The Guardian: Inside the bizarre, bungled raid on North Korea's Madrid embassy

Diplomatic defections are one of North Korea’s most visible problems, and in recent years there have been two high-profile cases. Just a few months before the embassy raid, in late 2018, the acting ambassador to Italy had abandoned his post and gone into hiding. Two years earlier, the deputy ambassador in London, Thae Yong-ho, became the most senior North Korean official to defect to South Korea. [...]

After the attackers fled, in the days and weeks that followed, details about their identities and aims started to trickle out, leaving as many questions as answers. The group seemed to be largely comprised of Korean Americans, South Koreans and North Korean defectors. But who were they? What did they want? Why did they fly across the world to attack an embassy in Europe? And what was the significance of the fact that one alleged member of the group turned out to have impressive connections within Washington? [...]

Far from being the bunkered fortress that one might expect, the Madrid embassy is a low, beige and brown building, surrounded by rough land, with rickety- looking security cameras and the sort of low walls that a bored teenager might be tempted to jump. It is an easy, isolated target, sitting on an island of scrubby, undeveloped land in a remote corner of Madrid’s exclusive Moncloa-Aravaca neighbourhood. That, Lankov told me, might help explain why it was chosen for the raid. Apart from three embassy cars, a thief would have found little of value inside. North Korea is poor, and economic sanctions are hitting hard. The cash-strapped embassy housed just one diplomat, his family and three “administrative staff” (plus one staff member’s wife), who also did the gardening and acted as doormen. In sweltering Madrid, the embassy has a single air-conditioning unit that is wheeled out for visitors. The building’s insurance policy lapsed last year.

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UnHerd: A dire warning for our old political system

That’s partly because the barriers to entry for anybody aspiring to replace them are pretty damned high, particularly in plurality systems such as the UK’s. Historically, anyway, it’s been somewhere between difficult and impossible for any party that can’t manage to score around 30% of the nationwide vote here to break through — unless, like the Scottish and Welsh nationalists or the Northern Ireland parties, they can claim to speak for a particular part of the country with a particularly strong identity. Nigel Farage, in offering the Tories some kind of electoral pact with the Brexit Party, isn’t so much doing them a favour as trying to prevent a re-run of 2015 when Ukip won nearly four million votes and only one solitary seat. [...]

What established parties do find difficult to escape, however, is being rendered increasingly irrelevant by social, economic and cultural change. Most of them will have come into being by mobilising identities that once upon a time were not only widespread, and made a lot of sense, but were also institutionally reinforced by relationships with big external players that both anchored them ideologically and supplied them with valuable resources. [...]

It is no accident, then, that it is parties in those traditions which (with a few honourable exceptions) seem to be suffering a slow (and, who knows, possibly in the end terminal) decline: what’s happened to both the Labour Party and Christian democrats in the Netherlands provides possibly the direst warning. This decline has been exacerbated in recent years by a failure to come up with convincing answers to widely-felt cultural anxieties brought about by mass immigration and its exploitation by arguably less responsible, but supposedly more responsive (and often more entrepreneurial) politicians – in their case, Geert Wilders and now Thierry Baudet.

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Nautilus Magazine: What Color Really Evolved For

These studies also have further implications. For one, the finding that melanosomes are so common inside animals’ bodies may overhaul our very understanding of melanin’s function, says McNamara. “There’s the potential that melanin didn’t evolve for color at all,” she said. “That role may actually be secondary to much more important physiological functions.” Her research indicates that it may have an important role in homeostasis, or regulation of the internal chemical and physical state of the body, and the balance of its metallic elements. “A big question now is does this apply to the first, most primitive vertebrates?” said McNamara. “Can we find fossil evidence of this? Which function of melanin is evolutionarily primitive—production of color or homeostasis?”

At the same time, the findings imply that we may need to review our understanding of the colors of ancient animals. That’s because fossil melanosomes previously assumed to represent external hues may in fact be from internal tissues, especially if the fossil has been disturbed over time. McNamara says her research has also shown that melanosomes can change shape and shrink over the course of millions of years, potentially affecting color reconstructions. [...]

Shawkey is looking into such questions, with one of his recent studies indicating that the wing color of birds may play an important role in flight efficiency by leading to different rates of heating. “What started as a novelty of deciphering dinosaur colors has turned into a very serious field which is studying the origins of key pigment systems, how the evolution of colorful structures may have helped drive major evolutionary transitions like the origin of flight, and how color is related to ecology and sexual selection,” said Steve Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh. “When I was growing up, so many of the dinosaur books I read in school said that we would never know what color they were. But as is so often the case in science, it was silly to treat this as impossible.”

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VOX: John Bolton left because Trump wouldn’t let him start a war (Sept 10, 2019)

When Bolton joined the administration in April 2018, the worry was that the arch nationalist hawk would convince the war-averse Trump to see the world as he did. Here was a guy who for decades called for bombing North Korea and Iran, exercising unilateral American power around the world, and cutting tethers to international institutions.

Bolton actually had a thought-out worldview that in many ways mirrored Trump’s. The question was if the top aide could channel the president’s instincts into actions that he has long wanted an administration to embrace. [...]

He has certainly threatened conflict before, going so far as to risk nuclear war with North Korea to persuade Kim Jong Un to come the negotiating table (remember “fire and fury?”). And he’s more willing to use military force than Obama, twice bombing Syria and escalating airstrikes on ISIS and other terrorists worldwide. He’s even continued and augmented US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

Still, Trump has walked back every chance he’s had to escalate to the highest level tensions with adversaries. That was always going to put Trump’s “America First” in conflict with Bolton’s “America Everywhere.”

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Politico: Putin’s party takes hit in Moscow election (9/9/19)

Yabloko, a tiny perestroika-era liberal party, won four seats. Its leader Sergei Mitrokhin was initially banned from standing at the polls but was reinstated after a court in Moscow ruled in his favor. “This is a massive achievement,” said Vitali Shkliarov, a political analyst who advised the party. Shkliarov added it is the first time genuine opposition candidates have been elected to the City Duma since the early 1990s.

Members of United Russia ran as “independents” in Moscow in an apparent bid to distance themselves from their increasingly unpopular party, after its ratings plummeted amid an increase to the national pension age and growing poverty. But neither that tactic nor reported voter fraud in favor of United Russia could save one of the party's heavyweights: Andrei Metelsky, the leader of United Russia’s branch in Moscow, lost his seat on Sunday. [...]

Although it is impossible to judge how much influence Navalny’s Smart Voting strategy had on the vote, a number of triumphant candidates acknowledged their debt to the opposition leader’s backing, and noted that had candidates affiliated with him been allowed to run, they would have won instead. Yandiev Magomet, who defeated United Russia’s candidate in central Moscow, admitted that in a fair vote he would have lost to Ilya Yashin, a blacklisted opposition politician. Yashin had a 28-percentage point lead before he was barred from the race, according to an opinion poll.

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