“A woolly mammoth that died 52,000 years ago is so well preserved that it is possible both to read its full genome and to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of its chromosomes – information that can provide unprecedented details about how the animal’s genes behaved during its life. The extraordinary feat was possible because the animal’s remains were naturally freeze-dried, preserving its DNA in a glass-like state. Scientists found the mammoth remains in a cave in Siberia in 2018 where they had been preserved in the permafrost. The mammoth’s tissues were dry, ‘but not as dry as commercial beef jerky,’ says Olga Dudchenko at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, ‘and it was actually woolly.’ Eager to see what genetic information they could glean, Dudchenko and her colleagues sampled flesh behind the mammoth’s ear and sequenced the DNA. Because molecules of DNA begin to break down when an animal dies, scientists have previously only been able to find tiny snippets of the woolly mammoth genome – but to the researchers’ surprise, the animal’s chromosomes were perfectly preserved. ‘This does not match with anything that we have analysed before that was 52,000 years old, so that was very surprising,’ says Juan Antonio Rodríguez at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, a member of the research team.” (Corryn Wetzel/New Scientist)
“Politico reports that before the Hollywood actor (and major Democratic donor) published his New York Times op-ed calling for Biden to step down, he ‘reached out to former president Barack Obama to give him a heads-up.’ As Politico, which spoke to people familiar with the conversation, notes: ‘While Obama did not encourage or advise Clooney to say what he said, he also didn’t object to it.’ The outlet adds that ‘the lack of pushback is an eye-popping revelation given that the former president was one of the first big voices defending Biden following his abysmal debate performance (while many of his former aides have been some of the incumbent’s biggest critics).’ A spokesperson for Obama did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. But the news does not appear to be going over well with the Biden campaign, which, according to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, believes that Obama ‘is quietly working behind the scenes to orchestrate this.’” (Bess Levin/VF)
“This was nothing like the debacle of the debate, but a quieter sort of fail—that of an eighty-one-year-old who is struggling to stay onstage, who still thinks he has wisdom to impart and a job to finish. Biden insisted on Thursday, as he has before, that he is ready to continue in the world’s hardest job, and he protested when a reporter for the Financial Times suggested he had acknowledged in recent days some limits he might put on the twenty-four-hour-a-day responsibilities of the Presidency. But then he began to elaborate on the limits—a shorter workday, a more disciplined schedule—he ought to put in place. He proceeded to go on about his wife being mad at him for doing too much, about his staff sneaking new events into his already packed calendar. It was a painful answer, an old-man answer. Because it was less of a car crash than the debate, the moment somehow felt even more tragic. All the more so because Biden is not Trump, whose vigorous projection at his speeches tends to mask their absurdity, incoherence, and flagrant incorrectness. Biden mixes up Putin’s name; Trump actually admires Putin. The current President clearly still knows what he’s talking about; indeed, his eyes lit up toward the end of the press conference when he started talking foreign policy. He did not seem confused. Or dangerous. He digressed. He offered mini-lectures on investing in China, on the need for a new industrial policy in the West, and on the evils of trickle-down economics. But it is not what America needed to hear from him tonight. ‘I think it’s important to allay fears,’ Biden allowed at one point. But had he done so?” (Susan B. Glasser/TNY)
“On July 11, 2024 President William Ruto dissolved his Cabinet following weeks of protests against his administration. As discussed in the previous post, the immediate trigger of the countrywide popular revolt was a raft of tax increases in the 2024 Finance Bill. But the grievances were deeper. Ruto came into office with a legitimacy deficit that has proven difficult to shake off. His Cabinet was one of the weakest in Kenya’s history and had come to symbolize the out-of-touch incompetence and arrogance towards the public associated with the administration. Real incomes were in decline, squeezed by a stagnating economy, inflation, and higher taxes. And the quality of public services (especially in education and health) had deteriorated for years even before Ruto came into office. The expected changes in the Cabinet might buy Ruto political breathing room — especially if he appoints a competent set of Cabinet Secretaries. However, it is unclear if he will choose the path of competence and effective service delivery. So far all indications are that he will go for a ‘unity government’ that brings in individuals from across the political divide and consolidates intra-elite collusion in opposition to the structural reforms demanded by protesters. Such a move will only fuel popular anger at the entire political class and likely result in more protests.” (Ken Opalo/The Africanist Perspective)
