Did asteroid that hit Australia help thaw ancient 'snowball Earth'?


Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified Earth’s oldest-known impact crater, and in doing so may have solved a mystery about how our planet emerged from one of its most dire periods.

Researchers have determined that the 45-mile-wide (70-km-wide) Yarrabubba crater in Australia formed when an asteroid struck Earth just over 2.2 billion years ago. The collision occurred at a time when the planet was believed to have been encased in ice and the impact may have driven climate warming that led to a global thaw.

“Looking at our planet from space, it would have looked very different,” said isotope geology professor Chris Kirkland of Curtin University in Australia, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature Communications. “... You would see a white ball not our familiar blue marble.”

The researchers suspect the region was covered in an ice sheet up to 3 miles (5 km) thick at the time. They calculated that the violent asteroid strike may have transformed immense amounts of ice into water vapor - sending perhaps 200 billion tons of it billowing into the atmosphere. It would have served as a greenhouse gas trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The researchers are wondering whether this thaw helped shepherd Earth into a climate more favorable for the simple microbes that inhabited the planet at the time to thrive and evolve, possibly making it a pivotal event in the history of life on Earth.

The planet descended into one of its two primordial “snowball Earth” periods 2.4 billion years ago amid a rise in oxygen in an atmosphere formerly dominated by methane and carbon dioxide. The asteroid, estimated at 4-1/2 miles (7 km) wide, landed at Yarrabubba in the state of Western Australia, coinciding with the end of the deep freeze.

“During the time of the Yarrabubba impact, life was more simple but did contain organisms like stromatolites, algal mounds that are still in existence today,” said study lead author Timmons Erickson, a NASA research scientist at the Johnson Space Center’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division.

“It is curious to think of an asteroid impact shifting the Earth’s atmosphere to something more clement for life than a ‘snowball’ scenario,” Erickson added.

The researchers determined the crater’s age by examining tiny crystals of the minerals monazite and zircon formed in the asteroid impact.

Earth has been hit by space rocks many times since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. For example, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the inexorable movement of Earth’s tectonic plates and surface erosion have erased most of the oldest craters. Until now, the oldest-known impact crater was one in South Africa with a diameter of more than 120 miles (200 km) that formed just over 2 billion years old.

The other “snowball Earth” period lasted from 700 million to 600 million years ago.

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler

Chilean scientists scramble to save last of desert frogs from extinction

VIDEO
https://www.reuters.com/video/?videoId=OVBY8FOFB&jwsource=cl

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - When Chilean scientists last year discovered 14 Loa water frogs struggling to survive in a nearly dry river bed in the country’s northern desert, the clock began ticking.

They believed these to be among the last of the species.

The tiny, dark-spotted amphibians, Telmatobius dankoi, had long persisted against all odds in a tiny creek in Chile’s Atacama desert, the world’s driest. But pollution and habitat destruction outside Calama, a fast-growing mining city of 180,000, has pushed the frogs to the brink, scientists say.

The frog’s tragic predicament has now unleashed a new effort in Chile to save them.

Scientists rushed the ailing frogs by plane to Santiago, where late last year they sought to recreate their habitat in Santiago’s Metropolitan Zoo.

“Our principal aim was to save them from extinction,” said Felipe Sotomayor, the zoo’s deputy director.

Zoo researchers were forced to start from scratch, first adding minerals to distilled water until they achieved a chemical composition similar to that of the Loa frog’s native habitat.

“There wasn’t a lot of research around how this animal lived in the wild and so we had to extrapolate much of the information from its relatives,” Sotomayor said.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers the frog to be “critically endangered,” but acknowledges more research is needed to understand their habitat and save them from extinction.

The frog’s range is restricted to just 10 sq. km (3.9 sq. mi), a tiny oasis of water and reeds amid a sprawling Chilean desert of parched sand and rock.

“The first stage was to save the lives of these animals,” said Osvaldo Cabeza, the zoo’s herpetology supervisor.

Thirteen of the frogs survived in their newly created home in Santiago. One perished.

Now, Cabeza says the scientist’s focus has shifted to encouraging the survivor’s to feed and reproduce in captivity, the frog’s last chance for survival.

“We’re lucky to have these frogs so that we can send out a warning cry for conservation,” Sotomayor says. “Clearly we’re doing something wrong and we don’t have much room for error.”

Reporting by Santiago Bureau and Reuters TV, writing by Dave Sherwood, Editing by Franklin Paul

Singapore's Shiok Meats hopes to hook diners with lab-grown shrimp

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Shiok Meats, a Singapore-based start-up whose name means very good in local slang, aims to become the first company in the world to bring shrimp grown in a laboratory to diners’ plates.

