It should have been possible to see what was coming, when Donald Trump’s team of highly unqualified attorneys managed to submit Trump’s complaint incorrectly, and the judge gave them a do over. Then the complaint came in missing everything necessary, and the judge sent instructions on exactly what she wanted to see.
Donald Trump is a prime example of someone who lies so often, that sometimes he ends up running into the truth, just by accident. On Saturday afternoon, Trump cranked up underpopulated and deeply in debt social media scam Truth Social to deliver a message that, breaking with precedent, I’m going to post in full.
On Friday, Judge Bruce Reinhart released parts of the affidavit the Department of Justice filed with the court previous to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. As expected, the document is heavily redacted to protect both witnesses and the contents of heavily classified documents.
On Wednesday, as Ukraine marked its independence day, Vladimir Putin put his signature to an order officially increasing the number of slots in the Russian army to over 2 million. While that sounds impressive, it was clearly a declaration with only symbolic value, as the total number of people in the Russian army is currently well below 1 million. There are plenty of empty helmets to fill—assuming Russia can find the helmets.
Yesterday was Independence Day in Ukraine, which Russia appears to have celebrated mostly in the same way it has celebrated every day for months: with a reported 98 towns shelled, missiles falling in Ukrainian cities (including at least 65 civilian casualties at a train station in Chaplyne, 100 miles from the front), and with many, many failed attempts to capture Ukrainian towns and villages.
It’s been more than three years since former Attorney General William Barr issued his infamous “summary” of the report created by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Aug. 24 is Ukrainian Independence Day. It also marks six months since Russian dictator Vladimir Putin began an illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. And now it marks the biggest U.S. military aid package since the war began.
President Joe Biden has made note of this occasion both by congratulating the Ukrainian people on their continued independence and by announcing a package of military aid designed to see that Ukraine stays a free and independent nation.
Ukraine’s position as one of the largest providers of exported grain has generated fears from the outset that Vladimir Putin’s illegal and unprovoked invasion would lead to food shortages in countries around the world. Those fears haven’t been helped by scenes of fields in the east of Ukraine pitted by thousands of artillery strikes, or news of farmers in the north dying after striking mines left behind by withdrawing Russian forces.
Over the last three weeks, attention has focused on the behind-the-lines attacks made by Ukraine on Russian bases, supply depots, and infrastructure. For good reasons. These attacks, made with a combination of precision weapons—including possible Ukrainian forces on the ground many kilometers inside areas Russia considered “safe”—have changed the entire tone of the war.
On Wednesday, more explosions have been reported in the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol. This time, the site of the attack appears to be the Russian command center for the area. This follows attacks over the last two days that took out the Russian HQ that had been set up in Lysychansk, electrical infrastructure for Melitopol, the rail lines serving much of Crimea, two Russian air bases in Crimea, and a massive supply depot containing both ammo and vehicles.
On Tuesday, there were reports of at least two large explosions in occupied Crimea, well beyond the range of Ukrainian artillery or of any HIMARS ammunition known to be in Ukrainian hands. This time the primary target appears to have been a stockpile of ammunition and equipment near a railway, and if that description makes it seem less significant than previous strikes on warehouses and buildings, videos of the site indicate otherwise.
Right now, Ukraine seems to be involved in a combination counteroffensive giant trap in the Kherson oblast. By simultaneously attacking Russia’s points of access in the bridges at Kherson and Nova Kakhovka, as well as a series of bridges over the Inhulets River in the middle of the oblast, Ukraine seems to be forcing Russia to scramble to come up with ways to maintain supply lines, while simultaneously encouraging Russia to reinforce their westernmost flank.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was both illegal and unprovoked. Every life lost in this conflict, both Ukrainian and Russian, is a murder that belongs to Russia alone, and specifically to dictator Vladimir Putin, who personally made the decision to begin this needless slaughter. This doesn’t just apply to the tens of thousands who have died in the invasion that began on Feb.
Ukraine has launched long-range artillery or HIMARS rockets into the Antonivskyi Bridge east of Kherson for a third night in a row, causing additional damage and closing the bridge to any kind of vehicular traffic. At Darivka, east of Kherson, the bridge across the Inhulets River that connects the city to traffic coming across the Kakhovka Bridge is also down, and the pontoon bridge which Russia had constructed there appears to be completely gone.
