News Burst 1 August 2023 – Featured News

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• Niger Republic has just suspended the export of uranium and gold to France this Sunday with immediate effect. While Protesters in Niger burned a French flag and shouted “Down with France!” as they supported the coup, according to Wazobia Reporters. “We have uranium, diamonds, gold, oil, and we live like slaves? We don’t need the French to keep us safe, ” one said. In an address on state television on Friday, the 62-year-old General Tchiani said he had taken control of the government to prevent “the gradual and inevitable demise” of the country. The African Union also demanded the military in Niger “return to their barracks and restore constitutional authority” within 15 days since it grabbed power.

 

• NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg has admitted that NATO has been supplying Ukraine with weapons since 2014. “We need to step up and sustain our support to Ukraine. That has been the message from NATO allies and partners now since the war started. And then we had to remember that the war actually started in 2014. What we saw in February last year was the full-fledged invasion and NATO allies have been providing, have provided support to Ukraine since 2014 that we stepped up after full-fledged invasion. Yes, the counteroffensive is of course extremely important, the Ukrainians are gaining ground, pushing back to the Russian occupiers, but they meet fierce resistance that dug in Russian positions, prepared defences, minefields, dragon teeth and a lot of other fixed defences. Of course this is a challenge. But again, the only answer from our side is to support Ukraine.”

 

• Saudi Arabia is preparing to host a summit to discuss Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plan for peace in his country amid the ongoing Russian invasion, according to a senior official in Kyiv. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the summit citing “diplomats involved in the discussion”, said the talks would take place on August 5 and 6, in the city of Jeddah, with some 30 countries attending. Previously, Ukraine has described the 10-point peace formula as including the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the withdrawal of Russian troops, the release of all prisoners, a tribunal for those responsible for the aggression and security guarantees for Ukraine. Russia has not been invited, according to the Associated Press news agency.

 

• The Ukrainian military has reportedly faced problems with the much-lauded Starlink communication system. Reports have popped up suggesting that Starlink has stopped operating in some parts of the Ukraine conflict zone. According to the Western press, SpaceX owner Elon Musk has repeatedly restricted his Starlink Internet access in some cases for the Ukrainian military, eventually backfiring on Kiev’s battlefield strategy. However, there is yet another possible explanation for the difficulties haunting Ukrainian military servicemen. “Based on the analysis of the [intercepted] chatter by Ukrainian militants on the line of contact, they had difficulties using the Internet via Starlink satellites [in the Lugansk tactical direction – Sputnik],” retired Lieutenant Colonel of the Lugansk People’s Republic Armed Forces Andrey Marochko told Sputnik on July 31. “Many attribute this to Russia using electronic warfare equipment to jam communications provided by SpaceX.”

 

• According to a report by the New York Times, a US government contractor that was revealed as having illegally and secretly used spyware made by the Israeli firm NSO Group was doing so as part of a contract with the FBI. The bureau now says it was lied to by the contractor. Earlier this year, the Times revealed a government contractor called Riva Networks had secretly concluded a contract with NSO in November 2021, just days after the Biden administration banned US companies from buying NSO’s spyware. The ban came after it was revealed that one of NSO’s most popular products, Pegasus, was being abused around the globe by governments intent on spying on journalists, activists and political dissidents. However, this product was different: the program was called Landmark and could secretly transmit a cell phone’s GPS location to the program’s user. The NYT report claimed the contract explicitly mentioned it being deployed in Mexico.

 

• “Scientists of the 68th Russian Antarctic Expedition of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, together with their colleagues from the Agrophysical Research Institute and the Institute for Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, successfully completed the first experiment on growing watermelons at the Antarctic station Vostok — the coldest place on Earth,” the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) said in a statement. Polar explorers managed to grow eight “ripe and sweet” watermelons in 103 days using the soilless technology of panoponics.

