Russia Secretly Worms Its Way into America’s Conservative Media | These Are the Asteroids That Scare Scientists. Are We Prepared for Them?, and more

The Kremlin has long sought to exploit divisions on both sides of the American political spectrum, but contentious conservative voices provide ample fodder for its own propaganda, especially when it involves criticism of the Biden administration or, more broadly, of the country’s foreign policy, including support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
The indictment detailed the lengths Russia went to try to make Tenet a player in the country’s political discourse, while obfuscating the fact that it was footing the bill.

If a Threat Is Not a Crime, Can the Police Prevent a School Shooting?  (Patricia Mazzei, New York Times)
Could law enforcement officials have done more to prevent it?
The painful and inevitable question has frequently dogged the police after shootings. Experts say that most mass shooters display warning signs before becoming violent, and officials have often received tips, calls or reports about concerning behavior, sometimes long before someone picks up a weapon.
But law enforcement officers, at least under traditional police training, are limited in what they can do in response. If a crime has not been committed or a subject does not meet the criteria to be sent for an involuntary mental health evaluation, the case is often closed.
“It’s easy in hindsight to say, ‘Well, they should have done more,’” said Adam Winkler, a law professor and gun policy expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But how many times do police get these leads that people are saying things online that are intercepted as threats that don’t lead to that kind of violence?”
The sheer number of shootings in the United States, however, has led to a nationwide push to rethink traditional policing when it comes to threats of mass violence. The ambitious effort would require training officers to work in multidisciplinary teams to identify troubling behavior early and monitor it over time in order to disrupt it.
“Law enforcement has to change its mind-set,” said Sheriff Bob Gualtieri of Pinellas County, Fla., who for six years has led a state commission investigating school violence after a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

How Telegram Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists  (Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano, Aaron Krolik, and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times)
Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by The New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company, which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities, has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app.
The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who coordinate activities among almost one million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons. In at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries.
Hamas, ISIS and other terror groups have thrived on Telegram, often amassing large audiences across dozens of channels. The Times analyzed more than 40 channels associated with Hamas, which showed that average viewership surged up to 10 times after the Oct. 7 attacks, garnering more than 400 million views in October.
Telegram is “the most popular place for ill-intentioned, violent actors to congregate,” said Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department. “If you’re a bad guy, that’s where you will land.”
Operating like a stateless organization, Telegram has long behaved as if it were above the law — though that may be changing. Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder of the platform, was arrested and charged in France last month for failure to cooperate with law enforcement and complicity in crimes committed on the service, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud.
In many democratic countries, patience with the app is wearing thin. The European Union is exploring new oversight of Telegram under the Digital Services Act, a law that forces large online platforms to police their services more aggressively, two people familiar with the plans said.

These Are the Asteroids That Scare Scientists. Are We Prepared for Them?  (Editorial, Washington Post)
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago was a once-in-a-250,000-centuries event; Earth is nowhere near due for another. In fact, smaller space rocks — not species-killers, but still big enough to cause catastrophe — are the ones that really worry experts. The planet should ensure it’s ready for them. Thankfully, humans have more tools than the dinosaurs did to face the threat.
Naturally, the bigger an asteroid is, the more damage it does. But there are many more small asteroids than large ones, and that means these hit Earth (or come close to it) more frequently. Because they’re smaller, they are, of course, more difficult to detect.
So-called dinosaur-killers are multiple miles in diameter: Imagine a slightly rounder version of Mount Everest hurtling toward us through space. Scientists say they already know the location of 95 percent of asteroids large enough to cause a potential global catastrophe (admittedly, this leaves an unsettling question: What about the other 5 percent?), rendering them less worrisome than their size might suggest. The smallest of small asteroids are similarly not a concern; about the size of a car, they tend to burn up in the atmosphere without having the chance to wreak any havoc.
That leaves the Goldilocks asteroids — those that are just right, or just wrong. They’re small enough to escape Earthly notice, and large enough to do real damage. These are the rocks that scare the scientists who study them. Some are about 150 meters in diameter. They arrive every 20,000 years or so and could cause mass casualties across a state or small country. Others measure around 50 meters, and they arrive approximately every 1,000 years. That might seem like a long time, but not when they could devastate a major metropolitan area.
The good news is that researchers don’t know of any asteroid on course to collide with Earth within the next 100 years that has the capacity to cause serious damage. The bad news: It doesn’t mean that none exist. Right now, astronomers think they’ve found somewhere around 40 percent of those country-smashing asteroids and just more then 10 percent of the city-destroyers. We’ve already gotten a hint of what could happen if one gets through without warning: Remember the meteor — about 20 meters wide — that obliterated about 50 acres’ worth of window glass in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013? The shock wave also leveled a forest. About 1,500 people were injured.