‘Lethal’ Chinese Gifts to Putin Could Spark ‘New Cold War’ With U.S.
Jose Pagliery – February 19, 2023
Sputnik/Sergey Bobylev/Pool via REUTERS
China is now considering a new escalation against the West by delivering weapons and ammunition to Russia in its war against Ukraine—crossing a red line that could spark a “new Cold War,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed on taped Sunday morning news programs.
The claim, if true, would be a startling change that would squarely position China on Russia’s side, violating the U.S.-led international pressure campaign to isolate and punish Russian President Vladimir Putin for his expansionary military campaign.
“We see China considering this. We have not seen them cross that line,” he said. “We are concerned that this is something that China was not doing for many months but may be considering now.”
On CBS and NBC, Blinken said the United States is only now sharing this intelligence with allies, hinting that China’s sudden shift is a relatively new development.
Blinken spoke from Munich, Germany, where he is attending the Münchner Sicherheitskonferenzan, an annual international security meeting that’s been going on since the height of the last Cold War in 1963.
Although he would not clarify what kinds of weapons China is preparing to send Russia’s way, he did classify it as “lethal aid” that would include arms and ammunition—and possibly more. He did, however, note that the Chinese Communist Party’s approach to economics allows little differentiation between the government and corporations there, a hint that could mean that weapon deliveries might come from Chinese companies that would be “separate” from Chinese officials themselves.
Discussing the matter with CBS “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan, the American secretary of state said that China’s recent moves on Russia—coupled with the recent Chinese spy balloon debacle, poses a major threat to world stability.
Blinken warned about the danger of “veering into conflict” with “a new Cold War,” a claim he also made on NBC’s “Meet the Press” with moderator Chuck Todd. Blinken said he cautioned China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, about the dangers when they met on Saturday in Munich.
He stressed “the importance of not crossing that line” and said “it would have serious consequences.”
50-year-old muscles just can’t grow big like they used to – the biology of how muscles change with age
Roger Fielding, Senior Scientist Team Lead Nutrition Exercise Physiology and Sarcopenia Team Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, Professor of Medicine, Tufts University – February 19, 2023
There is perhaps no better way to see the absolute pinnacle of human athletic abilities than by watching the Olympics. But at the Olympics – and at almost all professional sporting events – you rarely see a competitor over 40 years old and almost never see a single athlete over 50. This is because with every additional year spent on Earth, bodies age and muscles don’t respond to exercise the same as they used to.
I lead a team of scientists who study the health benefits of exercise, strength training and diet in older people. We investigate how older people respond to exercise and try to understand the underlying biological mechanisms that cause muscles to increase in size and strength after resistance or strength training.
Old and young people build muscle in the same way. But as you age, many of the biological processes that turn exercise into muscle become less effective. This makes it harder for older people to build strength but also makes it that much more important for everyone to continue exercising as they age.
The exercise I study is the type that makes you stronger. Strength training includes exercises like pushups and situps, but also weightlifting and resistance training using bands or workout machines.
When you do strength training, over time, exercises that at first felt difficult become easier as your muscles increase in strength and size – a process called hypertrophy. Bigger muscles simply have larger muscle fibers and cells, and this allows you to lift heavier weights. As you keep working out, you can continue to increase the difficulty or weight of the exercises as your muscles get bigger and stronger.
It is easy to see that working out makes muscles bigger, but what is actually happening to the cells as muscles increase in strength and size in response to resistance training?
Any time you move your body, you are doing so by shortening and pulling with your muscles – a process called contraction. This is how muscles spend energy to generate force and produce movement. Every time you contract a muscle – especially when you have to work hard to do the contraction, like when lifting weights – the action causes changes to the levels of various chemicals in your muscles. In addition to the chemical changes, there are also specialized receptors on the surface of muscle cells that detect when you move a muscle, generate force or otherwise alter the biochemical machinery within a muscle.
In a healthy young person, when these chemical and mechanical sensory systems detect muscle movement, they turn on a number of specialized chemical pathways within the muscle. These pathways in turn trigger the production of more proteins that get incorporated into the muscle fibers and cause the muscle to increase in size.
These cellular pathways also turn on genes that code for specific proteins in cells that make up the muscles contracting machinery. This activation of gene expression is a longer-term process, with genes being turned on or off for several hours after a single session of resistance exercise.
The overall effect of these many exercise-induced changes is to cause your muscles to get bigger.
How older muscles change
While the basic biology of all people, young or old, is more or less the same, something is behind the lack of senior citizens in professional sports. So what changes in a person’s muscles as they age?
What my colleagues and I have found in our research is that in young muscle, a little bit of exercise produces a strong signal for the many processes that trigger muscle growth. In older people’s muscles, by comparison, the signal telling muscles to grow is much weaker for a given amount of exercise. These changes begin to occur when a person reaches around 50 years old and become more pronounced as time goes on.
In a recent study, we wanted to see if the changes in signaling were accompanied by any changes in which genes – and how many of them – respond to exercise. Using a technique that allowed us to measure changes in thousands of genes in response to resistance exercise, we found that when younger men exercise, there are changes in the expression of more than 150 genes. When we looked at older men, we found changes in the expression of only 42 genes. This difference in gene expression seems to explain, at least partly, the more visible variation between how young and old people respond to strength training.
Strength training can help maintain overall fitness and allow you to keep doing other things you love as you age. Peathegee Inc via Getty Images
While younger people may get stronger and build bigger muscles much faster than their older counterparts, older people still get incredibly valuable health benefits from exercise, including improved strength, physical function and reduced disability. So the next time you are sweating during a workout session, remember that you are building muscle strength that is vital to maintaining mobility and good health throughout a long life.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.
