Jasmine Crockett Says She’ll Impose ‘Ethics Guidelines’ on Supreme Court Justices If Elected Senator

The fingerprint of one of seafarers who built the oldest known wooden plank boat in Scandinavia has been discovered in the tar used to waterproof it. A new study of caulking and cordage fragments revealed the presence of the fingerprint and provided new evidence on the boat’s possible origins and the techniques used to make it. First discovered by peat diggers in the Hjortspring bog on the island of Als off Jutland, Denmark, in the 1880s, it was fully excavated in 1921 and 1922. About 40% of the boat was recovered, enough to allow a full reconstruction of its form. The boat was about 20 meters (66 feet) long, weighed 530 kilos (1,170 pounds), and could carry 24 people plus gear. It was built from lime wood planks sewn together with cordage. A large number of spearpoints and shields were deposited in the bog with it, enough to outfit about 80 warriors. Archaeologists believe raiders in up to four similar-sized boats attacked Als but were defeated. The islanders then deposited the boat and the raiders’ weapons in the bog as offerings. The remains of the boat were conserved, stabilized and put on display in the National Museum of Denmark since 1937. Because they were treated with alum at first and then later with PEG, the wood could no longer be radiocarbon dated, but a new excavation of the find site in 1987 found additional wood fragments that could be C-14 dated. The results date the boat to the 4th or 3rd century B.C. The recent study analyzed parts of the boat — fragments of caulking and cordage — that were collected in the original 1920s excavation, but had never been subjected to chemical preservation treatments. Modern technical analysis found the cordage is made from lime bast with long spin strands that would have kept the lashes pliable during construction of the boat and in later repairs. Taken together, the results of our analysis of the Hjortspring cordage illustrate the skill and sophistication of ancient Scandinavian boatbuilding techniques. It is clear that the cordage found in the boat was made by highly skilled craftspeople who were well versed in what must have been a long-standing boat building tradition. Due to the fact that the cordage fragments were untarred, it is possible they were kept on the boat for potential repairs. Such cordage could have been spliced into existing lines in the manner identified in our experimental trials. It is likely that both caulking material and cordage were kept on the ship in order to conduct repairs while at sea. The caulking materials contained the imprints of cordage, knots and plank seams as well as the partial fingerprint. They were subjected to gas chromatography – mass spectrometry (GC-MS) which revealed the caulking was likely composed of a coniferous tar, probably pine, and far. “The boat was waterproofed with pine pitch, which was surprising. This suggests the boat was built somewhere with abundant pine forests,” says Mikael Fauvelle. Several scholars had previously suggested that the boat and its crew came from the region around modern-day Hamburg in Germany. Instead, the researchers now believe they came from the Baltic Sea region. “If the boat came from the pine forest-rich coastal regions of the Baltic Sea, it means that the warriors who attacked the island of Als chose to launch a maritime raid over hundreds of kilometers of open sea,” says Mikael Fauvelle. The print was likely left during repairs to the boat by a crew member. Researchers hope to extract ancient DNA from the caulking pitch to find out more about the seafarers who manned this vessel 2,300 years ago.

President Donald Trump said Thursday he would like to see the Senate confirm his nominee for the post of Religious Freedom ambassador, former Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC). During an executive order signing…

By Blessing NwekeResidents across the Pacific Northwest of the United States and western Canada are bracing for days of potentially life-threatening flooding as an intense atmospheric river continues…

[View Article at Source]The fate of the Central American nation is tied up in an ugly election over which the U.S. president looms. The post Honduras in the Vote-Count Crucible appeared first on The American…

[View Article at Source]At last: clarity, hierarchy, and a foreign policy with a spine. The post The NSS Is the Strategy We Have Waited For appeared first on The American Conservative.

