June 25 2024
Assange free; HIV vax; Gen Z debt; US mobilization; Chinese moon rocks; Panthers
1 Assange gets freedom in plea deal
2 New drug provides total protection from HIV
3 Get Z has higher credit card debt than prior generations
4 Inside US defense industry mobilization
5 China returns sample from dark side of moon
FL Panthers win Stanley Cup
6/25/1876 Custer’s Last Stand
see ad astra on x @greg_loving
1 Assange gets freedom in plea deal
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, agreed to plead guilty on Monday to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material in exchange for his release from a British prison, ending his long and bitter standoff with the United States. Mr. Assange, 52, was granted his request to appear before a federal judge at one of the more remote outposts of the federal judiciary, the courthouse in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, according to a brief court filing made public late Monday. He is expected to be sentenced to about five years, the equivalent of the time he has already served in Britain, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the terms of the agreement. It was a fitting final twist in the case against Mr. Assange, who doggedly opposed extradition to the U.S. mainland. The islands are a United States commonwealth in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — and much closer to Mr. Assange’s native Australia, where he is a citizen, than courts in the continental United States or Hawaii. Shortly after the deal was disclosed, WikiLeaks said that Mr. Assange had left London. Mr. Assange is scheduled to appear in Saipan at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday and is expected to fly back to Australia “at the conclusion of the proceedings,” Matthew J. McKenzie, an official in the Justice Department’s counterterrorism division, wrote in a letter to the judge in the case.
Article Source: NYT
2 New drug provides total protection from HIV
Researchers and activists in the trenches of the long fight against H.I.V. got a rare piece of exciting news this week: Results from a large clinical trial in Africa showed that a twice-yearly injection of a new antiviral drug gave young women total protection from the virus. “I got cold shivers,” said Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, an investigator in the trial of the drug, lenacapavir, describing the startling sight of a line of zeros in the data column for new infections. “After all our years of sadness, particularly over vaccines, this truly is surreal.” Yvette Raphael, the leader of a group called Advocacy for Prevention of H.I.V. and AIDS in South Africa, said it was “the best news ever.” The randomized controlled trial, called Purpose 1, was conducted in Uganda and South Africa. It tested whether the every-six-months injection of lenacapavir, made by Gilead Sciences, would provide better protection against H.I.V. infection than two other drugs in wide use in high-income countries, both daily pills.
Article Source: NYT
3 Get Z has higher credit card debt than prior generations
Young Americans are starting out with more credit-card debt than generations before them. That financial burden can have long-lasting effects. The rising debt load largely reflects a surge in prices for food and shelter at the start of their careers, coupled with a larger percentage of Gen Z who graduated with student loans. The average credit-card balance for 22- to 24-year-olds was $2,834 in the last quarter of 2023, compared with an average inflation-adjusted balance of $2,248 in the same period in 2013, according to new data from credit-reporting agency TransUnion. Younger people with higher debt are more delinquent on credit-card payments and need to rely on family for help if they lose their job, say economists and financial advisers. They also often delay life milestones, including homeownership and marriage, say the economists.
Article Source: WSJ
4 Inside US defense industry mobilization
The conflict in Ukraine has left the U.S. military and allies wanting for shells and other firepower, triggering a push to quickly boost production. Long reliant on World War II-era plants, the Pentagon is spending $6 billion to revamp them with modern equipment and expand output at new facilities that can churn out a variety of munitions, from shells to mortars. Armed with a slice of a $1 billion contract, defense contractor General Dynamics is leaning on complex machines to make ammunition faster and more efficiently. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. each month produced around 14,000 of the commonly used 155mm shells, which are about 2 feet long and weigh around 100 pounds. Ukraine has been firing thousands of shells a day from U.S.-made M777 howitzers, weapons designed to hit targets as far as 20 miles away. The Pentagon is seeking to boost U.S. output of 155mm shells from around 30,000 a month currently to 100,000 by the end of 2025. The Texas plant would take the nation more than halfway to that target, with the first of three production lines set to start this fall. The shell factory is among U.S. efforts to bring home the production of materials deemed critical to national security, such as explosives, rare-earth minerals and semiconductors. Lockheed Martin is doubling output of its Javelin and Himars rockets at facilities in Camden, Ark. A subsidiary of L3Harris Technologies is expanding a nearby solid rocket motor plant. The push to quickly expand domestic manufacturing will rely heavily on foreign countries. Machine tools and other critical gear needed to run domestic factories come from plants in countries such as Japan, Germany and Turkey. Defense supply chains that took decades to develop outside the U.S. could take as long to replicate domestically, industry executives said.
