How the West’s desire for agreement at any cost has created chaos

How the West’s desire for agreement at any cost has created chaos

Jasmin Mujanović writes: In the months leading up to the resumption of open Russian aggression in Ukraine, another European country consistently made international headlines concerning renewed threats of conflict: Bosnia and Herzegovina. Beginning last summer, Serb nationalist authorities in the country’s Republika Srpska entity (RS) — one of the two administrative regions within Bosnia created after the conclusion of the Bosnian War (1992-95) — launched a renewed secessionist bid following the imposition of an anti-genocide denial law. By January, the…

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Fears genocidal language in Russian media may prompt more war crimes

Fears genocidal language in Russian media may prompt more war crimes

The Guardian reports: Two days after Russia began its war in Ukraine, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency accidentally published an article celebrating the country’s lightning-quick victory over Kyiv, crowing that the “period of the split of the Russian people is coming to an end”. After a bloody month of war, after the discovery of evidence of war crimes in cities like Bucha and Borodyanka, the language in that same publication has grown even more extreme, containing calls for societal…

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The White House fears Putin’s next big win could be in Paris

The White House fears Putin’s next big win could be in Paris

Politico reports: The White House has begun to harbor fears that Vladimir Putin could soon notch his biggest victory of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — in Paris. There is growing concern within President Joe Biden’s administration about the narrowing polls in the French presidential election that show a tight race between incumbent Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen. A possible victory by Le Pen, a Putin sympathizer, could destabilize the Western coalition against Moscow, upending France’s role as…

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Le Pen vows ban on public hijab if elected

Le Pen vows ban on public hijab if elected

The New Arab reports: French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said on Thursday that she would ban the wearing of the hijab in public. She said fines would be imposed on women wearing the Islamic headscarf if she wins France’s upcoming presidential elections. Le Pen made the announcement during an interview with radio station RTL, where she said that a majority of the French population “supports a ban on the hijab in public”, and compared the introduction of a…

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Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed as Supreme Court justice: 4 essential reads

Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed as Supreme Court justice: 4 essential reads

The votes are there. Ketanji Brown Jackson will become the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court. AP Photo/Susan Walsh By Matt Williams, The Conversation The phrase “in a historic vote” gets thrown around a lot in journalism – and it isn’t always warranted. But shortly after 2 p.m. EDT on April 7, 2022, a Senate roll call confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson as the next U.S. Supreme Court justice – the first Black woman to sit on the…

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Journalism’s Twitter problem is the journalists

Journalism’s Twitter problem is the journalists

Choire Sicha writes: Today, New York Times honcho Dean Baquet ordered a company-wide “reset” in how his staff should think about Twitter. Mostly, he’d like them to never look at it again. You can see why. Most of the people who work for him are very bad at being on Twitter, and their tweets truly are just not good. And then their bosses are so obsessed with Twitter too, and on edge about it. A cycle of humiliation ensues. They…

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Particle’s surprise mass threatens to upend the Standard Model

Particle’s surprise mass threatens to upend the Standard Model

Nature reports: From its resting place outside Chicago, Illinois, a long-defunct experiment is threatening to throw the field of elementary particles off balance. Physicists have toiled for ten years to squeeze a crucial new measurement out of the experiment’s old data, and the results are now in. The team has found that the W boson — a fundamental particle that carries the weak nuclear force — is significantly heavier than theory predicts. Although the difference between the theoretical prediction and…

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German intelligence intercepted Russian military radio traffic from suspected perpetrators of Bucha atrocities

German intelligence intercepted Russian military radio traffic from suspected perpetrators of Bucha atrocities

Der Spiegel reports: The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, has acquired gruesome new insights into the atrocities committed by Russian military forces. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the BND has new satellite images and has intercepted incriminating radio traffic from Russian military personnel in the region north of Kyiv, where Bucha is located. Some of the intercepted radio traffic might be linked to dead bodies that have been photographed in Bucha. Following the withdrawal of the Russian military from…

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Russia suspended from UN Human Rights Council for ‘systematic abuses’

Russia suspended from UN Human Rights Council for ‘systematic abuses’

RFE/RL reports: The UN General Assembly has voted to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council over reports of “gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights” by invading Russian troops in Ukraine. The resolution received 93 votes in favor, 24 against, and 58 abstentions. The U.S.-initiated resolution adopted by the 193-member General Assembly expressed “grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.” [Continue reading…]

Fugitive Chinese tycoon and Steve Bannon ally Guo Wengui pushed out Hunter Biden smear

Fugitive Chinese tycoon and Steve Bannon ally Guo Wengui pushed out Hunter Biden smear

Mother Jones reports: Late in the 2020 presidential campaign, trailing in the polls, Donald Trump and his allies worked to make a campaign issue out of a trove of files on a laptop that his opponent’s son, Hunter Biden, had apparently abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The effort to publicize compromising emails, images, and videos from the device involved prominent Trump confidants including Rudy Giuliani and Steven Bannon. But it also featured an unexpected player: Guo Wengui, a fugitive…

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Why the World Health Organization took two years to say Covid is airborne

Why the World Health Organization took two years to say Covid is airborne

Nature reports: As 2021 drew to a close, the highly contagious Omicron variant of the pandemic virus was racing around the globe, forcing governments to take drastic actions once again. The Netherlands ordered most businesses to close on 19 December, Ireland set curfews and many countries imposed travel bans in the hope of taming the tsunami of COVID-19 cases filling hospitals. Amid the wave of desperate news around the year-end holidays, one group of researchers hailed a development that had…

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Elon Musk’s arrival stirs fears among some Twitter employees

Elon Musk’s arrival stirs fears among some Twitter employees

Reuters reports: News of Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk taking a board seat at Twitter has some Twitter employees panicking over the future of the social media firm’s ability to moderate content, company insiders told Reuters. Within hours of the surprise disclosure this week that Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” acquired enough shares to become the top Twitter shareholder, political conservatives began flooding social media with calls for the return of Donald Trump. The former U.S. president was banned…

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How many billionaires are there, anyway?

How many billionaires are there, anyway?

Willy Staley writes: In 1981, Malcolm Forbes, the eccentric and fabulously wealthy magazine publisher, came to his editors with a request: Could they pull together a special issue about the 400 richest Americans? The idea was inspired by Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the doyenne of Gilded Age New York, who regularly hosted the city’s high society in her Fifth Avenue ballroom, which was said to fit about 400 people. It’s quite possible Forbes saw something of himself in Astor. This was…

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Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims

Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims

The Guardian reports: Buried in forest litter or sprouting from trees, fungi might give the impression of being silent and relatively self-contained organisms, but a new study suggests they may be champignon communicators. Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi seemingly send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech. Previous research has suggested that fungi conduct electrical impulses through long, underground filamentous structures called hyphae – similar to how nerve cells transmit…

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