Protests across Russia and Belarus over the weekend. The main target is corruption. Here’s a backgrounder about the situation in Belarus. Alexei Navalny, a leader of the opposition in Russia, sparked protests there with a video about Dmitry Medvedev’s corruption (English subtitles). Why the protests focused on Medvedev. They are a problem for Putin too. The discontent is likely to affect Russia’s next election. Photo: A demonstration in Belarus.
How they do it: The CNS group figures out North Korea’s missile secrets. A reminder of the military situation in the Koreas. As part of current military exercises, the US and South Korea are reported to have practiced destroying North Korea’s chemical weapons. I’d like to know more about that: you need specialized equipment to destroy chemical weapons.
An optimistic report about nonproliferation in Myanmar (formerly Burma). But there are some strange, very large buildings in the Myanmar jungle.
Soviet nuclear testing spread fallout over populated areas. No way to figure out exactly how much it was, but it was bad.
Some analysis around the Trump administration. (You didn’t think you could escape it, did you?)
Rex Tillerson is still acting like a CEO. How Exxon employees think about the management suite contrasts with the plain-vanilla Fourth Floor I recall from Los Alamos. (Now Seventh Floor, I hear.) And the director traveled commercial, like all the rest of us. More: The ghost ship anchored at Foggy Bottom.The ghost ship anchored at Foggy Bottom.
Storified tweets on what we actually know about Trump and Russia. Several commentators, particularly on Twitter, are leaping to conclusions far beyond what the facts support. But there is a lot known; it’s just that this is a very complex, far-ranging story.
Trump’s immigration policies and threats are making foreign students and scholars think twice about coming to the US. This is bad for scholarship, but it is also important for the health of colleges and universities. Foreign students pay full tuition, in contrast to most American students. A few full tuition students make an enormous difference in the budgets of small schools. We may see more of those schools start to fail as a result of Trump policies.
Nuclear Diner 