Another Covid surge may be coming. Are we ready for it?

Another Covid surge may be coming. Are we ready for it?

The New York Times reports: Scarcely two months after the Omicron variant drove coronavirus case numbers to frightening heights in the United States, scientists and health officials are bracing for another swell in the pandemic and, with it, the first major test of the country’s strategy of living with the virus while limiting its impact. At local, state and federal levels, the nation has been relaxing restrictions and trying to restore a semblance of normalcy. Encouraging Americans to return to…

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Giving people the means to resist is the only way to prevent future crises

Giving people the means to resist is the only way to prevent future crises

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: In Syria, when the regime escalated its aerial attacks on civilian neighborhoods in the fall of 2012, the Obama administration rejected calls for a no-fly zone and deployed the CIA to the south of Turkey to prevent shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from reaching Syrian rebels. Consequently, the regime’s ancient air force, which could have been neutralized with ease, continued to bomb civilian neighborhoods with impunity. Lumbering Soviet-era Mi-8 transport helicopters rained unguided barrel bombs on urban areas,…

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Ukraine is destroying Russian tanks with a gift from Britain

Ukraine is destroying Russian tanks with a gift from Britain

The New York Times reports: In video after video taken in Ukraine, a puff of smoke and a brief flash of light signal that another clutch of Russian troops are about to die. Sometimes it is only a split second before that light streaks to a tank or armored vehicle that suddenly erupts in smoke and flame, often bursting from within as ammunition inside explodes. Rewinding these videos a bit often shows Ukrainian soldiers before the attack, patrolling to an…

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EU has ‘very reliable evidence’ China is considering military support for Russia

EU has ‘very reliable evidence’ China is considering military support for Russia

Politico reports: EU leaders are in possession of “very reliable evidence” that China is considering military assistance to Russia, a senior EU official told POLITICO, threatening potential trade measures if weapons’ deliveries go ahead. It follows a similar warning from U.S. officials earlier this week that the Russian government had asked China for military equipment and other support, as POLITICO and other media outlets reported. A subsequent Financial Times report said China signaled openness to the request. It is not…

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Is Putin looking for a way out?

Is Putin looking for a way out?

Lawrence Scott Sheets writes: In the Soviet period, watching the evening news broadcast on state television provided important clues into what was happening inside the Kremlin. One of my first jobs as a young Russian speaker living in Moscow was monitoring those broadcasts for American journalists — which leaders were shown shaking hands with whom could signal who was up or who was down in the Communist Party leadership. Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has eliminated the last vestiges…

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Impunity for war crimes in Syria casts a grim shadow over Ukraine

Impunity for war crimes in Syria casts a grim shadow over Ukraine

The New York Times reports: The Syrian police stormed her house and dragged her husband away. Her eldest son died in a rain of Syrian government shells on her hometown. So like millions of other Syrians, Hanadi Hafisi fled the country with plans to return when the war ended. A decade later, she’s still a refugee in Turkey, where her work at a center that treats war injuries exposes her to a constant display of the human destruction wrought by…

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Contrarians aren’t critical thinkers

Contrarians aren’t critical thinkers

David French writes: I want to share with you two remarkably similar numbers. At first glance, they should have nothing to do with each other. On closer examination, they’re inextricably linked. The first number is 57. That’s the percentage of Republicans who told Yahoo News/YouGov pollsters that the United States should take Ukraine’s side as it defends itself against Russian invasion (28 percent said the U.S. should back neither, and 5 percent said we should back Russia). By contrast, 76…

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Before neurons evolved, mechanics may have governed animal behavior

Before neurons evolved, mechanics may have governed animal behavior

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: The biophysicist Manu Prakash vividly remembers the moment, late one night in a colleague’s laboratory a dozen years ago, when he peered into a microscope and met his new obsession. The animal beneath the lenses wasn’t much to look at, resembling an amoeba more than anything else: a flattened multicellular blob, only 20 microns thick and a few millimeters across, with neither head nor tail. It moved on thousands of cilia that blanketed its underside to form…

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Low morale, corruption and bad leadership define Russia’s military

Low morale, corruption and bad leadership define Russia’s military

John Sweeney reports: The Russian army is 13 miles from my rather fancy Airbnb flat on Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main thoroughfare, where I am typing this. The hot tub doesn’t work, but there is a war on. Every now and then the air raid sirens howl and artillery crumps sound; however, the last time I felt incoming through my boots was three days ago. The electricity is still on, the internet is still on, and I still wear my neon-orange, lucky…

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A new diplomatic off-Ramp for Russia

A new diplomatic off-Ramp for Russia

Richard Wilcox writes: The war in Ukraine will end in some form. The longer it persists, the higher the costs to both Ukraine and Russia. Clearly a diplomatic solution is preferable, but it is difficult to identify a diplomatic construct that could provide a sufficient and face-saving off-ramp for Russia as well as the kind of security that Ukraine needs. The center of gravity of any negotiated settlement to this war will be the question of Ukraine’s status between the…

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How Putin’s oligarchs bought London

How Putin’s oligarchs bought London

Patrick Radden Keefe writes: Roman Abramovich was thirty-four years old—baby-faced, vigorous, already one of Russia’s richest oligarchs—when he did something seemingly inexplicable. The year was 2000. Abramovich, an orphan and a college dropout turned Kremlin insider, had amassed a giant fortune by taking control of businesses that once belonged to the Soviet state. He owned nearly half of the oil company Sibneft, and much of the world’s second-biggest producer of aluminum. A man of cosmopolitan tastes, he favored Chinese cuisine…

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The man who could help big oil derail America’s climate fight

The man who could help big oil derail America’s climate fight

Chris McGreal reports: In the spring of 2019, Phil Goldberg, a lawyer and hired gun for a front organisation serving some of America’s most powerful oil firms, spotted an opportunity to serve his masters. The University of Hawaii was holding a conference about a wave of lawsuits against the oil industry, and Goldberg was alarmed the event failed to include representatives from the energy business. So the day before the symposium, he fired off an email to the university demanding…

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America is zooming through the pandemic panic-neglect cycle

America is zooming through the pandemic panic-neglect cycle

Ed Yong writes: All epidemics trigger the same dispiriting cycle. First, panic: As new pathogens emerge, governments throw money, resources, and attention at the threat. Then, neglect: Once the danger dwindles, budgets shrink and memories fade. The world ends up where it started, forced to confront each new disease unprepared and therefore primed for panic. This Sisphyean sequence occurred in the United States after HIV, anthrax, SARS, Ebola, and Zika. It occurred in Republican administrations and Democratic ones. It occurs…

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Tucker Carlson’s favorite anti-Semite

Tucker Carlson’s favorite anti-Semite

Yair Rosenberg writes: Douglas Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army colonel who has become Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s go-to foreign policy expert. In recent appearances on the channel, he has argued that the U.S. should not sanction Russia and that Vladimir Putin should be allowed to annex as much of Ukraine as he wants, which is why many today consider Macgregor to be less a neutral observer than a Russia apologist. What they may not know is that he’s…

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