Rebecca Fuoco, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz – February 19, 2023
Ms. Fuoco is the director of science communications at the Green Science Policy Institute. Dr. Rosner is a professor of sociomedical sciences and history at Columbia. Dr. Markowitz is a history professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
A black plume and flames rise over East Palestine, Ohio, from a controlled burn of chemicals carried by a derailed train.Credit…Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press
Like a scene out of some postapocalyptic movie, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio convened a news conference on Feb. 5 to deliver a stark warning. “We are ordering them to leave,” he said of residents of the small rural community of East Palestine, Ohio, and a neighboring part of Pennsylvania. “This is a matter of life and death.” To emphasize the point, he added: “Those in the red area are facing grave danger of death if they are still in that area.”
In this case, the “grave danger of death” was not a zombie fungus or lethal bacteria but chemicals. The red area was an area one mile by two miles surrounding the town, on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border about 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
Two days earlier, it was the site of a fiery derailment of train cars carrying the gas vinyl chloride and other chemicals. Freight trains typically transport more than two million carloads of hazardous materials each year, including many chemicals. Vinyl chloride is particularly dangerous and increasingly common, used primarily to make polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, a hard plastic resin used to produce pipes, wire, cable coatings and packaging. We should begin phasing out the use of this chemical.
It was a particular concern in East Palestine after the derailment. Because vinyl chloride is so flammable, it created a risk of an explosion that could launch deadly shrapnel as far as a mile. To avoid such a catastrophe, railroad officials vented the vinyl chloride and burned it off.
But shrapnel wasn’t the only risk. Inhaling vinyl chloride fumes can be deadly. Even people in neighboring towns were at risk. On Feb. 10, seven days after the crash, the Environmental Protection Agency said that chemicals were “known to have been and continue to be” released to the air, surface soil and surface waters.
Residents complained last week of rashes, headaches and a lingering odor. Thousands of dead fish turned up in streams near the crash site.
Vinyl chloride is not just suspected of causing cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer considers it a Group 1 carcinogen known to cause liver cancer in highly exposed industrial workers. It has also been associated with brain and lung cancers, lymphoma and leukemia.
We need to stop producing and using vinyl chloride and its most important end product, PVC plastics. Increasingly, major businesses are phasing it out. Many European communities have banned or restricted its use, even as the PVC plastics industry is expanding.
The United States should begin eliminating PVC by categories of use. Legislation has been floated in California to prohibit PVC in food packaging — a ban that could be expanded to other nonessential needs. Though PVC is inexpensive, it is replaceable in most cases. Alternatives include glass, ceramics, linoleum, polyesters and more.
Also, discarded PVC should be labeled a hazardous waste. The designation would put the burden on users for its safe storage, transportation and disposal, creating an incentive to accelerate its elimination. The E.P.A. tentatively rejected such an action in January but is still accepting public comment on the proposal.
You might wonder why such a hazardous chemical, among others, is being transported along American railways and through our communities. It’s because vinyl chloride is one of the most produced petrochemicals in the world. Tens of millions of tons of it are manufactured annually. (It was used as an aerosol propellant in household consumer products like hair spray until it was banned in aerosols by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1974.)
Vinyl chloride manufacturers laid the groundwork for the chemical’s proliferation decades ago with cover-ups and disinformation campaigns. Their own research showed that exposure led to deadly cancers in rodents. Numerous studies have found that workers regularly exposed to the chemical during the 1970s developed malignant liver cancers at very high rates. Chemical companies knew early on they were unleashing a dangerous substance into the world.
The extraordinary efforts of the chemical industry to continue selling products it knew were harmful were recounted by two of us in our 2002 book “Deceit and Denial.”
In addition to the manufacturing and transportation risks of vinyl chloride, PVC plastics can release endocrine-disrupting phthalates, used to soften PVC, and cancer-causing dioxins into air and water during much of their life cycle.
Many of the vinyl chloride and PVC production facilities are clustered with other petrochemical facilities along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as Cancer Alley. People in one town in the area, most of whom are Black, are about 50 times as likely to develop cancer as the average American. They face the constant threat of chemical accidents.
The PVC plastics industry is expanding in other parts of the country. Growing plastics hubs in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia could become new cancer alleys.
As long as PVC production continues, the risk of vinyl chloride spills will persist. Worse, more workers and communities will be exposed to the ticking time bombs of cancer and other severe health harms.
Cemetery workers pre-digging graves in anticipation of more military funerals at a cemetery in Kharkiv, last month.Credit…Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
As we approach the first anniversary of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, two ominous trends are emerging at once. First, Russia is doubling down. It’s pouring fresh troops into Ukraine and launching new offensive operations.
Second, poll after poll after poll demonstrate that American support for Ukraine is slipping away. While Americans have sympathy for Ukraine, declining percentages are willing to spend American resources to keep Ukraine in the fight.
Yet the outcome of the war is simply too important — to America as well as Ukraine — to allow our support to falter. On the war’s anniversary it’s time for a concerted effort to persuade Americans of a single idea: We should support Ukraine as much as it takes, as long as it takes, until the Russian military suffers a decisive, unmistakable defeat.
Instead, domestic agreement is fraying. As The Washington Post reported last week, the Biden administration is telling Ukraine there are no guarantees of future support, and it’s “raising the pressure” on Ukraine “to make significant gains on the battlefield” in the short term, while Western aid still flows.
According to The Post, the administration is even qualifying the meaning of President Biden’s State of the Union pledge to support Ukraine “as long as it takes.” It quotes an administration official saying, “‘As long as it takes’ pertains to the amount of conflict,” but “it doesn’t pertain to the amount of assistance.”
