Anne Applebaum writes: The one time I saw Mikhail Gorbachev in public was on November 9, 2014. I can pin the day down because it was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were in a very large, very crowded Berlin reception room, and he was sitting at a cocktail table, looking rather lost. Gorbachev had been invited to this event as a trophy, a living, breathing souvenir of the 1980s. He was not expected to…
CNN reports: In the buildup to the current Ukrainian counteroffensive, the US urged Kyiv to keep the operation limited in both its objectives and its geography to avoid getting overextended and bogged down on multiple fronts, multiple US and western officials and Ukrainian sources tell CNN. Those discussions involved engaging in “war-gaming” with Kyiv, the sources said — analytical exercises that were intended to help the Ukrainian forces understand what force levels they would need to muster to be successful…
Elizabeth Bryan, Claudia Ringler, and Nicole Lefore write: In the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the global community is scrambling. The World Bank, the G7 group of the world’s largest developed economies, the European Union and the United States have collectively pledged more than US$40 billion to avert food and humanitarian crises (see Supplementary information). Yet these massive funds are unlikely to get women and girls the help they need. The investments might even exacerbate inequalities. Crises hit women…
The New York Times reports: The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years and a stark reminder of the toll exacted on the nation by the continuing coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, the average American could expect to live until the age of 76, federal health researchers reported on Wednesday. The figure represents a loss of almost three years since 2019, when Americans could expect to live, on average,…
The Guardian reports: More than two-fifths of Americans believe civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next 10 years, according to a new survey – a figure that increases to more than half among self-identified “strong Republicans”. Amid heated rhetoric from supporters of Donald Trump, the findings, in research by YouGov and the Economist, follow similar results in other polls. On Sunday night, the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham predicted “riots in the streets” if Trump is indicted…
S.V. Date writes: America can have peace and tranquility. Or it can have a criminal prosecution of Donald Trump. It cannot have both. Presenting this mob-like ultimatum appears to have become the former president’s strategy as the FBI and the Department of Justice close in on Trump’s possession of and refusal to return top secret documents he took with him to his Florida social club when he left the White House following his failed coup attempt. “Nice store you got…
NBC News reports: Chris Kise, Florida’s former solicitor general who served on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ transition team, inked a contract to represent Donald Trump in the criminal case that resulted in the FBI search of the former president’s home in Mar-a-Lago, according to two sources with knowledge of the discussions. Kise, who declined to comment, began negotiations with Trump shortly after the FBI’s search of his Palm Beach estate Aug. 8. Numerous other criminal defense attorneys have said they couldn’t…
The Washington Post reports: A third of Pakistan is now underwater amid an unprecedented amount of rainfall since June, Pakistan’s climate change minister, Sherry Rehman, said Monday. That would mean an area about the size of Colorado is underwater. Pakistan, home to about 220 million, has a land mass of 307,000 square miles. Flooding caused by eight consecutive weeks of rainfall has killed more than 1,100 people. “This is a huge humanitarian disaster, and I would call it quite apocalyptic,”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…