Category: Uncategorized

Tech giant says AI-powered tool is not intended to replace ‘essential’ role journalists play in covering the news.

Scientists release a record number of an endangered species into the wild to boost numbers.

A lump sum of at least £1,655 has failed to reach the pay packets of some “bank” nurses, who fill rota gaps.

These are the main developments as the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its 513th day.

July 2023 will probably be the world’s hottest month in “hundreds, if not thousands, of years,” top NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt said Thursday.

One of the British-devised plans allegedly involved replicating the 2020 Beirut explosion

Ukraine’s drone attack on the Kerch Bridge was most likely planned by former British military intelligence agents who signed a contract with Kiev in 2022, the independent outlet Grayzone has reported citing leaked documents.

A “cabal of British military-intelligence freelancers” led by Chris Donnelly has worked with the Odessa office of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) since April last year, Grayzone said in a report published Wednesday evening. The outlet had published leaked documents proving their partnership in October 2022, after the first attack on the Crimean Bridge. 

“A review of leaked files previously revealed by The Grayzone provides a solid basis for again blaming Donnelly’s cabal,” the outlet noted in reference to Monday’s drone attack that killed two civilians and orphaned a 14-year-old girl.

Read more

UK intelligence plotted Crimean Bridge bombing – The Grayzone

Donnelly is described as “a senior intelligence operative and former high ranking NATO advisor.” He is allegedly using a “transnational nexus” involving companies such as Prevail Partners and Thomas in Winslow, to manage “London’s contribution to the proxy war at arm’s length.”

The two companies signed a “technical support” agreement with the Odessa branch of the SBU in April 2022, according to Grayzone, which included the use of surveillance drones to “monitor coastline and Russian movement” and access to satellite imagery to assist military and black operations.

A “geospatial intelligence” specialist at Prevail provided the SBU with a presentation titled “Kerch Bridge info pack,” which laid out various plans to blow up the bridge built in 2018 to connect Crimea to the Krasnodar Region on the Russian mainland.

Read more

UK anti-terror police detain Grayzone journalist

“One speculative plot involved detonating a vessel containing ammonia nitrate directly under the bridge,” according to Grayzone. The proposal “approvingly cited as an example to emulate” the August 2020 explosion in Beirut, which killed at least 214 people and devastated the Lebanese capital.

According to Grayzone, the British advisers have also provided Kiev with assistance in targeting alleged “Russian collaborators” in territories under Ukraine’s control. Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, boasted to Western media in October 2022 that intelligence services were “shooting them like pigs.”

WikiLeaks publisher and other political prisoners should be free, Re:Union speaker Tara Reade has told RT

A newly founded network of human rights activists has held an online conference, taking up the cause of imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange and other victims of political or religious persecution, Tara Reade told RT on Thursday.

The group called Re:Union organized the video conference from a hub in Serbia, featuring more than 15 speakers from across the world. Reade, a former US Senate staffer who sought asylum in Russia last month, was one of the dissidents invited to address the forum.

The conference referred to Assange as one of the examples of the West violating the right to free expression. The WikiLeaks publisher has been held in a maximum-security British prison since April 2019, when Ecuador revoked his asylum and the US unsealed Espionage Act accusations that would see him imprisoned for 175 years if convicted. Assange has defended his 2010 publication of US military documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as basic journalism.

Reade told RT she was invited to testify about her own persecution in the US. She has accused current US President Joe Biden of sexual assault back when she was his aide in the Senate, and criticized the current Ukraine conflict as being a “US-NATO proxy war against Russia.”

She also noted that the government of Ukraine, celebrated by the US and its allies as champion of democracy, has in fact outlawed over a dozen opposition parties and all opposition media, while persecuting the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Read more

‘Migrant village’ for conservative Americans to be built in Russia – lawyer

Reade brought up the recent testimony of an FBI whistleblower, about how the US government has targeted traditional Catholics as dangerous “extremists” at home. Arriving in Russia, she said, was “the first time I felt safe in so long.”

Re:Union organized the video conference to introduce some of the speakers and pave the way for the ‘Free European Nations Forum’, a conference scheduled for October in Moscow. 

According to the group, the forum will welcome activists who disagree with the current political agenda in the US and the EU, offering “not a fight against the system” but a “revision of rules and relations” that would see all opinions get their due respect.

Kiev’s troops have been using the controversial shells “quite effectively” against Russia, a top White House official says

The US-supplied cluster munitions have already been deployed on the battlefield by Ukraine, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed on Thursday. The initial assessment from Ukraine indicates the munitions are being used by the Ukrainians against Russia’s troops “quite effectively,” the official said.

The controversial delivery of the cluster munitions was announced by Washington early this month. The so-called dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICMs) come in the form of standard-caliber NATO 155mm rounds.

President Joe Biden described the decision to deliver cluster munitions to Ukraine as a stopgap measure, insisting the US and its allies were running short on regular munitions in NATO caliber.

Washington admitted it was aware that the munitions posed an increased risk for civilians, but claimed that Kiev had pledged to use them responsibly and steer clear of densely populated areas.

Read more

Ukraine begins using US-provided cluster munitions – WaPo

However, the Ukrainian military has a long history of indiscriminately using controversial munitions, ranging from flechette-filled artillery shells to cluster rockets packed with anti-personnel PFM ‘petal’ mines.

Cluster munitions are banned in more than 100 countries, yet neither Ukraine, the US, nor Russia signed the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). Moscow has condemned the decision to supply cluster shells to Kiev, promising to retaliate in kind and freely use its own stockpiles of such munitions. Washington’s move has been sharply criticized even by its closest allies, including the UK, while the UN raised concerns over the implications for civilians in the use of such munitions.

The main danger posed by munitions of this type stems from their very design – the shells contain multiple bomblets, opening up in the air when fired and releasing these submunitions over a large area. Apart from direct, indiscriminate damage, these bomblets are prone to being dumped, littering the area, and staying live for years. To actually deliver the shells to Ukraine, the US had to circumvent its own restrictions, prohibiting the country from exporting weaponry with dud rates of over 1%. The artillery shells supplied to Kiev are said to have failure rates of at least 2.35%.

Bill comes as Arab governments move to rekindle relations with al-Assad government after years of diplomatic isolation.

The White House says the controversial weapons are having an impact on Russian formations.