HONEY HAVE YOU SEEN THE CHOW CHOW

Hungry North Koreans bristle as elites feast on expensive dog meat

Food is in short supply and prices continue to rise, but the privileged aren’t feeling the squeeze.

By Chang Gyu Ahn for RFA Korean
2022.07.21

A file photo shows a North Korean soldier holding a badminton racket on the banks of the Yalu River near the North Korean town of Sinuiju, opposite the Chinese border city of Dandong.

 REUTERS

While citizens in North Korea are nearly starving in the face of food price hikes and shortages, the country’s elite are feasting on one of the country’s most expensive delicacies: dog meat.

Meat of any kind is a rarity in the North Korean diet these days, and dog meat costs twice as much as pork. A single bowl of dog meat stew, called dangogi-jang, can cost the same as two kilograms of rice.

After a ban on imports at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in January 2020, and with harvests failing to yield enough food for the country’s needs, food shortages are widespread, a resident of Chongjin, in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong, told RFA’s Korean Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“Prices for food such as rice, corn and flour keep rising. Residents are frustrated as they suffer, … but high-ranking government officials and the wealthy class, for whom money is not an object, are busy looking for dog meat restaurants and taking care of themselves,” the source said.

Dog meat is not common in the typical diet of either North or South Korea, but it is considered by some to be a summer delicacy with purported virility-enhancing and medicinal properties. 

This summer, while the bellies of average citizens in the country of 25 million people rumble, the most popular dog meat restaurants in Chongjin and elsewhere are still bustling with powerful military and ruling party clientele.

“Since last summer, the Kyongsong Dangogi Restaurant has been operating out of a two-story traditional Korean building in Chongjin’s Pohang Square. As the hot days of summer begin, it is buzzing with people who have come for their fill of dog meat,” the source said.

“Kyongsong is the second largest dog meat restaurant in the country next to the Pyongyang Dangogi Restaurant on Tongil Street in Pyongyang. I believe [former leader] Kim Jong Il gave the restaurant its name. He was treated to dog meat stew every time he came to North Hamgyong province, and stayed at a hotel within the Kyongsong restaurant that has a scenic view,” he said.

The source was aware that outside of Korea, dog meat consumption is rare.

“In foreign countries, people don’t eat dog meat, but in our country, dangogi-jang is known for its invigorating effect on the body in summer. There’s even a saying that if you were to spill some of the soup on your foot, it would be like medicine to heal the body,” he said. 

“Ordinary residents cannot even dare to eat a bowl of dangogi-jang, no matter how good it is for the body,” the source said. “It is the cheapest dish among the various other dog meat dishes like steak or braised ribs. The stew costs 12,000 won [U.S. $1.70] for a single bowl, about the price of two kilos [4.4 lbs] of rice.” 

Besides Kyongsong, there are several other restaurants in Chongjin that serve dog meat dishes, according to the source.

This file photo shows a meal at the Pyongyang Dangogi Restaurant on Tongil Street in the North Korean capital. Photo: Yonhap

“People in power, such as party officials, prosecutors, social security agents and state security agents do not like to stand out and be seen in public, so they prefer to go to privately run restaurants to eat dog meat rather than public ones,” he said.

A source in the northwestern province of North Pyongan said he believed dangogi-jang helped to heal his sick mother.

“Everyone knows that dog meat is good for your health in the summer. But most residents cannot afford to eat even a single bowl each year,” the second source said.

“There are several restaurants serving dog meat in Uiju county. On July 16, the first of the three hottest days of summer, for the first time in five years, I visited a dog meat restaurant with my mother, who was suffering from a fever and was terribly weak,” he said. 

The second source said that there were many elites at the restaurant, including officials of the ruling Korean Workers’ party, agents of the Ministry of State Security and law enforcement officials.

“It took a long time for my mother to eat her bowl of stew because her teeth are weak. So when other customers finished their meal and new customers replaced them, I recognized the faces of several well known Uiju county officials,” said the second source.

“Ordinary residents are angry now because food prices are too high and there is no way to make money,” the source added. “I felt a sense of disappointment when I saw so many people in power who lined up to eat expensive dog meat … without a care about worrying how they would be able to earn a living.” 

Dog meat is available at restaurants in both North and South Korea, but the dog meat trade is of questionable legality in the South. A South Korean court ruled in 2018 that killing dogs for their meat was illegal, but the law did not specifically ban selling or eating the meat.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung O. Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Biden Administration Challenges GOP to Get Burn Pits Bill Passed

Victoria Cavaliere - Yesterday 

(Bloomberg) -- US Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough expressed confidence the Senate has enough votes to pass a bill to provide health care and benefits to 3.5 million veterans exposed to toxic burn pits, even after Republicans stalled the legislation.

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 28: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks during a news conference about the Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act on Capitol Hill July 28, 2022 in Washington, DC. A procedural vote to advance the bill, which would expand health care access for military veterans who became ill after being exposed to toxic burn pits, failed to pass in the Senate on Wednesday. 

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)


Forty-one Republican senators switched tactics and moved to force a debate on amendments that would reduce future mandatory spending in the bill. The majority of those lawmakers had supported an essentially identical version of the bill last month.