“As nations delay regulating the use of force in space, a new analysis says attacks on satellites and similar acts of space warfare may fall under existing international agreements. Dr. Chris O’Meara of the University of Exeter Law School recently produced a new survey applying current international law to anti-satellite weapons. By investigating where use-of-force laws developed for conventional warfare may apply to satellites, O’Meara has illuminated the heavy burden that would apply to justifying such action in space. In 1957, anxious Americans living under the bomb could walk out onto their porch in the evening and, under the right conditions, observe the Cold War’s latest symbol of existential terror in the night sky. The US Government was powerless to do anything as the Soviet Sputnik satellite looked down upon them, and fears of space-based weapons, especially the prospect of nuclear ones, ultimately led to agreements in the 1960s dealing with the militarization of space. Yet in our modern world, the fibers of which are held together by the network of satellites now above our heads, very little progress has been made on regulating space warfare, despite rapid advances in such weaponry by the United States, Russia, China, and India. Today, amidst what many scholars identify as a new Cold War, the chances of breaking the deadlock on meaningful international space warfare agreements are low. While our leading technology may be the frontier of human achievement, the same age-old concerns about civilian casualties and third-party consequences still apply. Some attempts have been made to extend International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to cover this area, but many questions remain.” (Ryan Whalen/The Debrief)
“It is incredibly expensive to run for office, and campaign costs have only continued to increase over time, according to data from OpenSecrets.org. Candidates, PACs, and political parties spend billions of dollars on campaigns, which help pay for staff salaries, travel expenses, yard signs, campaign buttons, polling data, and the biggest expense, advertising. Though an election isn’t necessarily decided by how much a candidate raises, raising more tends to put them at an advantage over their opponent. The high costs associated with campaigning often lead to wealthier candidates running for office, according to reporting from Carolina Public Press. These individuals have more resources to self-fund their campaigns, and often attend prestigious schools and work in high-paying jobs like law, giving them additional opportunities to network with wealthy potential donors. Candidates who aren’t wealthy often lack access to large donor networks and support from their parties, and are more likely to have to rely on small individual donations. Former Air Force physicist Mike Kripchak, who ran for Ohio’s Sixth District this past May, only raised about $22,000 during his campaign. His Republican opponent state Sen. Michael Rulli raised over $670,000. ‘My opponent, something like 72 percent of his funds come from big money PACs,’ Kripchak said. ‘Most of mine don’t. My average donation is $36. I have one PAC donation or contribution from the United Mine Workers for $2,500.’It’s also personally expensive for candidates to run for office. Poorer candidates may still need to work their regular jobs simultaneously.” (Janie Ekere/TAP)
“Hikers and mountaineers are stumbling on mysterious ancient objects in the Swiss Alps, and their discoveries are keeping archaeologists busy. From the Iron Age to ancient Rome to the Middle Ages, people traveled across the Alps' icy mountain passes with cows, mules, oil, wine, skis, weapons, and more. Their lost or abandoned belongings are now surfacing as the mountains' glaciers melt, providing clues about past civilizations and eras. Archaeologists gave Business Insider an inside look at some of their most mysterious and most revealing discoveries. Switzerland has more glaciers than any other European country, and they're receding quickly as global temperatures rise. In 2022 and 2023, the country lost 10% of its total glacier volume, according to the Swiss Academy of Sciences. This wooden statue, for example, hung on a mountaineer's living-room wall for nearly 20 years before Pierre-Yves Nicod, a museum curator, saw an old email about it and reached out. The mountaineer found the statue soaked in meltwater in 1999 and wiped it down with modern cleaning products, which could have damaged the ancient object. Still, after he donated it in 2018, archaeologists managed to date the wood to the first or second century BC — the Iron Age. The Valais History Museum sits atop a steep hill towering in the center of town. It's at the forefront of the new field of glacial archaeology.” (Morgan McFall-Johnsen/BI)
