Time for another gallery in Detail: more panoramas of the Tasman Peninsula, taken in July 2017. Won’t be the last.
Worst-Case Scenario
As the risk of a no-deal Brexit becomes ever greater, the Joint Emergency Service Interoperability Project has been told to prepare for massive civil unrest.
Hey, Brexiters: Spam and other tinned goods are still widely available. It’s still possible to make homemade wholemeal bread and mock apricot tarts out of carrots. You can even dig a hole in your back yard, put a tin roof over it and go and sleep in it, and pretend the traffic noises are Home Guard armoured cars driving past. You can live out your own personal “Very Well, Alone” fantasy without dragging the rest of us into it.
Cropmarks
The beautiful, ugly, and possessive hearts of Star Wars.
Emmy Noether changed the face of physics.
Usborne are giving away PDFs of their Computer Guides from the 1980s.
Coral forests have been discovered around deep-sea volcanoes off Sicily.
Drought has revealed ancient sites in Welsh farmland and a massive unknown henge at Newgrange.
Global warming is destroying Arctic archaeological sites.
Icelandic whalers may have killed a blue whale.
Rogue Chinese factories have been using CFCs. My home state ends up under the ozone hole every summer.
China’s dystopian dream: A.I., shame and lots of cameras.
How blogs broke the Web. Whoops.
Two by Four
As feared, Trump is making impossible demands of NATO allies as a pretext for pulling out. They don’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny.
Half of the US’s 3.5% of GDP defense spending must relate to its other spheres of influence, such as the Pacific and the Middle East, including standing bases that can’t just be moved elsewhere at a moment’s notice. So if other NATO countries started spending 4% of GDP on their armed forces, Europe would quickly exceed the US in military capability in the Atlantic.
To pick up on one of the countries already exceeding the 2% target, UK GDP in 2016 was US$2.619 trillion, so raising its defence spending from 2.1% to 4% of GDP would cost almost an extra US$50 billion, or £37.5 billion at current exchange rates. That’s two Brexit buses’ worth a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.