News Burst 4 July 2023 – Get The News! – July 4, 2023

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• After an inspection of the civil defense facilities in the city of Odessa, the Ukrainian authorities found the infrastructure to be 90% deficient. An investigation has been opened to understand what happened to the funds allocated, around 5 million euros, for the repairs of the same bunkers found unusable, or with serious defects. 4,989,852 euros . The money that was supposed to be used for the maintenance of the city’s air-raid shelters disappeared into thin air. The Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation into the matter: 90% of the fallout shelters in the Prymorsk district, Odessa region, have been recognized as dysfunctional or defective, despite the “copious” repairs amounting to a financing of approximately 200 million hryvnias (approximately 5 million euros).

• There is a 4-year-old girl in rural Arkansas. The girl is aware that her father is Hunter Biden and that her paternal grandfather is the president of the United States. The story surrounding the president’s grandchild in Arkansas, who is not named in court papers, is a tale of two families — one of them powerful, one of them not. But at its core, the story is about money, corrosive politics and what it means to have the Biden birthright. Her parents ended a yearslong court battle over child support Thursday, agreeing that Hunter Biden, who has embarked on a second career as a painter whose pieces have been offered for as much as $500,000 each, would turn over a number of his paintings to his daughter in addition to providing a monthly support payment. The little girl will select the paintings from Biden, according to court documents. The White House did not respond to questions about the case. Several of the president’s allies fear that the case could damage his reelection prospects by bringing more attention to a son whom some Democrats see as a liability.

• The Swedish Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that the government had decided to strengthen security and border control in the country after recent Quran-burning incidents. “In May this year, the Government decided to reintroduce border controls. We were clear about the reasons for this: it was primarily due to the elevated threat to Sweden, linked to events such as previous demonstrations at which Qur’ans were burned… The Swedish Police Authority has confirmed that it is now making necessary adjustments to the controls, and increasing its interactions with other relevant authorities to address the threat,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that the Swedish Security Service has also taken measures to ensure the country’s security. The statement added that freedom of speech in Sweden is protected by law, but the country’s government does not support “every opinion.”

• Ukraine has branded British consumer-goods titan Unilever “an international sponsor of war,” the country’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) announced on its official Telegram channel on Monday. NACP explained its designation, stating that Unilever has continued selling its products in Russia after the start of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine in February last year. NACP noted also that despite earlier claims that the company intended to leave the Russian market, Unilever failed to do so and instead doubled its profits in the country to more than 9.2 billion rubles ($103.2 million) in 2022, from 4.8 billion rubles ($53.6 million) in 2021.

• The Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland, are exploring options to leave the United Kingdom and become a self-governing territory of Norway, after the local leadership blasted the governments in Edinburgh and London for “failing” the islanders. A motion to be discussed on Tuesday by the Orkney Islands council has called upon the archipelago – consisting of more than 70 islands and islets – to move closer to its “Nordic connections” in pursuit of “alternative forms of governance,” according to council leader James Stockan. Orkney was under Norwegian and Danish control until 1472, when they were transferred to Scotland as part of a dowry arrangement for Margaret of Denmark’s marriage to King James III of Scotland. “We were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom,” Stockan told the BBC in comments published on Sunday.

• CIA director William Burns claimed on Saturday at a Ditchley Foundation lecture in the UK that “disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression.” “That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service. We’re not letting it go to waste,” he added. Burns noted that the CIA launched a Telegram channel in May to recruit military officers, government officials and scientists who can provide intelligence on the Russian leadership and economy. “We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business,” he said.

• Last week, the EU included Alfa Beta Creative and GFK Logistics Asia among a list of 87 enterprises that the bloc claims are enabling the Russian military-industrial complex. The Uzbek entities were featured in a similar blacklist compiled by the US government earlier this year. Inclusion on the list means an entity will face stricter limitations on its ability to source dual-use goods and technologies. The new penalties allow the bloc to impose restrictions on the sale of sensitive dual-use goods and technology to nations that may resell them to Russia.

• As de-dollarization is gaining steam, global investors are increasingly looking at the Chinese yuan as a potential future replacement for the greenback. The de-dollarization trend is here to stay, admit American experts, arguing, however, that there is still no replacement for the greenback, a freely convertible means of payment and a dominant reserve currency. “There is a very good reason why the dollar is used widely in trade, and that’s because we have deep, liquid, open capital markets, rule of law and long and deep financial instruments,” insisted Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last week. However, Chairman of Russia’s VTB Bank Andrei Kostin does not share Yellen’s stance, projecting back in May that “there is every reason to expect that the Chinese yuan will replace the US dollar as the world’s main reserve and settlement currency as early as the next decade.” So, who is right?

• US President Joe Biden’s special envoy to Iran, Rob Malley, has been placed on unpaid leave while he is being investigated for alleged mishandling of classified documents, CNN reported on Thursday. Little is known about the investigation, but Malley’s sidelining could imperil efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal. His absence was first noted in May, when he missed a Senate briefing on Iran. At the time, the State Department explained that the envoy was on personal leave due to an illness in his family.

