Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam plans to purchase two TaxiBots to move aircraft from the gate to the runway instead of using their own jet power, according to operator Royal Schiphol Group. It’s part of the airport’s effort to reduce pollution and make operations more sustainable.

Airports in Delhi and Bangalore, India, have conducted trials with a special aircraft tow vehicle. And Lufthansa tested a TaxiBot seven years ago. But Schiphol is the first airport in the world that wants to introduce sustainable taxiing on a large scale.

The TaxiBot is a semi-robotic hybrid towing vehicle made by Smart Airport Systems under license from Israel Aircraft Industries for taxiing airplanes with their power off. The system is based on a vehicle that connects to the aircraft and is controlled by the pilot. The special towing vehicles can reduce fuel consumption and noxious emissions, including CO2, as much as 85% and reduce noise pollution by 60%, according to the company. And it improves efficiency by reducing wasted time at the gate during engine start-up, speeding up aircraft turn times.

A previous trial at Schiphol showed that sustainable taxiing leads to 50% less fuel consumption during taxiing, in the process lowering CO2, nitrogen oxides and ultrafine particle emissions. Given the distance involved, these fuel savings can reach up to 65% percent when aircraft taxi to Schiphol’s runway, the airport operator said.

In his new book, “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism,” Matthew Continetti applies what scholars of all persuasions should do with American conservatism, treating it as a complex, contradictory movement, often at war between its populists and its intellectual elite wings. He pithily captures the liberal mindset with its refusal to treat conservatism as a serious intellectual force. //

“The Left sees conservatism as a long-running, berserk refusal to submit to the ministrations of liberal rule,” he writes.

He focuses less on what held the right together — the unifying issue of Cold War anti-communism until the Soviets imploded in 1991 — than on what tears them apart. Like any historian or pundit, he examines the past through the lens of the present. The election of Donald Trump with his “protectionism, immigration restrictionism, religiosity, and antipathy to foreign entanglements” was simply the latest skirmish between right-wing populism and intellectual conservatism. //

Continetti effectively documents this tug between conservative elites and conservative populists but does not really provide a way for them to come together. Without the “elites,” you don’t have articulated positions and “sweeping narratives” that inspire voters. Without the populists, you don’t have the true energy behind winning campaigns.

Until conservatives can reconcile the two the road ahead, even the fight against lightweights like Joe Biden will be rough.

Regime change, wrapped in all of its fantastical failure, is making a comeback in Washington, and no one seems to notice or even care. //

Sadly, history tells us how the war in Ukraine will end if we are lucky. Ukraine will be destroyed. Russia will take parts of its territory. Kyiv will join the European Union and NATO but not officially, integrating itself economically and getting billions in weapons to deter another Russian invasion. Russia will be massively weakened and completely dependent on China for its economic survival, selling anything it can to Beijing, including its best weapons, to survive.

What if we aren’t lucky, and the war drags on for months? Putin will keep upping the pressure, and we will do the same. With every bomb Russia drops on Ukraine, the moral outrage will keep rising and Western nations will give Ukraine more and more arms and sanction Russia in every way possible to the point that Russia will come close to collapse.

At some point, when Putin sees the Ukraine crisis as not a giant mistake but instead a fight for his own survival, true hell will break loose.

A newly obtained document includes Manos Antonakakis’s synopsis of what he told the special counsel’s team about the Alfa Bank hoax.

A Georgia Tech researcher’s candid reaction to the indictment of a former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer hints at an intriguing development in the Russia collusion scandal. Two days after the indictment dropped, the researcher told a university lawyer and other higher-ups that the special counsel had lied in the indictment about the Alfa Bank hoax, according to a document first obtained by The Federalist on Thursday.

But the details the Georgia Tech researcher explained instead reveal a more damning scenario concerning his peers’ potential access to data from the Executive Office of the President, or EOP, during the Trump transition period.