Demand for meat substitutes is booming, as consumer concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment grow. Plant-based meat alternatives, popularized by Beyond Meat Inc and Impossible Foods, increasingly feature on supermarket shelves and restaurant menus.

But so-called clean meat, which is genuine meat grown from cells outside the animal, is still at a nascent stage.

More than two dozen firms are testing lab-grown fish, beef and chicken, hoping to break into an unproven segment of the alternative meat market, which Barclays estimates could be worth $140 billion by 2029.

Shiok grows minced meat by extracting a sample of cells from shrimp. The cells are fed with nutrients in a solution and kept at a temperature of 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit), which helps them multiply.

The stem cells become meat in four to six weeks.

One kg (2.2 lb) of lab-grown shrimp meat now costs $5,000, says Chief Executive Sandhya Sriram. That means a single ‘siu mai’ (pork and shrimp) dumpling typically eaten in a dim sum meal would cost as much as $300, using Shiok’s shrimp.

Sriram, a vegetarian, hopes to cut the cost to $50 per kg by the end of this year by signing a new low-cost deal for nutrients to grow the meat cells and expects it will fall further as the company achieves scale.

Shiok is backed by Henry Soesan

to, chief executive of Philippines’ Monde Nissin Corp, which owns British meat substitute firm Quorn. It wants to raise $5 million to fund a pilot plant in Singapore to sell to restaurants and food suppliers.

“We are looking at next year, so we might be the first ever company to launch a cell-based meat product in the world,” Sriram said. Shiok still needs approval from the city-state’s food regulator.

Slideshow (8 Images)

Cell-based meat companies also face the challenge of consumer perception of their product.

Any alternative means of making animal protein without harming the environment are positive, but more studies are needed to understand any negative consequences of producing cellular protein, said Paul Teng, a specialist in agritechnology innovations at Nanyang Technological University.

In Singapore, some consumers said they would give lab-grown meat a shot.

“I am willing to try,” said 60-year-old Pet Loh, while she shopped for shrimp in a Singapore market. “I may not exactly dare to eat it frequently, but I don’t mind buying and trying it because the animals in the oceans are declining.”

Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan and Travis Teo in Singapore; Editing by Christian Schmollinger

UPDATED

'Karoo firewalkers': Dinosaurs braved South Africa's land of lava
An undated image of Afrodelatorrichnus ellenbergeri, a set of hand-feet impressions of a quadrupedal dinosaur, are seen preserved in a sandstone layer in South Africa alongside an interpretive outline of the tracks, in a combination of photos released January 29, 2020. Bordy et al. 2020 PLoS One/Handout via REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About 183 million years ago during the early part of the Jurassic Period, enormous amounts of lava flowed across the landscape in what is now South Africa, transforming the environment into a land of fire.

But fossil footprints described by scientists on Wednesday showed that intrepid dinosaurs and other animals managed to inhabit this region - now the semiarid Karoo region of South Africa - during quieter periods between the volcanic eruptions.

These “Karoo firewalkers,” as University of Cape Town geologist Emese Bordy called them, were some of the last animals known to have lived in this inhospitable region before it ultimately was engulfed by molten rock.

The researchers found a sandstone layer on a farm in the center of South Africa with five fossils trackways that were left by at least three different animals that walked across the moist sandy banks of a stream. One was a relatively small two-legged meat-eating dinosaur, another was a similarly small four-legged apparently plant-eating dinosaur and the third may have been a primitive mammal.

“For short time periods, the streams were flowing again, the sun was shining, the plants were growing and the animals, among them dinosaurs, were grazing and hunting,” said Bordy, who led the research published in the journal PLOS ONE. “This is attested by the vertebrate footprints of both meat- and plant-eating dinosaurs, plant remains, sediment deposits of streams and lakes, to name just a few.”

“The properties of the sandstone allow us to tell that the tracks were deposited in seasonal streams that run during flash flood events,” added Bordy, whose team also included postgraduate students Akhil Rampersadh, Miengah Abrahams and Howard Head. “Hot was hot back then, too. So no, they did not walk on the lava.”

During this time, there were major extinctions of species, especially in the oceans, caused mostly by gases emitted from immense lava flows that poured onto the land surface in South Africa. Even as it incinerated the landscape, the lava flows changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and seas.

Fossil footprints, in the absence of skeletal fossils, sometimes offer the only evidence that animals were present in an ancient environment. The sandstone containing the tracks was sandwiched in between layers of volcanic rock, revealing a picture of a functioning ecosystem that survived despite threats of devastation from further eruptions.


“This story helps us change the way we see life in stressful and hostile environments, and thus improves our understanding of the history of life on Earth,” Bordy said.

