Judges ban Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years over ‘appalling lies’

Judges ban Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years over ‘appalling lies’

The Guardian reports: The political future of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been cast into doubt after electoral judges voted to ban him from running for office for eight years for abusing his powers and peddling “immoral” and “appalling lies” during last year’s acrimonious election. Five of the superior electoral court’s seven judges voted to banish the far-right radical, who relentlessly vilified the South American country’s democratic institutions during his unsuccessful battle to win a second term in power….

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Out of the wild

Out of the wild

Samuel Matlack writes: On the Galápagos island of Floreana, a giant tortoise went extinct some 150 years ago, after human settlement. Conservationists are now working to bring its descendants, discovered on nearby islands, back to Floreana. But there is a problem: Rats, which came with the settlers and eat tortoise eggs and babies, run rampant there. If you could help bring back the tortoise by poisoning all of the island’s rats, would you do it? Here is an important detail:…

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How to end Russia’s war on Ukraine

How to end Russia’s war on Ukraine

Chatham House report: As Ukraine continues to fight to liberate its occupied territories and eject Russian invaders, its Western backers debate the likely endgame for the war and its aftermath. The international response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while impressive in many ways, remains inadequate to the task and dangerously wobbly. Russia’s wider threat to the rules-based international order is also insufficiently acknowledged. Many proposals have been put forward for how the conflict could, or should, be brought to…

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U.S. considers ATACMS long-range missiles to bolster Ukraine’s fight

U.S. considers ATACMS long-range missiles to bolster Ukraine’s fight

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. has been considering approving a long-range missile system for Ukraine, American and European officials said, a move that would come as Russia grapples with unrest in its military leadership and uncertainty on the battlefield. The Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, has a range of about 190 miles, enough for Ukrainian forces to strike Russian targets far behind the front lines. President Biden hasn’t signed off on the transfer, in part out of…

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Russian Gen. Sergey Surovikin was secret VIP member of Wagner, documents show

Russian Gen. Sergey Surovikin was secret VIP member of Wagner, documents show

Breaking: Documents shared exclusively with CNN suggest missing Russian General Sergey Surovikin was a secret VIP member of the Wagner private military company. @mchancecnn reports from Moscow pic.twitter.com/HZNe2nHBYK — CNN International PR (@cnnipr) June 29, 2023 CNN reports: Documents shared exclusively with CNN suggest that Russian Gen. Sergey Surovikin was a secret VIP member of the Wagner private military company. The documents, obtained by the Russian investigative Dossier Center, showed that Surovikin had a personal registration number with Wagner. Surovikin…

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Ending affirmative action may be just the beginning

Ending affirmative action may be just the beginning

Aziz Huq writes: It is easy to think of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill’s affirmative action programs as the end of a long road. A court with a Republican-appointed majority has been chipping away at the legality of using race to allocate state benefits since the Reagan administration. And a young lawyer in Reagan’s White House by the name of John Roberts candidly condemned state affirmative action measures in blunt terms as “highly objectionable.” Now, after…

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‘A tragedy for us all’: Supreme Court Justice Jackson blasts majority’s affirmative action ruling

‘A tragedy for us all’: Supreme Court Justice Jackson blasts majority’s affirmative action ruling

CNBC reports: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson excoriated her colleagues who voted to strike down race-conscious college admissions policies, accusing the majority of “turning back the clock” on affirmative action. “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote in a thundering dissent to the major court ruling Thursday. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” she wrote. “History speaks. In some form,…

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Neutrinos build a ghostly map of the Milky Way

Neutrinos build a ghostly map of the Milky Way

The New York Times reports: From ghostlike particles, astrophysicists have pieced together a new map of the galaxy we live in. For now, that map of the Milky Way is blurry and incomplete. But as more data is gathered, it will become clearer and will help illuminate galactic convulsions like the expanding remnants of exploded stars, providing clues to mysteries that are difficult to solve with only observations from conventional telescopes. “This is the first time we’ve seen our own…

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Our simple magic-free recipe for quantum entanglement

Our simple magic-free recipe for quantum entanglement

Huw Price and Ken Wharton write: Almost a century ago, physics produced a problem child, astonishingly successful yet profoundly puzzling. Now, just in time for its 100th birthday, we think we’ve found a simple diagnosis of its central eccentricity. This weird wunderkind was ‘quantum mechanics’ (QM), a new theory of how matter and light behave at the submicroscopic level. Through the 1920s, QM’s components were assembled by physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Alongside Albert Einstein’s relativity theory,…

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Wagner’s Prigozhin planned to capture Russian military leaders

Wagner’s Prigozhin planned to capture Russian military leaders

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin planned to capture Russia’s military leadership as part of last weekend’s mutiny, Western officials said, and he accelerated his plans after the country’s domestic intelligence agency became aware of the plot. The plot’s premature launch was among the factors that could explain its ultimate failure after 36 hours, when Prigozhin called off an armed march on Moscow that had initially faced little resistance. Prigozhin originally intended to capture Defense Minister Sergei…

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Russian general knew about mercenary chief’s rebellion plans, U.S. officials say

Russian general knew about mercenary chief’s rebellion plans, U.S. officials say

The New York Times reports: A senior Russian general had advance knowledge of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to rebel against Russia’s military leadership, according to U.S. officials briefed on American intelligence on the matter, which has prompted questions about what support the mercenary leader had inside the top ranks. The officials said they are trying to learn if Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the former top Russian commander in Ukraine, helped plan Mr. Prigozhin’s actions last weekend, which posed the most dramatic threat…

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Putin moves to seize control of Wagner’s global empire

Putin moves to seize control of Wagner’s global empire

The Wall Street Journal reports: In the hours after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s army of ex-convicts and mercenaries halted their advance on Moscow, the Kremlin set out to seize full control of the global empire built by the notorious military entrepreneur. Russia’s deputy foreign minister flew to Damascus to personally deliver a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: Wagner Group forces would no longer operate there independently. Senior Russian foreign ministry officials phoned the president of the Central African Republic, whose personal…

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Most Americans support U.S. arming Ukraine, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows

Most Americans support U.S. arming Ukraine, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows

Reuters reports: Solid majorities of Americans support providing weaponry to Ukraine to defend itself against Russia and believe that such aid demonstrates to China and other U.S. rivals a will to protect U.S. interests and allies, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey. The two-day poll that was concluded on Tuesday charted a sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine, with 65% of the respondents approving of the shipments compared with 46% in a May poll. Eighty-one percent of Democrats, 56% of…

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The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous

The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous

David Frum writes: War with Mexico? It’s on the 2024 ballot, at least if you believe the campaign rhetoric of more and more Republican candidates. In January, two Republican House members introduced a bill to authorize the use of military force inside Mexico. They were not know-nothings from the fringes of the MAGA caucus. One was Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy Seal who received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The other was Mike Waltz…

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