“There’s been one change since then” on “something completely unrelated to this issue,” McDonough said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “So if everybody does what they did before, this has 84 votes, so I think they should just get on with it. Have the vote.”

The bill has drawn support from comedian Jon Stewart and President Joe Biden, who told veterans protesting for expanded benefits outside the US Capitol that he’ll invite them to the White House once his Covid-19 infection clears. Some veterans exposed to burn pits, used to burn trash at military sites, have reported illnesses ranging from respiratory difficulties to cancer.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will bring the legislation back to the floor this week, and that he’ll allow Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey to bring an amendment addressing his party’s concerns for debate.

Toomey, who has consistently voted against the bill, says it creates an additional $400 billion in discretionary spending unrelated to veterans, allowing Congress to hide a spending binge.

Toomey said Sunday he’s sticking to his demand for a fix. “We could bang that out tomorrow night, literally,” he said on CNN.

Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, said Toomey’s budget concerns will be addressed.

Related video: Veterans react to Burn Pit vote fail

“Pat’s going to get his amendment and then we will see where it goes,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Read more: Jon Stewart and Democrats Urge GOP to Back Burn Pits Bill

The House passed the bill on a 342-88 vote in mid-July. An issue for Senate Republicans are nontaxable benefits. The Constitution requires all bills with tax items to originate in the House.

‘Drafting Error’

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican who initially voted for the legislation but switched his position, said ultimately he believes the health care funding will pass.

“We have to stand by our veterans who have been exposed to these chemicals,” Cassidy said on ABC’s “This Week.” “There was a drafting error, a $400 billion drafting error.”

McDonough pushed back on the $400 billion cited by Toomey, saying “you won’t see it” in the bill. It might be “deep in some charts” in the back of the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the legislation’s budgetary impact, he said.

A spending cap proposed by Toomey’s amendment could eventually amount to “rationing care for vets, which is something I just can’t sign on to,” McDonough said.

A spokesperson for Toomey said Sunday the fix will not amount to a cap, but instead “limits the amount of spending” that can be shifted from the discretionary category to the mandatory category.

The Department of Veterans Affairs opened a voluntary registry in 2014 for service members who might have been exposed to airborne hazards from burn pits.

The issue is personal for President Joe Biden, who lost his son Beau to brain cancer. Beau, who was a major in the Delaware National Guard, served overseas near burn pits, and Biden has suggested that the toxins from the pits may have caused the disease.

Christianity Was A Major Part Of Indigenous Boarding Schools – A Historian Whose Family Survived Them Explains


By Brenda J. Child
07/31/22


During a weeklong trip to Canada, Pope Francis visited a former residential school for Indigenous children in Maskwacis, Alberta, on July 25, 2022. The Ermineskin Residential School operated between 1895 and 1975 in Cree Country, the largest First Nations group in Canada.

As at many boarding schools set up to assimilate Indigenous children, students were punished for speaking their language and sometimes experienced abuse. According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba, 15 children died at this particular school over the years. Several of them succumbed to tuberculosis.

During his visit, the pope said he was “deeply sorry” for “the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples.”

Like many other Indigenous people of the U.S. and Canada – especially those, like me, whose family members attended the schools – I listened with interest as Pope Francis asked his audience for forgiveness “for the evil committed by so many Christians.” He apologized “for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated” in projects of forced assimilation while not acknowledging the role that the Catholic Church as an organization played in residential schools.


As a historian who has written about American Indian boarding schools in the United States, and as the granddaughter of school survivors, I have often been troubled by the misinformation in regional and the national media about this complex history.

Religion was a pillar of the forceful campaigns to assimilate Indigenous peoples on both sides of the border but played out differently in the U.S. and Canada. Christianity’s central role is responsible for lingering resentment today, and many Indigenous people, me included, question whether the pope’s apology fell short in holding the church responsible.

Outsourcing assimilation

Canada’s residential schools were different from those in the U.S. in two significant ways. First, the Canadian government farmed out First Nations education to the Catholic and Anglican churches and other Protestant denominations.

The U.S. federal government, on the other hand, operated its own Indian school system both on and off the reservations. Twenty-five were off-reservation boarding schools, the first of which was established in 1879: the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, whose most famous student was the Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe. The boarding schools dominated Indian education in the U.S. for a half-century.

Significant political and educational reforms led to new Indian policies under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, backing away from the previous generation’s goal of assimilation. Many boarding schools closed during the 1930s as FDR’s bureaucrats started to integrate American Indians into public schools. Ironically, that same decade saw the highest enrollment at boarding schools – largely at the request of American Indian families who used them as a form of poverty relief during the Great Depression so their families could survive.

In Canada, however, residential schools continued to be the dominant form of Indigenous education for another 50 years.

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Pope Says Genocide Took Place At Church Schools In Canada For Indigenous Children

‘Civilizing’ students

U.S. government boarding schools and Canada’s residential schools did share features in common. Family separation, enforcing the English language – or French, in some areas of Canada – manual labor training and the imposition of Christianity were core characteristics.

