‘We will not budge,’ says Biden after NATO summit
President Biden closed a meeting of NATO allies by comparing the war to oust Russia from Ukraine to the Cold War fight for freedom in Europe. “We will not waver,” he promised in the speech.
Biden appears to be preparing Americans and allies for a showdown that could last years. He cast the nearly year-and-a-half-long war as a test of the will of belligerent Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden insisted that NATO’s unity would hold.
“Putin still mistakenly believes he can outmaneuver Ukraine,” Biden said, describing the Russian leader as someone who made a huge strategic mistake in invading the neighboring country. “After all this time, Putin still doubts our staying power. He’s making a bad bet.”
Ukraine: The union has created a new council aimed at giving Ukraine an equal voice in matters related to its security with member states.
China: Beijing NATO criticized the statement, accusing it of military expansion that threatens the West, saying the alliance is still stuck in a Cold War mentality.
Uncertainty in Russia’s top ranks: General Sergei Surovikin, once a Wagner ally, has not been seen in public since last month’s coup. A top lawmaker said he was “taking a break”.
Another top commander was killed in an airstrike in Ukraine. And a third ex-commander was shot dead while on the run.
The hack, which went undetected for a month, comes at a time of heightened diplomatic tensions between the countries. “The Biden administration is trying to reset the relationship with Beijing,” Julian Barnes, who covers national security for the Times, told me. “The US doesn’t want that dialogue to end. So there is an interest in reducing it.
No classified email or cloud systems were said to have been breached, and the hack was not initially directly linked to Blinken’s trip. However, the attack was sophisticated.
The hackers targeted specific accounts rather than conducting broad-brush intrusions, which Chinese hackers are suspected to have done before. US officials did not identify which accounts were targeted. The breach exposed significant security gaps in Microsoft’s cloud, where the US government was transferring data from internal servers.
“We have all these promises that the cloud is not only going to be safer, but it’s going to be more secure,” Julian said. “But here is an example of breaching basic security and stealing information. That opened up a new avenue of attack for us: Here’s the first major cloud attack on US government email.
Technology: The Biden administration hopes to slow China’s economic growth and its AI industry by cutting off semiconductor chips. The plan could cripple China for a generation, but if it backs off it could hasten the fate the US wants to avoid.
Ocean heat wave threatens marine life
The water around Florida is warmer than most swimming pools in the US. It poses a severe threat to coral and marine life in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. But the real worry is that it’s only July: corals usually experience the most heat stress in August and September.
A marine heat wave has pushed water temperatures into the 90s Fahrenheit, or over 32 Celsius. Surface temperatures in these waters are the highest on record; Some beachgoers in Florida have compared the ocean to bathwater.
Science: When the ocean gets too hot, corals bleach, expelling the algae they feed on. If the water does not cool quickly enough, or if bleaching events occur in close succession, the corals die. That can lead to ripple effects throughout the ecosystem.
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Buchung Sonam fled Tibet in the 1980s. Later, he co-founded a publishing house for Tibetan writing, hoping that literature could be a salvation for other exiles.
As Beijing tightens its grip on Tibet, arresting writers and intellectuals, Sonam’s press is helping Tibet’s literature become a proxy for the nation-state, many say.
“I cannot live my life in Tibetan land,” said writer and editor Tenzin Dickey, “but I can live it in Tibetan literature.”
Arts and ideas
Milan Kundara passed away at the age of 94
“During the mid-1980s, it is difficult to overstate how central Milan Kundera was to literary culture in America and elsewhere,” my colleague Dwight Garner writes in an assessment of Kundera’s life.
Kundera, who died in Paris this week aged 94, wrote mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, adapted into a film, is his most famous book.
“He was the most famous Czech writer since Kafka, and his fiction brought news to sophisticated Eastern European societies trembling under the threat of Soviet repression,” continued Dwight.
