“War returned to Sudan in April 2023 when the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces turned their guns on each other, vying for control of Sudan. Omar al-Bashir had been toppled in a popular coup five years earlier and for a time, the RSF and Sudanese Armed Forces were allied in an effort to prevent civilians from taking control. But on April 15, the RSF and Sudanese Armed Forces engaged in vicious battles on the streets of Khartoum. The fighting soon spread to Darfur. Within months the Rapid Support Forces were unleashing a pattern of violence that harkened to the genocide 20 years prior.” (Mark Leon Goldberg/UN Dispatches)
“When Michael Protzman, the leader of the QAnon cult that believes former President John F. Kennedy and his son JFK Jr. are still alive, died in June, people hoped the end was near for the group. The family members of those who joined the cult hoped it would disband so that their loved ones would finally return home. But instead, a new leader has seemingly emerged: a 13-year-old girl known to her followers only as ‘Tiny Teflon,’ the name of the Telegram channel she uses to communicate with her followers.” (David Gilbert/VICE)
“A Russian warship was seriously damaged in an overnight Ukrainian naval drone attack on Russia's Black Sea navy base at Novorossiysk, the first time the Ukrainian navy has projected its power so far from the country's shores.” (Tom Balmforth/Reuters)
“My parents are Republicans, and I was raised in a Republican household. My mother, who is now 94, was one of the first people to say, ‘I used to have a beautiful granddaughter. Now I have a handsome grandson.’ It’s that simple.” (Annette Benning/VF)
“Inflation has fallen by two-thirds over the past year, and French economist Olivier Blanchard, who had predicted the 2021 Covid-19 stimulus would create inflation, coauthored a June paper with Ben Bernanke conceding that it did not. (The supply chain was to blame.) That same month, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel attacked Bidenomics by saying, ‘Savings, real wages, and economic confidence are all down.’ Wrong on all counts: Personal savings, real hourly wages, and economic confidence were all up.” (Tim Noah/TNR)
“Rwandan troops, police officers and intelligence agents in Mozambique now number 2,800. Despite Rwanda’s small population of 13.5 million, the country is establishing a brand as a counterinsurgency expert on the continent. But can it be a model for other successful African-led interventions?” (Joe Penny/PASSBLUE)
“Whatever happens, the indictment strips these people of their veneer of respectability. Trump’s gang are alleged to have committed a variety of dirty state crimes in the furtherance of their corrupt organization’s coup scheme: forgery or false documents and statements, soliciting or impersonating public officers, racketeering, perjury, computer tampering.” (Nina Burleigh/American Political Freakshow)
“When leaders of the BRICS group of large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – meet in Johannesburg for two days beginning on Aug. 22, 2023, foreign policymakers in Washington will no doubt be listening carefully. The BRICS group has been challenging some key tenets of U.S. global leadership in recent years. On the diplomatic front, it has undermined the White House’s strategy on Ukraine by countering the Western use of sanctions on Russia. Economically, it has sought to chip away at U.S. dominance by weakening the dollar’s role as the world’s default currency.” (Beth Daly/The Conversation)
“Long Covid is not a mystery like many people think it is. Humans have been experiencing post-infectious syndromes for centuries. ‘Gu Syndromes,’ for example, have been studied in Chinese Medicine since the seventh century, and describe how regular parasitic infections might weaken the entire organism because it is a systemic effect. Gu syndromes often present with the same symptoms as Long Covid as well as other comparable conditions like Lyme, Epstein Barr Virus, syphilis, malaria, and HIV. In this thinking, an individual’s pre-existing conditions do not predict whether someone gets sick but rather, someone’s fortitude to recover does. “ (Emily Mendenhall)
“Footage shows the chilling moment killer whales circle a group of terrified sailors before they can be seen ramming the yacht and ripping off its rudder in the latest orca attack in Portugal. The frightened tourists were trapped aboard the damaged 'Santa Barbara' off the coast of Sesimbra, Portugal, in the afternoon of August 9. In the video, a woman can be seen phoning authorities and asking for help, saying they are stranded one mile from land.” (Daily Mail)
“AT THE START of his third year of graduate school, Kazi Albab Hussain became a father. As a new dad and a PhD student studying environmental nanotechnology, plastic was on his mind. The year before, scientists had discovered that plastic baby bottles shed millions of particles into formula, which infants end up swallowing (while also sucking on plastic bottle nipples) … Hussain wanted to know how much was being released from the kinds of containers he’d been buying.” (WIRED)
"Archaeologists have unearthed more artifacts from the ruins of the ancient Greek sanctuary of Poseidon at Helike, on the northern coast of the Peloponese, southern Greece ...Ancient scripts describe how the town of Helike was dramatically destroyed by an earthquake in 372/3 BC ... The ancient world atributed the catastrophe to the wrath of Poseidon ... Ancient scholars Strabo, Eratosthenes, Pausanias, Diodorus of Sicily, and Ovid, all wrote about their visits to the site, sailing above the ruins of the submerged town, which was still visible under the waters for many centuries later, until the late Roman times.” (Greek Reporter)