Though churches did not operate the U.S. schools, most Americans and lawmakers in Washington, D.C., were committed to the idea that Indian people needed to be “uplifted” from an “uncivilized” life through education and assimilation into American culture, and that included Christianity. Native spirituality came under assault at boarding schools, and students were given “Christian” names to replace their “pagan” and “unpronounceable” ones.

Christianity was also imposed on Indigenous people through the reservation system. I sometimes like to give the example of my own grandparents, Fred and Jeanette Auginash, who “married” before an Episcopal minister on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota in October 1928.

According to the Ojibwe community in which they resided, they were already married. As my mother had been told, her father asked my grandfather to marry his daughter, and he brought the family gifts of money, food, blankets, horses and other items. For an Ojibwe family, the ritual exchange of gifts is what made a marriage.

However, when my grandparents went to apply for a housing loan on the reservation, they needed a marriage certificate signed by the local Christian minister. In this way, Christianity and the federal government blended their authority in another form of settler colonialism.
Cultural survival

Not surprisingly, Indigenous children and youths were often resistant to the boarding school regimen of family separation and enforced assimilation and Christianity. Young people frequently expressed themselves through rebellions large and small, most often through running away from school. They stowed away on trains and headed home to visit their families.

Parents and other relatives, meanwhile, demonstrated their commitment to their children by writing letters, staying in touch despite the distance and school terms that could last four years without visits home. Parents of boarding school children also wrote to school administrators, insisting that their children visit the doctor and maintain their good health in an era when there was no cure for diseases like tuberculosis and trachoma, an eye infection that can cause blindness.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Francis’ visit to Alberta was met with mixed emotions on the part of Indigenous Canadians. He also blessed a Native church known for blending Christian and Native traditions that is being rebuilt in Edmonton after a fire. In Maskwacis, site of the Ermineskin school, one Cree man gave him a headdress.

The act of generosity was widely criticized and mocked on Native social media. Many Indigenous people felt Pope Francis did not deserve the honor, and that his apology did not acknowledge the Catholic Church’s role in family separation and the abuse of children in residential schools.

As many Indigenous people work to rebuild their language and spiritual traditions, Christian traditions no longer have the same influence over their lives and destinies.

Pope Francis told Indigenous delegations that the abuse in church-run schools in Canada caused him 'pain and shame' Photo: AFP / Vincenzo PINTO

This article originally appeared in The Conversation.

Brenda J. Child is a professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

Analysis: The West should not trust Ukrainian spy agencies. Neither should Ukrainians

JULY 28, 2022 BY JOSEPH FITSANAKIS 

ON SUNDAY, JULY 17, the Ukrainian administration of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the most extensive shake-up of the nation’s security leadership since the Russian military invasion. Two key members of Zelenskiy’s inner circle, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova and domestic security chief Ivan Bakanov, were summarily fired. Venediktova was the public face of Kyiv’s war crimes campaign, which was launched in March in response to the Russian invasion. Bakanov, a childhood friend of Zelenskiy, had headed the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) since 2019.

In a subsequent video statement, Zelenskiy said he fired the two officials after he was informed that at least 60 employees of the SBU and the Prosecutor General’s office had defected to the Russians in eastern Ukraine. Last week, in an article for SpyTalk, Kremlin watcher Olga Lautman said Bakanov’s dismissal had been expected for a few days. Regardless, the move has shaken Western observers, and has given rise to legitimate questions about the susceptibility of Ukraine’s security and intelligence services to Russian meddling. Should the Western alliance, and Western intelligence agencies in particular, trust their Ukrainian counterparts? The answer is, invariably, no. In fact, even the Ukrainians themselves are not in a position to trust their own intelligence services.

From the KGB to the SBU

On September 20, 1991, just one week after Ukraine secured its independence from the Soviet Union, the SBU was founded in place of the Soviet KGB. Initially, the new agency handled both internal security and external intelligence functions. But in 2005, the SBU’s Department of Intelligence became a stand-alone agency under the title Foreign Intelligence Service (SZR). Since then, the SZR has functioned as the institutional equivalent of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), while the SBU has performed domestic security functions that resemble those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

As is the case with the entirety of Ukraine’s state sector, the two agencies are endemically bloated. Intelligence observers report that the SBU’s 30,000 employees make it far larger in size than its British counterpart, the Security Service (MI5). Meanwhile, according to the latest information, the SZR has “double the number of personnel than the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and is larger than Britain’s [Secret Intelligence Service, or] MI6”. By all accounts, even today, more than 30 years after the dissolution of the USSR, the two agencies continue to resemble Soviet-style bureaucracies in terms of size, sluggishness, and corruption.

The Ukrainian State’s Pro-Russian Enclave

In 1999, intelligence observers Julie Anderson and Joseph Albini were noting that, in comparison to its Soviet predecessor, the SBU was “new in form, but not in substance”. A shortage of trained intelligence and security personnel meant that, even a decade after its establishment, the agency had to rely on Russian personnel for over a third of its needs. According to Anderson and Albini, these Russian-born —and largely Russian-affiliated— employees had been “trained by and retained contacts with Moscow”. Meanwhile, longtime counterintelligence officer Nikolai Golushko, who had headed of the Soviet KGB in Ukraine until 1991, had fled to Russia, taking with him “key Ukrainian files”. For many years later, these files constituted “a valuable source for blackmail and exploitation of Ukraine’s remaining intelligence officers and their informants”, the authors noted.

