Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stopped the progression of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline following Moscow’s actions in eastern Ukraine. The pipeline, which would have increased European reliance on energy from Russia, has been a major source of contention in Europe and the United States for years. Without undergoing the certification or approval process, the pipeline cannot start running. 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has unveiled the "first tranche" of British sanctions on Russia, condemning Vladimir Putin's Ukraine aggression.

The European Commission proposed sanctions to EU members states and placed a particular emphasis that would mirror sanctions taken in Crimea after the 2014 annexation by Moscow.

In 2011, when it was announced that Mr. Putin would return to the Kremlin as president, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented war in the Donbas, we held huge antiwar rallies. And in 2021 we took to the streets once more throughout the country when Russia’s main opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny, was arrested after his return to Moscow.

I want to believe we did everything in our power to rein in Mr. Putin. But it’s not true. Though we protested, organized, lobbied, spread information and built honest lives in the shadow of a corrupt regime, we must accept the truth: We failed. We failed to prevent a catastrophe and we failed to change the country for the better. And now we must bear that failure.

Those who stayed have lost much of what remained of their freedom. After Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in Russia, many can’t even pay for a VPN service to get independent media.

As with any loving relationship, mine with Sweden is multidimensional and complex. I’m Nigerian American, and I’m a naturalized Swede based in Stockholm. I speak the language, and I’m raising its next generation. I was not surprised that some valid criticisms of the country’s history were quickly dismissed by Swedes. At the same time, I understand the Swedish defensiveness.

it is the most open society, run by the most private people. The cultural tropes it is praised for play a part in this: Lagom stipulates that we must take care of our individual needs first, without aggravating others in the process. This creates a society of interiority in which people are open-minded enough to allow their neighbors to do whatever they want, yet keep very close bubbles around their own lives to avoid stress, discomfort, and the unfamiliar

This is a part of why we have a segregated society where ethnic minorities congregate in subcommunities in order to feel accepted and listened to.

When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement.

But few know the story of what happened two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war.

For generations, the descendants of enslaved people paid the descendants of their former slave masters, with money that could have been used to build schools, roads, clinics or a vibrant economy.

A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus.

The backlash began last month, when a student reading “Mein Kampf,” the autobiographical manifesto of Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, was reported through the school’s “Protected Identity Harm” system.

The reporting system has been in place since the summer of 2021, but faculty say they were unaware of it until the student newspaper wrote about the incident and the system, spurring a contentious campus debate.

The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team.

Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.

The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor administration would be able to prosecute a former president,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.

Macron warned against any policy of regime change, noting just how disastrous this has been in the past. It is certainly hard to imagine anything that would be more likely to unite and galvanise Russians against the West. In the process, it would ruin any chances that this war will actually lead to a different Russia. There is, to be sure, a thick vein of imperialism in Russian culture. Yet there is also a clear lack of enthusiasm for Putin’s latest adventure, and the chance that defeat in Ukraine could help force Russians to come to terms with their new, less exalted place in the world, which would be broadly comparable to the effect of the Suez debacle on the UK.  Left to its own devices, a post-defeat Russia is more likely to generate a new leader who is a pragmatist: not a democrat, but not a militarist imperialist, either. Macron is right that the West could yet derail any hopes of a more positive transition if it is not careful.

With the temporary residency, parents can begin the process to gain citizenship, migration authorities say. An Argentine passport can be obtained in as little as two years, immigration lawyers and migration officials say, and gives the holder the ability to travel visa-free to Europe, which Russians can’t do.

Ms. Davydova and other new arrivals say they feel welcomed. Argentina has historically been a destination for emigrants from Europe and more recently from Bolivia, Paraguay and Venezuela.

On Feb. 9, 33 young Russians in advanced stages of pregnancy arrived on that flight, Ms. Carignano told a local radio station. Two days later, another 83 passengers, 16 of them pregnant Russian women, arrived via the same route, she said.

this is the key message of Tsu’s book: The story of how linguists, activists, librarians, scholars and ordinary citizens adapted Chinese writing to the modern world is the story of how China itself became modern.

Following the history of the script helps explain China’s past, present — and future. “More than a century’s effort at learning how to standardize and transform its language into a modern technology has landed China here,” writes Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale, “at the beginning — not the end — of becoming a standard setter, from artificial intelligence to quantum natural language processing, automation to machine translation.”

With their “ad hoc efforts to retrofit Chinese characters” to typewriters and telegraphs, Chinese inventors sought to resolve the difficulties “that accompanied being late entrants in systems intended for a different kind of written language. But many wondered if the Chinese script itself was the problem.”

Mutation is a random process, which is why successful new variants are more likely to come from places where lots of mutation is occurring

Airfinity’s researchers concluded that Burundi, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen and Nigeria are most at risk of producing a new variant.

Since the Cold War’s end, American foreign policy has been conducted by responding to today’s news. To the extent the United States has had a long-term perspective, it is the hazy dream, first articulated in Christian millennial terms by the Puritans, of an American-led global transformation.

(I wrote about this in a 1992 book, Grand Illusion, and political scientist John Mearsheimer recently described this outlook in The Great Delusion.)

The question to ask about this process is this: how did we get to the point where we were unable to respond constructively to Russian fears of a new encirclement from NATO? As my former colleague Robert Wright put it, how could American and Western European leaders say, on the one hand, that they did not contemplate Ukraine becoming a member of NATO and say, on the other hand, that they would not accede in any way to Putin’s demand — at the center of his December communication with Biden — that NATO commit itself to barring Ukraine’s membership?