[View Article at Source]Economic and social headwinds are pushing talent out of the UK. The post The Great British Brain-Drain appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The NSS Is the Strategy We Have Waited For At last: clarity, hierarchy, and a foreign policy with a spine. (Photo by DANIEL HEUER / AFP via Getty Images) The newly published National Security Strategy is beautiful. What makes the document powerful isn’t the prose but the clarity. For the first time in decades, America has a strategy grounded not in theories, slogans, or airy talk of an “international community,” but in the concrete interests of a real nation: our own. In Newsweek last year, I argued that America had to shake off the primacist hangover of the post–Cold War with what I called foreign policy stoicism: humility, hierarchy, and a sober respect for the nation-state, oriented toward changing what can most easily be changed and prioritizing the most concrete threats. The think-tank world—even the conservative one—treats these arguments as eccentric, premature, or impolite. But the new NSS doesn’t merely acknowledge this logic; it snaps into place like a long-delayed correction. For those of us who have been making this case from the margins, the document feels revolutionary not because it echoes us, but because it drags the center of gravity toward reality.  It is not an op-ed; it’s a governing blueprint.  Many commentators, desperate to shoehorn the document into familiar categories, have rushed to call it “realist” or “restrained.” But this entirely misses the point. America First, as presented here, is not realism in the graduate-seminar sense. It is realism in the statesman’s sense: clarity about ends, honesty about means, and an unapologetic commitment to the fortunes of the republic.  The NSS captures this in one of its most important lines: America First is “pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist’, realistic without being ‘realist’, principled without being ‘idealistic’, muscular without being ‘hawkish’, and restrained without being ‘dovish’.” That is not merely a doctrinal statement; it is a moral one. The intellectual schools of foreign policy have their uses, but the real task of strategy is simpler and older: determine what is necessary for the survival and flourishing of the nation and then do that, without distraction, apology, or delusion. This also explains why so many critics, especially in Europe, have reacted to the strategy with alarm and theatrical indignation. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk lamented, “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem.” A chorus of think-tankers joined him. But these reactions say more about European expectations than about the strategy itself. Far from dismissing Europe, the NSS places Europe exactly where it belongs: not above America’s core interests, not beneath them, but within a hierarchy of priorities. The truth is that Europe’s critique is built on selectively projected fantasies. For years, and currently, Europe has condemned America’s pursuit of its own interests, especially in the Western Hemisphere, while simultaneously expecting the United States to underwrite its defense, restrain its adversaries, and absorb the political and financial costs of its own hesitations. Yet the same Europe that demands unwavering American commitment has repeatedly hedged with China, ignored the obvious vulnerabilities of its energy policy, and treated its alliance with the U.S. as a kind of moral entitlement rather than a strategic relationship.  The NSS simply attempts to restore symmetry. It acknowledges Europe’s historic and cultural importance and the enduring value of the alliance, while making the obvious point that sovereign nations have sovereign responsibilities. States are not schoolchildren. They respond to incentives. They pursue interests. They can and should be pushed, not coddled. The United States expects Europe to contribute not because we care less about Europe, but because we believe Europe can do more.  The most striking aspect of the NSS is that it shatters silence about the Western Hemisphere in particular. For decades, major think tanks have ignored the region. They maintain chairs for Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; host conferences on Indo-Pacific architecture and European burden-sharing; release white papers on the Gulf, NATO, Taiwan. Yet the hemisphere, the region that most directly shapes the survival of the American republic, was largely treated as an afterthought. The very few people working on hemispheric issues can assure you: this is the most pathbreaking development in U.S. foreign policy in years. The NSS finally acknowledges what has long been obvious: Asia may be the global priority, but the hemisphere is the civilizational one. The NSS finally says out loud