“Most obviously, in an increasingly multipolar world, the Saudis have adopted a multi-partner foreign policy. For much of its history, the kingdom was firmly aligned with the West economically and politically. While those relations remain important, they are no longer exclusive. Today, China is the kingdom’s largest trading partner, and it is the Chinese who have more recently developed the kingdom’s railroads, ports and telecommunications networks. Last year, Riyadh and Beijing officially raised the level of their relations to that of strategic partnership … Saudi energy policy always seeks to keep oil prices as high as possible without driving its customers into recession or promoting the development of alternative energy sources.” (Unherd)
“Last week, a group of art investors announced they were suing Sotheby’s—one of the world’s largest art brokers—for allegedly colluding with a blockchain firm to inflate the price of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) during a 2021 auction. The class action lawsuit—filed by a group of anonymous NFT buyers—was originally filed against a wide range of celebrities and influencers in December 2022, accusing big names like Steph Curry and Madonna of being paid to raise the profile of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.” (Diego Lasarte/QZ)
“The United Arab Emirates is considering creating a multibillion-dollar fund to spur clean energy investments across the world that it plans to unveil at this year’s U.N. climate talks in Dubai, according to people familiar with the plan. The fund could amount to tens of billions of dollars, with a sizable slice of the money coming from the UAE’s sovereign wealth reserves, according to seven people with knowledge of the discussions. A G-7 government official said envoys from the oil-rich Mideast nation had privately mentioned the idea of a fund of at least $25 billion.” (Zach Colman and Karl Mathieson/Politico)
“I arrive at Yaddo lost. I’m absolutely lost in my life, and I turn sixty at the colony, and there’s something about a man there I find easy to be with. The first time we talk, we’re in a little parlor outside the room where meals are served, and I don’t know how Foucault comes up. It will turn out Foucault is always on Richard’s mind the way this conversation in the little parlor is always, more or less, on my mind. I say, ‘I find Foucault overdetermined.’” (Laurie Stone)
“Neglecting the risks to labor demand in AI governance frameworks is perilous. AI at times “frees” workers from the most fulfilling parts of their jobs rather than the dull, dangerous, or repetitive tasks that many hoped AI would take on. This leaves workers to correct machine errors in highly surveilled, algorithmically managed workplaces. Leading economists have warned about AI potentially exacerbating the hollowing out of the middle class by reducing the availability of stable, well-paying jobs that don’t require advanced degrees, and accelerating task automation while lagging in creating new tasks for human workers. Both trends predate the recent AI advancement and could worsen because of it.” (Katya Klinova and Anton Korinek/Brookings)
“Ötzi the Iceman, whose frozen remains were found in a gully high in the Tyrolean Alps by hikers in 1991, is perhaps the world’s most closely studied corpse. The mystery over his violent death, who he was and how he ended up on a mountain pass has sparked fascination far beyond the field of archaeology. Each year, thousands visit his mummified remains contained in a special cold cell at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy ... Originally, it was thought that Ötzi froze to death, but a 2001 X-ray revealed an arrowhead in his shoulder, which would have been fatal. He also had a head injury, possibly sustained at the same time, and his right hand shows a defense wound. 'The whole story of the Iceman is intriguing, including the mystery of his violent death … and the question why he was up there in the high mountains when he was killed,' Zink said." (Katie Hunt/CNN)
“My mother, a home economics teacher in our local South Dakota high school, encouraged my love of Barbie and longing to be Barbie by sewing clothes on her Singer sewing machine for both me and Barbie. I combed through displays of Butterick and Simplicity patterns and chose the best ones. The pencil-drawn cover models donning chic outfits fed my dreams of the popularity that would surely soon arrive, but when I tried on the finished products, my hopes were always dashed.” (Lori Marso/LARB)
“A former US ambassador to Kazakhstan, Richard Hoagland, advised writers to ensure that their cables were never ‘flabby’ or ‘cute’. ‘Be strategically nasty,’ Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, recommended. The publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of 250,000 US diplomatic cables (only 6 per cent of them classified as ‘secret’) was treated by the national security establishment and its helpmates as treachery pure and simple. But many diplomats thought the cables made their work look rather exciting. One junior attaché was disgruntled by ‘no-neck, black-leather-clad bodyguards’ in Sofia tearing up the streets in black 4x4s. A US embassy report on a Ukrainian presidential election noted that in preparation for the vote, ‘the idea of disappearing ink occurred to both camps.’ There were cables on hunting, on whales and on exotic animals. An American diplomat in Burma was disappointed after spotting an endangered Siberian crane dancing on the banks of the Irrawaddy River because the performance ended with the bird being shot by soldiers. “ (Tom Stevenson/LRB)