Putin orders Russia to respond after US missile test

MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military on Friday to
work out a quid pro quo response after the test of a new U.S. missile banned under
a now-defunct arms treaty. Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a meeting
with members of the Security Council in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Friday, Aug.
23, 2019. Putin ordered the Russian military to ponder a quid pro quo response
after Sunday's test of a new U.S. missile banned under a now-defunct arms treaty.
(Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) In Sunday's test, a modified
ground-launched version of a U.S. Navy Tomahawk cruise missile accurately struck
its target more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) away. The test came after Moscow
and Washington withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF)
Treaty. Speaking at a meeting of his Security Council, Putin charged that the U.S.
waged a "propaganda campaign" alleging Russian breaches of the pact to "untie its
hands to deploy the previously banned missiles in different parts of the world." He
ordered the Defense Ministry and other agencies to "take comprehensive measures to
prepare a symmetrical answer." The U.S. said it withdrew from the treaty because of
Russian violations, a claim that Moscow has denied. In an interview this week with
Fox News, Defense Secretary Mark Esper asserted that the Russian cruise missiles
Washington has long claimed were a violation of the now-defunct Intermediate-range
Nuclear Forces, or INF, treaty, might be armed with nuclear warheads. "Right now
Russia has possibly nuclear-tipped cruise - INF-range cruise missiles facing toward
Europe, and that, that's not a good thing," Esper said. The Russian leader noted
that Sunday's test was performed from a launcher similar to those deployed at a
U.S. missile defense site in Romania. He argued that the Romanian facility and a
prospective similar site in Poland could also be loaded with missiles intended to
hit ground targets instead of interceptors. Putin has previously pledged that
Russia wouldn't deploy the missiles previously banned by the INF Treaty to any area
before the U.S. does that first, but he noted Friday that the use of the universal
launcher means that a covert deployment is possible. "How would we know what they
will deploy in Romania and Poland — missile defense systems or strike missile
systems with a significant range?" Putin said. A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col.
Robert Carver, disputed Putin's assertion that the land-based U.S. missile defense
system in Romania could be used to launch ground-attack missiles. He said the U.S.
launch system in Romania, known as Aegis Ashore, "does not have the capability to
fire offensive weapons of any kind," including a cruise missile like the Tomahawk
variant used in the Aug. 18 U.S. test. "It can only launch the SM-3 interceptor,
which does not carry an explosive warhead," Carver said, adding that it would take
"industrial-level construction to reconfigure it to fire offensive weapons. That
reconfiguration would entail major equipment installation and software changes."
Russia long has charged that the U.S. launchers loaded with missile defense
interceptors could be used for firing surface-to-surface missiles. Putin said that
Sunday's test has proven that the U.S. denials have been false. "It's indisputable
now," the Russian leader said. He added the missile test that came just 16 days
after the INF treaty's termination has shown that the U.S. long had started work on
the new systems banned by the treaty. While Putin hasn't spelled out possible
retaliatory measures, some Moscow-based military experts theorized that Russia
could adapt the sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles for use from ground launchers.
The Interfax news agency quoted a retired Russian general, Vladimir Bogatyryov, as
saying that Moscow could put such missiles in Cuba or Venezuela if the U.S. deploys
new missiles near Russian borders. Putin said Russia will continue working on new
weapons in response to the U.S. moves, but will keep a tight lid on spending. "We
will not be drawn into a costly arms race that would be disastrous for our
economy," Putin said, adding that Russia ranks seventh in military spending after
the U.S., China, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France and Japan. He added Russia remains
open to an "equal and constructive dialogue with the U.S. to rebuild mutual trust
and strengthen international security." ___ Robert Burns in Washington contributed
to this report. Copyright 2019 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Should Schools Teach the Scientific Method? New Book Says Maybe Not