what many of us have argued quietly: proximity shapes power. If the United States wants to compete with China—economically, technologically, militarily—it must simultaneously secure the space in which its own republic exists. A great power does not project strength globally while hemorrhaging authority regionally. China seems to get this instinctively. It does not confront nuclear competitors while tolerating cartel rule on its own doorstep. It does not speak of deterrence while permitting mass migration that strains the civic and economic foundations of the nation itself. A republic that cannot control its borders cannot control its destiny. A country that allows its hemisphere to be infiltrated by hostile powers cannot act with clarity abroad.  Every statesman from John Quincy Adams and Alexander Hamilton onward understood that the Western Hemisphere is not a sentimental concern; it is a strategic prerequisite for national survival. What the NSS offers is not simply nostalgia for the Monroe Doctrine, nor a Cold War revival, nor a concession to diaspora pressure groups. It offers something far simpler: a recognition that the United States must secure its neighborhood if it intends to remain a sovereign power. Just as the Founders believed, just as the early republic believed, just as every serious strategist has believed, the hemisphere matters most because geography is not an academic abstraction. This, too, is part of America First’s philosophical simplicity. It begins with what is directly in front of us, not with what flatters our moral vanity. Some critics dismiss this as overly transactional or insufficiently moral. But the NSS demonstrates the opposite. It is moral precisely because it is responsible. It understands that before the United States can lead a coalition in Asia, or shape outcomes in Europe, or broker peace in the Middle East, it must remain a functioning republic. A country that is not confident in its sovereignty, not secure in its borders, not rooted in its own civilizational inheritance, is not a country capable of bearing the burdens of a great power. America First is not isolationist. It is not primacist. It is republican in the deepest sense. It is a strategic doctrine grounded in the belief that the American people deserve a government that protects them before it protects the world. The genius of the NSS is that it refuses to anthropomorphize states or sentimentalize alliances. It does not treat allies as fragile ornaments or adversaries as cartoon villains. It does not pretend that the United States can forever subsidize those who refuse to subsidize themselves. It rejects the unseriousness of the last 30 years: the fantasy that America could dominate the world at no cost, with no prioritization, and without consequence at home.  The NSS demands more of Europe because Europe has the wealth, the population, and the institutions to do more—and because the alliance must be reciprocal if it is to endure. It reframes Asia not as an arena for ideological crusade but as the central theater of economic and technological competition. It approaches the Middle East not as a moral mission but as a domain of interests. And it treats Africa not as a canvas for liberal guilt but as a landscape of opportunities and risks. Not all disruptions are destructive. Any honest historian knows that the most destabilizing act can be simply to face reality after decades of refusing to see it. The NSS forces that reckoning. It isn’t a manifesto or a theory. It’s a strategy built not for the world we wished for, but for the world we actually inhabit. In the end, its power lies in restoring American statecraft to its proper foundation: a sovereign people deserves a sovereign strategy. For the first time in a long time, we finally have one. The post The NSS Is the Strategy We Have Waited For appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Honduras in the Vote-Count Crucible The fate of the Central American nation is tied up in an ugly election over which the U.S. president looms. This Sunday, with Honduras one week into its vote-count deadlock, Juan Orlando Hernández—aka J.O.H.—revived his suspended socials by posting two jovial Facetime screenshots. Checking in with his wife and two daughters from New York in 2022, the disgraced former president of Honduras looks serene in the first screenshot. In the second, he beams through a disheveled beard and glasses upon his release from prison for drug trafficking, this past Sunday. He is visibly still savoring President Donald Trump’s pardon-via-X the week before. His whereabouts still unknown, J.O.H. was soon the subject of a new arrest warrant back home from a lame-duck attorney general, issued on domestic corruption charges. The election has altered his fate, but in what direction is still unclear—as is the future of Honduras itself. At Vicente Cáceres elementary in Tegucigalpa’s teeming Colonia Kennedy, Humvee-loads of military police peer through balaclavas as gaggles of monitors and the press fill the gym where the National Electoral Commission (CNE), is late for its opener. It’s barely daybreak, and Honduras is on a razor’s edge. Routine get-out-the-vote calls are missing their becalming effect. The eve blew the campaign’s death toll past 20. Candidates have nobody to report threats to. In a state of 10 million with a landmass the size of Virginia, the mighty observer-to-voter ratio will feel puny as the results are inevitably contested. By 7 a.m., this nerve center of polling stations stiffens up a notch.  