The 'Firewalkers' Of Karoo: Dinosaurs And Other Animals Left Tracks In A 'Land Of Fire'

1/29/2020 

In southern Africa, dinosaurs and synapsids, a group of animals that includes mammals and their closest fossil relatives, survived in a "land of fire" at the start of an Early Jurassic mass extinction, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Emese M. Bordy of the University of Cape Town and colleagues.


Palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the Highlands ichnosite at the 

Pliensbachian-Toarcian boundary [Credit: Bordy et al, 2020]

The Karoo Basin of southern Africa is well-known for its massive deposits of igneous rocks left behind by extensive basaltic lava flows during the Early Jurassic. At this time, intense volcanic activity is thought to have had dramatic impacts on the local environment and global atmosphere, coincident with a worldwide mass extinction recorded in the fossil record. The fossils of the Karoo Basin thus have a lot to tell about how ecosystems responded to these environmental stresses.

In this study, Bordy and colleagues describe and identify footprints preserved in a sandstone layer deposited between lava flows, dated to 183 million years ago. In total, they report five trackways containing a total of 25 footprints, representing three types of animals: 1) potentially small synapsids, a group of animals that includes mammals and their forerunners; 2) large, bipedal, likely carnivorous dinosaurs; and 3) small, quadrupedal, likely herbivorous dinosaurs represented by a new ichnospecies (trace fossils like footprints receive their own taxonomic designations, known as ichnospecies).

These fossils represent some of the very last animals known to have inhabited the main Karoo Basin before it was overwhelmed by lava. Since the sandstone preserving these footprints was deposited between lava flows, this indicates that a variety of animals survived in the area even after volcanic activity had begun and the region was transformed into a "land of fire."

The authors suggest that further research to uncover more fossils and refine the dating of local rock layers has the potential to provide invaluable data on how local ecosystems responded to intense environmental stress at the onset of a global mass extinction.

Bordy adds: "The fossil footprints were discovered within a thick pile of ancient basaltic lava flows that are ~183 million years old. The fossil tracks tell a story from our deep past on how continental ecosystems could co-exist with truly giant volcanic events that can only be studied from the geological record, because they do not have modern equivalents, although they can occur in the future of the Earth."

Source: Public Library of Science [January 29, 2020]

Bionic jellyfish? Yes, and they are here to help

Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It may sound more like science fiction than science fact, but researchers have created bionic jellyfish by embedding microelectronics into these ubiquitous marine invertebrates with hopes to deploy them to monitor and explore the world’s oceans.

A small prosthetic enabled the jellyfish to swim three times faster and more efficiently without causing any apparent stress to the animals, which have no brain, central nervous system or pain receptors, the researchers said.

The next steps will be to test ways to control where the jellyfish go and develop tiny sensors that could perform long-term measurements of ocean conditions such as temperature, salinity, acidity, oxygen levels, nutrients and microbial communities. They even envision installing miniscule cameras.

“It’s very sci-fi futuristic,” said Stanford University bioengineer Nicole Xu, co-author of the research published this week in the journal Science Advances. “We could send these bionic jellyfish to different areas of the ocean to monitor signs of climate change or observe natural phenomena.”

An initial goal will be deep dives because measurements at great depths are a major gap in our understanding of the oceans, added California Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor John Dabiri, the study’s other co-author.

“Basically, we’d release the bionic jellyfish at the surface, have it swim down to increasing depths, and see just how far we can get it to go down into the ocean and still make it back to the surface with data,” Dabiri added.


The study involved a common type of jellyfish called moon jellyfish, with a diameter of 4-8 inches (10-20 cm).

Jellyfish propel themselves through the water by contracting their muscles to collapse their umbrella-shaped body, and then relaxing. The prosthetic - basically a chip, battery and electrodes that stimulate the muscle - causes the jellyfish to pulse their bodies more frequently, akin to how a pacemaker regulates heart rate. The prosthetic is eight-tenths of an inch (2 cm) in diameter.

Jellyfish are known to secrete mucus when stressed. No such reaction occurred during the research and the animals swam normally after the prosthetic was removed, the researchers said.

“Care is taken not to harm the jellyfish,” Dabiri said.

A jellyfish augmented with a microelectronics implant designed by researchers Nicole Xu and John Dabiri is seen in an artist's rendering released January 30, 2020. Rebecca Konte/Caltech/Handout via REUTERS.

There are many existing technologies to study the ocean near the surface including satellites and robotic sailboats called saildrones, Dabiri said.

But knowledge of the ocean declines at depths greater than about 65 feet (20 meters), where researchers must rely either on instruments deployed from ships - costly to operate - or use smaller underwater vehicles typically limited to day-long operation due to energy-storage limitations, Dabiri added.

