Citizen Cartwright

Good news on health, energy, planets

It seems you can read the first 15 of this Fix the News edition without a password. And I’ve got tears of exhilaration as I go through them. For example:

"The world has made remarkable progress in reducing child mortality," says UNICEF. Since 2000, the global mortality rate of children under five has dropped by 52 percent. Clicking through to the UNICEF article and seeing the photo of the baby — whose eyes show such excited intelligence — could not be a better way to start my day.

And congratulations, California, on your win-win effort to generate energy while combatting drought. A pilot project is covering canals with solar panels, simultaneously generating clean energy and preventing water evaporation, says PV Magazine. 

Among the 28 items behind Fix the News’ paywall:

— A tiny magnetic robot that can take 3D scans deep inside the body could revolutionize early cancer detection. Researchers at Britain’s University of Leeds say they’ve generated the first high-resolution three-dimensional ultrasound images taken by a probe moving through the colon. 

— In 1990, there wasn’t a single planet known beyond our solar system. We’ve now discovered nearly 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. And a proposed telescope could find Earth-like exoplanets using just one pixel of data, says BigThink.

— California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania have joined in a Clean Rides Network. The group is working on environmentally friendly transportation projects it says the federal government has abandoned, The Associated Press reports.

Good news on energy, climate, communications

As usual, I hope you'll have time to scroll through Fix the News' 20 good-news items that are free to read. Among the items that apparently are behind the paywall:

— A California startup has developed new carbon-fiber transmission cables that can be retrofitted on old steel power lines, tripling their electricity-carrying capacity. This enables utilities to upgrade grid connections without lengthy permitting processes for new routes. The Tennessee Valley Authority already is testing the technology on its aging infrastructure, Fix the News says, citing a Bloomberg article that, sigh, requires a subscription.

— Northwestern University engineering scientists have developed a way to store carbon dioxide permanently, turning it into materials that can be used to manufacture concrete, cement, plaster and paint. This offers more benefits than carbon sequestration methods such as capturing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it underground. The process to generate the carbon-negative materials also releases hydrogen gas — a clean fuel with a variety of applications, including in transportation. 

— Researchers have broken a distance record in quantum communication by sending a secret encryption key from China to South Africa, using a cheap, lightweight ‘microsatellite,’ according to a Nature magazine article that’s republished without a paywall in Scientific American.

The accomplishment — a kind of encryption known as quantum key distribution — is a step toward being able to send ultra-secure messages between any two locations, however distant. QKD currently is used by banks and governments to transmit keys over fiber optics.

Risks as DOGE plans to rewrite Social Security’s code

The Department of Government Efficiency is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system — and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans depend — at risk, Wired reports.

 

“One of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” says a Social Security technologist.

 

In 2017, Social Security announced a plan to get funding to replace its core systems, Wired says. The agency predicted that the replacement would take about five years. That effort ended up being put off. 

 

Like many legacy government IT systems, Social Security's systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper, Wired says.

 

As recently as 2016, Social Security's infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s inspector general found. 

 

Social Security's core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s, according to the 2017 Social Security modernization plan.

 

Social Security's core “logic” also is written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, says a former senior Social Security technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer. Even minor changes could lead to cascading failures across programs.

 

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” says the technologist. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

 

It’s unclear when the code migration would start, Wired says.

 

I’m seeing suggestions online to download your Social Security records. You can create an online Social Security account here.  

About those secret war plans in a group chat

There’s so much attention to this that you likely already know all you want to. So I’ll just do a quick summary of some key points in The New York Times’ article:

 

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed war plans in an encrypted group chat that included a journalist two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen, the White House said on Monday, confirming an account in the magazine The Atlantic.

“The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote in an article published on Monday that he was mistakenly added to the text chat on the commercial messaging app Signal by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser.

“It was an extraordinary breach of American national security intelligence. Not only was the journalist inadvertently included in the group, but the conversation also took place outside the secure government channels that would normally be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning.

