The United States has concluded that Russia violated a landmark arms control treaty by testing a prohibited ground-launched cruise missile, according to senior American officials, a finding that was conveyed by President Obama to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in a letter on Monday.

It is the most serious allegation of an arms control treaty violation that the Obama administration has leveled against Russia and adds another dispute to a relationship already burdened by tensions over the Kremlin’s support for separatists in Ukraine and its decision to grant asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

At the heart of the issue is the 1987 treaty that bans American and Russian ground-launched ballistic or cruise missiles capable of flying 300 to 3,400 miles.  That accord, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, helped seal the end of the Cold War and has been regarded as a cornerstone of American-Russian arms control efforts.

Russia first began testing the cruise missiles as early as 2008, according to American officials, and the Obama administration concluded by the end of 2011 that they were a compliance concern.  In May 2013, Rose Gottemoeller, the State Department’s senior arms control official, first raised the possibility of a violation with Russian officials.

Thus, although current polls adjust our model’s forecast for individual races, the polls do not change our topline prediction, which is currently bullish for the GOP.

Why so bullish? Here’s an explanation in a nutshell.  Most analysts give the GOP a very good shot at controlling at least 46 seats.  See the list over at The Upshot.  Control of the Senate depends on nine apparently competitive seats: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Michigan.  The GOP needs to win at least five of those seats to control a majority (since the Democrats would presumably control the Senate with 50 seats, given Vice President Biden’s tie-breaking vote).

At the moment, our model suggests that the GOP has a very good chance of winning the Republican-leaning states: Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana.  That gives them five seats.  They also have a better than 50-50 chance of winning Iowa, where Joni Ernst’s recent surge has made the race neck-and-neck —a trend that is consistent with what our model suggested about the Iowa race back in May. Meanwhile, Democrats have a good chance of winning Colorado, Michigan, and North Carolina.

The updated forecast for the House is nothing surprising.  In line with what we’ve previously written, we estimate that the Democrats have less than a 1 percent chance of taking the House.   Our model currently estimates that the Democrats will win 193 seats, down slightly from the 201 they controlled after the 2012 election and the 199 they currently control, given existing vacancies.  We expect to update this forecast with additional data about the candidates once the primaries are over, and with polling data as well.  But, given how strong the Republicans’ position is, we would be surprised if any new information significantly altered the strong odds of continued Republican control.

Like almost everyone else in their village, Vivek and his family have no toilet, and the district where they live has the highest concentration of people who defecate outdoors.  As a result, children are exposed to a bacterial brew that often sickens them, leaving them unable to attain a healthy body weight no matter how much food they eat.

“These children’s bodies divert energy and nutrients away from growth and brain development to prioritize infection-fighting survival,” said Jean Humphrey, a professor of human nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  “When this happens during the first two years of life, children become stunted.  What’s particularly disturbing is that the lost height and intelligence are permanent.”

In a little-discussed but surprising finding, Muslim children in India are 17 percent more likely to survive infancy than Hindus, even though Muslims are generally poorer and less educated.  This enormous difference in infant mortality is explained by the fact that Muslims are far more likely to use latrines and live next to others also using latrines, a recent analysis found.

So widespread housing discrimination that confines many Muslims to separate slums may protect their children from increased exposure to the higher levels of waste in Hindu communities and, as a result, save thousands of Indian Muslim babies from death each year.

June's report, which the Indian government commissioned but hasn't formally endorsed, includes two major changes to the official methodology.  Using updated medical research, it sets minimum requirements for protein and fat in people's diets in addition to a baseline for mere calories.

In addition to the cost of food, the new formula adds the median monthly expenditure, in a government survey of 100,000 households, on four "essential" goods: education, clothing, shelter and transportation. An additional amount, for all other spending, is tacked on.

The result: You're poor in India if you earn less than 972 rupees a month in rural areas or 1,407 rupees a month in cities.  At market exchange rates, that is about $16 and $23, respectively.  The current thresholds are $14 and $17.

There has been some fanfare this week over the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11.  If the celebration has made you despair at the listless state of today’s space program, you may be comforted by another astronomical date, a sort of pre-anniversary: One year from now, for the first time in human history, a probe will reach Pluto.  The probe is a compact-car-sized NASA spaceship called New Horizons.  It left Earth in 2006.  Pluto’s a long way away.

Pluto used to be our smallest, remotest planet, the ninth planet from the sun.  In 2006, the International Astronomical Union redesignated Pluto as a “dwarf planet.”  Despite the indignation of everyone who grew up with a now-obsolete solar-system mnemonic, the demotion was not without justice.  According to the IAU, a planet ought to “clear its neighborhood” — that is, it should be the dominant massive object in its orbit.  In fact, Pluto is less than a tenth of the total mass following its path around the sun.  Earth, for reference, is very nearly 100 percent of the mass in our orbit.  Pluto is smaller than Earth’s moon.  It’s smaller than Saturn’s largest moon, and Neptune’s, and all four of Jupiter’s major, “Galilean” moons.

Last year, the National Labor Relations Board found that both sides were at fault:

NLRB regional director Ronald Hooks in Seattle says United Grain should have provided the union with a “timely, clear and complete offer” of what it needed to do to avoid to a lockout.