“Jellyfish have existed for over 500 million years, and over that time, their body structure has remained largely unchanged, so it’s interesting to figure out what makes them so special and how we can learn from them,” Xu said.

“Because we use animals with natural swimming motions, the hope is that they won’t disturb the environment in the same way that a submarine might, so we can expand the types of environments we can monitor,” she added.

VIDEO


Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Arabs in Israeli border towns fear Trump plan will transfer them to West Bank

Rami Ayyub, Sinan Abu Mayzer

BAQA AL-GHARBIYYE, Israel (Reuters) - Thousands of Israeli Arabs, many waving Palestinian flags, demonstrated in this town in Israel at the weekend to voice their fear that U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East plan could see them stripped of their rights as Israeli citizens.


FILE PHOTO: Buildings in the Palestinian village of Nazlat Isa near Tulkarm in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are seen behind the Israeli barrier and from the Arab-Israeli village of Baqa al-Gharbiyye, Israel February 1, 2020. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

Trump’s proposal, disclosed last week, would see Israel keep its settlements in the occupied West Bank.

But it also raised the possibility that 11 Arab border towns abutting the West Bank would become part of a new Palestinian state - alarming Israel’s 21 percent Arab minority.

“Israel wants to get rid of these people - their land, their history and their space,” said Mohammed Barakeh, a protester and former Arab member of Israel’s parliament.

Like their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank and Gaza, Arabs in Israel have criticized Trump’s plan, which suggested what it billed as a “two-state” solution for the decades-long conflict.

Critics say that by handing Jewish settlements in occupied territory to Israel and keeping Palestinians under Israeli security control, a viable independent state is impossible.


On Monday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the land swap idea, saying: “We do not agree at all, in any way, to swap land and residents from Israel to (Palestine)”.

Israel’s Arabs – predominantly Muslims, Christian and Druze – are mostly the descendants of the Palestinians who remained in their homes or were internally displaced following the 1948 war that surrounded Israel’s creation.

Many identify as Palestinians and regularly voice solidarity with those in Gaza and the West Bank.

But they fear losing their rights and ties to the land they have lived on for generations if they are moved from Israel to Palestinian rule in the West Bank.

Ayman Odeh, who heads a coalition of mainly Arab parties in Israel’s parliament, said Trump’s proposal was “a green light to revoke the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab citizens who live in northern Israel.”

Feelings also ran high at the weekend in Umm al-Fahm, a town on a hill that looks down into the West Bank across an Israeli military barrier that winds along its northern boundary.


“I am a Palestinian Arab and a citizen of Israel,” said Umm Mahmoud, 42, a housewife from Umm al-Fahm, as she shopped for home supplies.

“I cannot accept being transferred to the West Bank. Although we are the same, we cannot leave our land, lives and traditions. Although they (West Bank Palestinians) are our family, it is not possible,” she said.

“HYPOTHETICAL MATTER”

The Trump plan said land swaps could include both populated and unpopulated areas and redrawing the borders of Israel so that the so-called Triangle Communities become part of the State of Palestine would need to be agreed on by both parties.

David Friedman, the Trump-appointed U.S. Ambassador to Israel who was closely involved in the framing of the Middle East plan, denied that residents of Arab towns in Israel would lose citizenship if they eventually fell under Palestinian jurisdiction.

“No one is being stripped of citizenship. We don’t propose that,” he told reporters last Wednesday.

Some Israeli government officials have privately voiced reservations about the idea.

“I regard this as a hypothetical matter. This is something the sides can weigh as an option after the plan is implemented,” Gabi Ashkenazi, a senior member of the opposition Blue and White Party, told Israeli Internet television channel Ynet.

“We unequivocally regard the (Arab) citizens of Israel as equal citizens,” Ashkenazi said.


Reporting by Rami Ayyub and Sinan Abu Mayzer with additional reporting by Stephen Farrell and Nuha Sharaf in Umm al-Fahm, Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Ali Sawafta in Ramallah; Writing by Rami Ayyub and Stephen Farrell

Survivors of London's Grenfell fire denounce 'sabotage' of public inquiry

Estelle Shirbon


LONDON (Reuters) - Bereaved families and survivors of London’s 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people, on Monday accused those responsible for wrapping the building in combustible materials of trying to sabotage a public inquiry into the disaster.



FILE PHOTO: Flames and smoke billow as firefighters deal with a serious fire in the Grenfell Tower apartment block at Latimer Road in West London, Britain June 14, 2017. REUTERS/Toby Melville/File Photo

The blaze that destroyed the 23-storey social housing block, owned by the wealthy borough of Kensington and Chelsea, was Britain’s worst in a residential building since World War Two.

The public inquiry has established that a flammable cladding system fitted to external walls during a recent refurbishment was the key factor in the unstoppable spread of the fire.

