iNsAnItY iNtEnSiFiEd: Neuroscience Says This Simple Food Boosts Memory and Grows Brain Cells. (It Tastes Like Opportunity)

Neuroscience Says This Simple Food Boosts Memory and Grows Brain Cells. (It Tastes Like Opportunity)

"Boosts nerve growth and enhances memory."

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20 Years Later, Final Fantasy's Riskiest Sequel Is Still Ahead of Its Time

Imagine my surprise when I booted up the sequel to my favorite tactical RPG ever on the Game Boy Advance, and rather than assume the role of a noble knight in the land of Ivalice, I was instead put in the dirty shoes of a schoolboy defending a classmate from some bullies in a snowball fight.

Square Enix’s seminal Final Fantasy Tactics from 1997 is a dense tactical RPG full of political intrigue in a magical medieval land ravaged by conflict. A serious and often melodramatic examination of the role religion plays in classism, it remains one of the most influential, and greatest, TRPGs of all time. You’d think developers would take the typical approach to sequels: Refine everything that works while trimming the fat and smoothing out the pain points to make a more efficient and enjoyable experience.

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'Poker Face' Renewed for Season 2: Everything We Know So Far

It’s no mystery that Poker Face is a hit, because it’s been renewed for another season.

Less than a month after its January 26 premiere, NBC and Peacock have announced a renewal of Poker Face, Rian Johnson’s homage to ‘70s TV detectives starring Natasha Lyonne. NBCUniversal’s Susan Rovner said, “Poker Face is one of those rare, undeniable shows that we all fell in love with from the start, but the critical acclaim and viewer response has been beyond our wildest dreams.”

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Expert Q+A: why do people commit murder-suicides?

The deaths of Epsom College Head Emma Pattison and her daughter Lettie are a possible example of the rare and tragic phenomenon of murder-suicide. Pattison’s husband is believed to have shot his wife and child before taking his own life. We asked Sandra Flynn, an expert in forensic mental health at the University of Manchester, about why people commit this horrific act and what we should understand about it.

Researchers have examined the motive for past cases, which have included mental health, relationship problems, alcohol and substance use, physical health problems, criminal and legal issues, job or financial difficulties and domestic violence. More recently, a review of cases found negative childhood experiences to be risk factors, as are characteristics like gender, age and financial situation.

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'Quantumania' Director Unpacks Janet van Dyne's "Personal Connection" to Kang

Peyton Reed has been waiting his whole life to explore the Quantum Realm. Or, at the very least, he’s been waiting for eight years and two movies. The mysterious subatomic realm was first teased in 2015’s Ant-Man, but didn’t start to take shape until 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp — and even then, it was just as an Easter egg.

But the Quantum Realm might not have been introduced at all if it wasn’t something that Reed and Ant-Man co-writers Adam McKay and Paul Rudd simply thought was a really cool concept.

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Many Americans wrongly assume they understand what normal blood pressure is - and that false confidence can be deadly

Stunning as it may sound, nearly half of Americans ages 20 years and up – or more than 122 million people – have high blood pressure, according to a 2023 report from the American Heart Association. And even if your numbers are normal right now, they are likely to increase as you age; more than three-quarters of Americans age 65 and older have high blood pressure.

Also known as hypertension, high blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

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You Need to Watch the Most Ingenious Time-Loop Movie on HBO Max ASAP

Live. Die. Repeat. That was the title Doug Liman wanted for the 2014 sci-fi movie Edge of Tomorrow, based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel All You Need Is Kill. The film is an interesting study of the question of whether titles matter. Edge of Tomorrow is not particularly memorable, but it’s hard to say if the two other titles would have worked any better. Warner Bros. must have thought so: they elevated Live. Die. Repeat. from tagline to title on the home media release.

Regardless of the innocuous-sounding name, Edge of Tomorrow is a memorable sci-fi movie that revitalizes an ancient trope. It just hit HBO Max, and it’s worth another look for one specific reason: it’s the only contemporary sci-fi action movie that made time-loops seem brand new again.

