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- Saudi Arabia executed on Saturday 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from killings to belonging to militant groups, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history. The number of executed surpassed even the toll of a January 1980 mass execution for the 63 militants convicted of seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, the worst-ever militant attack to target the kingdom and Islam’s holiest site. It wasn’t clear why the kingdom choose Saturday for the executions. The number of death penalty cases being carried out in Saudi Arabia had dropped during the coronavirus pandemic, though the kingdom continued to behead convicts under King Salman and his assertive son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
- The Italian authorities have seized a yacht belonging to Andrey Melnichenko, the owner of major fertilizer producer EuroChem Group and coal company SUEK. The move comes just days after the billionaire was included on the EU’s sanction list along with 13 other businessmen from Russia. According to the Italian government, the world’s biggest sailing yacht was seized at the northern port of Trieste on March 11. The 143-meter (470-foot) vessel, designed by Philippe Starck and built by Nobiskrug in Germany, is reportedly worth €530 million ($578 million).
- YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has shut down the Ruptly channel, the video agency’s head, Dinara Toktosunova, said on Saturday in a Telegram post. The removal of RT’s German-language RT DE channel “turned out to be just a tryout,” she added, referring to YouTube’s decision to block RT DE in September 2021. “Now, it does the same to everything that has anything to do with Russia,” Toktosunova wrote in her Saturday post. The media manager also called Ruptly “the most popular channel among all international video agencies” on YouTube, pointing to its 2.1 million subscribers and a total of more than 1.5 billion views. “Ruptly has always presented unredacted pictures without any comments,” Toktosunova said. As of now, the channel is marked on YouTube as “unavailable in your country.”
- Russia could leave Western investors with huge losses if it is not allowed to pay off bond holders due to its foreign currency holdings being frozen abroad. Fitch ratings agency downgraded Russia’s sovereign rating further into junk territory on Tuesday, saying a default was imminent. Russia is due to pay $107 million in coupon payments on two bonds on March 16. Foreign banks have exposure of just over $121 billion to Russia with much of that concentrated in European lenders, according to data from the Bank of International Settlements cited by Reuters.
- The US Treasury Department has authorized non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to conduct humanitarian work, including “democracy building,” in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) – which were recognized by Moscow as independent states last month. In a statement announcing new sanctions against Russian individuals and businesses on Friday, the Treasury Department revealed that its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) had issued a license “to authorize certain transactions” in the DPR and LPR.
- US hedge funds have reportedly been told to freeze the assets of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich after British authorities imposed sanctions on him. “Currently accounts attributed to Roman Abramovich are blocked from transacting, as such any distributions, redemptions or payment cannot be made and no subscriptions or contributions can be accepted,” hedge-fund administrator SS&C Globe Op told one firm, the Wall Street Journal reported. Sources told the media that similar messages had been sent to other hedge funds. Empyrean Capital Partners, Millstreet Capital Management, Millennium Management, and Sculptor Capital Management are reportedly among the funds in which Abramovich has invested.
- According to various reports, North American government officials have been demanding the removal of Russian vodka from store shelves. But it turns out that almost none of it imported to the continent is actually made in Russia. The brands – Smirnoff or Stolichnaya, for example – just sound Russian. A bar in the state of Maryland has also renamed the classic Russian Mule cocktail, rebranding it a “Kyiv Mule”. And Magic Mountain ski resort, in Vermont, tweeted a video showing a bar man dumping bottles of Stoli – already bought and paid for, presumably – down the drain, apparently unaware that the brand is actually Latvian, with operations in Ukraine.
- YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced on Friday it would block access to “Russian state media” channels across the globe and block all monetization on its platform inside Russia, citing the conflict in Ukraine. On March 1, YouTube announced on Friday it was expanding this censorship to the entire planet, and including all channels “associated with Russian state-funded media.”