Article Source: WSJ
5 China returns sample from dark side of moon
There is a new space race, this time between the U.S. and China. On Tuesday, China took an important step forward. Chinese spacecraft touched down on grasslands in China’s Inner Mongolia region, carrying the first-ever rock samples from the far side of the moon. A scientific breakthrough in itself, the success also advanced China’s plan to put astronauts on the moon by 2030 and build a lunar base by 2035. Such momentum is worrying American space officials and lawmakers, who have their own ambitions to build moon bases.
Article Source: WSJ
FL Panthers win Stanley Cup
With a 2-1 win in an epic Game 7 matchup on Monday night, the Florida Panthers staved off a historic collapse and claimed the Stanley Cup that had once seemed theirs for the taking. It is the first NHL title in Florida franchise history.
Article Source: WSJ
6/25/1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn
On June 25, 1876, Native American forces led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeat the U.S. Army troops of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, Lakota Sioux leaders, strongly resisted the mid-19th-century efforts of the U.S. government to confine their people to reservations. In 1875, after gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills, the U.S. Army ignored previous treaty agreementsand invaded the region. This betrayal led many Sioux and Cheyenne tribesmen to leave their reservations and join Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in Montana. By the late spring of 1876, more than 10,000 Native Americans had gathered in a camp along the Little Bighorn River–which they called the Greasy Grass—in defiance of a U.S. War Department order to return to their reservations or risk being attacked. In mid-June, three columns of U.S. soldiers lined up against the camp and prepared to march. A force of 1,200 Native Americans turned back the first column on June 17. Five days later, General Alfred Terry ordered Custer’s 7th Cavalry to scout ahead for enemy troops. On the morning of June 25, Custer drew near the camp and decided to press on ahead rather than wait for reinforcements. At mid-day, Custer’s 600 men entered the Little Bighorn Valley. Among the Native Americans, word quickly spread of the impending attack. The older Sitting Bull rallied the warriors and saw to the safety of the women and children, while Crazy Horse set off with a large force to meet the attackers head on. Despite Custer’s desperate attempts to regroup his men, they were quickly overwhelmed. Custer and some 200 men in his battalion were attacked by as many as 3,000 Native Americans; within an hour, Custer and every last one of his soldiers was dead. The Battle of the Little Bighorn—also called Custer’s Last Stand—marked the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. The gruesome fate of Custer and his men outraged many white Americans and confirmed their image of the Native Americans as "wild." Meanwhile, the U.S. government increased its efforts to subdue the tribes. Within five years, almost all of the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne would be confined to reservations
Sources
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/us/politics/julian-assange-plea-deal.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/health/lenacapavir-hiv-prevention-africa.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
3. https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/gen-z-credit-card-debt-inflation-2f2f927e?mod=hp_lead_pos9
4. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/dallas-texas-ammo-ukraine-3ce81762?st=6ek7fl820utm3f3&reflink=article_copyURL_share
5. https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/historic-moon-mission-gets-china-one-small-step-ahead-in-space-race-41894d41?st=7e2dhh0vostpwzt&reflink=article_copyURL_share
6. https://www.wsj.com/sports/hockey/florida-panthers-stanley-cup-b985ff29?st=lz5cbc6tgom9elm&reflink=article_copyURL_share
Thanks for reading!
