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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1499927

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is known for its caves, but there’s a lot more to the national park – which is celebrating its centennial this year.

Despite its name, there is only one Carlsbad Cavern, but there are many other caves in the park. There’s also plenty to see above ground, including the park’s famous bats, brilliant night sky and the rugged beauty of the Chihuahuan Desert.

“The combination of the desert ecosystem, being so kind of harsh and fragile with hot temperatures and stabby plants, and then the fragile nature of the cave ecosystem beneath your feet is a really neat contrast,” said Anthony Mazzucco, a park guide and acting supervisory park ranger at Carlsbad Caverns. “The bats being like a link between the cave and the desert kind of brings it all full circle. It's a really powerful lesson in the way our ecosystems work and relate to each other.”

Here’s what visitors should know about Carlsbad Caverns, the latest national park in USA TODAY’s yearlong series. The Bat Flight Amphitheater is perfectly situated so visitors can see bats exiting Carlsbad Cavern's Natural Entrance from a safe distance. How many caves are in Carlsbad Caverns?

There are at least 120 known caves in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The only one currently open to the general public is Carlsbad Cavern. Mazzucco explained most caves are off limits to both visitors and park staff not only for their safety but to protect the cave ecosystems.

“Those areas of the self-guided routes in Carlsbad Cavern, and to an extent even the guided tour areas, have all been kind of sacrificed in a way,” he said. “The infrastructure and the lighting and the trail system create an element of permanent damage to the cave. (It) is great because you can allow people to see it up close and personal and learn about it in a safe manner, but some caves, that’s just not possible to do it in.”

Cavers can sometimes get recreational permits for other caves in the park, but that program is on hold, as are interpretative tours of Slaughter Canyon Cave. The only ranger-led tour currently available is the King’s Palace Tour of Carlsbad Cavern. Fragile soda straw stalactites and columns fill Doll's Theater in Carlsbad Cavern's Big Room. What’s so special about Carlsbad Cavern?

Carlsbad Cavern is full of mesmerizing rock formations that visitors can explore at their own pace.

The park notes late humorist Will Rogers once likened it to “the Grand Canyon with a roof over it,” adding “it’s got all the cathedrals of the world in it, with half of ’em hanging upside down.” Do you have to make a reservation for Carlsbad Caverns?

Reservations are required to enter the cavern itself. They must be made in advance at Recreation.gov or by calling 877-444-6777.

Reservations cost $1 per person, regardless of age. A $15 cavern entrance fee is also required for visitors ages 16 and up. Cave entry is free for guests age 15 and under, but they still need a $1 reservation.

“Anything on the surface, no reservation and no entry fee is needed into the park,” Mazzucco said. “So any surface hiking trails or watching the Bat Flight Program we do in the summertime evenings or any astronomy dark sky programs or just star-watching on their own, wildlife viewing, if the park has any special presentations or looking around the visitor center exhibit hall or doing any shopping in the bookstore, all of that is free.”

Visitors should note a number of surface hiking trails and Walnut Canyon Desert Drive are currently closed, due to flood damage. The latest conditions and closures can be found on the park’s website. Snow lightly covers Slaughter Canyon at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. What months are the bats at Carlsbad Caverns?

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is home to 17 bat species.

“The colony that we're famous for is referred to as Brazilian freetailed bats,” Mazzucco said. The migratory bats spend the summer roosting in Carlsbad Cavern, arriving as early as April and staying until September or October. “By the fall, whenever the weather gets a little colder, there's no insects around to eat, the bats will migrate south to Mexico or further south in Central America.”

Weather permitting, each night during the summer, rangers host a free Bat Flight Program talk at the park’s Bat Flight Amphitheater, where visitors can watch hundreds of thousands of bats take flight from the cavern’s Natural Entrance. The third Saturday of each July, the park hosts a whole bat celebration.

“Every day we like to celebrate our flying mammal friends but for Dawn of the Bats is kind of a day focus on that education,” Mazzucco said. “We typically have these ranger talks in the evening to watch the bats exit the cave every night. For Dawn of the Bats, we kind of reverse it and some of our staff will get up pretty early and invite the public to join right around sunrise for a chance to watch or mainly listen to the baths return to the cavern.” Other activities are held throughout the day. Visitors can watch hundreds of thousands of bats take flight each summer night at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. How long does it take to walk through Carlsbad Cavern?

Exploring Carlsbad Cavern can take as little as 45 minutes to upwards of two-and-half hours, depending on if visitors walk the steep path down from the cave’s Natural Entrance or take an elevator to the relatively flat Big Room.