This is a dangerous notion. Despite the remarkable success of the Ukrainian military thus far, pushing Ukraine to mount a premature offensive could have catastrophic results. It will take time for Ukraine to receive the deliveries of advanced Western tanks, for example. And deploying those tanks before Ukrainian soldiers are fully trained and before Ukraine has a maintenance infrastructure in place could result in unacceptable losses and squandered resources.
Compounding the challenge, the modest numbers of new Western weapons may not be enough to decisively break Russian lines, especially given that Russia has had time to build an “immense” network of fortifications in the Donbas region. Ukraine needs both quality and quantity to defeat the Russian military, and while dribbling small numbers of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and other weapons into the fight is much better than nothing, it is likely to be far short of adequate for the demands of combat on this scale. Ukraine, after all, is confronting one of the world’s great powers — even if it is not quite as great as we may have believed a year ago.
Rather than press Ukraine to undertake offensive operations, the administration and Democratic and Republican congressional allies must impress upon the American public the extraordinary high stakes for America in the outcome of a war fought so many thousands of miles from our shores.
One of the miracles of modern life is that it’s been generations since the great powers have gone to war against one another. The humanitarian catastrophes of the first two world wars are the stuff of history books for everyone but the last surviving veterans of World War II. But those same history books teach us that large-scale European conflicts implicate vital American interests and draw Americans into deadly conflict. There is no better way to prevent American men and women from dying in European battlefields than helping Ukraine defeat Russia and thereby deterring a general European war.
What more, if Russia defeats Ukraine, a dangerous precedent will be set. Nuclear-armed powers will prove they can invade smaller foes and then rattle the nuclear saber to deter an effective response, creating a one-way ratchet toward territorial aggression. Ironically enough, the effort to placate Russia to avoid escalation is likely to result in more aggression from nuclear-armed foes.
Moreover, if Russia ultimately defeats Ukraine, Vladimir Putin will have a message for his people: Russia confronted Ukraine and NATO, and Russia won. Russian victory will have a galvanizing impact on illiberal and authoritarian movements in the West. Western retreat from a winnable war will prove in many quarters the Russian critique of the “woke” West, that it is simply too self-indulgent, decadent and individualistic to survive and thrive.
Make no mistake, this is a winnable war. Yes, Ukraine alone cannot withstand Russia over the long term. It lacks the personnel and the industrial base. But American industrial outputdwarfs Russia’s, and our superior arms can help address the personnel gap. Better weapons can overcome the challenge of fewer people. America, the arsenal of democracy, has the capacity to help Ukraine win even a long fight. The question is whether we have the will.
American defenders of Ukraine will have to make their case, repeatedly, persuasively, and firmly. They’ll have to overcome not only the natural reluctance of the American people to spend large sums abroad when there are undeniable problems at home, but also a vicious and vitriolic new right that hates the Ukrainian cause, and is spewing that hatred to an audience millions strong.
Consider these words, from prominent right-wing Americans, when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed Congress last December. Tucker Carlson of Fox News derided Zelensky for wearing fatigues in the Capitol, saying he “dressed like the manager of a strip club.” The popular right-wing podcaster Candace Owens said, “I just want to punch him” in response to a video of Zelensky thanking Americans for their support. Not to be outdone, Donald Trump Jr. called Zelensky an “international welfare queen.”
Insults are not arguments. But insults can be answered by arguments. And the argument for defeating Russian aggression, destroying the offensive capability of the Russian military, and thereby potentially deterring future aggression in Ukraine and beyond, are overwhelming. Ukraine needs American aid to win its war, and America can help Ukraine win while expending a fraction of the cost of the American defense budget.
In 1990, as the United States and its allies mobilized their militaries to respond to Saddam Hussein’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Kuwait, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain told President George H.W. Bush, “This is no time to go wobbly.” At that moment, American troops and American treasure were on the line. Now only American treasure is at stake. But the same words apply — they apply to President Biden, to Congress, and, crucially, to the American people. This is no time to go wobbly.
It’s awful to say this about any war, given the horrific loss of life, but this one is winnable. And Russian aggression cannot prevail.
One Year Into War, Putin Is Crafting the Russia He Craves
In Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has met setback after setback. But its effect at home has been very different.
Anton Troianovski from Berlin, and Valerie Hopkins fromMoscow
February 19, 2023
A patriotic mural in Moscow dedicated to victory in World War II. The Kremlin is tapping into Russian pride in the nation’s victory over the Nazis to demonize Ukraine.
Photographs by Nanna Heitmann
The grievances, paranoia and imperialist mind-set that drove President Vladimir V. Putin to invade Ukraine have seeped deep into Russian life after a year of war — a broad, if uneven, societal upheaval that has left the Russian leader more dominant than ever at home.
Schoolchildren collect empty cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches, while learning in a new weekly class that the Russian military has always liberated humanity from “aggressors who seek world domination.”
Museums and theaters, which remained islands of artistic freedom during previous crackdowns, have seen that special status evaporate, their antiwar performers and artists expunged. New exhibits put on by the state have titles like “NATOzism” — a play on “Nazism” that seeks to cast the Western military alliance as posing a threat as existential as the Nazis of World War II.
Many of the activist groups and rights organizations that have sprung up in the first 30 years of post-Soviet Russia have met an abrupt end, while nationalist groups once seen as fringe have taken center stage.
As Friday’s first anniversary of the invasion approaches, Russia’s military has suffered setback after setback, falling far short of its goal of taking control of Ukraine. But at home, facing little resistance, Mr. Putin’s year of war has allowed him to go further than many thought possible in reshaping Russia in his image.
