How Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine’s greatest novelist, is fighting for his country

How Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine’s greatest novelist, is fighting for his country

Giles Harvey writes: On the morning of Feb. 25, the day after Russian bombs began falling on his country, Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine’s most famous living writer, received a phone call at his home near Independence Square in central Kyiv. The call was from an old friend, a businessman with close ties to the government, who had just got hold of some privileged information: Kurkov, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, was on a list of “pro-Ukrainian activists” drawn up by…

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Why Germany’s chancellor is reluctant to send more heavy weapons to Ukraine

Why Germany’s chancellor is reluctant to send more heavy weapons to Ukraine

Politico reports: Accusations of broken promises and spreading fake news. Criticism from within the government coalition’s own ranks. And a chancellor defending his course with references to Emperor Wilhelm II. In other words: Just another week of Olaf Scholz’s wavering policy on military support for Ukraine. The German chancellor, who has steadfastly refused to visit Kyiv or even say he wants Ukraine to “win” the war, has been under heavy fire since March for hesitating on delivery of tanks to…

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Why Viktor Muchnik closed down his Siberian TV station and left for Armenia

Why Viktor Muchnik closed down his Siberian TV station and left for Armenia

The Observer reports: On the ninth day of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, editor-in-chief Viktor Muchnik gathered the staff of TV2 for a meeting at their small newsroom in the Siberian city of Tomsk. New wartime laws meant the whole newsroom risked jailtime for reporting on the conflict, Muchnik told them, and TV2 had just been officially blocked by Russia’s communications watchdog, along with many other independent media outlets. “All of us who wanted to change things for the better…

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For Western companies, the moral, legal, and public relations risks of staying in Russia are huge

For Western companies, the moral, legal, and public relations risks of staying in Russia are huge

Natalia Antonova writes: The companies that have already left have tended—with good reason—to emphasize the moral risks. McDonalds, for instance, stated, “[O]ur values mean we cannot ignore the needless human suffering unfolding in Ukraine.” And that hasn’t meant abandoning Russian staff; many firms have been providing salary continuations or directly evacuating personnel. The businesses that are staying might think—or at least tell Western governments—that they can remain separate from Russia’s increasingly unhinged political system. But if they really think that,…

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What America needs is a liberalism that builds

What America needs is a liberalism that builds

Ezra Klein writes: In April, Brian Deese, the director of Biden’s National Economic Council, gave an important speech on the need for “a modern American industrial strategy.” This was a salvo in a debate most Americans would probably be puzzled to know Democrats are having. Industrial strategy is the idea that a country should chart a path to productive capacity beyond what the market would, on its own, support. It is the belief that there should be some politics in…

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At NRA convention, conspiracy theories abound among gun owners who see themselves as victims

At NRA convention, conspiracy theories abound among gun owners who see themselves as victims

Politico reports: The protesters who raised their middle fingers and shouted “shame” outside the National Rifle Association’s big gathering here on Friday had assumed — like much of official Washington — that the timing of a school shooting three days earlier might somehow be problematic for the NRA. For gun enthusiasts and the Republican politicians courting them, it was only more reason to come. Here, amid acres of guns and tactical gear inside a cavernous convention hall, the proximate cause…

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Ukraine pleads for weapons as Russian onslaught threatens to turn the tide

Ukraine pleads for weapons as Russian onslaught threatens to turn the tide

The Observer reports: Ukraine is in a race against time to save the eastern Donbas region as relentless Russian artillery and air strikes threaten to turn the tide of the war, and support for Kyiv’s continued defiance among some west European allies appears to be slipping. Ukrainian officials say they urgently need advanced US-made mobile multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) to halt Russian advances in Luhansk and Donetsk. The rockets would be capable of striking Russian firing positions, military bases,…

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Russia has incited genocide in Ukraine, independent legal experts conclude

Russia has incited genocide in Ukraine, independent legal experts conclude

The Washington Post reports: Russia is responsible for inciting genocide and perpetrating atrocities that show an “intent to destroy” the Ukrainian people, a new legal analysis signed by more than 30 independent experts concluded. The report, published Friday by the Washington-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, also concludes that there is “serious risk of genocide in Ukraine,” and that states have a legal obligation to prevent genocide from occurring….

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How do we solve the paradox of protection in Antarctica?

How do we solve the paradox of protection in Antarctica?

Alejandra Mancilla and Peder Roberts write: For more than 2,000 years, Antarctica existed only as a landscape of the imagination. If there was an Arctic continent, Aristotle reasoned in his treatise Meteorology, there ought to be an antipode, an ‘ant-Arctic’. For centuries, scientists, explorers and cartographers speculated about this antipodean Terra nondum cognita, a southern land not-yet known. But it wasn’t until 1820 that the continent was supposedly ‘found’ by three separate groups: a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb…

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The Supreme Court just okayed Biden’s ‘social cost of carbon’ — but it’s still way too low

The Supreme Court just okayed Biden’s ‘social cost of carbon’ — but it’s still way too low

Vox reports: The Supreme Court decided on May 26 to allow President Joe Biden’s administration to continue using a key metric in the fight against climate change. The court’s order, in refusing to put back an order from a federal judge in Louisiana that had blocked the administration, is just one line long. But it represents a big setback for the Republican-led states that have been suing the president over the metric, known as the social cost of carbon: a…

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The U.S. is the only country in which there are more civilian-owned guns than citizens

The U.S. is the only country in which there are more civilian-owned guns than citizens

Science News reports: On May 24, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, 19 children and two teachers were killed by a shooter. Just 10 days earlier, a white gunman was accused of a racially motivated shooting in a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., that left 10 Black people dead. These tragic incidents are among the latest mass shootings to rattle the United States, the only country with more civilian-owned firearms than citizens. Sadly, mass shootings — the definitions of…

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As Jews, we must demand justice for Shireen Abu Akleh

As Jews, we must demand justice for Shireen Abu Akleh

Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff writes: Growing up in a Jewish household means engaging in a lot of political discourse: discussions about oppression, death, injustice, guilt. In some Jewish households, we discuss social justice, the need to fight for the rights of the oppressed, taking a lesson from the pain of our own history as a “homeless” and shunned people, ensuring that the destructive authoritarianism and hatred that led to the Holocaust are not repeated anywhere in the world again. The Jewish-American community…

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Chimpanzees combine calls to form numerous vocal sequences

Chimpanzees combine calls to form numerous vocal sequences

Science Daily reports: Humans are the only species on earth known to use language. We do this by combining sounds to form words and words to form hierarchically structured sentences. The question, where this extraordinary capacity originates from, still remains to be answered. In order to retrace the evolutionary origins of human language, researchers often use a comparative approach — they compare the vocal production of other animals, in particular of primates, to those of humans. In contrast to humans,…

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Russian forces close to encircling Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine

Russian forces close to encircling Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine

The Guardian reports: The besieged Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk appears to be almost completely surrounded by attacking Russian forces, as the Kremlin continued to make incremental gains in its offensive in the Donbas region, backed by withering shell fire. “The Russians are pounding residential neighbourhoods relentlessly,” regional governor, Serhiy Haidai, wrote in a Telegram post on Friday. “The residents of Sievierodonetsk have forgotten when was the last time there was silence in the city for at least half an hour.”…

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