I last interviewed Ebrahim Raisi, the ultra-hard-line President of Iran, during his début appearance at the United Nations, in 2022. He spoke belligerently and with such speed that the interpreter struggled to keep up. He was the same on the U.N. dais, where he furiously waved a photo of General Qassem Soleimani and demanded that Donald Trump be tried for ordering his assassination—a “savage, illegal, immoral crime”—in a U.S. drone strike, in 2020. Back home, Iran was in turmoil after nationwide protests erupted in response to the death, in police custody, of a twenty-two-year-old named Mahsa Amini. She had been arrested for improper hijab; too much hair was showing. Raisi’s government ordered a brutal crackdown; security forces eventually killed more than five hundred protesters and arrested nearly twenty thousand. During an interview with a handful of journalists, conducted in the chandeliered ballroom of a New York hotel, Raisi was asked about the protests. “We’re all professionals,” he said, and insisted that we focus on the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program “rather than diverting to other issues.”
Raisi, who had a manicured white beard and wore a black turban signifying his descent from the Prophet Muhammad, offered no hint of diplomatic compromises over the growing tensions with the West, as three of his predecessors had done during their U.N. visits. He instead boasted of a shifting world order that mobilized America’s rivals. After his election, in 2021, Raisi oversaw Tehran’s expanding military cooperation with Russia, which included the transfer of hundreds of drones for its war in Ukraine. He tightened ties with China, which is now the main importer of Iranian oil, thus bailing Iran out of the sanctions noose created by Washington. At home, however, Raisi was “derided for incompetence” and often the butt of relentless Persian humor, Vali Nasr, the former dean of the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, told me. Raisi invoked tougher enforcement of the hijab and restricted personal freedoms, which in turn sparked the widest protests against the regime since the 1979 Revolution. He was arguably Iran’s most unpopular President. “Whoever succeeds him could be construed by the public as an improvement,” Nasr added. Raisi was also the first President to be personally sanctioned by the U.S.
Raisi died in a helicopter crash on Sunday. He was flying back from the country’s border with Azerbaijan, in the northwest, where he had celebrated the opening of a new dam with his Azerbaijani counterpart—a symbol of Iran’s strengthening relations with nations in the Caucasus. He flew in a convoy of three helicopters. Two landed safely after navigating thick fog over remote and rugged mountains. Raisi flew in a vintage U.S.-manufactured Bell helicopter, a model purchased during the monarchy in the nineteen-seventies. (Bell stopped producing it more than twenty-five years ago.) Iran has struggled to maintain its aging aircraft, and U.S. sanctions have complicated access to spare parts. Despite early conspiracy theories about deliberate sabotage of Raisi’s helicopter, which spread feverishly across social media, Iran attributed the crash to a “technical failure” after the charred wreckage was finally found early on Monday in a dense mountain forest. Eight others, including Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, were also killed.
Raisi died at a precarious time for a revolutionary regime that is ever more xenophobic, paranoid, and rigid. His legacy is “a sharp deterioration of Iran’s relations with the West, owing to the failed efforts to negotiate a return to the 2015 nuclear agreement, increasingly close military ties with Russia, and the perilous tit for tat with Israel,” Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, told me. His successor will have to deal with “deep social and economic discontent, regional instability and tension, and, over the longer horizon, the fate of the Islamic Republic.”
Black holes stretch the fabric of spacetime to its extreme—and the closer you get to one, the more warped things get. “You can be really very close to a black hole and, happily, circularly orbit,” says Andrew Mummery, a physicist at the University of Oxford. But as you draw nearer, a black hole’s gravitational grip becomes overpowering. You hit a precipice, and instead of peacefully circling, you simply fall.
At this point, classical orbital mechanics breaks down, and “[Isaac] Newton has nothing to say,” Mummery notes. Describing the dynamics of an object falling headlong down a black hole’s maw is a task for Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Einstein used this theory more than a century ago to predict what happens in what would later become known as black holes. Just outside a black hole’s event horizon—the boundary past which not even light can escape—an orbiting object will abruptly encounter a so-called plunging region and plummet to its doom at nearly the speed of light.
Theorists consider a black hole’s plunging region to be where the fate of all things falling in becomes sealed. Yet beyond that basic insight, this area has remained a near-total mystery. “Basically, the preexisting theoretical models ignored this region,” Mummery says—after all, it’s small and hard to see with current telescopes. But thanks to a chance outburst by a black hole feasting on matter in our galaxy, Mummery, and his colleagues have now observed the plunging region for the first time. They reported their results in a paper published last week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“The first time you see it, it’s just nice to know it’s there at all,” Mummery says. “Now that we know we can see this, there’s a lot of things we can, in principle, learn using it.”
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An artist’s concept of a stellar-mass black hole (right) siphoning material from a companion star (left). Much of the material forms an accretion disk around the black hole before falling inside. ESO/L. Calçada/M.Kornmesser
If not for the ongoing carnage in Gaza, there’s a good chance the spiral of violence between Israel and the Lebanon-based military group Hezbollah would be the Middle Eastern conflict dominating the world’s attention right now. In the weeks leading up to the current Israeli offensive in Rafah, there was often more actual fighting happening on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon than in the south in Gaza.
The fighting has been happening since the day after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, when Hezbollah launched guided rocket strikes against Israel in what it called “solidarity with the victorious Palestinian resistance.” Hezbollah has continually fired rockets and drones into Israel and in return, the Israeli military has launched air and military strikes against the group’s bases in Lebanon in response. Hamas and Hezbollah are both Iran-backed, anti-Israel militant groups, though they differ significantly in ideology and operational approach.
