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NATO to put 300,000 troops on high alert in response to Russia threat

NATO to put 300,000 troops on high alert in response to Russia threat

The Guardian reports: Nato’s secretary general has said this week’s Madrid summit will agree the alliance’s most significant transformation for a generation, putting 300,000 troops at high readiness in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Jens Stoltenberg said the military alliance’s forces in the Baltic states and five other frontline countries would be increased “up to brigade levels” – doubled or trebled to between 3,000 and 5,000 troops. That would amount to “the biggest overhaul of our collective defence and…

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Tracking where Russia is taking Ukraine’s stolen grain

Tracking where Russia is taking Ukraine’s stolen grain

BBC News reports: There’s mounting evidence that Russian forces in occupied areas of Ukraine have been systematically stealing grain and other produce from local farmers. The BBC has talked to farmers and analysed satellite images and shipping data to track where the grain is going. A few dozen miles from the frontline, Ukrainian farmer Dmytro describes how the business he nurtured over 25 years was lost in four months of Russian occupation. The BBC tried to contact more than 200…

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America is in the ‘figure it out yourself’ era of the pandemic

America is in the ‘figure it out yourself’ era of the pandemic

Ed Yong writes: In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th article of the country’s constitution: Débrouillez-vous, or “Figure it out yourself.” It was a droll and weary acknowledgment that the government won’t save you, and you must make do with the resources you’ve got. The United States is now firmly in the débrouillez-vous era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the country, almost all government efforts…

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Six years on, Brexit delivers more paperwork and less business

Six years on, Brexit delivers more paperwork and less business

The Observer reports: On 23 June 2016, Geoffrey Betts, the managing director of a small office supplies business in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, had high hopes for his firm, and the British economy, when he voted for Brexit. “I thought we would be like … ‘here we go, here we go. We are going to become the most competitive country in Europe and we are going to be encouraging business.’ Now I think: ‘What have we done?’” His firm, Stewart Superior, has…

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Viruses survive in fresh water by ‘hitchhiking’ on plastic, study finds

Viruses survive in fresh water by ‘hitchhiking’ on plastic, study finds

The Guardian reports: Dangerous viruses can remain infectious for up to three days in fresh water by hitchhiking on plastic, researchers have found. Enteric viruses that cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets, such as rotavirus, were found to survive in water by attaching to microplastics, tiny particles less than 5mm long. They remain infectious, University of Stirling researchers found, posing a potential health risk. Prof Richard Quilliam, lead researcher on the project at Stirling University, said: “We found that viruses can…

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Secretive operation involving allied commandos rushes weapons to Ukrainian troops

Secretive operation involving allied commandos rushes weapons to Ukrainian troops

The New York Times reports: As Russian troops press ahead with a grinding campaign to seize eastern Ukraine, the nation’s ability to resist the onslaught depends more than ever on help from the United States and its allies — including a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training, according to U.S. and European officials. Much of this work happens outside Ukraine, at bases in Germany, France and Britain, for example. But even as the…

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Sanctions push Russia to first foreign default since Bolshevik Revolution

Sanctions push Russia to first foreign default since Bolshevik Revolution

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia was poised to default on its foreign debt for the first time since 1918, pushed into delinquency not for lack of money but because of punishing Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine. Russia missed payments on two foreign-currency bonds as of late Sunday, according to holders of the bonds. The day marks the expiration of a 30-day grace period since the country was due to pay the equivalent of $100 million in dollars…

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Now is the time to make NATO even stronger

Now is the time to make NATO even stronger

Gitanas Nauseda, the president of Lithuania, writes: “Never again” was the oath most widely pledged after the end of World War II. Yet for more than 100 days now, Russia’s brutal war of aggression has been raging in Ukraine. The war has fundamentally challenged the security architecture of the West. NATO’s initial response was admirable. But now we must go further — by making urgently needed adjustments to the alliance and its structure. NATO must adapt to a radically changed…

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‘An invisible cage’: How China is policing the future

‘An invisible cage’: How China is policing the future

The New York Times reports: The more than 1.4 billion people living in China are constantly watched. They are recorded by police cameras that are everywhere, on street corners and subway ceilings, in hotel lobbies and apartment buildings. Their phones are tracked, their purchases are monitored, and their online chats are censored. Now, even their future is under surveillance. The latest generation of technology digs through the vast amounts of data collected on their daily activities to find patterns and…

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Decades ago, Alito laid out methodical strategy to eventually overrule Roe

Decades ago, Alito laid out methodical strategy to eventually overrule Roe

The New York Times reports: In the spring of 1985, a 35-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department, Samuel A. Alito Jr., cautioned the Reagan administration against mounting a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that declared a constitutional right to abortion. The Supreme Court was not ready to overturn it, he said, so urging it to do so could backfire. In a memo offering advice on two pending cases that challenged state laws regulating abortion, Mr. Alito…

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Why Donald Trump is still ‘in love’ with Rudy Giuliani

Why Donald Trump is still ‘in love’ with Rudy Giuliani

Andrew Kirtzman writes: Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker, described on national television on Tuesday the smear campaign that Rudy Giuliani waged against her and her mother. Mr. Giuliani, speaking to Georgia legislators weeks after the 2020 presidential vote, had accused the two women of engaging in “surreptitious, illegal behavior” while working the polls on election night and conjured a racist image of them “passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine.” The fabricated allegations,…

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Trump fatigue sets in: ‘Some donors are getting sick of the sh–show’

Trump fatigue sets in: ‘Some donors are getting sick of the sh–show’

Politico reports: As the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riots lays out Donald Trump’s obsessive efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Trump allies have responded with the political equivalent of a collective eye roll. But elsewhere in the party, operatives are taking notice. The former president is being damaged, they say — perhaps not fatally, but notably so. In interviews, those operatives describe a GOP electorate still enamored with Trump and dismissive of the committee and its findings….

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We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy

We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy

Jia Tolentino writes: In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case about a Mississippi law that bans abortion after fifteen weeks, with some health-related exceptions but none for rape or incest—was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in which abortion rights are not…

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Eighteen ways the Supreme Court just changed America

Eighteen ways the Supreme Court just changed America

Politico reports: The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will create two Americas when it comes to abortion access — the mostly red states where abortion is illegal in most circumstances, and the mostly blue states where it is mostly available with restrictions. But this sudden cleaving in the United States will go far beyond abortion access, affecting healthcare, the criminal legal system and politics, at all levels, in the coming years. We can’t know exactly how all…

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