Cossette López-Osorio just alleged that security risks required her to sit out the CNE, where she holds the opposition National Party’s seat in a party-appointed triad. Amidst trickery and intimidation within CNE itself, Cosette has emerged a rising star from the campaign. She may have wanted to avoid conveying approval of a crooked election process. Election outcomes in Honduras haven’t been trusted in a long time, not since “Mel” Zelaya called a premature win in 2005, with polls barely closed. No race has escaped challenge since the hard-left strongman took “21st century socialism” to a nation that was spared its preceding variant. Zelaya was ousted by the military in 2009 for running roughshod over Congress and the Supreme Court over constitutional term limits. He cried that he was the victim of a “coup,” duping the world into not seeing him as the perpetrator of one. Zelaya came unofficially back to power in 2017 via his wife, the outgoing Xiomara Castro, who on day one greenlit the extradition of her predecessor—the National Party’s aforementioned Juan Orlando Hernández—on contested drug charges in the Southern District of New York. Trust has been in freefall ever since. Some rigging attempt is, as of election day, a foregone conclusion, at a scale that could entrench the dismally unpopular power couple through LIBRE’s candidate, Rixi Moncada, a stodgy teacher-turned-finance minister on the back foot, not least for sparing some Castro-praise for Cuba’s late despot. Spirited hearings were held at the U.S. House and the Organization of American States. Both sent vast observer teams, though they were no match for the regional left’s specialty of dealing out vests and credentials to an army of activists routinely called on to thumbs-up sham races—including, most recently, Venezuela’s. The campaign’s harasser-in-chief was LIBRE’s man at the CNE, Marlon Ochoa, an Oxford MPhil who fuses dapper looks with selfie-documented pyromancy against Tegucigalpa’s U.S. embassy. Cossette’s daughter has been doxed, and deep fake voice-notes have been circulated in an attempt to tarnish his rivals. Ochoa has deadlocked the CNE, torpedoing the procurement of briefcase deliveries to polling stations, which this time carried a mistrusted biometric scanner. Vital early results would be transmitted through a tool, TREP, manned by a Colombian provider that LIBRE was lone to back, and later lone to disown—the antics of an endangered incumbent desperate to deflect allegations of a fraud plot by chalking it on its rivals. LIBRE-trained and instructed “shock groups,” another Venezuelan import, were pent-up at the leash. Should havoc (relajo) be wreaked at polling stations—ballots stolen, burnt, or otherwise endangered—Army Chief of Staff Gen. Roosevelt Hernández, another Zelaya-Castro loyalist, had ordered his men to stand down and let it rip. These “colectivos” already stormed CNE plenaries through the year’s two campaign seasons (the race was preceded by primaries). The Congress itself remains hijacked by LIBRE’s minority—47 vs. 81—which sent the chamber into recess while setting up a special commission under its thumb and keeping the keys to the building for itself. Meanwhile, crime soars beyond politics. In part a result of gang movements that have taken place since El Salvador’s law-and-order reset, the crime wave has tanked LIBRE’s popularity (which is also saddled with the sinking economy). Homicides are not down by enough to compensate for ubiquitous extortion, and Hondurans refusing to pay might end up chopped into small bits, stuffed into nylon bags, and left on a street curb. The executors are often young acolytes recruited at schools and universities. In a testament to the miseries of “21st century socialism,” a loo break at Vicente Cáceres exposes one to loyalty oaths sworn to various “maras,” the regional term for gangs, sharing wall space with deceptive state paeans to national hero Francisco Morazán. “Refundar educando,” a new school curriculum, is the educational leg of LIBRE’s plan to “re-found” Honduras. Along with such campaign slogans as “democratizing the economy,” Hondurans have reason to feel a larger 20-year socialist project is