Contractors involved in the refurbishment had been due to start giving evidence on Monday, but that was postponed after some made a last-minute request for guarantees that they would not be prosecuted over anything they told the inquiry.

“The timing of this application appears disingenuous and an attempt at sabotage,” Stephanie Barwise, a lawyer representing some of the survivors and bereaved families, told the inquiry on Monday, describing her clients as outraged.

Many in the Grenfell community have called for those responsible for the condition of the building to face criminal prosecution.

Police conducting a separate investigation have said they are considering charges including gross negligence manslaughter and corporate manslaughter but will not announce any decision until the public inquiry has ended.

Begun in September 2017, the inquiry aims to establish exactly what went wrong at Grenfell Tower, why it happened and who was responsible. Previously, the contractors and officials involved in the refurbishment had indicated they would cooperate fully in the interest of uncovering the truth.


Instead, Barwise and other lawyers argued, they had waited until the 11th hour to throw a curve ball, inflicting new anguish on the families just as the long-awaited moment of accountability was supposed to arrive.

DIFFICULT CHOICE

The inquiry chairman, retired judge Martin Moore-Bick, now faces a difficult choice. If he agrees to the contractors’ request, he risks alienating the Grenfell community. If he rejects it, he faces the prospect of key witnesses refusing to answer questions, citing their right not to self-incriminate.

Richard Millett, a lawyer representing the inquiry itself, condemned the timing of the request, but said that on balance, it was in the inquiry’s interest to grant it.

“Without it, you will not get the truth,” he told the chairman.

A lawyer representing the Metropolitan Police said the force would not give a view because it did not want to be seen to be trying to influence the gathering of evidence.

Barwise said it was impossible to know how any guarantee regarding evidence to the inquiry, if given, might affect subsequent prosecutions, which was one of the reasons why her clients were so upset about the request.

After hearing submissions from all the lawyers, Moore-Bick adjourned the hearing indefinitely to consider what to do.

The request came from current and former employees of Rydon Maintenance Ltd, the main contractor in charge of the refurbishment, as well as from Harley Facades Ltd, a sub-contractor that dealt with the cladding.

The same request was also made by Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization, which used to manage social housing in the borough and was stripped of its responsibilities after the fire.

Certain survivors have alleged that official neglect of their ethnically mixed, largely low-income community had played a part in the tragedy, and that warnings from residents that there were fire hazards in the tower had been ignored.
Editing by Catherine Evans
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Medical flights start from Yemen's Sanaa in diplomatic breakthrough

Reuters Staff

DUBAI (Reuters) - Flights carrying patients needing urgent medical attention began from the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said, a long-sought confidence-building measure in diplomatic efforts to end the five-year war.


A girl looks from behind a door glass before her boarding on a United Nations plane which will carry her and other patients to Amman, Jordan in the first flight of a medical air bridge from Sanaa airport in Sanaa, Yemen February 3, 2020. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

Fifteen-year-old Abdallah Abed was one of 16 patients to be flown out on the first flight to Amman.

“I have kidney failure and I need a transplant,” he said. “God willing we travel today to Jordan for treatment.”

The flights took two years of negotiations to set up, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Yemen Lise Grande said from Sanaa airport, which has been closed to civilian flights since 2015.

“There are thousands of patients who need this care. This is the first flight, there will be more,” she said, adding that the real solution is to end the war.

Supervised by the United Nations and World Health Organization, flights from Sanaa will go to Amman and Cairo. WHO said the majority of the patients are women and children suffering cancer and brain tumors, or needing organ transplants and reconstructive surgeries.

“It is hoped these flights will enable the opening of regular medical ‘bridge’ flights for sick patients,” said aid organization the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). “There is no justification for punishing very sick civilians by blocking them from accessing medical treatment.”

Yemen has been mired in conflict since the Iran-aligned Houthis ousted the government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi from Sanaa in late 2014. A Saudi-led military coalition intervened in 2015 to try to restore Hadi.

Although the Houthis control Sanaa airport, access is restricted by the coalition, which controls the air space. The airport has been closed to civilian flights since 2015 although U.N. planes have been permitted to land there.

Re-opening the airport has been a major aim of U.N.-led peace talks and a key demand of the Houthi administration.

The medical flights were the result of months of negotiations and the project had received an “extraordinary” amount of diplomatic support, U.N. Yemen Envoy Martin Griffiths said in an address to the Security Council last month.

The United Nations has been trying to re-launch political negotiations to end the war. Separately, Riyadh has been holding informal talks with the Houthis since late September about de-escalation.

Griffiths held last-minute talks with Houthi authorities on Sunday regarding the medical evacuation plans, a diplomatic source said, adding that about 60 patients and relatives are expected to leave on flights this week.

