Sanctions push Russia to first foreign default since Bolshevik Revolution

Sanctions push Russia to first foreign default since Bolshevik Revolution

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia was poised to default on its foreign debt for the first time since 1918, pushed into delinquency not for lack of money but because of punishing Western sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine. Russia missed payments on two foreign-currency bonds as of late Sunday, according to holders of the bonds. The day marks the expiration of a 30-day grace period since the country was due to pay the equivalent of $100 million in dollars…

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Now is the time to make NATO even stronger

Now is the time to make NATO even stronger

Gitanas Nauseda, the president of Lithuania, writes: “Never again” was the oath most widely pledged after the end of World War II. Yet for more than 100 days now, Russia’s brutal war of aggression has been raging in Ukraine. The war has fundamentally challenged the security architecture of the West. NATO’s initial response was admirable. But now we must go further — by making urgently needed adjustments to the alliance and its structure. NATO must adapt to a radically changed…

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‘An invisible cage’: How China is policing the future

‘An invisible cage’: How China is policing the future

The New York Times reports: The more than 1.4 billion people living in China are constantly watched. They are recorded by police cameras that are everywhere, on street corners and subway ceilings, in hotel lobbies and apartment buildings. Their phones are tracked, their purchases are monitored, and their online chats are censored. Now, even their future is under surveillance. The latest generation of technology digs through the vast amounts of data collected on their daily activities to find patterns and…

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Decades ago, Alito laid out methodical strategy to eventually overrule Roe

Decades ago, Alito laid out methodical strategy to eventually overrule Roe

The New York Times reports: In the spring of 1985, a 35-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department, Samuel A. Alito Jr., cautioned the Reagan administration against mounting a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that declared a constitutional right to abortion. The Supreme Court was not ready to overturn it, he said, so urging it to do so could backfire. In a memo offering advice on two pending cases that challenged state laws regulating abortion, Mr. Alito…

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Why Donald Trump is still ‘in love’ with Rudy Giuliani

Why Donald Trump is still ‘in love’ with Rudy Giuliani

Andrew Kirtzman writes: Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker, described on national television on Tuesday the smear campaign that Rudy Giuliani waged against her and her mother. Mr. Giuliani, speaking to Georgia legislators weeks after the 2020 presidential vote, had accused the two women of engaging in “surreptitious, illegal behavior” while working the polls on election night and conjured a racist image of them “passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine.” The fabricated allegations,…

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Trump fatigue sets in: ‘Some donors are getting sick of the sh–show’

Trump fatigue sets in: ‘Some donors are getting sick of the sh–show’

Politico reports: As the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riots lays out Donald Trump’s obsessive efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Trump allies have responded with the political equivalent of a collective eye roll. But elsewhere in the party, operatives are taking notice. The former president is being damaged, they say — perhaps not fatally, but notably so. In interviews, those operatives describe a GOP electorate still enamored with Trump and dismissive of the committee and its findings….

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We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy

We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy

Jia Tolentino writes: In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case about a Mississippi law that bans abortion after fifteen weeks, with some health-related exceptions but none for rape or incest—was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in which abortion rights are not…

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Eighteen ways the Supreme Court just changed America

Eighteen ways the Supreme Court just changed America

Politico reports: The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will create two Americas when it comes to abortion access — the mostly red states where abortion is illegal in most circumstances, and the mostly blue states where it is mostly available with restrictions. But this sudden cleaving in the United States will go far beyond abortion access, affecting healthcare, the criminal legal system and politics, at all levels, in the coming years. We can’t know exactly how all…

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Many states with antiabortion laws have pro-choice majorities

Many states with antiabortion laws have pro-choice majorities

Jake Grumbach and Christopher Warshaw write: We find that a majority of the public in about 40 states supports legal abortion rights. Only about 10 states have majorities that oppose allowing abortions. In some of these red states, such as Louisiana and Arkansas, bans on abortion may bring policy into line with the views of the majority of the public. But this increase in congruence between policy and public preferences in red states will probably be outweighed by the decrease…

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How Kavanaugh and Gorsuch deceived the Senate

How Kavanaugh and Gorsuch deceived the Senate

The New York Times reports: During a two-hour meeting in her Senate office with the Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh on Aug. 21, 2018, Senator Susan Collins of Maine pressed him hard on why she should trust him not to overturn Roe v. Wade if she backed his confirmation. Judge Kavanaugh worked vigorously to reassure her that he was no threat to the landmark abortion rights ruling. “Start with my record, my respect for precedent, my belief that it…

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Five misunderstandings of pregnancy biology that cloud the abortion debate

Five misunderstandings of pregnancy biology that cloud the abortion debate

Science News reports: Like most aspects of biology, early human development involves many complex processes. Despite the rhetoric around these issues, clear lines — between having a heart and not having a heart or being able to survive outside of the uterus — are scarce, or nonexistent. “There aren’t these set black-and-white points for much of this,” says obstetrician-gynecologist Nisha Verma, a fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Washington, D.C. Here’s what’s known about five key…

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Ukrainian troops retreat from Severodonetsk after weeks of brutal battle

Ukrainian troops retreat from Severodonetsk after weeks of brutal battle

The Wall Street Journal reports: Ukraine ordered its troops to withdraw from their remaining foothold in the city of Severodonetsk to avoid encirclement, the regional governor said, ending a battle that lasted nearly two months and giving Russia a small but symbolically important victory in the grinding war for control of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas area. Hard to defend and separated from the rest of Ukrainian-held territory by a river, Severodonetsk, a city of just over 100,000 people before the war,…

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Do you think you see the world objectively while others are biased?

Do you think you see the world objectively while others are biased?

Erika Weisz and Sarah Stamper write: When Lee Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford, explained to his students what his term “fundamental attribution error” meant, he loved to quote George Carlin. “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” The late comedian perfectly captured our tendency to attribute the world’s problems to other people and not ourselves. I’m the only good driver on the road….

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America is growing apart, possibly for good

America is growing apart, possibly for good

Ronald Brownstein writes: It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space….

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