Notes on the news

Russia has blown up the Hoover-sized Kakhovskaya dam.

It’s been more than a week since we surveyed the global news, and there’s been a lot of it. The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, and in a desperate attempt to fend it off, Russia has replied with a massive war crime, blowing up a critical dam and hydroelectric power plant along the front line in southern Ukraine, causing a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe that puts thousands at risk. Zelensky has correctly called this an act of terrorism and the “largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades.” (I can’t think of anything comparable in Europe since Chernobyl.)