Orphaned baby bats at a wildlife refuge center, Australia
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WINTER NIGHT
It snowed and snowed throughout the land,
A ceaseless snowing.
On the table, a candle burned;
A flame was glowing.
Like a swarm of gnats in summer
That flock to a light,
Snowflakes flew to the windowpane,
Afloat in the night.
The storm drew arrows on the glass
And circles, growing.
On the table, a candle burned;
A flame was glowing.
Up on the ceiling, shadows stirred,
Vivid and fleeting,
But where hands met and then legs met
Two fates were meeting.
And, knocked to the floor with a thud,
Two shoes came to rest;
And wax fell as lightly as tears
On folds of a dress.
All disappeared in snowy haze,
Blinding and blowing;
On the table, a candle burned;
A flame was glowing.
The candle shook in a draft, caught
In the chill one brings;
Temptation's heat, like an angel,
Raised its cross-shaped wings.
All February long it snowed,
And time and again
On the table, a candle burned;
A flame was glowing.
~ Boris Pasternak, translated by Frank Beck
When a poet writes about a snowstorm, we seldom know which storm he or she had in mind. In this case, we do. On the evening of February 6, 1947, Moscow pianist Maria Yudina invited a group of friends to hear her play and Boris Pasternak read. Rumor had it that the 56-year-old poet was working on a book of fiction, and there was great curiosity about it.
It snowed so heavily that day that Pasternak worried people wouldn't come; in fact, the car carrying him and his lover, Olga Ivinskaya, got lost repeatedly on the way to Yudina's apartment. Finally, as the car stood idling in the street, Pasternak looked up and saw a lamp flickering in a window. That must be the house, he said, and, strangely enough, he was right.
The symbolism of a single candle guiding the way, through spiritual darkness as well as through a night in winter, resonated with Pasternak. The following morning, he wrote 'Winter Night', which weaves the imagery of that February evening into the love story that was at the core of his new work. For a time he considered calling it, 'A Candle Burned.' By the time the book was published, a decade later, he had named it Doctor Zhivago.
'Winter Night' eventually took its place as one of the 25 poems that form the final section of the novel, and it is now among the most frequently translated of all 20th-century poems. Anna Pasternak, the writer's grand-niece, describes its genesis in detail in her 2017 book, Lara: The Untold Love Story and The Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago.
~ Franz Beck, Facebook
Olga Ivinskaya and Boris Pasternak, 1958
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'HISTORY HAS TREATED HER BADLY': HAMNET AND THE 400-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY AROUND SHAKESPEARE'S WIFE AND SON
Oscar-tipped new film Hamnet imagines the home life of William and Agnes Shakespeare – and the "soul-crushing" loss of their child. It's a powerful story that fills in many blanks.
In Hamnet – Maggie O'Farrell's eloquent 2020 novel and the deeply moving new film based on it – Shakespeare's wife, Agnes, is a herbalist who has a knowledge of medical potions and an almost supernatural ability to sense the future. But she cannot save her young son from the plague, a death that leads the boy's father to write one of the greatest plays in all of literature, Hamlet. And almost none of that is true in any verifiable way. On the page and on screen, Hamnet is a work of inspired imagination, a rich exploration of grief spun out of the barest of facts. You can't say that O'Farrell, who also wrote the film's screenplay with its director, Chloé Zhao, distorted the real story, because there is no known story, despite centuries of historians digging around in Shakespeare's past.
The sparse facts about Shakespeare's family are far outnumbered by the questions they raise. Records show that in 1582 William Shakespeare, then 18, married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. Three years later, their twins were born, called Judith and Hamnet, a name that at the time was interchangeable with Hamlet. In 1596, when he was just 11, Hamnet died. He was buried on 11 August and it is almost certain that Shakespeare, who was traveling with his theater troupe, could not have made it back to Stratford in time for the funeral. About four years later, he wrote Hamlet. Make of that what you will.
No one knows whether Shakespeare felt forced to marry the pregnant Anne or if they were wildly in love. No one knows how Hamnet died, but the plague was then rampant and the most likely cause of his death. Most crucially for the book and film, no one knows much about Anne herself, including whether she could read and write. The fiction gives her a strong-willed personality (as depicted by Jessie Buckley on screen in her Oscar-tipped performance) and a passionate romance with Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). Hamnet is really about Agnes.
Changing the narrative
In the author's note at the end of her novel, O'Farrell acknowledges how little is actually known about Hamnet and his parents. But she informs her story with careful research into the late 16th Century, and places it within that historical context. While researching the period, she tells the BBC, "I got slightly sidetracked by how badly history and scholarship has treated his [Shakespeare's] wife, the woman we've been taught to call Anne Hathaway. We've only ever really been given one narrative about her, and most biographers have just run with it, which is that she was an illiterate peasant who trapped him into marriage, that he hated her, that he ran away to London to get away from her.”
Even her name is uncertain. Her father, a successful farmer, left her a dowry in his will, calling her Agnes. O'Farrell chose to give her character that name, figuring "[if] anyone would know her name it would be her father." She says, "It just felt really emblematic to me that on top of everything else, we haven't even got her name right."
O'Farrell has a solid point about the vilification of Shakespeare's wife. Jo Eldridge Carney, author of the study Women Talk Back to Shakespeare: Contemporary Adaptations and Appropriations, and professor of English at The College of New Jersey, tells the BBC: "This [O'Farrell's] portrayal is a deliberate repudiation of centuries of ill-informed assumptions about Anne as either a patient but boring saint tending the home fires in Stratford or the promiscuous hag who lured Shakespeare into a miserable marriage.”
Figuring out her real name is more complicated. David Scott Kastan, a prominent Shakespeare scholar and professor emeritus of English at Yale University tells the BBC: "She is Anne in almost all records, Agnes only in one: her father’s will." Nothing else is certain. It is possible, he says, "that she was born Agnes but called Anne". He adds, "I like the way the novel uses the possibility to give her her own identity, apart from the marriage we know too little about and always view through the lens of Shakespeare."
A modern woman
To create Agnes's distinct character, O'Farrell reverse-engineered it from Shakespeare's plays. "What I did was go back to the plays and read around them in a different way, seeing if I could find her, because I've always felt that I can see Hamnet in Hamlet. But I was wondering – I thought she must be there."
One inspiration for Agnes's intuitiveness comes from those re-readings. "There's an awful lot of second sight in the plays. Think of Julius Caesar's oracle, for example," O'Farrell says. The fictional Agnes's knowledge of herbs and potions has its counterpart in the plays too, notably in Ophelia's monologue in Hamlet when she seems to be going mad and hands flowers and plants to other characters, with lines including "Rosemary, that's for remembrance."
"I read that every household had, at that time, a medicine garden," says O'Farrell. "And it would've been the responsibility of the woman of the house, the matriarch, to know how to make medicines and to treat ailments. It would not have been something that men knew about." For this speech, O'Farrell says, she could imagine Shakespeare relying on his wife's expertise.
Seeing her as a truly equal partner gives us, perhaps with a bit of wish fulfillment, an Anne / Agnes for the 21st Century. Buckley's Agnes is the kind of wife we might want Shakespeare to have – that is, someone extraordinary in her own way. She is so unusual that she is rumored to be, as Shakespeare's mother warns him in the film, "the child of a forest witch." She is smart, fiercely opinionated and understanding enough to see that her husband has to pursue his artistic calling in London. She is a woman whom a genius might have fallen for, and we understand why Mescal's Shakespeare is drawn to her from the start.
This conception of Anne / Agnes is not necessarily just wishful thinking though. Carney says: "While it may be tempting to see O'Farrell's Anne as her attempt to simply turn her into an early modern feminist – a figure more in keeping with our own sensibilities – this portrayal in fact aligns with what we know of the lives of many early modern women." She adds: "We know that many women successfully ran what we would today refer to as 'small businesses': brewing, herbal healing, malt-making, trading, weaving, and more. The degree of literacy required for these careers has been more difficult to assess."
We still don't know if Shakespeare's wife could read. The fictional Agnes can, but O'Farrell herself thinks the character's real-life counterpart was probably illiterate. "It would've been thought pointless to teach the daughter of a sheep farmer to read," she says.
The Hamlet-Hamnet connection
The marriage that the book and film imagines becomes more distant when Shakespeare leaves his family behind in Stratford-upon Avon for long stretches while he works in theatre in London, absences that are historically well-known. But when it comes to Hamnet's death and its mournful aftermath, there is only more speculation.
O'Farrell, in line with the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt's influential 2004 essay The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet, sees a direct line to the play, even beyond the echo of Hamnet's name. In the film, when Agnes travels to London to see the play for herself – another fictional touch – we see, as she does, that the actor playing Hamlet has been given a costume and hair color that makes him look like Hamnet. In a brilliant stroke of casting, Jacobi Jupe plays the boy Hamnet and his brother Noah Jupe is the actor playing Hamlet on stage. The visual resemblance between the two is unmistakable. In this interpretation, the play is not only a way for Shakespeare to channel his grief. By playing the role of the ghost of Hamlet's father, he gets to say goodbye to his son on stage as he never did in life.
Kastan says about the link between Hamnet's death and the play: "It had to have some [effect], we just don't know what it was. It is tempting, maybe irresistibly so, to relate the son's death to Hamlet. The death of Hamnet / Hamlet must have been felt by Shakespeare and his family as a soul-crushing loss. It might then have been at least part of the reason that within a few years of the boy's death, Shakespeare turned to an old play (maybe by Thomas Kyd) about a son named Hamlet and a ghost calling for 'revenge' to write his own Hamlet, in which he would appear on stage. It has long been speculated that Shakespeare played the ghost in his play, reversing the roles of living and dead." But there are many other influences on the play, both literary and cultural. "The connections between lived event and Shakespeare's art are just speculation, however intriguing," Kastan says.
The fact is that there is no surviving evidence of what Shakespeare thought or felt about his wife and family at all, not even a scrap of a letter. But new research into a fragment of a letter from an unknown sender may or may not shed light on the Shakespeares' marriage. Matthew Steggle, professor of English at the University of Bristol, suggests that a letter addressed to Mrs Shakespeare in London was meant for Anne. That would have her living there with her husband between 1600 and 1610 and would prove her literacy. Steggle himself has said his research merely "opens the door" to this prospect, that "it's a possibility that seems difficult to avoid rather than a certainty".
More than any scholarly research, though, it's this high-profile film that is likely to alter the public perception of Shakespeare’s wife, solidifying her as Agnes. That would be "very nice if it's true", O'Farrell says. But "maybe it'll be a fleeting thing. Maybe, like this letter, something else will come to light and we'll all have to change our minds again." She adds the two words that define so much about the Shakespeares and their son: "Who knows?”
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251120-hamnet-and-the-mystery-around-shakespeares-wife-and-son
Oriana:
Who knows indeed? I enjoyed watching the movie without buying its essential premise: that the death of the child Hamnet had anything to do with the character of Prince Hamlet in the most famous play in the world. The movie’s child Hamnet is heart-breakingly sweet and generous, all heart and no brooding, no seeking of solitude in which to create his own world. Hamnet is, if anything, the opposite of the Prince of Denmark. I utterly reject the notion that this saintly child was the inspiration for the brilliant, ruthless, sarcastic prince.
But I agree that the movie is about Anne / Agnes as a proto-modern woman. She dominates the movie completely. Her husband is not quite believable as Wiliam Shakespeare — but then we don’t know what Shakespeare’s was like as a human being, and the movie doesn’t really help us (or at least it didn't help me) imagine him. The absence of happy marriages in Shakespeare's major plays is perhaps significant — or perhaps not. Who knows? The movie is unconvincing, but beautiful nevertheless.
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HOW MARY ANN BICKERDYKE REVOLUTIONIZED WARTIME MILITARY MEDICAL CARE
Statue to Mary Ann Bickerdyke, Galesburg IL
A surgeon stormed into the general's office demanding a nurse be fired. The general's response became legendary.
The surgeon was furious. This woman had no medical degree, no military rank, no business telling trained doctors how to operate. She broke into locked warehouses. She overruled officers. She threw incompetent surgeons out of their own tents. She acted like she owned the entire Union Army medical corps.
General William Tecumseh Sherman listened to the complaint.
Then he delivered his verdict: She outranks me. Do what she says.
The woman's name was Mary Ann Bickerdyke. She was forty-four years old, widowed, and supporting two children by working odd nursing jobs in Galesburg, Illinois. She had no credentials, no connections, no authority whatsoever.
Within four years, she would become the most powerful medical force in the Union Army.
Her transformation began with a letter.
In 1861, a desperate plea reached her church from Union soldiers stationed in Cairo, Illinois. Disease was ravaging the camps. Wounded men lay dying, unattended. Food was rotting. Sanitation didn't exist. Medical supplies sat locked in warehouses while soldiers suffered.
The church gathered donations and searched for someone brave enough to deliver them to the war zone.
Mary Ann volunteered. She planned to drop off the supplies and return home within days.
She stayed for the entire war.
What she discovered in Cairo ignited something unstoppable.
Men lay on bare, filthy floors, covered in blood and waste. Infection spread unchecked. Surgeons were often drunk or incompetent. Food was inedible when it existed at all. Wounded soldiers died not from their injuries but from systematic neglect.
Mary Ann didn't ask permission to fix it. She simply began.
She built field kitchens and cooked nutritious meals herself. She organized laundries so soldiers had clean bedding. She scrubbed hospital floors on her hands and knees. When medical supplies were locked away by bureaucrats, she broke the locks and took what her patients needed.
When a drunken surgeon refused to treat wounded men, she physically removed him from his tent and performed the treatments herself.
When an officer told her she had no authority to commandeer a steam engine for heating water, she replied calmly that her authority came from the Lord and asked if he had anything that outranked that.
He backed down.
Word of Mother Bickerdyke spread like wildfire through the Union ranks.
She walked battlefields at night carrying a lantern, searching through carnage for wounded men others had abandoned, bringing them back for care. She served at nineteen major battles—Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Sherman's brutal March to the Sea.
Often she was the only woman on the battlefield, moving through smoke and chaos, organizing hospitals under fire, shouting orders at colonels, saving lives through absolute refusal to accept preventable death.
The soldiers worshiped her. Thousands credited Mother Bickerdyke with saving their lives, not just through medical skill but through her fierce insistence that they deserved proper care.
