“Whatever the impetus of the current negotiations, whether folly, hubris, or just plain denial, it never seemed realistic to me that the two parties were going to engage with each other in good faith on immigration—arguably the most toxic subject in American politics in the Trump era—and somehow come up with a deal that would pass in an election year with Trump on the ballot. Both parties deserve some censure here. Have they not been paying attention these last eight years? The opportunity to prove his continued dominance over the G.O.P. by tanking any breakthrough was inevitably going to prove irresistible to Trump. He spoke “at length” about it to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Johnson acknowledges, and sure enough Johnson, a nonentity who never would have become Speaker last fall had Trump not approved of him, did what Trump wanted, announcing in unequivocal terms that House Republicans would never go along with the Senate’s bipartisan deal. ‘Madness,’ he called it on Wednesday, in his first floor speech as Speaker. (Though he insists it’s ‘absurd’ to say he was blowing up the deal just to please Trump.) Tying the fate of Ukraine in its existential fight with Russia to a resolution of the near-irresolvable politics of the American border seems a particularly cruel twist. For Trump, it’s like a gift.” (Susan B. Glasser/NYer)
“Gothamist: In the beginning, there was concern that Flaco wouldn't know how to hunt and survive outside captivity, but now he's a true New Yorker. How do you think he was able to adjust? Wildlife photographer David Lei: He really just needed to embrace that instinct and rediscover his wild nature. He initially wasn't very good at flying. He’d get exhausted quite quickly, flying a short distance from one tree to the next, crashing into branches when he went to land, but he kept at it. And over time, he got better. He got better very quickly, actually. And before long, he was quite graceful in flight. We were also quite fortunate to watch him learn how to hunt. One other way that I could see Flaco's confidence increasing was in his hooting. Initially, he would hoot quite softly. I overheard one of the zookeepers tell a fellow birder that he scarcely ever hooted in the zoo.” (Michael Hill and Amanda Rozon/Gothamist)
“Technological advances, particularly in signals intelligence, have not made such human operations irrelevant, as some have predicted, but have instead revolutionized their practice. To be an effective twenty-first-century intelligence service, the CIA must blend a mastery of emerging technologies with the people-to-people skills and individual daring that have always been at the heart of our profession. That means equipping operations officers with the tools and tradecraft to conduct espionage in a world of constant technological surveillance—and equipping analysts with sophisticated artificial intelligence models that can digest mammoth amounts of open-source and clandestinely acquired information so that they can make their best human judgments. At the same time, what the CIA does with the intelligence it gathers is also changing. ‘Strategic declassification,’ the intentional public disclosure of certain secrets to undercut rivals and rally allies, has become an even more powerful tool for policymakers. Using it doesn’t mean recklessly jeopardizing the sources or methods used to collect the intelligence, but it does mean judiciously resisting the reflexive urge to keep everything classified. The U.S. intelligence community is also learning the increasing value of intelligence diplomacy, gaining a new understanding of how its efforts to bolster allies and counter foes can support policymakers.” (William Burns/Foreign Affairs)
“(Meta) handily beat on both earnings and revenue, up a whopping 25% in revenue year-over-year. That, coupled with the Instagram-parent announcing it will pay its first-ever dividend to shareholders, sent the company's stock jumping more than 15% after the bell. Mark Zuckerberg credited the company's efforts to infuse A.I. into its advertising business for helping bolster sales even as it slashed its headcount by 22% since last year.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)
“In 2018, the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest newspaper, had a print circulation of 129,000. That’s roughly a quarter what it had been a few decades earlier—and by 2022 it had plunged all the way to 40,000, according to Nieman Lab. Gannett, which owns the paper, and its chief rival, Lee Enterprises, have both drastically slashed staff and payrolls across all their publications. It’s just as bleak in New Hampshire, where once-powerful newspapers like the Union Leader and Concord Monitor aren’t what they used to be. Reduced circulations and viewership lead to reduced influence, and in recent years candidates have had relatively little reason to spend time indulging state outlets and the issues they cover. Art Cullen is the Pulitzer Prize–winning editor and publisher of the Storm Lake Times, a small paper in Northwest Iowa. He’s interviewed numerous presidential candidates, and often pushed them on key local issues—like when he sat down with Bob Dole in 1996 for an extended interview about the industrial crop program. This year, Cullen noted that the only local issue that got any regular mention from the candidates in Iowa was ethanol—and it was rarely more than a talking point. ‘Now the only thing [candidates] talk about is ethanol or ‘We’re going to put China in its place.’ How does that help the sixty-seven of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties that are losing population? How does that discussion really move that ball forward?’ he said. ‘There was no serious discussion of the erosion of rural communities.’” (Cameron Joseph/CJR)
