The new space race

Devika Rao, Staff writer
Mon, January 16, 2023 

Astronauts. Illustrated | Getty Images

The original space race was a key part of the Cold War, when the U.S. and the USSR competed to be the first country on the moon. Now almost 70 years later, the U.S. is in a new space race with a new competitor: China. Here's everything you need to know:
Why is there a new space race?

Simply put, the moon is prime real estate and both the U.S. and China want to stake their claim.

This year, the U.S. launched its 26-day Artemis I mission, sending an Orion space capsule around the moon before returning to Earth. This was a step toward the U.S. once again putting people on the moon, but this time with the hopes of a more permanent setup, writes Politico.

This objective is at risk because of China's lunar military potential. The country has expressed interest in landing taikonauts, the Chinese word for astronauts, on the moon as well as creating a space governance system. NASA has warned that China could potentially lay claim to prime resource areas on the moon under the guise of research, potentially barring others countries' access and potentially endangering U.S. satellites.

The U.S.-proposed moon base would likely be collaborative between multiple nations. However, in the 1990s, China was thought to have stolen U.S. space technology. This led to the Wolf Amendment, passed in 2011, which prevented NASA from ever collaborating with China. In turn, there are talks of China potentially launching a joint moon mission with Russia instead.

"It is a fact: we're in a space race," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they say, 'Keep out, we're here, this is our territory.'" He noted that China lays claim to the South China Sea despite it being considered international waters.

At the same time, China's space technology is rapidly improving raising worries that China might reach its goal earlier than expected.
How is China improving its space technology?

China has shown quick advancement in space technology over the past year. One of the most prominent achievements was the launching of a new space station in November. The Shenzhou 15 mission launched three taikonauts, sending them to the newly built Tiangong space station to wrap up construction. This makes China just the third country to operate a space station, after the U.S. and Russia.

The new station is technologically advanced and can support other astro-goals that China hopes to accomplish including launching a new space telescope, running experiments on life in space, and launching missions to Mars, writes Forbes.

Along with the space station, China also launched robotic landers and rovers on the moon and Mars. In addition, the country was the first to use landers and rovers to collect samples from the far side of the moon, continues Politico. "It's entirely possible they could catch up and surpass us, absolutely," remarked Space Force Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno. "The progress they've made has been stunning — stunningly fast."

China's great improvements to its space program have concerned the U.S. government.
How does the space race play into ongoing tensions?

The U.S. and China have been experiencing tension for many years now, making this space race especially contentious. Recent political conflict has included the U.S. giving vocal support to Taiwan, a territory that China has long claimed.

Additionally, China is a strong ally of Russia which the U.S. and other Western nations have condemned for its invasion of Ukraine. China may potentially launch a joint moon project with Russia, which would leave the U.S.'s space power and moon claim at even more significant risk.

China has been vying to solidify its standing as a frontrunner in innovation and combat, and landing on the moon could achieve that. The country has also shown that it may be able to set up communications between the Earth and the moon via existing satellites, which could spell trouble.

"There is potentially mischief China can do on the moon," Terry Virts, former commander of the International Space Station and Space Shuttle, commented to Politico. "If they set up infrastructure there they could potentially deny communications." China has responded to these claims saying, "Outer space is not a wrestling ground," and that, "China always advocates the peaceful use of outer space." China is also part of the Outer Space Treaty which prevents countries from staking a claim on celestial bodies.

Either way, the U.S. has also been working to get back on the moon, hoping to launch moon mission Artemis II by 2024, and Artemis III, which will put humans on the moon, by 2025, per The New York Times. However, China's moon landing date, "keeps getting closer and closer" according to Nelson, and the U.S. will only beat them there "the good Lord willing."

It's official: China's population is shrinking for the first time in 60 years

Matthew Loh
Mon, January 16, 2023 

Travellers crowd at the gates and wait for trains at the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station during the peak travel rush for the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday on January 15, 2023 in Shanghai, China.

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

China's population declined in 2022, the first time since the early 1960s.


The country's population fell by 850,000 people in 2022 to 1.4118 billion, per official statistics.


The drop, coupled with China's aging population, poses risks to the health of the nation's economy.

China's population is officially shrinking.

Mainland China's population fell by 850,000 people in 2022 to 1.4118 billion, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday. The country recorded 9.56 million new births and 10.41 million deaths in 2022. The news comes after years of falling birth rates and as Beijing grapples with an impending demographic crisis.

The decline is the first in China since Mao Zedong's failed Great Leap Forward of the early 1960s, when nationwide famine claimed an estimated 30 million lives.

The drop in 2022 also comes after China posted its slowest ever population growth in 2021, when its population rose by 480,000 people.

This new data poses drastic implications for the health of China's economy, such as potential falling demand for goods like housing and a significantly reduced working-age population.

Deaths in the country also increased, in part due to the pandemic — China has been reeling from a surge in COVID-related fatalities over the last month. On Saturday, health authorities reported nearly 60,000 COVID-related deaths between December 8 and January 12.

Health data firms elsewhere in the world estimate China's total pandemic death toll over the next few months will reach at least 1 million.

Meanwhile, India is set to overtake China as the world's most populous nation. The United Nations projects that India's population will hit 1.67 billion people by 2050, while China is expected to have a smaller population of 1.32 billion by then.

China records 1st population fall in decades as births drop






Commuters wearing face masks walk along a street in the central business district in Beijing on Jan. 12, 2023. China has announced its first overall population decline in recent years amid an aging society and plunging birthrate

. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Mon, January 16, 2023

BEIJING (AP) — China has announced its first population decline in decades as what has been the world's most populous nation ages and its birthrate plunges.

The National Bureau of Statistics reported Tuesday that the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than the previous year. The tally includes only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Macao as well as foreign residents.

That left a total of 1.41 billion people, with 9.56 million births against 10.41 million deaths, the bureau said at a briefing on Tuesday.