Officers either deeply respected her or lived in terror of her wrath.
Ulysses S. Grant supported her unconditionally. William Tecumseh Sherman became her most powerful defender.
Which brings us back to that furious surgeon.
Exhausted by being overruled by a middle-aged widow with no formal training, he went directly to General Sherman and demanded Mary Ann Bickerdyke be removed immediately.
Sherman's response became part of Civil War legend.
Whether his exact words were "She outranks me" or something similar hardly matters. The meaning was crystal clear: Mary Ann Bickerdyke possessed authority no rank could grant because the army simply could not function without her.
She operated above the chain of command because stopping her would cost lives. And Sherman knew it.
When the war ended in 1865, she didn't rest.
She spent years helping Union veterans navigate the pension system, fighting bureaucracy so disabled soldiers received what they were owed.
She moved to Kansas to help establish homesteads for veterans. She worked with the Salvation Army. She continued the same work she had always done—serving those who needed her.
Mary Ann Bickerdyke died on November 8, 1901, at age eighty-four. Newspapers across the country honored Mother Bickerdyke, the woman who had terrified incompetent officers, dismantled bureaucratic obstacles, and saved thousands by refusing to accept neglect as inevitable.
She had no medical degree. No military rank. No official permission for anything she did.
She was a widowed mother in her forties who was supposed to deliver supplies and quietly disappear.
Instead, she became more powerful than most generals by proving something that transcends any era:
Authority isn't always given. Sometimes it's earned by doing what desperately needs doing when everyone else hesitates.
She didn't request better conditions for dying soldiers. She created them.
She didn't politely ask for supplies. She took them.
She didn't tolerate incompetence that cost lives. She eliminated it.
And when the most powerful generals in the Union Army were asked to stop her, they refused—because stopping Mary Ann Bickerdyke meant letting soldiers die.
She broke every rule that stood between wounded men and proper care.
And when a surgeon complained, General Sherman told him to obey her orders.
Because some people don't need rank to lead. They just need courage and an unshakable conviction that lives matter more than protocol.
Mother Bickerdyke proved it on nineteen battlefields and in countless hospital tents.
She outranked everyone who tried to stop her from saving lives.
Robert Booker, Facebook 1-5-2026
Addendum: By the time the war ended in 1865, Mary Ann had built (with the help of the U.S. Sanitary Commission) 300 hospitals and aided the wounded on 19 battlefields. At the request of General Sherman, she was allowed to ride with the Army in the Grand Review in Washington, D.C. She continued her work to help soldiers by establishing veterans’ homes as well as helping them with obtaining pensions. She received a special pension of $25 a month from Congress when she retired to Kansas to live with one of her sons. Mary Ann Bickerdyke died in 1901 from a stroke and was buried in Galesburg, Illinois, where a statue was erected in her honor.
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Maurice Sendak on growing old:
~ I'm not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me and life is emptied. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. And it's like a dream life. I am reading a biography of Samuel Palmer, which is written by a woman in England. I can't remember her name. And it's sort of how I feel now, when he was just beginning to gain his strength as a creative man and beginning to see nature. But he believed in God, you see, and in heaven, and he believed in hell. Goodness gracious, that must have made life much easier. It's harder for us nonbelievers.
But, you know, there's something I'm finding out as I'm aging that I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they're beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music. You know, I don't think I'm rationalizing anything. I really don't. This is all inevitable and I have no control over it. ~
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THE 18TH CENTURY DUTCH REPUBLIC AS A PUBLISHING HUB OF FORBIDDEN BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
The interior of a printing house, Dutch, 18th century.
The 18th-century Dutch Republic was a hotbed of secretive Jacobite networks producing seditious pamphlets.
The prominence of the Dutch in global trade, combined with the industry of their press, made the 18th-century Dutch Republic an unrivaled news hub. Ambassadors and unofficial agents acting for foreign governments or for themselves descended on the Netherlands to buy influence and silence opponents. In the process, they turned the streets of Amsterdam and The Hague into frontlines in a European war of words.
One such incident in this struggle began on 15 September 1711, when James Dayrolle, an English envoy in The Hague, wrote to Whitehall complaining about an incendiary pamphlet that had appeared in a bookshop several days earlier. The offensive work was a Jacobite pamphlet, Formulair de Serment d’Abjuration (‘Form of the Oath of Abjuration’), which criticized Queen Anne, whom the Jacobites regarded as an unlawful usurper. Dayrolle promptly complained to the Dutch authorities about the pamphlet. Eager to ensure that their press did not give offense to a close ally, the Court of Holland saw to it that Formulair’s printer, Mattias Rogguet, was arrested and taken in for questioning.
Rogguet had printed the pamphlet, but on whose instructions? Dayrolle initially suspected the pope’s secret agent in the Republic, who he described as ‘a man who does no good here’. But informants also tipped him off about a shadowy figure called Corticelli. An Italian who normally resided in London, Corticelli had, Dayrolle learned, made several trips to Holland recently and was allegedly planning to print more pamphlets.
Rogguet was interrogated by the Dutch authorities but he had been in the business for 25 years and was used to unwanted attention from Dutch magistrates, having previously been rebuked for printing a pamphlet criticizing Queen Anne’s father, James II, on the eve of William of Orange’s invasion of England in 1688. Rogguet admitted to printing Formulair, but refused to say who had handed him the text.
With Rogguet declining to give up names, the Dutch magistrates resorted to draconian measures and, on 2 October 1711, Dayrolle reported that the Court of Holland had ordered Rogguet to close his shop ‘forever’. As Dayrolle noted, this was a harsh sentence, ‘so seldom, so severely inflicted on the like cases’. The early modern book trade was, like most other businesses, a family affair. By banning Rogguet from printing, the magistrates were not only depriving Rogguet, but also his descendants, of a livelihood.
Interior of a bookshop in Haarlem, 1628.
The severity of the sentence worked. The day after it was delivered Dayrolle wrote that Rogguet had come to him ‘to cry mercy and commiseration for a wife and several children’. The printer insisted that he had printed the pamphlet ‘as a novelty’, without knowing its contents and having been assured that it ‘contained nothing of consequence’. Dayrolle struck a bargain with Rogguet. He would intercede with the Dutch government, as well as with Queen Anne, to restore Rogguet – as long as he revealed who had handed him Formulair. Rogguet relented: it was Corticelli.
As he worked to restore Rogguet’s position, Dayrolle also moved against Corticelli. On 6 October Dayrolle wrote to Whitehall that he had personally questioned Corticelli, without involving the Dutch authorities. While the Italian confessed that he had delivered Formulair to Rogguet, he claimed that he had done so with ‘no design of having it printed’. Corticelli also claimed to have no knowledge of who had sent the pamphlet to him, claiming he had received the text without any accompanying information. Dayrolle was unconvinced and concluded his letter promising that ‘I will endeavour to oblige him one way or another to make a more sincere confession’.
To this end Dayrolle went to the Court of Holland, which secretly ordered its agents to capture Corticelli, but he had already fled The Hague for Amsterdam. On 9 October Dayrolle reported that the Dutch authorities were aware that Corticelli was in Amsterdam and were ‘in pursuit of him’.
Dayrolle had also discovered that Corticelli was not working alone, but as part of a larger network smuggling Jacobite propaganda from their court-in-exile outside Paris into London through Holland. Dayrolle had also learnt that Corticelli was receiving and sending his letters through another Italian, a chocolatier called Benacci based in Amsterdam.
A week later, however, Dayrolle could only report that the Dutch magistrates had looked for Corticelli in Amsterdam but to no avail. After another week, Corticelli assumed that it was safe for him to return to The Hague. Dayrolle, however, quickly learned of his return, and ‘the same night’ that Corticelli arrived in The Hague the Dutch magistrates seized him. Despite the evidence against him, Corticelli continued to deny any knowledge of who had sent Formulair to him. His claims of innocence were rendered yet thinner when Dayrolle discovered that Corticelli had received ‘several pictures’ of James Stuart, whom Jacobites regarded as the legitimate king, and his sister, from Paris, which he had ‘forwarded to England’.
At this point Dayrolle deferred the matter of Corticelli to his immediate master, the principal British ambassador in The Hague, Thomas Wentworth, the 1st Earl of Strafford. No further mention was made of the affair and Corticelli’s fate is unknown. We do know, however, that the British government interceded to reduce Rogguet’s sentence to a substantial fine – presumably at Dayrolle’s urging.
The Corticelli affair demonstrates that early modern diplomacy was not the sole preserve of elite politicians. It was also a world inhabited by very ordinary individuals, from printers to chocolatiers.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/ambassador-spy-and-chocolatier?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=38eac92c2b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-38eac92c2b-1214148&mc_cid=38eac92c2b
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‘THE REVOLUTION TO COME’ AND ‘REVOLUTIONS: A NEW HISTORY’ REVIEW
Two recent books, The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein and Revolutions: A New History by Donald Sassoon, illustrate the past and future of revolutionary studies.
Lamartine, l’Hotel de Ville, 1848
Much of the world’s population lives under revolutionary regimes. Cambodia, China, France, Greece, Haiti, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, the United States, even the United Kingdom, that distant descendant of the Glorious Revolution: all entered their modern histories with a revolution. And that’s not even to speak of decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, the post-Soviet sphere after 1991, or the ambiguous aftershocks of the Arab Spring in 2011. Most countries have put their revolution behind them. Others simply cannot stop rehashing it, the US most conspicuously (and not just thanks to the semiquincentennial in 2026). All helped to make revolution a hallmark of what it means to be modern.
For much of the 20th century, revolution’s role in midwifing modernity rendered it a compelling subject for historians, sociologists, and students of politics. Some of social science’s greatest hits treated revolution comparatively, from Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) via Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) to Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979).
But then the field fell strangely quiet. So-called and often self-styled ‘revisionists’ shrank individual revolutions to merely national or local events. Grand causal accounts gave way to histories of accident and contingent conjunctures. And the growing awareness of revolution’s human toll – the Terror and the Great Leap Forward; Stalin and Mao’s famines; the camps and the killing fields – cast a dark shadow over the promises of revolution. As a result, big thinkers moved on to other topics. The great days of revolution – that most future-oriented of collective human projects – seemed to be firmly in the past.
And yet, if Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History are anything to go by, revolution is back, and in a major way, spanning two millennia in Edelstein’s case but a mere four centuries or so for Sassoon. Sassoon writes in the great tradition of Brinton and Skocpol, lining up a roll call of revolutions – English, French, 19th-century European, Russian, Chinese – for comparative inspection.
Edelstein, meanwhile, masterfully combines the intellectual history of revolution with the experience of revolution all the way from the Peloponnesian War to our populist present. Sassoon points back to the heyday of revolutionary studies; Edelstein shows the way forward.
A conceptual revolution lies at the heart of The Revolution to Come. Edelstein convincingly demonstrates that revolution was defined by its critics until the early 18th century. From ancient Athens to the Enlightenment, revolution was unstintingly described as disastrous, unnatural, and to be avoided at all costs. To the Greeks, it was stasis; to the Romans, novae res: to both, and to their successors down to the Renaissance and beyond, it marked the worst of all political fates.
The modern idea of revolution as liberatory and forward-looking, something to be actively pursued rather than to be fiercely opposed, only emerged, Edelstein argues, when its promoters yoked a positive conception of fundamental transformation to a progressive idea of the future. Marx expressed this notion memorably in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’: ‘The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.’
By the time he wrote, in 1852, Marx was heir to a century of affirmative constructions of revolution. According to Edelstein, the break had happened in the 1750s, when the golden age of the past began to give way to an alluring vision of the future.
The presiding genius of the pre-revolutionary world was Polybius (c.200-c.120 BC). This Greek-speaking historian of Rome portrayed the anti-revolutionary ancien régime that modern conceptions of revolution would overthrow. Polybius famously described a historical cycle, or anacyclosis, that turned remorselessly from corruption to renewal and back again through a succession of constitutional forms. He proposed distributing power across multiple institutions as the cure for this dizzying churn. For centuries his followers refined that remedy into the familiar modern system of ‘checks and balances’. In this sense, Edelstein argues, the American Revolution, and especially its constitutional settlement, was ‘the last Polybian revolution’. Its consequences are still very much with us, even as America’s Polybian structure is now subject to unusual strain.
The first signs of a new revolutionary dispensation emerged alongside the preservative Polybian tradition. Classical Latin had not known the word revolutio: it was left to Augustine to coin it in late Antiquity. The capricious motions of Fortune’s wheel became not simply turnings but encompassed the overturnings of princes. Revolution thereby acquired, at least potentially, a political meaning, though not yet one associated with the willful overthrow of a regime.
That became thinkable when humanists recovered the crucial sixth book of Polybius’ Histories where he laid out his account of anacyclosis in greatest detail. By the early 16th century, vernacular translations of Polybius Book VI could speak of rivoluzione, révolutions, and revolutions in states and commonwealths. (The Germans came late to this party in the 18th century.)
Yet the idea of revolution still needed one more twist before this revolution in ideas could become a revolution in the streets in 1789.
That breakthrough came in the mid-18th century, when revolution became positively associated with cultural improvement. ‘C’est la faute à Voltaire’ (‘It’s Voltaire’s fault’) ran a satirical song of the 1810s, and Edelstein shows that it was, indeed, Voltaire who was responsible for that decisive conceptual shift. The stage was set for the French Revolution to cement that progressive vision of revolution into a ‘new attitude towards the future’, as wide open, full of possibility, and ready to be shaped by human action.
By 1789 ‘all the threads of modern revolution [were] woven together here for the first time’, including a reliance on reason, resulting in a lack of tolerance for pluralism. History in the future perfect can only have one, rational destination with a seemingly unavoidable orientation towards violence, encapsulated forever in the warning words of the Girondin Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud in 1793: ‘The Revolution, like Saturn, successively devours all its children.’ Revolutions opened the way not to sunlit uplands but instead to the Terror and the rule of what Edelstein calls ‘the Red Leviathan’.
The Revolution to Come brilliantly reveals the genealogy of the modern concept of revolution. After it, the study of revolution will never look the same again and no historian of revolution will be able to overlook the force of ideas in understanding the phenomenon. Sassoon’s ‘new history’ immediately seems old-fashioned by comparison. It may seem unfair to judge Revolutions in light of a book its author could not have read, but Edelstein trailed the thesis of The Revolution to Come in previous publications that would have helped.
