Turkey equipping Moscow’s war machine, data shows

The launch of a Russian Iskander-M ballistic missile. / А. Иванов,Russian defence min, cc-by-sa 4.0FacebookBy bne IntelIiNews November 27, 2023

NATO member Turkey’s exports to Russia of “dual-use” goods essential for Moscow’s war machine have soared this year, heightening concerns that Ankara is turning a blind eye to a lucrative ghost trade.

While official data from Turkey show surging declarations of exports of high-priority goods to ex-Soviet nations Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, those countries’ statistical agencies have not recorded matching gains in imports. The large discrepancies indicate that items suitable for both civilian and military use listed by Turkey as consigned to intermediaries were instead transported directly to Russia, analysts cited by the Financial Times on November 27, said.

Kazakhstan, for instance, registered high-priority goods imports from Turkey of $6.1mn in the year to September—but Turkey’s data declares that such exports to Kazakhstan stood at $66mn over the same period.

“It’s obvious these goods are going to Russia,” Elina Ribakova, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank and vice-president for foreign policy at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), told the FT.

Russia uses the high-priority goods in cruise missiles, combat drones and helicopters, according to US and EU defence analyses.

Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Turkey has maintained amicable diplomatic and unhindered trade links with Russia, though, importantly, it has pledged to Nato allies that it will not help the Kremlin circumvent Western export controls.

Disappointed by what the trade figures are showing, the US has increasingly stepped up its warnings to Turkey that if it does not crack down on trade that helps to enable Russia’s war effort, then Washington and its partners will take assertive enforcement action.

This week, Brian Nelson, US Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, will visit Istanbul and Ankara in his second trip to Turkey this year. He will discuss “efforts to prevent, disrupt, and investigate trade and financial activity that benefit the Russian effort in its war against Ukraine”.

In 9M23, Turkey reported $158mn of exports to Russia, and five former Soviet countries suspected of acting as intermediaries for Moscow, of 45 goods that the US lists as “high-priority”. The increase versus the same period of 2022, the year the war began, is around three-fold. The average figure for 2015-21 was $28mn, according to a Financial Times analysis of data from customs database Trade Data Monitor.

The goods categories include microchips, communications equipment and parts such as telescopic sights.

The data also showed Turkey’s imports of high-priority goods from G7 countries up more than 60% to nearly $500mn so far this year in comparison with the same periods between 2015 and 2021.

“The US, EU, UK and our G7 partners have made clear that we do not want any of our key partners to become places where our sanctions are circumvented,” James O’Brien, US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, told reporters on November 27.

Turkey has “made it more difficult for certain items to transit … especially from the United States, but obviously there is always more to do,” he added. “It is a job that is never done. The Russians are always trying to import more. And it is important that we continue to close doors for Russia otherwise we see more events like this weekend with a very large [armed drone] attack on Kyiv.”

The Turkish foreign ministry maintains that in line with Ankara’s policy that it will not assist Russia in dodging Western sanctions, Turkey’s large financial and industrial businesses are comprehensively complying with sanctions enforcement measures on dual-use goods. However, it says that there are little-known and insignificant entities that remain uninformed about the sanctions or are indifferent to them. 

 

Historical Violence In Tasmania: Victorian Collector Traded Human Aboriginal Remains For Scientific Accolades

The University of Cambridge’s collection of thylacines, sent from Morton Allport in 1869 and 1871, represent the UK’s biggest collection of this species known to originate from a single person. CREDIT: © University of Cambridge / Natalie Jones.

 November 30, 2023  

By Eurasia Review

A Hobart-based solicitor built his reputation as “the foremost scientist in the colony” in the mid-1800’s, despite limited contributions to scientific knowledge.

Morton Allport achieved his status by obtaining the bodily remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and Tasmanian tigers, also known as thylacines, and sending them to collectors in Europe – specifically asking for scientific accolades in return.

