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- Boeing Ceo Stan Deal said on Sunday it will have to do more work on about 50 undelivered 737 MAX airplanes, potentially delaying some near-term deliveries, after its supplier Spirit AeroSystems discovered two mis-drilled holes on some fuselages. The latest manufacturing slip originated with a supplier and will require rework on about 50 undelivered 737 jets to repair the faulty rivet holes, Boeing commercial chief Stan Deal said in a note to staff. A spokesman for fuselage supplier Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc. said it’s aware of the issue and will conduct repairs.
- Telecom firms linked to the UN-recognised Yemen government have said they fear Houthi rebels are planning to sabotage a network of submarine cables in the Red Sea critical to the functioning of the western internet and the transmission of financial data. The warning came after a Houthi-linked Telegram channel published a map of the cables running along the bed of the Red Sea. The image was accompanied by a message: “There are maps of international cables connecting all regions of the world through the sea. It seems that Yemen is in a strategic location, as internet lines that connect entire continents – not only countries – pass near it.”
- Sweden will this week announce the end of its investigation into the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, German media reported on Tuesday. The update comes after Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist told the Expressen national newspaper on Monday that he will disclose a major development in the case within days. Built to deliver Russian natural gas to Germany via the Baltic Sea, the Nord Stream pipelines were damaged by a series of powerful explosions in September 2022. Germany, Sweden, and Denmark each launched their own national probes into the incident after failing to agree on a joint effort. Several leading German news outlets, including Suddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, WDR and Zeit, have predicted that Sweden will close its investigation after failing to identify any suspects.
- U.S. President Joe Biden confused Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, with François Mitterrand, who led France from 1981 to 1995 and died in 1996. In a speech at a campaign rally in Las Vegas, while telling a story about the G7 summit that took place in England in June 2021 and which Macron attended, Biden said: “Right after I was elected, I went to a G7 meeting in southern England. And I sat down and said, ‘America is back!’ and Mitterand from Germany — I mean France — looked at me and said, ‘How long you back for?’” It wasn’t the first recent slip of the tongue by the 81-year-old U.S. president. In July 2023, he accidentally said “over 100” Americans have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic broke out. The White House later rectified this to “over 1 million.”
- Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have generated eccentric homes that are published on social pages. AI is already influencing our tastes, creating new fads and trends for architecture and design. No one can buy new houses. They don’t have a price, a place, no architect has ever designed or furnished them. They are houses imagined by artificial intelligence (AI). the AI does not take into account the structure, the planning, or simply the laws of physics, most of the homes it proposes would be unachievable, or extremely difficult to live in because they are unattainable. Like the house perched on a spur in the middle of the sea that appeared on the tinyhouseperfect Instagram page.
- A number of GOP lawmakers have voiced opposition to a $118 billion national security package, set to be voted on in the Senate this week, which includes $60 billion in Ukraine military aid, $14 billion for Israel and roughly $20 billion for funding US border policy changes. In a statement published by the Office of Management and Budget on Monday, the White house urged both chambers of Congress to reject Johnson’s Israel-only bill, calling it “another cynical political maneuver” after the Biden administration spent “months working with a bipartisan group of Senators to reach a national security agreement that secures the border and provides support for the people of Ukraine and Israel.” US Senate’s $60bn bill would give Ukraine three times more than border.
- Russia’s financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring has placed a former spokesperson for Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, on a list of individuals believed to have ties to extremist or terrorist activities. The US national, who is transgender, has, on multiple occasions, directed death threats at Russian journalists. Ashton-Cirillo, who was born male, decided to transition in 2019. In March 2022, she arrived in Ukraine as a freelance journalist but later enlisted in the country’s armed forces. She was appointed a spokesperson for the Territorial Defense Forces last summer before being suspended in September. Russian media outlets have reported that Cirillo appeared on the list on Monday. Rosfinmonitoring’s decision means that any bank accounts she may have with Russian banks will be frozen.
- As the left freaks out about Tucker Carlson’s upcoming interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the former Fox News host has published a pre-interview explainer over why he’s interviewing Putin – which boils down to an uncurious Western media, which has resulted in a grossly uninformed public. “Here’s why we’re doing it. First, because it’s our job. We’re in journalism. Our duty is to inform people. Two years into a war that’s reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed. They have no real idea what’s happening in this region, here in Russia or 600 miles away in Ukraine.”