Revolutions deliberately fail to offer a definition of revolution, with the result that its selection of case studies feels at once random and familiar. The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions are inescapable comparisons; the English Civil Wars (as Sassoon calls them, overlooking a generation of scholarship on the Wars of the Three Kingdoms) and the American Revolution perhaps less so, especially because Sassoon cannot decide whether the American Revolution was revolutionary or not.
His narrative accounts of the causes, course, and long afterlives of his various revolutions are rambling and may try some readers’ patience: certainly, he has no scholarly breakthrough on the scale of Edelstein’s to offer. And his choice of cases raises more questions than it answers: why the national(ist) ‘revolutions’ of 19th-century Europe – most of which were hardly revolutionary by the modern yardstick – but not the anti-imperial revolutions in Spanish America? Where are the Haitian, Cuban, or Iranian revolutions? And what about that global revolution we call decolonization? Sassoon peppers his accounts with well-chosen quotations and enticing anecdotes but his lack of an argument, or even any clear principle of inclusion, makes Revolutions a disappointing grab-bag, with little that would be new for most historians but likely too much unmotivated detail for more general readers.
Both books prompt the question: whither revolution? Sassoon’s conclusions about our present discontents may not inspire confidence in his predictions about the future, as when he judges that the US president is ‘weaker than the British prime minister’ or notes that the rise of the Right across the Western world has not yet ‘seriously threatened’ the ‘vainglorious claims of American liberalism’. More convincingly, Edelstein suspects that the coming revolution might arrive quietly, through democratic backsliding, the corrosion of institutions, the gradual acceptance that freedom of speech and association may need to be contained and even suspended.
The revolutions of the past – at least those after 1789 – followed a script in which a brighter future was the prize for overturning history and breaking a few heads (or even cutting them off): ‘A revolution is not a dinner party’, Mao warned. That was the ‘progressive’ version of revolution played out in Russia, China, and a host of imitative revolutions across the world.
But what if the seeming counter-revolutionaries are the new revolutionaries? Will revolution in future come from above and from the Right rather than – at least in theory – from below and from the Left, as history may have led us to expect? Only time will tell if we are entering a new age of revolutions of this novel and unheralded kind. Until we find out, The Revolution to Come stands as the most enlightening guide to the past, present, and even future of revolution.
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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: WAS IT A LIE?
We were taught that the French Revolution was a popular uprising against tyranny of the Bourbons and that good things ensued, like democracy, freedom of speech, human rights, equality of sexes and things like that, and it was a grand step forward.
It was all a lie.
What it was then? It was basically a coup d’etat by a certain fanatic faction intoxicated by Radicalist philosophy and who put up a reign of terror, state of lawlessness and organized the world’s first anti-clerical genocide. Moreover, they managed to terminate the French continuum of legitimacy, destroy countless pieces of irreplaceable artifacts of history, religion and culture, and impoverish both the state and the ordinary citizens.
The Revolutionaries had millions of young Frenchmen killed abroad in pointless wars and they started conscription, which had not existed before the Revolution.
It can be safely said the French Revolution was the most horrible catastrophe the Western civilization had ever faced before the 20th century, with possible exception of the Mongol conquest. All the advances of the revolution would have been adopted anyway by the natural course of societal evolution (just as happened in UK) and the only really good thing which ensued was the metric system.
The life of the ordinary citizen worsened as a consequence of the revolution. The rights women had were stripped away. Instead of an aristocracy, France was now a plutocracy, and workers fell into virtual wage slavery. Young men were now forced to serve in the military as conscripts on pain of prison or firing squad; and the whole state of France got impoverished so badly that the standard of living in 1840 was the same as it was in 1789.
Louis XVI was far from a tyrant and Marie Antoinette was not the nincompoop she was presented as. They were both actually very progressive. Most of the aristocrats of the era were actually civil servants who had been ennobled as reward for a long career in service of the state; and the crops had been failing for several years before the revolution.
The thing which was completely left unspoken was the Vendee uprising and rebellion; that the people in Brittany and Poitou were not at all enthusiasts of atheism, military dictatorship and upheaval of the order, but mutinied; and they managed to avoid the Reign of Terror altogether simply by keeping the revolutionary army, the Blues, at bay by fighting it. They represented legitimacy, not the Revolutionary government.
But the rebellion was eventually squashed and a genocide ensued. Some 300,000 men, women and children were brutally murdered as retribution and all churches destroyed and clergymen and nuns exterminated. Even today the Vendée rebellion and the genocide which ensued is a very prohibited issue in France.
The worst aspect was the Reign of Terror, complete lawlessness and wanton executions. Guillotine and firing squads reigned supreme. Paris was basically in state of chaos for over two years, and elsewhere in France the commissaries of the Revolution reigned their departments like Oriental despots.
All in all, the American Revolution was a success; the French Revolution a horrible catastrophe. ~ Susanna Viljanen, Quora
Andre Leong:
Conscription, plutocracy, mass killings, general fear and chaos all around…
So, like the Russian communist revolution then?
Susanna:
Exactly. Except plutocracy replaced by state ownership and control and state terror.
Winston Grace:
As odd as it sounds, it appears that the Reign of Terror could have been avoided if the Palace of Versailles was in Paris where the monarchy would have had instant intelligence on the seeds of the revolution. Humanitarian programs could have been initiated.
The French Revolution had some of the great scientists of that day executed because they were aristocrats. Medical research and other fields were destroyed by the Revolution.
Matthew Downhour:
The French Revolution was a huge success while it retained the constitutional monarchy. After they killed the king and set out to dismantle the church, it become impossible because the peasants would never accept it.
Garit Boothe:
There were different phases to the Revolution, and not all the bad things that you mentioned happened all once.
But I essentially agree with you that the legacy of the French Revolution is judged on the purest intents of its founders, not the actual results. Which is typical of leftist idealism to this day.
Radical Republicanism and Communism tend to be given a pass, when really their legacy is one of death, torture, misery, war, oppression, and poverty. They failed at achieving their aims.
But it's "ok" because they were chasing after a glorious ideal.
Lucas Frech:
A professor once said that the American revolution and the French revolution have nothing in common apart from the name. He defines revolution as an attempt to radically transform society via concentration of power, subject to no one but a future that never comes. That's the difference between the two, and that's what the French and communist revolutions have in common.
He defines the American revolution more as a war of independence, founded not on a future utopia, but on Christian and political principles.
Alfredo A. Sadun:
Points all well taken. But I can’t help but wonder, why did Thomas Jefferson, a very thoughtful and well informed man, take a contrary view? Why and for how long did he support the French Revolution?
Susanna Viljanen:
Why did the European intelligentsia support the Russian revolution 130 years later?
Shawn Lu:
I presume, as the US had long abolished ranks of nobility, for their association with monarchy, that they would hold similar views to the French radicals. The US was the first country to manage a non-God given, even semi-populist government in a very, very long time (The last ones to sort of do that were the Romans). Perhaps they imagined the French could manage the same.
Harold Zwanepol:
People of deep thought are rarely people of precipitous action, the converse also being true. It was not the philosophes who stormed the Bastille but rather the unwashed Paris mob.
The Revolution lasted 10 long years, and constituted a great upheaval in how French society was organized. One does not rend apart a culture without great social violence. It took years of trying, often lurching from one experiment to another (Thermidor Reaction), before France was re-knit. The mob simply wanted baguette and someone to blame for their misery.
It was only when Edmund Burke, Lord Acton and others asked, “Why was thing this done?” that the ideas of the philosophes were attributed to the Revolution; but, once done it stuck, and we now can find some meaning in the rivers of spilled blood.
To compare the American Revolution to the French Revolution, one must weigh carefully. The American Revolution was a secession, a breaking of ties, not a complete reworking of American society. Nor was America thrown into more than a decade of existential war immediately after its Revolution ended. Its economy may have been injured, but it still had much financial and social capital.
Tom S:
I would question whether the revolutionaries honestly wanted to make life better for everyone. As that bloke in Orwell's 1984 said: “You don't create a dictatorship to safeguard the revolution. You conduct a revolution so you'll be able to create a dictatorship.”
Bob:
Napoleon introduced many needed reforms in Germany and other countries to break old feudal laws, such as, the right to divorce, and above all, commercial freedom. Before there was no competition because business was conducted only be people who had been given the privilege by the local ruler. Maybe somethings would be reformed through the power of technological change in communication and industry, but the French Revolution was the first uprising of the masses that changed a major nation. That in itself, hastened the changes in England, as the aristocracy saw that their were limits to their ability to tax and control the masses.
Dave Klassen:
It was a failure, but not for the reasons you mentioned. The church survived, so it is automatically a failure. They should have completely obliterated the church.
Susanna Viljanen:
Napoleon was product of the revolution. Let’s say Robespierre was like Lenin and Napoleon was like Stalin.
What Napoleon was indisputedly good as was that he almost single-handedly unified and codified the French legislature. Napoleon was first and foremost a lawyer, a lawgiver, a jurist par excellence. Without his wars he would be remembered as a great lawgiver. His legislature unified the French civil code into a concise and logically organized jurisprudence. Even today the French jurisprudence is based on Codex Napoleonica.
404 Error:
People had no rights under Louis XVI’s regime. It was a tyrannical regime. Things happened for a reason. The French revolution was a grand step forward.
Giovanni Zuccherini:
I will be very unpopular, but I like the revolutionary calendar.
Mike Alexander:
At the end of the day, the Ancient Regime couldn't put food in bellies, so revolution was inevitable. I doubt the abolition of slavery or universal male suffrage would have ever happened had the Ancient Regime survived.
Oriana:
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité! There is nothing puzzling about the appeal of glorious ideals. How they are put into practice is a very different thing. But we must bear in mind that practically nothing is all good or all bad.
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MEANWHILE IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA, GENERAL IVASHOV CALMLY DISAGREES
For more than three years, the Russian dictator has narrated the war in Ukraine like a bedtime story told to himself. Maps are colored in, villages are ticked off and cameras dutifully record the old man explaining how history is bending to his will.
Then, unexpectedly, a voice from inside the Kremlin choir cleared its throat last week. That voice belonged to General Leonid Ivashov, a relic of Soviet military doctrine and no friend of liberal dissent.
As the Russian war criminal enthusiastically listed minor advances, Ivashov calmly pointed out that capturing houses and hills is not strategy.
He argued that while the Kremlin obsesses over meters on a map, Ukraine has been cutting the hands holding that map. Logistics, energy and money, the dull but fatal arteries of war, have been the real battlefield.
Ivashov reminded viewers that wars are no longer won that way. While Putin’s eyes sparkled over villages allegedly taken, Ukrainian strikes were turning refineries, storage depots and pumping stations into expensive bonfires.
Ivashov admitted what the Kremlin prefers not to say out loud. Russia did not expect its oil refinery system to be so exposed. Tankers stopped moving. Ports stalled. Energy infrastructure froze under pressure.
The economic fairy tale followed its usual script. Putin, the Soviet fossil, proudly cited growth figures and record low unemployment, presenting them as proof of strength. Ivashov translated this for ordinary Russians.
Low unemployment in wartime, he said, does not mean prosperity. It means the workforce is either at the front, in a grave, or locked inside an arms factory. That is not growth. It is an engine revving without fuel.
He then brought the discussion down to the kitchen table. Pensions of about 16,500 rubles, roughly 183 US dollars, were paraded by the Kremlin as generosity.
Ivashov noted that even a dog would struggle on that sum. Food quality has fallen, palm oil has replaced proper ingredients and import substitution has become a polite label for “you will eat what is cheapest.”
Beyond food, Ivashov described an industrial decline that reads like a Soviet joke with no punchline. Russia, once proud of launching humans into space, now struggles to build civilian aircraft. Planes stay in the air through cannibalized parts, turning each flight into a gamble.
Even space infrastructure, once sacred, has suffered neglect and accidents, symbols of a system running on memory rather than capacity.
On the battlefield, Ivashov acknowledged what Kyiv has demonstrated repeatedly.
Ukraine fights with operational art. Russia fights by pounding the ground with artillery.
NATO level intelligence, satellites and precision have allowed Ukraine to strike where it hurts most, while Russian forces rely on volume and scorched earth bombing.
Putin’s talk of buffer zones and security belts sounded to Ivashov like a man stretching butter too thin. Expanding fronts lengthen supply lines and invite more precise strikes.
Taking another town is meaningless if a refinery near Moscow is on fire. This, Ivashov explained, is how tactical success turns into strategic defeat.
Internationally, the picture is no brighter. Ivashov openly mocked the idea of allies. North Korea and Belarus resemble dependents rather than partners.
China, he said, is not an ally but a trader, treating Russia as a discount warehouse for raw materials. The Kremlin’s dream of leading a global bloc has shrunk to managing isolation.
Ivashov compared the moment to the late Soviet period, when confidence evaporated faster than slogans. Only this time, he warned, the collapse could be quicker and messier.
Ukrainian intelligence has reached similar conclusions, arguing that the war’s rising costs are pushing Russia towards financial exhaustion. Victory, in this arithmetic, looks suspiciously like bankruptcy.
What makes Ivashov’s intervention remarkable is not its content but its source. A loyalist calling out the KGB pensioner on live television suggests that belief inside the system is thinning.
Ukraine’s strategy now looks less like a counterattack and more like suffocation. Not just defeating soldiers, but exhausting the state that sends them. Ivashov’s warning was blunt. Russia can either rid itself of the man dragging it down, or sink further into dependency and decline.
~ Guy Rothschild, Quora
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DOES PUTIN WANT OPEN WAR WITH THE WEST?
Putin announced Russia’s war against the West in 2007 at Munich. He has been consistent since.
But if the question is about Russia waging a hot war against a western power — a head on military collision — this won’t happen. Putin will keep pushing, using sabotage, covert agents tasked with murder (like in the UK, poisoning people with polonium or Novichok), agents armed with weapons causing Havana syndrome, inciting civil unrest via the means of informational and hybrid warfare, paying criminals to commit horrible acts on foreign soil (using them as patsies), etc.
Russia has enough resources and strength to continue buying agents in the West and cause problems, but doesn’t have enough resources for a direct attack against NATO.