In 2010, Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to build a toaster from scratch. He walked into a shop, purchased the cheapest toaster he could find, and promptly went home and broke it down piece by piece.

He decided to create the steel components first. After discovering that iron ore was required to make steel, Thwaites called up an iron mine in his region and asked if they would let him use some for the project. Surprisingly, they agreed.

When it came time to create the plastic case for his toaster, Thwaites realized he would need crude oil to make the plastic. This time, he called up BP and asked if they would fly him out to an oil rig and lend him some oil for the project. They immediately refused. It seems oil companies aren't nearly as generous as iron mines. Thwaites had to settle for collecting plastic scraps and melting them into the shape of his toaster case. This is not as easy as it sounds. The homemade toaster ended up looking more like a melted cake than a kitchen appliance.

Startlingly large amounts of methane are leaking from wells and pipelines in New Mexico, according to a new analysis of aerial data, suggesting that the oil and gas industry may be contributing more to climate change than was previously known.

The study, by researchers at Stanford University, estimates that oil and gas operations in New Mexico’s Permian Basin are releasing 194 metric tons per hour of methane, a planet-warming gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. That is more than six times as much as the latest estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency.

He and Ms. Chen, a Ph.D. student in energy resources engineering, said they believed their results showed the necessity of surveying a large number of sites in order to accurately measure the environmental impact of oil and gas production.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson spent three days in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- two of them marathon sessions of questioning -- where she described herself as an impartial and transparent jurist, while taking a calm but forceful tone to push back at GOP claims about her record. The dueling themes that Democrats and Republicans wanted to present about her nomination were punched up in a final day of testimony from outside witnesses Thursday.

While she may pick up a few Republican votes, several GOP senators have sought to paint her as a soft on crime, "activist" judge, as they've used her hearings to showcase their messaging themes against Democrats heading into November's midterms.

"I am here, standing on the shoulders of generations of Americans who never had anything close to this kind of opportunity," Jackson said Tuesday. She highlighted how her grandparents received little formal education and that her parents went to segregated lower schools in Miami, before studying at Howard University.

(CNN)Two news stories dominated the headlines this week. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine reached its one month mark. And the Senate hosted confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to join the Supreme Court. It's with the Jackson confirmation hearings that we begin our statistical journey into the news of the week.

If Jackson's ratings hold up through her likely confirmation, she would be the most popular nominee to be confirmed since John Roberts in 2005. Jackson's popularity should only help her in the confirmation process. Read MoreA few years ago, I built a statistical model to help understand why senators vote the way they do on Supreme Court nominees. The model took into account variables such as a nominee's qualifications, the ideology of the nominee and the senator, etc.

A lot of that may have had to do with the fact that he was popular. Thomas had a +33-point net popularity rating among Americans, according to an average of polling taken before he was confirmed.

If I could distill the anger about that essay down to a single sentence (besides simply, “Shut up!”) it would be this: “You talk about the problems in Christian conservatism too much. Talk about the Left more.” 

And I get it. I really do. In a deeply divided nation where millions of people have convinced themselves that the church is under unprecedented siege, you want Christians who possess a public platform to “defend the church.” There is a deep and profound human desire for advocacy.

Yet that’s not remotely the model of biblical discourse, especially of how believers talk to each other.

U.N. investigators are seeking to verify reports of mass graves thought to contain the corpses of migrants at a trafficking hub in Libya, they said in a report published on Monday that also documented incidents of rape, murder and torture.

Libya has been in turmoil for a decade following a 2011 NATO-backed uprising. A comparative lull in east-west fighting has set in since 2020 but U.N.-backed efforts to organise elections as part of a peace process collapsed in December, intensifying a political crisis.

the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on March 30th had passed 4m. That does not count the 6.5m people displaced within Ukraine by Russia’s invasion.

Nearly a quarter of the population has been forced to move.

So far, the western response has been enlightened and generous. But that could change if governments mismanage the reception and integration of refugees, and disillusionment and fatigue set in.

. In 2014, participants in the two seminar groups lived their lives together seamlessly outside of the seminar, exploring Ithaca and the Cornell campus, eating and laughing together, and setting up a system to govern their community togethe

In 2022, however, I was told that the “Critical Black Studies” students would live and learn separately, creating a fully “black space.” My “Anti-Oppressive Studies” students were separated from them. Instead of participating in a summer community of 32 high-school students, my group was to be a community of 12 (that would dwindle to nine by the time of the mutiny).

in the 2022 community, afternoons and evenings would no longer be spent having fun and doing homework. Two college-age students called “factotums” (led by one I will call “Keisha”) were assigned to create anti-racism workshops to fill the afternoons. There were workshops on white supremacy, on privilege, on African independence movements, on the thought and activism of Angela Davis, and more, all of which followed an initial, day-long workshop on “transformative justice.” Students described the workshops as emotionally draining

They said Musk’s erratic leadership style also played a role, forcing them to work at a breakneck pace to develop the technology and to push it out to the public before it was ready. Some said they are worried that, even today, the software is not safe to be used on public roads. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“The system was only progressing very slowly internally” but “the public wanted a product in their hands,” said John Bernal, a former Tesla test operator who worked in its Autopilot department. He was fired in February 2022 when the company alleged improper use of the technology after he had posted videos of Full Self-Driving in action

“Elon keeps tweeting, ‘Oh we’re almost there, we’re almost there,’” Bernal said. But “internally, we’re nowhere close, so now we have to work harder and harder and harder.” The team has also bled members in recent months, including senior executives.