| | | | | On Sunday, a volatile region became even more unstable after Russian ships fired upon and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels attempting to pass through the Kerch Strait, which is under Russia's de facto control. "Neither [country] is interested in all-out war," writes Leonid Bershidsky for Bloomberg, but "[b]oth leaders will keep the confrontation simmering and the propaganda guns blazing." With an election fast approaching, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko needs to shift the focus off his country's sputtering economy, Bershidsky asserts. "Five years after its Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine is Europe's poorest country, with an economy stuck below the pre-revolutionary level and no breakthrough in sight while oligarchs and corrupt officials keep preying on it…. So he's highlighting his patriotism instead and his success in ripping Ukraine from Russia's orbit." "On the other hand, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who's losing support at home because of unpopular moves such as raising the retirement age, isn't averse to an escalation either to bring back some of the patriotic spirit kindled by Crimea."
| | Tear Gas at the Border Tears into America's Image | | | Donald Trump defended the Border Patrol on Monday after agents used tear gas on Sunday, insisting "they had to use [it] because they were being rushed by some very tough people." Although illegal immigration to the US presents an obvious domestic security risk, using such harsh tactics poses a risk to the US on the world stage. "We're the bad guys now," writes Jared Yates Sexton in The Globe and Mail. "Photographs of women and children crying as they fled clouds of gas now join the disturbing images of migrants in cages, toddlers wailing behind chain-link fences, families separated by armed guards," Sexton notes. It fits with a disturbing pattern of US activity abroad, having "invaded sovereign states, killed untold numbers of innocent victims and committed unthinkable crimes" in recent decades. "Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Emmanuel Macron have already spoken out to promote a world order in which liberal democracies no longer have to depend on America to the do the right thing," Sexton writes. "If we are to reverse this trend and reclaim our place as world leaders, we have to face facts and admit we've lost the moral high ground." | | | President Trump said Monday, not surprisingly, that he doesn't believe a comprehensive climate report released by his administration on Friday. Making matters worse, "his denialism is echoed by other Republicans who should know better," writes Max Boot in the Washington Post. The congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment found that the US has already experienced significant increases in temperature and sea level. "Imagine if these figures reflected a rise in terrorism — or illegal immigration," Boot writes. "Republicans would be freaking out. Yet they are oddly blasé about this climate code red." Boot, a former climate change skeptic himself, contends that conservatives "are captives, first and foremost, of the fossil fuel industry" but "also captives of their own rigid ideology. It is a tragedy for the entire planet that America's governing party is impervious to science and reason."
| | Brexit: So Close, Yet So Far | | | Now that the EU has approved Theresa May's Brexit agreement, the British prime minister faces the real challenge: convincing her own Parliament to support it. "The trouble is that Mrs. May's deal, inevitably, is a compromise, whereas Brexit has taken on the characteristics of a fundamentalist religion," observes The Economist. "Hardline Leavers are incensed that Britain will remain part of a customs union with the EU until further notice, in order to avoid reintroducing a hard border in Ireland," according to The Economist. "They would rather leave with no deal than with Mrs. May's, and hope that by voting against it they might achieve such an outcome. Remainers, meanwhile, still hope that the whole thing could be called off if Mrs. May's deal is voted down." "As long as these two options appear to be on the table, it looks as if too few MPs will be willing to accept Mrs. May's compromise."
| | "Pandora's Box Has Been Opened" | | | A Chinese scientist claims to have produced humanity's first genetically-edited babies, a stunning scientific breakthrough if true. Nonetheless, the announcement ignited an immediate firestorm among scientists and bioethicists, including a group of more than 100 Chinese biomedical researchers, who called the experiment "crazy."
"Such irreversible alterations on human genes will inevitably go into the human gene pool," the group writes in a public letter translated by Quartz. As questions swirl about whether the project actually received approval from an ethics review board, they condemn the research as "a strike at the reputation and development of China's science" and denounce any gene editing on human embryos "without scrutiny on ethics and safety." "Pandora's Box has been opened. We need to close it before we lose our last chance."
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