“Most of the work of government doesn’t go viral on social media or become fodder for TV talking heads. Every president’s administration makes changes both significant and trivial that largely escape the public’s attention — yet many have long-lasting impact. So we asked POLITICO’s newsroom, including the reporters who track the minutiae of government policy, to tell us about the major but under-the-radar changes made so far during Biden’s tenure that most of us might have missed. And there was a lot, from building drone armies to making birth control pills available in drug stores to lowering overdraft fees and loosening restrictions on marijuana. His administration even made a big decision on the colors for Air Force One, the president’s official aircraft. Here’s what they said.” (politico)
“The rivalry traces back to 2009, when Abu Dhabi objected to the proposed location of the headquarters for a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) central bank in Riyadh, which ultimately played a role in thwarting the establishment of the bank itself. Between 2012 and 2022, the UAE’s influx of investment-to-GDP has been nearly 3.5 times greater than that of Saudi Arabia, and Dubai has become the favored location for some 70 percent of Middle Eastern headquarters of major multinational companies. Meanwhile, the surge in oil prices in 2022, thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, propelled the Saudi economy to grow by 8.7 percent, the highest among G-20 countries, which has produced its own substantial influx of capital. And Saudi Arabia has actively encouraged foreign companies operating in the Persian Gulf area to relocate their headquarters to its territory, issuing warnings that companies failing to relocate their headquarters risk discontinuation of business relations with Riyadh. Energy politics between Saudi Arabia (the world’s largest oil exporter) and the UAE (the fifth-largest) has further intensified this competition. In the summer of 2021, a clear dispute emerged between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi regarding a Saudi-led plan within OPEC+ to prolong production cuts, with the UAE rejecting the proposition. Although an apparent resolution to this tension was quickly achieved, subsequent rumors circulated regarding Abu Dhabi’s objection to Riyadh’s dominance within OPEC+ and the potential consideration of withdrawal from OPEC. The competition for global prestige has also driven a wedge between Saudi Arabia and the UAE.” (Arash Reisinezhad/Foreign Policy)
“Carl Zimmer, NYT: Well, once upon a time, if you wanted to study ancient life, you were pretty much limited to fossils. After an animal or a person died, their bodies decomposed, and if you’re lucky, their bones managed to survive in rock. And then thousands or millions of years later, a paleontologist would come along and dig those fossils out. But now, it is actually possible to dig up those bones and to drill a little sample out of them and find some DNA still surviving in it. So this actually gives you a glimpse into the molecular life of these ancient people or ancient animals. And it’s amazing enough when scientists can get just a single gene out of a fossil that’s thousands and thousands of years old, but actually, the science has come so far in recent years that it’s pretty common for scientists to get a whole genome of an extinct species. That is like every single gene, every stretch of DNA reconstructed pretty accurately. Once you can look at the whole genome of some ancient organism, you are really starting to get the big picture of how that thing lived. And looking back at our own past, we can actually use this ancient DNA from fossils to figure out some clues about our ancient relatives going back a couple 100,000 years, actually. And this includes ancient relatives like Neanderthals, for example. So now we can actually see an entire genome of Neanderthal. But more recently, what’s been really spectacular is actually how scientists have been able to focus on the past 10,000 years. What we’re talking about there is that time in history where hunter gatherers started to domesticate animals and plants and start to farm, when you started to have the first towns, when you started to have first large scale societies. And we can actually go now and see what the DNA of these people looked like. Actually, we can see thousands of people from this time period.” (The Daily/NYT)