Men outnumbered women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million, a result of the strict one-child policy that only officially ended in 2016 and a traditional preference for male offspring to carry on the family name.

Since abandoning the policy, China has sought to encourage families to have second or even third children, with little success, reflecting attitudes in much of east Asia where birth rates have fallen precipitously. In China, the expense of raising children in cities is often cited as a cause.

China has long been the world's most populous nation, but is expected to soon be overtaken by India, if it has not already. Estimates put India's population at more than 1.4 billion and continuing to grow.

The last time China is believed to have recorded a population decline was during the Great Leap Forward at the end of the 1950s, under then-leader Mao Zedong's disastrous drive for collective farming and industrialization that produced a massive famine killing tens of millions of people.

Yi Fuxian, an expert on Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tweeted that the data reflected how China’s population began to decline nine to 10 years earlier than projections by Chinese officials and the United Nations.

That means that China's “real demographic crisis is beyond imagination and that all of China’s past … policies were based on faulty demographic data,” Yi wrote.

“China’s demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected," he added, predicting that China would have to take a less combative tone internationally and improve is relations with the West.

China's statistics bureau said the working-age population between 16 and 59 years old totaled 875.56 million, accounting for 62.0% of the national population, while those aged 65 and older totaled 209.78 million, accounting for 14.9% of the total.

The statistics also showed increasing urbanization in a country that traditionally had been largely rural. Over 2022, the permanent urban population increased by 6.46 million to reach 920.71 million, or 65.22%, while the rural population fell by 7.31 million.

It wasn't immediately clear if the population figures have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak that was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan before spreading around the world. China has been accused by some specialists of underreporting deaths from the virus by blaming them on underlying conditions, but no estimates of the actual number have been published.

The United Nations estimated last year that the world’s population reached 8 billion on Nov. 15 and that India will replace China as the world’s most populous nation in 2023.

In a report released on World Population Day, the U.N. also said global population growth fell below 1% in 2020 for the first time since 1950.

Also Tuesday, the bureau released data showing China’s economic growth fell to its second-lowest level in at least four decades last year under pressure from anti-virus controls and a real estate slump.

The world’s No. 2 economy grew by 3% in 2022, less than half of the previous year’s 8.1%, the data showed.

That was the second-lowest annual rate since at least the 1970s, after the drop to 2.4% in 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, although activity is reviving after restrictions that kept millions of people at home and sparked protests were lifted.

China’s population falls for first time since 1961, highlights demographic crisis





Children play on swings at a playground in Beijing

Mon, January 16, 2023 
By Albee Zhang and Farah Master

BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) -China's population fell last year for the first time in six decades, a historic turn that is expected to mark the start of a long period of decline in its citizen numbers with profound implications for its economy and the world.

The drop, the worst since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine, also lends weight to predictions that India will become the world's most populous nation this year.

China's population declined by roughly 850,000 to 1.41175 billion at the end of 2022, the country's National Bureau of Statistics said.

Long-term, U.N. experts see China's population shrinking by 109 million by 2050, more than triple the decline of their previous forecast in 2019.

That's caused domestic demographers to lament that China will get old before it gets rich, slowing the economy as revenues drop and government debt increases due to soaring health and welfare costs.

"China's demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defense and foreign policies," said demographer Yi Fuxian.

He added that the country's shrinking labour force and downturn in manufacturing heft would further exacerbate high prices and high inflation in the United States and Europe.

The national statistics bureau said in a statement that people should not worry about the decline in population as "overall labour supply still exceeds demand".

China's birth rate last year was just 6.77 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 7.52 births in 2021 and marking the lowest birth rate on record.

The death rate, the highest since 1974 during the Cultural Revolution, was 7.37 deaths per 1,000 people, which compares with rate of 7.18 deaths in 2021.

ONE-CHILD POLICY IMPACT

Much of the demographic downturn is the result of China's one-child policy imposed between 1980 and 2015 as well as sky-high education costs that have put many Chinese off having more than one child or even having any at all.

The data was the top trending topic on Chinese social media after the figures were released on Tuesday. One hashtag,"#Is it really important to have offspring?" had hundreds of millions of hits.

"The fundamental reason why women do not want to have children lies not in themselves, but in the failure of society and men to take up the responsibility of raising children. For women who give birth this leads to a serious decline in their quality of life and spiritual life," posted one netizen with the username Joyful Ned.

China's stringent zero-COVID policies that were in place for three years have caused further damage to the country's demographic outlook, population experts have said.

Local governments have since 2021 rolled out measures to encourage people to have more babies, including tax deductions, longer maternity leave and housing subsidies. President Xi Jinping also said in October the government would enact further supportive policies.

Measures so far, however, have done little to arrest the long-term trend.

Online searches for baby strollers on China's Baidu search engine dropped 17% in 2022 and are down 41% since 2018, while searches for baby bottles are down more than a third since 2018. In contrast, searches for elderly care homes surged eight-fold last year.

The reverse is playing out in India, where Google Trends shows a 15% year-on-year increase in searches for baby bottles in 2022, while searches for cribs rose almost five-fold.

(Reporting by Albee Zhang in Beijing and Farah Master in Hong Kong; Additional reporting by Kevin Yao in Beijing; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

Ex-Mexico security chief’s trial poised to lift lid on US and Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’

Oscar Lopez in Mexico City
Mon, January 16, 2023 

Photograph: Marco Ugarte/AP

One of Mexico’s most powerful former officials will stand trial in the US this week, charged with accepting million-dollar bribes from a violent cartel in a case with profound political implications that could expose the inner workings of the “war on drugs” on both sides of the border.

Genaro García Luna, a former head of Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI who went on to lead the country’s security ministry, was arrested in Texas in 2019, charged with conspiring to traffic cocaine and lying to the US government.