“For being such an extreme environment, it's fairly accessible, all things considered,” Mazzucco noted. “If folks have any of their own mobility devices, you know, wheelchair, electric scooter, one of those kinds of knee carts if they have a leg injury, things like that, A-OK to go down the elevator and explore most of the Big Room. We just kind of prohibit those devices on the main corridor section because of the steep switchbacking trail, to prevent any safety issue.”

There are more than 60 switchbacks on the Natural Entrance Trail, which he said descends 750 feet or the equivalent of three-quarters of the height of the Empire State Building. Visitors who use wheelchairs can access Carlsbad Cavern's Big Room by elevator.

National parks for every body:How to make the outdoors more accessible to people with disabilities Is Carlsbad Caverns the biggest cave in the US?

The Big Room is the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America, but Carlsbad Cavern is not the biggest cave.

Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is the longest known cave system in the whole world. What is the closest city to Carlsbad Caverns?

Carlsbad Caverns is 20 miles away from Carlsbad, New Mexico and 145 miles away from El Paso, Texas. El Paso International Airport is the nearest major airport. A caver looks out across Carlsbad Caverns National Park at night. How close are White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns?

The national parks are less than three and a half hours apart by car.

Carlsbad Caverns is actually closer to Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas. They are just over 30 minutes away from each other. Who are the Indigenous people of Carlsbad Caverns?

According to the park, prehistoric Native peoples lived in the Guadalupe Mountains between 12,000 to 14,000 years ago and Mescalero Apache arrived in the area in around 1400.

Mazzucco said while there is so far no known evidence of these early residents going far into the dark zone of Carlsbad Cavern, they did leave some pictographs and rock art near the Natural Entrance of the cavern.“Folks hiking down the main corridor, they kind of walk past that area, and keen observers can notice them,” he said. “There are lots (more) within the park, mostly in hard to reach backcountry areas that have some specific closures.” More than 60 switchbacks takes visitors down Natural Entrance Trail, which is not advised for visitors with heart or respiratory conditions.

In West Hollywood, home to one of the largest Russian-speaking communities in the United States, residents watched with hope and apprehension Saturday as a mercenary rebellion that threatened to upend the Russian government and undermine its bloody invasion of Ukraine appeared to subside.

Some were buoyed by the news that Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy Russian entrepreneur who owns the mercenary army known as the Wagner Group, announced that he was halting his march to Moscow. Others, like Andrei Braginski, dismissed the armed rebellion as an insignificant development in Russia, where the invasion of Ukraine and its mounting casualties have become increasingly unpopular.

“They’re rebels without support,” said Braginski, 58, carrying a bag of groceries filled with cherries, Kefir and tomato juice outside Odessa Grocery on Santa Monica Boulevard. “I don’t think it’s going to change the war. [Prigozhin] won’t win and won’t weaken the Russian army.”

Braginski, who was born in Estonia, has cousins in Russia and said he supports Ukraine and anyone standing on their side.

Inside the market, shoppers strolled past shelves lined with Russian candies and chips as a song from Russian Lithuanian singer Kristina Orbakaite blared through the speakers overhead. Some spoke on condition that they not be identified out of fear of reprisals by those who disagreed with their opinions.

Nina, 67, who was raised in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and declined to give her last name, was optimistic by the news that the Wagner Group had halted its march to Moscow.

“At the end of the day, peace will prevail,” she said as she scoured the frozen food aisle looking for pierogies for her mother.

She noted that her sister and nephew live in Zaporizhia, a city in southeast Ukraine where intense fighting has taken place in recent weeks.

Nina said she isn’t a fan of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but added that she does not support the war in her homeland.

“So many young kids are dying,” she said. “There have been tragedies beyond imagination.”

The Wagner Group operates in multiple countries and has fought alongside Russian forces in Ukraine. The mercenary operation in Ukraine has relied on well-trained Russian military veterans and convicts recruited from prisons and used for indiscriminate “human wave” attacks against Ukrainian forces, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service.

Regardless of the outcome of Prigozhin’s mercenary rebellion, he has tapped into popular sentiment across Russia, using social media to call out corruption and ineptitude of Russian generals leading the war in Ukraine, said Robert English, director of Central European Studies at USC.

He said Prigozhin will continue to pose a threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long hold on power.

“Prigozhin is hitting all the right notes,” English said Saturday in a telephone interview from Europe, where he has been monitoring the developments. “His message resonates.”

In West Hollywood, Liana sat at her desk in a notary public office, describing the rebels as criminals but adding that “any means to overthrow Putin is good enough.”