“Biden’s shifting approach toward Saudi Arabia reflects the difference between campaigning and governing. On the campaign trail in 2019-2020, Saudi Arabia (and particularly the murder of Saudi media figure Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul) was the subject of extensive media coverage and closely tied to then-President Donald Trump—particularly given Trump’s full-throated defense of the kingdom’s actions. By 2022, however, the importance of Saudi human-rights abuses had faded for the Biden administration when weighed against concerns both geopolitical (securing Saudi cooperation in the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and domestic (public concerns over inflation, and especially rising fuel prices). At the same time, Biden’s choice of advisors, limited interest in human-rights promotion elsewhere in the Middle East, and own political history suggest the administration had little interest in making Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ to begin with. U.S. officials began raising normalization with Saudi counterparts as early as 2021, while back-to-back presidential visits to Israel and Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2022 emphasized the administration’s commitment to locking in a new regional security architecture centered around Gulf-Israeli security ties. Securing the ‘crown jewel’ of Saudi-Israel normalization held clear appeal for a President both fond of noting his ‘ironclad’ commitment to Israel’s security and eager to surpass the Trump administration’s achievements in bilateral normalization.” (Andrew Leber/Brookings)
“Each and every day, news services carry heartbreaking stories of conflict and crisis throughout the world. The Israel-Hamas war has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands in urgent need of humanitarian relief in the Middle East. Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine has displaced 10.2 million and left 14.6 million in need of assistance across Europe. Criminal gangs control 80 percent of Haiti’s capital city and there are an estimated 5.5 million people in need. But somehow, what may be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis has received very little media attention. Sudan doesn’t have the same diaspora connections as Europe and the Middle East. It isn’t close to our shores like Haiti. But on the list of highest levels of human suffering—a list nobody wants to be on—it might just top them all. Sudan is the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis. According to the 2023 Global Trends report by the UN’s refugee agency, Sudan hosts 9.1 million internally displaced people—the highest number ever recorded in one country. Of the 1.8 million refugees who have left the country, 6 out of 7 are being hosted in neighboring countries like Chad and South Sudan, which are suffering their own hunger and poverty crises. More than 25 million people in Sudan (14 million of whom are children) are in need of humanitarian assistance—more than Ukraine, Gaza, and Haiti combined. Combined.” (Ambassador Mark Green/Wilson Center)
“Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother, was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie. O’Connor, after a diagnosis of lupus brought her home to Milledgeville in 1951, led a life in a farmhouse outside of town with her domineering mother, Regina, that bore some resemblance to a nun’s. Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her ‘filet mignon.’ Otherwise it seems she found most pleasures, especially the physical kind, to be base. In her fiction an amorous girl goes up to the hayloft with a man and gets her wooden leg stolen in the story ‘Good Country People.’ Two girls make themselves hot, bothered and ridiculous laughing over a nun’s claim that their bodies are ‘a temple of the Holy Ghost’ in a story of that name. And yet somehow O’Connor’s lunch order—which captured my imagination when I read about it in Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery—sounds paradoxically, well, pleasurable.” (Valerie Strivers/The Paris Review)
“An Axios poll from April suggested 42 percent of Democrats would support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Other polls have also found an anti-immigrant shift in the public’s mood. Gallup’s long-term tracking poll, which has been running since the 1960s, shows a more general decline in the share of Americans who want to increase rates of immigration or keep them the same. Conversely, the portion of Americans who want to decrease immigration has spiked: 55 percent of Americans feel this way, up from a low point of 28 percent in 2020. This shift against immigration is happening even as the general American consensus has been moving in favor of immigrants over the last few decades. In 1994, for example, 63 percent of Americans believed that immigrants were a “burden” to the country; only 31 percent said immigrants strengthen the country, according to Pew Research Center data. By 2019, those dynamics had flipped: 62 percent of Americans believed immigrants were an asset to the nation; only 28 percent thought they were a burden. Now, with the public seemingly lurching to the right on immigration, politicians are moving accordingly. There’s been a rightward pivot by Biden and congressional Democrats, and Trump — who built his first campaign on demonizing immigrants (and particularly immigrants of color) — has stepped up his constant attacks on the Biden administration’s immigration policy. So what explains the American public’s souring mood on immigrants and immigration?” (Charistan Paz/Vox)