Related: Twenty-four hours of terror as cartel violence engulfs Mexican city

He was subsequently charged with taking multimillion-dollar bribes from the powerful Sinaloa cartel, once run by the drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, in exchange for allowing it to operate with impunity, all while he was supposedly spearheading Mexico’s anti-drug efforts.

The accusations against García Luna surfaced during El Chapo’s trial, when one of the Sinaloa cartel’s members testified that he had given the former security minister briefcases filled with cash. If convicted, the former official faces up to life in prison.

“For nearly two decades, García Luna betrayed those he was sworn to protect”, said Seth DuCharme, acting US attorney for the eastern district of New York, announcing the second set of charges in 2020, “by accepting bribes from members of the Sinaloa cartel to facilitate their crimes and empower their criminal enterprise.”

The trial, which is set to begin in a Brooklyn court on Tuesday, has the potential to expose the insidious corruption that has plagued Mexican security agencies, while also underscoring the failures of the US-supported fight against drug trafficking groups, and provide Mexico’s current president with still more ammunition for his constant attacks against previous administrations.

Calderón sends in the army

Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, ordered thousands of troops onto the streets in response to an explosion of horrific violence in his native state of Michoacán.

Calderón hoped to smash the drug cartels with his heavily militarized onslaught but the approach was counter-productive and exacted a catastrophic human toll. As Mexico’s military went on the offensive, the body count sky-rocketed to new heights and tens of thousands were forced from their homes, disappeared or killed.

Kingpin strategy

Simultaneously Calderón also began pursuing the so-called “kingpin strategy” by which authorities sought to decapitate the cartels by targeting their leaders.

That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps – notably Arturo Beltrán Leyva who was gunned down by Mexican marines in 2009 – but also did little to bring peace. In fact, many believe such tactics served only to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more violence as new, less predictable factions squabbled for their piece of the pie.

Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s rhetoric on crime softened as Mexico sought to shed its reputation as the headquarters of some the world’s most murderous mafia groups.

But Calderón’s policies largely survived, with authorities targeting prominent cartel leaders such as Sinaloa’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, Mexico’s president bragged: “Mission accomplished”. But the violence went on. By the time Peña Nieto left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record year of murders, with nearly 36,000 people slain.

"Hugs not bullets"

The leftwing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December, promising a dramatic change in tactics. López Obrador, or Amlo as most call him, vowed to attack the social roots of crime, offering vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged young people at risk of being ensnared by the cartels.

“It will be virtually impossible to achieve peace without justice and [social] welfare,” Amlo said, promising to slash the murder rate from an average of 89 killings per day with his “hugs not bullets” doctrine.

Amlo also pledged to chair daily 6am security meetings and create a 60,000 strong "National Guard". But those measures have yet to pay off, with the new security force used mostly to hunt Central American migrants.

Mexico now suffers an average of about 96 murders per day, with nearly 29,000 people killed since Amlo took office.

“During Felipe Calderón’s presidency, [García Luna] was one of the two or three most important actors in the fight against drug trafficking, probably the most important,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a former foreign policy adviser to Calderón. “So yes, it is very significant.”

Once the head of Mexico’s Federal Investigation Agency, García Luna was selected by Calderón in 2006 to serve as secretary of public security, which also put him in charge of Mexico’s now defunct federal police.

Related: Architect of Mexico’s war on drugs held in Texas for taking cartel bribes

Throughout Calderón’s presidency, García Luna was tasked with developing and implementing the president’s militarized assault on the nation’s powerful drug cartels. In doing so, he worked closely with American security officials and traveled regularly to the US.

“He was one of Washington’s favorites,” said Fernández de Castro.

But according to the current US attorney for the eastern district of New York, Breon Peace, García Luna was secretly receiving millions of dollars from the Sinaloa cartel. In a letter last week to Judge Brian M Cogan, Peace said that, in exchange for the bribes, the cartel was granted “safe passage for its drug shipments, sensitive law enforcement information about investigations into the cartel, and information about rival drug cartels”.

The cartel was also at times tipped off about potential arrests, and even if they were arrested, cartel members were allowed to walk free. While being protected by García Luna, the Sinaloa cartel was able to import “multi-ton drug loads” to New York, according to Peace.

After leaving office in 2012, García Luna moved to Miami, where his lavish lifestyle, including a multimillion-dollar home and yacht, was supported by businessmen with whom he had worked while in office, helping them extend government surveillance and technology contracts.

Using what the US attorney called “an opaque constellation of shell companies, straw buyers, foreign bank accounts, cash businesses, and proxies”, García Luna is alleged to have “spent his time peddling the influence he had gained while participating in the conspiracy to create wealth for himself in the United States”.

García Luna has pleaded not guilty to the charges. César de Castro, a lawyer for the former security secretary, did not respond to an interview request.

People who knew and worked with García Luna, particularly in his early days as head of the Federal Investigation Agency, described him as serious and strict – a figure at odds with the mansion-dwelling Miami playboy portrayed by US prosecutors.

“He was a very disciplined guy, very institutional,” said Gustavo Mohar, who served as the general secretary of Mexico’s top intelligence agency CISEN under President Calderón. “He was the classic policeman who in front of his superiors was very ‘Yes sir, no sir.’”

The problem, said Mohar, came once García Luna was appointed to the head of the security ministry, a position with extraordinary power.

He became the guy in charge of taking down organized crime. I think that warped his sense of reality

Gustavo Mohar

“He became the policeman, the guy in charge of taking down organized crime, and particularly drug trafficking,” Mohar said. “I think that warped his sense of reality.”

Given the close ties the former security secretary once enjoyed with Washington, the trial could also be awkward for US officials, security analysts said.

“It’s part of this complex web of cooperation but also complicity between officials in Mexico and the United States in the war against drug trafficking and organized crime,” said Fernández de Castro, the former Calderón adviser.

Related: Betrayal, torture and a $100m bribe: what the El Chapo trial has revealed

Peace, the US attorney, said the government “expects that numerous witnesses, including several former high-ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel, will testify”. As happened at the trial of El Chapo, this testimony, along with García Luna’s own, has the potential to implicate current and former officials on both sides of the border.

