I’ve Studied 13 Days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This Is What I See When I Look at Putin. Two nuclear-armed states on a collision course with no obvious exit ramp. An erratic Russian leader using apocalyptic language — “if you want us to all meet in hell, it’s up to you.” ........ Even if we assume Mr. Putin is a rational actor who wishes to avoid nuclear annihilation, that is not necessarily reassuring. Contrary to popular belief, the biggest danger of nuclear war in October 1962 did not arise from the so-called eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Khrushchev and Kennedy but from
their inability to control events that they themselves had set in motion
. ........... there were times when both leaders were unaware of developments on the battlefield that assumed a logic and momentum of their own. ........... Khrushchev never authorized the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane over Cuba by a Soviet missile on Oct. 27, 1962, the most dangerous day of the crisis. Kennedy was unaware that another U-2 strayed over Russian airspace the same day, triggering Soviet air defenses.“There’s always some sonofabitch that doesn’t get the word,” was how he put it later.
........... A stray shell from either side could cause an accident at a nuclear power plant, spewing radioactive fallout over much of Europe. A bungled attempt by Russia to interdict Western military supplies to Ukraine could spill over into NATO countries like Poland, triggering an automatic U.S. response. A Russian decision to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian troop formations could escalate into a full-blown nuclear exchange with the United States. ......... the 1962 crisis should serve as a reminder of the limits of intelligence gathering. Kennedy was belatedly informed about the deployment of medium-range Soviet missiles to Cuba, but was left in the dark about other equally important matters. .......... He was unaware, for example, of the presence of nearly 100 Soviet tactical nuclear missiles in Cuba targeted on the Guantánamo naval base and a potential American invading force. The C.I.A. underestimated Soviet troop strength on the island and was unable to track the movement of any of the nuclear warheads. ............ What both Kennedy and Khrushchev did possess was an intuitive understanding of the peril confronting not just their own countries but the entire world if the crisis was allowed to escalate. That is why they maintained a back channel to communicate with each other privately (through the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin) even as they denounced each other publicly . .............. they acted swiftly to reach a compromise deal (kept secret for decades) that involved the dismantling of U.S. medium-range missiles in Turkey in exchange for a Soviet nuclear withdrawal from Cuba. ........... Like Kennedy, Khrushchev had experienced the horror of World War II. He knew that nuclear war would be many times more destructive. .......... Mr. Putin, by contrast, has chosen to raise the stakes at every critical point. Escalation has become his preferred tactic. .Putin and M.B.S. Are Laughing at Us Putin and Saudi de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are also probably hoping that the soaring energy inflation unleashed since Russia’s invasion helps the Donald Trump-led Republicans to regain control of at least the House of Representatives in next month’s elections. That would be icing on the cake for both, who view Trump as a president who still loves black crude over green solar and knows how to look the other way when bad things happen to good people. ..........
this cast of brutes, bandits and useful idiots.
........ to ensure oil prices don’t retreat, but instead go back over $100 a barrel and stay there. ......... “Germany’s cabinet on Wednesday passed two decrees to prolong the operation of sizable hard coal-fired power generation plants up to March 31, 2024, and to bring back idled brown coal capacity up to June 30, 2023, to boost supply.” .........All in all, Putin had a bad month in Ukraine — but a good month in the U.S. Congress.