• Kiev does not buy Chinese weapons in order to avoid irritating the US, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Vitaly Deinega has claimed. The official made the comments while discussing the importance of drones in modern warfare. “As far as it was explained to me… we cannot buy anything Chinese so as not to hurt our relationship with the US,” Deinega told Ukrainian news outlet Leviy Bereg on Monday. The official was discussing the use of Chinese-made DJI Mavic quadcopters by Ukrainian troops. Kiev’s forces have the aircraft “in large quantities” but rely on purchases by volunteers for supplies, because “there is the position that the Defense Ministry cannot procure them,” Deinega explained.

• The US State Department released its long-awaited after-action report on the botched 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan on Friday. The assessment blamed the snafu primarily on the insistence of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden on going ahead with a full military withdrawal. The decision to “end the US military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security,” it stated. The loss of military “enablers” put Washington’s diplomatic presence in the country at risk, while the departure deadlines set first by the Trump and then the Biden administrations were not accompanied by a sufficiently detailed exit plan, according to the report.

• When Stockton Rush, CEO of Oceangate Expeditions, launched his Titan submersible on June 18 to take himself and four other passengers to see the wreck of the Titanic 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, it was on board a vehicle that almost every industry expert had long refused to associate themselves with. Some of those experts spoke with a US magazine recently, sharing their experiences with being either ignored or dismissed by Rush when they raised their concerns, or fired for pointing out problems, or threatened with litigation if they told others about the dangers they had witnessed.

• Both verified and unverified Twitter users found that they were able to view only a limited amount of tweets per day, while people who don’t have a Twitter account discovered that they cannot peruse the platform’s content at all, as part of sweeping changes to Twitter last week. The restrictive measures implemented last week ensured that verified accounts were limited to viewing 6,000 posts per day, whereas unverified accounts and newly verified accounts were able to peruse 600 and 300 tweets daily, respectively.

• The White House and the surrounding area were evacuated on Sunday as the Secret Service investigated an unknown substance found on the grounds that turned out to be cocaine, the authorities have confirmed. The grounds were cleared “as a precaution” after the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division Officers spotted an “unknown item on the White House complex” at 18th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, a Secret Service spokesman told reporters on Sunday. The Washington, DC Fire Department’s hazardous materials team was dispatched to evaluate the find, while the Secret Service closed down multiple streets in the area around the White House.

• Palaeontologists in Brazil studying one of the earliest-known dinosaurs have found its backbone contained large air spaces found in the most gigantic species such as Diplodocus and Brontosaurus, which lightened their massive necks and helped them breathe. Macrocollum itaquii first appears in the fossil record around 225 million years ago, less than 10 million years later than the oldest-known dinosaur remains but long before the dinosaurs became the dominant order of animals after the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event around 201 million years before now. The bipedal, herbivorous Macrocollum, named for its long neck topped with a small head, belonged to the Sauropodomorph group, ancestors of the Sauropods which include the most enormous land animals that ever lived — including Brachiosaurus and recently-discovered giants like Supersaurus and Patagotitan. Now palaeontologists at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil’s Sao Paulo State have found the species shared a key adaptive feature with its gigantic descendants: sinuses in its vertebrae that lightened the bones and help with respiration.

• One of the most intriguing anomalies in this geoid is a vast ‘gravity hole’ in the Indian Ocean, a region where the gravitational pull is significantly lower than the global average. This gravity anomaly, spanning over three million square kilometers, has puzzled scientists for decades. In the Indian Ocean, this gravity anamoly manifests as a vast depression in the Earth’s crust. The sea level in this region is a staggering 100 meters lower than the global average due to the major dip in Earth’s gravity. This anomaly, known as the Indian Ocean geoid low (IOGL), has been a subject of scientific curiosity since its discovery in 1948. According to recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, the gravity anomaly is most likely caused by magma plumes rising from deep beneath Africa at the edges of the sinking remnants of an ancient ocean bed. These plumes of molten rock, believed to be remnants of the ancient Tethys Ocean, have been rising from deep within the Earth’s mantle for millions of years. The interaction of this ancient oceanic material with the surrounding hot molten rock is believed to be responsible for the creation of the geoid low.

• The sun produced over 160 sunspots in June, the highest monthly number in more than two decades. The data confirm that the current solar cycle, the 25th since records began, is picking up intensity at a much quicker pace than NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasted, sparking concerns of severe space weather events in the months and years to come. While the space agencies predicted a maximum monthly number of sunspots during the 25th solar cycle’s maximum to reach a modest 125, the star is now on a trajectory to peak at just under 200 monthly sunspots, and some scientists think this peak may arrive in just one year.

• Professor Loeb has just completed a $1.5m expedition searching for signs of a mysterious meteor dubbed IM1 that crashed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014 and is believed to have come from interstellar space. The 61-year-old told The Independent he oversaw a team of deep-sea explorers who found 50 tiny spherules, or molten droplets, using a magnetic sled that was dropped from the expedition vessel the Silver Star 2km underneath the surface of the ocean. He believes the tiny objects, about half a millimetre in size, are most likely made from a steel-titanium alloy that is much stronger than the iron found in regular meteors. Further testing was now required, but Prof Loeb believes they either have interstellar origins, or have been made by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Prof Loeb chaired Harvard’s astronomy department from 2011 to 2020 and now leads the university’s Galileo Project, which is establishing open-sourced observatories across the world to search for signs of UFOs and interstellar objects.
• News Burst 4 July 2023