Read about global boiling. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about global boiling.

With an extraordinary amount of luck, it will be hard to describe how hot the summer of 2023 was to future generations. The summer, hardly over, broke temperature records across the northern hemisphere and even caused undue warming south of the equator. “We are being battered by extraordinary events at an accelerating clip [[link removed]], and today’s public is increasingly aware that we live in an omnicidal [[link removed]] anthropocene,” write Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay at Phenomenal World [[link removed]]. While there are some signs of positive movement toward a fossil fuel-free future, the authors emphasize that the public needs to think of greenhouse gasses as already accumulated, and it is that accumulation that contributes to such anomalously warm weather. “What we face is planetary instability [[link removed]] and disruption of everyday life as burning carbon loads the climate dice [[link removed]] so that it throws six after six,” Mackenzie and Sahay continue. That’s rough odds, and it makes the urgency of massive, dramatic action all the greater. Rapid electrification will be needed to get there, but it must be done as much as possible by replacing the inherited machines of fuel eras past. There is no more time for gradualism, they conclude. The emergency is now — and a matter of survival.

leveled myths

Israel’s democracy, held together by a quasi-constitution, is balanced by the powers of the Supreme Court acting as a check on its national legislature. Perpetual Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the most reactionary coalition government he has ever assembled, is at work ending that check on parliamentary power, a process that will functionally end Israel as even a somewhat democratic country.

Writing at Welcome to Hell World [[link removed]], David Grossman draws a direct parallel to the latest moves and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in 1995. Rabin, already a national hero, became a martyr for a vision of liberal Zionism. His name — and ghost — is synonymous with a lost alternate history. But Rabin’s war heroism came, in part, from clearing Palestinian villages during the Nakba.

“Rabin was killed by a right-winger who was tired of pretending that he lived in anything besides a Jewish supremacist state, and now the nation’s political leaders have created a reality born of the assassin’s bullet,” writes Grossman. With Rabin’s death and the myth around him, it becomes possible to see clearly the contradictions of the Israeli state.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] regime changed

When the United States left Afghanistan in August 2021, the government it had stood up for nearly two decades collapsed, unable to marshall forces to continue a long war against the insurgent, and now victorious, Taliban. But the Taliban that seized power in 2021 is a generation or two removed from the Taliban that last held Kabul in 2001. Professor Hassan Abbas, speaking to Catherine Putz at The Diplomat [[link removed]], explains where the Taliban stand today and what the most salient changes are.

“Who I refer to as the Taliban 3.0 in the book are our current subjects: a mix of conservative old hardliners in Kandahar, who believe themselves to be harbingers of their distorted version of Islamic law, and those in Kabul who have happily adopted new titles of prime minister, cabinet ministers, administrators of this or that, etc. — high titular labels,” says Abbas. “Essentially, they are trying to learn how to govern on the fly, but with far more qualification than their predecessors.”

Rather than indefinitely try to lock the Taliban out of the international system, argues Abbas, nations like the United States should attempt positive engagement and end sanctions. The US war against the Taliban is over, and while there may come a time for harsh sanctions in the future, it is impossible to know if diplomacy will work without at least attempting it.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Burying The Lead: Part II

When refugees leave home, they exit any reasonable semblance of health infrastructure. For many, this may be a distinction without substance, as war or conflict has already obliterated hospitals, municipal water, and stability before making the call to leave. Still, departing from one country for another to settle safely in a new home after the old one has become inhospitable means taking on tremendous risk. Even in the best-case scenarios, refugees are often settled in subpar living conditions.

In “ Assessment and Prevention of Lead Poisoning in Refugee Populations [[link removed]],” authors Lois Wessel and Laura Andreko outline the likelihood that new arrivals come with lead poisoning and explain how health systems can better meet the needs of refugees.

Lead is encountered in a host of ways in daily life. While many countries don’t use leaded gasoline, it was common in Afghanistan until a decade ago, and lingering lead persists near motorways. Depending on the environment a person comes from, they may have encountered lead through ceramics, jewelry, kinds of makeup, paint, pipes, and even the raw material of war.

“Human Rights Watch warned that a refugee camp filled with Afghan and Syrian refugees in Greece was constructed on a former military firing range site and posed a serious risk to the refugees residing there. Anecdotally, the authors of this article have treated patients from El Salvador who suffered bullet wounds during that country's civil war of the 1980s for elevated lead levels that were found to come from bullet fragments,” the authors write. Clinics treating refugees should ask about shrapnel and bullet fragments, which can persist in the bodies of those fleeing war and cause long-term health risks.

