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Laws of nature are impossible to break, and nearly as difficult to define

Laws of nature are impossible to break, and nearly as difficult to define

Marc Lange writes: In the original Star Trek, with the Starship Enterprise hurtling rapidly downward into the outer atmosphere of a star, Captain James T Kirk orders Lt Commander Montgomery Scott to restart the engines immediately and get the ship to safety. Scotty replies that he can’t do it. It’s not that he refuses to obey the Captain’s order or that he doesn’t happen to know how to restart the engines so quickly. It’s that he knows that doing so…

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Putin has no good way out. That really scares me

Putin has no good way out. That really scares me

Thomas L. Friedman writes: If you’re hoping that the instability that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has wreaked on global markets and geopolitics has peaked, your hope is in vain. We haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until Putin fully grasps that his only choices left in Ukraine are how to lose — early and small and a little humiliated or late and big and deeply humiliated. I can’t even wrap my mind around what kind of financial and political shocks…

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine happened because the world gave Putin a free pass in Syria

The Russian invasion of Ukraine happened because the world gave Putin a free pass in Syria

Marwan Safar Jalani writes: When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, I rushed to a protest organized by Ukrainians in Oxford, England. I, along with fellow Syrians, brought the Syrian revolution flag to the protests to demand an end to the invasion. At the time, I struggled to put into words why I felt so strongly about Ukraine. Before long, I found out about the forceful Syrian participation in protests across Europe and the United States…

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Russia dehumanizes Ukrainians in strikingly similar ways that Israel dehumanizes Palestinians

Russia dehumanizes Ukrainians in strikingly similar ways that Israel dehumanizes Palestinians

Peter Beinart writes: In the days since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukrainians and their supporters have been lionized for the same forms of resistance to oppression for which Palestinians are routinely condemned. Western television networks have approvingly broadcast video of Ukrainians assembling Molotov cocktails. Governors who signed legislation penalizing boycotts of Israel have promoted boycotts of Russia. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced last month that he would join a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council…

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How the West undermines its own sanctions

How the West undermines its own sanctions

Casey Michel writes: As Russian troops bulldoze and bludgeon Ukraine, the West has begun implementing one of the few tools in its arsenal: sanctions. The United States blacklisted multiple Russian oligarchs and banks, and the United Kingdom followed suit by blocking Russian banks and barring Russian companies from raising money on British markets. The European Union issued what its foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, dubbed the “harshest package of sanctions” in the bloc’s history, targeting energy, trade, and a group of…

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How Western firms quietly enabled Russian oligarchs

How Western firms quietly enabled Russian oligarchs

The New York Times reports: Behind a set of imposing metal doors in an easy-to-miss office building in a New York City suburb, a small team manages billions of dollars for a Russian oligarch. For years, a group of wealthy Russians have used Concord Management LLC, a financial-advisory company in Tarrytown, N.Y., to secretly invest money in large U.S. hedge funds and private equity firms, according to people familiar with the matter. A web of offshore shell companies makes it…

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GOP pushes for an ‘earthquake in American electoral power’

GOP pushes for an ‘earthquake in American electoral power’

Politico reports: A legal argument lurking in two Supreme Court cases could give Republican legislators in battleground states sweeping control over election procedures, with ramifications that could include power over how states select presidential electors. Republicans from Pennsylvania and North Carolina challenged court-ordered redistricting plans in their states based on the “independent legislature” theory. It’s a reading of the Constitution, stemming from the 2000 election recount in Florida, that argues legislators have ultimate power over elections in their states and…

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Peptides on stardust may have provided a shortcut to life

Peptides on stardust may have provided a shortcut to life

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Billions of years ago, some unknown location on the sterile, primordial Earth became a cauldron of complex organic molecules from which the first cells emerged. Origin-of-life researchers have proposed countless imaginative ideas about how that occurred and where the necessary raw ingredients came from. Some of the most difficult to account for are proteins, the critical backbones of cellular chemistry, because in nature today they are made exclusively by living cells. How did the first protein form…

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Two million refugees, including one million children, have now fled Ukraine

Two million refugees, including one million children, have now fled Ukraine

The Associated Press reports: It’s a global day to celebrate women, but many fleeing Ukraine feel only the stress of finding a new life for their children as husbands, brothers and fathers stay behind to defend their country from Russia’s invasion. The number of refugees reached 2 million on Tuesday, according to the United Nations, the fastest exodus Europe has seen since World War II. One million of them are children, UNICEF spokesman James Elder tweeted, calling it “a dark…

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The first big crack in Western unity against Putin: Oil sanctions

The first big crack in Western unity against Putin: Oil sanctions

Politico reports: The West’s united response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is splintering over whether European countries are willing to take a severe economic hit and stop buying the oil that fuels the Kremlin’s war effort. While the U.S. is set to impose a crude oil ban, it looks increasingly unlikely that its European allies will agree to sanction President Vladimir Putin’s energy exports because of fears about runaway inflation and retaliation from the Russians. Sensing a danger to this…

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How does this end?

How does this end?

Christopher S. Chivvis writes: Wars sometimes start easily, but it is a tenet of strategy that they are always unpredictable and extremely hard to end. Putin’s war of choice in Ukraine is already escalating faster than most experts would have imagined just a week ago. He has now encircled major Ukrainian cities with his army and threatens to flatten them with thermobaric weapons, cluster munitions, and guided missiles. This will terrorize the civilian population and could demoralize the budding Ukrainian…

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Trump and the other Americans who agree with Putin

Trump and the other Americans who agree with Putin

Jonathan Chait writes: On February 25, the day after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Lee Smith published an essay in Tablet arguing that Ukraine had brought on its problems. Smith, a house stenographer for Representative Devin Nunes and the author of two pro-Trump books, unburdened himself of a long list of Ukrainian provocations. In 2014, Ukraine’s people rejected Vladimir Putin’s generous offer to remain a Russian dependency and voted out his handpicked presidential candidate. A few years later, Ukrainian Americans…

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Journalists are pulled out of Russia after Putin makes it illegal to call the war a ‘war’

Journalists are pulled out of Russia after Putin makes it illegal to call the war a ‘war’

The New York Times reports: The New York Times said on Tuesday that it was temporarily removing its journalists from Russia in the wake of harsh new legislation that effectively outlaws independent reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Russia’s new legislation seeks to criminalize independent, accurate news reporting about the war against Ukraine. For the safety and security of our editorial staff working in the region, we are moving them out of the country for now,” a spokeswoman for…

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Major U.S. companies not boycotting Russia including McDonald’s, Starbucks and Coca-Cola

Major U.S. companies not boycotting Russia including McDonald’s, Starbucks and Coca-Cola

The Washington Post reports: Among executives, board members, analysts and others in the business world in recent days, a “who’s who” list has been floating around, showing which companies have pulled out of Russia amid its attack on Ukraine — and which ones have stayed put. The spreadsheet, compiled by Yale University professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his research team, has become a naughty-or-nice list of sorts, with CEOs trying their best to avoid being placed on the roster of “Companies…

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