“It’s probably benefiting Ukraine that the mutiny and disruption is happening,” said the 26-year-old, who declined to give her last name out of concern for her mother in Russia. “I believe in the domino effect, that one event will impact another and then another. But no one knows what’s going to happen.”

Liana, who came to the United States nine years ago to attend drama school, called the war “surreal” and had complicated thoughts about the U.S.’s support of Ukraine.

“I don’t think the U.S. is supporting Ukraine out of the pureness of its heart,” she said. “ I think there’s always a political agenda when a country gets involved. Nevertheless, it’s good because Ukraine doesn’t have the same resources as Russia. And now it can fight back.”

But she doesn’t know how, or when, the war will end.

“I really hope for the best,” she said after a long pause. “ I just want people to be safe and continue to live as they were. But so many things have happened that are irreversible. That will never be forgotten.”

Her co-worker Nadia Akarsu, 36, remembers the day a bomb shook her awake in her Kyiv apartment.

It was Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russian troops stormed into her homeland.

“It’s horrible. We Ukrainians didn’t think it was possible in 21st century,” she said.

Although she called the leader of the Wagner group a “criminal,” Akarsu was glad when she heard news of their rebellion against the Russian army.

“When an enemy is divided and there’s conflict between themselves, it’s good,” she said. “I don’t think it will benefit Ukraine yet, but it will spread the attention of Russian forces.”

Akarsu fled the war last year and left behind her father and many friends, and said she’s appreciative of the U.S. support of Ukraine.

“The attack is a danger to world society and to peace,” she said. “The United States is the strongest country in the world and the leader of the world, and I’m glad they are taking responsibility as a leader.”

As for how she thinks the war will end, Akarsu is hopeful.

“I hope and believe that Ukraine will get back all territories occupied by Russia right now, and that we will be more independent and stronger than ever,” she said.

But she thinks it won’t happen anytime soon.

Earlier this month, General Motors announced that beginning in 2025, it will adopt Tesla's charging connector for all its electric vehicles.

With the announcement, GM joins Ford in partnering with Tesla to integrate Tesla charging connectors into the companies’ electric vehicles beginning in 2025, vastly expanding charging access for Ford and GM EV owners.

Tesla opened its charging technology, which it calls the North American Charging Standard, in late 2022.

“We invite charging network operators and vehicle manufacturers to put the Tesla charging connector and charge port, now called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), on their equipment and vehicles,” Tesla said in a press release.

The announcements from Ford and GM are a major shift toward adopting the North American Charging Standard as the industry’s standard EV charging system. Both automakers' electric vehicles use the Combined Charging System (CCS), which has been a standard in North America. To make Tesla Superchargers available to Ford and GM owners with CCS-compatible vehicles, the companies will provide adapters to hook into the Tesla stations. The NACS charging system will be available on all Ford and GM electric vehicles beginning with the 2025 model year. Tesla dominates the U.S. electric vehicle market

As demand for electric cars and trucks has increased, automakers have moved quickly to debut vehicles that rely only on battery power, as opposed to hybrid or internal combustion engines. Twenty-four brands offered pure electric vehicles in the U.S. in 2022. As of 2022, EVs represent 8% of the overall market, up from just over 5% in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency.

Despite a rush to meet demand across the rest of the industry, Tesla maintains dominance over the EV sector. Of all EVs sold in the U.S. in 2022, Tesla vehicles made up 64.5% of the market. Ford held the second-largest market share behind Tesla, selling 7.5% of all EVs. Tesla tops EV sales in 2022

Part of what makes Tesla so dominant is the diversity and familiarity of its electric vehicle lineup. Tesla offered four EVs in 2022, more than any other company, and they aren’t brand-new releases.

The Model S was first released in 2012, while Tesla’s most recent new release, the Model Y, first hit the market in 2020. For comparison, Ford’s first EV, the Mustang Mach-E, first went on sale in December 2022. Tesla still controls the electric vehicle market

Since Tesla electric vehicles greatly outnumber EVs from other brands, the NACS system is already the most common EV charger in North America, according to Tesla. Tesla maintains nearly 7,000 charging stations in the U.S., giving drivers access to more than 33,000 NACS ports, according to the Department of Energy. To date, just over 12,000 CCS chargers are available across the U.S. Where EV chargers are located

During the Formula E qualifying round in Portland, Oregon, today, the DS Penske team was fined €25,000 after it surreptitiously installed an RFID scanner at the entrance to the pit, which the FIA stewards said could collect data from other race cars and give them an advantage. The team’s racers, Stoffel Vandoorne and Jean-Éric Vergne, were also hit with a pit lane start penalty for today’s race — meaning they will have to wait at the end of the pit lane until all of the other cars have driven past before entering the race.