Schoolchildren during a tour of the Victory Museum in Moscow, dedicated to Russia’s sacrifices and ultimate victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.An exhibit at the Victory Museum titled “Everyday Nazism” includes artifacts from Ukraine’s Azov Battalion as evidence for the false assertion that Ukraine is committing “genocide” against Russians.
“Liberalism in Russia is dead forever, thank God,” Konstantin Malofeyev, an ultraconservative business tycoon, bragged in a phone interview on Saturday. “The longer this war lasts, the more Russian society is cleansing itself from liberalism and the Western poison.”
That the invasion has dragged on for a year has made Russia’s transformation go far deeper, he said, than it would have had Mr. Putin’s hopes for a swift victory been realized.
“If the Blitzkrieg had succeeded, nothing would have changed,” he said.
The Kremlin for years sought to keep Mr. Malofeyev at arm’s length, even as he funded pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and called for Russia to be reformed into an empire of “traditional values,” free of Western influence. But that changed after the invasion, as Mr. Putin turned “traditional values” into a rallying cry — signing a new anti-gay law, for instance — while styling himself as another Peter the Great retaking lost Russian lands.
A Russian Mole in Germany?: A director at Germany’s spy service was arrested on suspicion of passing intelligence to Russia. German officials and allies worry just how deep the problem goes.
Most important, Mr. Malofeyev said, Russia’s liberals have either been silenced or have fled the country, while Western companies have left voluntarily.
That change was evident last Wednesday at a gathering off the traffic-jammed Garden Ring road in Moscow, where some of the most prominent rights activists who have remained in Russia came together for the latest of many recent farewells: The Sakharov Center, a human rights archive that was a liberal hub for decades, was opening its last exhibit before being forced to shut under a new law.
The center’s chairman, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, once a Soviet dissident, told the assembled crowd that “what we just couldn’t have imagined two years ago or even a year ago is happening today.”
An exhibition of military equipment in Moscow in August.The exhibition included toy tanks for children to drive.
“A new system of values has been built,” Aleksandr Daniel, an expert on Soviet dissidents, said afterward. “Brutal and archaic public values.”
A year ago, as Washington warned of an imminent invasion, most Russians dismissed the possibility; Mr. Putin, after all, had styled himself as a peace-loving president who would never attack another country. So after the invasion started — stunning some of the president’s closest aides — the Kremlin scrambled to adjust its propaganda to justify it.
It was the West that went to war against Russia by backing “Nazis” who took power in Ukraine in 2014, the false message went, and the goal of Mr. Putin’s “special military operation” was to end the war the West had started.
In a series of addresses aimed at shoring up domestic support, Mr. Putin cast the invasion as a near-holy war for Russia’s very identity, declaring that it was fighting to prevent liberal gender norms and acceptance of homosexuality from being forced upon it by an aggressive West.
The full power of the state was deployed to spread and enforce that message. National television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, dropped entertainment programming in favor of more news and political talk shows; schools were directed to add a regular flag-raising ceremony and “patriotic” education; the police hunted down people for offenses like antiwar Facebook posts, helping to push hundreds of thousands of Russians out of the country.
“Society in general has gone off the rails,” Sergei Chernyshov, who runs a private high school in the Siberian metropolis of Novosibirsk, said in a phone interview. “They’ve flipped the ideas of good and evil.”
Students visiting the Victory Museum wore green army caps.Fireworks burst over a military music festival in Red Square in August.
Mr. Chernyshov, one of the few Russian school heads who has spoken out against the war, described the narrative of Russian soldiers fighting in defense of their nation as so easily digestible that much of society truly came to believe it — especially since the message meshed seamlessly with one of the most emotionally evocative chapters of Russian history: their nation’s victory in World War II.
A nationwide campaign urging children to make candles for soldiers has become so popular, he said, that anyone questioning it in a school chat group might be called a “Nazi and an accomplice of the West.”
At the same time, he argued, daily life has changed little for Russians without a family member fighting in Ukraine, which has hidden or assuaged the costs of the war. Western officials estimate that at least 200,000 Russians have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, a far more serious toll than analysts had predicted when the war began. Yet the economy has suffered much less than analysts predicted, with Western sanctions having failed to drastically reduce average Russians’ quality of life even as many Western brands departed.
“One of the scariest observations, I think, is that for the most part, nothing has changed for people,” Mr. Chernyshov said, describing the urban rhythm of restaurants and concerts and his students going on dates. “This tragedy gets pushed to the periphery.”
In Moscow, Mr. Putin’s new ideology of war is on display at the Victory Museum — a sprawling hilltop compound dedicated to the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. One new exhibit, “NATOzism,” declares that “the purpose of creating NATO was to achieve world domination.” A second, “Everyday Nazism,” includes artifacts from Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, which has far-right connections, as evidence for the false assertion that Ukraine is committing “genocide” against Russians.
“It was scary, creepy and awful,” one patron named Liza, 19, said of what the exhibit had shown her, declining to give her last name because of the political sensitivity of the subject. She said she was distressed to learn of this behavior by the Ukrainians, as presented by Russian propaganda. “It shouldn’t be that way,” she said, signaling her support for Mr. Putin’s invasion.
Hundreds of students were visiting on a recent afternoon, and primary schoolchildren marched in green army caps as their chaperone called out, “Left, left, one, two, three!” and addressed them as “soldiers.” In the main hall, the studio of Victory TV — a channel started in 2020 to focus on World War II — was filming a live talk show.