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, head of the Houthis’ Supreme Revolutionary Committee, said 32,000 people are registered on medical evacuation lists.


Reporting by Lisa Barrington and the Reuters team in Yemen, Editing by Peter Graff, Ed Osmond and Grant McCool

Recording shows Iran knew immediately it had shot down plane: Zelenskiy


Natalia Zinets, Babak Dehghanpisheh

KIEV/DUBAI (Reuters) - A leaked audio recording of an Iranian pilot talking to the control tower in Tehran shows that Iran knew immediately it had shot down a Ukrainian airliner last month, despite denying it for days, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.

On the recording, played on a Ukrainian television station late on Sunday, the pilot of another plane can be heard saying he saw “the light of a missile” in the sky before Ukrainian International Airways flight 752 crashed in an explosion.

Tehran blamed the Ukrainian authorities for leaking what it described as confidential evidence, and said it would no longer share material with Ukraine from the investigation into the crash.

All 176 people aboard the flight were killed when the plane crashed shortly after takeoff en route from Tehran to Kiev on Jan. 8.

The leaked audio “proves that the Iranian side knew from the start that our plane had been hit by a missile,” Zelenskiy said in a television interview.

“He says that ‘it seems to me that a missile is flying’, he says it in both Persian and English, everything is fixed there,” Zelenskiy said.

After denying blame for three days, Iran acknowledged shooting the plane down, saying it had done so by mistake while under high alert, hours after it had fired at U.S. targets in retaliation for a U.S. strike that killed an Iranian general.

Iran has said it worked as quickly as possible to determine what happened to the plane. The Iranian commander who first acknowledged the plane had been shot down said he informed the authorities on the day of the crash.

Iran has faced pressure from Ukraine and other countries whose citizens were on board the flight to send evidence abroad for international investigations.

The Iranian official in charge of accident investigations at Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization called it a “strange move” by Ukraine to release the confidential recording.

“This action by the Ukrainians led to us not sharing any more evidence with them,” the official, Hassan Rezaifar said, according to the semi-official Mehr news agency.

In the recording, a pilot for Aseman, an Iranian airline, can be heard radioing the control tower that he has seen what he believes is a missile.

“Is this an active area? There’s lights like a missile. Is there anything?” the pilot says.

“Nothing has been reported to us. What’s the light like?” the controller replies. The pilot says: “It’s the light of a missile.”

The control tower can be heard trying and failing to raise the Ukrainian airliner on the radio. The pilot of the Iranian plane then says he has seen “an explosion. In a very big way, we saw it. I really don’t know what it was.”

Ukraine International Airways said in a statement the recording provided “yet more proof that the UIA airplane was shot down with a missile, and there were no restrictions or warnings from dispatchers of any risk to flights of civilian aircraft in the vicinity of the airport.”

Rezaifar, the Iranian aviation official, said in the Mehr report that the Ukraine investigation team, as well as all other foreigners involved in the investigation, have left Iran.


Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh, Natlia Zinets and Pavel Polityuk; Writing by Peter Graff, Editing by William Maclean

Iran's Revolutionary Guard LIED to President Rouhani that they had not shot down Ukrainian passenger jet as they scrambled to cover up the disaster 

IRGC Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh 'suspected it was Iran who shot down the plane' 

Military commanders 'kept Rouhani in the dark for three days after the crash' 

On January 8, Iran shot down a Ukrainian Airlines passenger jet, killing 176

By RYAN FAHEY FOR MAILONLIN 27 January 2020

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps lied to President Hassan Rouhani by telling him they had not shot down the Ukrainian passenger jet while they scrambled to cover up the disaster, a new report claims.

General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the top commander of the IRGC's aerospace division, suspected that two Iranian anti-aircraft missiles had destroyed a Ukrainian Airlines passenger jet just outside of Tehran almost immediately after it happened.

In a later televised broadcast, Hajizadeh said that on the night of the disaster, he contacted the top brass of the IRGC to tell them what had happened.

He said that he admitted to them 'it's highly possible we hit our own plane,' according to a report from the New York Times published on Sunday.

On January 8, amid rising tensions between the US and the Islamic Republic, the Revolutionary Guard shot down a Ukrainian Boeing plane as it took off from Tehran, killing all 176 passengers on-board.



Iranian President Hassan Rouhani makes a speech on upcoming parliamentary elections, in Tehran last week. When Rouhani finally found out it was Iranian missiles that downed the Ukrainian passenger jet, he threatened to resign if the IRGC refused to announce the news internationally



Head of the Revolutionary Guard's aerospace division Amir Ali Hajizadeh speaks to media during a press conference in Tehran in September last year. Hajizadeh said that he suspected it was Iranian missiles that had downed the plane soon after he learnt of the catastrophe, according to a report

Video appears to show missile hitting Ukrainian plane

Due to the complex political and clerical hierarchy in Iran, the elite IRGC reports solely to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not to the country's president.

