Recommended Sunday reading—March 5

Trump inherits a secret cyberwar against North Korean missiles

The North’s missiles soon began to fail at a remarkable pace. Some were destroyed, no doubt, by accident as well as by design. The technology the North was pursuing, using new designs and new engines, involved multistage rockets, introducing all kinds of possibilities for catastrophic mistakes. But by most accounts, the United States programme accentuated the failures. In The New York Times.

Village of bachelors carves out a road to welcome its first bride

“It is because of this road that I got married, otherwise I too would have been just one of the scores of bachelors here,” Ajay Kumar Yadav triumphantly told this reporter at the village, which can be reached only after a 10 km trek. For over 50 years, Barwan Kala has been an inaccessible corner, up on the Kaimur hills in the western most part of Bihar. It has not witnessed any band, baaja or baraat (marriage ceremony). In The Hindu.

How disappearing sea ice has put Arctic ecosystem under threat
In a few days the Arctic’s beleaguered sea ice cover is likely to set another grim record. Its coverage is on course to be the lowest winter maximum extent ever observed since satellite records began. These show that more than 2 million square kilometres of midwinter sea ice have disappeared from the Arctic in less than 40 years. The ice’s disappearance—triggered by global warming caused by rising carbon emissions from cars and factories—is likely to have profound implications for the planet. In The Guardian.

The marked woman

In the early twentieth century, the members of the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world, after oil was discovered under their reservation, in Oklahoma. Then they began to be mysteriously murdered off. In 1923, after the death toll reached more than two dozen, the case was taken up by the Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which was later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In The New Yorker.

Intolerance in US: Why Modi’s nationalism no longer works for Indian-Americans

Let it be stated, unequivocally, that the heinous murder of 32-year-old Indian techie Srinivas Kuchibhotla was brought about by a fatal mix of racism, ignorance, hate and rising intolerance in the United States. But, equally, it can and should be argued that his murder raises as many troubling questions for Narendra Modi’s India as it does for Donald Trump’s America. In Hindustan Times.