Fragments of ‘Valentine’s fireball’ meteorite fall in southern Italy


Object hit balcony in Matera and remnants in pristine condition – ‘almost as if we collected it directly from space’, says expert

Matera is renowned for its limestone buildings and cave dwellings. 

Photograph: rudi1976/Alamy

Angela Giuffrida in Rome

Sun 19 Feb 2023

Residents of southern Italy’s picturesque and ancient “city of stone” have been gripped by another rocky phenomenon after a meteorite crash-landed on the balcony of a home in Matera’s suburbs.

The space object, which had been travelling at about 200mph, was spotted in the skies above the Puglia and Basilicata regions on 14 February, becoming known as “Valentine’s fireball”, before falling on to the balcony of the home of brothers Gianfranco and Pino Losignore and their parents.


Not that they realised at first: the two were carrying out checks on the property’s solar panels when, three days later, they noticed a damaged panel and tile, along with grey fragments scattered across the balcony.

“I wasn’t at home when it happened, but my mother was in the basement at the time and heard a loud bang,” said Gianfranco. “She was worried, but it was quite a windy day and so thought it might have been the branch of a tree. Never would we have expected it to have been a meteorite.”

The meteorite’s fireball had been observed on the surveillance cameras of Prisma, a project run by the Italian institute of astrophysics, enabling experts to track where it might have fallen.

More than 70 grams of the fragments have so far been gathered for study, which will eventually be put on display in a museum.

Carmelo Falco, a representative of Prisma who travelled to Matera straight away, said that while many meteorites hit the Earth, what is rare about the event in Matera is that the meteorite landed on a clean surface, so it has not been contaminated.

Fragments of the Matera meteorite. Photograph: Gianfranco Lossignore

It is also rare for meteorites to fall in an area from which their fragments can be easily recovered.

“We have to analyse the remnants of the meteorite, but what is unique with this one is the situation in which it was found,” said Falco. “The material, which is soft, much like sand, is very pure, as it did not touch soil or water – it is almost as if we collected it directly from space.”

This is the second time in recent years that a meteorite has fallen in Italy. In January 2020, one was found near Modena in Emilia-Romagna.

Domenico Bennardi, the mayor of Matera, a city famous for its sassi, cave dwellings carved out of limestone, said the discovery had triggered much “enthusiasm and emotion” among residents.

“Matera is one of the oldest cities in the world, where many discoveries have been made,” he said. “It’s incredible that fragments of rock from space have now fallen on the city of stone.”

The meteorite will be named after Gianfranco and Pino.

 

Although Giant Penguin Fossil Is Nice, Wyoming’s Dinosaurs Were So Big They Pooped 3,000-Pound Boulders

Published on February 18, 2023February 18, 2023  in Wyoming Life/Wyoming Dinosaurs/News

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By Jake Nichols, Cowboy State Daily
Jake@CowobyStateDaily.com

A recent paper published in the Cambridge University Press touted the largest-known fossil of a penguin discovered by paleontologist Alan Tennyson. 

This portly puffin waddled the coastline of New Zealand some 60 million years ago, weighing as much as a refrigerator. The ancient auk was identified as a new species, Kumimanu fordycei, and is thought to be the largest penguin to have ever lived. 

By the way, the now-submerged fragmental continent of Zealandia is considered the center of extant penguin diversity, with accumulating fossil evidence supporting hypotheses that penguins as we know them today originated in this part of the world.

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A left, a life-sized rendering of how large the prehistoric penguin found in New Zealand would be. At right, the brachiosaur, which was so large its poops are esteemed to weight 3,000 pounds.

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Wyoming’s Big Brachiosaur

What’s noteworthy about this discovery halfway across the globe is that in Wyoming, we’re crazy about dinosaurs. Who isn’t?

And frankly, and with all due respect to the scientific community digging up dead birds from the beaches of Otaga, New Zealand, the Cowboy State has dinosaurs that poop bigger than that monster penguin. Literally.

The impressively sized brachiosaur is thought to have supersized scat that weighs in at an estimated 3,000 pounds.

And not only is Wyoming home to the brachiosaur, it’s the biggest one ever found. Well, some of him anyway. 

Dubbed “Bigfoot” for obvious reasons, a foot belonging to a close relative of the long-necked, long-tailed brachiosaurus was uncovered in 1998 in the Black Hills region of Wyoming by a team from the University of Kansas. 

The brachiosaurus is a genus of herbivorous sauropod dinosaur that lived in North America during the Middle Jurassic, about 150-180 million years ago. It is featured as a gentle lumbering behemoth munching on treetops in the Jurassic Park movie franchise.

“This beast was clearly one of the biggest that ever walked in North America,” said Emanuel Tschopp, a Theodore Roosevelt Richard Gilder Graduate School postdoctoral fellow in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Paleontology, in a 2018 press release when the finding was officially recognized. 

Discovery Almost Didn’t Happen

Think the Mesozoic Era was long? It took forever to get this foot fossil to a research facility for cleanup and 3D scanning. 

In fact, the discovery is 77 years in the making and came close to never happening at all. 

Field crews first began exploring Mesozoic formations in the U.S. in the 1870s, starting in southern Utah. University of Kansas alum Elmer Riggs excavated the first brachiosaurus specimen in 1901 in Colorado. 

At that time, Wyoming was considered far too north for dinosaurs like the brachiosaurus to have roamed – until a 1941 expedition led by a team from the University of Nebraska found fossils on a remote hilltop in the Black Hills region of northeast Wyoming. 