In December, President Joe Biden extended the operation of the International Space Station (ISS) through 2030 as part of the Space Frontier Act. A month later, NASA set an explicit end date for the last crew to leave in January of 2031. Then in February, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin initiated an illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
One year, when I was in college, it snowed. At lot. And no, that’s not because it was during the Ice Age.
In any case, this was Kentucky, where snowplows were considered exotic beasts and 30” of white stuff was enough to literally call out the National Guard, declare a statewide emergency, and put the campus on a lockdown.
Back in early May, I wrote an update on Ukraine in which I insisted that that the tide had turned and that Ukraine was about to do big things in Kherson and Kharkiv. Which, yeah, that didn’t exactly pan out. Though to be fair, at the time Russia still occupied some areas right outside of Kharkiv, and Ukraine was just beginning the move that would net Staryi Saltiv and drive Russian forces back to the border in some areas, so … it wasn’t completely wrong.
On Thursday night, the House select committee on Jan. 6 held its eighth public hearing, presenting damning evidence that Donald Trump’s failure to halt the assault on the Capitol was itself a vital part of the coup plot. In the process, the committee drew an underscore under a series of hearings that showed: how Trump plotted, even before the election, to overthrow democracy; how he worked through various scheme and attempts before landing on the Jan.
On June 28, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson gave what was, until then, some of the most shocking testimony of the Jan. 6 hearings.
Early in the invasion of Ukraine, those interested in following the war discovered that they had some friends in high places—places anywhere from 200 to 800 miles above the ground. Not only has intelligence been available in terms of satellite imagery (some of it from free sources), but NASA’s FIRMS Fire Map has become a staple in tracking what’s happening on the front lines and behind the front lines.
By now I think everyone is tired of looking at maps of the Kherson area in which few things seem to change from day to day. So you may be excited to see that the map has changed today. Until you see that none of those changes is for the good.
Kherson area update reverts much of the ‘disputed’ area to Russian control.
It’s not that Russia has conducted a major offensive, or even that a number of past calls turned out to be wrong.
In January, when President Joe Biden made it clear he intended to nominate a Black woman for the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered what The New York Times called a “stern warning” to Biden against making a radical choice. Instead, declared McConnell, Biden needed to look for someone who would “govern from the middle, steward our institutions and unite America.
The James Webb Space Telescope was more than a decade in construction. When it finally launched back on Christmas Day, the massive and complex structure faced what NASA called “344 points of failure” on its way to its new home at Lagrange Point 2 (L2), roughly 1,500,000 kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth.
Day by day, week by week, the telescope didn’t just pass those points of potential failure, it passed with flying colors.
Police in Highland Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, report that six people are dead and another 26 are wounded following a mass shooting event that took place during a Fourth of July parade. The shooter has not yet been apprehended, but the murders were reportedly the act of a single individual firing from a rooftop into the crowd below.
At the beginning of May, Russian forces still occupied the ring of towns and villages just outside Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv. From that position, they rained down a constant barrage of artillery into the city, damaging over half the apartment buildings and homes, reducing some neighborhoods to smoldering wreckage, and making anything that looked like normal day-to-day life impossible.
It’s going to be hard to go very far with a regular series featuring objects in deep space without mentioning Charles Messier. Because between 1771 and 1784, Messier did something that keeps his name almost constantly on the lips of both backyard and professional astronomers today.
Messier was born in northern France in 1730, where his father held the totally important job of being a “court usher.
Perched on high ground across the river from the larger city of Severodonetsk, the town of Lysychansk has played a critical role over the last two months of the battle in eastern Ukraine. When Russian forces pressed into Severodonetsk in May, they seemed to think taking the city would be a cakewalk.
On Wednesday, I started an update on the situation south of Severodonetsk several times, and each time I updated a map, or wrote several paragraphs of text, I found myself having to change that information well before it was ready to publish. Things haven’t settled down much since then, so consider this an update likely soon to be an outdate.
If you want to know where the Republican Party has going, there’s been one guiding light since 2016. Not Donald Trump … former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens. And here is where Greitens’ is going today.
Greitens: “Today, we’re going RINO hunting. The RINO feeds on corruption is marked by the stripes of cowardice. Join the MAGA crew get a RINO hunting permit.
A few weeks ago, I used the looser schedule created by a Monday holiday to post a review of my new telescope. The tiny and odd-looking Vaonis Vespera isn’t really designed to snag great pictures of the Moon or planets. It’s intended to deliver a self-contained tool for doing deep space astrophotography, eliminating a lot of the hassle such images usually require.
Included with that review were a couple of images taken with the scope at that point.