A Year Under the Taliban A single year of extremist rule has turned life upside down for Afghans, especially women. A photographer who has long called the country home captured the jarring changes. ......... But then the militants ended education for girls after the sixth grade. Nilaab’s 13-year-old daughter, Arveey, cried every morning as she watched her younger sister, Raheel, 11, get ready for school. So Nilaab took Raheel out of school, too, until, she said, she could “figure out a solution.” ....... In the section for men, guests sat listlessly around tables with white table clothes. A videographer awkwardly filmed elder men exchanging a few words, while the younger ones stared at their phones. The silence was leaden. ....... Oddly enough, the life of the party was to be found in the women’s section. There, disco light pulsed in different colors, a DJ (female) played popular songs and the women were dancing. Many wedding halls have ignored the music ban in the female sections of their establishments, confident that the vice and virtue police cannot barge in without notice. ........... Some marched past the former U.S. Embassy, chanting “Long live Islam” and “Death to America.” ........ many a suicide attack. The worst was at the Sayed Ul-Shuhada girls’ school last year, and it killed at least 90 people and injured another 240. The school was in a community dense with Hazaras, a Shiite minority .......... The Ministry of Women’s Affairs is now the Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Afghanistan’s National Institute of Music is now a Taliban base. The British Embassy has been turned into a madrasa, an Islamic theology school for young men pursuing Islamic studies. ........ The hardest part about covering the Taliban rally earlier that day was having to smile at the men who had occupied my favorite corners of the city, my favorite cafes and parks, and now would not even allow me to enter because I am a woman. ......... After my home was raided, a friend sent me an old essay by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. “Once the experience of evil has been endured, it is never forgotten,” Ginzburg wrote.
Kathmandu Finally Got Tap Water. After a Climate Disaster, It Was Gone. A disaster that wiped out a decades-long project to bring pipe-borne water to Nepal’s capital shows the mismatch between slow-moving donor-financed efforts and rapid global warming. ......... It started with a sudden spike in temperature, nine degrees Fahrenheit, around the Himalayan glaciers. Then came the explosion: a deluge of melted ice racing down at a rate of 2.5 million gallons per second, unleashing a landslide of sludge that wiped out everything in its path. ........ Ancient trees, fertile fields, homes, power lines, bridges — all were swallowed up. Five people died. But the flood didn’t just leave this verdant valley unrecognizable. Its effects rippled dozens of miles away to the Nepali capital, Kathmandu, which had been waiting decades for something that much of the rest of the world takes for granted: clean tap water. .......... The project had never seriously accounted for climate change, even as evidence of the risk of Himalayan glacial melt mounted. And now it must go back to the drawing board. .........
Kathmandu is one of the world’s wettest capitals.
During the annual monsoon, rivulets of water run down the streets and into the swollen Bagmati River. ......... Once a pit stop for mountaineers on their way to Everest or other peaks, with a population working mostly as rice farmers, the city had grown in stature as it found a place at the end of the hippie trail. Its sublime landscape, ancient temples and first-rate hash drew young visitors from across the globe. ........ “People wanted that big project because it brought money into the country, not just water, that people in government and others could get money from,” said Cheryl Colopy, who wrote about Melamchi in her book “Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia’s Water Crisis.” ......... Corruption riddled the project from the outset ........ Now, 50 years after the idea was first floated, and with Nepali taxpayers still on the hook for about $420 million in loans, the government is no closer to supplying its parched capital city with drinking water. ......... the annual monsoons brought a nightly chorus of croaking frogs and jasmine-perfumed air......... But many of the wetlands and rice paddies that absorbed the monsoon rain and topped up the water table have since been paved over, as the Kathmandu Valley urbanized at one of Asia’s fastest rates, with its population rising from over half a million in 1991 to more than two million in 2021. ......... Like most people in Kathmandu, Mr. Gaurab relies on an elaborate system to catch, collect and buy enough water for his household. He uses two rooftop tanks of rainwater for washing and plumbing. He buys additional supplies from water tankers for washing vegetables and drinking. .......... In 2008, a river embankment failed, and the ensuing floods displaced more than three million people. Four years later, a glacier-fed river in Pokhara, Nepal’s second-largest city, flooded, causing extensive damage. In 2016, a dam in neighboring China containing a glacial lake burst, washing away a hydropower project in Nepal. ......... On the day of the disaster last year, Sharmila Shrestha was cooking dinner when she received a call from a relative living upstream, urging her to run. Her family of four managed to escape to higher groundBlunt Criticism of Russian Army Signals New Challenge for Putin An official in a Russian-occupied