Peace in our time? Why the Middle East deal is already doomed

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise”
~ Voltaire 1694-1778

Péter Magyar dared to criticise Orbán and this is an extract from the victory speech: "We want to make a country where no one is persecuted because they think differently or because someone loves in a different way to others."

Hungary election: Orbán concedes to Magyar's Tisza after projections show opposition winning two-thirds majority

 

FBI: Americans lost a record $21 billion to cybercrime last year

Bleeping Computer: “U.S. victims lost nearly $21 billion to cyber-enabled crimes last year, driven primarily by investment scams, business email compromise, tech support fraud, and data breaches, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says. 

The figure continues the year-over-year record trend as it is up 26% compared to 2024, when Americans lost $16.6 billion to cybercrime. A similar uptick was recorded in the number of complaints the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received, which surpassed 1 million last year, up from 859,000 the year before…”

Peace in our time? Why the Middle East deal is already doomed

Markets are celebrating a Middle East peace deal. They shouldn’t be. This is not peace; it is a US strategic retreat, repackaged as diplomacy. And

Read the full article…

Aussie driver outraged after split-second decision lands her a $509 fine: 'No leniency' - $562 in NSW

How the media should cover this deranged president

American Crisis – “The moment I saw Trump’s crazy and dangerous Truth Social post on the morning of Easter Sunday, I could imagine the freakout in newsrooms across the country. The essence of it would be something like this: “How much of this do we publish? How do we report this without breaking with every one of our standards and traditions?”…Based on my survey of regional-newspaper front pages on Monday morning, very few came anywhere near rising to the occasion. Many chose not to feature the story at all on their A1, or to give it much emphasis. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times did relatively well, leading their front pages with it. 

Both used Trump’s full language high up in their front-page story. There’s been a lot of talk — including here — about the media’s disastrous tendency to “sane-wash” Trump. It comes down to this: The press, because of its own conventions and time-honored practices, normalizes him, and thus fails to get across the extreme nature of this president’s behavior. 

Ten years of sane-washing have had their effect. He remains in power, reelected, undeterred. 

On seeing Trump’s post, I thought immediately of Mark Jacob’s October piece about how the media is missing the biggest story there is — Trump’s apparent mental illness. Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, wrote: “It keeps getting worse, and the mainstream media keep making the same mistakes in their coverage of the King of Crazytown.” 

After Trump claimed he “predicted” 9/11, Jacob wrote on Bluesky that “the media need to be writing about his mental unfitness every day until we get rid of him and save our country.” But of course, that didn’t happen then, and it didn’t happen this time. And now, with this horrible Easter morning development, we’ve entered new territory. But let’s get real. If traditional techniques and language (“emphatic threats”) aren’t getting it done, what actually would work? I’ll make three suggestions, and would be happy to hear yours…”

Another Giant Leap Reminds Us How Small We Are

Vrbov style school kitchen

The care and precision behind Korean school lunches, widely praised for their quality, balance, and nutrition

Another Giant Leap Reminds Us How Small We Are 

A mission that took four astronauts farther than any human has ever traveled in the history of mankind has made people feel a little trippy. 

By Ruth Graham April 11, 2026

 In the beginning, Artemis II was about science. The mission, which ended on Friday with a clean splash into the Pacific Ocean, carried four astronauts who gathered data, took photographs and tested life support systems as they orbited the moon. But for the astronauts themselves, and millions of people who checked in on them from hundreds of thousands of miles away, the mission also elicited meditations on more profound matters.

 “You just look up and feel wonder, grandeur and smallness at the same time,” said Jim Davis, a pastor in Orlando, Fla. He was having dinner at a restaurant with a small group from his church when the mission launched on April 1. The group stepped out into the parking lot to admire the rocket blasting upward into the early evening sky.

For 10 days, people admired the vastness of the universe. The frailty and interdependence of the human species. The sheer awesomeness of the moon.

“I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, reported to mission control this week. “It lasted just a second or two, and I actually couldn’t even make it happen again, but something just threw me in suddenly to the lunar landscape and it became real.” 