 

"Several Defense Department officials expressed shock that Mr. Hegseth had put American war plans into a commercial chat group. They said that having this type of conversation in a Signal chat group itself could be a violation of the Espionage Act, a law covering the handling of sensitive information.

 

“Revealing operational war plans before planned strikes could also put American troops directly into harm’s way, the officials said. And former F.B.I. officials who worked on leak cases described this as a devastating breach of national security.

“Former national security officials said that if personal cellphones were used in the group chat, the behavior would be even more egregious because of ongoing Chinese hacking efforts.”

 

Here is a conversation in The Atlantic between Goldberg and staff writer David Graham on what the incident reveals about the Trump administration.

 

Here is a comprehensive, well documented writeup of what happened and reaction to it by historian Heather Cox Richardson. 

Tools for stressful times: The perspective of kindness

The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, but it’s far exceeded its mission.

 

In 1990, as Voyager 1 was speeding out of our solar system, mission managers commanded it to look back toward home for a final time, from 3.7 billion miles away. It snapped a series of 60 images that were used to create the first “family portrait” of our solar system.

 

The photo that would become known as the Pale Blue Dot shows Earth in a scattered ray of sunlight. The original image and a 2020 updated version using modern software and other tech are here.

 

After snapping the Pale Blue Dot and the other “family photos” on Feb. 14, 1990, Voyager 1 powered off its cameras forever. Mission planners wanted to save its energy for the long journey to come.

 

Voyager now is 15 billion miles away, traveling at 38,000 miles an hour.

 

Planetary scientist Carl Sagan wrote this about the Pale Blue Dot:

 

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

Good news on AI, philanthropy, health

Fix the News’ Feb. 27 issue has nearly 20 good news items that are free to read and 35 that are behind the paywall.

 

Among the items that require a subscription:

 

— A problem that took microbiologists a decade to get to the bottom of was solved in two days by a new artificial intelligence tool, the BBC reports. 

 

Professor José Penadés and his team at Imperial College London had spent years figuring out and proving why some superbugs are immune to antibiotics. The Google AI tool "co-scientist” reached the same conclusion in 48 hours.

 

— Mackenzie Scott, philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has pioneered a new kind of giving that’s been transformative for nonprofit organizations, says CBS News.

 

Since 2019, Scott, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be more than $32 billion, has given $19 billion in no-strings-attached gifts to more than 2,000 nonprofits, meaning the recipients of the donations were permitted to spend the funds however they saw fit. The median gift size was about $5 million.

 

New research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy found that the size and lack of restrictions of Scott's charitable gifts have not only helped those nonprofits become more financially stable but has enabled them to increase the scope of their impact.

 

Scott says she believes the people closest to the work are best positioned to identify the organization's needs. 

 

— The World Health Organization and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have started distribution of free childhood cancer medicines in Mongolia and Uzbekistan, with shipments planned for Ecuador, Jordan, Nepal and Zambia, through the Global Platform for Access to Childhood Cancer Medicines.  

 

The goal is to reach 50 low- and middle-income countries in the next five to seven years. Childhood cancer survival rates are often 30 percent lower in these countries than in high-income countries, the WHO says.

‘A good deal is still within reach’ for Ukraine if U.S. is willing to pursue it

As European leaders and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau gather in Ukraine this morning to show their support on the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion, Foreign Affairs Magazine has published an article on what an actual political strategy for ending the war would look like.

 

“In its final year, the Biden administration, in which I served as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, prepared Ukraine for talks in 2025 regardless of who won the U.S. election in 2024,” writes article author Thomas Wright. 

 

Putting pressure on Russia to negotiate

 

“After the unsuccessful counteroffensive of 2023, the administration helped Ukraine create three vectors of action that would weaken Moscow’s ability to prosecute the war indefinitely and thus put pressure on it to negotiate seriously,” Wright says.