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Throughout that time, the SBU and the institutional descendants of the Soviet-era KGB in Russia, worked closely on several programs and operations. Numerous senior officers in the SBU continued to receive training in Russia. Unsurprisingly, by 2014, when Russia invaded the Ukrainian region of Crimea, the SBU was known to be “riddled with Russian spies, sympathizers and turncoats”, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Philip Shishkin, who has kept a closer eye on Ukraine’s intelligence services than almost any other foreign media correspondent. Almost as soon as Russia annexed Crimea, the local head of the SBU defected to its Russian counterpart agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB). It was reported at the time that, within days of the Russian invasion, close to a third of SBU employees in Crimea and the Donbas had joined the pro-Moscow separatists.

By then, the SBU’s untrustworthiness was commonly acknowledged and understood in Ukraine. In fact, under the five-year rule of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych (2010–2014), the SBU effectively became a branch of Russian intelligence. During that time, the agency deliberately ignored —and may have even assisted— Russian espionage operations against Ukraine, as the Kremlin’s “intelligence agencies met no obstacles to the infiltration of the SBU and [Ukrainian] military intelligence”. Even after Yanukovych fled to Russia following massive popular pressure, the SBU remained the most pro-Russian part of Ukraine’s labyrinthine government.

The SBU Under Zelensky

Despite sporadic attempts to reform the SBU’s pro-Russian culture after 2014, by 2019, when Zelensky assumed office in Kyiv, the SBU remained “porous vis-à-vis the Russian Security Service”. It was, by all accounts, “a service which Western counterparts [were] hesitant to engage with”. When they took over power, Zelensky and his close collaborators were aware of the SBU’s pro-Russian identity. But this problem was not easy to solve. When Yanukovych had fled to Russia, his SBU lieutenants had made sure to steal or destroy literally all internal data on the agency’s personnel, as well as “anything related to cooperation between the Ukrainian and Russian intelligence services”. It was reported at the time that every SBU “hard drive and flash drive” was literally smashed with hammers by officers loyal to the departing regime. Meanwhile, the agency’s entire senior leadership fled to Russia.

Zelensky knew that he had to act quickly. In his inauguration speech, which he delivered on May 20, 2019, he called on the Ukrainian parliament to immediately dismiss a number of senior government officials, including the head of the SBU, Vasyl Hrytsak. Having received the memo, Hrytsak resigned on his own initiative before he was fired. In the months that followed, Zelensky fired 90 percent of SBU officers, ranging from low-level technical staff to regional heads from across the country. They were replaced by a new generation of freshly minted officers, who underwent polygraph tests prior to being admitted into the SBU’s ranks. By late 2021, Zelensky and his closest aides believed they had successfully tackled the SBU’s “Russian problem”.

The SBU’s Russian Problem Persists

But they were wrong. The pace of reforms was too rushed and too unsystematic to sack the inner sanctum of the SBU’s Russian enclave. Like some of his predecessors, Zelensky consciously refrained from making his reforms seem like a purge, as doing so could reawaken longstanding divisions that are deeply entrenched in Ukrainian society. As a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) noted, “in a country aspiring to protect its democracy, there is […] an unwillingness to begin arresting [pro-Russian] Ukrainians, since [it could] fracture Ukrainian politics, creating precisely the conditions to facilitate a Russian takeover”.

That hesitation, however is what denied Zelensky political control over the SBU. In the words of that same RUSI report, the result of that hesitation was that Russia now “has a bureaucracy in waiting”, a “shadow structure […] inside the Ukrainian government to move information around known Kremlin assets”. Last week’s dismissals of the head of the SBU and the prosecutor general, were clear signs that Zelensky has recognized that his efforts to reform these institutions have been far from successful. The Ukrainian president is thus beginning to realize the very size of the Russian shadow structure within the Ukrainian state, which now directly threatens the cohesion of his administration and the very survival of the Ukrainian resistance against the Kremlin.

The Future

What will happen from now on? It will be difficult for the Zelensky government to survive without implementing an extensive and far-reaching cleanup of the state apparatus. There are reports that this is already underway. However, any such move runs the risk of being perceived as a Soviet-style purge, and could alienate large segments of Ukraine’s Russian speaking population.

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The situation is particularly problematic in areas under Russian control. As everyday Ukrainians, as well as government officials, are trying desperately to survive in the occupied areas, they face the dilemma of quitting their jobs, or continuing to work in hopes of receiving a much needed monthly paycheck. If they choose the latter option, they can easily be viewed as collaborationists by Zelensky and his government. Such an approach, combined with extensive purges in free Ukraine, may create the preconditions of a civil war. That would be an anathema for the Ukrainian cause, and would derail the efforts of the Western alliance to save Ukraine from the brink of disaster.

* Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis is Professor of Intelligence and Security Studies at Coastal Carolina University. He specializes in intelligence collection.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 28 July 2022 | Permalink

EU’s Drone Is Another Threat to Migrants and Refugees

Frontex Aerial Surveillance Facilitates Return to Abuse in Libya


“We didn’t know it was the Libyans until the boat got close enough and we could see the flag. At that point we started to scream and cry. One man tried to jump into the sea and we had to stop him. We fought off as much as we could to not be taken back, but we couldn’t do anything about it,” Dawit told us. It was July 30, 2021, and Dawit, from Eritrea, his wife, and young daughter were trying to seek refuge in Europe.


Click to expand Image

Reconstruction of the July 30, 2021, interception facilitated by Frontex drone. In addition to the track of the Frontex drone, the map shows the track of Seabird (a Sea-Watch airplane) that witnessed the interception. It also shows the NGO vessel Sea Watch 3 in the vicinity. There is no vessel tracking data for the Libyan Coast Guard patrol boat Ras Jadir or the intercepted vessel. Map courtesy of Border Forensics.

Instead, they were among the more than 32,450 people intercepted by Libyan forces last year and hauled back to arbitrary detention and abuse in Libya.

Despite overwhelming evidence of torture and exploitation of migrants and refugees in Libya – crimes against humanity, according to the United Nations – over the last few years the European Union has propped up Libyan forces’ efforts to intercept the boats. It has withdrawn its own vessels and installed a network of aerial assets run by private companies. Since May 2021, the EU border agency Frontex has deployed a drone out of Malta, and its flight patterns show the crucial role it plays in detecting boats close to Libyan coasts. Frontex gives the information from the drone to coastal authorities, including Libya.

Frontex claims the surveillance is to aid rescue, but the information facilitates interceptions and returns to Libya. The day Dawit and his family were caught at sea, Libyan forces intercepted at least two other boats and took at least 228 people back to Libya. One of those boats was intercepted in international waters, inside the Maltese search-and-rescue area. The drone’s flight path suggests it was monitoring the boat’s trajectory, but Frontex never informed the nearby nongovernmental Sea-Watch rescue vessel.

Human Rights Watch and Border Forensics, a nonprofit that uses innovative visual and spatial analysis to investigate border violence, are examining how the shift from sea to air surveillance contributes to the cycle of extreme abuse in Libya. Frontex’s lack of transparency – they have rejected ours and Sea-Watch’s requests for information about their activities on July 30, 2021 – leaves many questions about their role unanswered.

Dawit and others panicked when they saw the Libyan boat because they knew what awaited upon return. He and his family ended up in prison for almost two months, released only after paying US$1,800. They are still in Libya, hoping for a chance to reach safety in a country that respects their rights and dignity.

Judith Sunderland
Associate Director, Europe and Central Asia Division

Lorenzo Pezzani
Co-director, Border Forensics

Scientists Discover Europe's "Last Known" Giant Panda 

Scientists have discovered a new species of giant panda in the wetlands of Bulgaria. Scientists say it may be the "last known" and "most evolved" species. of the type found in Europe.

Unlike its modern black and white relatives, researchers, including those from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,A. He said that he did not rely on bamboo.

"It is not a direct ancestor of the modern giant panda genus, but it is closely related," explains study co-author Professor Nikolai Spasov of the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History.

Findings published last week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontologysuggest that ancient pandas likely ate softer plant material, suggesting that this group This is consistent with the general trend of increasing dependence on plants during the evolution of humans. history.

"This discovery shows how little we still know about ancient nature, and how historical discoveries in paleontology can lead to unexpected consequences even today." It shows," Dr Spasov said.

Scientists have evaluated the upper carnivorous tooth and upper canine tooth, first unearthed in northwestern Bulgaria in the 1970s and added to the museum's fossil treasures.

"There was only one vaguely handwritten label. It took me years to figure out its provenance and age. Then I realized that this was an unknown giant panda fossil." It took me a long time to realize that," said Dr. Spasov.

The tooth was found in a coal deposit and had a blackened color. This indicates that pandas lived in forested wetlands.

At this time in the late Miocene, about 10 million to 4.5 million years ago, fossils of the staple grass that supports modern pandas are rare in Europe, researchers say.

Fossil records and tooth tips from this period suggest that pandas at that time did not have teeth strong enough to crush tree trunks.

Instead, ancient pandas likely ate softer plant material, scientists say.

"Possible competition with other species, particularly carnivores and possibly other bears, is a major concern for giants. He explains that pandas specialize in plant foods in humid forest conditions. ,” Dr. Spasov said.

However, researchers suspect that the teeth provided "sufficient protection against predators."

Since the canine teeth are comparable in size to modern pandas, scientists speculate that ancient pandas were similar in size or slightly smaller.

According to them, the species may have become extinct due to climate change, most likely due to the "Messinian salinity crisis." This is an event in which the Mediterranean basin dried up and the surrounding terrestrial environment changed significantly.

"Even if A. niklovi were not as specialized in habitat and food as modern giant pandas, fossil pandas are well specialized and their evolution has It was related to wet forest habitats," said Dr. Spasov.

