World
Your Monday Briefing: Reports of Russian Atrocities
Good morning. We’re overlaying studies of Russian atrocities, a effervescent political disaster in Pakistan and a Taliban ban on rising poppies for opium.
Resistance: Right here’s how Kyiv has withstood Russian assaults and the way already legendary fighters repelled Russians from the small garrison metropolis of Vasylkiv.
Background: Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has repeatedly tried — and failed — to subjugate Ukraine.
Ripple results: The battle has pushed up the price of meals in East Africa, which is going through what could possibly be its worst drought in 4 a long time.
State of the Conflict:
Different developments:
The transfer — a defiant bid by Khan to stay in energy, regardless of dropping the backing of the army — threatens to plunge the nation right into a constitutional disaster. On Saturday, Khan stated he wouldn’t settle for the results of the vote, dismissing it as a part of an American conspiracy in opposition to him.
Reporting From Afghanistan
Opposition leaders accused Khan of excessive treason and requested the nation’s Supreme Courtroom to intervene, calling it “unprecedented” and a “blatant violation” of Pakistan’s Structure. A listening to was scheduled for Monday.
Evaluation: The maneuver risked destabilizing the delicate democracy in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation that helps the Taliban. Since Pakistan grew to become an unbiased nation in 1947, not one in all its prime ministers has accomplished a full time period.
Profile: Khan, a former cricket star, was elected in 2018 on a nationalist promise to struggle corruption and distance Pakistan from the U.S., with which it has had a troubled historical past. If Khan is ousted, many consultants say that Pakistan might develop nearer to the U.S. and the West.
Taliban outlaws poppy rising
The insurgents turned rulers of Afghanistan outlawed the cultivation of opium flowers on Sunday. The decree additionally banned the use, sale, switch, buy, import and export of wine in addition to heroin and different medicine.
The transfer can have far-reaching penalties for the various farmers who turned to the illicit crop amid the nation’s brutal drought and financial disaster.
Many farmers had planted the crop — which will be saved for a while after harvesting — as an funding. They anticipated dwindling provide and rising costs, although they knew the Taliban might transfer to limit cultivation. The Taliban’s announcement on Sunday got here in the course of the poppy harvest.
Context: Afghanistan accounts for about 80 % of the world’s provide of opium.
Background: Within the Nineteen Nineties, the Taliban made a number of halfhearted makes an attempt to limit opium earlier than enacting a ban on the cultivation of opium poppies shortly earlier than the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, after which the Taliban turned to the crop to gasoline their battle machine for 20 years.
THE LATEST NEWS
Asia and the Pacific
The Thai authorities is mounting a marketing campaign to get the world to name Thailand’s capital Krung Thep Maha Nakhon (Bangkok). Thai residents would like that their leaders concentrate on fixing the nation’s battered economic system.
ARTS AND IDEAS
A microplastics storm
So long as there was marine life, there was marine snow — a ceaseless drizzle of dying and waste sinking from the floor of the ocean into its depths.
Now, tiny bits of plastic have infiltrated the slow-descending flakes, that are the deep sea’s predominant meals supply and a pipeline that carries the ocean’s carbon to the seafloor. The microplastics, usually buoyant, sink with the flakes.
That’s new data: Scientists had initially assumed that plastic largely floated on the floor. However a current mannequin discovered that 99.8 % of the plastic that entered the ocean after 1950 sank beneath the primary few hundred ft. Scientists have discovered 10,000 instances extra microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated floor waters.
They’re simply starting to grasp the results. As a result of microplastics add to the floor space of marine snow, the combination might carry extra carbon to the seafloor and alter our planet’s historic cooling course of.
Sinking microplastics may injury deep-sea meals webs. “The plastics are a eating regimen capsule for these animals,” a carbon cycle scientist informed The Occasions.