“A handful of schools, including Amherst and Johns Hopkins, had ended the practice of giving admissions to the children of alumni — so called legacy preferences — in the years before affirmative action was struck down. Seven more ended the practice after the Supreme Court’s decision last year, and for a minute it appeared the dominoes would fall — but then no other college followed suit.
Meanwhile, many have doubled down on legacy preference and other mechanisms of exclusion that drive the massive wealth disparities on these campuses. And no “elite” college has made an explicit commitment to give a leg up in the admissions process based on socioeconomic disadvantage — the most obvious mechanism for promoting diversity. For several years now, at Harvard and 37 other U.S. colleges and universities, more students have come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than the bottom 60 percent.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/25/supreme-court-affirmative-action-ruling-elite-colleges-00164902https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/25/supreme-court-affirmative-action-ruling-elite-colleges-00164902
“Democrats didn’t convict Trump; a jury of 12 ordinary Americans did. The Biden administration played no role in prosecuting the case; the indictment came from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and was issued after federal prosecutors declined to go after Trump on similar charges.”
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“The current Republican party is so hostile to the foundations of the American political system that they can be counted on to attack the possibility of a fair Trump trial. Either Trump should be able to do whatever he wants with no accountability, or it’s proof that the entire edifice of American law and politics is rotten.”
“As part of a larger restructuring, the US Army also announced it is cutting thousands of posts in roles most heavily involved in counterterrorism. “The mission or the function of counterterrorism has continued, but it just doesn’t have the same limelight and focus that it did,” Javed Ali, a counterterrorism specialist formerly at the FBI, Pentagon, and National Security Council, told Vox.”
“On the second day of the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan war, the Armenian military posted a video of one of its surface-to-air missile systems shooting down a surprising enemy aircraft: an Antonov AN-2 biplane.
As it turned out, it wasn’t a sign of desperation on Azerbaijan’s part that its military was flying a plane first produced in the Soviet Union in 1947, and today used mostly for crop-dusting. Azerbaijan had converted several AN-2s into unmanned aircraft and used them as so-called bait drones. After the Armenians shot down the planes, revealing the positions of their anti-aircraft systems, their forces came under attack from more modern drones.”
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“it was also a hypermodern war where unmanned systems played an unprecedented role on the battlefield, and social media played an unprecedented role off it. Though it got relatively little coverage in the international media at the time — coming as it did at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a wave of global protests, and a bitter US presidential election campaign — it was in some ways a preview of the much larger war that would break out in Ukraine just two years later, and may yet be seen as the harbinger of a new and potentially devastating era of international conflict.”
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“The Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute is one of the so-called frozen conflicts left over from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nagorno-Karabakh, often referred to as Artsakh by Armenians, is an ethnically Armenian region within the borders of neighboring Azerbaijan. Violence in the region erupted in the 1980s when authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh demanded to be transferred to Armenia. (At the time, all were part of the Soviet Union.)
After the Soviet collapse, when both Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent, full-scale war broke out, resulting in more than 30,000 deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, mainly Azeris. The first war ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire in 1994 that left Nagorno-Karabakh as a semi-independent — but internationally unrecognized — territory surrounded by Azerbaijan, and Armenia retained control of some of the nearby areas. Effectively, it was an Armenian victory.
In the years that followed, the ceasefire was frequently violated by both sides and the underlying issues never resolved. Then on September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan’s forces launched a rapid dawn offensive, beginning 44 days of war.
This time, it was a resounding success for Azerbaijan, retaking all of the Armenian-held territory around Nagorno-Karabakh as well as about a third of the territory itself. At least 6,500 people were killed before the two sides agreed to a Russian-monitored ceasefire and only a winding mountain road was left to connect Armenia and Karabakh. (Though Russia, the preeminent military power in the region, is a traditional ally of Armenia, it has been hedging its bets more in recent years, particularly since the 2018 protests that brought a Western-inclined, democratic government to power in Armenia.)
Finally, in 2023 — with Russia distracted and bogged down by its war in Ukraine — Azerbaijan launched a blockade of Nagorno Karabakh, eventually seizing the region and causing the majority of its Armenian population to flee. The Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh was dissolved in 2024.”