"Climate change, which led to aridification at the end of the Miocene in southern Europe, likely had a negative impact on the last European panda presence," he added.

This study narrowed down the identity of the beast behind the fossil specimen to one belonging to the Ailropodini, a tribe of the Ursididae.

This group of animals , best known by its sole living representative, the giant panda, but scientists say it once lived in Europe and Asia.

As one possible evolutionary trajectory, researchers suggest that Aillopodini may have left Asia and reached Europe inA. nikolovi . thinking about.

However, they cautioned against this hypothesis, stating that paleontological data indicate that "the earliest members of this group of bears were found in Europe." 57}

This indicates that the group may have developed in Europe and then headed to Asia, where the ancestors of another genus Ailurarctosdeveloped.

These early pandas may have later evolved into the modern giant pandas, scientists say.

UK

‘Reactionary and regressive’: Tory leadership candidates slammed for promising the return of grammar schools

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

Yesterday


"How anyone can still argue that grammar schools are the magic wand to improve our broken education system beggars belief."

Both candidates in the race to No 10 have pledged their support for the expansion of selective education.

Rishi Sunak’s pledge was made during the Tory leadership hustings in Leeds this week. During the debate the former chancellor was asked if he would support the move to bring back grammar schools and he said “yes.”

“I believe in educational excellence, I believe education is the most powerful way we can transform people’s lives. But I also think there’s lots we can do with the school system as we have it.

“Now what Michael Gove did several years ago was transformative. And Michael took on some vested interests, challenged consensus, brought in some reforms that mean that millions of our children now are better off.

“But that’s a Conservative way to do it. It’s not about throwing more money at the problem, it’s about reforming the system to get better outcomes. And that’s what I would do with education as well,” Sunak added.

Following the debate, Rishi Sunak’s team clarified that he supported opening satellites to existing grammar schools.

Sunak’s rival Liz Truss was not asked the same question in the debate, but she reportedly told the right-wing 1922 committee of Conservative MPs at a husting that she would end the ban on new grammar schools.

The foreign secretary told Conservative Home website that she is a “huge supporter of grammar schools”.

“My two daughters now attend a grammar school, and I want people around the country to have the choice that we have to be able to send our daughters to a grammar school.”

Middle-class privilege

In 1965, amid concerns that the selective school system created middle-class privilege and heightened class division, a Labour government started to phase out grammar schools. In 1998, Tony Blair’s government put an outright ban on new grammar schools being opened in the UK and banned new schools from selecting pupils by their grades under the School Standards and Framework Act.

However, existing grammar schools are still allowed to expand and accommodate more students. There are currently 164 grammar schools in the UK.

In 2016, the then prime minister Theresa May revealed plans to scrap the ban and create a new generation of grammar schools, as well as expanding on existing ones. May argued that grammar schools improve social mobility and, in reintroducing them to Britain, would make the country a “true meritocracy.”

May’s plans met opposition, with Labour saying bringing new grammar schools back to the education system would “entrench inequality.” The then shadow education secretary Angela Rayner labelled the policy “divisive” and that it would “segregate” children.

Like when May announced her intention to bring back grammar schools, the Tory leadership hopefuls’ promises to see their return has been met with opposition.

In response to Sunak’s comments at the Leeds’ hustings, political commentator Patrick O’Flynn tweeted: “Not saying Rishi is in a blind panic as his campaign completely disintegrates, but don’t be surprised if he is offering everyone a free owl by the weekend.”

Another critic of Sunak’s pledge labelled it “reactionary and regressive.”

Reacting to the candidates’ support of an expansion of selective education, Dr Nuala Burgess, chair of Comprehensive Future, which campaigns for a secondary school system with fair admission and to put an end to 11-plus exams, said:

“It seems extraordinary that with a teacher retention crisis and schools desperate for funds, that the only education policy that the Tory leadership candidates can come up with is a push for more grammar schools.

“We firmly believe that outside a tiny minority of mainly elderly, comfortably-off Conservative members who will vote for our next PM, there is no appetite for the increased stress, bitter competition for school places and hot-housing of little children that more 11-plus testing and more grammar schools will inevitably generate.

“Every single piece of available evidence demonstrates conclusively that working class children do worse in areas of the country that have retained grammar schools. How anyone can still argue that grammar schools are the magic wand to improve our broken education system beggars belief. More grammar schools means more secondary moderns – you cannot have one without the other, but this is a point avoided by those who insist on the benefits of a selective education system. They also avoid mentioning that it permits schools to reject 80% of the pupils who apply for a place.”

Comprehensive Future also noted how Sunak would expand grammar schools by using the Selective School Expansion Fund (SSEF). The SSEF funds academy schools and local authority-maintained schools which select by ability to expand, subject to conditions.

“Sunak’s bid to make the expansion of grammar schools more palatable by re-introducing Theresa May’s flawed Selective School Expansion fund suggests he has not done his homework. He and his party should be ashamed of the fund’s failure to meet promises that it would bring many more disadvantaged pupils into grammar schools. The fact is that the £50 million spent in the Fund’s first year led to just 77 additional pupil premium places.

