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Top Russian military official dead after fall from 16th floor

Top Russian military official dead after fall from 16th floor

The Daily Beast reports: A Russian military official in charge of financial provisions for the military district blamed for the Kremlin’s worst losses in Ukraine has been found dead after a nasty fall from a St. Petersburg high-rise. Marina Yankina, head of the department of financial provisions for the Western Military District, was found dead on a sidewalk on Wednesday morning, according to multiple local reports. She is just the latest in a growing list of Russian military officials, defense industry figures, war critics, and gas…

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Hobby club’s missing balloon feared shot down by U.S. Air Force

Hobby club’s missing balloon feared shot down by U.S. Air Force

Aviation Week reports: A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10. The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet. But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10…

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Pablo Neruda was poisoned after U.S.-backed coup in Chile, according to a new report

Pablo Neruda was poisoned after U.S.-backed coup in Chile, according to a new report

NPR reports: International forensic experts delivered a report to justice officials in Chile today regarding the death of the South American country’s famous poet Pablo Neruda — some 50 years ago. A nephew of Neruda tells NPR that scientists found high levels of poison in the poet’s remains. Scientists from Canada, Denmark and Chile examined bone and tooth samples from Neruda’s exhumed body. Neruda died in 1973, just days after the U.S.-backed coup that deposed his friend President Salvador Allende….

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Syria’s silent rubble reproaches the UN’s resounding failure

Syria’s silent rubble reproaches the UN’s resounding failure

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: On a slab of concrete in the rubble of northwest Syria appears a new graffiti. “We are dead,” it reads, “Thanks for letting us down.” The graffiti speaks for the many who were trapped under fallen structures in the wake of last week’s earthquake, whose lives could have been saved, yet whose voices have since fallen silent. Two days after the disaster struck, the United Nations’ Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths tweeted, “The first 72 hrs…

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A notorious Syria conspiracy theory is definitively debunked

A notorious Syria conspiracy theory is definitively debunked

Brian Whitaker writes: In a long-awaited report, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has blamed the Syrian regime’s air force for a chemical attack in 2018 that killed at least 43 people in Douma, near Damascus. The international watchdog’s findings are not a surprise — it had previously reached the same conclusion about two other attacks involving the same substance. Yet the report is highly significant nonetheless, because the OPCW’s efforts to investigate the Douma attack became…

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In East Palestine, Ohio, where train derailed, anxiety and distrust are running deep

In East Palestine, Ohio, where train derailed, anxiety and distrust are running deep

14 miles from my house, in East Palestine Ohio. Norfolk Southern assures us that the vinyl chloride spilling from the tanks of their derailed train and burning and turning into hydrogen chloride as it rises into the atmosphere and mixes with water vapor and turns into …… pic.twitter.com/Rc8wbpXU8R — 𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐂 𝐀𝐭𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐉𝐫 🦺🌍🔥🌹 (@blckndgldfn) February 8, 2023 The New York Times reports: All around the once-thriving industrial town in the quiet hills of eastern Ohio, there were signs this…

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Nikki Haley endorsed by top Trump ally Ralph Norman who says GOP ‘has entered a season of change’

Nikki Haley endorsed by top Trump ally Ralph Norman who says GOP ‘has entered a season of change’

Fox News reports: Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has secured the endorsement of a top Trump ally, House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ralph Norman, for her first South Carolina delegation show of support as she launches her 2024 run for president. Ralph Norman is the first South Carolina lawmaker to publicly back Haley’s bid for presidency. His support comes despite former President Donald Trump’s endorsement of his re-election the 2022 midterm elections and also after Norman did not vote to…

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U.S. tracked China spy balloon from launch on Hainan Island along unusual path

U.S. tracked China spy balloon from launch on Hainan Island along unusual path

The Washington Post reports: By the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace late last month, U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast. U.S. monitors watched as the balloon settled into a flight path that would appear to have taken it over the U.S. territory of Guam. But somewhere along that easterly route, the craft took…