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William Jackson Harper Is The Hidden Gem Of The Quantum Realm

The Good Place actor opens up about his small-but-mighty role in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, vibing with Killmonger, and getting used to Hollywood success.

“I think I’m a lot angrier than how I come across,” William Jackson Harper says in his characteristically measured way. If you’ve watched him in movies like We Broke Up or as Chidi Anagonye in The Good Place, you know this voice. It’s a voice that’s resonant, steady. It lends to Harper’s ability to play characters who know something other people around him don’t. His talent for dutifully carrying the burden of knowledge is on full display in his latest film, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and also in the promotion of the Marvel movie, which opens today.

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Stop Rebooting 'Hellboy' and Let Guillermo del Toro Finish His Trilogy

It isn’t the apocalypse yet, but someone somewhere wants to bring Hellboy back to the big screen, and again without the director who made him special.

The news is still in rumor territory, but DiscussingFilm reports that Millennium Media is aiming to give the Hellboy IP — based on Mike Mignola’s comics — another go with a new live-action film (presumably a reboot) with the rumored title Hellboy: The Crooked Man. Director Brian Taylor, whose last feature film was the 2011 Ghost Rider sequel Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, has reportedly been tapped to helm.

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Harry Styles is winning big because his music is a breezy pop antidote to our post-pandemic blues

At this year’s Brit Awards, British artist Harry Styles took home the most coveted award of the night, album of the year, for Harry’s House. He beat the likes of grime artist Stormzy, indie group The 1975 and the other big winners of the night, indie band Wet Leg. Styles also took home the awards for British artist of the year, song of the year (for As It Was) and best pop/R&B act.

Styles swept all categories in which he was nominated. He also found great success at this year’s Grammys, winning three of the six awards he was nominated for, one of which was the ceremony’s most sought-after award, Album of the Year – beating Beyoncé.

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How far must employers go to accommodate workers' time off for worship? The Supreme Court will weigh in

Imagine you own a business with a few dozen employees. One, who is Muslim, asks if she can use a meeting room a few times a day for brief prayers – one of the five pillars of Islam. Another, who observes the Jewish Sabbath, says he cannot work on Saturdays. Yet another, a Christian, requests to no longer work on Sundays, one of the shop’s busier days.

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon address the extent to which employers must accommodate employees, if at all, in similar circumstances.

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A Selection of Canine Yearbook Quotes

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Fastelavnsboller: A Danish pastry for Fastelavn

"The secret to a good fastelavnsboller," said Thomas Spelling, owner of neighbourhood bakery Rondo in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, "is that it has to be rich, beautiful to look at and ugly to eat."

His words rang in my ears as I bit into one of the soft, ganache-topped cakes later in the day, ending up with thick cream all over my hands, cheeks, and inexplicably, my leg and the floor. It certainly looked beautiful, rounded and with a dark glossy top, and it filled my mouth with an explosion of soft, yielding cake and rich, smooth and thick cream – but it was absolutely impossible to eat without making a mess.

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'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey' Review: A Hundred Acres Far Away From Good

Horror is inherently a transgressive genre, with scares often achieved by taking the “safe” and rendering it “unsafe.”

It makes sense that one of the genre’s more successful perennial trends is specifically the transmogrification of childhood elements into sources of horror, from dangerous dolls (Child’s Play, Annabelle) and imaginary friends (Daniel Isn’t Real), to even mothers (The Babadook) and children themselves (Children of the Corn, Sinister). It’s no surprise that, given certain beloved children’s books are now in the public domain, we’re seeing these classic, heartwarming characters adapted into maniacal murdering monsters. Enter the horrific corruption of author A.A. Milne’s greatest creation in Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.

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'Like a Dragon: Ishin' Is the Best Samurai Game Ever Made

The town of Kyo is filled with all of my favorite friends, from “Vegetable Boy” who whines that his mom only feeds him tofu to a filthy cat that repeatedly falls in the mud.

