...Our president insults and threatens countries that never posed any threat to us. There must have been some misunderstanding. We allow our government to kill innocent people and treat children inhumanely. This is not a reflection of our character. Journalists report on astoundingly brazen, breathtakingly massive corruption. We will not let this define us. Italians hear that ICE agents will be here and immediately start protesting. Please—let’s not rush to judgment...

...The strongest evidence that ICE agents are not here is that Italians protested and nobody shot them. As other outlets have reported, ICE often provides security support at major sporting events, but it does not use agents from the detaining-three-year-olds branch of the operation. It is also possible ICE is here to congratulate Italy for how it treated Amanda Knox.

But when Italians heard that ICE agents will be at the Olympics, of course they protested. Why should they wait for reassurance from a U.S. government that lies so regularly?...

...when a nation’s credibility crumbles, it crumbles everywhere, even at the Olympics...

Since it was established in 1962, the Polar Marine Geosurvey Expedition (PMGE) has been one of Russia's leading institutions for geological exploration in the Arctic.

But the renowned company has come to the end of the road. Mounting focus on the Arctic and its vast mineral resources notwithstanding, the PMGE will be shut down this month...

"The company can operate if it has orders and they are fulfilled. If there are no orders, the company cannot operate, even if it has historical value,"...

...PMGE has been subject to US sanctions since early 2024...

...Carl von Clausewitz and other philosophers of war have distinguished the concepts of force and power in relation to statecraft. In the broadest sense, power is ideological capital, predicated on military strength and influence in the global political sphere. In contrast, force is the exertion of military might to coerce other nations to your political will.

While power can be sustained through a strong economy, alliances and moral influence, force is expended. It drains resources and can erode internal political capital as well as global influence if it is used in a way that is perceived as arrogant or imperialistic.

The Aztec empire formed in 1428 as a triple alliance between the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, with Tenochtitlan eventually dominating the political structure. The empire exerted force through seasonal military campaigns and balanced this with a power dynamic of sacrificial display, threat, tribute and a culture of racial superiority.

In both its use of force and power, the Aztec empire was coercive and depended on fear to rule. Those subjugated by the empire, and those engaged in what seemed perpetual war, held great animosity and distrust of the Aztecs. The empire was thus built on conquered people and enemies waiting for the right opportunity to overthrow their overlords...

...While subducting slabs are known to transport water into the mantle, scientists have long assumed that most hydrous minerals dehydrate at high temperatures, releasing fluids as they descend...

...the researchers conducted free-energy calculations and found that the dehydration of δ-AlOOH is both energetically and kinetically unfavorable under deep lower mantle conditions. Because water exists as superionic ice rather than free fluid, the conventional dehydration mechanism is effectively suppressed.

As a result, water from Earth's early stages or carried into the mantle by subduction may be preserved over geological timescales, accumulating as a long-term water reservoir near the base of the mantle...

...“The calculation results show enhancements of fusion yields by orders of magnitude with currently available intense low-frequency laser fields,” highlighted the study.

For a collision energy of 1 keV—a level where fusion is normally almost impossible—the application of a 1.55 eV low-frequency laser can transform the reaction rate.

At 10^20 W/cm² intensity, the fusion probability increases by three orders of magnitude, while increasing the intensity to 5×10^21 W/cm² boosts the efficiency by a staggering nine orders of magnitude.

This dramatic increase effectively makes fusion at 1 keV (relatively low temperature) as probable as fusion at 10 keV without laser assistance...

In 2000, a landmark study claimed to set the record straight on glyphosate, a contentious weedkiller used on hundreds of millions of acres of farmland. The paper found that the chemical, the active ingredient in Roundup, wasn’t a human health risk despite evidence of a cancer link.

Last month, the study was retracted by the scientific journal that published it a quarter century ago, setting off a crisis of confidence in the science behind a weedkiller that has become the backbone of American food production.

...The 2000 paper, a scientific review conducted by three independent scientists, was for decades cited by other researchers as evidence of Roundup’s safety. It became the cornerstone of regulations that deemed the weedkiller safe.

But since then, emails uncovered as part of lawsuits against the weedkiller’s manufacturer, Monsanto, have shown that the company’s scientists played a significant role in conceiving and writing the study.

...“This is a seismic, long-awaited correction of the scientific record,” said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, who is a pediatrician and epidemiologist and the director of the Program in Global Public Health at Boston College.