This took place in the context of a genocide against the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples, and persecution of the thylacine that eventually led to its extinction.

The new research by Jack Ashby, Assistant Director of the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, is based on transcriptions of letters sent by Allport to correspondents in Australia and Europe. It is published today in the Archives of Natural History, the journal of the Society for the History of Natural History.

His research reveals how the human and environmental costs of the colonial project were entwined with practices of natural history.

Ashby spent fifteen months investigating the colonial histories of the Australian mammal collections in Cambridge and other museums. The University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, holds one of the world’s best-preserved collections of skins of the iconic thylacine.

“Early British settlers considered both thylacines and Tasmanian Aboriginal people to be a hindrance to colonial development – and the response was institutionalised violence with the intended goal of eradicating both,” said Ashby.

In the process of reading Morton Allport’s letters, held mainly at the State Library of Tasmania, Ashby found that Allport identified himself as the principal exporter of the bodily remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people to Europe. Allport did not send any of these remains to the University of Cambridge.

Allport shipped a total of five Tasmanian Aboriginal skeletons to Europe, proudly identifying himself as the most prolific trader in Tasmanian bodily remains. He made clear in his letters that he had directed the grave-robbing himself. The human remains sent by Allport to the United Kingdom are no longer held in British collections – they were either destroyed by bombing during the Second World War or have since been repatriated to Tasmania.

“Allport’s letters show he invested heavily in developing his scientific reputation – particularly in gaining recognition from scientific societies – by supplying human and animal remains from Tasmania in a quid pro quo arrangement, rather than through his own scientific endeavours,” said Ashby.

Ashby’s research has shown that as populations of both thylacines and Tasmanian Aboriginal people were diminished, demand for their remains in museums and private collections increased. Morton Allport worked to meet this demand.

Allport’s exploits included acquiring the remains of an Aboriginal man, William Lanne, considered a “prize specimen” as he was believed by the colonists to be the last Tasmanian man when he died in 1869. The research explains how Allport likely instructed that Lanne’s body be mutilated both before and – following his exhumation – after his burial so that Allport could add him to a museum collection in Hobart.

The events surrounding Lanne’s death have been at the centre of much debate in Tasmania in recent years, and this August it was agreed that a statue of state premier William Crowther – also implicated in the mutilation of Lanne’s body – would be removed from Hobart city centre. But until now Allport’s role has been little explored.

“Outrageously, despite state-sponsored violence committed against thylacines and Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples, they were both described by the colonists as being at fault for what happened to them – that they couldn’t cope in the ‘modern’ world,” said Ashby.

The University of Cambridge’s collection of thylacines, sent from Morton Allport in 1869 and 1871, represent the UK’s biggest collection of this species known to originate from a single person.

Thylacines were the largest marsupial carnivores of recent times. In 1830, British settlers in Tasmania established the first bounties encouraging violence against both Tasmania’s first peoples and thylacines. The last known thylacine died in 1936.

“Specimens like the thylacines in our collection hold extreme power in allowing museums to connect people to this story,” said Ashby.

He added: “Although Allport did not send any human remains to Cambridge, I can no longer look at these thylacine skins without thinking of the human story they relate to. It shows how natural history specimens aren’t just scientific data – they also reflect important moments in human history, much of which was tragically violent.”

Professor Rebecca Kilner, Head of the University’s Department of Zoology, said: “We have a remarkable collection of animals in our museum. We have long appreciated that their natural history can help us understand more about the natural world and how to conserve it. We now realise that the social history behind our collections is just as important.”

She added: “Understanding why and how animals were collected, including the underlying political and social motivations, is key to understanding and addressing some of the social inequalities that exist today.”

A new web-resource sharing the stories behind the collections has been launched today. This work forms part of the University of Cambridge Museum’s inquiries into legacies of empire and enslavement.