 

One vector was a strategy of asymmetric attrition. According to the Defense Department, Russian casualties are more than 700,000 since the war began and averaging 1,500 a day. Moscow’s attempts to open a new pipeline of troops from North Korea seem to have failed because North Korean casualty numbers have been so high that Pyongyang hasn’t sent many more. 

 

So if he wants to fight a long war, Russian President Putin is facing the prospect of having to order a mobilization later this year, which he's tried to avoid in order to shield ordinary Russians from the reality and pain of the battlefront. 

 

The second vector was support for Ukraine’s long-strike campaign, initially through backing its indigenous drone program and then with the provision of long-range ATACMS. 

 

The third vector was ramping up sanctions on Russia, including on 50 banks and on its energy sector, to complicate Moscow’s ability to finance a long war. One effect was a spike in Russian inflation, which exceeded 9.5 percent, with interest rates more than 21 percent at the end of 2024.

 

The United States also sent enough artillery rounds, rockets, air defense, and fighting vehicles to enable Ukraine to fight through 2025, Wright says. “A $50 billion allied loan, leveraging frozen Russian sovereign assets, has given Ukraine a financial lifeline.”

 

“The result is that Russia is stuck. Moscow still seeks to dominate Ukraine, but it is gaining only slivers of territory in eastern Ukraine with very little prospect of making sweeping gains. It failed to cause Ukraine’s collapse through energy strikes over the winter. It still has not regained all of the Russian territory seized by Ukraine in Kursk, more than six months after Ukraine’s incursion. And all of this has been compounded by the fall of its ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the likely end of its military presence there.”

 

U.S. interests in Ukraine’s victory

 

— If Russia wins in Ukraine, it will be a victory as well for each of the three countries that have assisted it there — China, North Korea and Iran.

 

— The survival of a free and independent Ukraine would benefit the United States. Ukraine would emerge from the war with Europe’s third largest military, after Russia and Turkey. It's pioneered cutting-edge technological developments, especially on drone warfare and the application of artificial intelligence to warfighting. It would share this technology with the United States and help Europe renovate its defense industrial base.

 

— A Russian victory would increase the threat to U.S. allies Lithuania, Poland, Latvia and Estonia.

 

— “Finally, and perhaps most important, the United States has an interest in a stable and peaceful Europe.” Europe is the United States’ biggest source of foreign investment and largest export market, as well as a key ally. 

 

Problems for negotiations

 

“The primary problem that has to be solved in negotiations is that Russia wants a neutral and weakened Ukraine, whereas Ukraine wants sufficient security capabilities and guarantees so it can deter and defend against any future attack,” Wright says.

 

Putin said in a speech in June, “Ukraine should adopt a neutral, non-aligned status, be nuclear-free, and undergo demilitarization and denazification,” and he demanded that Ukraine cede the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces.

 

Since then, Putin also has described Ukraine President Zelensky as an illegitimate leader with no authority to sign a treaty to end the war. And Putin has demanded strict limits on the size and scope of Ukraine’s military, including a prohibition on “offensive” weapons, an effective Russian veto on any international security guarantees to Ukraine, and western security assurances for Russia.

 

The Ukrainian government’s official position is that it wants all of Ukraine’s sovereign territory, including Crimea, back, as well as membership in NATO. There are, however, indications that Ukraine would be willing to accept a freeze of the territorial line if it came without legal recognition of Russian gains and if allies supported Ukraine’s right to regain the territory by nonmilitary means. Most important for Ukrainians, it would be compensated with ironclad security guarantees for the rest of the country and with a pledge of political and economic integration into the West.

 

Four possible outcomes have been envisioned

 

— NATO membership for Ukraine

 

— The “Israel model,” with the United States providing enough military and intelligence assistance to enable Ukraine to deter and, if necessary, defeat Russian forces without direct intervention by other nations.