For many people back home on Earth, the mission was a brief reminder of the sheer scale of outer space, and a prompt to contemplate both our power and our powerlessness. It turned all of us into children at camp, lying supine and looking up at the stars, thinking very big thoughts.

Image

The Artemis II mission was a chance to pause and participate in the ancient human pastime of contemplating the skies.Credit...Cassandra Klos for The New York Times

It’s a paradox that scientists, philosophers and poets have tried to capture for centuries.

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” a writer of the Book of Psalms asked of God.

“When I search for the numerous turning spirals of the stars, I no longer have my feet on the Earth, but am beside Zeus himself,” reads a text attributed to the second-century astronomer Ptolemy.

Andrew Davison, a theologian at the University of Oxford who has written about the implications of extraterrestrial life, said in an interview that one of the “great provocations” of the cosmos is that, in it, “human beings seem unbelievably small, but also it bears witness to our greatness.”

He added, “We are a kind of being that can have that whole universe inside us, in our thoughts.”

For many astronauts, what begins as a scientific endeavor becomes something spiritual. Frank White, a space philosopher, coined the term “the overview effect” in 1987 to describe the shift in perspective that some astronauts said came from viewing Earth as merely one small sphere in an endless expanse.

Image

Christina Koch, one of the mission specialists on Artemis II, with a view of Earth. Ron Garan, a former astronaut, said this week that everyone he has talked to who has been to space “has been transformed in some way.”Credit...NASA, via Reuters

Ron Garan watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 as a small boy with his family, and was struck by the sense that “we had just become a different species.” For millenniums of human history, all life on Earth was constrained there. Then suddenly the rules changed, the boundaries expanded.

Mr. Garan grew up to become an astronaut who spent six months on the International Space Station in 2011. In space, he was overwhelmed by the realization that everyone on Earth is also in space already, together.

Now back on solid ground and working as a consultant and writer, he attributes the emotional impact of space travel in part to the phenomenon of weightlessness. If a person is sitting on a beach looking at the sunset, or is perched on the rim of the Grand Canyon, gravity attaches them to the scene they are admiring, Mr. Garan said.

“But when I was in space, for the first time in my life, I was outside the frame of the masterpiece looking in,” he said. “That changes everything.”

Mr. Garan compared space travel to a psychedelic experience (though he declined to say whether he knew this first hand). Astronauts over the years have described crying, worshiping God and experiencing utterly new feelings of almost disembodied awe while in space.

When the Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell was on his way back from the moon in 1971, he was overwhelmed by the thought that “the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars,” he later told an interviewer. “It was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy.”

Back on Earth, he researched various spiritual traditions to try to understand the experience and eventually found a term in Sanskrit that captured it: savikalpa samadhi, a state of deep meditation.

The Artemis II astronauts seemed at times to be undergoing similarly mind-expanding realignments of reality.

“You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth,” pilot Victor Glover mused in an interview with CBS News on Easter Sunday. “But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.”

Skeptics question whether the overview effect is anything more than a passing emotion.

Space travel remains a highly unusual human experience. Private space travel companies, like Blue Origin until recently, have taken dozens of tourists on brief flights above the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space about 62 miles above Earth. Traveling farther, to Earth orbit and beyond, is still out of reach for all but government-sponsored astronauts and the wealthiest space tourists.

The growing list of people who have technically gone to space includes billionaires like Jeff Bezos, pop stars like Katy Perry and space-coded celebrities like William Shatner, who concluded that the “vicious coldness” of space contrasted with Earth’s warmth and filled him with “overwhelming sadness.”

But celestial epiphanies have always been accessible to those who can’t physically travel outside Earth’s atmosphere.

“Since the dawn of our species, every human society has looked up at the stars,” said Jo Marchant, the author of “The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars.”

Stargazing has influenced religion, philosophy, art, science and politics. Isaac Newton’s discovery that laws of motion and gravity affect everything equally influenced democratic beliefs that kings to commoners should be subject to the same rules, Ms. Marchant said.

With the encroachments of light pollution and screen-based distractions, human beings in the 21st century arguably spend less of their time contemplating the night sky than ever before.

