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- During a press conference on Monday, the results of a new study were announced which revealed methamphetamine and fentanyl residue is prevalent on public transit in the Greater Seattle area and Portland area. The study from the University of Washington, sponsored by Sound Transit, King County Metro, Community Transit, Everett Transit, and TriMet was investigating if smoke from the use of fentanyl and methamphetamine is adversely affecting transit operators and passengers. The study was commissioned in response to concerns about employee and rider health due to exposure to smoke from the deadly drugs. Researchers placed detectors by the operators on their seats and hid battery-powered monitoring devices behind signs and panels on buses and trains. On buses and trains, meth was found in 100 percent of air samples analyzed and 98 percent of surface samples. Fentanyl was found in a quarter of the air samples and almost half of the surface samples. Despite the results, Dr. Scott Phillips medical director of the Washington Poison Center said, “Based on what was measured, we would not expect to see a health effect from these concentrations.”
- Myanmar uses the yuan to pay for supplies of Russian petroleum products, Myanmar Minister of Foreign Economic Relations Kan Zaw said, adding that the parties are preparing an agreement on the mutual conversion of national currencies. Kan Zaw expressed hope that Myanmar would conclude an agreement with Russia on tourism on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum. Last September, Prime Minister of Myanmar Min Aung Hlaing said that the country had begun purchasing Russian petroleum products. Myanmar will begin accepting cards of the Russian Mir payment system in October, Kan Zaw added.
- The first round of releasing treated water from the damaged Japanese Fukushima nuclear power plant was concluded. Now the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, is planning to start facilities inspections and other preparation procedures for the second stage. The preparations are expected to take up to three weeks. Russia and China, which oppose Japan’s release of tritium-laced treated water from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant into the sea, have jointly urged Tokyo to consider a vapor release disposal strategy instead.
- Ukrainian authorities are “wrong” to erect monuments to war criminals, Poland’s ambassador to Ukraine told the BBC on Saturday. Kiev’s continued veneration of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera is a source of “real pain” in Poland, he said. “You say that war is no time to deal with the dead,” ambassador Bartosz Cichocki said in an interview with the BBC’s Ukrainian office. “But I can answer you: war is also not the time to erect monuments to criminals and name streets after them.” By “the dead,” Cichocki was referring to the murders of between 40,000 and 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1944 in the regions of western Ukraine and eastern Poland also known as Volhynia and Galicia. The Volyn Massacre, as the entire ethnic cleansing campaign has become known, was carried out by the UPA, a paramilitary wing of the Nazi-allied Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The OUN was led at the time by Stepan Bandera, who today is celebrated by many Ukrainians as a national hero. Streets in multiple towns and cities have been renamed after Bandera, while the OUN leader has been honored with statues and monuments, including a seven-foot likeness in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
- Elon Musk on Monday dismissed accusations of “treason” in connection with his refusal to activate the Starlink satellite network over Crimea to aid Ukraine’s attack on Russia’s fleet. “I am a citizen of the United States and have only that passport. No matter what happens, I will fight for and die in America. The United States Congress has not declared war on Russia. If anyone is treasonous, it is those who call me such,” Musk said in a post on his social platform X. The post was a reply to allegations, including those made by political commentators, that Musk “personally sabotaged a military operation of a US ally.”
- A woman in Ukraine’s northern Chernigov Region was given a jail term of five years for simultaneously justifying, denying, and glorifying Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine, local media reported on Friday, citing a court decision. According to court documents, the defendant, whose identity was not made public, ‘liked’ three posts on the ‘Odnoklassniki’ website. The platform is popular in Russia and other former Soviet republics, particularly among the older population, but is banned in Ukraine. The woman also used a function that made all the posts she liked automatically reposted by her account, making them visible for her 178 social media friends, the court said. At the court hearing, the defendant made a full confession and asked the judge not to punish her particularly harshly. She also said she was acting “under the influence of political shows” and did not understand that she was committing a crime.
- White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre abruptly ended a news conference by US President Joe Biden on Sunday, cutting the president off mid-sentence as he rambled about “the third world” and his conversation with Chinese Premier Li Qiang. Biden took a number of scheduled questions from the press while on a visit to the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, before telling reporters that he was “going to bed.” However, Biden kept answering additional questions, including on his talk with Li at the G20 summit in India on Saturday. “It wasn’t confrontational at all,” Biden said. “We talked about making sure that the third world…the, uh, the, uh, the southern hemisphere has access to changing…” As Biden continued to mumble, Jean-Pierre announced that “this ends the current press conference.” After attempting to answer another question, Biden turned around and walked off stage.
- Astrophysicists have found evidence of what they think could be the closest black holes to Earth ever detected — at just some 150 light years away. The holes are thought to lie in the Hyades star cluster, which can be seen with the naked eye in the constellation of Taurus. Black holes are regions of where the fabric of spacetime is so deformed by concentrated mass that, beyond their “event horizon”, nothing — not even light — can escape their gravity.
News Burst 12 September 2023
Rose Rambles... 