“Last year, a Ukrainian counteroffensive failed to make significant gains. Now, Ukraine finds itself out-gunned, as US aid is held up and as Europe hasn’t delivered the promised load of artillery shells. The Ukrainian military is building and fortifying defenses, in anticipation of a Russian offensive this year. Some anecdotal reports suggest national morale has plummeted. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and CIA Director William Burns both warned this week that Ukraine faces a bleak battlefield outlook. At Foreign Policy, Oz Katerji paints a dire picture: ‘Because of the lack of shells, we have to pay with lives,’ [Ukrainian brigade commander Vladislav] said, making it clear that the price paid for Western inaction on artillery is being paid for in Ukrainian blood. I asked what the ratio of fire between them and the Russians currently was, and Vladislav delivered another grim assessment. ‘On the good days, between 10- and 20-to-1’ he said, ‘and on the bad days, it almost feels like they have an unlimited supply.’’ At Politico Magazine, Jamie Dettmer suggests Ukraine is on its way to losing the war: ‘It’s not just that Ukraine’s forces are running out of ammunition. Western delays over sending aid mean the country is dangerously short of something even harder to supply than shells: the fighting spirit required to win.’” (Fareed’s Global Briefing)
“In the coming days Israel will have to make historic policy decisions, ones that could shape its fate and the fate of the entire region for generations to come. Unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu and his political partners have repeatedly proven that they are unfit to make such decisions. The policies they pursued for many years have brought Israel to the brink of destruction. So far, they have shown no regret for their past mistakes, and no inclination to change direction. If they continue to shape policy, they will lead us and the whole Middle East to perdition. Instead of rushing into a new war with Iran, we should first learn the lessons of Israel's failures over the past six months of war. War is a military means for achieving political aims, and there is one key yardstick by which to measure success in war: Were the political aims achieved? Following the horrendous massacre of October 7, Israel needed to liberate the hostages and disarm Hamas, but these should not have been its only aims. In light of the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran and its agents of chaos, Israel also needed to deepen its alliance with Western democracies, strengthen cooperation with moderate Arab forces, and work to establish a stable regional order. However, the Netanyahu government ignored all these aims, and instead focused on revenge. It has failed to secure the release of all the hostages, and has not disarmed Hamas. Worse, it intentionally inflicted a humanitarian disaster on the 2.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and thereby undermined the moral and geopolitical basis for Israel's existence.” (Yuval Noah Harari/Haaretz)
“I agreed to discuss archaeology with pseudoarchaeologist Graham Hancock on the mega-popular but controversial podcast the Joe Rogan Experience. Celebrity author Hancock has made a fortune writing sensationalized books that claim a ‘lost’ ice age civilization once existed—without any direct evidence for this society. I am an archaeologist, a scientist who uses the remains of objects, structures, and other traces of human activity to reconstruct how past peoples lived. Some Rogan fans will surely dismiss my remarks as symptoms of a ‘woke mind virus,’ which apparently infects anyone who relies on evidence, experts, and the scientific method to form conclusions. Meanwhile, some colleagues will call me foolish. A pawn playing into the hands of pseudoscientists. Still, I’m appearing because Rogan’s podcast draws an audience in the tens of millions … I believe some listeners do have an interest in the past and will come with open minds. But there are compelling reasons to avoid sharing soundwaves with science deniers. For example, physician and scientist Peter Hotez refused to appear on Rogan’s podcast with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal opponent of vaccines and third-party candidate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. To Hotez, such a debate would seem to legitimize anti-vaccine views. (However, Rogan has interviewed many scientists on his podcast, including Dr. Hotez—just not at the same time as Kennedy.)” (Flint Dibble/Sapiens)
