In the news, Saturday, October 3, 2020

 

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OCT 02      INDEX      OCT 04

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from Asia Times

LEAST BIASED, HIGH;  News & Media Website based in Hong Kong

India opens tunnel route to tense China border

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday opened a Himalayan tunnel that will drastically reduce the time needed to rush troops to the country’s remote Chinese border as tensions grow between the Asian neighbors. The tunnel traverses India’s northern Himachal Pradesh state and lies on one of two main routes for troops headed to border areas in Ladakh. Twenty Indian and an unspecified number of Chinese troops were killed in June during a deadly clash in Ladakh, which shares a disputed boundary with China’s restive Xinjiang and Tibet regions.

White supremacists’ false belief in genetic ‘purity’

Far-right white supremacist ideology is on the rise in Europe, North America and Australia. It appeals to a racist notion whereby many white supremacists see themselves as members of a “pure” race that is at risk of dilution and contamination. Science does not support the idea of pure races with ancient origins. In the past few years, genetic sequencing of ancient and modern humans and related species has given us a flood of new information about how human populations have evolved.

A thousand times worse: or, how to nuke history

What pops into your head when you hear the number 1,000 in a political-military context? Having studied German military history, I immediately think of Adolf Hitler’s confident boast that his Third Reich would last a thousand years. In reality, of course, a devastating world war brought that Reich down in a mere 12 years. Only recently, however, such boasts popped up again in the dark dreams of Donald Trump. If Iran dared to attack the United States, Trump tweeted and then repeated on Fox & Friends, the US would strike back with “1,000 times greater force.” Think about that for a moment. If such typical Trumpian red-meat rhetoric were to become reality, you would be talking about a monumental war crime in its disproportionality.

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from The Spokesman-Review

Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from The Washington Post

Newspaper in Washington, D.C.

We nearly lost our first president to the flu. The country could have died, too.

George Washington was a strapping man — taller than his peers, an athletic rider and a fantastic dancer. But his immune system was weak. Throughout his life, he was regularly struck with illnesses and brought to the brink of death. And one of those severe illnesses — a bout of the flu in May 1790 — nearly threw the country into chaos.

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