Doctors Call For Expanded Reporting Of Medical Care Given In ICE Detention Centers

 November 30, 2023  

By Eurasia Review

A new study led by Dr. Annette Dekker, an assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at UCLA, calls for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers to increase health outcome reporting for detained immigrants to monitor the quality of medical care. Pulling from three different data sources, the researchers found discrepancies in care reported by emergency medical services (EMS) compared to ICE reports.  

Building upon work that reviews deaths that occur at ICE detention centers, Dekker and colleagues sought to address concerns that individuals detained by ICE receive subpar medical care. This study aimed to further understand how ICE manages medical emergencies.  

To conduct the study, published in JAMA Network Open, the researchers collaborated with EMS agencies to obtain data from 911 calls at three of the five detention centers in California that exclusively house detained immigrants from 2018 to 2022. They also analyzed data from ICE and the California Department of Justice (CA DOJ). 

Researchers report that obtaining relevant data to study medical emergencies was challenging due to limited reporting from ICE. “We were looking at a box and trying to interpret a few rays of light that are coming out of it rather than just opening the lid to see inside,” Dekker said. 

The study found that ICE itself reported more medical emergencies that required offsite care than was accounted for in EMS records. Dekker says the inconsistency in numbers raises questions about what medical care is provided in these centers.  

Females in one detention center, according to EMS records, were disproportionately likely to require a call to 911, in many cases due to pregnancy complications. Several of these pregnancy-related medical emergencies occurred after ICE released a directive stating that pregnant people should not be detained at ICE centers. EMS records also showed fewer psychiatric emergencies than expected based on the number of mental health encounters, including suicide attempts, reported by ICE.  

ICE is reporting less information about detainee health care now than during the four-year period this study was conducted, according to Dekker, and no longer releases monthly censuses or facility inspection reports.  

“If you look at other publicly funded healthcare systems like Medicaid or Medicare, there are clear standards and rigorous metrics must be collected and reported,” Dekker said.  

“It is very hard to contextualize what is happening at ICE detention centers and there is a huge need to expand the required reporting metrics so that we can ensure these facilities are providing appropriate medical care.

 

An Astronomical Waltz Reveals A Sextuplet Of Planets

A rare family of six exoplanets has been unlocked with the help of ESA’s Cheops mission. The planets in this family are all smaller than Neptune and revolve around their star HD110067 in a very precise waltz. When the closest planet to the star makes three full revolutions around it, the second one makes exactly two during the same time. This is called a 3:2 resonance. The six planets form a resonant chain in pairs of 3:2, 3:2, 3:2, 4:3, and 4:3, resulting in the closest planet completing six orbits while the outer-most planet does one. Cheops confirmed the orbital period of the third planet in the system, which was the key to unlocking the rhythm of the entire system. This is the second planetary system in orbital resonance that Cheops has helped reveal. The first one is called TOI-178. CREDIT: © ESA

 November 30, 2023 

By Eurasia Review

An international collaboration between astronomers using the CHEOPS and TESS space satellites, including NCCR PlanetS members from the University of Bern and the University of Geneva, have found a key new system of six transiting planets orbiting a bright star in a harmonic rhythm. This rare property enabled the team to determine the planetary orbits which initially appeared as an unsolvable riddle. 

CHEOPS is a joint mission by ESA and Switzerland, under the leadership of the University of Bern in collaboration with the University of Geneva. Thanks to a collaboration with scientists working with data from NASA’s satellite TESS, the international team could uncover the planetary system orbiting the nearby star HD110067. A very distinctive feature of this system is its chain of resonances: the planets orbit their host star in perfect harmony. Part of the research team are researchers from the University of Bern and the University of Geneva who are also members of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS. The findings have just been published in Nature.