A priest blessing men who had just been conscripted into the Russian Army at a recruiting office in Moscow in November.Families of conscripted Russian men saying farewell.
“The framework of the conflict helped people to come to terms with it,” said Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent pollster in Moscow. “The West is against us. Here are our soldiers, there are the enemy soldiers, and in this framework, you have to take sides.”
Weeks after launching his invasion, Mr. Putin declared that Russia faced a much-needed “self-purification of society.” He has glibly wished “all the best!” to Western businesses that have left the country and said their departures created “unique development opportunities” for Russian companies.
But in Khabarovsk, a city on the Chinese border in Russia’s Far East, Vitaly Blazhevich, a local English teacher, says the locals miss Western brands like H&M, the clothing retailer. When it came to the war, he went on, the dominant emotion was one of passive acceptance and the hope that things would end soon.
“People are nostalgic for what turned out to have been the good times,” he said.
Mr. Blazhevich taught at a Khabarovsk state university until he was forced to resign on Friday, he said, for criticizing Mr. Putin in a YouTube interview with Radio Liberty, the American-funded Russian-language news outlet. They were the kind of comments that would probably not have been punished before the war. Now, he said, the government’s repression of dissent “is like a steamroller” — “everyone is just being rolled into the asphalt.”
Mr. Malofeyev, the conservative tycoon, said Russia still needed another year “for society to cleanse itself completely from the last fateful years.” He said that anything short of “victory” in Ukraine, complete with a parade in Kyiv, could still cause some of the last year’s transformation to be undone.
“If there is a cease-fire in the course of the spring,” he said, “then a certain liberal comeback is possible.”
In Moscow, at the farewell event at the Sakharov Center, some of the older attendees noted that in the arc of Russian history, a Kremlin crackdown on dissent was nothing new. Yan Rachinsky, chairman of Memorial, the rights group forced to disband in late 2021, said the Soviets banned so much “that there was nothing left to ban.”
“But you can’t ban people from thinking,” Mr. Rachinsky went on. “What the authorities are doing today does not guarantee them any longevity.”
Conscripted soldiers being greeted as they returned to Moscow.
Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times. He was previously Moscow bureau chief of The Washington Post and spent nine years with The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and New York.
Valerie Hopkins is an international correspondent for The Times, covering the war in Ukraine, as well as Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Russia tells Macron: Don’t forget Napoleon when you talk of regime change
February 19, 2023
Plenary meeting of the Forum for the Islam of France (FORIF) in ParisRussian foreign ministry’s spokeswoman Zakharova attends a meeting in Moscow
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia on Sunday scolded Emmanuel Macron over remarks about wanting to see Russia defeated, saying Moscow still remembered the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte and accusing the French president of duplicitous diplomacy with the Kremlin.
Macron told paper Le Journal du Dimanche France wanted Russia to be defeated in Ukraine but had never wanted to “crush” it.
“About ‘Never’: France did not begin with Macron, and the remains of Napoleon, revered at the state level, rest in the centre of Paris. France – and Russia – should understand,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
“In general, Macron is priceless,” she said, adding that his remarks showed the West had engaged in discussions about regime change in Russia while Macron had repeatedly sought meetings with the Russian leadership.
Macron has drawn criticism from some NATO allies for delivering mixed messages regarding his policy on the war between Ukraine and Russia, with some considering Paris a weak link in the Western alliance.
On Friday, Macron urged allies to step up military support for Ukraine, but also said he did not believe in regime change and that there would have to be negotiations at some point.
“Let’s be clear, I don’t believe for one second in regime change, and when I hear a lot of people calling for regime change I ask them, ‘For which change? Who’s next? Who is your leader?'”
Clarifying those comments, he said in the paper that he did not believe a democratic solution from within civil society would emerge in Russia after years of a hardening of Moscow’s position and conflict. He added that he saw no alternative to Putin, who had to be brought back to the negotiating table.
“All the options other than Vladimir Putin in the current system seem worse to me,” Macron said.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and John Irish in Munich; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Millions of debt collections dropped off Americans’ credit reports
Gabriella Cruz – Martinez – Personal finance writer – February 18, 2023
Tens of millions of debt collections disappeared from Americans’ credit reports during the pandemic, a new government watchdog report found, but overdue medical bills remain a big strain on many households nationwide.
The total number of debt collections on credit reports dropped by 33% from 261 million in 2018 to 175 million in 2022, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, while the share of consumers with a debt collection on their credit report shrunk by 20%.
Medical debt collections also dropped by 17.9% during that time, but still made up 57% of all collection accounts on credit reports, far more than other types of debt combined — including credit cards, utilities, and rent accounts.
Despite the reduction in collections, the CFPB noted that the results underscore ongoing concerns that current medical billing and collection practices can lack transparency, often hurting the credit scores and financial health of those most vulnerable.
“Our analysis of credit reports provides yet another indicator that, due to a strong labor market and emergency programs during the pandemic, household financial distress reduced over the last two years,” Rohit Chopra, CFPB director said in a statement. “However, false and inaccurate medical debt on credit reports continues to drag on household financial health.”
Signage is seen at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) headquarters in Washington, D.C., (Credit: Andrew Kelly, REUTERS)
Having a debt in collections means your original creditor sent your debt to a third-party agency to collect it. According to the CFPB, common items that can slip into collections include medical debt, student loans, unpaid credit card balances and rent, to name a few.
Once in collections, these debts can stay on your credit report for up to 7 years, Experian noted, potentially harming your chances of gaining access to new credit in the future.
While pandemic-era stimulus benefits may have helped families reduce some of their overall debt, the CFPB noted that the decline in collections was mainly due to some debt collectors underreporting data.
