Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea

Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea

Politico reports: Blasts that rocked a Russian military airfield in forcibly annexed Crimea signal the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south and a critical new phase of the war that could shape its ultimate outcome, two Ukrainian officials told POLITICO. The series of explosions Tuesday sent huge fireballs and mushroom clouds of black smoke into the sky, scattering terrified Russian vacationers who were seen in videos shared on social media scrambling for safety on a beach and fleeing by…

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Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

Europe on course to suffer worst drought in 500 years

The Daily Mail reports: Germany’s most-important river is running dry as Europe suffers through a drought that is on course to become its worst in 500 years, with terrifying wildfires burning once again in France. Water levels in the Rhine – which carries 80 per cent of all goods transported by water in Germany, from its industrial heartlands to Dutch ports – are now so low that it could become impassable to barges later this week, threatening vital supplies of…

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Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Carbon-reduction plans rely on technology that doesn’t exist

Naomi Oreskes writes: At last year’s Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don’t yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry’s optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may…

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Israel and Gaza keep up their precarious dance

Israel and Gaza keep up their precarious dance

Neri Zilber reports: One week before the latest round of fighting over the weekend between Israel and the Gaza-based militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a senior Israeli security official had some prescient words. Unlike Hamas, which is the bigger and stronger group that actually rules Gaza, the PIJ “was an outlier … with no governing responsibility, which would require special treatment” if it chose to escalate, he told me. That “special treatment” came in the form of a three-day…

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How the physics of nothing underlies everything

How the physics of nothing underlies everything

Charlie Wood writes: Millennia ago, Aristotle asserted that nature abhors a vacuum, reasoning that objects would fly through truly empty space at impossible speeds. In 1277, the French bishop Etienne Tempier shot back, declaring that God could do anything, even create a vacuum. Then a mere scientist pulled it off. Otto von Guericke invented a pump to suck the air from within a hollow copper sphere, establishing perhaps the first high-quality vacuum on Earth. In a theatrical demonstration in 1654,…

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What the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago could mean for Trump

What the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago could mean for Trump

Isaac Chotiner writes: On Monday, F.B.I. agents searched the Florida home of former President Donald Trump, possibly commencing a new phase in the legal scrutiny that he has faced since leaving office. According to the Times, the search concerned classified material that Trump removed from the White House and took to Mar-a-Lago. What remains unclear is whether they found any information related to attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. To understand…

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China’s Taiwan aggression has backfired in Tokyo

China’s Taiwan aggression has backfired in Tokyo

William Sposato writes: China’s four days of military exercises encircling Taiwan in response to a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week has clear ramifications for Japan. The show of military muscle just 70 miles from Japanese territory and the firing of ballistic missiles into waters controlled by Japan were clearly meant as a warning that the country risks being dragged into any future conflict in the region. While China’s motives in indirectly targeting Japan are not known,…

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Bolsonaro is justifiably afraid of going to prison

Bolsonaro is justifiably afraid of going to prison

Vanessa Barbara writes: “I’m letting the scoundrels know,” President Jair Bolsonaro told supporters last year, “I’ll never be imprisoned!” He was shouting. But then, Mr. Bolsonaro tends to become animated when talking about the prospect of prison. “By God above,” he declared to an audience of businesspeople in May, “I’ll never be arrested.” As he spends “more than half” of his time dealing with lawsuits, he surely feels well armed against arrest. But there’s desperation in his defiance. The fate…

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How Sen. Kyrsten Sinema serves Wall Street

How Sen. Kyrsten Sinema serves Wall Street

CNBC reports: Long before Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., held up a massive spending bill that promised to create jobs, invest in clean energy and tax the rich — delivering on some of President Joe Biden’s and the Democratic party’s top campaign promises — those working at Wall Street investment firms had donated millions to the freshman senator’s campaign. One of her main objections was the bill’s so-called carried interest tax provision — which would have closed an arcane loophole in…

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Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

William MacAskill writes: Humanity, today, is in its adolescence. Most of a teenager’s life is still ahead of them, and their decisions can have lifelong effects. Similarly, most of humanity’s life lies ahead – an estimated 118 billion people have already lived, but vastly more people, perhaps thousands or even millions of times that number, are yet to be born. And some of the decisions we make this century will impact the entire course of humanity’s future. Contemporary society does…

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Webb telescope reveals unpredicted bounty of bright galaxies in early universe

Webb telescope reveals unpredicted bounty of bright galaxies in early universe

Science reports: The James Webb Space Telescope has only been watching the sky for a few weeks, and it has already delivered a startling finding: tens, hundreds, maybe even 1000 times more bright galaxies in the early universe than astronomers anticipated. “No one was expecting anything like this,” says Michael Boylan-Kolchin of the University of Texas, Austin. “Galaxies are exploding out of the woodwork,” says Rachel Somerville of the Flatiron Institute. Galaxy formation models may now need a revision, as…

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Cultural transmission makes animals flexible, but vulnerable

Cultural transmission makes animals flexible, but vulnerable

Tim Vernimmen writes: Just a few decades ago, even most biologists would have readily agreed that culture is a quintessentially human feature. Sure, they already knew there were dialects in birdsong, and good evidence that many birds largely learned these regional songs by copying other birds. They knew that some enterprising European songbirds called tits had learned how to open milk bottles by watching one another. Scientists had even reported that the practice of washing sweet potatoes in seawater had…

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Five U.S. states will decide if the 2024 election can be stolen

Five U.S. states will decide if the 2024 election can be stolen

Bloomberg reports: Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden failed, but his loyalists have never stopped trying to turn the US election system into one that would return him to the White House in 2024—fairly or otherwise. In the last two years, Republicans have sought to remove state officials who wouldn’t manufacture votes and falsely declare him the winner. They changed the way elections are run in response to his conspiracy theories. Most importantly, they’ve…

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Maps in four states were ruled illegal gerrymanders — but they’ll still be used in November

Maps in four states were ruled illegal gerrymanders — but they’ll still be used in November

The New York Times reports: Since January, judges in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio have found that Republican legislators illegally drew those states’ congressional maps along racial or partisan lines, or that a trial very likely would conclude that they did. In years past, judges who have reached similar findings have ordered new maps, or had an expert draw them, to ensure that coming elections were fair. But a shift in election law philosophy at the Supreme Court, combined with…

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