YI PENG 3 (IMO: 9224984) is a
Bulk Carrier and is sailing under the flag of
China. Her length overall (LOA) is 225 meters and her width is 32.3 meters.
Two fiber-optic cables – one linking Finland and Germany, the other connecting Sweden to Lithuania – stopped working between Sunday and Monday, recalling previous security incidents in the busy waterway affected by war between Russia and Ukraine.
“We have to state, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a ‘hybrid’ action. And we also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage,”
“No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally. I also don’t want to believe in versions that these were ship anchors that accidentally caused the damage,” German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said before a meeting with EU colleagues in Brussels.
Two undersea fiber-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, including one linking Finland and Germany, were severed, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors, countries and companies involved said on Monday.
The episode recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
The 1,200-kilometer (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working around 0200 GMT on Monday, Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms company Cinia said.
A 218-km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at about 0800 GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group.
Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable” and were investigating “an incident (that) immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage.”
The incident is reminiscent of a similar event in 2023 when the Balticonnector between Finland and Estonia was damaged. Hong Kong-registered container vessel
NewNew Polar Bear was later found to have dragged its anchor across the pipeline.
Danish authorities appear to have narrowed down a possible culprit to Chinese bulker
Yi Peng 3, which traveled over the reported incident site at the time of the failure. Its AIS track shows the vessel drifting back and forth for around an hour the morning of November 18.
In the weeks since Putin invaded Ukraine, investors have ditched stakes in Russian oil and gas with unprecedented speed.
The financial sector is finally acting on the calls campaigners have been making for years. Banks, pension funds and investors are unshackling themselves from problematic investments in companies and states complicit in destruction in Ukraine – and they’re doing it fast.
This transformation happened within weeks – and demonstrates that divesting from fossil fuels can be a bold political move that raises the standard for corporate behaviour in those companies.
This was evident in the actions of Russia’s second largest oil company, Lukoil. Days after investors raced to divest from the energy giant, it became the first major Russian company to break ranks with Putin, calling for the “soonest termination of the armed conflict”.
If the financial world can divest this rapidly from companies linked to Russia’s imperial war – with dramatic political consequences – it can also part ways with the other companies fueling the climate fire. For a safe and prosperous future for us all, this must be a reckoning for the financial world.
Putin used revenues from oil and gas to build Russian military power in the run-up to the war on Ukraine. Forty percent of Russia’s federal budget comes from oil and gas. Russian oil, gas and mining companies paid the Russian state £39 billion in taxes in 2020. This is just shy of the £41.7 billion Russia spent on its military in 2019.
But this is just one example in a devastating pattern of the fossil fuel economy financing violence – a pattern repeated around the world. Whether it is the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa in the Niger Delta or Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, the murders of indigenous environmental protectors in the Amazon or conflict in the Cabo Delgado – fossil fuel economies play an instrumental role in perpetuating violence around the world.
“Though Russia is only one foreign actor capable of targeting US political audiences through the QAnon community, its history of operations appear to be the most ideologically aligned with the overarching QAnon theory,” the report said. “Russia also appears to have made the most effort to gain credibility within the community thus far.” QAnon was named by the FBI as a potential instigator of domestic terrorism, and followers have been charged with making a terror threat, murder and other crimes.
“Though Russia is only one foreign actor capable of targeting US political audiences through the QAnon community, its history of operations appear to be the most ideologically aligned with the overarching QAnon theory,” the report said. “Russia also appears to have made the most effort to gain credibility within the community thus far.” QAnon was named by the FBI as a potential instigator of domestic terrorism, and followers have been charged with making a terror threat, murder and other crimes.
Bots and Russian trolls spread misinformation about vaccines on Twitter to sow division and distribute malicious content before and during the American presidential election, according to a new study. Scientists at George Washington University, in Washington DC, made the discovery while trying to improve social media communications for public health workers, researchers said. Instead, they found trolls and bots skewing online debate and upending consensus about vaccine safety. The study discovered several accounts, now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the US election, as well as marketing and malware bots, tweeting about vaccines. Russian trolls played both sides, the researchers said, tweeting pro- and anti-vaccine content in a politically charged context. “These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” Mark Dredze, a team member and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, which was also involved in the study, said.
Russia’s athletes and military personnel are increasingly turning to ancient pagan beliefs, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church has warned. The Orthodox church, a strong conservative force closely allied to the Kremlin, has expanded its presence in the Russian military with specially trained priests who are attached to individual units. The patriarch’s words are the latest volley in the church’s long battle against paganism, a tribal pre-Orthodox belief system.
Mainstream political scientists look slightly askance at the subset of geopolitics. They regard geopoliticians much as mainstream economists regard the so-called “gold bugs,” who persist in believing in the eternal value of gold as a medium of exchange and who place their faith in the old constants which they are sure will inevitably reappear. Similarly, the geopoliticans, an exotic subculture within the expert community, believe that despite lofty principles and progress, the mean — strategic conflict over land — will always prevail. Sometimes, they are right. The Foundations of Geopolitics sold out in four editions, and continues to be assigned as a textbook at the General Staff Academy and other military universities in Russia. “There has probably not been another book published in Russia during the post-communist period which has exerted a comparable influence on Russian military, police, and statist foreign policy elites,” writes historian John Dunlop, a Hoover Institution specialist on the Russian right.
The piece about “nooscope” — whoever wrote it — has nothing to do with science, says Kirill Martynov, a philosophy professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “It is not even clear to which area of expertise we can attribute it. Basically, it’s nonsense. In terms of Russian language, the words in it make sense, but in terms of science — they don’t,” Martynov told The Moscow Times.
The article lacks many of the formal characteristics of a piece of scientific work: like coherence, connectivity and the facts being attributed to sources. “Instead, the article uses semi-mystical terms and facts that cannot be verified or proved,” the philosophy professor says. “For example, it says that ’nooscope’ has 50 patents, but there is no attribution to any of them.”
This falls into a trend called “aboriginal science,” according to Martynov. “In aboriginal science people imitate scientific activity, using platforms that have nothing to do with international science, but are convenient for achieving their goals,” he says.
So far, at least, there has been no explanation.
Earlier on Monday BBC Russia reached out to one of Vaino’s co-authors, Viktor Sarayev, and asked about the “nooscope.”
“[Isaac] Newton invented the telescope, [Antonie van] Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope, and we invented the nooscope — a device of the material Internet that scans transactions between people, things and money,” Sarayev wrote back to the BBC. He declined to give more details about the device.
Full of complicated terms, schemes and graphs, the article reveals a “nooscope,” a device designed in Russia five years ago, that will help “study the collective conscience of mankind” and “register, among other things, [things that] can’t be seen.” The device apparently consists of a network of “spatial scanners,” designated to monitor and register changes in the “biosphere.”
“[Isaac] Newton invented the telescope, [Antonie van] Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope, and we invented the nooscope — a device of the material Internet that scans transactions between people, things and money,” Sarayev declined to give more details about the device.
Hundreds of migrants have cycled into Norway from Russia after finding a new route into Europe that avoids the deadly Mediterranean crossing. They are not allowed to cross the Arctic border on foot, so a lucrative trade in bicycles has opened up, with migrants buying bikes and pedalling the final few metres.