According to the report, debt collectors — particularly those who primarily collect on medical bills — reported 38% fewer collection tradelines from 2018 to 2022. Chopra noted this could be troubling.
(Photo: Getty Creative)
The “decline in collections tradelines does not necessarily reflect a decline in debt collection activity, nor an improvement in families’ abilities to meet their financial obligations,” he said, “but a choice by debt collectors and others to report fewer collections tradelines, while still conducting other collection activities.”
Fortunately, a growing share of Americans may see even more medical debt disappear from their credit history this year, helping to improve their creditworthiness.
In the first half of 2023, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion will no longer include medical debts under the amount of $500 on credit reports. That followed the credit bureaus’ move last year to remove approximately 70% of medical collection debt tradelines from consumer reports. Additionally, unpaid medical debt would take a year — rather than the current six months — to show up on a person’s credit report, the bureaus said.
About two dozen people eventually filled the “Debt and Collections” courtroom in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Many of the cases on the docket involved medical debt. (Credit: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Those upcoming changes may still be just a drop in the bucket toward reducing medical debt, Chopra said.
“While this will reduce the total number of medical collections tradelines, an estimated half of all consumers with medical collections tradelines will still have them on their credit reports,” Chopra said in the report, “with the larger collection amounts representing a majority of the outstanding dollar amount of medical collections remaining on credit reports.”
The CFPB analysis builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s aim to strengthen the Affordable Care Act and implement new consumer protections to reduce the burden of medical debt and lower medical costs.
It also follows a string of CFPB reports citing how inaccurate medical debt tradelines could not only unfairly harm consumers’ credit scores, but also create long-term repercussions such as avoidance of medical care, risk of bankruptcy, or difficulty securing employment.
Gabriella is a personal finance reporter at Yahoo Finance.
How Climate Change Is Making Tampons (and Lots of Other Stuff) More Expensive
Coral Davenport – February 18, 2023
Cotton left over after the harvest in Meadow, Texas, Jan. 19, 2023. (Jordan Vonderaar/The New York Times)
When the Agriculture Department finished its calculations last month, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and other products.
In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74% of their planted crops — nearly 6 million acres — because of heat and parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change.
That crash has helped to push up the price of tampons in the United States 13% over the past year. The price of cloth diapers spiked 21%. Cotton balls climbed 9%, and gauze bandages increased by 8%. All of that was well above the country’s overall inflation rate of 6.5% in 2022, according to data provided by the market research firms NielsonIQ and The NPD Group.
It’s an example of how climate change is reshaping the cost of daily life in ways that consumers might not realize.
West Texas is the main source of upland cotton in the United States, which in turn is the world’s third-biggest producer and largest exporter of the fiber. That means the collapse of the upland cotton crop in West Texas will spread beyond the United States, economists say, onto store shelves around the world.
“Climate change is a secret driver of inflation,” said Nicole Corbett, a vice president at NielsonIQ. “As extreme weather continues to impact crops and production capacity, the cost of necessities will continue to rise.”
Halfway around the world in Pakistan, the world’s sixth-largest producer of upland cotton, severe flooding, made worse by climate change, destroyed half that country’s cotton crop.
There have been other drags on the global cotton supply. In 2021, the United States banned imports of cotton from the Xinjiang region of China, a major cotton-producing area, out of concerns about the use of forced labor.
But experts say that the impact of the warming planet on cotton is expanding across the planet with consequences that may be felt for decades to come.
By 2040, half of the regions around the globe where cotton is grown will face a “high or very high climate risk” from drought, floods and wildfires, according to the nonprofit group Forum for the Future.
Texas cotton offers a peek into the future. Scientists project that heat and drought exacerbated by climate change will continue to shrink yields in the Southwest — further driving up the prices of many essential items. A 2020 study found that heat and drought worsened by climate change have already lowered the production of upland cotton in Arizona and projected that future yields of cotton in the region could drop by 40% between 2036 and 2065.
Cotton is “a bellwether crop,” said Natalie Simpson, an expert in supply chain logistics at the University at Buffalo. “When weather destabilizes it, you see changes almost immediately,” Simpson said. “This is true anywhere it’s grown. And the future supply that everyone depends on is going to look very different from how it does now. The trend is already there.”
Return of the Dust Bowl
For decades, the Southwestern cotton crop has depended on water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches underneath eight western states from Wyoming to Texas.
But the Ogallala is declining, in part because of climate change, according to the 2018 National Climate Assessment, a report issued by 13 federal agencies. “Major portions of the Ogallala Aquifer should now be considered a nonrenewable resource,” it said.
That is the same region that was abandoned by more than 2 million people during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused by severe drought and poor farming practices. John Steinbeck famously chronicled the trauma in his epic “The Grapes of Wrath,” about a family of cotton farmers driven from their Oklahoma home. Lately, the novel has been weighing on the mind of Mark Brusberg, a meteorologist at the Agriculture Department.
“The last time this happened, there was a mass migration of producers from where they couldn’t survive any longer to a place where they were going to give it a shot,” Brusberg said. “But we have to figure out how to keep that from happening again.”
In the years since, the farmland over the Ogallala once again flourished as farmers drew from the aquifer to irrigate their fields. But now, with the rise in heat and drought and the decline of the aquifer, those dust storms are returning, the National Climate Assessment found. Climate change is projected to increase the duration and intensity of drought over much of the Ogallala region in the next 50 years, the report said.
Barry Evans, a fourth-generation cotton farmer near Lubbock, Texas, doesn’t need a scientific report to tell him that. Last spring, he planted 2400 acres of cotton. He harvested 500 acres.
