by tyler | May 18, 2023 | CNN, world
Myanmar’s ruling military junta has imported at least $1 billion in weapons and military-related equipment since its bloody coup, according to a new United Nations report which said much of the equipment was coming from individuals and businesses in Russia, China and Singapore.
Army general Min Aung Hlaing seized power in February 2021, ending Myanmar’s brief experiment with democracy, jailing former leader Aung San Suu Kyi and plunging the impoverished Southeast Asian nation into a raging civil conflict that continues to this day.
Battles between the military and resistance groups unfold daily across the country.
Airstrikes and ground attacks on what the military calls “terrorist” targets occur regularly and have killed thousands of civilians, often including children, according to monitoring group.
Whole villages have been burned down by junta soldiers and schools, clinics and hospitals destroyed as a result of the attacks, according to local monitoring groups.
Tom Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, published a new report on Wednesday that detailed transfers of arms and raw materials and identified “254 unique suppliers” to the Myanmar military since the coup.
“Since the coup, the Myanmar military has imported at least $1 billion worth of arms and dual use goods to support the military’s domestic arms manufacturing,” Andrews wrote.
In 94% of the transactions Myanmar’s military was listed as the ultimate receiver “eliminating any doubt of who the end recipient would be,” Andrews added.
The report, which used trade data and spanned more than 50 pages, listed $406 million in sales from Russian entities and $267 million from China, including some state-owned companies.
The report also found $254 million in imports originating from Singapore.
Andrews said he received no information indicating that the government of Singapore had approved military sales or transferred arms to Myanmar’s military – unlike with Russia and China.
CNN has approached authorities in China, Russia and Singapore for a response on the UN report’s findings.
Citing a recent deadly attack carried out last month by the Myanmar Air Force on a village in the northwestern Sagaing region, the UN report listed several weapons which were used that included Yak-130 aircraft and Mi-35 helicopters supplied by Russia and raw materials from “private entities in Singapore, China and Thailand.”
“Bombs were released over Pazigyi village in the Kanbalu township, Sagaing region… hitting their intended target: a ceremony attended by approximately 300 people, including dozens of children, marking the opening of a (local) administrativae office,” the report said.
“The ordinance detonated with deadly impact – ripping the bodies of men, women and children open, turning their skin to ash and inflicting critical shrapnel wounds.”
“The attack is yet another example of the Myanmar junta’s probable crimes against humanity and war crimes… and also how (it) is using internationally supplied arms and associated materials to commit atrocities,” the UN said.
Andrews said sanctions against Myanmar’s generals were “easily circumvented” and ineffective.
“Those providing these weapons are able to avoid sanctions by using front companies and creating new ones while counting on lax enforcement,” Andrews said.
“The good news is that we now know who is supplying these arms and the jurisdictions in which they operate. Member states now need to step up and stop the flow of these arms.”
He called on the international community to stop more arms from going to the Myanmar military.
Singapore has previously addressed the topic of arms sales to Myanmar since the coup.
Speaking during a parliamentary session in February, Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan addressed allegations from experts at the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M) who claimed that Singapore was “functioning as a strategic transit point for potentially significant volumes of items” contributing toward military production by the Myanmar military.
“Singapore complies strictly with our international obligations on international arms sales and transfers, as well as UN sanctions and embargoes against any country,” Balakrishnan said.
“Singapore submits regular reports to the UN Register of Conventional Arms… the government of Singapore decided to prohibit the transfer of arms to Myanmar and also decided not to authorize the transfer of dual-use items assessed to have potential military application to Myanmar.”
“We will not hesitate to take action against those who contravene our laws.”
by tyler | May 17, 2023 | CNN, world
The world is now more likely than not to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels for the first time – a critical global temperature limit – according to the World Meteorological Organization, thanks to a combination of heat-trapping gasses from fossil fuel and a looming El Niño.
Breaching 1.5 degrees may only be temporary, the WMO said. But it would mean the world has crossed a critical climate threshold, a signal of how quickly climate change is accelerating. And as temperatures surge, there is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record, the WMO reported.
Countries pledged in the Paris Climate Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees – and preferably to 1.5 degrees – compared to pre-industrial temperatures. Scientists consider 1.5 degrees of warming as a key tipping point, beyond which the chances of extreme flooding, drought, wildfires and food shortages could increase dramatically.
In its annual climate update, the WMO said that between 2023 and 2027, there is now a 66% chance that the global average temperature will breach 1.5 degrees Celsius – or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit – of warming for at least one year.
“This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius level specified in the Paris Agreement which refers to long-term warming over many years. However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency,” said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas, in a statement.
The temperature increases are fueled by the rise of planet-heating pollution from burning fossil fuels, as well as the predicted arrival of El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon with a global heating effect.
