Renewed Belarus military buildup is a sign of Lukashenka’s desperation

Renewed Belarus military buildup is a sign of Lukashenka’s desperation

Brian Whitmore writes: With war raging in Ukraine’s east and south, there are mounting concerns that the threat to the country’s north and west, including the capital Kyiv, could soon return. Alyaksandr Lukashenka said on June 10 that Belarus may be forced to enter the war to fight for the west of Ukraine so that it is “not chopped off” by NATO. The Belarusian dictator’s remarks came as Minsk was reinforcing its electronic warfare capabilities along the Ukrainian border, according…

Read More Read More

January 6 hearings: Republicans will do it again

January 6 hearings: Republicans will do it again

Jonathan Chait writes: The January 6 hearings are about the events of a single day, but they implicate a much broader phenomenon: the Republican Party’s faltering commitment to democracy. The mob attack on Congress a year and a half ago was merely the most grotesque manifestation of Donald Trump’s rejection of democracy, and Trump himself merely the most grotesque manifestation of his party’s authoritarian impulses. “Parties that are committed to democracy must, at minimum, do two things: accept defeat and…

Read More Read More

Corporations you know are helping finance Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ caucus

Corporations you know are helping finance Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ caucus

Alex Kingsbury writes: We tend to think of the past and future threat to elections as coming from voters for Donald Trump and those whom they’d elect to office. But the success of these politicians also depends on money. And a lot of money from corporations like Boeing, Koch Industries, Home Depot, FedEx, UPS and General Dynamics has gone to politicians who reject the 2020 election results based on lies told by the former president, according to a tally kept…

Read More Read More

Did Margaret Mead think that a healed femur was the earliest evidence of civilization?

Did Margaret Mead think that a healed femur was the earliest evidence of civilization?

By Gideon Lasco, SAPIENS According to a commonly shared story, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was supposedly asked by a student what she thought was the earliest sign of a civilized society. There are many variations of the anecdote, but the general details are similar: To the student’s surprise, Mead replied that the first sign of civilization is a healed human femur—the long bone that connects the hip to the knee. Mead proceeded to explain, as the story goes, that wounded…

Read More Read More

Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else

Science reports: A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight. Then came…

Read More Read More

Rhetoric and reality collide as France, Germany, Italy back Ukraine’s EU bid

Rhetoric and reality collide as France, Germany, Italy back Ukraine’s EU bid

Politico reports: By proclaiming their support for Ukraine and Moldova becoming official candidates for EU membership, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy on Thursday sent an unequivocal message to Vladimir Putin: the Soviet sphere of influence is dead — and it will not be resurrected by force. The leaders — French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi — also delivered another even more pointed and immediate message to Russia: The EU and…

Read More Read More

Russia turns to old tanks as it burns through weapons in Ukraine, European officials say

Russia turns to old tanks as it burns through weapons in Ukraine, European officials say

Bloomberg reports: Russia is scraping across the country to find manpower and weapons, including old tanks based in the Far East, having used up much of its military capacity in the first 100 days of its invasion of Ukraine, according to senior European officials with knowledge of the situation on the ground. As a result, Russia may be only a few months from needing to slow operations for a major regroup, these people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to…

Read More Read More

New data reveals extraordinary global heating in the Arctic

New data reveals extraordinary global heating in the Arctic

The Guardian reports: New data has revealed extraordinary rates of global heating in the Arctic, up to seven times faster than the global average. The heating is occurring in the North Barents Sea, a region where fast rising temperatures are suspected to trigger increases in extreme weather in North America, Europe and Asia. The researchers said the heating in this region was an “early warning” of what could happen across the rest of the Arctic. The new figures show annual…

Read More Read More

Biden is simply too old to run in 2024

Biden is simply too old to run in 2024

Mark Leibovich writes: Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for reelection in 2024. He is too old. Biden will turn 80 on November 20. He will be 82 if and when he begins a second term. The numbers just keep getting more ridiculous from there. “It’s not the 82 that’s the problem. It’s the 86,” one swing voter said in a recent focus group, referring to the hypothetical age Biden would be at the end of…

Read More Read More

Democrats’ risky bet: Aid GOP extremists in Spring while hoping to beat them in Fall

Democrats’ risky bet: Aid GOP extremists in Spring while hoping to beat them in Fall

The New York Times reports: Even as national Democrats set off alarms over the threats posed by far-right Republican candidates, their campaign partners are pursuing an enormously risky strategy: promoting some of those same far-right candidates in G.O.P. primaries in hopes that extremists will be easier for Democrats to beat in November. These efforts — starkest in the Central Valley of California, where a Democratic campaign ad lashed Representative David Valadao, a Republican, for voting to impeach Donald J. Trump…

Read More Read More

White parents rallied to chase a black educator out of town. Then, they followed her to the next one

White parents rallied to chase a black educator out of town. Then, they followed her to the next one

ProPublica reports: [Celia] Lewis was beginning to prepare for her move South, spending as much time with friends and family as possible, when she got a strange call from an official in her new school district. The person on the line — Lewis won’t say who — asked if she had ever heard of CRT. Lewis responded, “Yes — culturally responsive teaching.” She was thinking of the philosophy that connects a child’s cultural background to what they learn in school….

Read More Read More

How reporters can cover and distinguish threats to democracy from politics-as-usual

How reporters can cover and distinguish threats to democracy from politics-as-usual

Protect Democracy: Authoritarianism rarely happens overnight these days. Today’s authoritarian playbook is a process that happens piecemeal and is hard to distinguish from normal political jockeying. Our report, The Authoritarian Playbook: How reporters can contextualize and cover authoritarian threats as distinct from politics-as-usual outlines the seven fundamental tactics used by aspiring authoritarians, describes examples from in and outside the United States, and offers a framework journalists can use to differentiate between politics-as-usual and something more dangerous to democracy. The vigilance…

Read More Read More

Under Russian artillery fire, Ukrainians wait on Western arms

Under Russian artillery fire, Ukrainians wait on Western arms

Tom Mutch reports: We can see the rockets landing in the field in front of us, around a mile away from the frontline barracks we are holed up in. A shell whistles over our head only to smash into the forest next to us, but the birds don’t even wait for the smoke to clear before you can hear their melodic singing waft from the trees along with the plumes of white smoke. With a bright blue twilight sky and…

Read More Read More

Putin isn’t winning yet, but his military is finally waging the kind of campaign it knows best

Putin isn’t winning yet, but his military is finally waging the kind of campaign it knows best

Fred Kaplan writes: After a string of tactical defeats, the Russian army is making some headway in its campaign to capture the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, site of the war’s deadliest fighting. Its troops have taken nearly all of the region’s northern district, known as Luhansk, and all but surrounded the town of Severodonetsk. Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops are exhausted, with 100 to 200 dying daily. While this is true of Russian troops as well, the Ukrainians are running out…

Read More Read More