- Turkey is not going to impose sanctions on Russia, but will instead work to maintain dialogue with the Kremlin, Turkey’s TRT Haber TV channel reported on Friday, citing Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesperson for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Kalin also pointed out that Turkey would want to avoid any negative repercussions for its own economy as a result of punitive measures. Turkey, unlike most other NATO countries, has stopped short of slapping punitive measures on Russia. Ankara instead is seeking to mediate between the two warring sides in the hope of brokering a peace deal, or at least a ceasefire. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told Turkish media on Friday that the alliance expects “all our allies to impose sanctions” on Russia, and that he “conveyed this matter” to Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu during their meeting in Antalya.
- Joe Biden designated Qatar and Colombia as major non-NATO allies of the US on Thursday, a special status that will grant the two nations defense and trade privileges in their relations with Washington. The major non-NATO ally status has been granted to over 15 nations around the world. It provides US partners with economic privileges such as loans, cooperative research, and even exclusive defense contracts with NATO countries.
- On 11 March, the UN Security Council convened at Russia’s request to discuss the “biological activities of the US on the territory of Ukraine”. Earlier, the Russian Ministry of Defence discovered 30 biolabs in Ukraine and released documents indicating collaboration between Kiev and the Pentagon on studying highly dangerous pathogens. “The US State Department says that the public mission of the biolabs in Ukraine is about securing Cold War era Soviet bioweapons”, says former Pentagon analyst and retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski. “The companies that operate and have constructed these labs competed far more recently for contracts awarded by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), so the Cold war or Soviet era weapons disposal rings hollow. In fact, the successful 2014 US colour revolution in Ukraine opened the door for fresh DTRA contracts, and these facilities appear to be relatively modern. What they are working on is not strictly defensive, and Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland publicly stated as much before the US Congress a few days ago”. Nuland’s exchange with Senator Marco Rubio during the Tuesday hearings at the Senate triggered a heated debate, given that Washington had previously strongly denied the presence of any US-run biolabs in Ukraine. When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons”, Nuland admitted that “Ukraine has biological research facilities.” What’s more, as US independent journalist Glenn Greenwald later remarked, she immediately “destroyed… any hope to depict such ‘facilities’ as benign or banal”.
- Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta announced that calls for violence and death against Russian soldiers and Russian President Vladimir Putin would be temporarily allowed in its social media networks in the context of Moscow’s special military operation to demilitarise and de-Nazify Ukraine. “The Facebook platform was always based on an illusion of inclusivity, itself being the creation of a person incapable of understanding the concept,” says Dr. Binoy Kampmark, senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. “In truth, it is based on the dogma of the algorithm, the excitement caused by searches and controversy, the value-free prism of extravagant ‘debate’. Racism and xenophobia are sexy components to the Facebook vision, and say much about their founder. The fact that the platform is openly endorsing a position against a country or nationality is an admission that it is coming clean: to hate is to sell.”
- The star of the musical drama “Empire”, Jussie Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in jail. In January 2019, the actor, who is Black and gay, said he was a victim of a hate crime. He stated that two men wearing ski masks assaulted him in the street and yelled racial and homophobic slurs at him. Police detained the perpetrators, who also turned out to be Black. Later, it became known that they had worked as extras on the set of the musical drama “Empire”, where Smollet starred, and that one of them was gay. The men told the police that the actor actually paid them to stage a crime in order to promote his career. Aside from a jail sentence, the 39-year-old actor paid over $120,000 in restitution to the city of Chicago and $25,000 in fines. Prosecutors said police spent over 3,000 hours investigating the purported hate crime and had interviewed dozens of witnesses, walking door-to-door during Chicago’s Polar Vortex, one of the coldest period in the city’s history.
- NASA has conducted a month-long exercise to prepare for an asteroid impact. Not that there is one threatening Earth right now, but the US space agency wants its personnel and American officials to be ready if and when one should arise. The exercise, which was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, was divided into stages corresponding to ever increasing levels of awareness of officials of the asteroid threat. With the current level of technology, no government can predict an impact when an asteroid is too far away. That was the first stage of NASA’s exercise after the scientists “discovered” the hypothetical 2022 TTX asteroid that was due to collide with Earth in six months, according to the scenario. As the participants of the exercise progressed through the scenario, they received additional information on 2022 TTX’s properties, helping them take further steps to avert disaster.
News Burst 13 March 2022
Rose Rambles... 