near Kherson city, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, claimed. However, in a Telegram post, Arestovych cautioned against any expectations of a quick win, describing the offensive as…

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Another Russia is possible

Another Russia is possible

Dmitri Alperovitch and Sergey Radchenko write: As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine drags on and realigns global geopolitics, the United States needs to review and revise its long-term strategy toward Russia. The primary focus of this strategy, not unlike the original Cold War–era strategy of containment articulated by George Kennan in this magazine 75 years ago, must once again be a “patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” During the Cold War, the United States…

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How xenobots reshape our understanding of genetics

How xenobots reshape our understanding of genetics

Philip Ball writes: Where in the embryo does the person reside? Morphogenesis – the formation of the body from an embryo – once seemed so mystifying that scholars presumed the body must somehow already exist in tiny form at conception. In the 17th century, the Dutch microscopist Nicolaas Hartsoeker illustrated this ‘preformationist’ theory by drawing a foetal homunculus tucked into the head of a sperm. This idea finds modern expression in the notion that the body plan is encoded in…

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Major sea-level rise caused by melting of Greenland ice cap is ‘now inevitable’

Major sea-level rise caused by melting of Greenland ice cap is ‘now inevitable’

The Guardian reports: Major sea-level rise from the melting of the Greenland ice cap is now inevitable, scientists have found, even if the fossil fuel burning that is driving the climate crisis were to end overnight. The research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a…

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Trump’s second term would look like this

Trump’s second term would look like this

Jonathan Rauch writes: Ever since the U.S. Senate failed to convict Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection and disqualify him from running for president again, a lot of people, myself included, have been warning that a second Trump term could bring about the extinction of American democracy. Essential features of the system, including the rule of law, honest vote tallies, and orderly succession, would be at risk. Today, however, we can do more than just speculate…

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DOJ indicates Trump’s demand for special master may be too late

DOJ indicates Trump’s demand for special master may be too late

Politico reports: Donald Trump’s team demanded last week that a judge appoint an official to sift through all the material that was seized from his home to find out if it was privileged. The government indicated Monday that his demand — which came nearly two weeks after the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate — may have come too late. The Justice Department told a federal judge that its review of the records seized identified only a “limited set” that might…

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When an election denier becomes an election chief

When an election denier becomes an election chief

Politico reports: Many of the election deniers running for secretary of state this year have spent their time talking about something they can’t do: “decertifying” the 2020 results. The bigger question — amid concerns about whether they would fairly administer the 2024 presidential election — is exactly what powers they would have if they win in November. Atop the list of the most disruptive things they could do is refusing to certify accurate election results — a nearly unprecedented step…

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Ukrainian forces begin ‘shaping’ battlefield for counteroffensive, senior U.S. officials say

Ukrainian forces begin ‘shaping’ battlefield for counteroffensive, senior U.S. officials say

CNN reports: Ukrainian forces have begun “shaping” operations in southern Ukraine to prepare the battlefield for a significant Ukrainian counteroffensive, two senior US officials briefed on the intelligence told CNN. Shaping operations are standard military practice prior to an offensive and involve striking weapons systems, command and control, ammunition depots and other targets to prepare the battlefield for planned advances. The US believes the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which has long been anticipated, will include a combination of air and ground operations….

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The environmental cost of the war in Ukraine

The environmental cost of the war in Ukraine

Fred Pearce writes: What happens to the environment when a large, industrialized country is consumed by war? Ukraine is finding out. While concern about human lives remains paramount, Russia’s war on that country’s environment matters. The fate of Ukraine after the conflict is over is likely to depend on the survival of its natural resources as well as on its human-made infrastructure – on its forests, rivers, and wildlife, as well as its roads, power plants, and cities. Some 30…

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Bacteria’s immune sensors reveal a novel way to detect viruses

Bacteria’s immune sensors reveal a novel way to detect viruses

Annie Melchor writes: “All of the life forms on Earth have the same problem,” said Jonathan Kagan, an immunology researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. “And that is dealing with infection.” Just as we worry about bacterial infections, bacteria are on the watch for the viruses called phages that infect them, and — like every organism across every kingdom of life — they have evolved an arsenal of molecular tools to fight infections. Large, complex creatures like humans can splurge on…

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Justice Alito’s crusade against a secular America isn’t over

Justice Alito’s crusade against a secular America isn’t over

Margaret Talbot writes: Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the countercultural protests and the antiwar activism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Others were shaped by their aversion to those movements. Justice Samuel Alito belongs to the latter category. For many years, he lacked the power to do much about that profound distaste, and in any case he had a reputation for keeping his head down. When President George W. Bush nominated Alito to the Supreme Court,…

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Trump’s legal team scrambles to find an argument

Trump’s legal team scrambles to find an argument

The New York Times reports: On May 25, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to a top Justice Department official, laying out the argument that his client had done nothing illegal by holding onto a trove of government materials when he left the White House. The letter, from M. Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor, represented Mr. Trump’s initial defense against the investigation into the presence of highly classified documents in unsecured locations at his…

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Assessing Trump’s claim of ‘executive privilege’ on FBI access to MAL docs

Assessing Trump’s claim of ‘executive privilege’ on FBI access to MAL docs

Michael Stern writes: The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and former President Donald Trump are locked in a long running dispute over records taken from the White House in January 2021. According to a NARA May 2022 letter and more recent reporting, the agency went back and forth with Trump’s lawyers about “missing Presidential records” throughout 2021 and well into 2022. In January 2022, Trump transferred 15 boxes of records from Mar-a-Lago to NARA. It’s an exchange that may…

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‘The U.S. could lose the right to vote within months,’ warns Colorado secretary of state

‘The U.S. could lose the right to vote within months,’ warns Colorado secretary of state

The Guardian reports: Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, is warning anyone who will listen that the fate of free and fair elections in the United States hangs in the balance in this November’s midterm contests. In many of the most competitive races for offices with authority over US elections, Republicans nominated candidates who have embraced or echoed Donald Trump’s myth of a stolen election in 2020. Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State (Dass) and is…

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