While bullets cause the most direct harm during and after a conflict, the lack of infrastructure abroad and the poor resources available for resettlement in the United States can lead to people, especially children, testing with higher blood lead levels than found at initial intake.

“Refugee children may arrive with high blood lead levels and may be placed in housing with high lead risks from deteriorating paint or contaminated soil,” write the authors. “In a review of blood lead levels in refugee children in the U.S. from 2010–2014, authors identified associations between [Elevated Blood Lead Levels] and overseas exposures, nutritional deficits, and use of imported products containing lead including food, toys, jewelry and cosmetics, as well as resettlement in older homes with lead paint in the U.S.”

Ultimately, as countries like the United States face the arrival of more refugees, they should take steps to ensure that health harms in new arrivals can be treated. Housing that does not exacerbate injury is essential. After all, the health and educational gains from reduced exposure to lead are phenomenal [[link removed]].

“Climate disruptions, war, and economic crises, as well as the history of the United States in offering refuge to populations in need, indicate that refugee resettlement will continue in the U.S. for decades,” conclude the authors. “Additionally, refugee families should receive culturally and linguistically appropriate education on potential lead hazards and ways to reduce exposures.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] RECEIPTS

Joshua Coe witnessed [[link removed]] the annual “Iron Harvest” in Flanders, Belgium, where farmers unearth unexploded ordnance in the course of collecting their crops. “We have two to three cases every year where a farmer hits a shell with his farming equipment, and the shell blows up. So, the farmers are sometimes hurt,” Sanders Poelmans told Coe. Poelmans is a sergeant with DOVO, Belgian’s bomb disposal unit, and during every harvest, they respond to calls from farmers unearthing the unspent ammunition. Both World Wars saw fighting and left deadly debris in Flanders fields, but World War I vintage shells sometimes contain leftover chemical weapons, like mustard gas, which is especially risky to clean up.

Will Lennon decried [[link removed]] the deaths of local town criers — or the decline of local newspapers. Through evocative storytelling, he contrasts the baseline news awareness of a paper reader in 2003 with that of the same person following news online in 2023. This imagined reader has a much more immediate sense of the latest discourse controversy but is missing reported insight into their immediate surroundings. “America’s rivals have taken note of the trash factory at the center of its social and political culture and joined in on the carnage,” writes Lennon. Without local news as a check, decline in local government creates fertile ground for misinformation and conspiracy theorizing, with the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as just one manifestation.

Carolyn Beeler spoke [[link removed]] with farmer Yuriy Zahoryui. His fields, in Makariv village north of Kyiv, were on the path Russia followed in its failed attempt to capture Ukraine’s capital. Russian forces have long been pushed back, but the explosives they left in the ground remain. “Last spring, we found around 10 anti-tank mines here, and one local resident got injured when one of the mines blew up,” he told Beeler and The World correspondent Anastasia Vlasova. “Where we’re standing right now was sort of a gray zone, because [the] Ukrainian military was positioned over there behind the forest, 500 feet away from here. And over there, there is a highway leading towards Kyiv.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Xed Out

A quick programming note on the well-played section. X, the site owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter, is increasingly managed in a way that is unsafe for users. Most recently, this came to light when Musk personally intervened [[link removed]] to restore an account that had posted upsetting and illegal imagery. Safeguards against the upload of such imagery [[link removed]] appear to be missing from the site. This is normally the part of the newsletter where I tell jokes, riffing on the news of the week as seen on Twitter, which is one of the joys of producing and sharing Critical State. However, given the refusal of the company to maintain basic and vital safeguards, I feel uncomfortable directing anyone to the site once and probably still known as Twitter.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

River Gulu [[link removed]] is the most famous river in England, the locals just haven’t adopted the correct name yet.

Never Again should directors try to make this extended metaphor [[link removed]] work.

Northern Virginia is a world of infinite possibilities [[link removed]] to not ask too many questions.

A Holocaust Museum in Fortnite [[link removed]] raises the question: is it better to learn history through a battle royale game, or not at all?

My new hobby is finding photos taken by the US military and tagged “undisclosed location” where the location is really obvious [[link removed]].

Political scientists prescribe politics [[link removed]] to cure the body politic.

Who called it an inability of the US to support a light truck market and not a Technical Liability [[link removed]]?

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]