Troy D. Allan was an Army chaplain in Afghanistan when he began intentionally spending time outside at night. He knew little about astronomy or constellations, but found that simply staring up into the sky helped him find peace in a period of his life otherwise marked by turmoil.

Mr. Allan now heads a program at Utah State University that facilitates camping trips for teenagers and others to contemplate the night sky, and their place underneath it. His campers set up their tents, then lie back and watch the stars come out. At first, time moves slowly for young people accustomed to clicking through life at the pace of TikTok. But gradually, they warm to the experience.

“What happens to humans when we encounter vastness, silence, beauty and mystery?” Mr. Allan said. “It’s the recalibrating of our lives.”

After the stars come out, Mr. Allan’s group goes on a hike, with the Milky Way stretched like a banner above them. Then they stop again for a long time and look up.

Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.

The Puppet Masters and Hidden Hands: 10-Year-Old Nikon D5 DSLR Really Is the Best Camera for Artemis II.

On our two existential and nautical marks

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” ~ Mark Twain aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens quoting Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

A HIPPIE’S DREAM:  Scientists Gene Hacked a Plant So It Grows Five Types of Psychoactive Drugs at Once

  Scientists Engineer “Tumor-Eating” Bacteria That Devour Cancer From Within

Seizure of 2,000 ants at Nairobi airport highlights the hidden scale of insect trafficking The Conversation

 BACK TO THE FUTURE: The 10-Year-Old Nikon D5 DSLR Really Is the Best Camera for Artemis II.

While much of the discussion surrounding the Artemis II crew’s beautiful photos from their Orion spacecraft has focused on the images themselves, and they are fantastic shots, some of the discussion has surrounded the cameras used to capture the photos. Photographers love chatting gear, after all. While the Nikon D5 DSLR may seem like a puzzling choice as the primary camera on a prestigious space mission in 2026, it’s the best tool for the job.

Although the Artemis II crew successfully campaigned to get Nikon’s current flagship camera, the mirrorless Z9, aboard at the last minute, the crew is using the rigorously tested Nikon D5 DSLR from 2016 as the main camera. Not the Nikon D6, Nikon’s last professional DSLR that was discontinued in 2025, but the 10-year-old D5.

It’s easy to wonder why the Artemis II astronauts, who are part of an Artemis program costing many billions of dollars to operate, are using an old DSLR that, frankly, was not particularly beloved at the time of its release.

It’s all part of a theme with this mission. Unless I’m having a Mandela Effect moment, I seem to recall Ron Howard on the director’s commentary on the DVD of Apollo 13 talking about the irony of making a history movie about a Saturn V-powered moonshotecause of how dated the ’60s-era NASA technology had become by 1995. As Glenn wrote about Artemis a few weeks ago in the New York Post, that retro theme continues on this flight as well:

The Apollo program’s cutting-edge technology, in both the rocket boosters and the spacecraft themselves, advanced the state of the art in astronautics and established the United States as the leader in space exploration, bar none.

Artemis aims to be all these things, but mostly it’s recapturing Apollo’s “very risky” side.

Ironically, that’s not because it uses cutting-edge technology, but because it uses 50-year-oldtechnology.

NASA wasn’t allowed to design the Artemis craft from scratch;  Congress ordered it to use off-the-shelf technology developed for the space shuttle, including the shuttle’s main engines and fuel tanks.

Critics have dubbed the Artemis rocket — the SLS, or Space Launch System — the “Senate Launch System,” since it deliberately preserved existing jobs for existing contractors in important states.

As a jobs program, it’s been a success.

As a moon rocket, much less so.

The Artemis II mission is late because it’s had a series of serious technical problems, including life support system woes and a persistent hydrogen leak that echoed similar difficulties with the uncrewed Artemis I launch in 2022.

You’d think this would have been fixed in the intervening three years, but no.

The astronauts’ issues with Microsoft Outlook, and their numerous unplanned homages to Stanley Kubrick’s “Zero Gravity Toilet” moment in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, all continue to provide a strangely dated technological feel to this mission.