“If our former chancellor really cared about education, he would use his education budget more wisely. He might start by applying his financial acumen to finding ways of restoring teachers’ salaries to 2010 levels and increasing per pupil spending. In this way, every child and young person would benefit, irrespective of the school they attended,” Dr Nuala Burgess continued.

Celia Birchby, former headteacher of a primary school in Macclesfield, told LFF her thoughts on the reintroduction of grammar schools in the UK.

“As a child attending a grammar school in the 1960s, I remember how horrendous the system was, splitting up friends from primary school and stoking division. It’s all about the same-old Tory elitism. But what they don’t understand is that most of us don’t want elitism, we want everyone to be equal.”

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward

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Hawaii couple alleged to be Russian spies using fake names held without bail

AUGUST 1, 2022 BY JOSEPH FITSANAKIS 

A FEDERAL JUDGE IN HAWAII has denied bail to a married American couple, who are believed to have assumed the identities of dead children in order to lead double lives for over 20 years, according to prosecutors. Local media reports allege that Bobby Edward Fort and Julie Lyn Montague, who were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on July 22 on the island of Oahu, are Russian spies, and that their names are parts of their assumed identities.

According to the reports, the real names of the couple are Walter Glenn Primose, 66, and Gwynn Darle Morrison, 54. Government prosecutors allege that, in the late 1980s, the couple hurriedly left their home in the state of Texas, telling family members that they were entering the US Federal Witness Protection Program. They are also said to have given some family members permission to take whatever they wanted from their home, before it was foreclosed.

The government claims that the couple then assumed the identities of two infants, Bobby Edward Fort and Julie Lyn Montague, who had died in Texas in 1967 and 1968 respectively. They then used these infants’ birth certificates to obtain social security cards, drivers’ licenses, and even US passports. In 1994, while living in Hawaii under his assumed name, Primrose enlisted in the US Coast Guard, which is the maritime security and law enforcement service branch of the US military. He served there for over 20 years as an avionic electrical technician with a secret level clearance. Following his retirement in 2016, Primrose is said to have worked as a private contractor for the US Department of Defense until his arrest on July 22 of this year.

Now US government prosecutors claim that federal agents found 30-year-old photographs of Primrose and Morrison dressed in uniforms of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s intelligence agency. There are also unconfirmed reports that Primrose lived in Romania during the Cold War. He maintained passports under both of his names, and used them to travel abroad. He reported some of his foreign trips to his employer, but not all, such as for example several trips to Canada, according to court documents. Government prosecutors further claim that invisible ink instruments, coded documents and maps of US military facilities were found in the couple’s home in the town of Kapolei.

Both Primrose and Morrison have denied they are foreign spies, saying they are American-born. They also claim that the photos of them in KGB uniform were part of a prank they played with the help of a friend. But the court denied them bail, despite the fact that neither of them has a criminal record. They have been charged with identity theft, lying on their passport applications and conspiring to commit crimes against the US. It is likely that espionage charges will follow in the coming weeks.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 01 August 2022 | Permalink

War, Climate Change, Energy Costs: How the Wheat Market Has Been Upended

The price has fallen sharply from its peak after one major producer, Russia, invaded another, Ukraine. But that hasn’t ended fears of a global hunger crisis.

A Ukrainian wheat farm. Ukraine and Russia account for roughly a quarter of global wheat exports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

By Joe Rennison
Aug. 1, 2022

The price of wheat has tumbled from its peak after Russia invaded Ukraine, but experts say one of the world’s most widely consumed foods remains in short supply and warn that a global hunger crisis still looms.

Like oil, steel, beef and other commodities integral to the economy, wheat shifts in price and availability in response to a complex set of overlapping factors, such as geopolitics and the weather. While the falling price of wheat offers some respite for countries dependent on importing the crop, it may dissuade farmers from planting more. Nor does the drop in price address pre-existing problems worsened by a war between two of the world’s biggest producers. Energy prices remain high, affecting the cost of running farm equipment and transporting the wheat to market as well as the cost of fertilizer. And hot, dry weather that crimps crop yields is becoming more common.

“The fundamental picture hasn’t really changed,” said Ehsan Khoman, who manages emerging-market and commodities research for Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, a Japanese bank. “There is a potential where food prices could spiral out of control.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused food and fuel prices to soar, as war and sanctions disrupted supplies from two of the world’s major agriculture and energy exporters. The two countries together account for roughly a quarter of global wheat exports, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Oil prices have eased a bit since the start of the war, though it still costs a lot more than it did at the start of the year for Americans to fill their cars with gasoline, for Europeans to heat their homes with natural gas and for just about anyone anywhere to do anything linked to the cost of oil. Wheat prices, though, have fallen to roughly where they began the year.

The price of a widely traded type of wheat that started the year about $7.70 per bushel jumped to $13 in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, according to futures contracts traded in Chicago, a global hub for the commodity. The price mostly stayed in double digits until mid-June, when it began to fall. On Friday, wheat traded at a little more than $8 a bushel.