“If you zero in on these omissions, the posture of these Democratic economists can appear unseemly: Where do these rich liberals find the nerve to tell working-class Americans that they should stop worrying about rising food prices and start loving the Biden economy? Countless self-styled populists have made versions of this argument in recent months. This X post from the author Carol Roth is a crude, but not atypical, example: ‘Paul Krugman doesn’t know any regular Americans, and so he and the rest of the corporate press mock and gaslight you while you struggle with your rent or mortgage, food and other living costs. Absolutely zero compassion or connection to reality.’ And yet, although this brand of commentary is populist in affect, it may be contrary to workers’ best interests in practice. The signature strengths and weaknesses of the Biden economy — its low unemployment and elevated prices — are byproducts of one fundamental policy decision: Faced with the Covid recession, the US government chose to prioritize poverty reduction and full employment over minimizing the risk of inflation. Put differently, instead of forcing the nation’s most vulnerable workers to pay the inescapable economic costs of the pandemic through prolonged periods of material deprivation and joblessness, we spread those costs across the entire population through a temporary period of high inflation.” (Erik Levitz/Vox)
“Sometime next year, the Ford Motor Company will begin to produce electric trucks at BlueOval City, a sprawling manufacturing complex in an impoverished rural area of western Tennessee. The multibillion-dollar project, which received a federal loan through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Biden signed in 2021, has already created thousands of construction jobs that pay substantially more than locals are accustomed to earning. Landing a job at BlueOval City ‘changed my life,’ one worker recently said. Another was able to begin the process of buying her first home, a plan she’d delayed for years. As a report published by the Center for American Progress noted, these workers were hired under a project-labor agreement, a collective-bargaining contract that requires construction projects to pay employees union-level wages and benefits. Inserting prevailing wage standards and other worker-friendly rules into domestic-spending programs is one of the reasons that many scholars and union officials have come to view Joe Biden as the most pro-labor President since Franklin Roosevelt, a designation he has proudly embraced. And yet awareness of these policies hasn’t always filtered down to the rank and file.” (Eyal Press/TNY)
“A natural-born party promoter, Sean Combs could work any room. Chatting with hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio in 2019, Diddy broadcast a voracious hunger for knowledge, plying his mentor for career advice: ‘I don’t want to make the most money. I want to be known for giving the most money away.’ Dropping into New York rap radio station Power 105.1’s ‘The Breakfast Club’ amid a noisy return to music last year, he served liquor, talked about spirituality, and cracked ‘pause’ jokes in quick succession. That disconcerting closeness of the cosmic and carnal was par for the course for Combs, an altar boy turned entrepreneur whose career is a monument to these and other striking dualities. His business empire blossomed across the ’90s and the early aughts in spite of jarring investigations into his enterprises and morals. He cultivated an affable, absurdist air offsetting his worst press, which in turn always tugged against his wholesome revamps. Now, as Combs fights an array of allegations of ghastly violence and sex trafficking that figure into a few different decades of his career, and endures FBI raids on his homes, how much of his public persona may have been a deliberate, face-saving con is becoming clear. The Harlem native overcame profound adversity as a child when his father, an associate of legendary heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, was murdered in 1972, and his mother worked overtime to stay afloat … The fact of the matter is some people find a hip-hop heavyweight behaving like a crime boss alluring in the same way they hunger for gladiatorial strife between rappers. When Vanilla Ice claimed that Death Row Records founder Suge Knight shook him down on a balcony in the early ’90s, and when Jay-Z was accused of stabbing rap exec Lance ‘Un’ Rivera in 1999, the hip-hop community viewed the incidents as evidence that those men would stop at nothing to get their way in a business relationship.” (Craig Jenkins/NYMag)
“Of all the individuals and institutions implicated in the global migration crisis, you’d be hard-pressed to find a figure more universally detested than the human smuggler. U.S. immigration authorities routinely vilify the ‘ruthless smugglers and transnational criminal organizations who exploit vulnerable migrants’ with ‘disinformation.’ Smugglers, one Customs and Border Protection officer recently claimed, treat migrants as a ‘commodity’ no different from ‘vegetables or drugs’ … ‘Everyone says that we are all bad, but that’s not true,’ a Honduran smuggler working in southern Mexico tells anthropologist Jason De León in his new book, Soldiers and Kings. ‘It’s just that no one ever listens to our stories.’ This is at once a somewhat trite sentiment and a basic truth about this hypervisible, poorly understood occupation, whose practitioners are often typecast, in De León’s formulation, as ‘pot-bellied Latinos with silver-capped teeth and slick hair’ who ‘reek of cologne and drive shiny trucks bought with the hard-earned (or borrowed) money of desperate people trying to get to la USA.’ De León set out to correct these misperceptions, to understand who smugglers are and how and why they get caught up in the work that they do. For nearly seven years, the former MacArthur fellow listened to their stories during impromptu tattoo sessions, in between bouts of partying in ramshackle safe houses, and over meals of roasted iguana on the tracks of la bestia, the Mexican trains so-named for their tendency to devour the limbs and lives of migrants hitching rides north.” (Jack McCordick/TNR)
