Spot The Difference.

Original sin.

News Items covers four subjects: (1) World in Disarray, (2) Financialization of Everything, (3) Advances in Science and Technology, and (4) Electoral politics, foreign and domestic. Six days a week, not Sundays. Weekdays by ~6:45am ET. Saturdays: sometime in the morning, usually. Tom Smith, who heads up research, contributed to this report.

1. With Russia expected to soon carry out large-scale drills of its nuclear forces as President Vladimir Putin threatens to use them, the United States and its allies will be challenged to ensure they can spot the difference between exercises and the real thing. Russia typically holds major annual nuclear exercises around this time of year, and U.S. and Western officials expect them perhaps in just days. They will likely include the test launch of ballistic missiles, U.S. officials say. But with Putin having openly threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia in its unraveling invasion of Ukraine, some Western officials are worried Moscow could deliberately try to muddy the waters about its intentions. "This is why you don't want to have extraordinarily overheated rhetoric at the same time you're going to do a nuclear exercise," a Western official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. (Source: reuters.com)

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2. Since emerging in late 2021, the highly transmissible omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2 has splintered into a dazzling array of subvariants that are now driving fresh waves of Covid-19 cases around the world. The proliferation of such a diversity of variants is unprecedented, and pits numerous hyper-mutated iterations against each other in a race for global dominance. That’s turbo-charged Covid, making it one of the fastest-spreading diseases known to humanity, and further challenging pandemic-mitigation efforts in a global population already weary of frequent booster shots, testing and masking. (Source: bloomberg.com)

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