The Globalist Podcast, Friday, July 21, 2023: Monocle’s US editor, Christopher Lord, speaks to Nato’s deputy secretary general, Mircea Geoana, at the Aspen Security Forum.
Plus: Wagner mercenaries train Belarusian special forces close to the Polish border, thousands of anti-government protesters in Peru call for the president’s resignation and we celebrate “Barbenheimer” in our culture round-up.
The House cleared away a number of potential sticking points that had threatened to hold up the bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. It goes next to the Senate.
Scorching temperatures have threatened the health of the elderly and pushed them inside, while governments are trying to take extraordinary steps to protect them.
A lawyer started small with a creative tactic. It grew into an effort that could force fossil fuel companies to pay hundreds of billions in damages.
The president has taken swipes at Republicans, including a video playfully featuring Marjorie Taylor Greene as a narrator, but he and his allies are avoiding one target: his predecessor’s legal woes.
A-bomb architect “was no Einstein,” historian says, but he did Nobel-level work on black holes
Fertility is still poorly understood
After louise brown was born in Manchester in July 1978, her parents’ neighbours were surprised to see that the world’s first “test-tube baby” was “normal”: two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes. In the 45 years since, in vitro fertilisation has become the main treatment for infertility around the world. At least 12m people have been conceived in glassware. An ivf baby takes its first gulp of air roughly every 45 seconds. ivf babies are just as healthy and unremarkable as any others. Yet to their parents, most of whom struggle with infertility for months or years, they are nothing short of miraculous.
Officials from Beijing to Phoenix are grappling with unbearable temperatures
The best thing that has happened in Phoenix, Arizona, since the beginning of July is that the electricity grid has kept functioning.
This has meant that during a record-breaking run of daily maximum temperatures above 43°C (110°F), still in progress as The Economist went to press, the houses, indoor workplaces and publicly accessible “cooling stations” in the city have been air-conditioned. There have been deaths from heat stroke and there will be more; there has been a lot of suffering; and there will have been real economic losses. But if Arizona’s grid had gone out, according to an academic quoted in “The Heat Will Kill You First”, a new book, America would have seen “the Hurricane Katrina of extreme heat”.
Designed to communicate to possible space-faring civilizations something of the diversity of life and culture on our world, the Golden Record consisted of greetings in 59 human languages and those of the humpback whales, 115 images of life here, the sounds of Earth, and 27 pieces from the world’s musical traditions. It has been called the beginning of the concept of “world music.”
It was Voyager 1 that looked homeward from high above Neptune to take, at Carl Sagan’s behest, the iconic Pale Blue Dot photograph. Upon flawlessly completing the first phase of their mission, the NASA Voyagers 1 and 2 made for the open sea of interstellar space, teaching us the actual shape of our solar system as it moves through the galaxy. The Golden Record is an unparalleled document in the history of space exploration and our civilization.
She was built for and by an experienced yachtsman and has been lovingly maintained by the same Owner with a rigorous and well-documented maintenance program since her delivery, leaving her in exceptional condition.
Bringing together Frers Naval Architecture and Rhoades Young interior design, the result is a sleek sailing yacht that is both luxurious and very comfortable. She can accommodate 8 guests in 3 staterooms and features ample deck space to lounge and connect with the sun and sea.
It’s famed for the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which sparked revitalization when it opened in 1997. The museum houses prominent modern and contemporary works, but it’s the curvy, titanium-clad building that receives the most attention.
The Globalist Podcast, Thursday, July 20, 2023: MI6 invites dissident Russians to spy for Britain and Putin agrees not to attend the BRICS summit in Johannesburg.
Also in the programme: We discuss the anti-government protests in Peru and look ahead to the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.
Ukraine accused Moscow of specifically targeting the infrastructure for exporting food, after Russia pulled out of an agreement allowing ships carrying grain to sail past its Black Sea blockade.
John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, emerges from talks in Beijing without a new agreement. But just talking is progress, he said.
The dawn of a new geological epoch is recorded in the contaminated sediment at the bottom of Crawford Lake in Canada.
The official marker for the start of a new Anthropocene epoch should be a small Canadian lake whose sediments capture chemical traces of the fallout from nuclear bombs and other forms of environmental degradation. That’s a proposal out today from researchers who have spent 14 years debating when and how humanity began altering the planet.
To smooth the path of the quantum revolution, researchers and governments must predict and prepare for the traps ahead.
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