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“What made Azerbaijan’s rapid victory possible? One major factor was Turkey’s strong military support for Azerbaijan, a fellow Muslim, Turkic-speaking nation that Turkey saw as a key ally in extending its influence into the Caucasus. Another related factor was Azerbaijan’s deployment of unmanned drones, particularly the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 attack drone, as well as several models of exploding drones purchased from Israel. These weapons proved stunningly effective at destroying the tanks and air defense systems of the Armenian and Nagorno-Karabakh forces.”
“Several other states have gestation crate bans, but the California and Massachusetts laws are unique because they outlaw not just the use of crates within those states’ borders, but also the sale of pork produced using gestation crates anywhere in the world. Both states import almost all of their pork from bigger pork-producing states (the top three are Iowa, Minnesota, and North Carolina), so the industry has argued that Prop 12 and Massachusetts’ Question 3 unfairly burden producers outside their borders. California in particular makes up about 13 percent of US pork consumption, threatening to upend the industry’s preferred way of doing business for a big chunk of the market.
The California and Massachusetts laws also ban the sale of eggs and veal from animals raised in extreme cage confinement. Both industries opposed Prop 12 before it passed but have largely complied with the law; neither has put up the fierce legal fight that the pork industry has, led by Big Meat lobbying groups like the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, and the American Farm Bureau Federation.
House Agriculture Committee chair Glenn Thompson (R-PA), who introduced this year’s House Farm Bill last month, touts “addressing Proposition 12” as a core priority. The legislation includes a narrowed version of the EATS Act (short for Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression), a bill introduced by Republicans in both chambers last year to ban states from setting their own standards for the production of any agricultural products, animal or vegetable, imported from other states.
The Farm Bill language has been tightened to focus solely on livestock, banning states from setting standards for how animal products imported from other states are raised. It is less extreme only in comparison to the sweeping EATS Act, but also more transparent about its aim to shield the meat industry from accountability. At the Farm Bill markup on May 23, when the legislation passed committee, Thompson urged his colleagues to protect the livestock industry from “inside-the-beltway animal welfare activists.”
The provisions slipped into the Farm Bill may have consequences that reach far beyond the humane treatment of animals. They “could hamstring the ability of states to regulate not just animal welfare but also the sale of meat and dairy products produced from animals exposed to disease, with the use of certain harmful animal drugs, or through novel biotechnologies like cloning, as well as adjacent production standards involving labor, environmental, or cleanliness conditions,” Kelley McGill, a legislative policy fellow at Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program who authored an influential report last year on the potential impacts of the EATS Act, told me in an email.
House Republicans have been trying to use the Farm Bill to overturn public preferences on animal welfare for more than a decade, as Vox’s Kenny Torrella reported last year, ever since the far-right former Rep. Steve King of Iowa introduced the precursor to the EATS Act in 2013. What may seem more surprising, at first blush, is that the factory farm industry’s campaign to force animals back into immobilizing cages has drawn support from a broader swath of authorities, including the Biden administration.”
“North Korean officials have long expressed irritation about balloons coming over from the south containing political information and cultural products banned by the regime. These packets are generally sent over by private individuals, including North Koreans who have defected to the South as well as activists seeking to foment resistance.
Since North Korean people are closed off from the outside world and have little access to political or cultural information, the South Korean balloons are one attempt by activists to combat these constraints. According to North Korean officials, the trash balloons were meant to show South Koreans how annoying these deliveries are and to push back on these efforts as a whole.
“Kim [Jong Un] doesn’t want his people to know about their relative deprivation and the quality of life in the free world. He is more afraid of BTS than US nukes,” Victor Cha, a Georgetown professor of government, told Vox.”
“Overall, the BJP lost 63 of the seats it previously held in the Lok Sabha. That means that, although the BJP still has the most seats of any party in the lower house of parliament, it doesn’t have a majority. Together with its coalition partners, the BJP still has a 293-seat majority, but that’s not enough to make constitutional amendments unchallenged. Modi and the BJP will now encounter more friction — both from the opposition and potentially from within the coalition it formed as an insurance policy during the campaign.”