“This is one of the worst years of farming I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We’ve lost a lot of the Ogallala Aquifer, and it’s not coming back.”
When Evans began farming cotton in 1992, he said, he was able to irrigate about 90% of his fields with water from the Ogallala. Now that’s down to 5% and declining, he said. He has been growing cotton in rotation with other crops and using new technologies to maximize the precious little moisture that does arrive from the skies. But he sees farmers around him giving up.
“The decline of the Ogallala has had a strong impact on people saying it’s time to retire and stop doing this,” he said.
Kody Bessent, the CEO of Plains Cotton Growers Inc., which represents farmers who grow cotton across 4 million acres in Texas, said that land would produce 4 or 5 million bales of cotton in a typical year. Production for 2022 is projected at 1.5 million bales — a cost to the regional economy of roughly $2 billion to $3 billion, he said.
“It’s a huge loss,” he said. “It’s been a tragic year.”
From Cotton Fields to Walmart Shelves
Upland cotton is shorter and coarser than its more famous cousin, Pima cotton. It is also far more widely grown and is the staple ingredient in cheap clothes and basic household and hygiene products.
In the United States, most cotton grown is upland cotton, and the crop is concentrated in Texas. That’s unusual for a major commodity crop. While other crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans are affected by extreme weather, they are spread out geographically so that a major event afflicting some of the crop may spare the rest, said Lance Honig, an economist at the Agriculture Department.
“That’s why cotton really stands out, with this drought having such a big impact on the national crop,” Honig said.
Sam Clay of Toyo Cotton Co., a Dallas trader that buys upland cotton from farmers and sells it to mills, said the collapse of the crop had sent him scrambling. “Prices have gone sky-high, and all this is getting passed on to consumers,” he said.
Clay said he is experiencing the impacts himself. “I bought six pairs of Wranglers a year and a half ago for $35 a pair. I’m paying $58 a pair now.”
At least 50% of the denim in every pair of Wrangler and of Lee jeans is woven from U.S.-grown cotton, and the cost of that cotton can represent more than half the price tag, said Jeff Frye, the vice president of sustainability for Kontoor Brands, which owns both labels.
Frye and others who deal in denim did point out, however, that other factors have driven up price, including the ban on imports of Xinjiang cotton, high fuel costs and the complicated logistics of moving materials.
Among the cotton products most sensitive to the price of raw materials are personal care items like tampons and gauze bandages, since they require very little labor or processing like dying, spinning or weaving, said Jon Devine, an economist at Cotton Inc., a research and marketing company.
The price of Tampax, the tampon giant that sells 4.5 billion boxes globally each year, started climbing fast last year.
In an earnings call in January, Andre Schulten, chief financial officer for Procter & Gamble, which makes Tampax, said the costs of raw materials “are still a significant headwind” for the company across several products, forcing the company to raise prices.
On a recent Sunday at a Walmart in Alexandria, Virginia, several shoppers said they had noticed rising prices.
“The price of a regular box of Tampax has gone up from $9 to $11,” said Vanessa Skelton, a consultant and the mother of a 3-year-old. “That’s a regular monthly expense.”
Make Way for Polyester
Cotton farmers say that Washington can help by increasing aid in the farm bill, legislation that Congress is renewing this year.
Taxpayers have sent Texas cotton farmers an average of $1 billion annually over the past five years in crop insurance subsidies, according to Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis.
Farmers say they’d like expanded funding for disaster relief programs to cover the impact of increasingly severe drought and to pay farmers for planting cover crops that help retain soil moisture. They also say they hope that advances in genetically modified seeds and other technologies can help sustain Texas cotton.
But some economists say it may not make sense to continue support a crop that will no longer be viable in some regions as the planet continues to warm.
“Since the 1930s, government programs have been fundamental to growing cotton,” Sumner said. “But there’s not a particular economic argument to grow cotton in West Texas as the climate changes. Does it make any economic sense for a farm bill in Washington, D.C., to say, ‘West Texas is tied to cotton?’ No, it doesn’t.”
In the long run, it could just mean that cotton is no longer the main ingredient in everything from tampons to textiles, said Sumner, “and we’re all going to use polyester.”
Macron wants Russia’s defeat in Ukraine without ‘crushing’ Russia
The Kyiv Independent news desk – February 18, 2023
On the flight back from the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 18, French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters that while he wanted Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine, France would never advocate for “crushing Russia.”
“I want Russia to be defeated in Ukraine, and I want Ukraine to be able to defend its position, but I am convinced that in the end, it will not be concluded militarily,” Macron said, French newspaper Le Figaro reported.
“I don’t think, like some, that Russia should be totally defeated, attacked on its soil. These observers want, above all, to crush Russia. This has never been France’s position, and it never will be.”
The security conference held on Feb. 17-19 brought together multiple leaders, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius pledged continued support of Ukraine. Macron similarly called on Europe as a whole to “invest more in defense.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky joined the event online, giving a video address on Feb. 17. In his speech, Zelensky said that “there are no alternatives” to Ukrainian victory, the country’s membership in the EU and NATO.
“There is no alternative to our unity. Therefore, there is and will be no alternative to getting rid of Russian aggression once and for all, liberating the land and the people,” Zelensky said.
Here’s What Really Matters in Preventing Dementia. It’s Not All Brain Teasers and Crosswords.
By Neal Templin – Feb. 18, 2023
Illustration by Barron’s Staff
Put down that brain teaser you torture yourself with and get your hearing tested. If you are interested in preserving brain function as you age, some of the clearest benefits come from staying socially connected, scientists have found.
