davel

It turns out yesterday’s mass strikes on Moscow which were meant to coincide with the Euro Council meeting were pure Hollywood spectacle: the drones themselves were stuffed full of kerosene mixtures in the way Hollywood stages car explosions to look more “dramatic” by producing thick plumes of oily smoke.

In the video below, a shot-down drone can be seen jettisoning its special FX package.

It now makes perfect sense how Ukraine was able to fabricate such an eye-catching mise-en-scene, as each downed drone managed to pockmark the horizon with its own PR-ready plume:

The actual damage to the refinery itself turned out to be disappointing, as only a few oil storage tanks were actually destroyed.

In fact, much of Ukraine’s recent narratives have been rapidly falling apart. The Crimean “isolation” turned out to be a total bust, as even top Ukrainian accounts have outlined the steps Russia swiftly took to reverse any issues Ukrainian drone attacks have managed to temporarily cause.

tubeup uses yt-dlp to download a Youtube video (or any other provider supported by yt-dlp), and then uploads it with all metadata to the Internet Archive using the python module internetarchive. It was designed by the Bibliotheca Anonoma to archive single videos, playlists (see warning below about more than video uploads) or accounts to the Internet Archive.

Prerequisites

This script strongly recommends Linux or some sort of POSIX system (such as macOS), preferably from a rented VPS and not your personal machine or phone.

• https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
• https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/main/Formula/t/tubeup.rb
• https://archive.org/
• https://wiki.bibanon.org/

Cognitive skills assessed in the studies included memory recall, decision-making, and response speed and accuracy. When these assessments were taken as a whole, short-term fasting (with a median duration of 12 hours) didn't significantly change the scoring.

There were some nuances though.

The researchers found modest cognitive performance reductions in fasting intervals over 12 hours, and "noticeable declines" in children and teenagers (though kids only made up a small portion of the participants).

That suggests that young and developing brains might be more at risk from going without food for extended periods, and that for kids and teens, three regular meals a day matters a lot.

Interestingly, food-related tasks testing cognitive performance are where impacts showed up the most. It's possible that very specific brain circuits do start to flag during fasting, though further studies will be required to know for sure.

"Performance deficits were often evident only in tasks involving food-related stimuli, such as looking at pictures of food or processing food-related words," Moreau said.

"In contrast, performance on tasks using neutral content was largely unaffected."

"Hunger might selectively divert cognitive resources or cause distraction only in food-relevant contexts, but general cognitive functioning remains largely stable."

The researchers also found that individuals who were fasting tended to do worse in cognitive tests when they were carried out later in the day – perhaps hinting that going without food acts as a sort of amplifier to the natural dips in concentration that can come with our built-in circadian rhythms.

As well as helping some people to manage their weight, fasting has also been associated with other health benefits in scientific studies, including improvements in cardiovascular health and reductions in inflammation levels.

The plan was daring: Under cover of night, an elite group of forces would ambush Syrian government soldiers and cut off strategic supply lines supporting the regime-held northern city of Aleppo.

These elite fighters were not from Syria. They were Uyghurs — a largely Muslim ethnic minority long persecuted in China. And when the offensive kicked off one night in November 2024, they went to work.

This is the story of how the Uyghurs, a Turkic and predominantly Muslim ethnic minority spread across Central Asia but concentrated in China's far-western Xinjiang region, eventually became the largest contingent of foreign fighters in Syria.

Many of the 40-odd Uyghur fighters and their families that NPR spoke to for this story — all of whom requested that they be identified by only their first names to protect remaining family members in Xinjiang from reprisals by Chinese authorities — say they fled to Syria and fought the way they did because of their deep hatred of the Chinese government.

They say they now hope to preserve their culture and perhaps one day raise an army powerful enough to seize control of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as the Uyghurs call it, the region that the Uyghurs consider their homeland and that the Chinese Communist Party took control of in 1949.

He and most other Uyghurs first headed to Turkey, home to a large Uyghur diaspora community. But many Uyghurs were unable to secure residency documents in Turkey and feared deportation to China. In 2012, they began trickling into northern Syria through Turkey's largely porous southern border.

There in Syria, around the northern city of Idlib, a loose coalition of thousands of Uyghurs and their families began to settle down.

Many Syrian Arabs oppose the continued presence of foreign fighters, including the Uyghurs, in Syria. Outside Idlib, most Syrians have never seen or met a Uyghur fighter before, and the conservative Sunni Muslim beliefs held by many Uyghurs in Syria have scared Syria's minority communities.

Given China's economic and military strengths, Choghtal and other Uyghur fighters NPR interviewed say that despite their ardent desire to turn their attention to China, attacking it is unrealistic, even foolhardy, and they need to bide their time. "We believe the Communist Party of China will collapse one day, just like we believe in the sun and the moon," Choghtal says. "And then we will be ready."

"Even if it takes until the end of our lives, if only we could return to our homeland, liberate it and live there. To be buried in the earth of our homeland — that is what we dream of," Anas says. "We do not want our children to wander in foreign lands all their lives. Even if we ourselves cannot achieve it, if we open this path, then maybe one day our children can."

Paywall bypass: https://archive.today/NytYP

As the leaders of the United States and China met in Beijing on Thursday, Xi Jinping had a much older rivalry on his mind.

The Chinese president invoked a warning from the Classical world, when the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta went to war, saying that the United States and China should beware the “Thucydides Trap” in their own relations.

Mr. Xi cited the concept, popularized in recent decades, as he warned that Beijing and Washington could enter an “extremely dangerous place” if President Trump sought to impede China as it asserted itself over Taiwan.

The trap referred to by Mr. Xi was named for Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general, whose account of the Second Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.) is considered one of the first written military histories.

In it, Thucydides argued that the war between Athens and Sparta was driven by the threat posed to an established power by one gaining strength. “The rise of Athens frightened Sparta and forced them into war,” wrote Thucydides. (The precise translation is contested among classicists).

For some scholars, the war — and the explanation offered for it in that ancient passage — presaged nearly every major conflict to follow. The international relations theorist Graham Allison dubbed it the “Thucydides Trap” in the early 2010s.

“The idea is that when an established, great power is met with a rising power, conflict between the two is certainly likely if not inevitable,” said Daniel Sutton, a classicist at the University of Cambridge who studies Thucydides, on Thursday.

In Mr. Xi’s version of the analogy, an emboldened China is the Athens to an American Sparta.

To demonstrate his theory, Professor Allison identified 16 times in history that a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. According to his tally, which is subjective, 12 of the 16 rivalries ended in a conflict.

The UN chemical weapons watchdog has been ordered to pay moral and legal compensation to one of its former investigators who was censured and smeared by the organization for challenging its fabricated claim that the Syrian government carried out a chemical attack against its own civilians in Douma in April 2018.

On 1 May, former Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigator Brendan Whelan announced that an independent arbitration body, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), had ruled in his favor and ordered the OPCW to pay damages and legal costs.

Beyond vindicating Whelan, the arbitration case highlights the OPCW leadership's effort to manipulate its own report to maintain the false narrative that the former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was behind a series of chemical attacks during the 14-year US and Israeli-backed dirty war that sought to topple his government and install an Al-Qaeda-linked militant leader in his place.

This month-old instance has three communities. One is for testing and the other two are anti-trans.