Like a Dragon: Ishin absolutely revels in the Yakuza series’ weirdo humor, but that’s only one half of the equation. There’s also a genuinely dramatic samurai story sizzling with tension. Ishin has some of the best storytelling the series has ever seen. The only thing holding it back is a convoluted combat system that takes a while to find its groove.

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Extra SNAP benefits are ending as US lawmakers resume battle over program that helps low-income Americans buy food

Millions of Americans will find it harder to put enough food on the table starting in March 2023, after a COVID-19 pandemic-era boost to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits comes to an end. Congress mandated this change in budget legislation it passed in late December 2022.

Roughly 41 million Americans are currently enrolled in this program, which the government has long used to ease hunger while boosting the economy during downturns.

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Who Would Win: Thanos vs. Kang? The Strongest Marvel Villain, Revealed

When Kang (Jonathan Majors) meets Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, his first question is a simple one: “Have I killed you before?” The time-traveling despot has traveled across the multiverse killing variants of the Avengers to the point he can no longer remember who is who. But what about the Avengers’ greatest adversary?

In their plan to defeat Thanos (Josh Brolin), The Avengers, accidentally allowed a variant of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to escape in Avengers: Endgame, inadvertently setting off the chain of events that led to Kang coming into power, as seen in Loki.

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How Sylvia Plath's profound nature poetry elevates her writing beyond tragedy and despair

I cannot stop writing poems! … They come from the vocabulary of woods and animals and earth.

Popular perceptions of Sylvia Plath tend to dwell on a deeply troubled version of the young poet due to her well-documented difficulties with depression and the morbid imagery found in some of her poetry. So the idea that nature inspired her writing may come as a surprise.

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What to Stream: A Lost Seventies Classic About a (Rather Sympathetic) Stalker

Hollywood sneaks exemplary works of audacious modernism into plain sight at the multiplex. Some of them boldly trumpet their filmmakers’ ambitious artistry (think of David Lynch), but others arrive (and often depart) far more modestly. One such secret masterwork, Alan Rudolph’s 1978 romantic melodrama “Remember My Name,” never reached the mainstream. Despite a cast that features Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Alfre Woodard, and Jeff Goldblum, it was scantly released and tarred with negative reviews; it is rarely screened, has apparently gone unreleased on VHS or DVD, and has remained widely unseen owing to the vagaries of the marketplace. Yet it’s one of the most unusual and original films from nineteen-seventies Hollywood, a decade of innovation and renewal. It’s a double display of the quasi-musical power of cinematic images and of the image-like authority of great music in movies. And now it’s streaming on Prime Video (for subscribers) and on Tubi (free, with commercials).

Rudolph, born in 1943, was raised as a Hollywood insider (his father, Oscar Rudolph, was a longtime assistant director of movies and a major director of such TV series as “Batman” and “The Brady Bunch”) and worked as an assistant to Robert Altman on “The Long Goodbye” and “Nashville.” Altman, who produced “Remember My Name,” was a myth buster, opening the doors of Hollywood traditions to the sharp winds of reality, whereas Rudolph (who’s seventy-nine) is an embellisher, endowing ordinary lives with the grandeur of cinematic mythology and the refined styles that go with it. “Remember My Name” is an understated, involuted film noir in coolly natural color, a drama of stark motives that give rise to delicately intricate surfaces. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, it’s the story of a stalker—albeit an unusually sympathetic one.

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A National Experiment in Refugee Resettlement

In January, the State Department announced the launch of a program called the Welcome Corps, proclaiming it to be the “boldest innovation in refugee resettlement in four decades.” Under the plan, groups of five or more American citizens or permanent residents can apply to privately sponsor the resettlement of refugees. These groups will raise the required money—at least two thousand two hundred and seventy-five dollars per refugee—to place refugees in local communities and will help them find housing, identify job opportunities, and enroll children in schools. The first refugees under the new program will arrive in April. Private sponsorship is not an entirely new idea, but the Biden Administration has good reasons, both compelling and lamentable, to promote the Welcome Corps now.