After the initial shock of the invasion, higher prices dissuaded some countries from buying wheat, lowering demand and weighing on prices. An uptick in supply from winter wheat harvests has also lowered prices in recent weeks.

A deal to free trapped grain provides only partial relief.

A major factor pushing wheat prices down has been the progress of negotiations over the fate of more than 20 million metric tons of grain stuck in Black Sea ports in Ukraine. A little over a week ago, an agreement was reached to open an export corridor to allow some of the grain trapped by the war to move out across the world.

The deal may not hold amid the fighting, and even if it does, experts say it probably won’t be enough to address other issues hanging over the global wheat market.

“This agreement has been bigged up as something that will be a solution to the world’s food shortage, and it is just not,” said Tracey Allen, an agricultural commodities strategist at JPMorgan Chase.

Other, more entrenched factors in the wheat market, from the prices of energy and fertilizer to climate change, could play a bigger role in determining the cost — and availability — of a loaf of bread around the world.

Experts think wheat prices are likely to rise again. Adding further uncertainty is that futures contracts work by allowing buyers and sellers to agree on a price for wheat that will be delivered in the future, typically three months’ time. And a lot can change in three months.

“Prices are going to remain higher, and consumers are going to feel that in the price of products they purchase on supermarket shelves,” Ms. Allen said.

A major factor pushing down wheat prices recently has been negotiations over grain stuck in Ukraine’s ports.

Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times


Climate change is making wheat harvests less predictable.

Droughts last year meant that even before Russia invaded Ukraine, global food markets were under pressure.

While some regions like Argentina saw bumper crops, and Russia is expected to have a hefty harvest this summer, severe heat and low rainfall affected the amount of wheat that others could grow.

In Canada, temperatures soared to new records. At the end of July 2021, about three-quarters of the country’s agricultural land was classified as abnormally dry. Canada’s wheat production dropped nearly 40 percent from 2020 to 2021, causing its exports to Latin America and the Caribbean to decline by over 3 million tons, according to the U.S.D.A.

The decline in global supply resulting from bad weather had already helped push up prices coming into this year. In January 2020, wheat was about 30 percent cheaper than it is now.

Canadian wheat production is expected to pick up over the next year. The spring crop in the United States, led by North Dakota, is also expected to be robust. But Europe has been suffering from a heat wave, raising concern about a weak yield, while India banned exports of wheat in May because of drought.

Experts warn that fluctuations in the weather are likely to become more pronounced, adding to the uncertainty over global production and the direction of prices in the future.

Energy prices are important to wheat farmers.

Oil prices largely determine the cost of running farm equipment and transporting harvested grain. Natural gas prices are even more important to farmers because nitrogen, used to produce fertilizers like ammonia and urea, is produced from natural gas.

“It’s not just about grain prices — it’s shipping costs and fuel prices and fertilizer prices and so on,” said Luiz Eduardo Peixoto, an economist specializing in emerging markets at BNP Paribas.

Russia, the largest producer of fertilizer in the world, has steadily restricted the flow of natural gas to Europe, not only driving fuel prices higher but also nudging up the cost of nitrogen-based fertilizers. As fertilizer prices have risen, so have wheat prices, ticking up in the past week.

Because Russian fertilizer is so important to the global farm trade, it has avoided international sanctions that have restricted other Russian exports, giving Moscow political leverage over another crucial commodity that the world needs.
Lower prices aren’t necessarily a good thing for wheat producers.

Higher costs for fuel and fertilizer eat into the profit that farmers can make and create a quandary for wheat-producing nations. That is particularly true for Ukraine, where transporting wheat to buyers abroad has become costly because of the war, said Dan Basse, an agricultural economist and president of AgResource, an analytics company.

While high prices hurt countries that import wheat, low prices might dissuade farmers from planting extra this year, especially in Ukraine as they contend with challenges selling their current crop, which could make them unable to afford to grow more.

Egypt and Indonesia depend heavily on Ukrainian wheat, and famine-struck Somalia imports wheat primarily from Ukraine and Russia.

The U.S.D.A. forecasts that the 18.8 million metric tons of wheat that Ukraine exported over the past 12 months will fall to around 10 million in the coming 12 months.

“Farmers can’t afford to plant that next crop,” Mr. Basse said. “We need world wheat prices to rise for farmers to expand planting in the upcoming growing season.”

Yet even if prices rise enough to encourage more planting, that may prove irrelevant when grain storage is overflowing as farmers struggle to move crops around conflict areas.

“It almost doesn’t matter how high prices are,” Ms. Allen of JPMorgan said. “It does not solve the problem of getting wheat off the farms.”

International agencies have issued repeated warnings about how altered trade patterns after the war in Ukraine could keep prices for commodities like wheat higher than usual. But some experts say the warnings are not being heeded.

“The issues affecting food markets have not been solved,” said Mr. Khoman of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. “There is still a shortage.”


Joe Rennison covers financial markets and trading, a beat that ranges from chronicling the vagaries of the stock market to explaining the often-inscrutable trading decisions of Wall Street insiders. @JARennison

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 1, 2022, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: What Drives The Price Of Wheat.