“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” Taalas said. “This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. We need to be prepared.”
The current hottest year on record is 2016, which followed a very strong El Niño event. El Niño tends to ramp up the temperatures the year after it develops, which could put 2024 on track to be the hottest year on record.
The world has already seen around 1.2 degrees of warming, as humans continue to burn fossil fuels and produce planet-heating pollution. And despite three years of cooling La Niña, temperatures have soared to dangerous levels. The last eight years were the warmest on record.
The report stated that the chance of temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius has risen steadily since 2015, when the WMO put the chance of breaching this threshold at close to zero.
The annual mean global near-surface temperature for each year between 2023 and 2027 is predicted to be between 1.1 degrees Celsius and 1.8 degree Celsius higher than the 1850-1900 average, said the WMO. That refers to the period before the sharp increase of planet-heating pollution from burning fossil fuels.
“Global mean temperatures are predicted to continue increasing, moving us away further and further away from the climate we are used to,” said Leon Hermanson, a Met Office expert scientist who led the report, in a statement.
by tyler | May 15, 2023 | CNN, world
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe a rare comet in our solar system, making a long-awaited scientific breakthrough and stumbling across another mystery at the same time.
For the first time, water was detected in a main belt comet, or a comet located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The discovery came after 15 years of attempts by astronomers using different observation methods.
The space observatory detected water vapor around Comet Read, which suggests that water ice can be preserved in a warmer part of the solar system. A study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Nature.
Comets typically exist in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, icy regions beyond the orbit of Neptune that can preserve some of the frozen materials left over from the formation of the solar system. The comets venture on long, oval-shaped orbits around the sun that can take thousands of years and have streaming tails that develop as the frigid objects occasionally pass close to the sun. Their fuzzy appearance and tails of material differentiate comets from asteroids.
But a rare subclass of comets called main belt comets are objects in the asteroid belt with circular orbits around the sun that periodically exhibit cometlike behavior, such as shedding material that creates a fuzzy appearance and a trailing tail.
Rather than shedding icy material through sublimation, when a solid turns directly to a gas, the main belt comets only seemed to eject dust. Given their location in the warm inner solar system closer to the sun than typical comets, main belt comets weren’t expected to retain much ice — until now. And the discovery could add more evidence to the theory of how water became a plentiful resource on Earth early in its history.
Comets and water-rich asteroids may have collided with early Earth and delivered water to our planet.
“Our water-soaked world, teeming with life and unique in the universe as far as we know, is something of a mystery — we’re not sure how all this water got here,” said study coauthor Stefanie Milam, Webb deputy project scientist for planetary science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. “Understanding the history of water distribution in the solar system will help us to understand other planetary systems, and if they could be on their way to hosting an Earth-like planet.”
Main belt comets were first codiscovered in 2006 by study coauthor Henry Hsieh, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Comet Read was one of the original comets used to create the subcategory.
The precise data collected by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph helped astronomers to determine the signature of water vapor around Comet Read shortly after its close approach to the sun.
“In the past, we’ve seen objects in the main belt with all the characteristics of comets, but only with this precise spectral data from Webb can we say yes, it’s definitely water ice that is creating that effect,” said lead study author Michael Kelley, astronomer and principal research scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park, in a statement. “With Webb’s observations of Comet Read, we can now demonstrate that water ice from the early solar system can be preserved in the asteroid belt.”
Along with the discovery came a new puzzle. Comet Read has no detectable carbon dioxide, which is an ingredient that makes up about 10% of the material vaporized by the sun in all other comets.
It’s possible that the warmer temperatures of the main asteroid belt cause Comet Read to lose its carbon dioxide over time, the researchers said.
“Being in the asteroid belt for a long time could do it — carbon dioxide vaporizes more easily than water ice, and could percolate out over billions of years,” Kelley said.
Comet Read might have also formed in a warmer pocket of the solar system without carbon dioxide, Kelley said.
The observation team is eager to study other main belt comets and compare them with Webb’s data from Comet Read to see if the celestial objects also lack carbon dioxide and determine the next steps for unlocking the secrets of rare comets.
“Now that Webb has confirmed there is water preserved as close as the asteroid belt, it would be fascinating to follow up on this discovery with a sample collection mission, and learn what else the main belt comets can tell us,” Milam said.
by tyler | May 12, 2023 | CNN, world
Palestinian militants launched rockets towards Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank on Friday, an escalation of violence in the region that has led to the deaths of at least 33 Palestinians in Gaza and one person in Israel.
The al Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad said in a statement shortly after the rocket fire: “The launching towards Jerusalem is a message, and everyone should understand its purpose. Jerusalem is in front of our eyes, and what is happening there is not separate from Gaza.”
It called the operation “Revenge of the Free.”