The FIA Stewards explanation for the penalty was provided to The Verge via email:

The Stewards were advised by the Technical Delegate that the competitor had installed RFID scanning equipment in the pit lane entry this morning that was able to collect live data from all cars. Firstly, it is forbidden in general for competitors to install or place any equipment in the pit lane. Secondly, the collection of data by this method gives the competitor a lot of information, which is a huge and unfair advantage. Taking all the circumstances together, the Stewards feel that the given penalty is appropriate.

RFID chips have been used in Formula E tires for the entirety of the still-young motorsport, primarily to track the condition of tires, including temperature and tire pressure, and encourage their efficient use, according to a 2014 article in Tyrepress.

For the 2023 season, Formula E has switched to a new “Gen 3” car design and a new tire manufacturer, going from Michelins to the Hankook iON. A Motorsport.com report from off-season testing discussed how much of a challenge that presented for the teams and a possible reason why attempting to glean data from the entire field was something Penske would even try.

For the 2022-2023 season, the series picked up a sponsorship from Hankook tires, which a report in Motorsport indicated presented challenges for the drivers, who had been used to the same Michelin tires for the previous 8 seasons.

Should go without saying, but:

Telegram and Twitter were big spreaders of misinformation during the Russian coup attempt. Credit: Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The potential coup attempt in Russia by a paramilitary organization may already be over(opens in a new tab), but the misinformation sure did flow during the breaking global event.

On Friday, news quickly spread that the Kremlin-aligned private army known as Wagner Group, led by "Putin's chef" Yevgeny Prigozhin, was leaving the war in Ukraine and marching towards Moscow. This breaking news caught many by surprise, and people flocked to social media in an effort to make sense of what appeared to be a coup attempt.

However, with information sparse as events in Russia were still unfolding, misinformation and wild speculation ran rampant online, showing that modern day social media and internet news sources are still highly flawed and lacking.

A major issue with this particular event is that many of the most popular platforms in the country aren't ones that get much use in the western world. Telegram, for example, is extremely popular in non-English speaking countries like Russia. Much of the breaking news surrounding the coup attempt was first being posted there, and in Russian.

English speakers not only had to understand the language, but be familiar with which Telegram channels were legitimate sources of information. Due to lackadaisical moderation on the platform, many English-language users that are on Telegram tend to be far right-wingers and biased towards Putin's regime. These accounts are not the best sources of information, if they even have any actual on-the-ground info to begin with.

Much of what flowed on Telegram eventually did make its way to English-speaking users in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere via Twitter. And that poses yet another problem. Since Elon Musk acquired the platform, Twitter has gone through changes that don't exactly bode well for it as an invaluable breaking news resource like it once was.

For example, prior to Musk, the blue checkmark meant that a user was verified by Twitter as the journalist or expert that the individual claimed they were. Remember, the purpose of the checkmark was to make sure these users couldn't be impersonated. Now, however, anyone who pays $8 per month for Twitter's premium subscription service, Twitter Blue, gets a blue checkmark.

Furthermore, those paid blue checkmark users now get priority placement in Twitter's For You feed algorithm, and in the replies to other users' tweets. And, echoing the issue on Telegram, many Twitter Blue subscribers are not far, ideologically speaking, from the Putin regime.

​​"It's probably not good that during a major breaking news event, the ongoing Wagner mutiny in Russia, the majority of viral false and misleading claims are from accounts with Twitter Blue subscription, whose posts are promoted by Twitter's algorithm," observed(opens in a new tab) Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist that covers disinformation and conspiracy theories at BBC Verify.

The issues on Twitter became so obvious that they quickly even became meme-fodder(opens in a new tab) on the platform. For example, many blue checkmark users began spreading information in long tweet threads about the Russian coup, regardless of the fact that they had no expertise on the matter.

It also didn't help that Elon Musk, who owns the platform and has more than 144 million followers, decided not to use his reach to promote experts or journalists on the ground. Instead, Musk deemed(opens in a new tab) a cryptocurrency and tech entrepreneur who hosts larger Twitter Spaces audio chats, the provider of the "best coverage of the situation," and referred his followers to their account.

And unfortunately for those most affected, like people living in Russia, online information was hard to come by as well. Internet observatory NetBlocks reported(opens in a new tab) that the country's major telecommunications providers were blocking users from accessing Google's popular news aggregator, Google News.

