What Zelenskyy can learn from Netanyahu & his Oval Office meltdown with Obama

Source: New York Post
by Michael Oren

“On May 20, 2011, inside the Oval Office and before the cameras, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured President Barack Obama. The incident was the closest the two countries came to a total breakdown. I was then Israel’s ambassador to the United States and had a ringside seat to the clash. It left a deep impression on me, underscoring the importance of interpersonal relationships in the shaping of foreign policy. Those lessons proved especially applicable last week in the wake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Oval Office meltdown with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance. By repeatedly interrupting and finally lecturing his hosts, the feisty Ukrainian leader supplied a textbook example of how not to handle a foreign leader of formidable pride and breakaway policies. To understand how he might get out of this mess, it’s worth going back to the Netanyahu-Obama collision.” (03/03/25)

https://nypost.com/2025/03/03/opinion/what-zelensky-can-learn-from-netanyahus-oval-office-meltdown/

Spain: Father tries to block daughter’s euthanasia in landmark case

Source: BBC News [UK State Media]

“A young woman is due to testify in a Spanish court today in a bid to persuade a judge to let her die voluntarily against the wishes of her father, in the first case of its kind. The 23-year-old woman who wants to end her life is paraplegic due to injuries suffered when she tried to take her own life in 2022. She has the support of the regional government of Catalonia after a local euthanasia guarantee and evaluation board unanimously supported her decision in July 2024. … The woman was due to die in August, but the process was suspended at the last moment due to legal objections raised by her father, with the backing of the campaign group Christian Lawyers (Abogados Cristianos).” (03/04/25)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crrdqdky9gxo

The DOGE Charade

Source: CounterPunch
by Phil Mattera

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk keep claiming that their scorched-earth approach to remaking the federal government is made necessary by the prevalence of fraud and waste. Musk’s DOGE attack-squad tabulates its progress on a Wall of Receipts that currently purports to have saved Uncle Sam $65 billion. That number appears to have been plucked out of thin air. The savings for the 2,300 individual contracts listed on the site add up to only $9.6 billion, and even that amount is shaky. For example, the single biggest savings, $1.9 billion, is attached to a Treasury Department contract that is reported to have ended during the Biden Administration. DOGE gives no details of any fraud it may have found in the contracts. That is not surprising, since it is impossible to have done a careful examination of that many contracts in such a short amount of time.” (03/04/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/04/the-doge-charade/

US State Department unfreezes $95 million in aid for the Lebanese army

Source: Axios

“The State Department is waiving $95 million in military assistance to the Lebanese armed forces amid the Trump administration’s nearly 90-day foreign-aid freeze, two U.S. officials told Axios. The waiver suggests the Trump administration intends to try to strengthen Lebanon’s military and the new government that took office in January. The aid is part of a broader Trump administration strategy to try to continue weakening Hezbollah, decreasing its influence in Lebanon and making sure the ceasefire with Israel holds, U.S. officials said.” (03/04/25)

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/04/lebanon-state-department-unfreezes-aid

Trump’s Narrow Iran Window Is Closing

Source: The American Conservative
by Trita Parsi

“Punishing Iran was not on Donald Trump’s mind when he entered the White House in January. Rather, he had gone out of his way to declare his desire for a deal by avoiding insulting rhetoric, disavowing regime change and declaring nuclear weapons as his only red line. Similar signals came from Iran. Direct talks with Trump was Tehran’s new line. Yet this unique window of opportunity is closing fast, mainly because Trump isn’t paying attention. Iran policy is once again falling into the hands of the neocons who sabotaged Trump’s hope to reach a deal with Iran during his first term — with war lurking around the corner.” [editor’s note: Trump entered his first term with a deal — a really GOOD deal — and broke that deal for “maximum pressure.” That was him, not “the neocons” – TLK] (03/04/25)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trumps-narrow-iran-window-is-closing/

The Five Dogmas of DEI

Source: Persuasion
by Joseph Heath

“The efforts of the Trump administration to purge DEI (‘diversity, equity and inclusion’) programs from the federal government bureaucracy have revealed an enormous amount of confusion about what DEI actually is (or was). In part this is due to the way it was sold by its practitioners, who often presented it as a straightforward extension of the ideas and principles that animated the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In reality, many of their claims were a lot more controversial. If there is any hope for resisting the full-fledged assault that is taking place, it should begin with a re-examination of these claims, with an eye to producing a more defensible body of doctrine.” (03/04/25)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-five-dogmas-of-dei

Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice

Source: The Guardian [UK]

“A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse. Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028. Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter. Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. ‘It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,’ Lamm said.” (03/04/25)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/04/genetically-modified-woolly-mice-mammoth