on the ballot, and they’re taking the race as a plebiscite. The result is, as of this writing, tied up in a nail-biter, but one thing is clear: Honduras voted against a re-founding into socialism. Both the conservative National Party’s candidate, Nasry—a.k.a. “Tito”—Asfura, and Salvador Nasralla of the centrist-leaning though non-descript Liberal Party, are edging to claim victory as their respective fiefdoms alternate to feed the CNE’s national tally, and as suspicious blackouts give way to hand-wringing and outcry. Rixi, who’d even led some polls, lingers a distant third below the 20% mark, many of her candidates alienated or otherwise distanced. Zelaya has cried out gringo interference—and LIBRE has kicked into full-on election denialism this week—but even he is working to cut his clan’s losses by keeping Rixi at arm’s length. Asfura holds a narrow lead in this “technical tie,” but has pledged not to call an early win. The National Party hopes its rural fiefdoms, latecomers to the tally, will flip the race just as they’ve reliably outdone Nasralla’s urban leads thus far. The race is down to Honduras’ two legacy players, but the National Party’s superior party machine is making a difference past election-day. All parties play a role in the tallying of votes, yet National Party’s army of volunteers can collect ballots (“actas”) at a scale that allows it to crosscheck CNE tallies, amounting to a TREP of its own. Tegucigalpa, lost after Asfura’s mayorship, was resoundingly retaken. This doesn’t mean Nasralla’s outsider aura, however illusory—he has run for president four times to Asfura’s two—won’t help his chances. Many a European chancellery wishes a third way out of National Party-LIBRE, even as the claim to be elbowed out by a duopoly is mimicked by all three parties, and Nasralla’s role as Xiomara’s kingmaker—not least enabling her 2017 “win” and becoming her VP—is too easily forgotten. The Liberal Party’s Anna Paola Hall, who holds the CNE’s rotating Presidency, has disowned Nasralla’s fraud claims about an engineered blackout alleged to put Asfura on the lead, but more outlandish allegations are making it into the global headlines with less scrutiny. Asfura’s rise holds lessons, still, whatever the outcome. He received a bombshell endorsement from Trump on Friday, followed by a trickier post on X: a pledge to pardon J.O.H., who was barely one year of the way to serving a 45-year jail term in Hazleton, West Virginia. It came with Trump’s cries of DOJ lawfare, an assessment shared even by some of J.O.H.’s enemies. Extradited by his rivals from a statelet where foreign drug empires inevitably hold sway, J.O.H. was harmed by an out-of-context quote, politically-tainted testimony, and the foul record of his own brother who is himself serving a life sentence. One version has it that J.O.H. merely failed to cooperate with a DEA mission out of Colombia, resulting in two long-time moles shot dead—and real narcos on the run—as they landed in Honduras. Mel Zelaya, meanwhile, is in cahoots with Venezuelan drug traffickers, and the construction of secret landing sites for planes smuggling cocaine is suspected to have resumed under Xiomara. His brother Carlos was caught in a “narco-video” being happily bribed as he urged: “half for the comandante.” Perhaps more so than Mel, J.O.H now has a shot at a free man’s life: he should be spared LIBRE’s harsher retribution the moment his new arrest warrant goes the way of Johel Zelaya, the outgoing attorney general who issued it. Nasralla, however—suspected of negotiating with Mel to keep the National Party from returning to power—has pledged a Honduran trial for J.O.H., should he win the presidency. Though not its first judicialized race, this was Honduras’ most transnational one yet. Children in cages, families apart, and law-abiding migrants in detention centers or deportation planes remain Trump-era torments for Hondurans, both at home and in America. Yet, to the confusion of the press, Trump’s endorsement wasn’t a liability in this corner of Central America. Asfura spoke in the language of hard bilateral interest, eschewing high-flown humanitarian pieties. He pledged the same low U.S. tariffs that Guatemala and El Salvador face, along with an extension of Temporary Protected Status for Honduran nationals to live and work in America. The root causes of migration, in turn, would be tackled to Honduras’ benefit: investment in maquila factories, call centers, primary exports, and banking. With remittances contributing 30 percent of GDP, their handling in cash feeds the infamous “trap,” whereby successive Honduran governments had lost the incentive to keep people home. It was a markedly geopolitical race, too. Xiomara had ghosted Taiwan for no tangible benefit in Chinese investment. Hondurans went to the polls amidst gathering clouds over Venezuela, with even some