Wagner Group now appears to have reversed course and will no longer march towards Moscow. Instead, the paramilitary group will join the Kremlin and again turn their focus to Ukraine, the country that Russia has invaded, to continue a war that has been subjected to its own disinformation campaigns. However, this potential coup, which lasted less than 24 hours, put a big spotlight on how the internet may be worse off than ever before when it comes to spreading accurate information during breaking global news events.

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use(opens in a new tab) and Privacy Policy(opens in a new tab). You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.

YouTube has been making some big announcements for creators at this year's VidCon(opens in a new tab).

Yesterday, Mashable reported on the new long-awaited thumbnail A/B split testing feature called Test & Compare which will help YouTubers maximize their video views. And now YouTube is working on a potential new way to help creators reach a larger audience: AI-powered multi-language voiceover dubbing for their video content.

The tool is powered by Aloud, an AI dubbing company that is part of Google's own Area 120 startup incubator.

Aloud first provides the creator with a transcription of their video. The user can then edit the transcribed text as they see fit. After the creator signs off on the transcription, Aloud creates(opens in a new tab) an AI voiceover dub for the video. Aloud currently provides this service for free on its website, which is separate from the tool YouTube is building into its platform, but there's currently a waitlist.

A YouTube spokesperson told(opens in a new tab) The Verge that the company has already been testing out the AI dubbing tool with "hundreds" of creators.

There are a few pretty big limitations with Aloud, according to the FAQ section on its website(opens in a new tab). The startup's AI-powered tool currently only works with English-language videos and can only dub into two languages, Spanish and Portuguese, at this time. However, with Google's backing and this new partnership with YouTube, it wouldn't be surprising to see Aloud roll out more language options in the near future.

This tool would mark the second major feature related to multi-language dubbing that YouTube launched this year.

In February, the company rolled out an option to upload multiple audio tracks for individual videos, sorted by language. Viewers can now simply hit the Settings button on any YouTube video that enables this feature and choose to listen with an alternative audio track in the language of their choice. However, this feature requires creators to supply their own audio, which would require the YouTuber to go out and have their video translated and dubbed on their own.

YouTube's partnership with Aloud to create AI-powered dubs could help YouTubers save both time and money while still broadening their audience.

A San Jose physician was convicted of illegally prescribing and distributing large quantities of opioids without a legitimate medical purpose, including to one person who died of an overdose, federal prosecutors announced Friday.

Donald Siao, 58, a family physician, was convicted by a federal jury on Tuesday of 12 counts of distributing the controlled substances oxycodone and hydrocodone outside the usual course of his medical practice over a 12-month period between 2016 and 2017, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release.

After identifying Siao in a separate prescription fraud investigation, investigators discovered Siao had written 8,201 prescriptions for controlled substance medications in just the one-year period from May 2016 to May 2017, according to prosecutors. During the course of the investigation, Siao prescribed increasing amounts of opioids to four separate undercover agents posing as patients, even though in some instances they admitted to sharing the drugs with co-workers or friends.

Each of the 12 counts against Siao carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Ismail J. Ramsey, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, announced on Friday he would seek to have Siao’s medical license forfeited.

Calls to the U.S. Attorney’s office and to Siao’s lawyer were not immediately returned.

Eight of the 12 counts against Siao involved a mother and son identified in court documents as E.J. and A.J., respectively.

Both mother and son claimed to have lost or had pills stolen and Siao continued to respond with prescriptions, according to court documents.

Siao also ignored a warning from an insurer about potential fraud regarding E.J. and a notice that A.J. had previously been arrested for selling pills, prosecutors said in the news release.

A.J. overdosed twice but still received prescriptions from Siao, according to court documents. A.J. died from an overdose of opioids in December 2019. In addition, Siao did not comply with medical records requests from the coroner following A.J.’s death.

The last four counts against Siao were related to an operation conducted by an undercover interagency task force.

The California Department of Justice Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse, or BMFEA, was one of several agencies investigating Siao in 2017, according to court documents. In May of that year, the agency searched a state controlled substance database and found that Siao had written more than 8,000 prescriptions for controlled substances.

Many of those prescriptions called for 30 milligrams of oxycodone, which is at the higher end of dosage strength. The National Library of Medicine states, for instance, that immediate-release oxycodone tablets begin at 5 mg and top out at 30.

Along with oxycodone, Siao issued prescriptions for combinations of opioids, muscle relaxers and benzodiazepine, often known as the “Holy Trinity,” according to court documents. The Department of Justice has said the trio taken together “depress the central nervous system and the ability to breathe.”

The drug task force conducted an investigation from February to May 2018. Four agents visited Siao’s office multiple times to request prescriptions for controlled substances.