Just before, explosions were heard in Jerusalem as a new wave of rockets was launched from Gaza towards Israel, amid persistent cross-border fire that has led to heavy bloodshed in the region, particularly along the strip.
Talks to bring about a ceasefire between Israel and Islamic Jihad in Gaza are “on ice right now,” a diplomatic source familiar with the negotiations told CNN Friday. The source asked not to be named discussing closed-door diplomatic talks.
Rockets have not previously been fired towards Jerusalem in the current hostilities, which began earlier this week.
A CNN team in Sderot, southern Israel, saw Israeli air defenses intercept approximately eight to 10 incoming rockets from Gaza on Friday, and had to take shelter briefly from falling shrapnel. They also saw smoke rising from a location in the Gaza Strip following an Israeli airstrike.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced at about the same time that IDF fighter jets struck four military posts belonging to Islamic Jihad. IDF aircraft also struck a mortar shell launcher in the southern Gaza Strip.
A CNN producer in Gaza heard long-range rockets being fired earlier on Friday, along with other rockets and mortars.
Sirens sounded in Israel throughout the day on Friday, warning of incoming rocket fire in areas around Gaza.
The IDF began unleashing waves of airstrikes on Tuesday on what it says are Islamic Jihad operatives and infrastructure along the strip. The IDF has struck 254 targets in Gaza during the operation, which it calls “Shield and Arrow.”
Palestinian militant groups retaliated by launching hundreds of rockets towards Israel.
At least three Palestinian deaths were announced on Friday.
One was a Palestinian man who died of his injuries in Gaza on Friday, according to the Ministry of Health there.
The hospital where he died named him as Alian Abu Wadi, 38, and said he died after doctors attempted to save him. His family said he was wounded Thursday night in an airstrike in the town of Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
Before the news of Wadi’s death, IDF chief spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the Israeli military believed among the 30 Palestinians killed, 16 were “combatants,” and 14 were “uninvolved.” The IDF said that four of those Palestinians were killed by Islamic Jihad rockets falling short and landing in Gaza, which the militants rejected as a lie.
Some 973 rockets have been launched towards Israel in the past three days, as of 4 p.m. (9 a.m. ET) Friday, the IDF said. Of those, 761 crossed into Israel and 212 fell short in Gaza or landed in the Mediterranean sea.
Israel’s Iron Dome air defenses intercepted 296 rockets, the IDF said. The system only activates when it projects that a rocket is on target to hit a populated area in Israel.
Authorities in Gaza have also outlined the extensive damage caused by Israeli airstrikes and border closures inside the extremely isolated enclave, beyond the deaths and injuries.
At least nine civilian houses and 28 housing units have been demolished, and 532 additional housing units were damaged, 37 of which are uninhabitable, authorities said in a government briefing on Friday. In all, 90 families have lost their homes, they added.
They warned that Gaza would be forced to shut its electricity plant within 72 hours because they cannot import fuel, adding that one of three turbines at the power station was already shut down.
Additionally, all formal schooling in Gaza has been halted.
Fishing has been stopped for four days, leaving 3,500 fishermen without work. More than 600 tons of agricultural products are stuck in Gaza, unable to be exported.
Gaza is one of the most densely packed places in the world, an isolated coastal enclave of almost 2 million people crammed into 140 square miles.
Governed by Hamas, the territory is largely cut off from the rest of the world by an Israeli blockade of Gaza’s land, air and sea dating back to 2007. Egypt controls Gaza’s southern border crossing, Rafah.
Israel has placed heavy restrictions on the freedom of civilian movement and controls the importation of basic goods into the narrow coastal strip.
by tyler | May 12, 2023 | CNN, world
Astronomers have spotted the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed, and it’s 10 times brighter than any known exploding star, or supernova.
The brightness of the explosion, called AT2021lwx, has lasted for three years, while most supernovas are only bright for a few months.
The event, still being detected by telescopes, occurred nearly 8 billion light-years away from Earth when the universe was about 6 billion years old. The luminosity of the explosion is also three times brighter than tidal disruption events, when stars fall into supermassive black holes.
But what triggered such a long-lived, massive cosmic explosion? Astronomers said they think a supermassive black hole disrupted a vast gas or dust cloud, potentially thousands of times larger than our sun. It’s possible that the cloud was drawn off the course of its orbit and went flying into the black hole, the researchers said.
As the black hole swallowed pieces of the hydrogen cloud, shock waves likely reverberated through the cloud’s remnants and into the swirling mass of material that orbits around the black hole.
The AT2021lwx event dethrones gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A as the brightest recorded cosmic explosion, which was reported in 2022. The gamma-ray burst was actually brighter, but it only lasted for a fraction of AT2021lwx, which is releasing more energy overall.