Citizens have played a role in refugee resettlement for a long time. Under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, hundreds of thousands of Europeans—including Catholics, Protestants, and Jews from Poland, Germany, Latvia, and the U.S.S.R.—resettled in the United States. After the Cuban Revolution, Cuban parents sent more than fourteen thousand children to states across the country. In the nineteen-seventies, around a hundred and thirty thousand Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees were resettled in the United States under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975. In the nineteen-eighties, participants in the sanctuary movement helped resettle a large number of Central Americans fleeing civil wars—surreptitiously, as the Reagan Administration opposed their efforts. Since the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, the U.S. has admitted more than three million refugees. The government sets caps on the number of refugees who can enter the country and provides substantial funding, but receives assistance from non-governmental organizations, many of them faith-based.

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The war in Ukraine hasn't left Europe freezing in the dark, but it has caused energy crises in unexpected places

Through a year of war in Ukraine, the U.S. and most European nations have worked to help counter Russia, in supporting Ukraine both with armaments and in world energy markets. Russia was Europe’s main energy supplier when it invaded Ukraine, and President Vladimir Putin threatened to leave Europeans to freeze “like a wolf’s tail” – a reference to a famous Russian fairy tale – if they imposed sanctions on his country.

But thanks to a combination of preparation and luck, Europe has avoided blackouts and power cutoffs. Instead, less wealthy nations like Pakistan and India have contended with electricity outages on the back of unaffordably high global natural gas prices. As a global energy policy analyst, I see this as the latest evidence that less wealthy nations often suffer the most from globalized oil and gas crises.

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Cuba: why record numbers of people are leaving as the most severe economic crisis since the 1990s hits -- a photo essay

Record numbers of Cubans are fleeing their country as the island suffers its worst socio-economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The number of Cubans seeking entry to the US, mostly at the Mexican border, leapt from 39,000 in 2021 to more than 224,000 in 2022. Many have sold their homes at knockdown prices to afford one-way flights to Nicaragua and travel through Mexico to the US.

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Asking This 5-Word Question Is a Sign You're an Emotionally Intelligent Leader

Instead of assuming you have all the information you need, ask this simple question.

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President Biden Greets Visiting Space Alien

How the west is finally hitting back against China's dominance of cleantech

Michael Jacobs is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute. In a personal capacity he is a member of the Labour Party.

Climate change policy has entered a new era. The growing row between the United States and the European Union over the impacts of the new American green subsidy regime makes that all too clear. Yet in many ways, this story is ultimately about China.

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5 Tweets That Changed the World, and What You Can Learn From Them

From founders, ordinary citizens, and a former president, these are the tweets that made history.

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How vinyl chloride, chemical released in the Ohio train derailment, can damage the liver - it's used to make PVC plastics

Vinyl chloride – the chemical in several of the train cars that derailed and burned in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023 – can wreak havoc on the human liver.

It has been shown to cause liver cancer, as well as a nonmalignant liver disease known as TASH, or toxicant-associated steatohepatitis. With TASH, the livers of otherwise healthy people can develop the same fat accumulation, inflammation and scarring (fibrosis and cirrhosis) as people who have cirrhosis from alcohol or obesity.

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5 Super Effective Ways to Show Your Emotional Intelligence On the Job

Your emotional intelligence does matter. A lot.

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Brenda Lucki's retirement will not fix the RCMP's structural problems

RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki announced her retirement on Feb. 15. It is easy to make Lucki the scapegoat for almost five years of RCMP crises, debacles, collapsing public support and allegations of systemic racism and employee harassment. After all, the buck stopped at her desk. But there’s no point replacing the driver when the vehicle itself is rusted out, out of fuel and mechanically unsound.

We shouldn’t have hopes for an RCMP renaissance with Lucki’s retirement. The problems with RCMP leadership are not about the gender or identity of the person in charge.

