chemical weapons

Links – March 16, 2018

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

No, Scott Kelly’s year in space didn’t mutate his DNA. There is a lot of VERY bad reporting on this. Top photo from here – Mark Kelly on the left, and Scott on the right.

A good proposal for how Britain might respond to the Salisbury nerve agent attack. Another possibility: Take Putin to the International Criminal Court. Some basic information about nerve agents. Legal basis for options. Decoding the Prime Minister’s speech. Background on Sergei Skripal.

If you read only one thing on the Trump-Kim summit, this should be it. And here are a couple more, from Evans Revere and Jeffrey Lewis. An interview with Siegfried Hecker.

Update: The New York Times has a clickbait article on Russian hacking of the US electrical system. Philip Bump at the Washington Post actually reports on the grid and why it’s not that vulnerable.

Links – February 1, 2018

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Cool dinosaur and mammal tracks at NASA. Top photo from here.

The first thing Congress needs to do, when it can get away from the fever dreams of the worst of its members, is to reconstruct the process for passing a budget before the end of the fiscal year.

Americans Are Rising to This Historic Moment. I’m not as convinced as Eliot Cohen, but I think there are positive signs.

Heather Cox Richardson on creeping authoritarianism.

Five Questions the Nunes Memo Better Answer. What is at stake – the grand bargain with the intelligence community. And why aren’t we hearing more from the intelligence community?

Is the Trump foreign policy great-power competition or America First? It depends on whom you ask.

Zeynep Tukfeci on the latest data privacy debacle. It’s not enough to ask individuals for their permission.

Leaks, feasts and sex parties: How ‘Fat Leonard’ infiltrated the Navy’s floating headquarters in Asia. There are simple ways to avoid this kind of corruption. We need to know why the Navy didn’t apply them.

Victor Cha: Giving North Korea a ‘bloody nose’ carries a huge risk to Americans. Cha was to be US ambassador to South Korea, but apparently the ideas expressed in this op-ed were felt to be disqualifying.

This is definitive, if you have friends who are still pushing the Sy Hersh narrative about nerve agents in Syria. It was the Syrian government who were responsible for the sarin attacks.