Putin wants his place in Russian history books, but he also wants to live — he doesn’t want to end up like Hussein or Nasrallah.
The West won’t have peace with Putin in power. He’s all in. He won’t stop. He will continue his hybrid war — and he would attack a western country (Baltic states, Poland) if he were sure that NATO wouldn’t respond with all its strength.
Putin needs the war in Europe (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia) to continue, so that he can still promise “full victory over the West” to his domestic audience. Putin promised them “the Russian world from Vladivostok to Lisbon” — an Eurasian Empire — and anything less will be never seen as the “full victory.” Anything less, if the hot war in Ukraine stops, will be only a temporary ceasefire until Russia gains enough strength (and gets more governments in power in Europe that prefer to be friends with Putin, like Orban and Fico).
In short, Putin means war. If there is no hot war, he’ll have more money to wage the hybrid war.
Putin believes the West will back down.
He believes he will live to push through to this moment. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Elena Gold:
Russian government insiders warn that Putin is terrified to lose the war, just before his “big victory” — like Germany lost WW1. Germany was gaining territory but decided to stop the war and accepted defeat, because continuing the war was too hard. Putin thinks he can outlast all of Europe and “win.”
Gregory Armand:
Putin’s history is one of conflict. He has written about how he has learned “never to back down”, to continue the fight regardless of what looks like a win or loss. It is what separates him from people trying to analyze him such as K.T. McFarland who has STATED Ukraine should surrender “yesterday” because they “gamed out the war and Ukraine lost.”
There is also a historical importance in Russia to “live forever” by having statues put up and every third street named after you. Ok, hyperbole there on the street naming but the point is valid.
Putin is channeling WWII for many reasons — it was a “great victory” for the SSSR and it saw the nation “come together”. Oddly, both of these are questionable; yes it was a “great” victory but the cost was horrendous and the moral / ethical breaches the Soviet soldiers forced upon the populations they “liberated” were sickening! Again, oddly, the SAME EXACT things are being done to the population in Ukraine! Go figure.
The “third” large thing to remember is that Russia is an “aging” country both in population AND in production. A large amount of their manufacturing base is done in factories “stolen” or “won” during the “Great Patriotic War” against Germany. They would shuffle in, rape everything that moved and some things that didn’t, torture, and then dismantle entire factories and ship them back to Russia. These factories have grown long in the tooth and are without the young people to work. They require too much manpower to be able to keep up to the current numerical reduction in people. Plus, it can be argued that Ukraine has been the brains behind many of the military innovations seen in the SSSR making their loss to Russia more profound in the sense of weapons making capability / innovation. However, the Balkan countries also have contributed highly to weapons innovation.
Fourth, Putin believes strongly that you side with him or you face retribution. He has done exactly this in every place he has entered with his forces including places most people haven’t followed too closely such as Mali (West Africa) as well as places people have followed such as Syria. Ukraine should have bowed to Putin (in his mind) and they did not do so — the “wayward brother” syndrome Putin has spoken about.
Kendall King:
And we Americans (US) have the perfect dumb-shit to help him. The idiocy in the world right now is astonishing and worrying.
John Fox:
Our biggest fear now is this, NATO has never had to defend anything, it has no leader and trying to get so many different members to agree on anything is incompetence on a grand scale, so has little fear for Putin. The other problems is that unstable Trump who has already started on South America, looking at Canada and threatened Greenland a NATO country could turn rogue. It would seem from info coming in he would not defend or help Taiwan if China invaded either. We may even see the emergence of another communist country if Trump gets his way. The American people have some serious decisions to make right now before Trump changes America for good.
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If we could abolish the electoral college, everything else would eventually sort itself out. Republicans very rarely win the popular vote, and after this disaster, it may be centuries before they win it again. ~ Craig Lilyestrom, Quora
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THE MOST IMPORTANT SOVIET GENERAL DURING WW2
The most interesting figure among Soviet leaders is Georgy Zhukov. It was not immediately known how unsafe it was to work under Joseph Stalin. Majority of generals were mere yes men as they were threatened with being executed, whereas Zhukov was made of iron.
In 1941 he challenged Stalin on the defense of Kiev. He informed the dictator about the plan being incorrect. Stalin felt at first indignant, but when Kiev was captured just as Zhukov had predicted he realized that Zhukov was the only sincere man he could rely on.
Yet he was a hard man. He used his soldiers as a fuel to a machine. He once informed General Eisenhower that when his men stumbled in a minefield, he would tell them to continue their march without considering them. It is atrocious now but he thought that a swift victory was the only alternative in the war. He was not a kind man though; he was the sledgehammer that the Soviets needed to halt the Nazis.
~ Rayyan Cheema, Quora
Mario Delao:
Zhukov set up his base as close as he could to the Germans during the Battle of Stalingrad while German artillery was landing close by. One may say that was a bad idea but the effect it had on his soldiers was priceless. Times were different back then. Can anyone think of a president current or past that would send their son to fight a war and put him in the front line. And if he does the son becomes a POW. Has the chance to have him released in an POW exchange agreement, and declines it. Well Stalin did, my point is the Soviets were bad ass!!
Sam Matt:
The best Russian was General Winter.
John Browning Cowley:
Is he the same badass who allegedly, after giving orders that retreating Soviet soldiers are to be shot, said “It takes a very brave man to be a coward in the Russian army !”
Colm MacKernan:
After the war, Zhukov's popularity caused Stalin to see him as a potential threat. Stalin stripped him of his positions and relegated him to military commands of little strategic significance.
Later, after Stalin’s death, Zhukov was a key figure in the plot to remove and execute Lavrentiy Beria, with Zhukov leading troops to arrest Beria in June 1953, followed by Beria's secret trial and execution in December 1953 for treason and other crimes against the state.
“Accounts of what happened vary considerably, but it seems that Beria’s downfall was engineered by Nikita Khrushchev, secretary to the Party Central Committee, who quietly secured the support of other powerful figures, including Malenkov and a number of generals. On June 26th, apparently, at a hastily convened meeting of the Presidium, Khrushchev launched a blistering attack on Beria, accusing him of being a cynical careerist, long in the pay of British intelligence, and no true Communist believer.
Beria was taken aback and said, ‘What’s going on, Nikita?’, and Khrushchev told him he would soon find out. The veteran Molotov and others chimed in against Beria and Khrushchev put a motion for his instant dismissal. Before a vote could be taken, the panicky Malenkov pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They immediately burst in, seized Beria and manhandled him away.
Beria’s men were guarding the Kremlin, so the officers had to wait until nightfall before smuggling him out in the back of a car. He was taken first to the Lefortovo Prison and subsequently to the headquarters of General Moskalenko, commander of Moscow District Air Defense, where he was imprisoned in an underground bunker. His arrest was kept as quiet as possible while his principal lieutenants were rounded up – some were rumored to have been shot out of hand – and regular troops were moved into Moscow.
The Central Committee spent five days convincing itself of Beria’s guilt. R.A. Rudenko, an experienced prosecutor well known to Khrushchev, was appointed to make certain that the police chief was expeditiously tried, condemned and executed with the maximum appearance of legality. Pravda announced Beria’s fall on July 10th, crediting it to the initiative of Comrade Malenkov and referring to Beria’s ‘ criminal activities against the Party and the State’.
On December 17th, Rudenko’s office announced that Beria and six accomplices, encouraged by foreign intelligence agencies, had been conspiring for many years to seize power in the Soviet Union in order to restore capitalism. A special tribunal was set up. The accused were allowed no representation and no appeal. When the death sentence was passed, according to General Moskalenko, Beria fell to the floor and begged on his knees for mercy. It was not a quality he had shown to others, and it was not now shown to him. He and his confederates were taken away and promptly shot. His wife and son were sent to a Siberian labor camp.”
Oriana:
Beria was also a notorious rapist. He had his men kidnap attractive women right off the street. Afterwards, the woman received a bouquet of flowers. If she accepted it (to create the impression that the sex had been consensual), she was allowed to walk away. If she refused the flowers, she put her life in danger. Beria’s men followed her and made sure she’d remain silent.
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ONE VIEW: NEW YORK TIMES ON THE REMOVAL OF MADURO: ILLEGAL AND UNWISE
Over the past few months, President Trump has deployed an imposing military force in the Caribbean to threaten Venezuela. Until now, the president used that force — an aircraft carrier, at least seven other warships, scores of aircraft and 15,000 U.S. troops — for illegal attacks on small boats that he claimed were ferrying drugs. On Saturday, Mr. Trump dramatically escalated his campaign by capturing President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as part of what he called “a large scale strike” against the country.
Few people will feel any sympathy for Mr. Maduro. He is undemocratic and repressive, and has destabilized the Western Hemisphere in recent years. The United Nations recently issued a report detailing more than a decade of killings, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detention by henchmen against his political opponents. He stole Venezuela’s presidential election in 2024. He has fueled economic and political disruption throughout the region by instigating an exodus of nearly eight million migrants.
If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse. The United States spent 20 years failing to create a stable government in Afghanistan and replaced a dictatorship in Libya with a fractured state. The tragic consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq continue to beset America and the Middle East. Perhaps most relevant, the United States has sporadically destabilized Latin American countries, including Chile, Cuba, Guatemala and Nicaragua, by trying to oust a government through force.
Mr. Trump has not yet offered a coherent explanation for his actions in Venezuela. He is pushing our country toward an international crisis without valid reasons. If Mr. Trump wants to argue otherwise, the Constitution spells out what he must do: Go to Congress. Without congressional approval, his actions violate U.S. law.
The nominal rationale for the administration’s military adventurism is to destroy “narco-terrorists.” Governments throughout history have labeled the leaders of rival nations as terrorists, seeking to justify military incursions as policing operations. The claim is particularly ludicrous in this case, given that Venezuela is not a meaningful producer of fentanyl or the other drugs that have dominated the recent epidemic of overdoses in the United States, and the cocaine that it does produce flows mostly to Europe. While Mr. Trump has been attacking Venezuelan boats, he also pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, who ran a sprawling drug operation when he was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022.
A more plausible explanation for the attacks on Venezuela may instead be found in Mr. Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy. It claimed the right to dominate Latin America: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” In what the document called the “Trump Corollary,” the administration vowed to redeploy forces from around the world to the region, stop traffickers on the high seas, use lethal force against migrants and drug runners and potentially base more U.S. troops around the region.
Venezuela has apparently become the first country subject to this latter-day imperialism, and it represents a dangerous and illegal approach to America’s place in the world. By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors. More immediately, he threatens to replicate the American hubris that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
He is now abandoning this principle, and he is doing so illegally. The Constitution requires Congress to approve any act of war. Yes, presidents often push the boundaries of this law. But even Mr. Bush sought and received congressional endorsement for his Iraq invasion, and presidents since Mr. Bush have justified their use of drone attacks against terrorist groups and their supporters with a 2001 law that authorized action after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Trump has not even a fig leaf of legal authority for his attacks on Venezuela.
Congressional debates over military action play a crucial democratic role. They check military adventurism by forcing a president to justify his attack plans to the public and requiring members of Congress to tie their own credibility to those plans. For years after the vote on the Iraq war, Democrats who supported Mr. Bush, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, paid a political price, while those who criticized the war, like Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama, came to be seen as prophetic.
In the case of Venezuela, a congressional debate would expose the thinness of Mr. Trump’s rationale. His administration has justified his attacks on the small boats by claiming they pose an immediate threat to the United States. But a wide range of legal and military experts reject the claim, and common sense refutes it, too. An attempt to smuggle drugs into the United States — if, in fact, all the boats were doing so — is not an attempt to overthrow the government or defeat its military.
We suspect Mr. Trump has refused to seek congressional approval for his actions partly because he knows that even some Republicans in Congress are deeply skeptical of the direction in which he is leading this country. Already, Senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski and Representatives Don Bacon and Thomas Massie — Republicans all — have backed legislation that would limit Mr. Trump’s military actions against Venezuela.
A second argument against Mr. Trump’s attacks on Venezuela is that they violate international law. By blowing up the small boats that Mr. Trump says are smuggling drugs, he has killed people based on the mere suspicion that they have committed a crime and given them no chance to defend themselves. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and every subsequent major human rights treaty prohibit such extrajudicial killings. So does U.S. law.
The administration appears to have killed defenseless people. In one attack, the Navy fired a second strike against a hobbled boat, about 40 minutes after the first attack, killing two sailors who were clinging to the boat’s wreckage and appeared to present no threat. As our colleague David French, a former U.S. Army lawyer, has written, “The thing that separates war from murder is the law.”
The legal arguments against Mr. Trump’s actions are the more important ones, but there is also a cold-eyed realist argument. They are not in America’s national security interest. The closest thing to an encouraging analogy is President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama 36 years ago last month, which drove the dictator Manuel Noriega from power and helped set Panama on a path toward democracy. Yet Venezuela is different in important ways. Panama is a much smaller country, and it was a country where American officials and troops had operated for decades because of the Panama Canal.
The potential for chaos in Venezuela seems much greater. Despite Mr. Maduro’s capture, the generals who have enabled his regime will not suddenly vanish. Nor are they likely to hand power to María Corina Machado, the opposition figure whose movement appears to have won the country’s most recent election and who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize last month.
Among the possible bad outcomes are a surge in violence by the left-wing Colombian military group the ELN, which has a foothold in Venezuela’s western area, or by the paramilitary groups known as “colectivos” that have operated on the periphery of power under the Maduro dictatorship. Further unrest in Venezuela could unsettle global energy and food markets and drive more migrants throughout the hemisphere.
So how should the United States deal with the continuing problem that Venezuela poses to the region and America’s interests? We share the hopes of desperate Venezuelans, some of whom have made a case for intervention. But there are no easy answers. By now, the world should understand the risks of regime change.
We will hold out hope that the current crisis will end less badly than we expect. We fear that the result of Mr. Trump’s adventurism is increased suffering for Venezuelans, rising regional instability and lasting damage for America’s interests around the world. We know that Mr. Trump’s warmongering violates the law.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/opinion/venezuela-attack-trump-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BlA.e_FJ.gEOM_qM1slc1&smid=fb-share
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‘A MORE CONVENIENT DICTATORSHIP’: FEAR AND UNCERTAINTY IN VENEZUELA AFTER FALL OF MADURO
US capture of president gave many Venezuelans hope, but a week on, an even more draconian atmosphere pervades.