But one official likely looking forward to the trial is the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who built his brand campaigning on the corruption that plagued his predecessors.

“This is a marvelous gift for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, because it speaks to the corruption of the past,” said Fernández de Castro. “It’s a football the US justice system is giving him so he can score an incredible goal.”

Unlike the 2020 arrest of Gen Salvador Cienfuegos, which caused such outrage among Mexican officials that the US returned him to Mexico, López Obrador has spent months raging about García Luna – even reprimanding Mexican media for not covering the trial enough.

“It’s going to be interesting,” the president said last week. “It’s very important for me to follow it, and I hope the media are going to be reporting on it constantly.”

US drug trial opens for Mexico ex-security head
 

In this Jan 3, 2020 file courtroom sketch, defense attorney Cesar de Castro, left, Mexico's former top security official, Genaro Garcia Luna, center, and a court interpreter, appear for an arraignment hearing in Brooklyn federal court in New York, Jan. 3, 2020. The former top security official is scheduled to go on trial Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023, on charges he accepted millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for helping the powerful Sinaloa Cartel move drugs and its members avoid capture.

 (AP Photo/Elizabeth Williams, File)

 In this 2008 photo provided by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, Jesus Zambada is shown. In 2019, jurors in his New York trial heard Zambada testify that he personally made at least $6 million in hidden payments to top Mexican security official Genaro Garcia Luna on behalf of his older brother, cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. 

(U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York via AP, File)

MARK STEVENSON
Mon, January 16, 2023

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The man who was once Mexico's top security official and in charge of fighting the drug cartels goes on trial Tuesday on charges he accepted millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for helping the powerful Sinaloa Cartel move drugs and its members avoid capture.

Genaro García Luna was best known as the mumbling, tough-looking former security secretary under ex-President Felipe Calderón who spearheaded the bloody war on cartels between 2006 and 2012.

United States prosecutors allege he was so brazen he accepted tens of millions of dollars, often stuffed in briefcases. The evidence against him includes pay stubs, though whether they were from official jobs, private sector consultancy, cartel payments or other bribes is unclear.

They say he continued to live off his ill-gotten proceeds even after he moved to the United States, where he was arrested in 2019, though the defense says he was a legitimate businessman. Jury selection was scheduled to begin Tuesday.


In the end, the case could reveal the inner workings of how Mexican cartels have been able to operate so openly for so long: by bribing Mexican police and military right up to the top ranks.

“For decades, Mexico’s political elite, of all parties, has sought by any means to have security ministers, generals, police commanders, interior secretaries and high-ranking officials tried and imprisoned in Mexico … all that to avoid them giving information on the ties between the drug cartels and politicians,” said Mexican security analyst David Saucedo. “Garcia Luna’s trial in the United States breaks with that pattern.”

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has welcomed the trial expected to cast light on corruption in the administration of Calderón, who the president accuses of having robbed him of the presidency in 2006.

But López Obrador himself fought tooth and nail to avoid a U.S. trial of former defense secretary Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos on similar charges in 2020, at one point threatening to kick DEA agents out of Mexico unless the general was returned, which he was.

The trial begins just days after U.S. President Joe Biden met with López Obrador in Mexico City. The two governments pledged continued cooperation against the drug cartels, especially against the scourge of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which contributed to more than 107,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2021. López Obrador scrapped the civilian federal police force that García Luna once led and put the military in charge of much of the country's security.

“It’s not the same to put a civilian PAN official on trial, as it is to put a defense secretary on trial, when your whole national security policy rests on the armed forces,” said Ana Vanessa Cárdenas, an international security analyst at the Anahuac University, referring to Calderón's conservative National Action Party.

García Luna has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges and a continuing criminal enterprise. He could face decades in prison if convicted.

What he will face in a Brooklyn courtroom is a parade of government witnesses, including high-level cartel members, of a kind not seen in Brooklyn since Sinaloa boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was convicted there in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison. Some accusations against García Luna surfaced at the Guzmán trial.

“While holding public office, (García Luna) used his official positions to assist the Sinaloa Cartel, a notorious Mexican drug cartel, in exchange for multimillion-dollar bribes. At trial, the government expects that numerous witnesses, including several former high-ranking members of the Sinaloa Cartel, will testify about bribes paid to the defendant in exchange for protection,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace wrote in a court filing last week.

“In exchange for these bribes, the defendant provided the Sinaloa Cartel with, among other things, safe passage for its drug shipments, sensitive law enforcement information about investigations into the cartel, and information about rival drug cartels,” Peace wrote. “These payments allowed the cartel at times to receive warnings in advance of law enforcement efforts to apprehend cartel members and to allow cartel members to be released if arrested.”

Before convicting Guzmán in 2019, jurors in his New York trial heard former cartel member Jesús Zambada testify that he personally made at least $6 million in hidden payments to García Luna, on behalf of his older brother, cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

The cartel is now believed to be run by Zambada and at least three of Guzmán's sons, one of whom was arrested earlier this month on an extradition request from the United States.

García Luna isn't the first top Mexican official arrested for involvement with drug traffickers. Gen. Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo was made Mexico’s drug czar by President Ernesto Zedillo in 1996. He was arrested the following year after it was discovered he was living in a luxury apartment owned by the leader of the Juarez cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Did Russian Archaeologists Really Discover a New Ancient Culture?

Candida Moss
Mon, January 16, 2023 

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

Do you ever find yourself performing a task only to find that someone—possibly even you—has already done the work? Something similar happened to a team near the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, in 2018. While construction workers were flattening land in preparation for a new cemetery, they discovered that they were on the site of a 2,000-year-old tomb. What are the chances? Now, scientists from the Siberian Federal University claim that the tomb holds evidence of a new, previously unknown ancient culture. But does it?