Think back to what you still remember from science class. No, there’s no need to
strain your brain recalling the particulars of cellular mitosis or the periodic
table. Instead, consider the idea that spanned any science class from biology to
physics: the scientific method, the five-step process for analyzing problems,
collecting data and coming to a well-supported conclusion. But what if the
scientific method is actually inaccurate—or at best reductive? What if spending so
much time on this framework is giving students the wrong idea about how rigorous
work is done by scientists? That’s the unusual hypothesis being made by John
Rudolph, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author
of “How We Teach Science: What's Changed, and Why It Matters.” We sat down with
Rudolph to talk about the fascinating history of teaching the subject in the U.S.,
and why we’re still searching for the right approach. Along the way he touched on
the perils of teaching climate change in schools and why all those AP science
classes might not be the best use of students’ time. Listen to the discussion on
this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast. You can follow the podcast on the Apple Podcast
app, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play Music or wherever you listen. Or read a portion
of the interview below, lightly edited for clarity. EdSurge: Tell us a little bit
about your book, which focuses quite a bit on the history of science. Rudolph: I
wrote an earlier book on the science education reform during the cold war, after
Sputnik. The great thing about the postwar period is that scientists, with the
atomic bomb and everything, have great archives of materials. All these records and
papers had been saved. Going through the letters of some of these scientists, there
were some really rich conversations. As they began to look at what was going on in
science classrooms, they zeroed in on the scientific method. They said, “What?”
There is some very colorful language about the scientific method they teach in
schools, and it caught my eye. I'm thinking to myself, “There's something about the
process of science—or how science is done that seems really important to them.” I
began to look at how has the process of science or the scientific method been
taught going back to when science first appeared in schools in the early 1800s to
the present. And it turned out to be a really interesting story about tensions
between professional educators and scientists who said, “No, that's not how science
is done. This is how science is done,” and back and forth over the last 130 or 140
years. It turns out there's a lot to be interested in—or concerned about—regarding
how we teach the process of science to students. What are some of those lessons
from the past that can inform our present? In the early or middle 1800s, science
was brought in as an information subject—i.e., we should teach it because it’s a
utilitarian, useful thing. Science was then taught as the facts of the world. Learn
these facts, and you'll be able to do things. That was the justification for why it
was in schools. That shifted in the late 1800s, as these scientists came back from
Europe. They said, students should work in laboratories and do science to learn
science. That was the beginning of the laboratory method. Once education grew and
more students went to school, science education wasn’t for such a select group of
students. It was for the masses. Along comes John Dewey who says science should be
used in everyday life: He introduced what is commonly thought of as the scientific
method. There's a problem, you gather evidence, you come to a conclusion. It
matters whether the method is something that students think anyone can do, or if
it's something that’s just the province of experts in the scientific research
fields. This was the challenge, the struggle that happened in the post-war period.
The scientists said the five-step scientific method is not an accurate description
of how science works, and it gives the public the impression that anybody can do
science. Another lesson is this notion that ever since that time period, there was
always this view that the best way to teach science was to have students do science
—this notion that science pedagogy should be the same thing as the process of
science. That's been problematic—as I show in the book—because almost no teachers,
high school or middle school teachers, have actually done science. They’re not
scientists. They've have no expertise in scientific research, and yet they're
supposed to lead students through the process of science. They revert to teaching,
almost by rote, these steps of a scientific method. But if you take away students
from doing science, is there a risk of making it inaccessible, considering you
write in the book that you still need a lot of public support for science? I don't
think that I would argue that you take students away from doing science. I think
that that shouldn’t be the only avenue to understanding science. I think there are
larger things to learn about science—the big ideas, the theories, the way we think
the world works. Part of that learning can come from the students doing science. I
think we need to broaden what we teach students about how science works. Think
about macro-evolutionary change. You don't do an experiment to demonstrate that.
You gather indirect evidence. You make arguments from historical patterns in fossil
data or biogeographic distributions. That’s a different way of doing science. This
is the problem we run into with climate change issues. There's not a way to easily
demonstrate, “Oh, I can prove, through doing an experiment, that climate change is
happening and humans are causing it.” What I would argue for is having students
participate or do some of these things but have a range of methods of science, and
to understand that different phenomena use different types of scientific
methodologies and techniques, and appreciate then that science is many things, not
just one thing. I think that’s an important lesson to learn. In the conclusion, you
wrote that economic concerns also influenced what's being taught in science, and
now there's a big push for college and career readiness. Can you talk about how
that influences what's actually being taught in the classroom? You have this push
now with the Next Generation Science Standards. There's definitely a focus on
wanting students to engage in the process of science. At the same time, just look
at the world we live in, with the increase in income inequality and parents wanting
to give their kids a leg up. So schools are all about, “Oh, we want to offer more
science classes, more AP classes.” You've got the pressure from state agencies, so
you have states and districts focused on student achievement-test scores. When you
look at students, they want to take X number of AP classes, not because they want
to develop a deep understanding of what science is, but because they want to gather
these credentials that’ll increase their admission chances to the elite colleges
they want to get into. It leads to a shift to focus on content knowledge because
it’s easy to assess. It’s very difficult to test students’ understanding of how
science works—the process of science. Is teaching subjects like climate change
going to be a hard sell in today's world, where there's something of a mistrust of
science? It's going to be a hard sell for a couple of reasons. There have been some
studies done of how science teachers themselves understand climate change, and they
don't always have a complete grasp of where that information has come from and how
that science works. It's a challenge, always, to get from what the scientists know
or what we think should be taught into classrooms across the country. Then you have
this false balanced treatment, where teachers sense the notion of: This is
controversial; I need to be careful about what I say. A lot of times, the political
authority and control comes from local school districts, and so those teachers need
to be careful about how they approach these things. Otherwise kids go home and tell
their parents. It’s the same problem we ran into with teaching evolution in the
schools. What can an individual teacher do to rethink science instruction and the
way that it's taught in their classroom? Take the population as a whole—all the
students in your classes. Think about how many actually go to college, how many
graduate from college and how many major in science. The numbers tail off quickly,
and you get maybe 10 percent or fewer of those students that are sitting in class
who are going to have any appreciable deep future in science. What do you do with
the other 80 or 90 percent of the students? You need to think of a different way of
teaching science than thinking, “I need to prepare them for college science,” which
typically ends up being a lot of content memorization. I think teachers should do
what they can to think about, “What does a citizen or a member of the general
public need to understand?” And I think that has more to do with how science works
than with the content of the scientific disciplines.
David Ignatius: The China challenge is America's new Sputnik moment

No result found, try new keyword!LA JOLLA, Calif. — One of the weirdest aspects of
this year's Democratic presidential campaign is that foreign policy, potentially
one of President Trump's most vulnerable issues, has been ...