The Full Belmonte, 2/23/2024
USA's first lunar landing in 52 years
The Odysseus lunar lander during its descent toward the Moon yesterday. Photo: Intuitive Machines via AP
“An American-made spacecraft reached the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo missions ended in 1972.
Why it matters: The mission made Houston-based Intuitive Machines the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, Axios' Jacob Knutson writes.
Flight controllers at Intuitive Machines in Houston celebrate the landing. Photo: Intuitive Machines via AP
The robotic Odysseus lander touched down during dinnertime newscasts after a several-minute delay because of communication issues between equipment on Earth and the spacecraft.
The mission includes experiments that are crucial for NASA's Artemis program and the manned lunar landing currently scheduled for 2026.
Between the lines: The successful touchdown could be the start of a lunar economy and the anticipated era of for-profit moon exploration.” [Axios]
U.S. hits Russia with more than 500 new sanctions after Alexei Navalny’s death
“The Biden administration’s move targets scores of Russian companies and individuals, aiming to constrict the billions of dollars in energy revenue that have financed President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.”
Read more at Washington Post
President Biden met with Alexei Navalny’s widow and daughter yesterday.
“What to know: Biden, who met them in San Francisco, has blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the death of the Russian opposition leader in a Russian prison last week.
What’s next? Biden pledged to issue new sanctions against Russia today. He is also seeking more aid for Ukraine, as the war with Russia reaches the two-year mark tomorrow.”
Read this story at Washington Post
The informant who allegedly lied about the Bidens was rearrested yesterday.
“Who? Alexander Smirnov, initially charged last week. The former FBI informant had been released on bond but was deemed a flight risk after claiming ties to Russian intelligence.
What else to know: Smirnov’s accusations against the Bidens had been a central part of Republicans’ effort to impeach the president over his family’s business deals.”
Read this story at Washington Post
Presidential race
“South Carolina voters will head to the polls on Saturday for the state's Republican primary election. Former President Donald Trump holds a wide lead among likely GOP voters, but his sole challenger, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, said she would ‘absolutely’ remain in the race through Saturday's contest in her home state. Performing well in primaries and caucuses equals delegates, and the larger goal is amassing the magic number of 1,215 delegates to win the party's nomination. As of now, Trump has 63 delegates to Haley's 17, with 50 at stake in South Carolina this weekend. On the Democratic side, South Carolina already delivered President Joe Biden his first official primary victory of the 2024 campaign on February 3.” [CNN]
Alabama I.V.F. Ruling
Medications for I.V.F. treatments. Wes Frazer for The New York Times
“A second Alabama health provider halted I.V.F. after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children.” [New York Times]
“Democrats criticized the Alabama ruling. Vice President Kamala Harris accused its proponents of blocking ‘the right to start a family.’” [New York Times]
“Even among anti-abortion politicians, opposition to I.V.F. is unusual. ‘I.V.F. allowed me, as it has so many others, to start my family,’ said Representative Michelle Steel, a Republican who sponsored a national abortion ban in Congress.” [New York Times]
“Alabama’s chief justice invoked God in the ruling, writing that ‘human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.’” [New York Times]
“Patients sue clinics for errors that destroy embryos, like faulty freezers. Alabama’s ruling raises the stakes of those errors.” [New York Times]
Politics
The Boy Scouts settlement involves more than 82,000 claims. Mary Altaffer/Associated Press
“The Supreme Court allowed a $2.4 billion plan to settle sex abuse lawsuits against the Boy Scouts of America to go forward.” [New York Times]
“Pro-Trump internet trolls are attacking Nikki Haley in sexist and racist ways, using artificial intelligence to manipulate her likeness and depicting her as Shiva, the Hindu goddess of destruction.” [New York Times]
“State Republican parties in Arizona, Michigan and other swing states are struggling with dysfunction and debt.” [New York Times]
“Most Democrats oppose teaching elementary school students about gender identity, polls found, though most do support teaching it and other L.G.B.T.Q. topics in high school.” [New York Times]
How the death of a nonbinary Oklahoma teenager has renewed scrutiny on anti-trans policies
“Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary high school student, died a day after a fight inside a bathroom at their high school. The teen’s family says the student was bullied over their gender identity. Read more.
Why this matters:
Oklahoma’s Republican-led Legislature has passed laws targeting trans and nonbinary people, including bills that prevent trans children from using school bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.
Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Schools has also embraced anti-trans policies and faced blowback for appointing a social media influencer known for posting anti-trans rhetoric to a state library panel.