According to the story, first published in Haaretz and now making the rounds on archeological news websites, the discovery took place as workers bulldozed a mound (30m in diameter) that, at the time, they believed to be a natural hill. They quickly discovered that it was not and, since 2021, Dr. Dimitry Vinogradov and his team have been excavating the site.

The tomb itself is roughly 2,000 years old and features a large rectangular pit, lined with wood and inlaid with a birch bark carpet. When it was in use, the tomb likely had a roof, but the bulldozing of the site destroyed all evidence of it. Inside the tomb were the remains of fifty people, who were interred alongside their most prized belongings. Archeologists found bronze axes and daggers, knives, mirrors, needles, bronze plaques, beads, and ceramic containers for food. One plaque showed an image of a stag—a popular ancient motif in Siberian Scythian art.

These are likely to have been objects that people would were supposed to need, and use, in the afterlife.

Vinogradov and his team believe that the grave was likely a family tomb used over successive generations. The discolored soil that surrounds it suggests that, at some point, the tomb was sealed and set ablaze. It would then have been covered in soil to create the burial mound (known as a kurgan) typical of the region.

The archeologists argue that the tomb is evidence of a previously unknown “Scythian-type culture” that flourished in the second-first century B.C. They call this transitional culture “Tesinian,” adapting a term originally coined by historian Mikhail Gryzanov. Gryzanov developed his theory while excavating a site in the Minusinsk Basin and Russian archeologists link it to Tagar culture. It’s a bold claim and a fascinating discovery, but it is also one that deserves some scrutiny.

To begin with we have to start with the Scythians themselves. Who were they and on what basis is this new culture being compared to them?

The Scythians—who left no writings of their own—were a nomadic equestrian people who flourished from the seventh to the third centuries B.C. and spread their influence all over Central Asia from China through Siberia to the northern Black Sea region.

Almost everything scholars know about the Scythians—including their name—is drawn from ancient Greek, Assyrian, and Persian literature. Perhaps the most vivid description comes from the fifth century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote that no one who attacks the Scythians escapes unscathed. Scythians were known for their remarkable mobility as well: Herodotus added that you cannot find the Scythians unless they want to be found. Both male and female Scythians were well-known for their physical endurance and remarkable ability to endure a rugged lifestyle lived on horseback and in frigid temperatures. Together, their migratory habits and tough character traits intimidated other peoples. Herodotus called them “invincible”, and the historian Thucydides agreed. The Scythians defeated King Darius of Persia and at one point even reached the borders of Egypt.

For a people who could vanish seemingly without a trace, they left a huge impression in the memory of their neighbors. In her book The Amazons Stanford historian Adrienne Mayor excavates the ways that the Scythians informed ancient Greek ideas about the mythical Amazons. Even today the ideal of a warrior horse-riding people lives on in Game of Thrones. George R. R. Martin has written that he based the Dothraki on an “amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures” and a number of historians have pointed out the similarities between Dothraki and Scythians.

Archeologically speaking, and like most nomadic groups, the Scythians are difficult to pin down. Most of the data about their lives comes from the tens of thousands of burial mounds they left throughout the Eurasian steppe region. Some remains reveal that some of them were heavily tattooed, and various forms of evidence suggest that they used cannabis (and later alcohol) to protect them from the cold.

These are generalizations, however, that obscure a lot of differences as well. Mayor told the Daily Beast that the name Scythian is a “handy collective name” that refers to “myriad diverse tribes” that were “loosely connected, constantly moving, and intermarrying.” Each of the groups that made up Scythian culture, she added, had its “own customs, tongues, histories, etc, but similar styles of warfare, clothing, weapons, equipment, burial practices, and artistic motifs.” In other words, when we talk about the Scythians, we are already talking about a loosely arranged group that had diverse traditions and customs even if they shared a love of horse, warfare, itinerancy, and burial customs.

The second thing to note is the problem of the evidence. The top of this burial bound was sliced off before the modern excavations meaning that the scientists involved are missing a great deal of information about the tomb. Even the estimate of the burial mound’s diameter is based on an analysis of old photographs. As Mayor pointed out to me, this is not an isolated discovery. Scholars are aware of roughly 150 burial mounds in the Krasnoyarsk region that were destroyed during urban development projects in the 20th century. This means that a great deal of comparative information has been lost. In addition, there’s much we still don’t know about this new discovery. Peer-reviewed studies take a great deal of time in archeology, but basic details—for example, the gender of the remains discovered at the tomb—have not been released to the broader academic community.

Looking at the evidence that we do have, it’s easy to see points of commonality between the newly excavated burial and other known practices. Certainly, Mayor said, the bronze plaque with the antlered stag is reminiscent of distinctive Scythian-style animal art in kurgans from Ukraine and Kazkakhstan. Mayor told me that, “The burial of several bodies in a kurgan mound with timber walls is like kurgan burials across the steppes.” Many of the same grave goods are found in the other burial mounds. “The only difference with the newly studied kurgan is that the bronze weapons are miniature replicas.” This might be accounted for by the high value of weaponry at the time. It is correct to say that Tagar culture was known to have burned the remains of its dead, but cremation and burial was widely practiced and varied in meaning over time within the same region and culture.

Is the discovery evidence of a new culture? Well, “previously unknown” is a strong statement that requires more research. Given everything we know about the many permutations of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples who lived and intermarried with one another across this vast region this might not even be the right question.

Ancient Maya cities, 'super highways' revealed in latest survey





Laser technology reveals "World's first highway system" in Mayan zone of Guatemala and Mexico

Mon, January 16, 2023 

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - A new high-tech study has revealed nearly 1,000 ancient Maya settlements, including 417 previously unknown cites linked by what may be the world's first highway network and hidden for millennia by the dense jungles of northern Guatemala and southern Mexico.