 

— A European security guarantee

 

— Ukraine neutrality

 

A “good enough” outcome

 

“If it backs Ukraine in negotiations and uses the leverage available to it, the Trump administration could secure the Israel model for Ukraine — the construction of a powerful future force with the ability to strike Russian territory if it were attacked, backed by a promise of indirect U.S. support in the event of a new war,” Wright says. “This deal would not be perfect, as it leaves Ukraine without external security guarantees.” 

 

Whle NATO membership for Ukraine isn’t acceptable to President Trump, it could be pursued by a different U.S. administration in the future, Wright says.

 

"The Israel model provides a viable pathway to a free and independent Ukraine with the ability to defend itself and deter future attack. And over time, it may serve as a stepping stone to a more durable and just peace,” Wright says.

 

Here is a gift link for the article. 

DOGE’s ‘God Mode’ access to federal data

Several employees across federal agencies say Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has “an unprecedented ability to view and manipulate information at many federal agencies,” reports The Atlantic.

 

Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, recently was appointed director of Technology Transformation Services — a part of the federal General Services Administration — that's intended to help federal agencies improve the delivery of information.  

 

Shedd has requested privileged access to 19 different IT systems administered by teams within TTS, according to two federal workers. With that level of control, Shedd would be able not only to view and modify federal data, but also to grant and revoke access to other people, The Atlantic says.

 

“Among the federal agencies we reported on, USAID is the only one where we could confirm that DOGE has acquired God-mode access across the entire digital system. … But as Musk and his acolytes enter a growing number of federal databases and IT systems, their unfettered access at USAID offers a sense of what they might be able to do elsewhere,” The Atlantic says.

 

“The federal government does not typically grant such wide-ranging access to a single entity, let alone one that is effectively under the control of an unelected, erratic, and politically extreme actor such as Musk. The group is working on behalf of Donald Trump, but sources we spoke with emphasized that the level of access DOGE possesses means that the organization may already be able to siphon data that Musk or his agents could hold on to forever, long after his time as a government liaison, or even after a potential falling-out with the president,” says The Atlantic.

 

“The purpose of DOGE’s incursions remains unclear to employees at these agencies. Musk was supposed to help improve the workings of the government — that is DOGE’s stated purpose. But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems, some are beginning to worry that he might prefer to destroy it, to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself,” The Atlantic says.

 

“At USAID and other agencies whose employees we spoke with, leaders explained that Musk’s team could copy and remove information from government servers without anybody knowing. The team could then feed this classified information into AI tools, either for training purposes or to mine the data for insights. (Members of DOGE already reportedly have put sensitive data from the Education Department into AI software.),” The Atlantic says.

 

“The risk of harm, abuse, or political revenge is clear. But simple, brazen corruption is also a concern among the federal workers we spoke with. The CDC staffer wondered if DOGE’s unelected and seemingly unaccountable leadership, including Musk, might simply want to sell the public-health data the CDC collects,” The Atlantic says.

 

“Democratic leaders have also expressed the worry that Musk’s interest in SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars in contracts from NASA over the years, creates an untenable conflict of interest. The NASA employee worried that Musk would end up ‘reaping all of the profits of the investment that the American public put into NASA’s research, which was being shared with the country.’ NASA holds technical specs and research data for SpaceX competitors, and insiders fear that such information will soon be compromised, too. They also worry that classified NASA R&D in areas such as quantum, biotech, and astrobiology could be stolen for private gain.”

 

Here is a gift link to this article.

How Musk’s businesses benefit from government shrinkage

President Trump and Elon Musk took questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, and Trump signed an order directing federal agencies to work closely with Musk's effort to shrink the federal workforce.

The order sets forth rules requiring government agencies to hire no more than one employee for every four workers who leave, and it compels agencies to work with Musk's team to identify large-scale reductions in force and determine which agency components can be eliminated outright, Reuters reports.

 

“Trump resisted the suggestion by Democrats and other critics that Musk's role presents a conflict of interest,” Reuters says.

“If we thought that, we would not let him do that segment or look in that area, if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest,” said Trump.