Dr. Landrigan recently chaired an advisory committee for a global glyphosate study that found that even low doses of glyphosate-based herbicides caused leukemia in rats.

“It pulls the veil off decades of industry efforts to create a false narrative that glyphosate is safe” he said. “People have developed cancers, and people have died because of this scientific fraud.”

...The retraction points to a wider problem of research secretly funded by industries like tobacco and lead, said David Rosner, co-director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. “Shading the science to favor the corporate interest,” he said, was likely “the rule rather than the exception.” Journals needed to “press scientists more forcefully to identify conflicts of interest,” he said. “Huge financial interests are at stake.”

...Saudi Arabia said the strike targeted an arms shipment from the United Arab Emirates meant to reach Yemeni separatists...

...Separatist group Southern Transitional Council (STC) are backed by the UAE, while Yemen's presidential council are backed by Riyadh...

Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers in a closed-door interview Wednesday that his team of investigators “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trumphad criminally conspired to over the results of the 2020 election...

...Several Democrats who emerged from Smith’s interview said they could understand why Republicans did not want an open hearing based on the damaging testimony about Trump they said Smith offered.

The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, said the Republican majority “made an excellent decision” in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly “because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities” of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021...

...the conflict in Ukraine is unfolding similarly to others in Russia’s long history of failed or inconclusive imperial wars. Several times in the past few centuries, Russian leaders launched wars of conquest against foes they misunderstood and underestimated, and with little appreciation of the larger international context...

...The Crimean War (1853-56), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), World War I (1914-18), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-88) offer the most relevant analogies. All were wars of choice for territorial aggrandizement or other imperial interventions, which ended in military defeat followed by political upheaval.

Russia’s failure in these wars stemmed from common mistakes and shortcomings that also afflict Putin’s war in Ukraine. One common failing was to underestimate their foes’ military capabilities and societal resilience. Emperor Nicholas I expected the Ottoman Empire to quickly give way on his demand for a protectorate over Orthodox Christians in what is now Moldova and part of Romania, while Emperor Nicholas II and his commanders believed that the Japanese military could never stand up to a European great power. Similar hubris colored their assessment of the Ottomans in 1914-15, when they settled on seizing Constantinople and the Black Sea Straits as a war aim. Nor did Soviet commanders have much respect for the ragtag mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Second, Russian leaders frequently downplayed the risks and impacts of foreign (i.e., Western) involvement that ended up prolonging the war and increasing the costs Russia was forced to bear. The landing of French and British troops in Crimea in 1854 forced Russia to fight on multiple fronts against better-equipped armies. British intelligence support enabled Tokyo to remain a step ahead of Russian plans throughout the Russo-Japanese War. While Russia declared war against Austria-Hungary in August 1914, it soon found itself at war with Germany, the Ottomans, and Bulgaria as well. A German-Ottoman blockade of the Black Sea Straits choked off Allied support, exacerbating the tsarist government’s inability to mobilize defense production. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the United States, in uneasy alliance with Saudia Arabia and Pakistan, to arm the mujahedeen forces that ground down the Soviet army until General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ordered their withdrawal nearly a decade later.

With an economy far less dynamic that those of its Western rivals, Russia in each case found itself at an increasing disadvantage the longer these wars went on. As economic burdens and personnel losses mounted, so too did opposition not just to the war, but to the regime prosecuting it...

...Officially named PSR J2322-2650b, this Jupiter-mass object appears to have an exotic helium-and-carbon-dominated atmosphere unlike any ever seen before...

“The planet orbits a star that's completely bizarre — the mass of the Sun, but the size of a city,” said the University of Chicago’s Michael Zhang, the principal investigator on this study. “This is a new type of planet atmosphere that nobody has ever seen before. Instead of finding the normal molecules we expect to see on an exoplanet — like water, methane, and carbon dioxide — we saw molecular carbon, specifically C3 and C2.”

Molecular carbon is very unusual because at these temperatures, if there are any other types of atoms in the atmosphere, carbon will bind to them. (Temperatures on the planet range from 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit at the coldest points of the night side to 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit at the hottest points of the day side.) Molecular carbon is only dominant if there's almost no oxygen or nitrogen. Out of the approximately 150 planets that astronomers have studied inside and outside the solar system, no others have any detectable molecular carbon.