It is the latest discovery of roughly 3,000-year-old Maya centers and related infrastructure, according to a statement on Monday from a team from Guatemala's FARES anthropological research foundation overseeing the so-called LiDAR studies.

The findings were first published last month in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

All of the newly-identified structures were built centuries before the largest Maya city-states emerged, ushering in major human achievements in math and writing.

LiDAR technology uses planes to shoot pulses of light into dense forest, allowing researchers to peel away vegetation and map ancient structures below.

Among the details revealed in the latest analysis are the ancient world's first-ever extensive system of stone "highways or super-highways," according to the researchers.

Around 110 miles (177 km) of spacious roadways have been revealed so far, with some measuring around 130 feet (40 meters) wide and elevated off the ground by as much as 16 feet (5 meters).

As part of the Cuenca Karstica Mirador-Calakmul study, which extends from northern Guatemala's Peten jungle to southern Mexico's Campeche state, researchers have also identified pyramids, ball game courts plus significant water engineering, including reservoirs, dams and irrigation canals.

"It shows the economic, political and social complexity of what was happening simultaneously across this entire area," said lead researcher Richard Hansen.

The latest finds date to the so-called middle to late pre-classic Maya era, from around 1,000-350 BC, with many of the settlements believed to be controlled by the metropolis known today as El Mirador. That was more than five centuries before the civilization's classical peak, when dozens of major urban centers thrived across present-day Mexico and Central America.

(Reporting by Sofia Menchu and David Alire Garcia, editing by Deepa Babington)

'Huge Cover-Up': GOP Lawmaker Says Feds Must 'Release Everything' On UFOs

BFORE 1947 UFO'S THERE WERE WWII GREMLINS

Ed Mazza
Mon, January 16, 2023

A Republican lawmaker is accusing the government of a cover-up on UFOs, days after a declassified report revealed hundreds of new encounters with what the military now prefers to call unidentified aerial phenomenon.

“This thing is a huge cover-up, for whatever reason,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told NewsNation over the weekend. “And I just feel like America is ready, we need to know, and to stop with all the shenanigans.”

Burchett, who also said there’s a reference to a UFO in the Bible, said recent UFO footage shows the objects making the kinds of maneuvers that no human could withstand.

“If you were human and make the turns that have been seen in some of this footage, you would literally turn into a ketchup package,” he said. “I mean, you would be gone.”

He noted that clips of UFOs, such as the famous “Tic Tac” footage, shows no vapor trails typical of aircraft.

Some have speculated that the seemingly impossible-for-human moves and lack of vapor trails are signs the objects are drones or balloons ― potentially of foreign origin, at least in some cases ― rather than crewed vehicles or extraterrestrial visitors.

Burchett said the government has been covering up UFO encounters since the Roswell incident of 1947.

“I don’t trust government. There’s an arrogance about it,” he said. “I think the American public can handle it and they need to release everything.”

That, he said, includes potential UFO spacecraft or material from a spacecraft.

See the full segment below:

H/T Mediaite

'You freakin' idiots': Dave Ramsey blasts US colleges for pitching online gambling to students — while making millions. Why young people are the perfect prey

Serah Louis
Mon, January 16, 2023 


Sports betting is soaring across America — with flashy ads and easily accessible apps encouraging wagers both at home and in stadiums — and has found its way into several college campuses as well.

The New York Times recently uncovered that at least eight universities have partnered with online sports-betting companies, while at least a dozen athletic departments and booster clubs have signed agreements with brick-and-mortar casinos.

Personal finance author and radio host Dave Ramsey lambasted the institutions on The Ramsey Show, calling the practice "stupidity on steroids."

“You freakin’ idiots … Selling out your own students who you’re supposed to be caring for,” said Ramsey. “The No. 2 addiction in North America today — and fastest growing addiction in North America today — is online gambling. It starts with the sports betting as a gateway drug.”

The National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) says researchers estimate about three-quarters of college students gambled in the past year, and 6% have a gambling problem.

More accessibility means students are more susceptible to problem gambling

What kicked things off was in 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a decision that limited sports betting to Nevada — and now 33 states and Washington, D.C. have legalized online or in-person betting, while three more have passed laws that will allow for it in the future.

It didn't take long for the relaxed rules to extended over to higher education institutions as well — online betting company Caesars Sportsbook struck a whopping $8.4 million dollar deal with Michigan State University last year, reports The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the University of Colorado Boulder reportedly collects $30 every time someone uses the university’s promotional code to download the PointsBet gambling app and starts betting.

Many atheltics departments have gained back revenue lost from the COVID-19 pandemic, with the help of these partnerships. However, the colleges have also received criticism for promoting gambling to young adults — some of whom may not even be of legal betting age (ranges from 18 to 21 depending on the state) or who are already burdened with sky-high student debt and have yet to receive relief.

“We believe that the risks for gambling addiction overall have grown 30% from 2018 to 2021, with the risk concentrated among young males 18 to 24 who are sports bettors,” said Keith Whyte, executive director of the NCPG, in an interview.

Whyte has also said that his organization believes the growth of online gambling, including sports betting, has exacerbated the severity and rate of gambling problems, citing a 45% increase in gambling hotline calls and a 100% increase in text and chat communications in the first year after the Supreme Court decision.

The American Gaming Association actually discourages promoting or advertising sports betting on college campuses in its Responsible Marketing Code for Sports Wagering.

Ramsey — who has previously criticized colleges for teaming up with credit card companies — says this new phenomenon is “way worse,” dubbing it “stupidity on steroids.”

What are the risks of a gambling addiction?

Some school-sponsored websites may either downplay the risks of losing or provide incentives such as free bets. But there are plenty of financial risks — especially if students develop a gambling addiction.

There aren’t any visible effects of a gambling addiction, compared with drugs or alcohol, but there are still some major red flags you can look out for, says Diana Gabriele, a gambling counselor at Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare in Windsor, Ont. in Canada.

