🇺🇸🇹🇭 Two sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln were restricted to the ship after a drunken fight near Pattaya’s Walking Street. Thai police called it a small scuffle. No charges were filed. After 286 days at sea, two guys arguing outside a bar is the scandal. Sailors have been doing this in Pattaya since Vietnam. The surprise is that ONLY 2 got caught. Writer: Jamie

Colossal Biosciences' mammoth has slipped from 2028 to the early 2030s. Their CEO's phrasing: "not 2036, but not 2030 either." The reason is the interesting part. The original plan targeted around 65 genes to convert an Asian elephant genome into something mammoth-like. As they analysed more ancient DNA from better-preserved Siberian specimens, that number went up to about 85 & Lamm says it could move again. 🧬 Traits like dense fur & cold adaptation turned out to depend on more genetic machinery than the initial analysis suggested. That's a normal result in genomics. Complex traits are rarely one gene doing one job & the more closely you look, the more contributors you find. The rest of the timeline is biology you can't compress. Elephant gestation runs about 22 months. Asian elephants are endangered, so using them as surrogates carries regulatory hurdles Colossal hasn't cleared. Even with a viable embryo tomorrow, the calf is nearly two years out. Worth keeping the honest framing that outside scientists keep raising: this produces a gene-edited Asian elephant with mammoth traits, not a mammoth. 🦣 As one put it, you might alter the hair pattern & cold tolerance, but you're changing an elephant. The spin-off technologies may end up mattering more than the animal — artificial womb research, multiplex editing, ancient DNA assembly. Colossal has spun out healthcare companies off the back of it. A slipping deadline isn't the scandal here. Discovering the problem is harder than you thought is what the work actually looks like.

🇹🇼 | 200,000 protest in Taipei demanding the resignation of the ruling US-backed DPP. What began as a food safety scandal over contaminated "toxic" cooking oil is becoming what some call the biggest existential crisis yet for Taiwan's DPP. The scandal is affecting all Taiwanese cities and nearly 2,000 schools and businesses. Protesters accuse the DPP of a "cover-up." The Specter was on the ground in Taipei, talking to protesters who made clear the discontent goes far beyond the current crisis. "The DPP deliberately creates division, glorifies Japanese colonization, vilifies mainland China, and denies their own ancestry," one protester told The Specter. About 60% of respondents in Taiwan support the protests, organized by the KMT opposition, according to the latest polls.

For those who claim that Nawrocki’s crude anti-Ukrainian actions and the growing fascization of Polish society are somehow the result of “mistakes” on the Ukrainian side – that we failed to ask the neighbors’ permission about whom we honor, how we name our military units, that we ignored some special Polish sensitivities, and other nonsense of the same kind. Below is the image and text the President of Poland posted yesterday. What matters about Nawrocki’s post? 1) Nawrocki demands that Poland ban the “criminal Bandera ideology.” But what is this “criminal ideology”? The ideology of Bandera and the Bandera movement was the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. So it follows that this – an independent Ukraine – is exactly what Nawrocki and his allies want to outlaw. And there are many such people in Poland, their numbers growing as Polish society radicalizes. 2) To leave no room for doubt, Nawrocki illustrated his post by crossing out the words “Glory to Ukraine!” and “Glory to the Heroes!” – words spoken with pride not only across Ukraine but around the world as expressions of respect and solidarity. The image itself is a deliberate anti-Ukrainian gesture, and a law banning the Ukrainian idea would be an openly hostile act, characteristic of a totalitarian state, not a democratic one. 3) The post came just one day after Nawrocki’s openly unfriendly act of stripping the President of Ukraine of his Polish decoration. The scandal over the order was evidently not enough for him. Rather than de-escalating the conflict he created – or at least pausing – he deliberately chose an even more explicitly anti-Ukrainian statement, complete with illustration. His goal is not to end tension but to inflame confrontation with Ukraine and hatred toward Ukrainians as far as it will go. This serves him as a tool of domestic politics and as a form of self-assertion, which he has always built on hatred and conflict, because he is fundamentally incapable of anything else. The entire scandal – over the order and over the naming of the “UPA Heroes” unit – was artificial from the start. Over the past three decades, thousands of streets, monuments and institutions honoring UPA fighters have appeared across Ukraine. Nawrocki knew this perfectly well, and one more unit named after UPA heroes was neither extraordinary nor unexpected. As the former head of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, he also knew perfectly well that honoring the UPA in Ukraine carries no anti-Polish meaning whatsoever. So the statements by him and his ideological allies – on the “UPA Heroes” unit and on the proposed ban on “Bandera ideology,” including the slogan “Glory to Ukraine!” – are deliberate and entirely baseless anti-Ukrainian acts. To believe that he simply does not understand, or that this anti-Ukrainian hysteria can be stopped through explanation or Ukrainian concessions, is profoundly naïve. Author: Taras Shamayda

In 1990, Salomon Brothers found a way to push past a limit in the U.S. Treasury auction system. The limit was 35%. No single bidder could receive more than 35% of the securities offered to the public. Then came the December 27, 1990 auction of $8.5 billion of four year Treasury notes. Salomon bid $2.975 billion for itself exactly 35%. But it also submitted an unauthorized $1 billion customer bid. Combined: 46% of the entire offering. The customer bid was ultimately transferred to Salomon. And this wasn’t an isolated incident. Salomon later admitted to unauthorized bids in five Treasury auctions between December 1990 and May 1991. The scandal triggered investigations by the Treasury, SEC, Federal Reserve and Congress. The SEC later alleged that Salomon had repeatedly submitted false bids to circumvent Treasury’s purchase limits. Here’s the part traders should remember A market rule doesn’t automatically create a level playing field. The real game includes understanding Who the rule applies to. How it is calculated. What counts as one bidder. What happens when participants try to work around it. That’s not a lesson about “breaking rules.” It’s a lesson about market structure. If you’re trading a market, don’t just learn its price patterns. Learn the rules that determine how the game itself is played.