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Russia

Gorbachev To Putin: Your Time Is Up

The 80-year-old former Soviet leader says Vladimir Putin's best days are behind him. Putin, Russia's current prime minister, is hoping to regain the presidency in next month's election.

Gorbachev will be 81 next month (Veni Markovski)
Gorbachev will be 81 next month (Veni Markovski)

MOSCOW – Less than a month before Russia's presidential election, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev used a public lecture to both criticize the candidacy of Vladimir Putin and offer his services to monitor the vote.

Speaking at Moscow's International University, Gorbachev said Putin had done "some useful things' but that the current prime minister now the presidential frontrunner had "exhausted" his reserves of leadership of the country.

Instead, the 80-year-old Gorbachev said it was time to find "solid candidates' for the Duma, the Russian parliament, instead of appointments through nepotism.

A Nobel peace prize winner who served from 1985 to 1991 as the last leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev also said he was available to help run the Voters' League, which was set up last month to promote a fair election and monitor against fraud at the polls. It was the Voters' League coined the slogan "for fair elections," which was used at the rallies that brought tens of thousands out onto the streets last weekend.

"Yes, I would have agreed to head the League of Voters. If the situation does not change after the elections, we will go out into the streets," Gorbachev said.

The monitoring group said it had received a "strange letter" from Putin's team, requesting that it send a representative it could work with during the election campaign.

Last month, while in London, Gorbachev criticized Russia's electoral system, saying it needed a "major readjustment."

Read the full article in Russian by Maria Makutina

Photo - Veni Markovski

*Newsbites are digest items, not direct translations

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Green

Forest Networks? Revisiting The Science Of Trees And Funghi "Reaching Out"

A compelling story about how forest fungal networks communicate has garnered much public interest. Is any of it true?

Thomas Brail films the roots of a cut tree with his smartphone.

Arborist and conservationist Thomas Brail at a clearcutting near his hometown of Mazamet in the Tarn, France.

Melanie Jones, Jason Hoeksema, & Justine Karst

Over the past few years, a fascinating narrative about forests and fungi has captured the public imagination. It holds that the roots of neighboring trees can be connected by fungal filaments, forming massive underground networks that can span entire forests — a so-called wood-wide web. Through this web, the story goes, trees share carbon, water, and other nutrients, and even send chemical warnings of dangers such as insect attacks. The narrative — recounted in books, podcasts, TV series, documentaries, and news articles — has prompted some experts to rethink not only forest management but the relationships between self-interest and altruism in human society.

But is any of it true?

The three of us have studied forest fungi for our whole careers, and even we were surprised by some of the more extraordinary claims surfacing in the media about the wood-wide web. Thinking we had missed something, we thoroughly reviewed 26 field studies, including several of our own, that looked at the role fungal networks play in resource transfer in forests. What we found shows how easily confirmation bias, unchecked claims, and credulous news reporting can, over time, distort research findings beyond recognition. It should serve as a cautionary tale for scientists and journalists alike.

First, let’s be clear: Fungi do grow inside and on tree roots, forming a symbiosis called a mycorrhiza, or fungus-root. Mycorrhizae are essential for the normal growth of trees. Among other things, the fungi can take up from the soil, and transfer to the tree, nutrients that roots could not otherwise access. In return, fungi receive from the roots sugars they need to grow.

As fungal filaments spread out through forest soil, they will often, at least temporarily, physically connect the roots of two neighboring trees. The resulting system of interconnected tree roots is called a common mycorrhizal network, or CMN.

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