Spending more money than you initially intended to or siphoning money from other sources to fund your habit is the number-one indicator, she says. Another concerning sign is if your habit starts to impact other aspects of your life, like jeopardizing your significant relationships, career opportunities or education.

Read more: Over 65% of Americans don't shop around for a better car insurance deal — and that could be costing you $500 a month

Setting firm limits on how much and how often you gamble can help keep you from sliding into risky behaviors. The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction recommends that you bet no more than 1% of your household income before tax per month, and to restrict yourself to gambling no more than four days a month.

An addict may also find their problem has gotten so big that they can’t cover basic expenses, like their mortgage or rent payments.

The average debt generated by a man addicted to gambling is between $55,000 and $90,000, while women average around $15,000, reports Debt.org

What can you do to get help?

Experts have concerns that universities may not have enough resources to help students identify or deal with a gambling addiction.

“I don’t see any significant programs put in place — prior to the deal, or part of the deal, or after the deal,” Whyte told The New York Times.

However, the NCPG features a list of treatment centers, self-help tools and helplines by state as a starting point for people seeking help.

When it comes to regaining your financial wellbeing, you may also want to speak to a professional.

Mike Bergeron, a certified credit counselor at Credit Canada, says depending on the severity of your debt, you may want to consider everything from debt consolidation or refinancing your mortgage to filing a consumer proposal or declaring bankruptcy.

You can work with a counselor to create an action plan to live within your means and work on reducing your debt load. For some in the early days of recovery, it might be easier to take some of the decision-making out of their hands and limit their access to money by naming a financial trustee.

ABOLISH THE SECOND AMENDMENT

Finding who can be held to account after a six-year-old shoots a teacher

Erum Salam

THE GUARDIAN
Mon, January 16, 2023 

Photograph: Billy Schuerman/AP

The shooting of a Virginia teacher by her six-year-old student last week left the town of Newport News and the rest of the US shaken and shocked.

Even in a country long used to the sort of school shootings that are rare in much of the rest of the world, the astonishingly young age of the shooter prompted a bout of public agonizing in the US about its gun violence problem.

Related: No fight or warning before six-year-old boy shot teacher, say Virginia police

But the almost unique nature of the Newport News incident meant that the parameters of the subsequent debate were somewhat different than previous shocking school shootings in the US, such as last year’s tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where a teen gunman killed 19 children and two teachers,

While issues of school security did figure in, there was also an anguished conversation over how to deal with such a young shooter and over who will ultimately face consequences for the shooting in a country that is so awash in guns.

University of Virginia law professor Richard Bonnie is part of a consortium of mental and public health experts working to establish better policies to curb gun violence. Bonnie said the fault cannot legally lie with the six-year-old, who in the aftermath of the shooting was held in a medical facility, not a jail cell.

“Children at the age of six don’t appreciate the nature and consequences of their behavior. Criminal liability is not permissible in any state under these circumstances. In most, if not all states, the child isn’t subject to the jurisdiction of the juvenile court’s delinquency jurisdiction either,” Bonnie said.

The boy remains in custody, but six-year-olds cannot be tried as adults under Virginia law. According to Bonnie, fault may be found in the adults in the child’s life. The gun shot by the child belonged to his mother, who legally obtained it. Thus, as has happened previously with other school shootings by young people, the legal – and political – focus has been on the problem of Americans’ widespread and easy access to firearms.

I think the real repercussions that lie in a situation like this really are for the parents

Law professor Richard Bonnie

“I think the real repercussions that lie in a situation like this really are for the parents. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the circumstances here – the relationship between the child and the parents, for example. The parents failed to carry out their own responsibilities to prevent access to a weapon by the child. And that certainly would provide potential tort liability,” Bonnie said.

Bonnie added: “We obviously we don’t have any idea what was going through that child’s head, you know, at the time, and I mean, I think that is one thing we shouldn’t be speculating about.”

An aspect of this case unique to shootings committed by children is intent. Authorities called the shooting by the child deliberate, but Joshua Horwitz, the co-director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said: “It’s hard for a six-year-old to form criminal intent.”

“They’re not responsible. They’re not even eligible for juvenile adjudication at that young age. That responsibility has got to reside with the adult.”

The wounded teacher, Abigail Zwerner, 25, is expected to survive, but exact details surrounding her physical condition are still unknown.

Richneck elementary school – where the incident took place – and its parent school district scrambled for a response to the unexpected episode. Classes were cancelled for two days following the shooting and talks of installing a metal detector in the school are taking place.

Newport News superintendent George Parker told parents at a meeting on Thursday night that a school official was made aware of the 9mm handgun the child brought into his classroom before he fired the weapon. But it was too late.

Horwitz underscored the importance of implementing policy that requires safer storage of firearms in homes where children live.

“Safe storage laws work. Strong safe gun storage laws save lives. This is something that we should all be able to agree on,” he said. “The safest home generally is going to be a home without a firearm. If you have children in the home, you have to be very careful when you bring a gun in and, at a minimum, you have to keep [it] completely locked up.”

The safest home generally is going to be a home without a firearm

Joshua Horwitz of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Violence

The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions says more than half of all US gun owners – including 55% of gun owners with children in the home – do not practice safe firearm storage. The policy, Horwitz said, should not be centered around punishment for children who access firearms, but rather the forces that led to weapon possession in the first place.

“If we’re building policy based on whether a six-year-old can be held accountable, that’s absurd. We’ve completely lost focus. What happens when every child has access to a firearm, they do so because of an adult who has either intentionally, negligently or recklessly providing access to a firearm.”

Horwitz, who lives in Virginia, said this shooting in particular “really hit home”.

“My immediate thought was, ‘I hope everybody’s OK.’ And I didn’t mean that physically, necessarily, but emotionally. That’s a big toll for people to take. How do you deal with community members who will be coming to our colleagues and saying: ‘I’m in pain. I don’t know what to do?’”



