- Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has praised the police crackdown on anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protesters in the Canadian capital. With the demonstrations cleared, he told state media that trucks, campers, and vehicles seized from the protesters should be sold off, claiming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s controversial emergency powers allow him to do so. Despite video footage showing shocking scenes of police brutality, Watson said that officers had “done a remarkable job,” and were “very measured in their response.” At least 170 protesters have been arrested, more than 50 vehicles have been seized, and the government has frozen the bank accounts of at least 76 protest participants and supporters.
- Multiple stealth fighter jets were reportedly spotted intercepting a white orb UFO flying over Hawaii at the start of this week. It has been reported that “many witnesses” noticed the peculiar object hovering over the island of Oahu on Tuesday, February 12. According to UFO Sightings Daily, F-22 jets were caught responding to a series of reports, which said the object was seen stationary for a period of time.
- New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced a systemwide crackdown on homeless people sheltering in the subway. Announcing his plan to cleanse the city’s subways of the homeless people who use them as a place to sleep, panhandle, or threaten other passengers during a Friday press conference, Adams declared, “The system is not meant to be housing. It’s made to be transportation, and we have to return back to that basic philosophy.”
- In a Saturday statement, the Australian military claimed one of its P-8A Poseidon spy planes “detected a laser illuminating the aircraft while in flight over Australia’s northern approaches.” “The laser was detected as emanating from a People’s Liberation Army – Navy (PLA-N) vessel,” the statement alleged, calling the “illumination of the aircraft by the Chinese vessel” a “serious safety incident.” The Chinese vessel was allegedly sailing east through the Arafura Sea, between Papua New Guinea and Australia, at the time of the incident.
- Ghislaine Maxwell’s brother told the New York Post that their family “fears for her safety” at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center following the deaths of Epstein and Brunel. Ian Maxwell also insisted that his sister is not suicidal. Following news of Brunel’s death, Ian Maxwell told the Post that it was “really shocking” there had been “another death by hanging in a high-security prison,” and said his reaction was “one of total shock and bewilderment.”
- The FBI, National Security Agency, and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a report on Wednesday alleging that since at least January 2020, the hackers have been collecting information that is unclassified but contains “significant insight into US weapons platforms development and deployment timelines.” The attacks apparently hit contractors working for all the branches of the military, including the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Space Force, as well as companies working for US intelligence programs. The firms that were targeted include ones involved in aircraft design and the development of combat and weapons systems.
- Senator Margarita Pavlova, one of the bill’s authors, told RIA Novosti that lawmakers in the country’s upper house of parliament were working on expanding the list of banned subject matter and intended to include radical feminist material and content promoting voluntary childlessness among the prohibited topics. “We are working with Roskomnadzor on a bill to expand the lists of topics of destructive content to be blocked,” the senator said. Roskomnadzor is the government body that oversees communications, information technology, and mass media.
- A Yemeni spy chief implicated in torture. The sons of an Azerbaijani strongman who rules a mountainous territory as his own private fiefdom. Bureaucrats accused of looting Venezuela’s oil wealth and hastening its descent into humanitarian crisis. They come from all over the world, each associated with a different corrupt, authoritarian regime and each enriching themselves in their own way. But there is one thing that unites them: Where they kept their money. After its luxury watches, snow-capped mountains and superior chocolates, the Alpine nation of Switzerland is perhaps known best for its secretive banking sector. And at the heart of that sector is Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse. More than 160 reporters from 48 outlets have obtained leaked records identifying more than 18 000 accounts belonging to foreign customers who stashed their money at Credit Suisse. Dozens of the accounts belonged to corrupt politicians, criminals, spies, dictators and other dubious characters. These are not obscure names, their misdeeds often identifiable through a simple Google search. And yet, their accounts – which held more than US$8 billion (about N$121 billion) – remained open for years. “The irony is that Switzerland has become the place for dirty money to go because it is pure, well-managed, reliable,” says James Henry, a senior adviser to the United Kingdom charity Tax Justice Network who has studied tax evasion at Credit Suisse. “The business model of taking money out of poor countries is the problem.”
- Six Icelandic-owned companies are trying to defeat every attempt to have some of their directors prosecuted because of their involvement in large-scale fraud and corruption in Namibia’s fishing sector, a lawyer representing the prosecutor general argued in the Windhoek High Court yesterday. Directors of the companies Esja Holding, Mermaria Seafood Namibia, Saga Seafood, Heinaste Investments (Namibia), Saga Investment and Esja Investment are declaring that they will “fight tooth and nail” to avoid being sent to Namibia to face charges in the Fishrot corruption and fraud case. This attempt by the companies is evidence of their arrogance, South African senior counsel Wim Trengove charged.
- Female Moroccan university students have broken their silence about professors demanding sexual favours in return for good grades, a scandal that has shaken the higher education system. “I was expelled from university a year ago under the pretext that I had cheated on an exam,” said 24-year-old student Nadia, who declined to give her full name. “The truth is that I had just refused to submit to sexual blackmail from one of my professors.” The Hassan I University in Settat, near Casablanca, where she was eventually re-admitted, is now embroiled in a scandal involving five professors. One was sentenced to a two-year prison term this month for demanding sexual favours for good grades, in the first such verdict, while four others are due to face court monday. “My case was not an isolated one,” said Nadia.
- A boater from California who fell into the Santa Barbara Channel in the middle of the night earlier this month told reporters that he was preparing to die until a seal came to his rescue and pushed him to a nearby oil rig. In an interview with ABC7, Scott Thompson said he accidentally fell overboard while on his boat several miles off the coast of Santa Barbara. As he swam, he suddenly heard a splash and felt something touch his leg. “It was a medium-sized harbour seal…The seal would go underwater and he came up and nudged me like a dog comes up and nudges your leg,” Thompson said, adding that he believed that was “an angel” who came to his rescue. It took him five hours to reach the rig, where he was rescued and given medical aid. He was then taken to hospital and treated for hypothermia.
- Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said he sees no reason to revise the country’s policy of not joining NATO, but acknowledged that such discussions are currently taking place amid the worsening situation in Ukraine. Speaking with CNN, Niinisto was asked whether the current crisis in Ukraine may sway Finland, which has a 130 mile-long border with Russia and, like Kiev, is not a NATO member, to rethink its position on not joining the alliance. “There’s a lot of discussion on this subject just now, and I think we’ll continue that discussion. And depending on what really happens in Ukraine, it might even get a lot more likely,” Niinisto said.
- Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov has commented on the latest escalation of tensions in eastern Ukraine, saying that it is inappropriate to talk about a Russian invasion in the coming days. “Today, as of this hour, Russia has not formed yet a strike force in any city where it surrounded Ukraine. Therefore, it is inappropriate, in my opinion, to talk about the attack tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. But this does not mean that the risks are low, and it does not mean that there is no threat. I want to remind our partners that the threat has existed since 2013,” Reznikov told Ukraine’s 1+1 broadcaster.
- The M-dwarf star, in the Aquarius constellation –named after the ground-based Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, the facility that first found evidence of planets around it in 2015– is orbited by seven temperate planets similar in size and mass to Earth, of which three show particular potential for habitability, receiving about as much energy from their host star as the Earth receives from the Sun. “If planet TRAPPIST-1 e did not lose all of its water during the early phase,” explains astrobiologist Andrew Lincowski at the University of Washington, “today it could be a water world, completely covered by a global ocean. In this case, it could have a climate similar to Earth.”
News Burst 21 February 2022
Rose Rambles... 