In one case, one agent known as A.M. pretended to be a retired football player who complained of pain in his shoulder, arm and elbow. He saw Siao three times, with each visit ending with a prescription.

In his third appointment with Siao in July 2018, A.M. admitted he had shared a portion of a previous 60-tablet, 30-mg strength oxycodone dosage, a potentially addictive controlled substance used for pain management, with a co-worker. The agent asked if Siao could increase the amount of pills to compensate for the borrowed cache.

Siao obliged and increased the total to 75 pills at an appointment that lasted approximately two minutes, according to court documents.

Another agent, identified only as E.T. in court documents, sought Siao for a prescription of Norco, a combination of hydrocodone and acetaminophen used for pain management.

The agent said he had previously purchased Norco at work for $10 a pill. Siao said, “That is nuts,” according to court documents. The doctor then added, “I’m not going to say anything. Some people try to make a business out of that; put it that way.”

The physician then prescribed 45 tablets of 10-mg strength after a first visit in April 2018, according to court documents.

Siao eventually increased the amount to 60 tablets upon E.T.’s second visit, prosecutors said. He also prescribed a cannabinoid, Marinol, at the agent’s request. The agent told Siao he was a marijuana user and needed to show his employer that any cannabis found in his blood stream through random testing was due to another drug.

Siao replied “gotcha” and filled out the prescription, prosecutors said.

Ralph Reed speaks during a Donald Trump campaign event on July 23, 2020, in Alpharetta, Ga. | John Amis/AP Photo

The big debate in Washington this week is about realism versus idealism. It played out first in foreign policy, when Joe Biden hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a state dinner.

Biden has made big claims about how democratic ideals are at the heart of American foreign policy; but he spent two days lavishing time and attention on Modi, who is persecuting Muslims and cracking down on public dissent from reporters and political opponents.

Biden needs India to be an ally against China and that priority outweighed the instinct to shun Modi for his creeping authoritarianism.

We talk about this debate all the time when it comes to American foreign policy.

But sometimes that same debate becomes central to American domestic politics as well.

And across town, just as Modi was wrapping up his joint address to Congress, evangelical conservatives from across the country were gathering at the Washington Hilton to hear from their own flawed partner: Donald Trump.

Well, actually not just Trump — Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, and every major Republican candidate is scheduled to speak at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference.

But, naturally, Trump is what religious conservatives are talking about. After all, he is the dominant frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination. And he is the group’s keynote speaker at their gala dinner on Saturday night. And he is also the politician about whom two things can be said:

One, his personal and public life makes a mockery of the Christian ideals of evangelical voters.

And, two, he is the person who has delivered more policy victories for these same voters than any other president.

The questions that evangelicals are debating in Washington this week are whether that deal with Trump was worth it… and whether they should renew the contract.

This week’s guest has a lot of thoughts about this. He is the founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, Ralph Reed.

Reed was recruited in 1989 by Pat Robertson, the late televangelist, to help run a new organization: the Christian Coalition.

It grew to be a powerful political group that cemented social conservatives as a core constituency of the Republican Party and made issues such as opposition to abortion rights non-negotiable policies in the GOP.

As you will hear in this episode, Ralph Reed is a political junkie. He left the Christian Coalition in 1997 and soon became one of the key strategists for George W. Bush.

And then in Obama’s first term, Reed struck up an unlikely friendship with a guy named Donald Trump.

He did for Trump what he does for every presidential candidate who comes calling for his advice: he explained how to win over evangelical voters, who make up about 60 percent of the Republican presidential primary electorate.

In his view it worked out pretty well: Evangelicals overwhelmingly backed the thrice-married New York playboy who famously botched Bible verses on the stump. And Trump kept his word when it came to their most important issue: appointing Supreme Court judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

So what will evangelicals do in the 2024 Republican presidential primary?

That is the question that Playbook co-author and Deep Dive host Ryan Lizza spoke with Reed about in a backroom at the Washington Hilton as his conference attendees filed in.

LA's year long UBI study ended a few months ago and they are gathering data, and planning more future trials

Over the course of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s extravagant three-day state visit to Washington, which featured a tented dinner on the South Lawn and a rare joint address to Congress, he and President Biden frequently spoke of their nations’ shared democratic values.

But that lofty rhetoric papered over the reality that in India, the hugely popular Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party have advanced policies that discriminate against Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities and limit freedom of speech and the press.

At the White House on Thursday, Modi offered a rare response to a reporter’s question about his government’s handling of religious minorities and free speech amid concerns about the erosion of human rights in India.

“We have always proved that democracy can deliver. And when I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender,” Modi said. “There’s absolutely no space for discrimination.”