“More than 270 political candidates in Mexico have requested government protection ahead of June’s general election, underscoring a spiral of political violence that is tarnishing Mexican democracy. At least 15 federal-level candidates have been assassinated this campaign season and 28 candidates have been attacked, according to Mexico News Daily, though the number is just a fraction of the attacks seen among the 70,000 total candidates running for local and state elections. Independent think tanks have reported more than 800 political attacks in the last five years. Analysts say federal policy has long ignored tackling the foundational issues that pull youth into organized crime, and the issue has become one of the major talking points for presidential candidates.” (semafor)
“Sudan, at war since April 2023, has not considered Ethiopia an enemy. However, the conflict within Sudan may require calming the ongoing sesame ‘wars’ with Ethiopia before more foreign entities are attracted to what has indirectly fuelled the fighting inside Sudan. Two development experts at Chatham House say sesame, a grain often eaten as a snack or used to make pastries throughout the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, is not solely to blame for the violence. But its value and profits may be fuelling the conflict in Sudan and tensions on the border between Sudan and Ethiopia. ‘The sesame trade is no longer just a mainstay of local livelihoods in Ethiopia and Sudan. Amid civil war and territorial rivalry on both sides of the border, it now plays a central role in a conflict economy that perpetuates violence and political instability,’ they observe in their new paper: The Conflict Economy of Sesame in Ethiopia and Sudan, which analyses how farming along the Ethiopia-Sudan border has become entangled in transnational conflict.” (Aggrey Uttambo/The East African)
“I’m a biomedical engineer and researcher at Duke University School of Medicine, and I study ways for people to survive in extreme environments like underwater and outer space. I’m not alone in using my own body first in research; in fact—except in fields like chemotherapy and brain surgery—the practice is surprisingly common. One time, Dr. Sherri Ferguson, another diving researcher, needed a chamber that could pressurize the air around only a human subject’s legs. She used her own body to help figure out a good design for such a thing. In the process she found herself popped out of the prototypes by the pressure and rocketed across the room, over and over again, until she made a seal that worked. She has also strapped on a mask and breathed in toxic gases so that she could properly inform and warn prospective test subjects of the symptoms they would experience—and so they couldn’t fake any results. Dr. Ferguson and I certainly aren’t the only scientists to use ourselves as our first test subjects. In my field of dive research, there’s one story from eight decades ago that blows the rest of us out of the water. It concerns a group of scientists who conducted a series of tests on themselves so extreme, so dangerous, and so key to the outcome of the Second World War that it got buried under classification markings for generations. This groundbreaking research was so secret, in fact, that professionals in my field will learn about it here for the first time.” (Rachel Lance/WIRED)
“Consumer Reports — the watchdog group that’s currently urging the Department of Agriculture to remove Lunchables from the National School Lunch Program — found that pesticide contamination posed serious risks in popular produce items, per a new report. The group examined 59 common fresh fruits and vegetables along with their canned, dried or frozen variations. Consumer Reports found that pesticides ‘posed significant risks’ in 20% of the foods they examined, including bell peppers, blueberries, green beans, potatoes, and strawberries. Green beans, in particular, contained residues of a pesticide that hasn’t been allowed to be used on the vegetable in the U.S. for over a decade. And imported produce, especially some from Mexico, was likely to carry especially high levels of pesticide residues. On the bright side, pesticides were relatively low in nearly two-thirds of the foods, including nearly all of the organic ones.” (Joy Saha/Salon)