Many Venezuelans say little will change after the downfall of Maduro.
Freddy Guevara will never forget the 34 excruciating days he spent inside Venezuela’s most notorious political prison after being snatched by masked men from Nicolás Maduro’s intelligence agency.
The black hood, the interrogations, the stress positions, the salsa music his captors blasted at him in an attempt to make him crack.
“It was horrible … You don’t know what is going to happen,” recalled the 39-year-old opposition leader who was forced into exile after eventually being released.
“It was the Covid era and they told me that if I didn’t give them the passwords [to my phone] they’d go to my grandma’s house and give her Covid and she would die,” Guevara said.
Nearly five years after winning back his freedom, Guevara had hoped the approximately 1,000 political prisoners still languishing behind bars in Venezuela – some in overcrowded, rat-infested cells – might also be released after Maduro’s dramatic capture by US troops last weekend.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump hinted that El Helicoide – the spectacular brutalist shopping mall turned jailhouse where Guevara was held – was entering its final days. “They have a torture chamber in the middle of Caracas that they are closing up,” the US president claimed as Maduro found himself behind bars after being abducted from a military base.
Two days later, Venezuelan authorities announced the release of a “significant number” of Venezuelan and foreign prisoners and several prominent figures emerged from El Helicoide, including the Spanish-Venezuelan activist Rocío San Miguel and the former presidential candidate, Enrique Márquez. “This is a very important and smart gesture,” Trump said.
But a week after the US’s audacious – and, to many experts, illegal night-time raid – there were few other signs of a major political thaw.
Instead, many detected an even more draconian atmosphere as the South American country’s “new” regime – led by Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez – sought to assert its authority and deter unrest after the operation, which Venezuela’s interior minister said left 100 people dead.
Kalashnikov-carrying masked civilians roamed the disconcertingly quiet streets of Venezuela’s capital on motorbikes. Security forces set up checkpoints and scoured citizens’ phones for compromising, anti-regime material. Journalists were detained, deported and barred from entering Venezuela to witness the latest moment of upheaval for a country reeling from years of hyperinflation, hunger, political instability and a refugee crisis that has driven eight million people to flee abroad.
In 23 de Enero, a working-class area in Caracas long considered a bastion of regime support, members of paramilitary groups called colectivos imposed an informal curfew. “After 6pm you don’t see anyone in the streets,” said one local describing how those groups were recruiting and arming homeless people and drug addicts to join their patrols. “People are afraid something else might happen and their kids might be out on the street,” the woman added.
The fear stretched right across Venezuela, from Caracas near the Caribbean to the western border with Colombia, in the foothills of the Andes. There, a 57-year-old entrepreneur implored the Guardian not to broadcast an audio recording of his voice lest it lead to his identification and arrest.
“We’re happy about the news [of Maduro’s capture] but we can’t show it because it’s dangerous … You can’t even publish anything [on social media],” the man confided as he crossed from the Venezuelan border town of San Antonio del Táchira into Cúcuta in Colombia on foot.
The man complained that while US special forces had decapitated the monster by seizing Maduro, its body remained in the form of Venezuela’s new rulers. “Our hope is that they come back for the rest of the body,” he added, although he was unsure that would happen.
When news of Maduro’s capture broke early last Saturday, government opponents were euphoric, believing Venezuela was finally entering the “new era” of democracy and reconstruction promised by the opposition leader María Corina Machado, the Nobel laureate they expected to lead that change. But those hopes were soon dashed as Trump announced he would recognize Rodríguez, one of Maduro’s closest allies, and work with the remnants of his regime to “stabilize” the country. Machado, whose movement is widely believed to have won the 2024 presidential election, was sidelined.
“It’s the same regime – [this was] just a leadership change. But instead of being a palace coup, it was an external coup,” said Tom Shannon, a veteran US diplomat who has worked with Venezuela since the 90s and was ambassador to Brazil. “We removed a leader and then chose the next one – but it’s the same gang.”
Andrés Izarra, a minister under Maduro’s late mentor, Hugo Chávez, who now lives in exile, agreed. “Trump rewrote regime change. Now it’s regime capture,” he said, describing how the White House had simply delegated control of Venezuela to Maduro’s main allies, led by Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, the powerful president of the national assembly.
The US emphasized its hostile takeover of Venezuela’s government this week, with the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, telling reporters: “Their decisions are going to continue to be dictated by the United States of America.”
“Trump conquered an oil hacienda … and hired the Rodríguez siblings to run it for him,” Izarra said, pointing to Trump’s admission that he sought “total access” to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest. “This has nothing to do with democracy or a transition to democracy,” Izarra added. “That’s all bullshit. This is all about power and enrichment.”
On Wednesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, outlined a three-phase strategy for Venezuela’s future under Washington’s tutelage: stabilization, recovery and reconciliation, and political transition. “We feel like we are moving forward here in a very positive way,” Rubio said.
But observers see a treacherous road ahead as Maduro’s successors jockey for power and struggle to understand who betrayed their leader. CIA agents had infiltrated Maduro’s regime to such a degree that the US was reportedly able to pinpoint “how he moved, where he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore [and] what were his pets.”
“My guess is that the Cubans are hard at work on that,” Shannon said of the counterintelligence hunt for culprits.
Izarra suspected Maduro’s capture had plunged his former government colleagues into a maelstrom of distrust. “If they were paranoid and untrusting of each other before, I can’t imagine how it is now … These guys [must be] sitting around a table with their daggers behind their backs.”
The disorientation was underlined on Monday night when gunfire rang out near the presidential palace, leading many to speculate that a secondary coup to remove Rodríguez was afoot. Later, it emerged that police and paramilitaries had exchanged fire after being spooked by the presence of government drones.
Moisés Naím, a former minister from the early 90s who lives in exile, said predicting how long Rodríguez’s reign would last was impossible. “She can be out as we speak or she can stay for 10 years,” he said, lamenting how Trump had “essentially thrown María Corina Machado under the bus” to embrace members of the old regime.
“At the beginning, I was exhilarated, overjoyed [at the possibility of being] able to go back to my country,” said Naím, who has not returned for 15 years. But almost immediately, as the focus turned to the US’s thirst for oil rather than democracy, Naím realized it had merely been “a hiccup of happiness.”
“The situation today is almost indistinguishable [from before]. You really have to use a magnifying glass to try to find differences,” said Benjamin Gedan, the director of the Latin America Program at Washington’s Stimson Center and the national security council’s former South America chief. “This is just a more convenient dictatorship … It was an unfriendly dictatorship and now it’s a friendly one … It would be like picking a different crown prince in Saudi Arabia.”
This week’s prisoner release provided some encouragement to Venezuelans yearning for genuine change, although by Friday lunchtime, only a tiny fraction of those incarcerated had been freed.
As he crossed into Cúcuta from Venezuela, passing three armored personnel carriers guarding against unrest, Ricardo Alcalá voiced optimism over his country’s new direction. “We’re into the last season of the series,” predicted the 42-year-old journalist who had driven for two days across the country from the city of Barcelona to collect a relative returning home from Chile.
How would the series end? “We don’t know,” Alcalá replied. “The truth is, nobody knows anything.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/09/fear-uncertainity-venezuela-after-maduro-trump-us?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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ANOTHER VIEW: DOWN WITH THE DICTATOR! MISHA FIRER ON MADURO’S REMOVAL
Back in 2015, Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu who would later convince President Putin that special military operation in Ukraine would be a cakewalk, received Venezuelan president Maduro's medal for ensuring Venezuela's security.
Russian Air Defense Forces couldn’t protect Maduro from American attack helicopters and missiles as they failed in Iran but they sure are good at giving each other medals for bogus achievements.
Loser dictators of the world, unite!
Shortly before the lightning strike rendition of the Venezuelan dictator who’s caused a hyperinflation in his country, Kremlin doubled down in their support, and Russian tourists taking a cue from the mainstream media continued to buy packaged tours to Venezuela.
They were confident that Russian-made Air Defense systems so much superior to American weapons that they would thwart any attempts at overthrowing Maduro and spoiling their New Year holiday trip.
All these flights have now been canceled, flights suspended and Russian tourists are lining up to demand their money back, futilely I should add.
While Kremlin’s propaganda machine officially condemns Trump’s actions in Venezuela, rest assured that in private they are biting their elbows in frustration and throwing vintage objects at the walls of their suburban mansions. For they have been shown how to conduct special military operation properly and efficiently.
There were surgical air strikes under the cover of the night after weeks of massing troops along the border. There was rendition of the leader and adding a mother of all insults to injury: huge crowds celebrating the deposition of the president and welcoming foreign forces.
This is what intelligence services top brass and Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu, whose special military operation in Syria had also ended up disastrously, had promised Putin but failed to deliver.
In Russian intelligence agencies, officers were crying bitter tears studying what happened in Caracas on a January night.
Operation "Caracas in 3 Hours" was executed with precision and had taken much preparation, it was flawless from every angle. Delta Force was able to extract the Venezuelan president from his bedroom in 180 minutes while Russian intelligence forces can’t extract Zelensky from his trips to the frontlines for four years.
Putin’s Kiev in Three Days special operation will soon celebrate its 4th anniversary with five packages of sanctions per year.
As the US force approached Caracas, the air force began to destroy and disable Venezuelan air defense systems, using weapons to ensure the safe passage of helicopters into the target area.
Russian intelligence forces and military didn’t even take into account that Ukrainian special forces had stingers to down their planes with paratroopers who didn’t have night vision goggles and javelins to take out their battle tanks.
As the US forces crossed the final stretch of high terrain, where they were concealed behind obstacles, we assessed that the element of surprise had been fully maintained. The capture forces penetrated the residence and acted quickly, precisely, and with discipline, isolating the area to apprehend the accused.
Russian intelligence failed to acknowledge that Zelensky was legitimately elected president and would be supported by the majority of the population in the event of a regime change operation, and that there would be resistance. On February 24, 2022 Russian special forces didn’t even know his address and used paper maps to locate presidential palace and got lost on the way.
The meticulous intelligence work of the Americans is diametrically opposed to shoddy work of Russian intelligence officers who are only interested in concocting fantasies to placate their dictator and to rob businessmen of their profits.
Moreover, at the time when Putin’s troops were running away from the battlefield because they didn’t go to Ukraine to take part in a war and “partial mobilization” caused massive outbound traffic of Russian men who didn’t want to become cannon fodder, Putin in a bizarre move to legitimize his war of attrition signed a decree for partially occupied four regions of Ukraine to be incorporated into Russia.
At the time, it was meant to make it legal for the mobilized troops to be fighting on home turf but when none showed up to recruitment offices the whole thing turned out to be a terrible move that trapped him in doubling down on pouring more funds he didn’t have into war he couldn’t win.
Now that all these “new territories” that haven’t even been occupied by Russian armed forces due to shortages in manpower and mercenaries from impoverished rural regions who lack any semblance of professionalism of a regular army are now on every map and globe and textbook as Russia’s territory.
Any peace deal that doesn’t allow Kremlin to have the territories that haven’t been occupied by its military will have to be erased from maps and globes and textbooks following by an amendment of the previous amendment in the constitution that has been revised more times than an essay of an F student.
Putin’s rule has been a kaleidoscope of farcical moves and decisions little opposed by anyone in power due to fear of falling out of a high window or being poisoned by tea. It feels like a troupe of mean clowns have been in charge of Russia for twenty five years.
Even establishing control over the entire Donbas requires a rethinking of the entire state model. It will increase tax burden on already impoverished population and require trillions of rubles to rebuild what they have blown up.
Going forward, Putin’s socio-economic model is finished. We have to start from square one.
Officials should be freed from the compulsive obsession to steal, and security forces from the compulsive obsession to steal from what has already been stolen.
The vertical power structure built from 1991 to 2022 has to be allowed to collapse. The collapse will be epic and anyways it can’t survive under so much external and internal strain.
Trump's special operation, for all its cunning and serious preparation, had a simple and clear goal, achievable within 24 hours — to catch the sleeping, mustachioed Maduro and load him into a helicopter and take him to the US.
Putin’s hold on power for over a quarter century has held no other objective than nonstop theft from the taxpayers who have been cynically duped into believing that Putin has their best interests at heart. ~ Misha Firer, Quora, January 5, 2026
James McCurvy:
I think that the Russians can and could have taken out Zelensky at many points, and he only came out of wherever he was hiding after the PM of Israel secured a guarantee of personal safety from Putin. He has confirmed this in an interview. Arresting him would have been more difficult.
The strange thing is that, unlike in Panama and Grenada, we have not actually installed the opposition. At this point, the Chavista Vice President remains head of state, and the Chavista power structure is intact. I think a deal was made. They all sold him out. That is to say, at this point at least, it’s not really a ‘regime change’.
Are the celebrations in Venezuela? Footage I see is always from expats.
Villi Bernaroli:
Expats can cheer safely. Those still in Venezuela are waiting to see where things will go. As you said, the Chavista power structure is still intact. I too would wait a bit before hitting the streets of Caracas to celebrate.
Yes it was a very well carried out military operation. And you make what seems a fair comparison between it and the Russian shambles.
But I have two concerns.
Even though Maduro is by all accounts an utter bounder, and his country will be better off without him, assuming someone worse does not get it. And even though over the years I have wished the US would go and arrest one dictator or another and bring them to trial.
I would still know it was the wrong thing to do. The act tramples over the rules established after WW2. It brings us all closer to a conflict which will be infinitely worse than what the Venezuelans would have suffered under Maduro.
Stephen Jones:
Trumps unprovoked attack on the people of Venezuela is a war crime, plain and simple. Whatever his motives or justification, it’s still a war crime. We Brits hate the ****, so I presume it’s ok to send our SAS and SBS to Mar-a-Lago and kidnap him and Melanoma? You OK with that?
Stanko:
I wouldn't bother with it. Russia has already broken everything it can. Realistically, it can't be said that the rules will work in the future with this setup. If someone is acting like a wolf, you won't win by acting like a sheep. You have to become a wolf for a while and you can lie to yourself that you are not a wolf, but a guard dog. You will still have to bite before the wolf understands.