The dig uncovered an extremely large femora belonging to a sauropod, but with summer coming to a close, the site was secured for the winter with every intention of returning.

Then the U.S. entered World War II. 

Most field activities were curtailed during wartime. By the time follow-up excavations were organized in the early 1950s, no students or professors could remember exactly where the quarry was located. Records were incorrect (two miles off, it would turn out) and the dig site was nearly lost forever.

Professor Larry Martin at the University of Kansas was a student at U. Nebraska at the time of the original dig in 1941. He organized a new expedition in the 1990s and was able to zero in on the exact location of the famed fossilized femur with the help of a few old-time ranchers in the area.

While it is not the largest brachiosaurus ever found, it is the largest intact foot from the species ever dug up and positively identified. 

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Wyoming’s Snakey Croc-Faced Sea Monster

Not to be outdone by Bigfoot, College of Charleston geology professor Scott Persons announced the discovery of a bizarre new prehistoric sea monster in September 2022. 

Persons labeled his find Serpentisuchops, a biological name translating to “snakey crocodile-face.” It was unearthed from a sulfuric patch of scrubland near Lusk, Wyoming, in 1995.

It took 27 years for the bones to be carefully excavated, cleaned up by a volunteer group of elderly women known as the “Glenrock Bone Biddies,” and finally verified.

This member of the plesiosaur species swam the seas of Wyoming when it was under water some 70 million years ago. Its discovery is significant, Persons says, because this sea creature has both a long neck and a big head. 

“It’s an unusual one. It looks like a sea turtle with the shell removed,” Persons commented during a podcast interview with the College of Charleston late last year. “When I was a student, I was taught plesiosaurs come in two basic flavors — one with a really long neck and a tiny head, or the other way around with a short neck and enormous head and crocodile jaws.”

This extraordinarily preserved specimen sports a total of 32 neck vertebrae as well as really long jaws.

“It is unusual to find a plesiosaur with this mix of traits. Very weird,” Persons added. “It might represent a lineage of plesiosaurs that evolved to do something different.”

After studying the fossilized remains, Persons speculates this creature was especially adept at striking out to the side to gulp down a school of prehistoric fish as they passed by. 

Today, you can see the unique serpentisuchops sea monster, or the 35% of it unearthed, at the Glenrock Paleon Museum. 

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Scott Persons with an artist rendering of his novel “sea creature.” (Courtesy College of Charleston)

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T. Rex Tracks In Glenrock

Persons is credited with another fossil first in the Cowboy State. It happened almost by accident when the budding dinosaur hunter was a mere 13 years old. Not even that, truthfully. 

His parents fudged the 12-year-old’s application form so he could participate in his first expedition in Wyoming. 

During that visit to Glenrock and its Paleon Museum, Persons befriended then-director Sean Smith, who himself made a groundbreaking discovery of a skull of a triceratops in 1994 when he was just 19 years old. 

It was a rare find that put Glenrock on the paleontological map and launched the museum. 

Smith took notice of Persons’ enthusiasm and asked the kid if he wanted to see something really cool. 

Persons remembered, “Sean led me out to a sandstone slope and started brushing away at an indented spot. At first, it looked like a prehistoric pothole. But soon I could see the imprints of three big toes, each with sharp claw tips. It was so cool my jaw dropped.”

It was the footprint of a large carnivorous dinosaur, most likely a Tyrannosaurus rex. And not just one print, but two more, making a left-right-left trackway.

Persons never forgot that experience. Years later, while finishing up his graduate-level study at the University of Alberta, Persons reached out to Smith, pleading with him to pursue formal scientific recognition of the find. That effort was realized in 2016 with the publication of their research in “Cretaceous Research” (V.61, June 2016).

The trackway found in the Lance Formation behind the Paleon Museum is now regarded as the longest sequential set of prints from a tyrannosaurid in the world. 

By measuring the distance between the prints and estimating the relative size of the dinosaur—likely an adolescent T. rex, Persons guesses—the research also helped establish that these tyrannosaurs walked faster than previously assumed, according to their stride. 

Since the discovery, Sean’s father, Don Smith, confirmed to Cowboy State Daily that the trackway continues on even further. A total of 10 footprints have now been discovered, but private property rights have hampered further exploration.

“We’ll probably never know how far they go,” Smith said.

Persons has come full circle with his love for paleontology. The professor brought a dozen Charleston students to Glenrock last summer for a field trip and plans to do the same this summer with 10 more grad students. He now hopes to unearth the full skull of a triceratops, Wyoming’s official state dinosaur. 

“We got super close last year,” Persons said. “An enormous lower jaw, the biggest I have ever seen. We’re hoping to find the rest of him in coming summers.”

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Wyoming’s Jurassic Mile

All this dino stuff and we haven’t even mentioned a 1-square-mile stretch of rugged terrain in the Big Horn Basin near Cody. 

This 640-acre patch of land in the heart of the Morrison Formation is so exceptionally rich in fossil records it’s been dubbed the “Jurassic Mile.”

In 2019, a 20-year lease was signed by The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, in partnership with University of Manchester, to allow scientists exclusive access to the dig site that has been victim to private and commercial pillage in decades past. 

The massive, $27 million dino dig is expected to eventually uncover hundreds of prehistoric specimens including some never before cataloged. Already, almost 1,000 bones have been discovered.

The exact location of the dig site is kept highly confidential for fear of fossil looters. Reporters headed to the area to cover a news story must agree to switch off geotagging on their phones and avoid taking photographs that feature the horizon.