In the days since news of Benedict’s death became public, calls from Oklahoma to a national crisis hotline for LGBTQ+ youths have spiked by more than 500%, the founder says.” [AP News]
Bibi's first post-war plan
Displaced Palestinians camp in Rafah, near the border fence between Gaza and Egypt. Photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — for the first time — laid out his post-war plan for Gaza yesterday, Axios' Barak Ravid writes.
Why it matters: President Biden has long pushed Netanyahu to focus on the day after the war.
The document is short on concrete details but broadly addresses several key areas for post-war Gaza and Israel:
The IDF would indefinitely maintain freedom of operation across the entire Gaza Strip.
The Gaza Strip would be completely demilitarized except for weapons that are ‘necessary to maintain public order.’
Gaza's reconstruction ‘will be carried out with the financing and leadership of countries acceptable to Israel.’
The Strip will be governed by ‘local elements with management experience’ who will be responsible for civilian management and public order.” [Axios]
Ukraine's best hope in '24: Limit losses
Data: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project. Map: Axios Visuals
“Ukraine's best hope for year three of Russia's invasion may be to avoid losing additional territory — and some military analysts question whether even that will be achievable without urgent help from Washington, Axios' Dave Lawler writes.
Why it matters: The war — which crosses the two-year mark tomorrow — has devolved into a deadly stalemate that could tilt in Russia's favor.
Ukrainian hopes for a decisive breakthrough were dashed in 2023. Russia now has clear manpower and firepower advantages.
‘It seems unlikely that there will be resources for another major Ukrainian offensive this year,’ says Michael Kofman, a leading analyst of the war and Carnegie Endowment senior fellow.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose rhetoric about the war has grown increasingly dire, warned in a visit to the front this week that his forces were in an ‘extremely difficult’ position due to ‘delays’ in weapons supplies.
Between the lines: Ukraine can still hope to ‘hold and potentially exhaust’ Russia's forces this year — but only with sufficient support from Western backers, Kofman says.
With the House deadlocked over further Ukraine funding, and a potential Trump presidency looming, Kofman believes the question of whether U.S. support endures may decide the outcome of the war.” [Axios]
Russia and Ukraine
Lyudmila Navalnaya, Aleksei Navalny’s mother, and Alexei Tsvetkov, his lawyer. Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
“Russian officials say that the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny died of natural causes. But they refuse to release his remains unless he’s given a ‘secret funeral,’ his mother said.” [New York Times]
“President Biden met with Navalny’s widow and daughter. He also criticized Donald Trump for likening Navalny’s death to his legal troubles.” [New York Times]
“Biden called Vladimir Putin a ‘crazy S.O.B.’ during a California fund-raiser. The Kremlin called Biden a ‘cowboy.’ Read how Putin has embraced his strongman persona.” [New York Times]
“U.S. officials investigated claims that allies of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, met with and took millions of dollars from drug cartels. López Obrador said the allegations were false and disclosed a Times reporter’s cellphone number on national television.” [New York Times]
“Two years of war with no end in sight. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has turned into a political, military and economic battle of stamina and will between the Russian president and Kyiv’s US and European allies.
Ukrainian resistance remains unbowed, even as the task grows harder and bloodier with ammunition supplies and manpower dwindling and US military aid stuck in Congress. Russian forces have made advances in recent days after months of stalemate on the battlefield.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s military shakeup exposed tensions within the leadership amid growing war-weariness in Kyiv, while in Russia, the prison death of opposition leader Alexey Navalny underlined how intense state repression has become under Putin.
The US will unveil fresh sanctions today to punish Putin for the war and demise of Navalny. Still, the Kremlin leader boasts that 10 years of international sanctions — starting after the 2014 annexation of Crimea — failed to destroy Russia’s economy.
Tomorrow also marks the anniversary of the start of the Desert Storm ground war in 1991 that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait after Saddam Hussein’s invasion. A US-led coalition restored Kuwait’s borders under a United Nations Security Council resolution that Moscow supported.
Today, Russia uses its permanent UNSC membership to block condemnation of Putin’s invasion. And nobody proposes sending NATO troops to help Ukraine restore its international borders, even as alliance members worry they may be next to be attacked.
That’s partly due to Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. He signaled his defiance again yesterday by taking a flight on a Russian strategic nuclear bomber.
Zelenskiy is signing security guarantees with key allies as he continues to press for NATO membership, which is unlikely as long as the war continues.
That offers Putin an incentive to keep fighting until Western resolve cracks.