The IRGC made every effort to hide the truth from Rouhani, with the leaders ensuring the truth was kept among themselves and not learned of by anyone, the report alleges.

They set-up a top-secret committee to investigate the cause of the attack, eventually deciding that the missiles had been launched due to 'human-error'.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe, officials from Rouhani's government adamantly denied any Iranian involvement. 

Ali Rabiei, the government spokesman, called international accusations a 'big lie'.

The report, which gives a day-by-day chronology of the events after the crash, alleges that by Thursday, government officials were becoming suspicious of the military's denials.



Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gives his first Friday sermon after eight years in the Imam Khomeini Musalla, in Tehran, Iran on January 17, 2020. The IRGC kept President Hassan Rouhani in the dark for three days. The Revolutionary Guard report directly to Khamenei, not to the president

Iran admits 'unintentionally' shooting down Ukrainian jet

'Thursday was frantic,' Rabiei said later in a news conference. 'The government made back-to-back phone calls and contacted the armed forces asking what happened, and the answer to all the questions was that no missile had been fired.'

According to the New York Times, Rouhani attempted to contact a number of military commanders who blanked his calls.

It wasn't until Friday - two days later - that the miltary commanders called a meeting to enlighten their president of the truth.



Iran has said it has 'no plans' to send the black boxes from downed Ukrainian passenger plane to Kyiv less than 24 hours after stating they would be sent. (Pictured: Black boxes from flight)

Jailbreak in the 'city of blood': Brazil's drug gangs overrun Paraguay

Gabriel Stargardter, Daniela Desantis

THE NARCO POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION

PEDRO JUAN CABALLERO, Paraguay (Reuters) - Luis Alves da Cruz awoke around 3 a.m. to a commotion in the Paraguayan prison he called home.
Guards are seen at the border prison, where prisoners, housed in a gallery for members of Brazil's First Capital Command (PCC) gang, broke out of the jail in Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay January 22, 2020. REUTERS/Gabriel Stargardter

A small-time Brazilian drug smuggler, da Cruz saw fellow inmates dressed head-to-toe in black. “We’re breaking out,” one of them told him. “Are you coming?”

Within minutes, da Cruz was among 75 prisoners who fled the facility in the early hours of Jan. 19 in one of the most audacious jailbreaks in Paraguay’s history.

The fugitives were members of the First Capital Command, Brazil’s largest and most powerful gang, known by its Portuguese acronym PCC. The escape underscores the organization’s growing influence in Paraguay, whose weak institutions have proven no match for the PCC and other fast-growing Brazilian criminal syndicates that have set up shop here.

Authorities at the prison in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero near the Paraguay-Brazil border knew what the PCC was planning, according to Paraguay’s Justice Minister Cecilia Pérez. Some were complicit, she said, while others looked the other way out of fear of retribution. Thirty-two prison officials, including the jail’s warden, are now under arrest.

“We’re facing a security crisis whose epicenter lies in the prison system,” Pérez told Reuters.

The Pedro Juan Caballero Regional Penitentiary did not respond to a request for comment.

Forty of the escapees, including da Cruz, were Brazilians. So far, only 11 prisoners have been recaptured. Da Cruz, was nabbed within days near the Brazilian town of Dourados. Reuters obtained exclusive access to the testimony he gave to Brazilian police.


Da Cruz, 30, told them that guards at the Paraguayan lockup had helped facilitate the escape. He said he was among those who fled through a fan-ventilated tunnel that prisoners had dug with trowels and illuminated with light bulbs tacked to the earthen walls with forks. The tight, muddy passage started in a cell occupied by PCC members and exited just beyond the jail’s exterior wall.

Senior prisoners didn’t bother getting dirty, da Cruz said in his testimony; they simply walked out the front door. Other recaptured prisoners gave similar accounts, Paraguayan police say.

“This (jailbreak) demonstrates that the PCC does what it wants, when it wants,” said Juan Martens, an academic and security analyst based in the capital Asunción who has studied the PCC’s role in Paraguay. “The Paraguayan state represents no obstacle to its plans.”
‘CITY OF BLOOD’

Sandwiched between Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, Paraguay is one of the world’s top marijuana producers and a key trans-shipment point for Andean cocaine. Paraguay is poor, with a GDP per capita in line with that of Namibia. It is also riddled with graft, trailing Venezuela as the second-most-corrupt country in South America, according to Transparency International’s 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index.