That means getting a hearing aid if you can’t hear what people around you are saying. People with untreated hearing loss have a 90% higher rate of dementia than others in their age group, according to the 2020 report of the Lancet commission on dementia prevention, intervention, and care.
As America grays, seniors are looking for answers to make sure their cognitive abilities don’t expire before they do. They are told they should eat a Mediterranean diet. Get enough sleep. Avoid stress. Walk 10,000 steps a day. Lose weight.
Which one of those things actually helps? Probably all of them. Barron’s has been talking to brain scientists to learn what the research tells us about maintaining brain function. There is no one thing that protects against dementia, they tell us.
“It’s everything,” says cognitive neuroscientist Denise Park, who runs the Park Aging Brain Laboratory at the University of Texas at Dallas. “There are hundreds of skills that people possess, and you lose a lot of them if you don’t just interact with other people but with your environment.”
Park, 71 herself, makes a conscious effort to keep her brain working all the time. “Even when I wait in line, I pull out my phone and play computer games,” she says. “I never have an idle moment ever.”
Little wonder that so many seniors are obsessed with avoiding dementia. Brain health is key for both happiness in retirement and, to a large degree, financial security. “There is real evidence that people over 50 worry the most about dementia and beginning to lose their memory,” says Gill Livingston, the University College London psychiatry professor who led the Lancet commission on dementia. “It’s financial but it’s also very individual.”
Asked what she does to protect her own brain, Livingston replied that she lifts weights, tries to walk 10,000 steps a day, drinks moderately and watches her blood pressure. The 63-year-old also had her hearing tested, found hearing loss that she wasn’t aware of, and now uses hearing aids.
The modern world places a premium on remaining lucid. The advent of 401(k) savings plans over the past 40 years has transformed all of us into our own pension plan managers. Whereas our parents and grandparents simply waited for the pension check to arrive each month, now we must make complex investing decisions on our own.
Brain health is also a key for delaying—or avoiding altogether—the need for a nursing home, which can help preserve a retirement nest egg. William Bernstein, a former neurologist who became a financial author and money manager, says some mental slowing is inevitable as we age. He recommends simplifying your finances and going over your investment strategy with your children so they can take over if need be.
“There’s a good chance you won’t be as cognitively intact and you ought to make provisions for that,” says Bernstein.
The Lancet Commission combined research around the world with its own research and found 12 modifiable risk factors that in aggregate account for 40% of dementias. Some are behaviors or conditions long associated with health problems such as smoking, heavy drinking, or diabetes.
Others are more surprising. It turns out higher education levels early in life appear to protect against dementia later in life, research found. Working helps protect against dementia by keeping our brains engaged, scientists observed. The Lancet report noted that countries with lower retirement ages had higher dementia rates.
Why might education and work be protective? Livingston of the Lancet Commission says challenging intellectual activity creates a brain with denser connections that allow it to keep functioning even with the inevitable deterioration that comes with age or disease. This capacity was called “cognitive reserve” in this paper by neuropsychologist Yaakov Stern of Columbia University. “If you have cognitive reserve, you are more likely to survive without developing dementia,” Livingston explains. “We think education in itself strengthens the brain. It makes it more resilient.”
Controlling hypertension is another key in protecting your brain. High blood pressure can cause tears in the white matter of the brain over time, says Park, the UT Dallas neuroscientist. “If you get enough of those tears, you will have trouble transferring signals to the cortex of the brain,” she says. In essence, your brain will work less well.
Arterial disease also puts you at greater risk of stroke. “You can have a large number of smaller strokes, some of which you’re not even aware of and the cumulative effect is substantial cognitive decline that impairs your daily life,” said Thad Polk, a University of Michigan professor and cognitive neuroscientist who wrote “The Aging Brain” for The Great Courses.
The Lancet Commission found that middle-aged people who have systolic blood pressure more than 130 have a 60% greater chance of developing dementia down the road.
“What is good for your heart is good for your brain,” says Polk. He says numerous studies have found that exercise is one of the best things you can do to protect your brain.
But when it comes to the brain, physical health factors aren’t the entire story. A number of studies found that people who care for someone with dementia are more likely to get dementia themselves. Why? The answer appears to be that the stress of caring for someone alters their brains in ways that make it more vulnerable to dementia.
Zachary Cordner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, has run tests on mice where he purposely stressed the rodents and found their brains changed. Mice, like humans, are normally social creatures. In one experiment, researchers would isolate a mouse all day to impose one sort of stress, and then expose it to an aggressive “bully” mouse to oppose another type of stress.
When they examined the mice’s brains, they found changes in the regions of the brain involved in learning and memory as well as mood, anxiety, and social interactions.“ It’s clear these chronic stress exposures alter the stress system in the brain,” Cordner says.
As the human brain ages, it changes. Research has found that an older brain processes information more slowly. Seniors often have declining episodic memory, which is why they have more trouble remembering where they put the keys. (Although the 66-year-old reporter writing this article can attest he had trouble remembering where he put them even when young.) Older people have more trouble mastering large bodies of new facts, even as they may remember a familiar set of facts in sharp detail.
None of this mean our brains stop working. To the contrary, an older person with a specialized skill or knowledge set may retain that to the end of their days. What their brain loses in processing power may be offset by increased experience in the world.
And what about those brain teasers mentioned at the beginning of this article? “The issue with brain games is there is good evidence you will improve at the brain games,” says Polk of the University of Michigan. “There’s not good evidence that will generalize to other areas of cognition.”
He goes on: “There is nothing wrong with playing these games. But there might be better ways to spend your time if your goal is brain health.”