United Grain disputes the finding. An administrative law judge will hear the matter June 30.

Separately, Hooks said the longshoremen violated labor law by engaging in threats and violence early in the lockout.  For example, he said, picketers threw rocks at a security officer and threatened to rape a manager’s daughter.

I don't know about you, but to me violence, and threats of violence, seem worse than not making a clear offer.

United Grain continued operating, and the picketing continued.  As did threats of violence against anyone crossing the picket line, including state grain inspectors.   For a time, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee provided state patrol officers to protect those inspectors, but he has now withdrawn them.

With the expected result:

To assuage the fears of state inspectors from the Washington State Department of Agriculture, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee directed state troopers to provide an escort past the longshoremen’s picket lines in October 2013.

“They were being harassed. A lot of verbal abuse, obscenities and remarks our staff took as threats,” said Hector Castro, spokesman for the WSDA.

Citing a lack of progress in labor talks between ILWU and several Northwest grain handlers, Inslee discontinued those escorts, which caused state inspectors to stop entering the United Grain facility on July 7.

(WSDA = Washington State Department of Agriculture.)

If the grain isn't inspected, it can't be exported.

Let's summarize:  On the left side, we have Governor Inslee and the ILWU.   On the right side, we have United Grain, farmers and farm workers, all the people who move that grain from the farms to the markets, the state inspectors, and those starving children in Asia.  (All right, technically, not all of the food will go to children, and not all of the children are currently starving, though some of them are certainly very hungry.)  I know which side I'm on.

We can't say, from this evidence, that Governor Inslee doesn't care about those children (and all the others on the right side of that dispute), but we can say that he cares more about the ILWU than the children and the rest.  And we can say that he isn't put off by the ILWU's tactics.

By way of Lars Larson, who has an interview with Hector Castro you can listen to.

Mr. Daniels suggested the rainy-day funds, which totaled "somewhere in the mid-nine figures" and were kept by a host of academic departments for operating expenses, be moved out of low-interest-bearing accounts and put to better use.

It was the first of many steps Mr. Daniels has taken as he seeks to reorganize Purdue's sometimes-antiquated systems.  A year and a half into his tenure, Mr. Daniels has frozen tuition (for the first time in 36 years), cut the cost of student food by 10% and introduced volume purchasing to take advantage of economies of scale.
. . .
Mr. Daniels cut millions from state higher education as governor, but millions more pay for the administrative salaries that have ballooned at Purdue, along with most universities around the country.  At Purdue, there are now 75% more administrators and staff on the payroll than there were 13 years ago.

The Copenhagen Consensus Center process has won world-wide respect for its scrupulously fair methods and startling conclusions.  Its 2012 report, published in book form as "How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place," came to the conclusion that the top five priorities should be nutritional supplements to combat malnutrition, expanded immunization for children, and redoubled efforts against malaria, intestinal worms and tuberculosis.

Their point wasn't that these are the world's biggest problems, but that these are the problems for which each dollar spent on aid generates the most benefit.  Enabling a sick child to regain her health and contribute to the world economy is in the child's interest—and the world's.

The numbers produced by this exercise are eye-catching. Every dollar spent to alleviate malnutrition can do $59 of good; on malaria, $35; on HIV, $11.  As for fashionable goals such as programs intended to limit global warming to less than two degrees Celsius in the foreseeable future: just 2 cents of benefit for each dollar spent.

Forty years on, there are many genuine mysteries still surrounding Watergate, and "The Nixon Defense," for all its density and the publisher's claim that Dean has produced an "authoritative" work, doesn't begin to answer most of them.  We still don't even know who ordered the break-in or what the burglars were looking for.

The notorious underwear bomber's plot in 2009 to blow up a plane on Christmas Day failed because the explosives became 'degraded' after he wore the same pair of underpants for two weeks, according to a U.S. official.

A Bellevue anesthesiologist is taking an immediate voluntary leave of absence as federal investigators continue to build a case against him alleging he ran a large prostitution ring using young women smuggled from Thailand and housed in several of Bellevue's ritziest high rises.

Federal investigators say the doctor used BECU ATM machines at a busy downtown Bellevue intersection on Bellevue Way and 2nd Street to deposit thousands of dollars in cash from the prostitution ring and launder the money.

First lady Michelle Obama on Thursday night urged Democrats to “dig deep” into their pockets and “write a big fat check” before the midterm elections, but minutes later complained of too much money in politics.

The two U.S. women — Muna Osman Jama, 34, of Reston, and Hinda Osman Dhirane, 44, of Kent, Washington — were arrested Wednesday and have been charged with 20 counts each of providing material support to a foreign terrorist group, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.  The U.S. designated al-Shabab as a terrorist group in 2008; in 2012, leaders of al-Shabab and al-Qaida announced they were merging.

Jama faced an initial appearance Wednesday afternoon at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, and Dhirane appeared in U.S. District Court in Seattle.  Dhirane's husband, Rashid Jama Barhadle, told Seattle's KING-TV that she has done nothing wrong.