“Quentin Tarantino has announced that his tenth (or 11th, depending on how you count the Kill[s] Bill) film, The Movie Critic, will be his last. ‘Directors don’t get better as they get older,’ Tarantino told Playboy in 2012. ‘Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film f—s up three good ones. I don’t want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography, the movie that makes people think, ‘Oh man, he still thinks it’s 20 years ago.’ When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.’ Tarantino said the movie went into ‘pre-pre-production’ in June 2023, and we doubt a lot happened while SAG-AFTRA was on strike … Tarantino told Deadline that the lead in his tenth story is based on a real guy. One of Tarantino’s jobs as a teen was restocking a pornography-magazine vending machine. Sidestepping the legality of that as a job for a teen, Tarantino says he came to really appreciate the writing of the film critic for a ‘porno rag’ he doesn’t want to name. ‘He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle might be if he were a film critic,’ he said. ‘He wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s. He died in his late 30s. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was it was complications due to alcoholism.’” (Beth Squires/Vulture)
“Though the Take Our Border Back convoy has largely been a mess so far as the small group makes its way toward the Texas-Mexico border, experts warn that it has acted as a lightning rod for militias, far-right extremists, and even long-dormant vigilante groups. It could reach a tipping point this weekend, as multiple rallies are planned against immigrants and the Biden administration along the border in Texas, as well as Arizona and California. ‘Data we collected tells us emphatically that the standoff between Texas and the federal government has become a magnet for far-right vigilantism,’ said Devin Burghart, the executive director at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, during a press briefing on Thursday organized by the immigration reform group America’s Voice. ‘From the convoy steering committee on down, the protest comprises many of the same dangerous elements as the January 6 insurrection: militia members, election deniers, QAnon conspiracists, Covid deniers, and other hardcore far-righters.’ Those groups include the Proud Boys, neo-Nazi militias, and other vigilante groups. Last week, the Republic of Texas Proud Boys shared a post in its Telegram channel calling immigrants ‘brown immigrant invaders,’ and the South Texas Proud Boys told followers to ‘grab your guns.’ Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi Aryan Network issued a rallying cry in support of the Texas ‘resistance,’ asking for white men to join. In another post, the group added, ‘to hell with the United States of America.’ ‘The convoy itself has really inspired some of these more fringe, really extreme sects of the far right to engage in operations down in border states,’ said Freddy Cruz, the program manager for monitoring and training at Western States Center, during the briefing. ‘Discussions around the convoy and just the convoy itself really animate extreme anti-democracy groups to go down to the border.’” (David Gilbert/WIRED)
“The Russian approach has changed over time. During the Soviet period and the Cold War, there was a great deal of hostility toward Israel, which was tied to deeply rooted domestic antisemitism as well as the Kremlin’s suspicion of Soviet Jews having divided loyalties after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The USSR actively blocked Soviet Jews from leaving the country to settle in Israel, or anywhere else for that matter. There was quite a lot of attention paid inside the Soviet Union to building up relationships with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Arab countries opposed to the state of Israel. The USSR offered educational opportunities to Palestinian and other Arab students. I was a student in Moscow in 1987 and 1988, and, as a “Western” student, lived in a Moscow university long-stay hotel, which was next to several student dormitories. The largest contingent next to us was Arab students, some of whom were Palestinians who went on later to become prominent in organizations like the PLO and Fatah. In the 1990s, beginning with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s co-hosting with U.S. President George H.W. Bush of the March 1991 Madrid conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Russian government played a role in international efforts to move toward a two-state solution, but the relationship with Israel was still very tense. In the 1990s and early 2000s, after the collapse of the USSR, restrictions on leaving the country were lifted. There was a wave of Jewish migration from Russia and other post-Soviet countries like Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, and from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Most went to Israel as well as to the United States, and to some extent to Europe. The sustained mass emigration to Israel eventually shifts Moscow’s perspective.” (Fiona Hill and Kevin Huggard /Brookings)
“Sherman Hemsley, the actor who played “George Jefferson” on the The Jeffersons and All in the Family is known to be a huge fan of prog rock, especially Gentle Giant, Nektar and Gong. Hemsley collaborated with Yes’s Jon Anderson on a funk-rock opera about the ‘spiritual qualities of the number 7’ (never produced). Hemsley also did an interpretive dance to the Gentle Giant song ‘Proclamation’ on Dinah Shore’s 70s talkshow, that was apparently somewhat confusing for her. But the best story, I mean the best story of all time, is the one told by Gong’s Daevid Allen about his encounter with the beloved 70’s sitcom star.” (Dangerous Minds)