- The conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza has hurt McDonald’s sales in the Middle East, the US fast-food chain has said. Another American company, coffee franchise Starbucks, also revealed last week that it missed Wall Street revenue forecasts in the fourth quarter of 2023 amid a decline in domestic and international sales. The coffeehouse chain also cited the impact of the conflict in Gaza, as well as increased discounting by rivals in overseas markets. The two restaurant giants are among several Western brands that have seen boycott campaigns against them over their perceived pro-Israeli stance.
- Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu has said he will not allow his country’s sovereignty to be “undermined,” in what has been viewed as a thinly veiled swipe at India amid strained relations between the two nations. The leader, who was elected president in September, reiterated his government’s position on the Indian military stationed in the archipelago nation. Male had earlier this month set a deadline for New Delhi to withdraw around 80 troops, most of whom were deployed to operate and fly two Dornier aircraft and a helicopter given to the Maldives by India for emergency evacuations.
- British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is under fire after betting £1,000 ($1,250) during a TV interview with Piers Morgan that the government would start deporting immigrants to Rwanda before the next election. Appearing on Talk TV on Monday, Sunak insisted that the government would succeed in its controversial plan to send illegal immigrants to the African country, despite the UK High Court ruling last year that the scheme was “unlawful.” “I’ll bet you £1,000 to a refugee charity you don’t get anybody on those planes before the election. Will you take that bet?” Morgan asked Sunak. In response, the prime minister shook hands with the TV host and said he was committed to the flights going ahead. The next UK general election is due to be held no later than January 28, 2025.
- The Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday condemned remarks by the Israeli ambassador to Moscow, on issues including the holocaust and the Gaza conflict, calling them “provocative and unacceptable.” An explosive interview with Simona Halperin, published by the Russian daily Kommmersant on Sunday, was slammed in a statement by the ministry as distorting the “historic realities and foreign policy approaches of our country.” The ministry noted that Halperin had criticized Russia for not including an international Holocaust memorial day on its official list of state days, an issue she pledged to discuss with diplomats in Moscow. The ministry also criticized Halperin for describing the Holocaust as an unprecedented mass-killing event that targeted “only the Jewish people.” According to cornerstone international documents, including several UN Security Council resolutions, such a take on the Holocaust is not accurate, the ministry insisted.
- Scientists are now inspecting snagged, bagged and tagged bits and pieces from asteroid Bennu, the cosmic mother lode delivered by NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security — Regolith Explorer mission. Known in acronymic astro-speak as OSIRIS-REx, that seven-year-long voyage brought home the goods via a sample return canister that came to full stop on Sept. 24, 2023, parachuting into a remote stretch of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. Those specimens from afar are believed to contain the leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
- On Feb. 7, NASA is scheduled to launch a major satellite to a reserved spot in Earth’s orbit. Sitting above even the International Space Station, the spacecraft called PACE (which stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem) has a very big goal: to monitor our planet’s health on an epic scale, starting from deep within its vast blue seas to far across its candy white clouds. “We are studying the combined Earth system — it’s not an ocean mission, it’s not an atmosphere mission, it’s not a land mission, it’s an all-of-those-things mission,” Jeremy Werdell, the mission’s project scientist, said during a press briefing on Sunday. “What we’re doing here with PACE is really the search for the microscopic, mostly invisible, universe in the sea, and in the sky, and, in some degrees, on land.”
- Zoozve — the strange ‘moon’ of Venus that earned its name by accident. Thanks to the beauty of human error, Radiolab podcasters managed to name a moon. About a year ago, Latif Nasser did a double take of the artfully illustrated poster. And, for the first time, he noticed something strange. This unassuming diagram indicated Venus has a moon — a moon named Zoozve? With a Ph.D. from Harvard’s History of Science department, as co-host of the iconic science podcast Radiolab and as executive producer of the science documentary series Connected, Nasser was perplexed. Why had he never heard of Zoozve? Perhaps the solar system had some corners he simply didn’t know about. Perhaps Venus, the planet he thought lived alone, just has a lovely, whimsical moon. “Venus has no moons,” a NASA page clearly stated.
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Rose Rambles... 