Pure Bliss: Dig Your Own Dinosaur

Tucked away in the northeast part of Wyoming on the border with Montana is the Bliss Dinosaur Ranch. The 3,000 deeded acres are owned by Frank Bliss, a former Jackson Hole resident and co-founder of Geologists of Jackson Hole. He has a master’s in Geology and a BS in GeoBiology. He’s been a field paleontologist since 1980.

Bliss offers a dinosaur dig, bed & breakfast experience where guests can keep some items they find. “As long as it is not collector, museum-type pieces,” Bliss said. 

Bliss is sitting on Hell Creek and Fox Hills sediment—formations marking the latter part of the Cretaceous some 65 million years ago as dinosaurs were slowly dying out. Still, this time period supported around 300 different creatures, 28 species of dinosaurs. 

Bliss has amassed an impressive collection of over 10,000 pieces—mostly heavier stuff like teeth and horns that were not easily carried away in the big river flows occurring as ancient oceans drained away westward. 

“I get a lot of individual isolated bones because the river was tough on things and broke them up,” Bliss said. “We find teeth and claws and horns, many from triceratops. We do about five digs a year for guests.”

THUMBNAIL: Crew from University of Kansas discovered large fossilized brachiosaur foot in the Black Hills region of Wyoming.

'I think we're going to save many lives': Alberta firefighters return from training mission in Ukraine


Karyn Mulcahy
CTVNewsEdmonton.ca Digital Producer
Published Feb. 18, 2023 

A group of local firefighters has just returned from providing training to first responders in Ukraine.

The trip was organized and paid for by Firefighter Aid Ukraine (FFAU), a not-for-profit organization that has been providing training and equipment to Ukrainian first responders since 2014.

"When we got to Ukraine and just to realize that all the folks that live there, in this hardest for them time ever, they haven’t lost their heart," said Anatoli Morgotch, firefighter and FFAU translator.

During the 12-day trip they taught their Ukrainian counterparts about skills and equipment that aren't taught in that country.

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"Some of this medical equipment that we’ve sent out they have never seen, have never done so they needed more education on how to properly use it."

The group practiced their training program on Ukrainians in Edmonton before the trip to make sure nothing was lost in translation, and Margotch said the practice really paid off.

"We didn’t want to lose anything in the meaning by just translating words so many times. During the course we would stop and we’d have a discussion with our students as to how to properly, proper terminology of the skills that we’re doing or the systems that we’re working with."

Margotch said students stayed after the course to run more scenarios so they could get more hands-on experience.

"For us a great thing to realize is when you’re doing a course and students come up and they want more of it means you’re doing the right thing."

Ukraine has been at war for nearly a year after Russia invaded on Feb. 24, 2022.

Members of the Alberta group were impressed at the calmness the Ukrainians displayed in frightening situations.

"Our first day of training we were doing a news conference and the air raid siren went off and we moved from the top floor down to the basement and it was so seamless," said Nikki Booth of FFAU. "People were not frazzled, people were not worked up, they are used to this but they’re so calm and they took great care of us."

"I remember asking what that air raid siren was for and someone said, 'Well there’s missiles overhead in our airspace,' and after that you just don’t ask because we have a job to do. We’re there and you can’t let there be distractions or fear, and as long as they’re not afraid you’re not afraid."

Booth believes the training provided by the Alberta group will help save lives.

"We’ve helped prepare 72 individuals in ways additional to their current experience and I think that’s going to have an impact."

"As one of our trainers said, 'If we just save one life with this, we’ve accomplished the goal of our mission,' and I think we’re going to save many lives by providing this training."

The group is in talks to go back to provide more training in the future.


Alberta firefighters do training with their counterparts in Ukraine. (Credit: Firefighter Aid Ukraine)

In Russia's push into Africa, Sudan is the strategic prize

Analysis: Russia's inroads into Africa serve to counterbalance threats to its influence on the international stage, with Sudan Moscow's most significant foothold.

Analysis
Giorgio Cafiero
16 February, 2023

While the West continues imposing stringent sanctions on Moscow while trying to make Russia a global pariah nearly one year into the Ukraine War, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been busy visiting African capitals.

His two latest visits to Africa, which came within ten days of each other, underscore the continuation of Russia’s positive relationships with many governments in the Global South notwithstanding Western efforts to further weaken and isolate Moscow.

On 8 February, Lavrov arrived in Sudan shortly after visiting Mali, Mauritania, and South Africa. While in Khartoum, Russia’s chief diplomat took advantage of an opportunity to thumb his nose at the US and other Western powers.

“We discussed the need to coordinate within international institutions, reform the (UN) Security Council, and build a multipolar world,” announced Lavrov at a press conference.

"Russia currently has a strong base of operations in Mali and the Central African Republic; but with deeper ties to Sudan, it could connect these footholds into its own arc of influence"

His visit was important to Moscow’s efforts to bolster its relationship with Sudan’s military against the backdrop of Western pressure on the African country to establish civilian rule. Although nothing too tangible resulted from the Sudanese leg of Lavrov’s latest African tour, it highlighted the critical role that Sudan plays in Russia’s Africa foreign policy as Moscow makes more inroads into the continent.

“Sudan is a big prize strategically for Russia in Africa,” Cameron Hudson, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Africa Program, told The New Arab. “Russia currently has a strong base of operations in Mali and the Central African Republic; but with deeper ties to Sudan, it could connect these footholds into its own arc of influence.”

In a TNA interview, Dr Samuel Ramani, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, identified Sudan as Russia’s “most significant foothold” in East Africa.

