Trump treated my family like disposable pawns and tore us apart, says daughter of convicted Jan. 6 rioter

Trump treated my family like disposable pawns and tore us apart, says daughter of convicted Jan. 6 rioter

Insider reports: For Peyton Reffitt, 18, what began as debates around the dinner table ended with her family falling apart and her father receiving the longest jail sentence yet for his involvement in the Trump-inspired Capitol riot. American family life in the age of Trump has taken on a toxic dimension, the young woman from Texas said. Peyton said her family’s disintegration started as angry shouting matches between father and children and was completed when her brother, Jackson Reffitt, then…

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As attacks mount in Crimea, Kremlin faces rising domestic pressures

As attacks mount in Crimea, Kremlin faces rising domestic pressures

The New York Times reports: Nearly six months into the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin still refers to its invasion as a “special military operation” while trying to maintain a sense of normalcy at home. But a series of Ukrainian attacks in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, is puncturing that narrative. And as Ukrainian attacks mount in the strategically and symbolically important territory, the damage is beginning to put…

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Darya Dugina: Daughter of Putin ally killed in Moscow blast

Darya Dugina: Daughter of Putin ally killed in Moscow blast

BBC News reports: The daughter of a close ally of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been killed in a suspected car bombing. Darya Dugina, 29, died after an explosion on a road outside Moscow, Russia’s investigative committee said. It is thought her father, the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is known as “Putin’s brain”, may have been the intended target of the attack. Mr Dugin is a prominent ultra-nationalist ideologue who is believed to be close to the Russian president….

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Millions in East Africa face starvation due to drought

Millions in East Africa face starvation due to drought

Yahoo News reports: The World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that millions of people in East Africa face the threat of starvation. Speaking at a media briefing in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that drought, climate change, rising prices and an ongoing civil war in northern Ethiopia are all contributing to worsening food insecurity. Over 50 million people in East Africa will face acute food insecurity this year, a study from late July by the World Food Programme…

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China plans cloud seeding to protect grain crop from drought

China plans cloud seeding to protect grain crop from drought

The Associated Press reports: China says it will try to protect its grain harvest from record-setting drought by using chemicals to generate rain, while factories in the southwest waited Sunday to see whether they would be shut down for another week due to shortages of water to generate hydropower. The hottest, driest summer since the government began recording rainfall and temperature 61 years ago has wilted crops and left reservoirs at half their normal water level. Factories in Sichuan province…

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The Anthropocene demands a massive realignment of priorities

The Anthropocene demands a massive realignment of priorities

Martin Rees and Charles F. Kennel write: Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries; and humans for a few thousand. But this century is the first when our species is so numerous—and so demanding of energy and natural resources—that we risk collectively despoiling our planet. It’s surely an ethical imperative that we should not deny future generations the wonders and beauty of the natural world. Policy must, in the words of the Brundtland Commission, “meet the needs of the…

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Why the Trump classified-files scandal is so dangerous

Why the Trump classified-files scandal is so dangerous

Quinta Jurecic writes: The iron law of scandals involving Donald Trump is that they will always be stupid, and there will always be more of them. Trump scandals—the Russia investigation; Trump’s first impeachment, over his efforts to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the insurrection on January 6—have something else in common: All these catastrophes result from Trump’s refusal to divorce the office of the presidency and the good of the country from his personal desires. Now Trump’s apparent squirreling away…

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The chaos Trump created inside the White House

The chaos Trump created inside the White House

The New York Times reports: Four days before the end of the Trump presidency, a White House aide peered into the Oval Office and was startled, if not exactly surprised, to see all of the president’s personal photos still arrayed behind the Resolute Desk as if nothing had changed — guaranteeing the final hours would be a frantic dash mirroring the prior four years. In the area known as the outer Oval Office, boxes had been brought in to pack…

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Pro-Ukrainian saboteurs are behind blasts at Russian military sites, Ukrainian official says

Pro-Ukrainian saboteurs are behind blasts at Russian military sites, Ukrainian official says

NBC News reports: Pro-Ukrainian saboteurs were involved in the recent spate of explosions at Russian military sites in Crimea, a Ukrainian government official told NBC News. The series of blasts hit military depots and airbases in the annexed peninsula over the past week, hinting at a growing ability by Ukraine’s military or its backers to strike deep behind enemy lines, a development that could shift the dynamics of the war. Kyiv has stopped short of publicly claiming responsibility for the…

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The other Ukrainian army

The other Ukrainian army

Anne Applebaum writes: History has turning points, moments when events shift and the future seems suddenly clear. But history also has in-between points, days and weeks when everything seems impermanent and nobody knows what will happen next. Odesa in the summer of 2022 is like that—a city suspended between great events. The panic that swept the city in February, when it seemed the Russian invaders might win quickly, already feels like a long time ago. Now the city is hot,…

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The legacy of James Lovelock

The legacy of James Lovelock

John Gribbin writes: Jim Lovelock (never ‘James’) is remembered as the father of the Gaia hypothesis: the idea that Earth is a self-regulating living organism. Few accepted his argument that this should be elevated to the status of a theory, even though it generated predictions about environmental changes that were borne out by subsequent observations. As a heuristic model, however, Gaia profoundly influenced thinking about the environment and how we interact with it, giving rise to the field of Earth-system…

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Desertification in an Iraqi bread basket

Desertification in an Iraqi bread basket

Tessa Fox reports: Palm branches whip back as Hussein Ibrahim walks through his densely planted land in Al Fao, the very last village in Iraq’s south as it reaches the Persian Gulf. Affectionately known as Abu Yusuf in reference to his eldest son, Ibrahim explains that farming is his culture. “I’ve inherited this land from my grandfather and even the father of my grandfather had it. We were all farmers; we were born to be farmers,” says the father of…

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Odesa is defiant. It also remains Putin’s obsession

Odesa is defiant. It also remains Putin’s obsession

Roger Cohen reports: The Odesa Fine Arts Museum, a colonnaded early-19th-century palace, stands almost empty. Early in Russia’s war on Ukraine, its staff removed more than 12,000 works for safe keeping. One large portrait remained, depicting Catherine the Great, the Russian empress and founder of Odesa, as a just and victorious goddess. Seen from below in Dmitry Levitzky’s painting, the empress is a towering figure in a pale gown with a golden train. The ships behind her symbolize Russia’s victory…

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Ukraine’s southern forces wage a slow campaign to wear the Russians down

Ukraine’s southern forces wage a slow campaign to wear the Russians down

The Wall Street Journal reports: Until recently, Russian artillery pounded Ukrainian forces on the front lines of the war in the south. But today, just 3 miles from the Russian line, incoming shells have become far less frequent since Ukrainian forces started taking out Russian ammunition depots and bridges in the Kherson region and Crimea. “There’s about half as much incoming as three or four weeks ago,” says Yevhen, a Ukrainian infantry squad commander, who hasn’t fired his rifle in…

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