Foreign policy experts, democracy advocates, Indian dissidents and even the U.S. government disagree with his assessment. The State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom has accused Modi’s government of overseeing arbitrary killings, restrictions on freedom of expression and the media, and violence targeting religious minorities.

Human rights groups have accused his government of undermining democracy, including by passing a citizenship law that discriminates based on religion and revoking the special autonomous status granted to India’s only Muslim-majority territory, Jammu and Kashmir. In April, top opposition leader and vocal Modi critic Rahul Gandhi was expelled from parliament after a court convicted him of defamation for mocking Modi in an election speech.

India has also become an especially difficult place to be a reporter. The nation’s ranking has slipped to No. 161 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, a list compiled by Reporters Without Borders. Afghanistan, Venezuela and South Sudan rank higher.

In February, Indian tax authorities raided local BBC offices weeks after the British broadcaster aired a documentary on Modi’s role in anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, when he was the state’s chief minister. The government attempted to ban the documentary, labeling it “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.”

I know a bit about the anxieties of reporting in Modi’s India. As a reporter for BBC News in 2019, I covered his reelection campaign.

Before traveling to New Delhi, I was summoned to the Indian Embassy in Washington, where I sat down for chai with an official from the BJP, Modi’s party, who quizzed me on my family’s background and my plans in India.

I recounted my father’s journey from southern India’s Chennai, then known as Madras, to the U.S. in 1965, his life in Chicago as a doctor and my work as a journalist.

I didn’t tell him I planned to travel to Assam state’s border with Bangladesh to interview some of the millions of Muslims who would be rendered stateless under a citizenship law that would pass in Modi’s second term. I left out my plans to write about the similarities between Modi’s policies and those of then-President Trump.

That reporting led to an onslaught of hate mail and social media harassment, but I was able to return home. The same can’t be said for the Indian journalists who have been detained or bullied for scrutinizing the BJP.

Last year, 10 human rights and democracy organizations called out Modi’s government for targeting journalists, saying it had “emboldened Hindu nationalists to threaten, harass, and abuse journalists critical of the Indian government, both online and offline, with impunity.”

“This government has employed a range of tactics to chill free expression,” said Nadine Farid Johnson of PEN America, a nonprofit organization that advocates for free expression.

She pointed to the Indian government’s more recent effort to purge textbooks of references to the Muslim Mughal dynasty, the nation’s founding as a secular republic and Gujarat state’s anti-Muslim violence on Modi’s watch.

“It actually mirrors what we’re seeing here in the U.S. — these legislative efforts that have used government power to censor the diversity and complexity of our own country’s history — something we’ve seen the [Biden] administration speak out against,” Johnson said.

For Biden, the focus on shared democratic values was an awkward feature of Modi’s visit. Critics say his warm welcome of Modi undermines his messages about the threats to democracy posed by Trump, his 2020 — and potentially 2024 — Republican opponent.

At Modi’s welcoming ceremony Thursday, Biden made oblique references to human rights, hailing freedom of expression and religious pluralism as “core principles” for both countries. At a news conference that day, the president said universal human rights faced challenges “in each of our countries” but remained vital to both nations’ success. When asked by a reporter about the criticism that his administration was overlooking India’s crackdown on dissent, Biden said the two leaders had a “good discussion” about democratic values.

The administration’s feting of Modi stretched into Friday at the State Department, where Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken hosted a luncheon in the Indian leader’s honor. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former PepsiCo Chief Executive Indra Nooyi and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi nibbled on samosas as Harris and Blinken praised the U.S.-India partnership.

“Both countries wear the democracy label on their sleeves,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center. “It’s a challenge for the administration, because they would like to be able to use that democracy story in India as a way of underscoring the importance of U.S.-China competition and working with like-minded democracies to counter China — but they really can’t because of the democracy struggles in India.”

The U.S. should also acknowledge its own struggles with democracy, he added, pointing to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Even if the scale of the democratic backsliding in India is significantly higher than in the United States, I think the objective for the administration would be not to make it seem like it’s lecturing India,” Kugelman said. “That’s a point of sensitivity in New Delhi and among Indians on the whole — that the U.S. is a hypocrite.”

Biden administration officials have made clear that Washington’s economic and security partnership with New Delhi outweighs most other considerations. The U.S. holds more military exercises with India than with any other country, according to the State Department. And Washington became New Delhi’s largest trading partner in the 2022-23 fiscal year.

Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, called the deepening of ties with India a “hinge moment in geopolitics,” and said he didn’t think Modi’s lavish visit undercut the president’s broader narrative of a values-based foreign policy.