Roland Marshalin:
While I'm prepared to believe that getting rid of Maduro will indeed make the average Venezuelan better off and happier, in reality, as it looks to be currently heading, they've only exchanged one dictator for another.
And already the asset stripping by the USA of Venezuela appears to have begun!
Richard Jordan:
Obviously it’s the oil under the guise of a campaign promise about stopping drug smuggling.
Stan Coolidge:
Putin has screwed up Russia strategically, he has gone all in on Ukraine. He can't
Luispinheirodoesmontes:
The problem with this kind of “successful special operation” is that it sets a precedent for powerful countries to disregard international law, based only in their own national interest.
I swear I can't hear anyone anymore saying how great this operation was “because Maduro is such a bad guy”!!! That's not the point!!! The point is that the US is only after their own interest! Which is OIL! And lots of it! IF IT WAS THE DRUGS, MEXICO WOULD HAVE BEEN A MORE LEGITIMATE TARGET! And if it was about human rights….Well, one of USA's allies just recently killed upwards of 20.000 children, with bombs “made in US” and the supply only has increased!
So why don't we scrap ‘human rights’ off the list as well?
Which leaves us with the real reason… USA's own interest in the largest oil reserve in the planet! Next will be China taking Taiwan, Japan invading China to finish what they started 100 years ago, Russia…well, they were the first on this ‘new’ wave of countries taking action to “reinstall order where otherwise there was none” kind of operations.
Folks rejoicing the US for this kidnapping “in the name of justice” make me sick.
Ray Ryan:
There was supposedly a moral high ground America stood on that she didn’t invade and take over another sovereign country. Dictators such as Putin did that, not an American president. Bush jr. now has someone else in his club.
Oriana:
I am among the rejoicers. The forced removal of a corrupt, criminal head of state, when not achievable through democratic means, can still be justified as a benefit to the population. To be sure, it’s the last resort. Israel still exists because it has realized from the start that it doesn’t have the luxury of subscribing of pristine values — values that in the long run can survive only if, when dealing with a murderous enemy, we don’t tie our hands with scrupulosity.
The Catholic church defines scrupulosity as a sin. It’s excessive attention to what doesn’t really matter, or matters much less than the good we are hoping to achieve. Being overly scrupulous leads to paralysis, while the bad guy (e.g. Putin), with zero scruples on his side, continues to give orders that lead to endless death and destruction.
Yes, it would be wonderful to use the due process and put Putin on trial in the Hague, but that would be extremely difficult. But if an “illegal” way to remove Putin opened up, I wouldn’t worry about legality. I remember my parents’ friend, a Jewish surgeon. He said that if his patient happened to be Hitler or Stalin, he wouldn’t hesitate to break the Hippocratic oath. The good to be achieved is simply too great to allow for any idealistic defense of principles, no matter how revered under normal circumstances, to perpetuate the evil of the status quo.
First, eliminate evil.
I hope that Iran is next. It's strangely satisfying to watch dictators fall.
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A solar panel 100 miles by 100 miles (161x161km) in the Mojave Desert (USA) could replace all the coal now burned to generate electricity in the entire U.S.
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VICTIMS OF LA FIRES STILL LIVING IN TOXIC HOMES
One year on from the Eaton fire, long after the vicious winds that sent embers cascading from the San Gabriel mountains and the flames that swallowed entire streets, a shadow still hangs over Altadena.
Construction of new properties is under way, and families whose homes survived the fire have begun to return. But many are grappling with an urgent question: is it safe to be here?
The fire upended life in this part of Los Angeles county. By the time firefighters brought it under control, 19 people were dead, tens of thousands displaced and nearly 9,500 structures destroyed, primarily in Altadena but also in Pasadena and Sierra Madre.
The flames incinerated many older homes and businesses filled with lead paint and asbestos. They showered the community with toxins, leaving tall piles of ash and unseen traces of heavy metals in the soil and along and inside standing structures. Research has indicated some hazards remain even after properties have undergone remediation, the clean-up process that is supposed to restore homes and ensure they are safe to occupy.
As Altadena fights to return, residents – some eager to stay in the community and others who simply can’t afford to go anywhere else – are facing immense challenges while trying to rebuild their lives and come back home.
Official information about the health risks was limited early on and those returning often only learned about the dangers as they went. Some people have developed health concerns such as migraines and respiratory issues. Many are still battling their insurance companies to fully cover their costs, and make certain their homes are habitable.
Their predicament highlights the increased dangers that come with urban fires, and shows how Altadena has come to serve as a sort of living laboratory with scientists and residents learning in real time.
Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist, and her family moved back into their Altadena home over the summer after their property underwent an extensive cleanup process, but their air purifiers still register high levels of particulate matter, heavy sediment appears when they vacuum and when it rains the distinctive smell from the fire returns.
“The toll of displacement was really high on my family. And I just had to move home and try [to] mitigate risk and keep fighting the good fight,” she said. “There’s always that back-of-your-mind concern, did I make the right choice, but I also don’t have other choices.”
Early on in those first careening hours of the fire, as thick smoke and ash fell like snow over her yard, Dawn Fanning was sure her home would not be spared. The wind was blowing from the fire straight to the Spanish bungalow the producer shared with her adult son, and it seemed there was no way to stop it.
Fanning’s home, miraculously, escaped the flames. But, while the stucco structure was intact – clothes still hanging undisturbed in her closet and her son’s baby photos packed carefully in bins in the garage – it hadn’t been unscathed either. Virtually nothing in Altadena was.
“It’s dusty and there’s piles of ash in the windowsills and on the floor. At first glance, it doesn’t look any different,” Fanning said. “Your house looks the same – but it’s not. There’s toxicity in your attic and in your crawlspace and on your mattresses and on all the things.”
Confused and frustrated with the local government’s handling of health concerns, Maccalla and Fanning joined other fire survivors to form Eaton Fire Residents United in hopes of ensuring the impacted areas recover safely. The community group is developing testing and remediation guidelines, gathered hygienic testing reports of hundreds of homes, and advocated for fire survivors and workers.
“We’re still trying to work on that and get the protections people need.”
Firefighters protect a structure as the Eaton fire advanced in Altadena, California, last January
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Tamara Artin had returned from work to see chaos on the street, with fierce winds and billowing smoke all around the house she rented with her husband. Artin, who is Armenian by way of Iran and has lived in Los Angeles for about six years, always loved the area. She enjoyed the history and sprawling green parks, and had been excited to live here.
Now the pair was quickly abandoning the home they had moved into just three months earlier, heading toward a friend’s house with their bags and passports.
Fanning and her son had gone to a friend’s home too. As they stayed up late listening to the police scanner, they heard emergency responders call out addresses where flames were spreading. These were friends’ homes. She waited to hear her own.
In the first days after the fire began, the risk remained and there was little help available with firefighting resources spread across Los Angeles. Maccalla and her son soon returned to their property to try to protect their home and those of their neighbors.
“I was working on removing a bunch of debris that had flown into the yard and all these dry leaves. I didn’t know at the time that I shouldn’t touch any of that,” she said.”The devastation in Altadena, as in the Palisades, was staggering. Many of the 19 people who died were older adults who hadn’t received evacuation warnings for hours after people in other areas of town, if at all.
Physically, parts of Altadena were almost unrecognizable. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, bright red flame retardant streaked the hillsides. Off Woodbury Road, not far from where Robles and Artin lived, seemingly unblemished homes stood next to blackened lots where nothing remained but fireplaces and charred rubble – scorched bicycles, collapsed beds and warped ovens. The pungent smell of smoke seemed to embed itself in the nose.
Robles would sometimes get lost in the place she had lived her whole life as she tried to navigate streets that had been stripped of any identifiable landmarks. Fire scorched the beloved community garden, the country club, an 80-year-old hardware store, the Bunny Museum and numerous schools and houses of worship.
Artin and her husband returned to their home, which still stood, after a single night. They had no family in the area and nowhere else to go – hotels were packed across the county. For nearly two weeks they lived without water or power as they tried to clean up, throwing away most of their furniture and belongings, even shoes, and all of the food in the fridge and freezer.
“We were worried, of course, because we were inhaling all those chemicals without knowing what it is, but we didn’t have a choice,” Artin recalled.
As fires burn through communities, they spread particulate matter far and wide, cause intense smoke damage in standing structures and cars, and release chemicals even miles beyond the burned area.
When Fanning saw her home for the first time, thick piles of ash covered the floors. She was eager to return, but as she tried to figure out her next steps, reading scientific articles and guides, and joining Zoom calls with other concerned residents, it was clear she needed to learn more about precisely what was in the ash. Asbestos was found in her home, meaning all porous items, clothing and furniture, were completely ruined.
“You can’t wash lead and asbestos out of your clothing. I was like, OK, this is real and I need to gather as much evidence [as I can] to find out what’s in my house.”
In Altadena, more than 90% of homes had been built before 1975 and likely had lead-based paint and toxic asbestos, both of which the EPA has since banned, according to a report from the California Institute of Technology. All sorts of things burned along with the houses, Fanning said: plastic, electric cars, lithium batteries.
“The winds were shoving this into our homes,” she said.
The roof on Maccalla’s home had to be rebuilt, and significant cleanup was required for the smoke damage and layers of ash that blanketed curtains and beds.
Despite these concerns, residents grew increasingly frustrated about what they viewed as a lack of official information about the safety of returning to their homes. Many also encountered pushback from their insurance providers that said additional testing for hazards, or more intensive remediation efforts recommended by experts, were unnecessary and not covered under their policies.
So earlier this year a group of residents, including Fanning and Maccalla, formed Eaton Fire Residents United (EFRU). The group includes scientists and people dedicated to educating and supporting the community, ensuring there is data collection to support legislation, and assembling an expert panel to establish protocols for future fires, Fanning said. They’ve published research based on testing reports from hundreds of properties across the affected area, and advocated that homes should receive a comprehensive clearance before residents return.
Research released by EFRU and headed by Maccalla, who has a doctorate in education and specializes in research methodology, found that more than half of homes that had been remediated still had levels of lead and/or asbestos that rendered them uninhabitable.
“There’s still widespread contamination and that one round of remediation was not sufficient, the majority of the time. Six out of 10 homes were still coming back with lead and or asbestos levels that exceeded EPA safety thresholds,” said Maccalla, who serves as EFRU’S director of data science and educational outreach.
Maccalla moved back home in June after what she viewed as a decent remediation process. But she hasn’t been able to get insurance coverage for additional testing, and worries about how many people are having similar experiences.
“We’re putting people back in homes without confirming that they’re free of contamination,” she said. “It feels very unethical and a very dangerous game to be playing.”
She couldn’t afford not to come home, and the family couldn’t keep commuting two hours a day each way from their temporary residence to work and school or their Altadena property where Maccalla was overseeing construction. But she’s experienced headaches, her daughter’s asthma is more severe, and her pets have become sick.
“I don’t think anybody that hasn’t gone through it can really comprehend what [that is like],” she said. “For everything in your environment that was so beloved to now become a threat is mentally a really hard switch,” she said.
Robles settled back to the home she’s lived in for years with a few new additions. Seven of her relatives lost their homes, including her daughter who now lives with her. “I thank God there’s a place for them. That’s all that matters to me.”
After the fire, she threw away clothes, bed sheets and pillows. The family mopped and washed the walls. Her insurance was helpful, she said, and covered the cleanup work. Robles tries not to think about the toxic contamination and chemicals that spread during the fire. “You know that saying, what you don’t know?” she said, her voice trailing off.
Artin said she received some assistance from her renter’s insurance, but that her landlord hadn’t yet undertaken more thorough remediation. She’s still trying to replace some of the furniture she had to throw away. The fire had come after an already difficult year in which her husband had been laid off, and their finances were stretched.
She shudders when she recalls the early aftermath of the fire, a morning sky as dark as night. “It was hell, honestly.”
Her rent was set to increase in the new year, and while she fears exposure to unseen dangers, moving isn’t an option.
“We don’t have anywhere else to go. We can’t do anything,” Artin said.
Fanning has been battling her insurance company to cover the work that is necessary to ensure her house is safely habitable, she said. Her provider is underplaying the amount of work that needs to be done and underbidding the costs, Fanning said. She and her son have been living in a short-term rental since late summer, and she expects they won’t be able to return home before the fall.
Sometimes she wonders if she’ll be up to returning at all. Even now, when Fanning drives through the area to come get her mail or check on the house, she gets headaches. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe, no matter all the things that I know and all the things that I’m gonna do. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe again.”
In between trying to restore her home, she’s focused on advocacy with EFRU, which has become her primary job, albeit unpaid. “There are so many people that don’t have enough insurance coverage, that don’t speak English, that are renters, that don’t have access like I do … I feel it’s my duty as a human.”
There’s much work to do, Fanning said, and it has to be done at every single property.
“It’s a long road to recovery. And if we don’t do it right, safely, it’s never gonna be what it was before.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/07/la-wildfire-victims-toxic-homes
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RECORD OCEAN HEAT IS INTENSIFYING CLIMATE DISASTERS
Oceans absorb 90% of global heating, making them a stark indicator of the relentless march of the climate crisis
The extra heat makes hurricanes and typhoons more intense, causes heavier downpours of rain and greater flooding, and results in longer marine heatwaves.
The world’s oceans absorbed colossal amounts of heat in 2025, setting yet another new record and fuelling more extreme weather, scientists have reported. Almost every year since the start of the millennium has set a new ocean heat record.
This extra heat makes the hurricanes and typhoons hitting coastal communities more intense, causes heavier downpours of rain and greater flooding, and results in longer marine heatwaves, which decimate life in the seas. The rising heat is also a major driver of sea level rise via the thermal expansion of seawater, threatening billions of people.
Reliable ocean temperature measurements stretch back to the mid-20th century, but it is likely the oceans are at their hottest for at least 1,000 years and heating faster than at any time in the past 2,000 years.
The atmosphere is a smaller store of heat and more affected by natural climate variations such as the El Niño-La Niña cycle. The average surface air temperature in 2025 is expected to approximately tie with 2023 as the second-hottest year since records began in 1850, with 2024 being the hottest. Last year the planet moved into the cooler La Niña phase of the Pacific Ocean cycle.
“Each year the planet is warming – setting a new record has become a broken record,” said Prof John Abraham at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, US, and part of the team that produced the new data.