 

• Finnish astronomers have found a brand-new Northern Lights spectacle called the aurora borealis. Finland’s Ursa Astronomical Association stated that star watchers identified a distinctive red crescent shape in the sky accompanying the luminous Northern Lights. At first, admirers assumed it was the usual-renowned phenomenon – the stable auroral red (SAR) arc – they’ve known for over 50 years. However, further aurora research indicated that this red-colored curve and the greenish-white patterns illustrated by stargazers were generated by a solar wind, that is, a stream of solar particles. Regular auroras occur because of electrons in the solar gust, but the occurrence spotted recently emanates from heavier particles called protons – a remarkable discovery in more than 50 years.

 

• India’s Home Ministry informed the parliament last week that over 1 million adult women and more than 250,000 underage girls went missing across the country between 2019 and 2021, PTI news agency reported. The data was compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau. The figures come as a shocking revelation at a time when the nation is being rocked by the news coming out of Manipur, a remote state in India’s northeast, where crimes against women have become a visible part of the ongoing ethnic conflict.On Monday, the Supreme Court decried a “horrendous” incident in which two women were paraded naked and molested in Manipur, a video of which only became public months after the event took place. Commenting on the footage that shocked the nation, the Supreme Court said it was “deeply disturbed” and that using women as instruments for perpetrating violence was “simply unacceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

 

• Denmark will look for a legal mechanism to stop the public burning of the Quran, which has caused protests and fury across the Muslim world, Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said on Sunday. “We must find a legal tool that would allow us to prevent the Quran burning in front of foreign embassies in Denmark,” Rasmussen told public broadcaster DR, adding that these stunts “only serve the purpose of creating division.”

 

• Ukraine has received a new grant from the United States worth $1.25 billion to reimburse state budget expenses, including wages for state employees and social benefits, the Ukrainian Finance Ministry said on Monday. “The involved grant funding will be aimed at reimbursing state budget expenditures, in particular, to pay wages for government employees and payments under certain state social assistance programs (IDPs [internally displaced persons], people with disabilities, low-income families and housing, utility subsidies) and other social payments,” the ministry said. Ukraine has received $8.45 billion in US grants to support the state budget in 2023 alone, while as much as $20.4 billion has been disbursed since February 2022.

 

• New York City paid a mobile medical services company $432 million to carry out the mayor’s plan to bus thousands of migrants to upstate towns that didn’t want them, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The questionable no-bid contract, which was not approved by the city comptroller, saw DocGo pivot from offering Covid-19 testing and vaccination on-the-go to dumping asylum seekers in small towns and cities that didn’t have the resources to handle them, according to the investigation. Migrants told the NYT that they were lured upstate with promises of comfortable accommodation and plentiful work. Instead, they said, they were given fake work and residency permits, some printed on phoney New York City letterhead, all rejected when they tried to present them at the local Department of Motor Vehicles to secure an ID.

 

• Meteorite NWA 13188, originally discovered in Africa a few years ago, made headlines earlier this month when a team of scientists voiced their suspicions about this rock originating from our planet. If the researchers’ theory is to be believed, NWA 13188 was hurled into space some 10,000 years ago when an asteroid collided with Earth, to re-enter its atmosphere after spending up to a few thousand years in space. Commenting on this development, Natan Eismont, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute, told Sputnik that, while this hypothesis does seem plausible, this matter requires further investigation. “There are no contradictions here, unlike the cases involving some humanoids,” Eismont said, with the latter portion of his remark apparently referring to theories about intelligent alien life in space.

 

• More than 100 kinds of plant material for space breeding were sent to the Tiangong space station aboard the Shenzhou 16 mission, Chinese space officials have revealed. The 136 seeds and other plant genetic materials delivered to Tiangong in late May come from 53 institutions, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). These include 47 crops, consisting of 12 grain crop seeds, 28 cash crop seeds, seven saline-alkali tolerant plants, and 76 species of forest plants, grasses, flowers and medicinal plants. A further 13 microorganisms, including agricultural and industrial microorganisms, edible fungi, algae and mosses, are also part of the cornucopia of genetic material shipped to orbit.

News Burst 1 August 2023