The planets in the HD110067 system revolve around the star in a very precise waltz. When the closest planet to the star makes three full revolutions around it, the second one makes exactly two during the same time. This is called a 3:2 resonance. “Amongst the over 5000 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars than our Sun, resonances are not rare, nor are systems with several planets. What is extremely rare though, is to find systems where the resonances span such a long chain of six planets” points out Dr. Hugh Osborn, CHEOPS fellow at the University of Bern, leader of CHEOPS observation programme involved in the study, and co-author of the publication. This is precisely the case of HD110067 whose planets form a so-called “resonant chain” in successive pairs of 3:2, 3:2, 3:2, 4:3, and 4:3 resonances, resulting in the closest planet completing six orbits while the outer-most planet does one.

A seemingly unsolvable puzzle

Although multiple planets were initially detected thanks to their transits, the exact arrangement of the planets was unclear at first. However, the precise gravitational dance enabled the scientists’ team to solve the puzzle of HD110067. Prof. Adrien Leleu from the University of Geneva, in charge of analysing the orbital resonances, and co-author of the study, explains: “A transit occurs when a planet, from our point of view, passes in front of its host star, blocking a minute fraction of the starlight, creating an apparent dip of its brightness.” From the first observations carried out by NASA’s TESS satellite, it was possible to determine that the two inner planets called ‘b’ and ‘c’ have orbital periods of 9 and 14 days respectively. However, no conclusions could be drawn for the other four detected planets as two were seen to transit once in 2020 and once in 2022 with a large 2-year gap in the data, and the other two transited only once in 2022.

The solution to the puzzle for those four additional planets finally began to emerge thanks to observations with the CHEOPS space telescope. While TESS aims at scanning all of the sky bit by bit to find short-period exoplanets, CHEOPS is a targeted mission, focusing on a single star at a time with exquisite precision. “Our CHEOPS observations enabled us to find that the period of planet ‘d’ is 20.5 days. Also, it ruled out multiple possibilities for the remaining three outer planets, ‘e’, ‘f’ and ‘g’,” reveals Osborn.

Predicting the precise waltz of the planets

That is when the team realized that the three inner planets of HD110067 are dancing in a precise 3:2, 3:2 chain of resonances: when the innermost planet revolves nine times around the star, the second revolves six times and the third planet four times.

The team then considered the possibility that the three other planets could also be part of the chain of resonances. “This led to dozens of possibilities for their orbital period,” explains Leleu, “but combining existing observational data from TESS and CHEOPS, with our model of the gravitational interactions between the planets, we could exclude all solutions but one: the 3:2, 3:2, 3:2, 4:3, 4:3 chain.” The scientists could therefore predict that the outer three planets (‘e’, ‘f’ and ‘g’) have orbital periods of 31, 41 days, and 55 days.

This prediction allowed to schedule observations with a variety of ground-based telescopes. Further transits of planet ‘f’ were observed, revealing it was precisely where theory predicted it based on the resonant-chain. Finally, reanalysis of the data from TESS revealed two hidden transits, one from each of planets ‘f’ and ‘g’, exactly at the times expected by the predictions, confirming the periods of the six planets. Additional CHEOPS observations of each planet, and in particular planet ‘e’ are scheduled in the near future.

A key system for the future

From the handful of resonant-chain systems found so far, CHEOPS has highly contributed to the understanding of not only HD110067, but also of TOI-178. Another well-known example of a resonant-chain system is the TRAPPIST-1 system which hosts seven rocky planets. However, TRAPPIST-1 is a small and incredibly faint star which makes any additional observations very difficult. HD110067, on the other hand, is more than 50 times brighter than TRAPPIST-1.

“The fact that the planets in the HD110067 system have been detected by the transit method is key. While they pass in front of the star, light also filters through the planetary atmospheres” points out Jo Ann Egger, PhD student at the University of Bern, who computed the composition of the planets using CHEOPS data, and co-author of the study. This property is allowing astronomers to determine the chemical composition and other properties of the atmospheres. Since a lot of light is required, the bright star HD110067 and its orbiting planets are an ideal target for further studies to charachterize the planetary atmospheres. “The sub-Neptune planets of the HD110067 system appear to have low masses, suggesting they may be gas- or water-rich. Future observations, for example with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), of these planetary atmospheres could determine whether the planets have rocky or water-rich interior structures,” concludes Egger.