“Global warming is ocean warming,” he said. “If you want to know how much the Earth has warmed or how fast we will warm into the future, the answer is in the oceans.”
The analysis, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, used temperature data collected by a range of instruments across the oceans and collated by three independent teams. They used this data to determine the heat content of the top 2,000 meters of the oceans, where most of the heat is absorbed.
The amount of heat taken up by the ocean is colossal, equivalent to more than 200 times the total amount of electricity used by humans across the world. “Ocean warming continues to exert profound impacts on the Earth system,” the scientists concluded.
Ocean warming is not uniform, with some areas warming faster than others. In 2025, the hottest areas included the tropical and South Atlantic and North Pacific oceans, and the Southern Ocean. In the latter, which surrounds Antarctica, scientists are deeply concerned about a collapse in winter sea ice in recent years.
The North Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea are also getting warmer, as well as saltier, more acidic and less oxygenated owing to the climate crisis. This is causing “a deep-reaching ocean state change in, making the ocean ecosystems and the life they support more fragile”, the researchers said.
“As long as the Earth’s heat continues to increase, ocean heat content will continue to rise and records will continue to fall,” said Abraham. “The biggest climate uncertainty is what humans decide to do. Together, we can reduce emissions and help safeguard a future climate where humans can thrive.”
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EARTH’S CORE IS LEAKING GOLD
Trace amounts of precious metals found in volcanic rock appear to come from the Earth's inner core.
Contrary to conspiracy theories, the Earth’s core isn’t hollow. The dense, hot ball instead contains a stew of precious metals including platinum, ruthenium, and pretty much all of the planet’s gold. As lucrative as that sounds, there’s essentially no way humanity will ever access this natural treasure chest buried beneath more than 1,850 feet of solid rock. But according to recent discoveries made at volcanoes in Hawai’i, trace amounts of some of those coveted metals are seeping up from the planet’s deepest reaches.
“When the first results came in, we realized that we had literally struck gold,” Nils Messling, a geochemist at Göttingen University, said in a statement. “Our data confirmed that material from the core, including gold and other precious metals, is leaking into Earth’s mantle above.”
Messling and collaborators explained their findings in a study published on May 21 in the journal Nature. The team recently detected trace amounts of the precious metal ruthenium while analyzing volcanic rock samples collected across the islands of Hawai’i. More specifically, they noted the unexpected presence of the ruthenium isotope, ¹⁰⁰Ru.
“Unexpected” is the key word there. While ¹⁰⁰Ru does exist in Earth’s mantle, it’s slightly more abundant inside of the core—alongside 99.999 percent of the planet’s gold and other precious metals. That’s because during the planet’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago, some of the ruthenium that is locked inside Earth’s core originated from a different source than the small amount found in the mantle today. The discrepancies between these two forms of ruthenium is so slight that the equipment used by geologists to study these isotopes hasn’t been able to tell the two apart.
However, researchers at Göttingen University in The Netherlands recently developed new isotopic analysis methods that allowed them to do just that. In differentiating between these two types of the same isotope, the team discovered that some of Hawai’i’s volcanic basalts contain an unusually high ¹⁰⁰Ru signal meaning it must have originated from near the core-mantle-boundary.
The ramifications are significant: Earth’s core, once thought inaccessible, is ejected in small amounts up towards the surface during volcanic eruptions.
“We can now also prove that huge volumes of super-heated mantle material—several hundreds of quadrillion metric tons of rock—originate at the core-mantle boundary and rise to Earth’s surface to form ocean islands like Hawaii,” added study co-author Matthias Wilbold.
The question now isn’t if this unexpected process happens—it’s a question of if and when it’s happened in the past.
“Our findings open up an entirely new perspective on the evolution of the inner dynamics of our home planet,” added Messling.
https://www.popsci.com/environment/earth-core-leaking-gold/
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SEISMOLOGISTS MIGHT HAVE IDENTIFIED THE DEEPEST LAYER OF EARTH’S CORE
The so-called 'innermost inner core' could become the latest addition to geology textbooks.
In high school science class, textbooks often feature a recognizable image of the Earth and all its layers—currently, that’s the crust, outer and inner mantle, and outer and inner core. But a new study published February 21 in Nature Communications might leave all of those graphics a little outdated. Seismologists at the Australian National University analyzed the reverberating waves from powerful earthquakes and found what they believe to be evidence of a distinct innermost inner core.
Each inner division of the Earth plays its own unique role in our lives. We exist on top of the thin, outermost layer called the crust. Although there have been past efforts to dig deep enough to break into the mantle, no one has succeeded yet. The mantle, both outer and inner, are made up of liquid rock, and the convection currents present there are responsible for the jostling and bumping of the crust’s tectonic plates. Finally, there’s the core. The liquid outer layer of the core is responsible for producing Earth’s magnetic field, which is further stabilized by the solid inner section.
We can’t easily study the inner structure of the Earth, so geologists research the mantle by examining samples of rock from volcanic eruptions that may have come from that far underground. On top of that, they study the seismic waves produced by earthquakes. When an earthquake starts at an epicenter deep underground, the movement creates waves that shake the surface. Those waves can be measured by seismometers all around the globe, and by measuring just how fast the seismic waves are moving, seismologists can figure out a surprising amount about just what the center of the Earth looks like.
That is, when the numbers make sense. For a while, seismologists had noticed that when they measured earthquake waves passing through the very center of the inner core, their models would be less accurate. All waves, seismic or otherwise, travel at different speeds through different materials, but a phenomenon called anisotropy means that waves can also travel at different speeds in different directions. In 2002, researchers proposed the existence of the innermost inner core as a way to explain the anisotropic effects they had found when examining some powerful earthquakes.
Now, more research seems to be supporting that theory. As the number of seismic recording stations has increased in recent years, it’s become easier to triangulate exactly how fast and in what direction a wave is moving. The seismologists at the ANU looked at earthquakes above a magnitude of 6.0 over the last decade to determine the exact path of the seismic waves. Because of the increase in equipment, scientists were able to track the waves as they bounced around the Earth up to five times. And indeed, their findings supported that as the waves passed through the center of the Earth, their path was altered as if there was an innermost inner core. The researchers think the divide comes from a different crystal arrangement of the iron and nickel atoms that make up the core.
Some seismologists aren’t completely convinced by the findings because it’s still not clear that this is a hard boundary rather than a gradual transition. But discovering a new layer of the earth doesn’t happen often, and if the innermost inner core continues to be backed up by evidence, the authors argue it might just give geologists more insight into the geologic structure of the earliest days of the planet.
https://www.popsci.com/science/earths-inner-core-new-layer/
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ARE THERE ANY DINOSAURS STILL LEFT?
Did all dinosaurs become extinct, killed when an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago? Or could a few of them, somehow, have survived that mass extinction event – with their descendants living even today?
It is exciting to imagine that gigantic dinosaurs are still rumbling and lumbering around in some remote part of the world. But no evidence of this exists. There are no cousins of Tyrannosaurus rex stomping through the vast woods of Siberia, no Apatosaurus ambling through the Congo rainforest.
As a paleontologist, I have spent much of my life studying ancient animals, particularly dinosaurs. But I have seen only fossils of these creatures, nothing living – with one exception. One group of dinosaurs is still around. To find them, just go outside and look up.
Ankylosaurus was a plant-eating dinosaur with body armor and a tail club that could kill any attacker.
The killer asteroid
In 1977, American geologist Walter Alvarez was working in the Apennine mountains in Italy. There, he found a thin layer of clay with an unusual amount of a metal called iridium in it. The clay was in between rocks from the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods and dates from the time the dinosaurs disappeared.
Iridium is rare on Earth but more common in some meteorites. Working with his father, Luis, who was a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Walter Alvarez developed the theory that a giant space rock – an asteroid – collided with Earth 66 million years ago. This impact left iridium traces around the world and triggered the unimaginable disaster that killed the dinosaurs and countless other species of animals and plants on land and in the sea.
At first, many scientists rejected the theory. But then, in 1991, geologists discovered a huge crater buried under the sea floor off the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. This spot was where an asteroid, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) across, crashed into our planet 66 million years ago.
The collision was so powerful it sent trillions of tons of dust and molten rock into the sky. Many pieces of molten rock fell back to Earth, causing huge wildfires everywhere. A thick blanket of dust in the atmosphere blocked most sunlight, leading to freezing temperatures worldwide. Earth turned into a cold, desolate place for many years, even centuries.
The loss of sunlight killed many plants. With no food available for them, big plant-eating dinosaurs like Triceratops quickly went extinct. That left big predators like Tyrannosaurus rex without prey animals to eat, so they died, too.
But smaller animals like mammals, lizards and turtles could adapt. They could hide in burrows and live on a wide variety of foods. Fish lived in rivers and lakes and were protected by their watery homes. And surviving with them: birds, the only remaining dinosaurs.
The bird connection
Fast-forward about 66 million years: Scientists noticed in the 19th century how the skeletons of modern birds and fossilized dinosaurs were alike in many ways. The similarities in the legs and feet were especially striking. However, most scientists then thought dinosaurs and birds were too different to be closely related.
Then, in 1964, dinosaur expert John Ostrom discovered fossils of the dinosaur Deinonychus. It had a mouth full of sharp teeth with serrated edges like steak knives, long slender hands with three fingers ending with large, curved claws, and a huge claw on the second toe of each foot. A fast hunter that did not fit the traditional ideas about dinosaurs as slow and not very active, Deinonychus lived in North America during the Cretaceous period, about 110 million years ago.
For another research project in the early 1970s, Ostrom examined the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, which lived 150 million years ago in what is now Germany. It had feathered wings and a wishbone, along with reptilelike traits, including jaws with sharp teeth, hands with three fingers each, and a long tail.
Comparing this ancient bird with Deinonychus, Ostrom realized their skeletons shared many special features. For example, both had unusually long arms and hands, a very flexible wrist, hollow bones and an S-shaped neck.
Based on these and many other similarities, Ostrom showed that birds descended from small, predatory, birdlike dinosaurs.
In the past three decades, paleontologists have discovered many skeletons of ancient birds and birdlike dinosaurs in Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks in China. Surprisingly, the birdlike dinosaurs, including close relatives of Deinonychus, were covered in feathers, just like the birds living with them. Paleontologists now agree that many if not all dinosaurs maintained constant high body temperatures, just like birds and mammals do today. Feathers kept them warm.
In the past three decades, paleontologists have discovered many skeletons of ancient birds and birdlike dinosaurs in Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks in China. Surprisingly, the birdlike dinosaurs, including close relatives of Deinonychus, were covered in feathers, just like the birds living with them. Paleontologists now agree that many if not all dinosaurs maintained constant high body temperatures, just like birds and mammals do today. Feathers kept them warm.
Birdlike dinosaurs did not make it through the extinction event 66 million years ago – but some of the early birds who had lived alongside them did. And they evolved into the birds alive today.
Think of that: to see a dinosaur, all you need do is glance skyward. And as someone who has studied dinosaurs for a long time, I’m happy to know I share the world with dinosaurs.
https://www.si.edu/stories/could-dinosaurs-still-exist
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USING BODY ODOR TO DETECT DISEASE
We emit a barrage of whiffy chemicals through our pores and in our breath. Some are a sign that we might be getting ill – and could be used to diagnose diseases up to years in advance.
~ It was obviously nonsense. That was how analytical chemist Perdita Barran reacted when a colleague told her about a Scottish woman who claimed she could smell Parkinson's disease.
"She's probably just smelling old people and recognizing symptoms of Parkinson's and making some association," Barran remembers thinking. The woman, a 74-year-old retired nurse called Joy Milne, had approached Barran's colleague Tilo Kunath, a neuroscientist at the University Edinburgh, at an event he was speaking at in 2012.
Milne told Kunath that she had first discovered her ability after noticing her husband, Les, had developed a new musky odor years earlier. He was later diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a progressive neurodegenerative illness characterized by tremors and other motor symptoms. It was only when Milne attended a group meeting for Parkinson's patients in her home town of Perth, Scotland, that she made the connection: all the patients had the same musky smell.
"So, we then decided to test whether she was right," says Barran, who worked at the University of Edinburgh at the time but is now at the University of Manchester.
It turned out that Milne was no time-waster. Kunath, Barran and colleagues asked Milne to sniff 12 T-shirts, six of which had recently been worn by Parkinson's patients, alongside six worn by others without the disease. She correctly identified the six patients. What's more, she identified one further person who less than a year later was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
"That was kind of amazing," says Barran. "She pre-diagnosed the condition, just like she'd done with her husband."
In 2015, news of her astounding ability made headlines around the world.
Milne's story is not as outlandish as you might assume. People's bodies give off a range of different odors. A new smell may indicate that something has changed, or gone wrong in the body.
Now, scientists are working on techniques for systematically detecting whiffy biomarkers that could speed up diagnoses of a dazzling array of conditions ranging from Parkinson's disease and brain injuries to cancer. The key to spotting them may have been hiding right under our noses.
Smells are caused by chemicals that interact with odor receptors in our nose
"It drives me mad that people are dying and we are putting needles up people's butts in order to find out if they have prostate cancer, when the signal is already outside and detectable by dogs," says Andreas Mershin, a physicist and co-founder of RealNose.ai, a company that is developing a robotic nose for diagnosing diseases based on scent. Such technology is necessary as relatively few people have noses powerful enough to detect these tell-tale biochemicals that crop up in the early stages of a disease.
Joy Milne, it turned out, was one of those few. She has hereditary hyperosmia, a trait that means that her sense of smell is much more sensitive than that of the average human – a kind of super-smeller.
There are some diseases that give off such a strong characteristic whiff that most humans can smell them. The breath or skin of people with diabetes who are having a hypoglycemic episode, for example, can have a fruity or "rotten apples" aroma to it due to the build-up of fruity-smelling acidic chemicals called ketones in the bloodstream. These are produced when the body metabolizes fat instead of glucose.
People with liver disease can emit a musty or sulphurous odor from their breath or urine, while if your breath smells of ammonia or has a "fishy" or "urine-like" aroma to it, then this could be a sign of kidney disease.
