jpedmd2026-04-03T14:04:14-05:00April 3rd, 2026|

On Good Friday, Sam Sifton writes in his NYT The Morning newsletter on a story by C.J. Chivers on how Russia weaponized the cold this past winter in their attacks against Ukraine:

“His reporting comes from a residential neighborhood at the northeastern edge of Kyiv called Troieshchyna. Most of the buildings you’ll see there are classic late-Soviet apartment blocks — giant stacks of prefabricated reinforced concrete panels, some rising 15 stories or more above the street. Few have boilers to provide heat. Instead, the Soviet government built centralized thermal plants to supply hot water and heat to dozens, even hundreds, of buildings at a time.

This winter, one of the coldest in Ukraine in close to 20 years, Russian forces used long-range strikes to target those plants, rendering huge swaths of Troieshchyna virtually uninhabitable.

Here’s Chivers:

The attacks of early January severed more than 400,000 households from electricity, city officials said, and left 6,000 buildings without heat. Problems compounded from there. Once buildings become cold enough, pipes freeze and residents lose running water. In this way, a measure of cruelty from long-range attacks can be distributed to an entire population in their homes without hitting the homes at all. Call it sanctuary denial on the cheap or, in the words of Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, a premeditated assault “on the life-support system of a modern city.”

Ukrainians called what followed the “kholodomor,” a sort of portmanteau of the Ukrainian words for “cold” and “plague.” More than 600,000 residents fled the city in search of warmth and safety as Russian drones continued to strike.”

Chivers’s story is here.  Don’t be like Russia; stand with Ukraine.

jpedmd2026-03-16T16:40:11-05:00March 16th, 2026|

Well, here’s some good news for a change. A new drug, acoziborole, has been approved as a new, single-dose, oral treatment for T.b. gambiense sleeping sickness.  More effective against different disease stages and has a much better side effect profile:
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/16/g-s1-113246/sleeping-sickness-drug-treatment-tsetse-fly
https://dndi.org/research-development/portfolio/acoziborole/

• The live video feed from the Artemis II mission: https://www.youtube.com/live/6RwfNBtepa4

NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window on April 2, 2026, after completing the translunar injection burn:

• More worthwhile reading:

First, from the NY Times Editorial Board, Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran:

“There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat — to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, especially to prevent it from menacing its neighbors and, above all, from developing a nuclear weapon. We are skeptical, but we acknowledge that there is a case to be made.

Mr. Trump is not making it. Instead, he has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.”

And also from the Times, a most excellent essay from Phil Klay: Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran. It’s definitely worth reading.

• I highly recommend Jamelle Bouie’s latest NYT opinion piece – Is There Method to Trump’s Madness? Excerpt:

“So, again, there is no method to this particular madness. There is no method at all. What there is, instead, is a man with a fourth-rate intellect and a fifth-rate temperament who treats reality as a television show for which he is the cloistered, pampered star. But the world actually exists. Real lives are at stake. And his actions have weight that cannot be easily moved.”