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.

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/

From Matt Yglesias’ January 20 Slow Boring, Blame Trump for Trump-era immigration excesses:

All of this is terrible. And all of it is Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s doing (with help from the Supreme Court).

And now ICE has committed yet another brutal, inexcusable murder. R.I.P. Alex Pretti, ICU nurse and model American citizen.  None of this would be happening if we had decent, moral leadership and if ICE was operating in a lawful manner (and perhaps operating in states where there are many more illegal immigrants, rather than ones the petulant president likes to goad).  And the reprehensible lying about what is transpiring – sickening. As the New York Times Editorial Board said today, “The administration is urging Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. Ms. Noem and Mr. Bovino are lying in defiance of obvious truths. They are lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power.” I am sad and fear for my country.

After watching what actually transpired in the horrific shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an as-yet unnamed ICE agent versus the responses from the current administration, I thought that Steve Vladeck, writing in his One First Substack, had a wonderfully fitting quote from Hannah Arendt, who wrote in her 1967 New Yorker essay “Truth and Politics”:

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”

And so it is.

If you are interested in an excellent summary of Jack Smith’s sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, read Parker Molloy, writing in her The Present Age substack here. One excerpt:

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

Besides the Republican release of the transcript on New Year’s Eve, one might surmise that the timing of the illegal Venezuelan incursion was not entirely coincidental.

And the plague of firearm deaths continues…from Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist:

“Almost immediately, social media seized on the tragedy to argue that Australia’s strict gun laws don’t work. I’ll stop that right there. This isn’t a debate because the data are crystal clear:

1. 1. Mass shootings are extremely rare in Australia. Since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, strict firearm regulations (a buyback program and tight licensing) have kept mass shootings to zero or one per year on average in Australia. By contrast, the U.S. experiences roughly 400–650 mass shootings annually, with more than 46,000 deaths from gun violence each year. As the graph below shows, it’s not even close.
      
   2. A tragedy does not disprove the effectiveness of these laws. Data show that strict regulations reduce deaths. Beyond Australia, places like the U.K., Japan, and Canada have similarly strict gun laws and extremely low rates of mass shootings. We can also see variability within the United States. States with the most lax gun laws have the highest rates of gun violence.
   3. Firearm deaths are the leading cause of death for children in the U.S., whereas in Australia, child deaths from firearms are extremely rare, with suicide and road accidents being the top causes.”

Maxwell Kennedy writes evocatively about his father Bobby Kennedy’s legacy in the Boston Globe.  I was 14 and remember being absolutely devastated when RFK was assassinated.  Reading this essay reminds me of how incredibly far the quality of our leadership has plummeted.

From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

“Today, former U.S. district judge Mark L. Wolf, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by President Ronald Reagan, explained that he resigned on Friday because he wanted the freedom to do “everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.” Wolf called out Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to hurt his political opponents, his firing of inspectors general, the administration’s pay-to-play policies in which wealthy donors get government favors, the corruption of cryptocurrency, unconstitutional executive orders, and the threats against judges as Trump attacks the rule of law.”

Kudos to Judge Wolf.  His Atlantic essay Why I am Resigning is here.

From Bernard C, Duchemin T, Marty L, et al. First-Trimester mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination and Risk of Major Congenital Anomalies. JAMA Netw Open. 2025;8(10):e2538039. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.38039:

“Question  Are messenger RNA (mRNA)–based COVID-19 vaccines teratogenic ?

Findings  In this nationwide cohort study of 527 564 live-born infants, 130 338 (24.7%) were exposed to an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine during the first trimester of pregnancy. There was no association with an increased risk for 75 different major congenital malformations, whether examined overall, grouped by organ systems, or individually.”

Res ipsa loquitur.

Having in the past administered a lot of rabies PEP with RIG and the vaccine, I thought this new rabies PEP alternative was pretty cool; from a UMass Chan press release:

A new post-licensure clinical study published in The Lancet further demonstrates that Rabishield, a monoclonal antibody therapy developed by UMass Chan Medical School in partnership with the Serum Institute of India, offers a safe and effective alternative to older rabies treatments. In India, rabies kills an estimated 20,000 people every year—two people every hour. 

In the new study, more than 4,000 patients in India who had high-risk animal bites received either Rabishield plus a rabies vaccine or the traditional equine rabies immunoglobulin plus vaccine. Both groups developed strong immune responses, but Rabishield was better tolerated, with fewer serious side effects. Importantly, no participants developed rabies during a year of follow-up.