Some infectious diseases also give off characteristic smells. Sweet-smelling poo could be a sign of infection with cholera or the Clostridioides difficile bacteria, which is a common cause of diarrhoea – although one study found a group of unfortunate hospital nurses were unable to accurately diagnose patients by sniffing their faeces. Tuberculosis, meanwhile, can cause a person's breath to smell foul, like stale beer, and their skin like wet brown cardboard and brine.
Detecting other diseases, however, requires a special kind of nose.
Dogs, for example, have a sense of smell that is reportedly up to 100,000 times stronger than ours. Scientists have trained canines to sniff out lung, breast, ovarian, bladder, and prostate cancers in people. In one study on prostate cancer, for example, dogs were able to detect the disease in urine samples with a 99% success rate. Dogs have also been trained to detect early signs of Parkinson's disease, diabetes, oncoming epileptic seizures, and malaria, all from smell alone.
But not all dogs have what it takes to become a disease detector, and it takes time to train the animals that do. Some scientists say we can replicate the amazing olfactory capabilities of canines, and people like Milne, in the laboratory, perhaps offer the chance to have a simple swab that could be sent off for testing.
Barran, for example, is using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze sebum (an oily substance produced on people's skin) from Parkinson's patients. Gas chromatography separates the compounds, and mass spectrometry weighs them, allowing you to determine the precise nature of the molecules present. The food, drink and perfume industries already use this form of odor analysis routinely.
Out of the 25,000 or so compounds commonly found on human skin, roughly 3,000 are differently regulated in people with Parkinson's, says Barran. "We are now in a position where we've narrowed that down to about 30 that are really, really consistently different in all people with Parkinson's."
A lot of the compounds are lipids, or fats, and long chain fatty acids, she says. For example, one early study focused on three lipid-like molecules linked to the odor caused by the disease – hippuric acid, eicosane and octadecanal. This makes sense as previous studies suggest that abnormal lipid metabolism is a hallmark of Parkinson's disease.
"What we have found is that the ability of cells to transport long-chain fatty acids into the mitochondria is impaired [in people with Parkinson's disease]," says Barran. "We know, therefore, that there are more of these lipids circulating around the body, and some of those are excreted through skin, and that's what we measure.”
The team is now developing a simple skin swab test that can detect Parkinson's disease during its early stages. Currently, general practitioners typically refer people showing tremor-like symptoms to a neurologist, who will then make a diagnosis. This can, however, take years.
"What we want is to have a very quick, non-invasive test that will allow someone to be triaged effectively, so that they can then see a neurologist who will assess them and tell them 'yes' or 'no'," says Barran.
But why do diseases affect our body odor? The reason is down to a group of molecules known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs). In order to stay alive, our body must continually convert food and drink into energy. It does this through a series of chemical reactions taking place inside the mitochondria – the tiny structures in our cells that convert sugars from our food into energy our body can use. These chemical reactions produce molecules known as metabolites, some of which are volatile, which means they can easily evaporate at room temperature – and so potentially be picked up by our noses. The VOCs are then excreted from the body.
"If you are suffering from an infection, or a disease, or an injury, it's logical that there's going to be an effect on your metabolism," says Bruce Kimball, a chemical ecologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Centre, a research institute in Philadelphia, US. "That change in metabolism will be realized in the distribution of metabolites in different places in your body."
In other words, having a disease can change the VOCs produced, altering our body odor fingerprint.
"We've looked at a number of viral and bacterial infections, we've looked at pancreatic cancer, rabies. There's a pretty long list," says Kimball. "I would say, when comparing to a healthy condition, it's very rare that we don't see an ability to discriminate between healthy and whatever condition we're looking at. That's pretty typical."
But, crucially, many of the VOC changes associated with these diseases are too subtle for humans to pick up, which is why dogs – or odor-sniffing medical devices – could help us diagnose some serious but otherwise difficult-to-detect conditions in the future.
Kimball, for one, is working with colleagues to develop a test for diagnosing brain injuries in children who play contact sports, based on changes to the VOCs emitted by their bodies.
In 2016, they published a study revealing that traumatic brain injuries in mice cause a distinct smell and that it is possible to train other mice to sniff it out. In new, soon to be published work, Kimball observed specific ketones in human urine in the first several hours following concussion. The reason why the odorants are released following such injuries is unclear, but one theory is that the brain releases VOCs as a by-product while trying to repair itself.
"The class of the ketones that we see suggest that it has something to do with trying to get more energy to the brain to maybe combat the injury, or at least support recovery," says Kimball.
There's good reason to think so. Studies have shown that ketones can serve as alternative energy sources following brain injury and are thought to provide neuroprotective qualities.
Body odor could also reveal that someone has malaria. In 2018, scientists discovered that children infected with malaria give off a distinct smell through their skin, which makes them especially attractive to mosquitoes. By studying samples from 56 children in western Kenya, the team identified a "fruity and grassy" smell that appeared irresistible to the flying, biting insects.
Further analysis of these samples unearthed the presence of chemicals called aldehydes – specifically heptanal, octanal and nonanal – that were responsible for the unique odor. The research could be used to develop a new test for malaria. For now, the scientists hope to replicate the scent and use it as a lure to trap mosquitoes, drawing them away from communities and villages.
And Mershin, a former researcher scientist at MIT now working at RealNose.ai, says he and his team hope to develop an odor-detecting device that can identify prostate cancer, a disease that one in 44 men will die of.
"The company sprung out of about 19 years' worth of research I did at MIT, where Darpa [the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency] asked me to beat the dog's nose at the limit of detection," says Mershin. "We were basically asked to make bio-cyborgs.”
The device currently being developed by RealNose.ai incorporates real human olfactory receptors – grown by stem cells in the lab – which are fine-tuned to allow them to detect the plethora of odorant molecules associated with prostate cancer. Machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, then searches for patterns in the activation of the receptors.
"It's not enough to know the components of what's inside a sample," says Mershin. "The ingredients of a cake tell us little about the taste of the cake, or the smell of the cake. That has to happen after your sensors interact with these volatiles, and your brain processes that information and turns it into a perceptual experience.
"We're looking for patterns in sensory activation which is closer to what you do as a mind, as a brain," says Mershin.
Joy, meanwhile, is now working alongside Barran on her research team, helping her to develop a diagnostic test for Parkinson's and other conditions.
"We don't use her much for odor detection anymore," says Barran. "She can do at best 10 samples in a day and it's quite emotionally exhausting for her. She's 75, so she's precious."
Nevertheless, if Barran's technique could replicate Joy's ability and spot Parkinson's disease in its early stages, that would be quite a legacy for Joy and Les.
"What I think is remarkable is how Joy and Les were medically trained people, so they knew that this observation was meaningful," says Barran. "But I think the story here is that everyone should feel empowered about their health or their friend's health or their family's health, to make observations and to act if they feel something is wrong.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250815-these-scientists-say-they-can-diagnose-health-problems-by-smelling-your-body
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THE BEST TIME OF DAY TO EXERCISE
You might find your performance during resistance exercise such as weight lifting will be better in the evening than the morning
There is growing evidence that the time of day we exercise makes a difference to our performance and health, but can we train our bodies to peak at different times of the day?
The world's top athletes gather to compete for the ultimate prize in sport – gold at the Olympic Games. For those hoping for a chance to enter the history books with a record-breaking performance, they might want to look at the hour on the clock before they settle into the starting blocks.
At least the swimmers might, according to one scientific study. Across four Olympic Games in Athens (2004), Beijing (2008), London (2012) and Rio (2016), the swim times of 144 medal-winning swimmers were found to be the fastest if they were competing in the early evening. Specifically, around 5:12pm. It is part of a growing amount of evidence suggesting that physical performance is affected by the time-of-day.
The phenomena is not just found among decorated Olympians – recreational cyclists complete faster time trials in the evening. Resistance exercise is particularly susceptible to time-of-day effects, with performance nearly always peaking between 4pm and 8pm. The time-of-day seems to also lead to affect men and women differently when they exercise.
But what if your schedule means you only have time to exercise at 7am? There are some indications it may even be possible to adjust your peak time for athletic performance.
At the root of the differences in how our bodies perform and respond to exercise are our circadian rhythms – the body's molecular clock responsible for regulating behaviors such as sleep and appetite throughout the 24-hour period.
A central clock located in the hypothalamus of the brain responds to light exposure via signals from the optic nerve. The suprachiasmatic nucleus, as this circadian pacemaker in the hypothalamus is known, in turn sends signals to peripheral clocks in other organs, muscle tissue and fat tissue, keeping the whole body in sync. These peripheral clocks, however, can be adjusted by other cues such as when we eat or perform certain activities. The "skeletal muscle clock" responds in this way to exercise, and so can be tuned by exercising regularly at different times.
But while this can affect performance, it can also alter the effect exercise has on our health, too.
Juleen Zierath, an exercise physiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has been researching the interaction between exercise and the circadian system. She and her colleagues found mice that exercised in the morning burn more fat. Zierath says the findings suggest that exercising at an optimal time-of-day could maximize the health benefits of exercise for individuals with metabolic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and obesity.
"Everybody agrees that exercise is good, irrespective of time-of-day, but one can maybe fine-tune the metabolic outcomes of the exercise based on when you exercise," says Zierath.
Their findings reflect a recent study in humans that showed performing an exercise regime of resistance training, interval sprints, stretching and endurance for an hour one day a week in the morning can reduce abdominal fat and blood pressure in women. Interestingly, when women did the same exercises in the evening, it enhanced their muscular performance.
For men, evening exercise helped to lower blood pressure and stimulates the breakdown of body fat.
But research in this area is still evolving and some recent analyses of previous studies suggests the evidence is somewhat inconclusive for an advantageous time-of-day effect upon exercise performance or health benefits.
One reason for this is almost certainly the differences that exist between individuals. For example, the time of peak athletic performance differs among individuals with early chronotypes and individuals with late chronotypes, also known as morning larks and night owls.
"There are variations in the timing of our clocks," says Karyn Esser, a physiologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville in the US. "Those of us that are larks have a clock that likely runs a little bit less than 24 hours, and those of us that are owls probably have a clock that runs a little bit more than 24 hours."
But if you find your own circadian rhythms don't quite allow you to give your best performance at the times you have available, exercise may also help to "reset" your muscle clock
A group of researchers led by Esser, found that consistent endurance running training among mice in the morning can cause the rodent's bodies to adapt to the new exercise regime. The exercise appears to shift the molecular clocks in their skeletal muscle and lung tissues to an earlier time-of-day.
Swimming in the morning might be refreshing, but you are less likely to break any records
The team's latest study, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, found that the magnitude of adaption in performance was greater in mice trained in the morning, compared to those trained in the afternoon. After six weeks of training, both morning and afternoon mice achieved the same maximum endurance performance.
The researchers suggest that if a similar effect is found in humans, it might be possible for athletes to recalibrate their internal "muscle clocks" with the right training. There is some preliminary evidence that exercise can shift circadian rhythms in humans, making it perhaps useful for those adjusting to shift work or jet lag.
"The simple notion here is that the clocks in our muscles are actually paying attention to when we train," says Esser.
Routine appears to be key – our body adapts better to training when it is performed regularly at the same time of day.
"If you're in the general population, or even an elite athlete, and you plan to compete, you should try to have a race-day-specific training," says Zierath. "Time your training bouts so that they are consistent with the time that you're going to have to be performing or competing at your peak."
Most researchers are keen to point out, however, that exercising at any time is beneficial. But, if do you find a time that works and stick with it, your body may just adapt to give you an extra edge.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240105-whats-the-best-time-of-the-day-to-exercise
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TEN MINUTES OF INTENSE EXERCISE MAY HELP TREAT COLORECTAL CANCER
Researchers from Newcastle University recently examined the impact of exercise on colorectal cancer cells.
The scientists noted that prior research has shown exercise offers some protection against cancer, and their goal was to expand on how this protection occurs at a molecular level.
One key finding showed that a single intense exercise session helped repair DNA damage faster.
Exercise may do more than just improve heart health. A new study found that 10 to 12 minutes of intense exercise may be able to provide benefits such as slowing the growth of colorectal cancer cells.
In the study, researchers examined blood both before and after an intense workout session and then tested the serum of each blood sample on cancer cells in the lab. When they exposed the cancer cells to the post-exercise blood serum, the scientists saw activity changes in more than 1,300 genes.
While the findings do not prove exercise treats cancer, they do explain how physical activity may protect against colorectal cancer.
The researchers analyzed blood samples and found that the intense exercise session increased levels of several proteins, including interleukin-6 (IL-6), a cytokine that contributes to DNA repair.
They also found that the intense exercise suppressed genes associated with rapid cell division, meaning it could help slow cancer cell growth.
The scientists’ next step involved creating serums from both the pre- and post-exercise blood samples and seeing how colorectal cancer cells reacted to each serum.
The post-exercise serum triggered widespread changes in gene activity, including in pathways related to DNA repair and tumor growth.
Cancer cells treated with post-exercise serum showed signs of faster DNA repair. When the researchers introduced radiation to the cancer cells, the cells treated with the post-exercise serum had a faster repair response.
While the scientists noted that high-intensity exercise may not be possible for everyone with colorectal cancer, the findings show how significant a single intense workout session can be. The team mentioned exploring whether lower-intensity exercise may have similar benefits.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/10-minutes-intense-exercise-may-treat-prevent-colorectal-cancer#Exciting-findings-but-more-research-needed
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GREATER HEIGHT, MORE CANCER CELLS?
“Strong evidence suggests that there is a general effect of height on cancer risk,” Leonard Nunney, professor of biology and an evolutionary biologist at the University of California.
He has previously carried out analysis showing that the 10% increase in cancer risk seen per additional 4 inches in height in humans is due to a higher number of cells in the bodies of taller people as they are larger.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320132?utm_source=ReadNext#summary
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ending on beauty:
He was at Naples writing letters home
And, between letters, reading paragraphs
On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned
For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there
While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,
Cast corners in the glass. He could describe
The terror of the sound because the sound
Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain
Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,
Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.
The volcano trembled in another ether,
As the body trembles at the end of life.
It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.
There were roses in the cool café. His book
Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.
Except for us, Vesuvius might consume
In solid fire the utmost earth and know
No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up
To die). This is a part of the sublime
From which we shrink. And yet, except for us,
The total past felt nothing when destroyed.
~ Wallace Stevens, Esthetique du Mal, first two stanzas
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