The risk in a third year of war is that Ukraine gets just enough support to continue resisting but not sufficient to defeat Russia”. —Anthony Halpin [Bloomberg]
A Ukrainian soldier fires a mortar at Russian positions. Photographer: Scott Peterson/Getty Images
“Putin is shipping free grain to six African countries as part of a program that includes security assistance and arms supplies to forge closer ties with the continent. What the Kremlin gets in return is political support and access to markets that can potentially soften some of the impact of US and European sanctions.” [Bloomberg]
“Yemen-based Houthi militants are preparing for a lengthy confrontation with the US and its allies by continuing to attack shipping in the Red Sea regardless of how the Israel-Hamas war plays out. Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said the Iran-backed militants have influenced international trade and ‘have realized the power of this tool.’” [Bloomberg]
“Senegalese President Macky Sall pledged to step down at the end of his term on April 2 after weeks of turmoil sparked by his attempt to stay in power. A constitutional crisis in the West African country, long thought of as one of the continent’s most stable democracies, erupted when he postponed elections scheduled for this weekend and lawmakers proposed extending his tenure by 10 months.” [Bloomberg]
Senegalese gendarmes during opposition demonstrations in Dakar on Feb. 4. Photographer: John Wessels/AFP/Getty Images
“The US and China are in talks that could ease the $400 billion-plus annual debt service burden for poorer countries through new measures to prevent a wave of emerging market sovereign defaults, sources say. The discussions represent one of the most significant attempts in years at economic cooperation between the rival superpowers, Eric Martin and Shawn Donnan report.” [Bloomberg]
Information Warfare
The exterior of the i-Soon office building is seen in Chengdu, China, on Feb. 20.AP
“Chinese police are investigating the leak of hundreds of documents that detail how a private, Shanghai-based firm carried out large-scale, systematic hacking operations against foreign entities for Beijing’s government. Around 570 documents and related intelligence were posted online to GitHub late last week, though it is unclear who published the information or why.
Together, the documents provide an extraordinarily in-depth look into China’s global espionage efforts and hacking-for-hire network.
‘We rarely get such unfettered access to the inner workings of any intelligence operation,’ said John Hultquist, chief analyst at cybersecurity firm Mandiant Intelligence. ‘We have every reason to believe this is the authentic data of a contractor supporting global and domestic cyberespionage operations out of China.’
Beijing employed the Chinese firm i-Soon (known as Anxun in Mandarin) to gather information on foreign governments, companies, and infrastructure. The trove revealed contracts going back eight years to extract data for Chinese state and military uses. Targets were located within at least 20 foreign governments and territories, including Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. One spreadsheet listed 80 overseas targets that i-Soon appeared to have successfully hacked, and another hinted at the firm selling unspecified data related to NATO in 2022.
‘In information warfare, stealing enemy information and destroying enemy information systems has become the key to defeating the enemy,’ one of the documents said.
The leak also showed Chinese state efforts to surveil its own citizens living domestically and abroad. Beijing is highly wary of dissent inside the global diaspora, which it sees as a potential threat to its rule. ‘For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which sees suppressing any threats to its power as a life-and-death struggle, cyberspace is a new battlefield,’ Minxin Pei wrote in an excerpt from his new book in Foreign Policy.
China’s government has employed private companies for the past two decades to conduct intelligence-gathering campaigns for state purposes—sometimes referred to as ‘patriotic hacking.’ Rival firms compete for government contracts by promising to provide better, more damaging classified intelligence. Over the past year alone, U.S. officials say, hackers working for China’s military breached computer systems in dozens of key U.S. infrastructure entities.” [Foreign Policy]
“Gunmen attack Israeli civilians. Israeli officials said three Palestinian gunmen killed at least one Israeli and injured around 13 others in a shooting attack near the A-Zaim checkpoint in the West Bank on Thursday. Two of the suspects were killed on site and the third was arrested after attempting to escape.
Hamas praised the attack as a ‘natural response to the occupation’s massacres and crimes’ in Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir condemned the violence and urged officials to distribute more weapons to Israeli settlers in the region, who are living in the West Bank despite these settlements being illegal under international law.
Israelis’ ‘right to our lives prevails on their [Palestinians’] freedom of movement,’ Ben-Gvir declared during a visit to the scene of the attack.
In Gaza, Israeli forces bombed the southern city of Rafah on Thursday, destroying a mosque and several residential homes. According to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, at least 97 Palestinians were killed and another 130 wounded in the past 24 hours, though local officials predicted the death toll to be higher. Residents said it was one of the heaviest Israeli assaults on Rafah since Israeli forces rescued two hostages held there nearly two weeks ago. Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz warned last week that Israel will launch a ground offensive in Rafah if Hamas does not release all remaining captives by March 10.” [Foreign Policy]
“Historic impeachment. South Africa’s parliament impeached one of the nation’s top judges for misconduct late Wednesday. John Hlophe, president of Western Cape province’s high court, allegedly tried to influence two other justices involved in a 2008 arms-deal corruption case against former President Jacob Zuma. An investigation accused Hlophe of trying to sway the results in Zuma’s favor, which Hlophe denies. Only one lawmaker voted against removing Hlophe; 296 members voted in favor, and 13 parliamentarians abstained.