The shooting won’t just have a lasting impact on the teacher, but on the child, too, Horowitz said. Child psychologists are now involved and his welfare is under scrutiny.

“I’m not ashamed to admit this, but I’m not a particularly religious person. I literally pray every day not to become desensitized [to shootings], because it’s one of the ways you survive in this field. It’s somewhat unusual for a six-year-old to intentionally shoot a teacher, but it also then opens this floodgate of anger. And I am angry because we live in a country … where we’ve been desensitized to the risks of gun ownership, and people are going out and buying lots of guns. The industry is saying guns keep us safe. Everybody believes that. It’s just not true.

“Guns make your home more dangerous. And this is just the sort of the grossest example of what happens when we live in a society desensitized to the risks of firearms,” Horwitz added.

Wyoming wants to phase out sales of new EVs by 2035

It's a symbolic gesture aimed at states like California.


NurPhoto via Getty Images


Igor Bonifacic
·Weekend Editor
Sun, January 15, 2023

While jurisdictions like California and New York move toward banning the sale of new gasoline-powered cars, one US state wants to go in the opposite direction. Wyoming’s legislature is considering a resolution that calls for a phaseout of new electric vehicle sales by 2035. Introduced on Friday, Senate Joint Resolution 4 has support from members of the state’s House of Representatives and Senate.

In the proposed resolution, a group of lawmakers led by Senator Jim Anderson says Wyoming’s “proud and valued” oil and gas industry has created “countless” jobs and contributed revenue to the state’s coffers. They add that a lack of charging infrastructure within Wyoming would make the widespread use of EVs “impracticable” and that the state would need to build “massive amounts of new power generation” to “sustain the misadventure of electric vehicles.”


SJ4 calls for residents and businesses to limit the sale and purchase of EVs voluntarily, with the goal of phasing them out entirely by 2035. If passed, the resolution would be entirely symbolic. In fact, it’s more about sending a message to EV advocates than banning the vehicles altogether. To that point, the final section of SJ4 calls for Wyoming’s Secretary of State to send President Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom copies of the resolution.

“One might even say tongue-in-cheek, but obviously it’s a very serious issue that deserves some public discussion,” Senator Boner, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told the Cowboy State Daily. “I’m interested in making sure that the solutions that some folks want to the so-called climate crisis are actually practical in real life. I just don’t appreciate when other states try to force technology that isn’t ready,”

While the resolution has the markings of a political stunt, it does allude to genuine economic anxiety. Wyoming produced 85.43 million barrels of oil in 2021, making it the country’s eighth-largest crude oil producer that year. The state’s Carbon County is also home to one of the largest wind farms in the US. Something that’s not talked about enough when it comes to climate change is how the world transitions to a zero-emissions economy in an equitable way. People in many rural US states are rightfully mistrustful of so-called green technologies because they haven’t benefited from more recent technological shifts as much as their urban counterparts. Take the advent of the internet, for instance. In 2018, Microsoft found that many rural communities don’t have access to broadband internet. That’s something that has contributed to diminishing economic opportunities in those places.


Wyoming lawmakers propose ban on electric vehicle sales

Lauren Sforza
Mon, January 16, 2023

A group of GOP Wyoming state lawmakers want to end electric vehicle sales there by 2035, saying the move will help safeguard the oil and gas industries.

The measure, introduced to the state legislature on Friday, was sponsored by six state legislators, who said in it that electric vehicles will hinder Wyoming’s ability to trade with other states. The bill states that citizens and industries would be encouraged not to purchase electric vehicles before the ban goes into effect.

“The proliferation of electric vehicles at the expense of gas-powered vehicles will have deleterious impacts on Wyoming’s communities and will be detrimental to Wyoming’s economy and the ability for the country to efficiently engage in commerce,” the bill reads.

The legislation said that adding new power charging stations would require “massive” amounts of new power to “sustain the misadventure of electric vehicles.”

The bill added that the oil industry has employed thousands of people in the state.

Fifteen other states, meanwhile, including New York and California, have moved to ban gas-powered vehicle sales. The last clause of the bill instructs Wyoming’s secretary of state to send a copy of the bill to the California governor, who has backed his state’s ban on gas-powered vehicles throughout his governorship.

THE END OF U$ HEGEMONY

Dutch trade minister: won't summarily agree to U.S. rules on China exports


FILE PHOTO: Employees are seen working on the final assembly of ASML's TWINSCAN NXE:3400B semiconductor lithography tool with its panels removed, in Veldhoven

Mon, January 16, 2023 

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The top Dutch trade official said the Netherlands will not summarily accept new U.S. restrictions on exporting chip-making technology to China, and is consulting with European and Asian allies.

Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher spoke on Sunday on the television show Buitenhof ahead of a visit to the U.S. by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Tuesday, when he is expected to discuss export policy with President Joe Biden.

The Netherlands' largest company is ASML Holding, a key supplier to semiconductor equipment makers.

The Dutch government has denied ASML permission to ship its most advanced machines to China since 2019 following a pressure campaign by the Trump administration, but ASML did sell 2 billion euros worth of older machines to China in 2021.

The U.S. in October adopted measures aimed at hobbling China's ability to make its own chips, and U.S. trade officials said at the time they expected the Netherlands and Japan to implement similar rules soon.

ASML has said that the U.S. rules could impact roughly 5% of its group sales.

Schreinemacher said the U.S. had "justified worries" about over-reliance on Asia, where 80% of advanced chips are made, and the threat that they could wind up in a military application or being used against the Netherlands.

"We've been talking with the Americans for a long time, but they came up with new rules in October, so that changes the playing field," said Schreinemacher. "So you can't say that they've been pressuring us for two years and now we have to sign on the dotted line. And we won't."

She said the Netherlands is also talking with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany and France.

She underlined that Germany has an economic interest as it is a key supplier to ASML and to "ensure that if we put a certain technology on a list of products that can't be easily exported, that other countries do too."

(Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by Leslie Adler)