In the first six months of the fighting, there were at least 4,400 combined strikes from both sides, according to the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). An estimated 250 Hezbollah members and 75 Lebanese civilians have been killed in the fighting, along with 20 Israelis — both civilians and soldiers. More than 60,000 residents of northern Israel have been displaced by the attacks, along with some 90,000 people in southern Lebanon.
Those numbers may pale against the far larger death toll and refugee crisis caused by the fighting in Gaza, but the situation in the north could have been — and may yet be — far worse than it has been, given the military strength on both sides. The Israeli military is, for its size, one of the most powerful in the world, while Hezbollah is the best-armed non-state group in the world, with an arsenal of between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles and up to 30,000 active personnel and 20,000 reserves, according to CSIS estimates. If it wanted to, Hezbollah could cause far more damage on Israel than Hamas — which, for comparison, had around 30,000 rockets before October 7 — ever could.
While both sides have seemed to be trying to avoid escalating the fighting into a full-scale war as devastating as the one they fought in 2006, that doesn’t mean such a war won’t happen anyway. After the latest series of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) airstrikes in Lebanon, in response to Hezbollah drone attacks on May 6 that killed two IDF soldiers, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant predicted a “hot summer” on the border.
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An Israeli reserve combat soldier takes part in a training drill on May 8, 2024, in the Golan Heights. Amir Levy/Getty Images
Three separate research groups have demonstrated quantum entanglement — in which two or more objects are linked so that they contain the same information even if they are far apart — over several kilometers of existing optical fibers in real urban areas. The feat is a key step towards a future quantum internet, a network that could allow information to be exchanged while encoded in quantum states.
Together, the experiments are “the most advanced demonstrations so far” of the technology needed for a quantum internet, says physicist Tracy Northup at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Each of the three research teams — based in the United States, China, and the Netherlands — was able to connect parts of a network using photons in the optical-fire-friendly infrared part of the spectrum, which is a “major milestone”, says fellow Innsbruck physicist Simon Baier.
A quantum internet could enable any two users to establish almost unbreakable cryptographic keys to protect sensitive information. But full use of entanglement could do much more, such as connecting separate quantum computers into one larger, more powerful machine. The technology could also enable certain types of scientific experiment, for example by creating networks of optical telescopes that have the resolution of a single dish hundreds of kilometers wide.
Two of the studies were published in Nature on 15 May. The third was described last month in a preprint posted on arXiv, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Impractical environment
Many of the technical steps for building a quantum internet have been demonstrated in the laboratory over the past decade or so. And researchers have shown that they can produce entangled photons using lasers in direct line of sight of each other, either in separate ground locations or on the ground and in space.
Forgive, though they stand unapologetic and tall, For your grace is vast; it encompasses all. Let them claim victory; let them have their say, In your silence, you win as you walk away. Send them love, though they know it not, Your kindness is the lesson they forgot. Bid them farewell, let your spirit be […]
At Brooklyn Friends School, progressive Quaker values are part of the curriculum. A required seminar for ninth-grade students encourages them to explore matters of identity and social justice, and there are land acknowledgments on the walls. But a debate over Israel between parents and the school has tested its values. Brooklyn Friends says it is trying not to pick a side, but parents who are critical of Israel say the school has silenced them.
BFS is one of many liberal entities to face a split within its ranks after October 7, including the rift inside the Democratic Party. PEN America, a free-expression group, canceled its prestigious awards and World Voices Festival after writers withdrew, calling on the organization to more strongly condemn Israeli attacks on Palestinian writers and culture. College campuses across the country are convulsed not only by student protesters but by administrators who respond with violent crackdowns.
Nobody has called the police on critical parents at BFS, but there is tension all the same. It stretches as far back as December, when BFS asked Esther Farmer, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, to speak at an event honoring Human Rights Day. Farmer says she readily agreed, figuring she had been invited to provide JVP’s anti-Zionist perspective. In her view, that wouldn’t be out of keeping with the school’s pacifist Quaker tradition. “The American Friends Service Committee has been pro-Palestinian and pro-peace for many, many years. And I had a lot of respect for them,” she says.
A few weeks later, BFS withdrew Farmer’s invitation and later canceled the event altogether. “So that was a little surprising because this was the Friends school, and I couldn’t understand what happened there,” Farmer says. Kevin Murungi, the school’s director of global civic engagement and social impact, says they “vetted all the speakers, including Esther, carefully, and told them the spirit of the event that they were attending.”
Farmer wasn’t the only person surprised by her cancellation. Some parents were taken aback when they learned of the decision through a December 8 email from Crissy Cáceres, the head of the school. She wrote that other parents had raised concerns about JVP. “We would never knowingly pursue a course of action that would put any of our students in harm’s way,” Cáceres said.
But what harm could Farmer — who is Jewish — pose to students? “I have to say my experience of that is that’s really what’s antisemitic,” Farmer says. “So we’re only allowed to hear some Jewish voices but not other Jewish voices?”
“The Fall Guy” is an action comedy directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, loosely based on the 1980s TV series of the same title. The plot follows a stuntman working on his ex-girlfriend’s directorial debut action film, only to find himself involved in a conspiracy surrounding the film’s lead actor. I have […]
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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James' World 2 