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Home power backup systems -- electrical engineers answer your questions

South Africa’s electricity utility Eskom has made it clear that “loadshedding” – rolling scheduled power cuts – isn’t going to end any time soon. This reality, and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement during his annual state of the nation speech on 9 February 2023 that tax incentives for solar power use are imminent, mean that many people are considering alternative electricity supply systems for their homes.

But deciding on the best system isn’t a simple matter. There’s a bewildering array of jargon to sift through and many elements to consider, from the right kind of inverter to the size of your solar panels.

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The Massive Tesla Recall Is A Much Bigger Problem Than It Seems

If you're haggling over the word, you've already lost.

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7 ways to take the stress and worry out of sending your child to summer camp

Of all the things that can get in the way of summer camp, one of the biggest is not just anxiety among children worried about what camp will be like, but rather parental anxiety over whether the camp will be caring and safe for their child.

Separation, along with related worries like an inability to communicate with their child and the need to place trust in camp directors and staff they don’t know, may be difficult barriers for a parent to overcome.

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Magic Mike and the new age of the male stripper

One does come to a Magic Mike film for the plot. Until recently, the world of male stripping was not perceived as an aspirational one, or a particularly deep one. Male strip shows may have been popular a choice of entertainment among hen parties et al, but the male stripper was seen as a laughable figure within popular culture – you only have to think of hit British film The Full Monty (1997), whose humour rested on the fact that a group of ordinary steelworkers were "reduced" to taking their clothes off as a result of being in dire financial straits. More like this: – Magic Mike's Last Dance review – The sex scenes too taboo for Hollywood– Is the romcom truly back?

Nowadays, though, the profession has gone through a complete image overhaul – and that's all thanks to Magic Mike. The multi-pronged franchise, which comprises multiple films, live shows around the world, and an HBO talent show, has single-handedly given the male revue a glossy new allure: last week, the third and supposedly final movie, Magic Mike's Last Dance hit cinemas.

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AI's threat to Google is more about advertising income than being the number one search engine

Google’s dominance as the most visited website has been undisputed since it rose to prominence as the leading search engine in the early 2000s. However, that position could now be facing its biggest ever threat, with the arrival of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT, which can answer people’s questions online.

Google is countering by developing its own AI products. But its chatbot, Bard, didn’t have the most auspicious start. This month, a Google advert showed that Bard had provided an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb space telescope.

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Refugee families being moved from London to Leeds - our research shows what is lost when newcomers have to leave a neighbourhood

Just over a year after fleeing the Taliban and seeking asylum in the UK, more than 150 Afghan refugees, including children, are facing more upheaval. In a matter of weeks, the Home Office has given dozens of refugee and asylum seeker families short notice that they will be moved from their accommodation in London to hotels in Yorkshire and Bedfordshire, hundreds of miles away.

Our work involves speaking to newcomers, learning about their experiences since arrival, spending time in local places that feature in their lives, and working alongside people that provide services and support.

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Turning 50? Here are 4 things you can do to improve your health and well-being

When the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve to mark the beginning of 2023, I came to grips with the fact that I would turn 50 years old this year.

Entering a new decade is often a time to pause and reflect on our lives, particularly when reaching middle age. For 50-year-old American men, the average remaining life expectancy is 28 more years; for women, it’s 32.

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Africa's agribusiness sector should drive the continent's economic development: Five reasons why

Africa’s agriculture sector accounts for about 35% of the continent’s gross domestic product, and provides the livelihood of more than 50% of the continent’s population. These shares are more than double those of the world average and much higher than those of any other emerging region.

Dependence on agriculture has declined in other emerging regions. For example in Southeast Asia, agriculture’s share of GDP dropped from 30-35% in 1970 to 10-15% in 2019. In Africa it has remained unchanged for decades, according to World Bank data. At the same time, Africa’s agriculture sector is the world’s least developed, with the lowest levels of labour and land productivity. Value added per worker in agriculture is about a quarter of the world’s average and less than a fifth of China’s.