The 15-year impeachment delay was due to lengthy investigations and appeals. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa must now approve the decision and schedule a date for Hlophe’s removal. Hlophe will be the first South African judge to ever be removed from office since democratic rule began in 1994.
Another judge, Nkola Motata of Gauteng province, was also impeached on Wednesday for disorderly conduct and racial outbursts during a drunken-driving accident in 2007. Having already retired, Motata did not need to be removed from office.” [Foreign Policy]
“Weapons deliveries. Iran began shipping hundreds of missiles to Russia early last month, sources told Reuters on Wednesday, and more transfers are expected in the coming weeks. These deliveries include short-range, surface-to-surface ballistic missiles that can strike targets located between 186 and 435 miles away. According to one source, the deal was finalized late last year during security talks in Tehran and Moscow, and the weapons were transported on ships via the Caspian Sea and by plane.
United Nations sanctions on Iranian missile and drone exports expired in October 2023, but the United States and Europe still maintain sanctions on the regime’s missile program. Iran and Russia, meanwhile, are bolstering their defense cooperation as Moscow nears the two-year anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine—signaling growing shared animosity toward the West.
Not only could deepening relations between Moscow and Tehran prolong the war in Ukraine, but it could also ‘endanger U.S. allies in the Middle East that oppose Iran if the Russian government delivers new forms of military technology and high-end weapons systems’ to Tehran, FP’s Robbie Gramer and Amy Mackinnon wrote last year.” [Foreign Policy]
“For the first time in 1,250 years, women participated in Japan’s “naked festival” on Thursday. Despite what the name suggests, revelers at the festival, which centers on driving away evil spirits by praying for happiness and giving offerings, are not actually nude. The women wore waist-length purple robes and shorts while the men wore loin cloths. Women did not participate in the main event, where a large group of men physically clash together to remove evil forces, but they did take part in chanting and carrying a large bamboo trunk as an offering.” [Foreign Policy]
Vice Media meltdown
The company's office in Venice, Calif. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images
“Vice Media is laying off ‘several hundred positions’ and shutting down its website, Axios' Sara Fischer and Kerry Flynn write.
The company instead will emphasize using social channels where ‘content will be viewed most broadly,’ Vice CEO Bruce Dixon said.
The big picture: Once high-flying new media brands are shrinking as the digital ad market tightens.
BuzzFeed announced the sale of Complex for $108.6 million. It paid nearly triple that amount.” [Axios]
Phone outage
“AT&T has resolved Thursday's massive service outage that left tens of thousands of people across the US unable to place calls, text or access the internet for nearly 12 hours. Customers also had trouble reaching emergency services and at least one police department reported that its 911 line was briefly flooded with people dialing to see if their calls would go through from their cell phones. At one point, the outage affected more than 70,000 customers as many raised questions over whether malicious activity could have caused the issue. AT&T said in a statement Thursday evening that the outage was caused ‘by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack.’” [CNN]
Google blocked its Gemini AI from creating images of people.
“Why? Some users claimed the tool had an anti-White bias. AI-generated images of a female pope and a Black founding father went viral on social media this week.
Zooming out: As tech companies have attempted to correct AI’s diversity issues, conservatives have accused them of liberal bias. Google said Wednesday it was ‘missing the mark.’”
Read this story at Washington Post
The sun launched three huge solar flares in 24 hours.
An image of an X-class solar flare captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory yesterday. (NASA)
“What to know: The bursts of radiation from the sun were the most intense of the current 11-year solar cycle, and they disrupted radio communications on Earth.
Should we worry? These weren’t the kind of flares that can affect satellites. And scientists said they were unlikely to be behind the blackout of AT&T services yesterday.”
Read this story at Washington Post
Mount Everest is trying to tackle its poop problem.
“Why? Climbers trashing the mountain has been an issue for years. As adventure tourism continues to boom, the poop puts local health — and the mountain’s beauty — at risk.
The solution: People ascending the world’s tallest peak will be expected to collect their poop in doggy bags and carry it back to base camp, according to new local regulations.”
Read this story at Washington Post
“Lives Lived: Hydeia Broadbent, born with H.I.V., was 6 years old when she began talking on television about her struggle with the virus, aiming to educate the public. She died at 39.” [New York Times]