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Punished by despotic regimes for nothing more than speaking out on social media

Punished by despotic regimes for nothing more than speaking out on social media

An editorial in the Washington Post says: On Feb. 27, 2022, Danuta Perednya, a 21-year old university student, reposted a message on the social media app Telegram criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for the war in Ukraine. On Dec. 28, 2020, a young Saudi woman, Salma al-Shehab, tweeted an appeal to release Loujain al-Hathloul, an activist who was in prison for seeking the right of women to drive in the kingdom. In October, a 19-year-old…

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Snowden and Hersh: Useful idiots, posing as political dissidents, promote disinformation for Russia

Snowden and Hersh: Useful idiots, posing as political dissidents, promote disinformation for Russia

TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency, reports: The situation around three unidentified flying objects that were shot down over North America is designed to distract reporters’ attention from the investigation into the sabotage on the Nord Stream gas pipelines, former NSA (National Security Agency) employee and whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Monday. “I wish it were aliens, but it’s not aliens,” Snowden wrote on Twitter on Monday, commenting on the downing of balloons and UFOs in the United States and…

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Republic of fear: Trump considers televised firing squads, group executions, and use of the guillotine if re-elected

Republic of fear: Trump considers televised firing squads, group executions, and use of the guillotine if re-elected

Rolling Stone reports: “What do you think of firing squads?” That’s the question Donald Trump repeatedly asked some close associates in the run-up to the 2024 presidential campaign, three people familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone. It’s not an idle inquiry: The former president, if re-elected, is still committed to expanding the use of the federal death penalty and bringing back banned methods of execution, the sources say. He has even, one of the sources recounts, mused about televising…

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How Russian invaders unleashed violence on small-town residents

How Russian invaders unleashed violence on small-town residents

Anne Applebaum and Nataliya Gumenyuk write: On the night of February 24, 2022, the sound of missiles jolted Viktor Marunyak awake. He saw flashes in the sky and billowing black smoke; then he got dressed and went to work. Marunyak is the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, and he headed immediately to an emergency meeting with leaders of other nearby villages to discuss their options. They quickly realized that they were already…

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Banning ideas and authors is not a ‘culture war’ – it’s fascism

Banning ideas and authors is not a ‘culture war’ – it’s fascism

Jason Stanley writes: A wave of Republican enthusiasm for banning concepts, authors and books is sweeping across the United States. Forty-four states have proposed bans on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, and 18 states have passed them. Florida’s Stop Woke Act bans the teaching of eight categories of concepts, including concepts that suggest that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms…

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Three downed unidentified airborne objects may have been commercial or benign, says White House

Three downed unidentified airborne objects may have been commercial or benign, says White House

NBC News reports: The White House said Tuesday that the U.S. intelligence community is considering that the three most recent unidentified objects shot down over North America were being used for commercial or benign purposes. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters the evaluation is based on what the U.S. knows from images of the three objects and cautioned that the assessment is preliminary because no debris from any of them has been recovered. “One thing we have to…

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How tensions with Russia are jeopardizing key Arctic research

How tensions with Russia are jeopardizing key Arctic research

Ed Struzik writes: Biologist Eric Regehr and his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began studying polar bears from the American side of the Chukchi Sea, which stretches from Alaska to Russia, in 2008. But as the region warmed, and the increasingly thin spring sea ice off the Alaskan Coast made helicopter landings unsafe, he knew he would need to find another base from which to survey the health and size of the population. Russia’s remote Wrangel Island…

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U.S. warns Ukraine it faces a pivotal moment in war

U.S. warns Ukraine it faces a pivotal moment in war

The Washington Post reports: As the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears, U.S. officials are telling Ukrainian leaders they face a critical moment to change the trajectory of the war, raising the pressure on Kyiv to make significant gains on the battlefield while weapons and aid from the United States and its allies are surging. Despite promises to back Ukraine “as long as it takes,” Biden officials say recent aid packages from Congress and America’s allies represent Kyiv’s…

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