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Whatâ€™s Behind the Chinese Spy Balloon

Earlier this month, the United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had travelled over a large swath of North America. According to the Biden Administration, the balloon was "part of a larger Chinese surveillance-balloon program," which the White House argued had violated the sovereignty of nations all over the world. The Chinese government accused the U.S. of overreacting, and signalled that it views the response as a sign of American decline. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelled a diplomatic trip to China that was to include meetings with high-level officials, including President Xi Jinping, who has amassed more power than any Chinese leader in a generation. (U.S. and Canadian authorities have shot down several more objects flying over the two countries in recent days, but there is no evidence of any connection between those objects and the Chinese balloon.)

To talk about China's military strategy, and the future of U.S.-China relations, I recently spoke by phone with M. Taylor Fravel, a professor of political science at M.I.T. and the director of its Security Studies Program. He is also the author of "Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949." During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how China has modernized its military during the past twenty-five years, how Xi has taken control of military policy, and why the diplomatic fallout from the balloon incident may be much more dangerous than the usual spy games.

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Ukraine war has exposed the folly - and unintended consequences - of 'armed missionaries'

The evening before Russia invaded Ukraine, it seemed to many observers – me included – nearly unimaginable that Putin would carry through with weeks of a threatened military attack. As I wrote at the time, Putin is not as erratic or rash as he is sometimes painted.

I had failed to take into account that Putin is, in the words of French statesman and revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre, an “armed missionary.” Writing in 1792, Robespierre explained, “The most extravagant idea that can take root in the head of a politician is to believe that it is enough for one people to invade a foreign people to make it adopt its laws and constitution. No one likes armed missionaries; and the first advice given by nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies.”

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'Picard's New Starship Took Inspiration From "Retro" Star Trek Canon

The best new starship in Star Trek canon isn’t the Enterprise! In Star Trek: Picard Season 3, the bold new adventure will happen onboard a new starship even more retro than the Enterprise-D. Of all the new stars of Picard Season 3, the USS Titan is perhaps the most exciting for longtime fans.

But how does this ship fit into the Trek timeline? Is it an old ship? A new ship? A bit of both? Inverse got in touch with Picard showrunner Terry Matalas and production designer Dave Blass to get the details on the latest and greatest ship in Starfleet. Spoilers ahead for Picard Season 3, Episode 1, “The Next Generation.”

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A Year of the War in Ukraine

In the year since Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians have shown incredible fortitude on the battlefield. Yet an end to the conflict seems nowhere in sight. “Ukraine is winning in the sense that [it] didn’t allow Russia to take that whole country,” Stephen Kotkin, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of Russian history, tells David Remnick. “But it’s losing in the sense that its country is being destroyed.” Remnick also speaks with Sevgil Musaieva, the thirty-five-year-old editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, an online publication based in Kyiv, about the toll that the war is taking on her and her peers. And Angela Bassett talks about preparing for some of her most iconic roles, from Tina Turner to Queen Ramonda of Wakanda.

David Remnick talks with the historian Stephen Kotkin and the Kyiv-based journalist Sevgil Musaieva about a year of disaster, and what a Ukrainian victory would look like.

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Do we need political parties? In theory, they're the sort of organization that could bring Americans together in larger purpose

The 27 million people who watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Feb. 7, 2023, witnessed the spectacle of a family divided, with boos and cheers perfectly arranged along party lines.

Are political parties getting in the way of the nation’s well-being? For the approximately 40% of those polled in January 2023 by the Gallup Organization who say they are neither Democrats nor Republicans, but independent, as well as any viewers of the State of the Union speech, the answer is likely “yes.”