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“It is true that Russia has managed to make forays toward Ethiopia over the common support for sovereignty in the Tigray war and they’ve maintained their alliance with Eritrea, which is strengthened by the fact that Eritrea is the only African country that’s consistently voted for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations. But the economic and security depths to these partnerships are quite limited. So, Sudan is their most important partner in that region.”

At the end of the Cold War, Moscow lost Soviet client states in Ethiopia and South Yemen. Ever since, Moscow has sought new opportunities to achieve a resurgence in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. Sudan serves these Russian interests.

Moscow’s flagship project is in Port Sudan, located on Sudan’s Red Sea coast. In 2017, Moscow and Khartoum signed an agreement to establish a Russian naval base at this seaport through which 90 percent of Sudan’s imports arrive.

A view of the Russian Navy frigate RFS Admiral Grigorovich (494), anchored in Port Sudan in 2021. [Getty]


Signed toward the end of Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s three decades in power, this agreement permitted the Russians to construct the base, reportedly with Emirati assistance, which would be capable of hosting Russia’s nuclear-powered ships and leased to the Russians for a quarter of a century.

But with the Biden administration putting pressure on Khartoum to not move forward with the project, it has been frozen since mid-2021. “The Russians are hoping that a relationship with a friendly warlord like [Rapid Support Forces commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (a.k.a. Hemedti)] could lead to a revival of that project,” explained Dr Ramani.

"Russia is increasingly presenting itself as providing an alternative to the traditional western-led models of development and diplomatic relations"

Hudson told TNA that “with the potential of a naval base on Sudan’s Red Sea coast, Russia could project influence into the Arabian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and feed its growing network across Africa”.

Economic interests in Sudan’s natural resources, chiefly gold, are important to Russia’s agendas in the country. Since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent implementation of Western sanctions, the Russians have worked with the Sudanese military’s leadership to smuggle gold out of Sudan.

According to a CNN report, as of last summer the Russians had extracted billions of dollars worth of gold from Sudan, bypassing the government in Khartoum and depriving the African country of badly needed state revenue to the tune of hundreds of millions of USD.

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Countering Western pressures

Stronger relationships with countries in the Global South such as Sudan help Moscow counter Western-led efforts aimed at squeezing and isolating Russia. “In the eyes of the Kremlin, the Lavrov visit allows Moscow to credibly demonstrate to the international community that it’s still a player in geopolitics,” Colin P. Clarke, the director of policy and research at the Soufan Group, told TNA.

“In other words, Russia has not been completely shut out of dealing with other countries because of its invasion of Ukraine, it still has friends, particularly in Africa.”

Moscow “wants to show that such NATO policies do not have much heft outside of Europe,” said Dr Gregory Aftandilian, a non-resident fellow at Arab Center Washington DC and a senior professorial lecturer at American University, in an interview with TNA.

“Visits by Russian officials to non-European countries like Sudan fit this pattern…Sudan is an important geo-strategic country in Africa with mineral resources and a substantial coastline on the Red Sea that is attractive to Russia.”

Protesters stand atop a United Nations armoured vehicle as they demonstrate carrying a Russian flag in Ouagadougou on 2 October 2022. [Getty]

The larger picture

The deepening of Russian-Sudanese relations must be understood within the context of Moscow’s quest to further establish itself as a great power with growing clout across the African continent. Against the backdrop of huge challenges which Russia faces in Ukraine, such inroads into Africa serve to counterbalance real threats to Moscow’s influence on the international stage.

In African countries such as Mali, perceptions of France and the US as neo-colonial powers have offered Moscow opportunities to move in and build new relationships and counterterrorism partnerships via the Wagner Group.

Russia’s message to these governments is that Moscow stands in defence of their sovereign rights and, unlike the West, will sell arms to these states without attaching strings concerning domestic governance.

"As long as secondary sanctions aren't imposed, Sudan is going to maintain an equilibrium and a balance between NATO and Russia"

When Bashir ruled Sudan and the West worked to isolate his regime over the situation in Darfur and other sources of tension, Russia used its veto power at the UN Security Council to undermine those Western efforts.

Today, as Washington, London, and Paris try to influence Sudan’s political transition toward democracy, Moscow is appealing to Sudan’s military by stressing its position that no outside actor should interfere in Sudan’s internal issues.

“Russia is increasingly presenting itself as providing an alternative to the traditional western-led models of development and diplomatic relations,” Hudson told TNA. “To the extent that Russia has a strategy in Africa, it seems simply as a foil to Western interests.”

The implications for US interests in Africa are significant. Nonetheless, the White House does not appear to have a coherent set of policies aimed at reversing rising Russian influence in Sudan or other African countries.

“The US desperately needs a strategy to counter Russia in Africa but unfortunately the Biden administration has been somewhat quiet on how it plans to deal with Moscow’s moves on the continent,” according to Clarke’s assessment.

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If the Biden administration sees Russia’s relationship with Sudan as increasingly problematic from the standpoint of Western efforts to squeeze Moscow, it is worth considering possible actions that Washington might take against Khartoum.

Although the US has at least not yet imposed secondary sanctions on Sudan over Russia’s gold mining activities, Washington possibly doing so later could cause some difficulties for Khartoum as it carefully navigates tensions between the West and Moscow while seeking to avoid being locked in NATO and Russia’s struggle against each other.

“As long as secondary sanctions aren’t imposed, Sudan is going to maintain an equilibrium and a balance between NATO and Russia,” Dr Ramani told TNA.

Time will tell how long Khartoum can continue striking this delicate balancing act as East-West bifurcation accelerates and the Ukraine War shows no signs of ending any time soon.

Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics. Follow him on Twitter: @GiorgioCafiero

Roger Stone Tweets, Then Deletes, Fake Soros Conspiracy Photoshop To Attack DeSantis Aide

By Hunter Walker
February 17, 2023 12:56 p.m.

The looming GOP primary is leading to some wildly conspiratorial right-on-right violence.

Ron DeSantis is widely expected to launch a White House bid, and the Republican Florida governor has begun to take preemptive, incoming fire from former President Trump and his allies. On Monday night, Roger Stone, the far-right former Trump adviser and infamous political dirty trickster, used a fake photoshopped image to attack one of DeSantis’ top aides, Christina Pushaw.

In a tweet, Stone shared a picture that — at first glance — appeared to show Pushaw alongside billionaire financier George Soros.

“Ron DeSantis’s Ukrainian Handler and her real boss.…” Stone wrote.


Soros, who donates to progressive causes, has long been a fixture of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on the far right that paint him as a nefarious global force. There’s a lot to unpack here, but, first off, the picture was a fake.

John Cardillo, a former host on the ultra-conservative cable channel Newsmax, quickly debunked Stone’s photo by tweeting it side by side with what appeared to be the original image of Pushaw that it was taken from. In the real photo, Pushaw was standing with Cardillo, not Soros.




Cardillo was a prominent pro-Trump pundit. However, more recently, his social media posts have taken a turn, criticizing the former president while boosting DeSantis.

Stone, who did not respond to a request for comment, is no stranger to disinformation. He was a particularly influential figure in the 2020 election denial movement and was present in Washington D.C. as protests against Trump’s loss turned violent on Jan. 6, 2021. Soon after posting the image, Stone began to receive a steady stream of messages noting it was fake. He deleted his tweet a few hours later.


Pushaw, who also did not respond to a request for comment, is an interesting figure in her own right. She came into DeSantis’ orbit in early 2021 after writing an article on a right-wing website that attacked one of the governor’s critics and pressing for a job with his team. She became the governor’s press secretary in May 2021. Last August, as speculation about a potential presidential bid ramped up, Pushaw left his office to join his reelection campaign team.

During her stint with the governor, Pushaw has become one of DeSantis’ most high-profile allies. She has earned a reputation for brawling with reporters and Democrats on Twitter, often using incendiary rhetoric. Pushaw was influential in promoting the use of the term “groomer,” which had become popular in QAnon circles to target individuals who its conspiracy theorist adherents believed to be pedophiles. Pushaw employed the term as a catch-all slur for critics of DeSantis’ legislation that prohibited discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. During her time with DeSantis, Pushaw has also helped connect him with far-right figures, including election deniers and anti-vaccine conspiracists.

Prior to joining DeSantis’ team, Pushaw worked in Eastern Europe, including for Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president and Ukrainian politician who is currently imprisoned under conditions that have been decried by international observers. Last year, after being contacted by the Justice Department, Pushaw belatedly registered as a foreign agent for work she did for Saakashvili between 2018 and 2020. At the time, DeSantis criticized coverage of Pushaw’s foreign lobbying as a “smear.”

Stone’s tweet seemingly referenced Pushaw’s past foreign work. The right has become increasingly critical of the U.S.’s relationship with Ukraine as America has provided financial and military aid to that country in its ongoing conflict with Russia.

While it was just a small social media spat, the episode is a telling one. When Trump announced his re-election bid last November, he was the only major Republican candidate in the field. On Wednesday, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s U.N. ambassador, threw her hat into the ring and became his first real, official rival.

As the field becomes more crowded and some Republicans break from Trump, there is surely going to be more intra-right-wing infighting. And, with conspiracy-minded political brawlers like Stone and Pushaw involved, those fights are likely to push the boundaries of both taste and facts. In other words, it’s going to get ugly out there.

Hunter Walker (@hunterw) is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo. He is an author and former White House correspondent whose work has appeared in a variety of publications including the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and New York Magazine. He can be reached at hunter@talkingpointsmemo.com

Raquel Welch was a 'stealth' Latina until she wasn't — a reflection of the times

“She was in a complicated space about it,” scholar Brian Herrera said of Welch’s ethnicity. “And she arrived in a transitional period of how Latinos are understood in U.S. culture.”
Actress Raquel Welch was born Jo-Raquel Tejada; her dad was Bolivian. Her trajectory represented "the complexity of the Latino experience," says film historian Luis I. Reyes. Hulton Deutsch / Corbis via Getty Images




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Feb. 17, 2023, 10:58 AM MST
By Raul A. Reyes

When Raquel Welch died this week at 82, condolences and tributes poured in from around the globe. The star of “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) and “The Three Musketeers” (1973) was lauded for her work on film, in television and on Broadway.

But another throughline of Welch’s life was her complicated relationship with her heritage. Like many Latinas, Welch faced challenges as she navigated her personal and professional life — and her connection to her background often reflected the times.


Jo-Raquel Tejada was born in Chicago in 1940. Her father, Armando Tejada, was a Bolivian-born aeronautics engineer, while her American mother could trace her roots back to the Mayflower.

Like many immigrants of his generation, Welch's father believed that assimilation was the only way to survive in the U.S. He banned speaking Spanish at home, and raised his family in La Jolla, California, removed from other Latino families.

“In a way he didn’t have a choice. There was a sense of shame on his part, of the confusion and the prejudice around against Latinos,’’ Ms. Welch said in a 2002 New York Times interview. “So he suffered a great deal. I suffered some. My suffering is more of a kind of psychological feeling of not knowing who I am.’’