As a result, it has become an attractive operational base for Brazilian gangs, including the Sao Paulo-based PCC, Rio de Janeiro’s Red Command and a Porto Alegre syndicate with the pugnacious moniker Bullet In The Face.

Authorities say Brazilian gangsters operate with near-impunity here, both inside and outside prison. The PCC, for example, actively “baptizes” non-affiliated prisoners into its ranks, according to Gilberto Fleitas, the head of criminal investigations at Paraguay’s National Police.

He estimated there are currently 500 PCC members in Paraguay’s prisons, a figure that has doubled since last year thanks to the gang’s aggressive recruiting. Fleitas’ colleague, Ruben Paredes, believes that number to be even higher, and that around 10% of Paraguay’s 16,000 prisoners belong to Brazilian gangs. Many more operate beyond the jailhouse walls, Paredes said, buying off lawmakers and corrupt police.


“At least in prison they’re contained,” said Paredes, investigations chief of the National Police in the densely populated region that includes Asunción. “Outside, they do as they please.”

Dubbed the “city of blood,” Pedro Juan Caballero has proven a particularly alluring outpost for Brazil’s drug gangs, authorities said. The city blends almost imperceptibly into the adjacent Brazilian municipality of Ponta Porã. Reuters saw no police checkpoints or barriers separating the two towns. People from both sides of the border cross with ease.

Small planes carrying Bolivian cocaine frequently touch down on remote landing strips outside Pedro Juan Caballero, Brazilian and Paraguayan authorities told Reuters. From there, they said, the drugs move through southern Brazil and on to Europe, where demand is booming.

The fallout can be seen in the rising body count in Pedro Juan Caballero as gangs battle to control trafficking routes, authorities said. Mayor Jose Carlos Acevedo said there were more than 150 homicides last year in the city of 120,000 people. He said residents live in fear of the gangs, who have made a mockery of the security apparatus.

“The police are completely corrupt,” Acevedo said.

In a Jan. 30 editorial, Paraguay’s most influential newspaper, ABC Color, bemoaned the atmosphere, alleging it is the “golden dream” of many cops to be transferred to Pedro Juan Caballero because of the “illicit extra money” they can earn aiding and abetting drug traffickers.

The city’s police force, which does not report to Acevedo, did not respond to requests for comment.
CRIMINAL HISTORY

The criminal trajectory of da Cruz, the recaptured escapee, highlights Paraguay’s challenge.


Slideshow (8 Images)

Born in an isolated village in northeastern Maranhão, Brazil’s poorest state, da Cruz told police he moved to the western state of Mato Grosso when he was 10 years old.

In 2012, he went to jail for selling drugs, but was freed under a day-release program in 2015. He didn’t hang around. Da Cruz said in his testimony that he fled across the border to Pedro Juan Caballero, where he was arrested on drug trafficking charges in 2016 and sent to the city’s prison.

Once inside, he opted for PCC baptism and began handling administrative chores for the gang, he said in his testimony.

Da Cruz was a low-ranking prisoner, according to a Brazilian cop who requested anonymity.

But prison brought him into contact with heavy hitters. More than a dozen of the PCC’s top regional assassins lived in the cellblock alongside da Cruz, according to Fleitas, the criminal investigations chief.

They, too, were among the escapees. But unlike da Cruz, who will likely spend the rest of his sentence in a Brazilian jail, they remain on the lam, police said.

The first intelligence reports about a possible prison break in Pedro Juan Caballero surfaced in mid-December.

Joaquín González Balsa, Paraguay’s national prison director, in a Dec. 16 letter warned organized-crime investigators in Asunción that his agency had picked up chatter about a planned “rescue of inmates from criminal groups” at the lockup, according to a copy of that letter seen by Reuters. González Balsa was replaced after the escape.

Pérez, the justice minister, said the prison’s warden had come forward with similar information, leading them to believe him trustworthy. She said a subsequent sweep of the facility by prison guards and police officers in December turned up no signs of a tunnel.


“One of the prisoners who was recaptured said they dug the tunnel after the search,” she said. “The company that monitors the security cameras didn’t alert us to anything, because they say they didn’t see anything.”

Gustavo Sánchez, a representative of that security company, Asunción-based SIT, told Reuters it gave the Justice Ministry information relating to the night of the jailbreak. He declined to elaborate.

Pérez said Paraguay would step up cooperation with Brazil’s right-wing government, which is trying to hobble the gangs by hitting their finances and sending bosses to high-security federal prisons.

Fleitas, the Paraguayan criminal investigations chief, is dubious about the chances of success.

“There’s no way that anyone ... can stand up to this,” he said. The gangs “identify your family, they coerce your relatives, judges, prosecutors, police.”


Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Marla Dickerson