 

Meanwhile, a New York Times article by two reporters who’ve spent the past year investigating Musk’s business with the federal government says many of the federal employees who’ve been pushed out were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Musk’s companies.

 

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Musk’s six companies, according to the Times.

 

Among them:

 

— Federal Aviation Administration fines of Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, for safety violations

 

— Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit pressing Musk to pay the federal government perhaps as much as $150 million, accusing him of having violated federal securities law

 

— The National Labor Relations Board, an independent watchdog agency for workers’ rights, has 24 investigations into Musk’s companies

 

— At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a public database shows hundreds of complaints about Musk's electric car company Tesla, mostly about debt collection or loan problems. The agency also would have regulated Musk’s new efforts to bring a payments service to X.

 

None of the investigations or lawsuits involving Musk and his companies, at least so far, have formally been dropped since the start of the new administration, according to more than a dozen current and former federal officials interviewed by the Times.

 

And the Times found no evidence that Musk directly ordered that an investigation into one of his companies be shut down or stalled.

“The shifts at the agencies in many cases reflect changes in national priorities that come with a president who has long complained that government regulation has been too aggressive, a view widely held in the business community,” says the Times.

“But the upheaval at federal agencies represents one of the first tests of a wide range of conflicts of interest Mr. Musk has brought to the White House, including 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies,” the Times says.

 

Musk controls Tesla, which is publicly traded. He's the founder of SpaceX; the artificial intelligence start-up xAI; the Boring Company, a tunneling venture; and Neuralink, which is developing brain computer implants. All of those are private companies. Musk also owns the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

 

Musk’s companies secured $13 billion in contracts over the past five years, making SpaceX, which collects most of that money, one of the largest government contractors, the Times says. And there's already talk in the Trump administration of expanding these deals, especially at the Air Force.

 

On Monday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency. The office had pending requests to investigate Musk based on allegations raised by Democrats in Congress last week that Musk’s role as a federal government official creates an unavoidable conflict of interest.

The letter from 12 House Democrats said, “The American people deserve assurances that no individual, regardless of stature, is permitted to influence policy for personal gain.”

Trump is inaugurated, issues promised deluge of executive orders

The president, flanked by his family and tech billionaires, delivered a second inaugural address on Monday that “promised massive national success, pledging an expansion of U.S. territory and an end to foreign wars, with a sweeping indictment of the status quo,” as The Associated Press puts it.

 

Trump’s aides had said the speech would focus on unity.

 

But with his presidential predecessors sitting nearby, by the third paragraph Trump was referring to “the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government.”

 

In paragraph five: “For many years, the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens. While the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair, we now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”

 

Shortly afterward, Trump spoke to supporters in another area of the Capitol and said he’d toned down his speech at the urging of his wife and his vice president.

 

The first of Trump’s executive orders rescinded 78 Biden actions, on topics including racial equity, gender discrimination, climate change, the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, additional ethics requirements for political appointees, lowering prescription drug costs, sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and the withdrawal of offshore drilling from some areas, according to The Washington Post.

 

Other orders include:

 

— Ending birthright citizenship

— Declaring a “national emergency” on the southern border, among other things directing the military to make it priority to “seal the borders”

— Addressing the “cost-of-living crisis”

— Requiring federal workers to return to the office

— Freezing federal hiring

— Establishing the “Department of Government Efficiency”

— Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement

— Ending the “weaponization” of the federal government

— Delaying the ban on TikTok for 75 days

— Pardoning 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 others

— Officially recognizing two sexes

— Expanding energy production and temporarily stopping wind leasing, ending the “electric vehicle mandate”

— Withdrawing from the World Health Organization

— Starting the process to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America

— Declaring drug cartels terrorist organizations

 

Congress and the courts potentially can block executive orders, says a separate AP explainer.

 

Here is a transcript of Trump’s inaugural address, by AP.

 

Here is the text of the executive orders, from the White House.