Hollywood legend Raquel Welch dies at 82

FEB. 16, 2023

By the time she set her sights on Hollywood, Welch was a divorced mother of two, pursuing her career with her first husband’s surname. Even this compromise was initially not enough. When she signed with 20th Century Fox, the studio suggested that she change her first name to Debbie because Raquel sounded too ethnic.

“You just couldn’t be too different,” Welch said in her Times interview. She recalled that in her breakthrough role in “One Million Years B.C.,” her hair was dyed blond. “It’s a marketing thing.”

John Richardson and Raquel Welch in "One Million Years BC." 

Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images

“Back then everyone changed their names to fit the image they were trying to sell, or to fit the image the studios were trying to sell,” said Luis I. Reyes, author of “Viva Hollywood,” a comprehensive history of Latinos in film. “But there was a bias against what you would call foreign-sounding names.”

He compares Welch to other stars like Rita Hayworth and Anthony Quinn who altered their names for their careers.

If Welch did not actively promote her Latina identity when she first achieved fame, it’s largely because that was an unknown concept in the 1960s. Terms like “Hispanic” and “Latino” were not in general use at the time, and Hispanic Heritage Month would not exist until 1988.
'In a complicated space' about her heritage

Brian Herrera, an associate professor at Princeton, describes Welch as “a stealth Latino.”

“Her heritage was always there, always visible, and it was not a secret. Yet she was not locked into it,” Herrera said. Long before the media presented performers as Latino, he said that many Latinos were aware that Welch was “one of us.”

“She was in a complicated space about it,” Herrera said of Welch’s ethnicity. “And she arrived in a transitional period of how Latinos are understood in U.S. culture.”

While she was renowned as a sex symbol, Welch played a wide variety of roles. As the civil rights movement was flowering, she made history with her interracial love scenes in “100 Rifles” (1969), with the African American actor Jim Brown. She portrayed a transgender character (“Myra Breckinridge,” 1970); a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease (TV’s “Right to Die,” 1987); and a wealthy widow ("Legally Blonde," 2001).

In real life, Welch also became what the Hollywood Reporter termed an “unlikely heroine in the fight for actors’ rights,” when she successfully sued MGM Studios for breach of contract in 1981. She won $10 million after being fired from the film “Cannery Row” at 40 and being replaced by Debra Winger, who was 15 years younger. This was a landmark legal victory against sexism and ageism in the entertainment industry.

Raquel Welch at the Emmy Awards in 1987.

Bob Riha Jr / Getty Images

Blazing a path of 'Latino fusion'

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Welch reclaimed her ethnic identity. “Latinos are here to stay,’’ she said at the National Press Club in 2002. “As citizen Raquel, I’m proud to be Latina.’’

When Welch did her interview later that year with The New York Times, it was widely regarded as her “coming out” as Latina. By then, she had been in Hollywood for nearly 40 years. “I’m happy to acknowledge it (my heritage) and it’s long overdue and it’s very welcome,” she said. “There’s been a kind of empty place here in my heart and also in my work for a long, long time.”


Welch’s belated embrace of her roots is not unlike that of some assimilated Latinos, who may not explore their heritage until adulthood. For Welch, this sparked a career renaissance, as she went on to perform in Latino-themed projects like “Tortilla Soup” (2001), “American Family” (2002) and “How to Be a Latin Lover” (2017). In 2001, she received an Imagen Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors the contributions of Latinos to the entertainment industry.

“She rediscovered her roots, embraced her roots when the times changed,” said the entertainment journalist and podcast host Jack Rico. “There must have been layers she had to work through, a kind of suppression of self that she didn’t need or want to hide anymore. And the market was certainly ready for her.”

Raquel Welch accepts the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 

16th Annual Latino Media Image Awards in 2001. 

Lucy Nicholson / AFP via Getty Images

Had Welch pursued her career from the start as a Latina, Rico mused, she might have had a career more like Rita Moreno. But although Moreno became the first Latina to win an acting Oscar for “West Side Story” in 1962, he pointed out that Moreno usually played supporting roles. In contrast, he said, “from the beginning, Welch was an icon. She achieved classic, one-of-a-kind genuine Hollywood stardom, which is an incredible feat.”

After her passing, the National Hispanic Media Coalition praised Welch, noting that she “broke the stigma of Hollywood’s typical blonde bombshell,” and that she ultimately honored her identity by fighting typecasting standards that were set early in her career.

Author Luis I. Reyes believes that Welch deserves to be remembered as a uniquely American star.

“She went through a lot of stages in her career. She blazed a path so that someone like Ana de Armas could play Marilyn Monroe," he said. "She really represented the Latino fusion of contributions to American culture, and the complexity of the Latino experience.”


Raul A. Reyes
Raul A. Reyes, a lawyer, is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Texas Monthly and the Huffington Post.

HER LATINO  CHARACTER APPEARED IN WESTERNS

    

 

A Doodle Reveals da Vinci’s Early Deconstruction of Gravity

Long before Galileo and Newton used superior mathematics to study a fundamental natural force, Leonardo calculated the gravitational constant with surprising accuracy.


A mysterious triangle on Page 143 of The Codex Arundel notebook seemed to show Leonardo deconstructing gravity. Credit...The British Library

By William J. Broad
Feb. 17, 2023

When Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t painting a masterpiece or dreaming up flying machines, he was pondering the mysteries of gravity. The Renaissance thinker considered himself as much a man of science as an artist and spent untold hours exploring how the “attraction of one object to another” could affect such things as the flight of birds and the fall of water.