region of Ukraine suggested Russia’s defense minister should shoot himself because of his army’s failings, an unusually blunt and public rebuke of Kremlin leadership. .......... Russia’s floundering invasion of Ukraine has produced an extraordinary barrage of criticism from supporters of the war in recent days, directed primarily at the leadership of the Russian military. The outpouring of discontent is creating a new challenge to President Vladimir V. Putin, who, after cracking down on Russia’s liberal opposition, now faces growing dissent in his own camp. ........... “Many people are saying that as an officer, the defense minister could simply shoot himself for being the one who let things get to this state,” said Mr. Stremousov, Russia’s “deputy governor” of the Kherson region of southern Ukraine. .......... Last month, it was largely pro-Russian bloggers who were voicing anger over the failings that led to the Russian army’s being routed in northeastern Ukraine. But after Russian troops were forced to retreat in two other sections of the front line in the last week, prominent officials have increasingly joined the chorus. .......... Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the defense committee in Russia’s lower house of Parliament, excoriated the Defense Ministry for covering up the bad news from the front. Another lawmaker said that members of Parliament had written to Russia’s prosecutor general asking for an investigation into the military’s supply problems. ......... There were indications that the criticism was part of infighting in the Russian ruling elite that was spilling into the open. It comes on the heels of a tirade against the military leadership published over the weekend by Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman ruler of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya and an ally of Mr. Putin. ............... Mr. Kadyrov’s broadside appeared to open the floodgates — especially after the Kremlin did nothing public to punish him for his breach of wartime discipline. While none of the prominent pro-war critics of the military have attacked Mr. Putin personally, the Kremlin could still lose control of the situation if Russian battlefield losses continue, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst. ............ “This is a rather dangerous situation for Putin because no one is in control of it.” ......... One common thread in the criticism has been that Russia’s military, despite the country’s enormous defense budget, turned out to be unprepared for a real war. Many Russian hawks have been calling on the military for months to escalate its offensive, but are frustrated by its poor execution. ......... “So what’s the genius idea of the General Staff?” Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent state television host, said on his online talk show on Thursday. “Just explain it to me, dear people who have received all the necessary budget resources for so many years.” ......... What he did not appear to have bargained for is that the war’s loudest supporters would themselves turn into critics of the government. On Telegram — a social network and messaging app widely used by Kremlin critics and supporters alike — war bloggers and public officials have gone from cheerleading Russia’s advances to grumbling ever more loudly about the military’s failings. .......... The move was supposed to be a way for Mr. Putin to escalate the war quickly; instead it turned into a demonstration of the Russian military’s inability to house and train an influx of new soldiers. ........ how some of the men who were drafted were in their 50s and 60s, even though the officially announced cutoff age was 35. Others highlighted how a man blind in one eye was drafted. ........... The questions around mobilization are part of a larger, unusually public debate about how Russia’s military command is executing the war,
and how is it possible that Russia could be losing
. While the most common excuse is that Russia is fighting the entire NATO alliance, the questions are hitting closer to home. ............ “‘Who is leading us? What is going on? Who are these donkeys? We have traitors among us, we need to shoot them.’ That is some of the worm-eating-its-own tail stuff that should be sending alarm bells up the chain.” .............. “What is he going to do, sacrifice Shoigu or Gerasimov?” said Mr. Alberque. “Saying that his commissars are wrong only works so far in a campaign that has been owned so personally by Putin. ......... analysts are surprised at both the public level of criticism of the war and how much of it is being lobbed at senior figures.Tracking the Coming Economic Storm Meteorologists tell us that global warming has created new problems for forecasters. Not only are hurricanes getting stronger, they’re also intensifying more rapidly than they used to, making it difficult to issue early warnings for communities in their path. ......... the risks a hard-money policy poses to financial stability and the world economy in general are looming larger. ........ the cost of shipping a container across the Pacific, which was $20,586 in September 2021, is now $2,265. ........ the potential mayhem from rapidly rising interest rates (and the rising dollar, which is causing stress around the world). ....... we really, really don’t want the Fed to do a Lee County, and refuse to act on warnings of an economic storm until all the uncertainty is gone. By then it will be too late to avoid the worst. .
गठबन्धनमा आज पनि जुटेन सहमति, मैत्रीपूर्ण प्रतिस्पर्धाको प्रस्ताव . .
जनता राज स्थापनाका लागि हामी चुनावमा होमिरहेका छौं