 

Bees Are Still Being Harmed Despite Tightened Pesticide Regulations

 November 30, 2023 

By Eurasia Review

A new study has confirmed that pesticides, commonly used in farmland, significantly harm bumblebees – one of the most important wild pollinators. In a huge study spanning 106 sites across eight European countries, researchers have shown that despite tightened pesticide regulations, far more needs to be done. 

While the agricultural uses of insecticides have been in the spotlight for their negative effects on bees, it has remained unknown how the effects scale beyond single substances in focal fields. Here, a large team of researchers answered recent calls for a more realistic assessment of the risks posed by mixtures of commonly used pesticides at landscape scales.

The findings, published today in the leading journal Nature, show that despite the world’s most rigorous risk assessment process, the use of approved pesticides in European agricultural landscapes still negatively affects non-target organisms – significantly reducing the colony performance of bumblebees, a key wild and commercial pollinator.

Although not perhaps a major surprise, the results were nonetheless sobering. Bumblebee colonies exposed to these pesticides saw significant reductions in 1) total colony production (the number of cocoons), 2) maximum colony weight, and 3) the number of new queens. 

“When you step outside the laboratory, a challenge of ecotoxicology is to capture the effect of real-world practices at organism-relevant scales,” said Dr Charlie Nicholson, co-lead author and postdoc at Lund University. “With the largest experimental field deployment of any pollinator, we see that bumblebees encounter multiple pesticides in agricultural landscapes, resulting in fewer offspring. On top of this, pesticides do more harm in landscapes with less habitat.” 

Dr Jessica Knapp, co-lead author, now at Trinity College Dublin, said: “The data also show us how bumblebees perform when we use less pesticides. These ‘healthier’ colonies that experience less pesticide risk help us generate a baseline to show that 60% of our bumblebee colonies would fail proposed pollinator protection goals. 

“Our findings show that the current assumption of pesticide regulation – that chemicals which individually pass laboratory tests and semi-field trials and are considered environmentally benign – fails to safeguard bees and potentially other pollinators that support agricultural production and wild plant pollination.”

The study forms a key output of PoshBee – a pan-European project seeking to monitor and improve bee health. 

“The scale of this work provides a step-change in our understanding of the impact of agrochemicals on pollinator health. It was possible through EU funding that supported the project involving 13 countries. Bumblebees, and other animals, do not recognise international borders, and to protect them, we need to take a similarly international approach,” saidPoshBee coordinator Prof. Mark Brown, Royal Holloway University of London. 

Prof. Jane Stout at Trinity College Dublin and coordinator of the pan-European field experiment added: “This work was possible because of the collaboration and dedication of the transdisciplinary field teams in each country and the partnership with the labs that conducted the common analyses. Researchers, beekeepers, and farmers worked together to implement common protocols to collect these unique data. Similar collaborative approaches will be needed if we are to turn the tide and offer the far greater protection that pollinators need.”

The study findings support the need for sustainability goals to reduce pesticide use and risk – critical challenges highlighted at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP 15 meeting and a vital part of the European Farm to Fork strategy – with anticipated benefit to bees and, potentially, their pollination services. 

Dr Maj Rundlöf, the senior author and researcher at Lund University, concluded: “Our work supports the development of landscape-based environmental risk assessment and post-approval monitoring of bees’ pesticide exposure and effects. Our approach is promising for this, but there is also a need to better understand how the wider pollinator community is exposed to and potentially impacted by pesticide use.”

Ireland is already leading in reducing the use and risk of pesticides by 2050. But knowing that pesticides do more harm in landscapes with less habitat reiterates the importance of the All Ireland Pollinator Plan for boosting pollinator habitat across Ireland, which can, to some extent, mitigate the pesticides our bees are exposed to.