Now, scientists have discovered that Leonardo did detailed experiments that sought to illuminate the nature of gravity a century before Galileo and some two centuries ahead of Newton’s making its investigation an exact science. The scientists’ study of his gravitational ideas and experimentation was published earlier this month in the journal “Leonardo.”

“Nothing could stop him,” Morteza Gharib, an author of the paper and a professor of aeronautics at California Institute of Technology, said in an interview. “He was far ahead in his thinking. It could not wait for the future.”

Z. Jane Wang, a professor of physics at Cornell University who has studied some of da Vinci’s pioneering analyses but was not involved in the current paper, said the new study revealed a man determined to find an iron law of nature that would shed light on the overall dynamics of falling objects.

“It’s not enough” to call the polymath an artist, Dr. Wang said. More accurately, she added, he was “a quintessential” man of the Renaissance, which gloried in the revival of not only art and literature but also science and explorations of nature.

Leonardo has long been famous for his technical ingenuity and versatility, for his sketches of flying machines and fighting vehicles. He also made advances in geology, optics, anatomy, engineering and hydrodynamics, the arm of science that explores the behavior of fluids.

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of da Vinci, reports that as a close observer of nature, he gave much attention to how birds shift their center of gravity as they twist, turn and maneuver in the wind. He also said that Leonardo realized that gravitational attraction kept the seas from falling off the earth.

A self-portrait of da Vinci from around 1512.Credit...Pictures From History/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

Dr. Gharib said he learned of Leonardo’s gravity experiments while examining an online version of The Codex Arundel, named after a British collector, the Earl of Arundel, who acquired it early in the 17th century. Da Vinci composed the collection of hundreds of papers between 1478 and 1518 — that is, between the ages of 26 and 66 — the year before his death. The papers now reside in the British Library. The collection features his famous mirror-writing as well as diagrams, drawings and texts covering a range of topics in art and science.

What caught Dr. Gharib’s eye is what he calls “a mysterious triangle” near the top of Page 143. Its strangeness lay in how Leonardo’s sketch showed an adjoining pitcher and, pouring from its spout, a series of circles that formed the triangle’s hypotenuse. Dr. Gharib used a computer program to flip the triangle and the adjacent areas of backward writing.

Suddenly, the static image seemed to come to life. “I could see motion,” Dr. Gharib recalled. “I could see him pouring stuff out.” It was a eureka moment that unveiled Leonardo’s precocious experiment.

The effects of gravity are typically seen as causing something to fall straight down — be it a dropped ball or Newton’s apocryphal apple. In gazing at Leonardo’s drawing, Dr. Gharib realized that he had managed to split the effects of gravity into two parts that revealed an aspect of nature normally kept hidden.

The first effect was the natural downward pull. The second was added when the holder of the pitcher moved it along a straight path parallel to the ground, pouring out sand or something else along the way. In the drawing, Leonardo noted where the movement of the pitcher had begun, labeling it with the capital letter A. Then, to show the falling material, he added a series of vertical lines going down from the triangle’s top line, the series getting longer as the pitcher moved farther and farther from its starting point. Their growing lengths defined the hypotenuse.

The setup turned gravity’s hidden nature into visible increments. The pitcher experiment, Dr. Gharib said, revealed that gravity was a constant force that resulted in a steady acceleration — a steady gain in speed. Leonardo illustrated the gain as the pitcher’s contents falling lower and lower over time. He succeeded in deconstructing gravity.

Video

 

Researchers at CalTech recreated Leonardo’s pitcher experiment using ball bearings to demonstrate the “equalization of motion.”CreditCredit...CalTech

The researchers say Leonardo wrote in the codex that he witnessed fast-moving clouds from which pellets of hail had fallen, which they believe inspired the experiment.

Dr. Gharib said “the fascinating part” of Leonardo’s feat was that it let him estimate a constant of nature, the gravitational constant, represented today in physics by the letter G. The constant quantifies the exact strength of gravity’s pull and thus how quickly it can accelerate an object.

Despite the crudeness of his experimental setup 500 years ago, da Vinci, Dr. Gharib said, was able to calculate the gravitational constant to an accuracy within 10 percent of the modern value.

“It’s mind boggling,” Dr. Gharib said. “That’s the beauty of what Leonardo does.”

The researchers say that Galileo and Newton could better address the gravitational question because they had better tools of mathematics and better ways of measuring time precisely as objects fell.

Dr. Gharib agreed with Dr. Wang in seeing da Vinci as far more than an artist and suggested that his fame as a pioneering scientist could skyrocket if more technically knowledgeable experts probed The Codex Arundel and other sources. In his biography, Mr. Isaacson reports that more than 7,200 pages of Leonardo’s notes and scribbles survive to this day.

Dr. Gharib said that he hesitated to peer more deeply into The Codex Arundel lest he find himself tempted to focus exclusively on the mind of Leonardo da Vinci. “I’m like a kid in a toy store,” he said. “I’m afraid of even looking at it.”

He said many art historians had examined The Codex Arundel — but not scientists. “It’s an open book they haven’t looked at yet, haven’t spent time exploring,” he said. “There are so many other things to be discovered.”