The findings published Thursday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Astronomers first detected the explosion in November 2020 with the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, followed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System in Hawaii a few months later. Both keep an eye out for objects in the night sky that rapidly change in brightness, such as exploding stars, asteroids and comets.
“We came upon this by chance, as it was flagged by our search algorithm when we were searching for a type of supernova,” said lead study author Dr. Philip Wiseman, research fellow at the University of Southampton in England, in a statement. “Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away. For something to be bright for two plus years was immediately very unusual.”
Follow-up observations were conducted using the space-based Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, the New Technology Telescope in Chile and the Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, Spain.
Researchers were able to determine the distance between Earth and the event by analyzing the different wavelengths of light used to observe the explosion.
“Once you know the distance to the object and how bright it appears to us, you can calculate the brightness of the object at its source,” said study coauthor Sebastian Hönig, a professor at University of Southampton, in a statement.
The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System has been observing the explosion every few nights for the last 2½ years.
The research team determined that the incredibly luminous event was nearly 100 times brighter than all the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined.
The only celestial objects to rival the brightness of AT2021lwx are quasars, or supermassive black holes that constantly feed on gas at a high velocity.
“With a quasar, we see the brightness flickering up and down over time,” said study coauthor Mark Sullivan, professor at the University of Southampton, in a statement. “But looking back over a decade there was no detection of AT2021lwx, then suddenly it appears with the brightness of the brightest things in the universe, which is unprecedented.”
The team had initial theories when studying the luminosity of the explosion. Now the researchers want to collect more data across different wavelengths of light to learn about the details of the event, including its temperature.
“At first, we thought this flare-up could be the result of a black hole consuming a passing star. But our models showed that the black hole would have to have swallowed up 15 times the mass of our Sun to stay this bright for this long,” said study coauthor Dr. Matt Nicholl, an associate professor at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, in a statement.
“Encountering such a huge star is very rare, so we think a much larger cloud of gas is more likely. Many massive black holes are surrounded by gas and dust and we are still trying to work out why this particular black hole started feeding so vigorously and so suddenly.”
by tyler | May 12, 2023 | CNN, world
Palestinian militants launched rockets towards Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank on Friday, an escalation of violence in the region that has led to the deaths of at least 31 Palestinians in Gaza and one person in Israel.
The al Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad said in a statement shortly after the rocket fire: “The launching towards Jerusalem is a message, and everyone should understand its purpose. Jerusalem is in front of our eyes, and what is happening there is not separate from Gaza.”
It called the operation “Revenge of the Free.”
Just before, explosions were heard in Jerusalem as a new wave of rockets was launched from Gaza towards Israel, amid persistent cross-border fire that has led to heavy bloodshed in the region particularly along the strip.
Rockets have not previously been fired towards Jerusalem in the current hostilities, which began earlier this week.
A CNN team in Sderot, southern Israel, saw Israeli air defenses intercept approximately eight to 10 incoming rockets from Gaza on Friday, and had to take shelter briefly from falling shrapnel. They also saw smoke rising from a location in the Gaza Strip following an Israeli airstrike.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced at about the same time that IDF fighter jets struck four military posts belonging to Islamic Jihad. IDF aircraft also struck a mortar shell launcher in the southern Gaza Strip.
A CNN producer in Gaza heard long-range rockets being fired earlier on Friday, along with other rockets and mortars.
Sirens sounded at least five times in Israel on Friday morning, warning of incoming rocket fire in areas around Gaza, but there were no immediate sirens in Jerusalem.
Violence ramped up between the two sides on Tuesday, when the IDF began unleashing waves of airstrikes on what it says are Islamic Jihad operatives and infrastructure along the strip.
Palestinian militant groups retaliated by launching hundreds of rockets towards Israel.
Talks about a ceasefire between Israel and Islamic Jihad have stalled, a diplomatic source briefed on the talks told CNN Thursday. The source asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the diplomatic discussions.
The latest casualty was a Palestinian man who died of his injuries in Gaza on Friday, according to the Ministry of Health there.
The hospital where he died named him as Alian Abu Wadi, 38, and said he died after doctors attempted to save him. His family said he was wounded Thursday night in an airstrike in the town of Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
Before the news of Wadi’s death, IDF chief spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the Israeli military believed among the 30 Palestinians killed, 16 were “combatants,” and 14 were “uninvolved.” The IDF said that four of those Palestinians were killed by Islamic Jihad rockets falling short and landing in Gaza, which the militants rejected as a lie.
As of early Friday afternoon local time, militants in Gaza have launched 938 rockets, the IDF said. Some 730 crossed the border into Israel, 177 landed in Gaza, and 31 landed in the sea, the IDF said. Twenty of the rockets fell in Israeli-populated areas, and 263 were intercepted, the IDF said.
