1.Search for Malaysian Jet Becomes Criminal Inquiry
The New York Times MARCH 15, 2014
SEPANG, Malaysia — Malaysia turned the search for Flight 370 into a criminal
investigation on Saturday, after the prime minister declared that the plane had
been deliberately diverted from its planned route a week ago from Kuala Lumpur
to Beijing. The plane then flew as much as seven hours to an unknown
destination.
The prime minister, Najib Razak, said in a news conference on Saturday
afternoon that Malaysia would seek the help of other governments across a large
region of Asia in trying to find the plane.
Malaysian authorities later released a map showing that the last satellite
signal received from the plane had been sent from a point somewhere along one
of two arcs spanning large distances across Asia.
In other developments Saturday, police officers were seen arriving at the
gated residential compound where the flight’s pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, had
his home, and Malaysian news media reported that a raid was underway. A
police spokeswoman declined to comment, saying that no details would be
available until a news conference early Sunday evening.
According to Mr. Najib, a satellite orbiting 22,250 miles (35,800 kilometers)
over the middle of the Indian Ocean received a transmission that, based on the
angle of transmission from the plane, came from a location somewhere along one
of two arcs. One arc runs from the southern border of Kazakhstan in Central Asia
to northern Thailand. The other runs from near Jakarta, Indonesia, to the
Indian Ocean, roughly 1,000 miles off the west coast of Australia.
“These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the
plane,” Mr. Najib said. He noted that one communications system had been
disabled as the plane flew over the northeast coast of Malaysia. A second system,
a transponder aboard the aircraft, abruptly stopped broadcasting its location,
altitude, speed and other information a few minutes later, at 1:21 a.m., while the
plane was one-third of the way across the Gulf of Thailand from Malaysia toVietnam.
Mr. Najib’s news conference, at an airport hotel here on the outskirts of
Kuala Lumpur, came a day after American officials and others familiar with the
investigation told The New York Times that Flight 370 had experienced
significant changes in altitude after it lost contact with ground control, and
altered its course more than once as if still under the command of a pilot.
Military radar data subsequently showed that the aircraft turned and flew
west across northern Malaysia before arcing out over the wide northern end of
the Strait of Malacca, headed at cruising altitude for the Indian Ocean.
The disappearance of the jet has mesmerized many in China, partly because
nearly two-thirds of the 239 people aboard were Chinese citizens. After Mr.
Najib’s statement Saturday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded to
know more, and said that China was sending technical experts to Malaysia.
“We ask that the Malaysian side provide even more comprehensive and
accurate information,” a spokesman, Qin Gang, said in a statement on the
ministry’s website. “We urge that based on the new circumstances, Malaysia
further expand and clarify the scope of the search and intensify search efforts,
and we ask that Malaysia call on even more countries to become involved in the
search.”
2. The Roots of the Ukraine Crisis
Putin's Russia is using military might to rewrite the history of the Soviet collapse
The Wall Street Journal March 14, 2014
Last Wednesday, in a phone conversation with Mustafa Dzhemilev, a leader of the Muslim Tatar minority in the Crimea, Vladimir Putin raised a chilling possibility: According to Ukrainian media reports, he questioned the legality of Ukraine's secession from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Back then, the world also feared war and prolonged conflict between Russia and Ukraine. If the Russian president's current takeover of Ukraine's Crimea region succeeds, it may be followed by Russian efforts to seize other chunks of Ukraine—and beyond that, perhaps pieces of Moldova and the Baltic states too, which also house substantial numbers of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking minorities.
The roots of today's crisis go back to the last days of the Soviet Union, whose demise Mr. Putin has lamented as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Moscow has long cast an acquisitive eye on Ukraine—now the second-largest Slavic state, previously a vast part of the Soviet Union and always Russia's uneasy neighbor. The current Ukrainian crisis and Russia's occupation of the Crimea are directly linked to Moscow's project of reintegrating the space of the former Soviet Union into a comprehensive economic, political and military Eurasian Union.
A referendum in Crimea to decide whether the region will stay within Ukraine or become part of Russia will take place this Sunday.
Though the Soviet Union was often called Russia, it was actually a conglomerate of nationalities—lumped unhappily into 15 different republics—ruled by Moscow with an iron fist for most of the Soviet period. Russians, who numbered close to 150 million people, constituted only 51% of the Soviet population. The Ukrainians were the second-largest group, with more than 50 million people, accounting for close to 20% of the Soviet population.
When Ukraine voted for independence on Dec. 1, 1991, it sealed the Soviet Union's fate. More than 90% of Ukrainian citizens voted in favor of statehood. Even in the Crimea, which then (as now) had an ethnic Russian majority, 54% voted for independence. In Sevastopol, the Soviet naval base in the Crimea, 57% were in favor. The Russians of Ukraine, in short, voted in large numbers for Ukrainian independence.
The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had drawn up a template for a new, looser union, but Boris Yeltsin of the Russian republic and Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine refused to join. On Dec. 8, 1991, in a hunting lodge in the forests of Belarus, Mr. Yeltsin and Mr. Kravchuk dissolved the U.S.S.R. and created a Commonwealth of Independent States to link the former republics. Neither Mr. Gorbachev nor Mr. Yeltsin could imagine a viable union without Ukraine. The Russian leadership, skeptical about bearing the costs of the new Commonwealth, could be persuaded to do so only together with Ukraine. As Mr. Yeltsin told President George H.W. Bush repeatedly, without its fellow Slavs in Ukraine inside the Commonwealth, Russia would be outnumbered and outvoted by the Central Asian republics.
3. The Future of Brain Implants
How soon can we expect to see brain implants for perfect memory, enhanced vision, hypernormal focus or an expert golf swing?
The Wall Street Journal March 14, 2014
Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago, fraught with risk, applicable only to a narrowly defined set of patients – but a sign of things to come. NYU Professor of Psychology Gary Marcus discusses on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty.
What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip, wired directly into your brain's hippocampus, that gave you perfect recall of everything you read? Or for an implanted interface with the Internet that automatically translated a clearly articulated silent thought ("the French sun king") into an online search that digested the relevant Wikipedia page and projected a summary directly into your brain?
Science fiction? Perhaps not for very much longer. Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago. They are not risk-free and make sense only for a narrowly defined set of patients—but they are a sign of things to come.
Unlike pacemakers, dental crowns or implantable insulin pumps, neuroprosthetics—devices that restore or supplement the mind's capacities with electronics inserted directly into the nervous system—change how we perceive the world and move through it. For better or worse, these devices become part of who we are.
Neuroprosthetics aren't new. They have been around commercially for three decades, in the form of the cochlear implants used in the ears (the outer reaches of the nervous system) of more than 300,000 hearing-impaired people around the world. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first retinal implant, made by the company Second Sight.
Both technologies exploit the same principle: An external device, either a microphone or a video camera, captures sounds or images and processes them, using the results to drive a set of electrodes that stimulate either the auditory or the optic nerve, approximating the naturally occurring output from the ear or the eye.
Another type of now-common implant, used by thousands of Parkinson's patients around the world, sends electrical pulses deep into the brain proper, activating some of the pathways involved in motor control. A thin electrode is inserted into the brain through a small opening in the skull; it is connected by a wire that runs to a battery pack underneath the skin. The effect is to reduce or even eliminate the tremors and rigid movement that are such prominent symptoms of Parkinson's (though, unfortunately, the device doesn't halt the progression of the disease itself). Experimental trials are now under way to test the efficacy of such "deep brain stimulation" for treating other disorders as well.
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