William J. Broad is a science journalist and senior writer. He joined The Times in 1983, and has shared two Pulitzer Prizes with his colleagues, as well as an Emmy Award and a DuPont Award. @WilliamJBroad

UN Secretary-General Calls For Radical Transformation Of Global Financial System To Tackle Pressing Global Challenges

Saturday, 18 February 2023, 
Press Release: UN Department of Global Communications

UN Secretary-General calls for radical transformation of global financial-
system to tackle pressing global challenges, while achieving sustainable
development

UN Chief reiterates call for G20 countries to agree on $500 billion annual stimulus
for Sustainable Development Agenda

17 February 2023, New York - With the failure of the global financial system to effectively cushion the impacts of current global crises on the Global South — the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the ongoing climate emergency — the UN today called for the urgent need for a significant increase of finance for sustainable development.

“Today’s poly-crises are compounding shocks on developing countries – in large part because of an unfair global financial system that is short-term, crisis-prone, and that further exacerbates inequalities,” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the occasion of the launch of the SDG Stimulus released today.

“We need to massively scale up affordable long-term financing by aligning all financing flows to the SDGs and improving the terms of lending of multilateral development banks,” stressed the Secretary-General. “The high cost of debt and increasing risks of debt distress demand decisive action to make at least $500 billion dollars available annually to developing countries and convert short term lending into long term debt at lower interest rates.”

A financial system that works for all
Halfway to the 2030 Agenda deadline, progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – our roadmap out of crises – is not where it needs to be. To reverse course and make steady progress on the Goals, the SDG Stimulus outlines the need for the international community to come together to mobilize investments for the SDGs – but, in so doing, create a new international financial architecture that would ensure that finance is automatically invested to support just, inclusive and equitable transitions for all countries.

The current global financial system – originally created to provide a global safety net during shocks – is one in which most of the world’s poorest countries saw their debt service payments skyrocket by 35% in 2022. The “great finance divide” continues to proliferate, leaving the Global South more susceptible to shocks. Developing countries don’t have the resources they urgently need to invest in recovery, climate action and the SDGs, making them poised to fall even further behind when the next crisis strikes – and even less likely to benefit from future transitions, including the green transition.

As of November 2022, 37 out of 69 of the world’s poorest countries were either at high risk or already in debt distress, while one in four middle-income countries, which host the majority of the extreme poor, were at high risk of fiscal crisis. Accordingly, the number of additional people falling into extreme poverty in countries in or at high risk of entering debt distress is estimated to be 175 million by 2030, including 89 million women and girls.

Even prior to the recent rise in interest rates, least developed countries that borrowed from international capital markets often paid rates of 5 to 8 per cent, compared to 1 per cent for many developed countries.

SDG Stimulus Offers

The SDG Stimulus aims to offset unfavorable market conditions faced by developing countries through investments in renewable energy, universal social protection, decent job creation, healthcare, quality education, sustainable food systems, urban infrastructure and the digital transformation.
Increasing financing by $500 billion per year is possible through a combination of concessional and non-concessional finance in a mutually reinforcing way.

Reforms to the international financial architecture are integral to the SDG Stimulus. As highlighted in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, financing sustainable development is about more than the availability of financial resources. National and global policy frameworks influence risks, shape incentives, impact financing needs, and affect the cost of financing.

The SDG Stimulus outlines three areas for immediate action:
First, tackle the high cost of debt and rising risks of debt distress, including by converting short-term high interest borrowing into long-term (more than 30 year) debt at lower interest rates.
Second, massively scale up affordable long-term financing for development, especially through strengthening the multilateral development banks (MDB) capital base, improving the terms of their lending, and by aligning all financing flows with the SDGs.
Third, expand contingency financing to countries in need, including by integrating disaster and pandemic clauses into all sovereign lending, and more automatically issue SDRs in times of crisis.

Central role of International Financial Institutions
The international financial institutions remain at the heart of this agenda. Of immediate urgency, there are three important ways in which the Multilateral Development Banks can act.

First, the MDBs must massively expand the volume of lending, including concessional lending. This can be achieved through increasing their capital bases, better leveraging of existing capital and implementing recommendations of the G20 Capital Adequacy Framework Review, and re-channeling Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) through MDBs. As long as countries remain in need of urgent resources the SDG Stimulus will also call for a new round of SDRs.

Second, MDBs must improve the terms of their lending, including through longer-term lending, lower-interest rates, more lending in local currencies, and the inclusion of all vulnerable countries in lending programmes.

Third, MDBs – as well as all public and private actors – must explicitly incorporate the SDGs into their framing, their operations and all stages of the lending process and disaster and pandemic clauses must be integrated into all debt contracts to provide immediate relief in times of crisis.

This means adopting a transition approach, which aligns investments with the SDGs while also considering specific country and development contexts, and the trade-offs that may be involved on the path towards a more resilient, just, and inclusive global economy. At the national level, the UN also stands ready to support, including through supporting the development and application of SDG-aligned Integrated National Financing Frameworks (INFFs).

Member States – including the Group of Twenty (G-20) – must play their part. It is clear that the G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatment (CF) has failed. The SDG Stimulus calls for providing immediate relief to all countries in need, including through debt suspensions, re-profilings, exchanges and write-downs where necessary, as well as the creation of a permanent mechanism to address sovereign debt distress.

As underscored by the UN Secretary-General, the SDG Stimulus, while ambitious, is achievable: “Investing in the SDGs is both sensible and feasible: it is a win-win for the world, as the social and economic rates of return on sustainable development in developing countries is very high.”

But to make this happen, “urgent political will to take concerted and coordinated steps to implement this package of interconnected proposals in a timely manner is critical.”

A Bretton Woods 2.0 is sorely needed, both to fulfil the function for which it was originally designed for and to prepare the world, and its vulnerable people, as we head into uncertain terrain.

The link to the SDG Stimulus is here.

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