F-35s rumored to be lined-up in Soto Cano, a major U.S. military installation in Honduras and Central America’s only U.S. base. Rixi’s loss weakens Maduro’s ailing regime no less than the latter’s downfall would have strengthened Tito, who is boosted by the region’s rightward tide. Several stresses came to a head in this crucible of a race. The juncture in which Zelaya’s clan saw its power slip holds lessons for the region’s left-wing Bolivarian attempts to synthesize the formalities of popular rule with fundamentally undemocratic impulses. These hybrid regimes can’t remain hybrid indefinitely. Honduras was on a unidirectional ratchet, but didn’t break out of the chrysalis on time to make socialism prevail over democracy. Arbitrariness was widespread—violence, cronyism, fraud, persecution—but the trappings of electoral competition were still allowed their sphere. Xiomara, to be sure, had staked a middle-ground to court international investment, and her pretense of cooperating with global agendas earned Honduras millions in aid and sustained revisionist claims about 2009. Yet even combined with egalitarian promises and help from the anti-U.S. axis, they clearly weren’t enough. Had Rixi won fraudulently—the only kind of win within her reach—the uproar would have called for quelling by the military and colectivos, in turn sowing authoritarian remorse at granting elections in the first place. The irrationality of not dispensing with democratic niceties would have been, ex post, too evident. Even if such chances to defeat would-be tyrants at the ballot box, just on time, won’t always be repeated elsewhere, this one is emboldening. Yet, as their Cuban patrons have endlessly instructed, the mirror lesson from Zelaya’s lost bet—to kick into higher gear before the window of opportunity closes—is being drawn by authoritarians up and down the region. Asfura himself also has lessons for perceptive observers. A grandfatherly figure donning baggy denims and landscaper boots, he has tended Honduras as a garden, harping on about honesty and work and opportunity in a gravelly, earnest voice. His tech clumsiness was even endearing, not alienating, to youths: he turned “la racha” from a digital term-of-art into a viral sensation having barely understood its meaning (a TikTok streak in which he was asked to appear). Embodying the strenuous ethos of a developing country bent on overcoming, he stressed investment and infrastructure and jobs as articles of faith, somewhat formulaic but never scripted. He has eschewed jabs at opponents, to the point where the boisterous politics of his main endorser, and the electoral mud fight waged by his opponents, reveal some degree of naivety—a deficit of cunning—to be the flipside of his strengths. Asfura’s likely win confirms that all leadership is local. In a country of dirt roads and never-ending construction sites, Tegucigalpa’s bridges and paved surfaces crystallize the former mayor’s ethos of service. He remains, at some level, an archetype of the Honduran everyman: self-made, not overly literate, of Palestinian descent but removed from the largely Arab “10 families” of oligarchs that LIBRE has waged economic war on (and that Nasralla seems desperate to join). As a construction tycoon, Asfura knuckled down after Hurricane Mitch, in 1998, from which his nickname—“Papi a la orden,” uttered when delivering aid or equipment in stricken areas—sprang. The phrase connotes alert fathership and has struck a chord with vulnerable Hondurans. Amidst the heady recount, Trump has followed up with a third message urging transparency and respect for Papi’s victory. Had his sympathy had a basis in familiarity, this would be it: Memes of the two donning safety helmets have gone viral, while local journalists have stressed that Papi “is a tractor man, not an office man,” and that like Trump, he “smells of concrete.” In its lighter, narcissistic form, politics is the art in which Nasralla may have a better claim to the Trumpian filiation. A former beauty pageant anchor and sports pundit, bluster runs as a thread through his career. He has claimed Trump’s first X post was an unapproved comms job, that the White House actually likes him more, that his phone has blown up with advance congratulations, and that multi-billion USD investments are waiting to pour into Honduras at the snap of his presidential fingers. Asfura is an unlikelier populist, if one at all; measured, ever cautious not to appear a snake oil salesman, with only his future efforts to tout. He has urged respect for “institutionality,” reckoned with America’s power over the region, and never spoken of character detached from deeds. Our populist era hasn’t supplanted the stark realities of life and leadership, just cast a different light over them. The post Honduras in the Vote-Count Crucible appeared first on The American Conservative.