“We are dealing with the gathering and march of autocratic forces in ways that are not in the United States’ national interest, and ... we do need to rally the values, norms and forces of democracy to push back against that,” he told a group of reporters Tuesday. “And that is a point the president has made consistently since he came into office. But he has also been clear that in that larger effort, we need constructive relationships with countries of all different traditions and backgrounds.”

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Members of Wagner group sit atop of a tank in a street in the city of Rostov-on-Don, on June 24, 2023. Senators and House members noted on Saturday the implications of the rebellion on Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. | AFP/Getty Images

Lawmakers on Saturday spoke out in unison on the historic significance of escalating conflict in Russia after warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin declared war on his own country’s military leadership and threatened to march on Moscow.

Senators and House members noted in particular the implications of Prigozhin’s efforts on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine while some voiced concern about the potential brutality of a Prigozhin-led insurrection.

“Our national security agencies are closely following the extraordinary internal conflict among Russian forces currently underway,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), a senior member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter. “No matter how this turns it is certain to have a significant and potentially historic impact.”

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D–Mich.), called the development “breathtaking” and “the clearest public confirmation of the folly of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Slotkin suggested the internal threat from Prigozhin was a clear indicator of Putin’s military vulnerability, comparing the conflict in Russia to the “U.S. military depending on an armed defense contractor” who then turned on U.S. leadership and marched on Washington, D.C.

“This escalating conflict between the Wagner Group and the Russian military would not be occurring if Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was going well,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D–Calif.), a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, wrote on Twitter. “Clearly it is not.”

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called on Ukraine to take advantage of the short-term benefits of Prigozhin-led upheaval.

“This will almost certainly benefit the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the near term and [Ukraine] should move fast to capitalize,” Crow wrote on Saturday.

Prigozhin — a former Putin loyalist who has led the private Wagner Group’s effort in the Russian war against Ukraine — threatened to march on Moscow after seizing crucial territories in Southern Russia, including the strategically positioned city of Rostov-on-Don.

Wagner, the organization Prigozhin helms, is a coalition of militant mercenaries that have worked with the Russian military during the country’s 16-month invasion of Ukraine.

Prigozhin’s decision to break from Russian military leadership comes after frequent clashes with Russian military leaders. He has taken to social media to criticize Russia’s lack of preparedness for the war, arguing that the war in Ukraine has been led by Wagner forces.

Lawmakers noted Prigozhin’s reputation for brutality and the Wagner Group’s deep involvement in the war against Ukraine.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D–Texas), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote on Twitter that Prigozhin was “as bad as, arguably worse than, Putin.”

“Let’s be absolutely clear about who Prigozhin is and what he wants,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.), a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, wrote on Twitter. “This guy is a murderous thug. And he doesn’t want an iskra in Russia, he wants a military change of command so he can lead a more efficient slaughtering of innocent Ukrainians.”

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The attack begins after less than a minute. Two dozen men are milling about a rec room in Men’s Central Jail when one of them takes a swing.

Others pile on, and soon half a dozen people are punching, kicking and stabbing. There are no jailers in sight — and no sign they even notice. Suddenly, after roughly a minute, the violence stops. The attackers seem to have grown bored, or maybe tired.

For the next 10 minutes, the victim paces and tries to clean up his own blood. A few onlookers go back to working out in the corner — until suddenly the beating resumes.

Finally, roughly 14 minutes after the attack began, deputies show up and order everyone to the ground.

The brutal 20-minute clip is one of a few dozen graphic videos from the past six years saved to a thumb drive picked out of the trash by one inmate, and later secreted out of the jail by another. Together they paint a picture of a jail system awash in far more violence and disarray than previously revealed to the public.

Several of the clips recently reviewed by The Times show stabbings and fist fights. One shows an inmate trying to kill himself, and another shows several jailers punching a man in the head as they try to subdue him. Still another shows a woman giving birth in the middle of a hallway, where her newborn falls out onto the jail floor in a puddle of blood.

Some of the videos, all apparently taken from the jails’ surveillance systems, show men so inured to violence that they continue on with their daily routine, working out and reading even as bloody brawls and beatings by deputies unfold feet away. Other clips highlight a troubling inattentiveness from jailers, who are slow to respond or leave vulnerable inmates unattended.

After learning of the thumb drive and reviewing two of the videos, Michele Deitch — a senior lecturer in criminal justice at University of Texas at Austin — said she was “utterly stunned” by the brutality and lack of oversight, particularly after watching the 20-minute clip.

“There was absolutely no supervision,” she said. “That that could be happening with cameras on and no one comes is mind-boggling.”