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Neuroscience Says This Simple Food Boosts Memory and Grows Brain Cells. (It Tastes Like Opportunity)

"Boosts nerve growth and enhances memory."Continued here

The Glass Ceiling, Still Intact: Women and Power in Washington

The California senator Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement this week. First elected in 1992, she became one of the most powerful senators in the chamber and was often spoken of as a possible Presidential contender, although she never ran. Also this week, Nikki Haley announced her bid to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination. In Democratic circles, there have been new reports of hand-wringing over Vice-President Kamala Harris’s political prospects. That got the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos thinking about 1992—the Year of the Woman, as it was known—and about what has and hasn’t changed for women in politics in the three decades since.

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Reintroducing top predators to the wild is risky but necessary - here's how we can ensure they survive

Large carnivores are critical to the balance of an ecosystem. In Yellowstone National Park in the western US, grey wolves keep elk populations at a healthy level. This prevents vegetation from being overgrazed and leads to taller woody plants which allow other species, such as beavers, to flourish.

But habitat loss and persecution have eliminated many large carnivores from their historical environment. The Eurasian lynx could be found in the UK over a thousand years ago and wolves roamed the country until the mid-18th century.

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What Did We Learn About the Georgia Grand Juryâ€™s Findings?

"A majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it," a panel in Fulton County, Georgia, stated in sections of its final report released on Thursday. Whomever might they mean? Between last June, when the special grand jury began hearing evidence related to possible criminal interference in the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia, and the completion of its work, in December, it had, by its own account, heard evidence "from or involving" seventy-five witnesses, the great majority of which "was delivered in person under oath." Not all came willingly or gladly. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, fought his subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, managing only to set some limits on what he was asked; John Eastman, the former law professor who helped Donald Trump come up with the plan for what a federal judge called "a coup in search of a legal theory," took the Fifth Amendment when he came down to Georgia. After Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer, appeared, he said, "I was very happy that I satisfied my obligation." The part about his happiness might have been a lie, but it wasn't under oath.

So which witness, or witnesses, does the jury think may have committed perjury? That guessing game will continue for a whileâ€”only a few pages of the report were released, with the rest now in the hands of Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. But perjury is not the only potential state charge that should concern Trump and his associates; others include criminal solicitation of election fraud. "The allegations are very serious. If indicted and convicted, people are facing prison sentences," Willis told the Washington Post, in September. Willis began an investigation a few weeks after a January 2, 2021, phone call during which President Trump told Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to "find" him 11,780 votesâ€”one more than Joe Biden's margin of victory in the state. Not to do so, he told Raffensperger, would be "a big risk to you." Raffensperger, a Republican, did not comply; he was one of the grand jury's earliest witnesses, and testified for nearly five hours last June.

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15-minute cities: how to separate the reality from the conspiracy theory

Conspiracy theories aren’t a new thing, and for as long as they’ve been around they’ve ranged from the benign to the absurd. From the six moon landings being faked to the earth being flat, or our ruling class being lizards, we’ve all likely come across them in one form or another.

Yet, in a surprise twist, the hottest conspiracy theory of 2023 comes from an unlikely corner: town planning. This relates to the idea of “the 15-minute city” and has even gone so far as to be mentioned in UK parliament by an MP who called the idea “an international socialist concept” that will “cost us our personal freedom”.

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How much immunity do we get from a COVID infection? Large study offers new clues

After a COVID infection, whether it’s a first, second, or even a third, many of us wonder how long we might be protected against a reinfection, and whether we’ll be susceptible to new variants. Also, if we do catch COVID again, will the immunity we’ve acquired from this infection reduce the severity of the next one?

A new study published in The Lancet set out to answer these questions, looking at the strength and duration of natural immunity by COVID variant.

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Philippines sides with US amid rising regional tensions between Beijing and Washington

The US-China rivalry in east Asia has taken an interesting turn after the recent visit of US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, to the Philippines. Austin’s trip ended in an expanded deal, the enhanced defense cooperation agreement (EDCA).

This gives the US access to four additional military bases in a highly strategic region, a significant move for the Philippines, which – not so long ago – had signalled its intention to prioritise its friendship with China over the US.

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