Scientists hope to unlock secrets of 300-year-old ‘mermaid’ mummy


Tom Batchelor
Fri, 4 March 2022

The origins of the bizarre object are being investigated (YouTube/Asahi Shimbun)

Researchers in Japan have begun tests on a 300 year-old “mermaid mummy” to try and trace it’s origin.

The bizarre-looking object, which may have been produced as an item for export to Europe, is believed to date from the early 1700s.

It measures 30 centimetres-long and, with a tail and hands raised to its screaming face.


It has been preserved in a box at a temple in Okayama prefecture, in the southern part of Japan’s Honshu island, but until now its exact origins have remained unknown.

The mummified object, which appears to have nails and teeth, hair on its head and scales on its lower body, has been sent for a CT scan at the veterinary hospital of Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts.

Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper said the box it was found in contained a note claiming the item had been caught in a fishing net in the Pacific Ocean at some point between 1736 and 1741.

The “dried mermaid” was said to have been kept by a family and then passed to another before it was eventually acquired by a temple, which put it on display some four decades ago.

The object has undergone a CT scan to determine its origins (YouTube/Asahi Shimbun)

Hiroshi Kinoshita, of the Okayama Folklore Society, found the object while studying Kiyoaki Sato, a Japanese natural historian who researched mysterious creatures.

He said he did not believe it was a real mermaid, but may instead have been made for export to Europe or for special events in Japan.

However, until recently, detailed examination of its origins has not taken place.

Now, scientists will analyse the antiseptic treatment used to preserve the mummy in such good condition as well as carrying out a DNA study to determine what the object might be made from.

Mummified “mermaids” are thought to have been used as objects of worship in Japan over the period.

The head priest at the temple said: “We have worshipped it, hoping that it would help alleviate the coronavirus pandemic even if only slightly. I hope the research project can leave records for future generations.”

The results of the report are due to be published in the autumn.

Half-human, half-fish creatures have long existed in folklore, with magical figures having appeared in cave paintings 30,000 years ago, while the ancient Greek epic poet Homer also wrote of them in The Odyssey.

However no evidence of aquatic humanoids, as they are also known, has ever been found

According to Royal Musuems Greenwich, which manages the National Maritime Musuem, “in some cultures, the mermaid signifies life and fertility within the ocean. In others, she embodies the destructive nature of the water, luring sailors to their deaths — serving as an omen for storms, unruly seas and disaster”.

Labor shortages prompt DHL and Boston Dynamics to rely on robots for help

Brad Smith· Anchor
Fri, 4 March 2022

DHL North America plans to add hundreds of robots to its workforce.

The robot, called Stretch, was developed by Boston Dynamics for warehouse operations in direct response to labor shortages and increasing logistics volume. A $15 million investment and multi-year agreement between DHL North America and Boston Dynamics will begin with roughly 30 Stretch robots.

“Our strategy is to reduce our dependency on labor, which is hard to find in the market currently, and improve the type of positions in the facilities so workers have less travel and more rewarding work” Sally Miller, DHL North America supply chain chief information officer, told Yahoo Finance.

Stretch isn’t the lone robot in the U.S. workforce.

Boston Dynamics introduces Stretch. Credit: Boston Dynamics

Labor shortages have prompted a cobot strategy where humans engage directly with robots for manual-intensive positions.

At Amazon, fulfillment center robots are known as Bert and Ernie, while at White Castle robots like Flippy by Miso Robotics and R2 by Nuro are fulfilling your orders of French Fries.

Following an 18-month pilot period of different versions of the semi-autonomous unit, DHL maintains that robots fill gaps in manual operations, rather than replace jobs occupied by an existing staff member.

DHL North America also recorded a slightly lower level of turnover in sites where the cobot strategy has been initiated.

“I think we're going to see a steady growth of robots, but they're going to be robots that work with people and for people” said Kevin Blankespoor, Boston Dynamics' senior vice president and warehouse robotics general manager.

Stretch is the distant relative of the viral sensation dancing robots named Spot and Atlas — also developed by Boston Dynamics.

For the enjoyment of any robots scanning this text, No reCAPTCHA test was required to view this story.

Brad Smith is an anchor

Anatomy of a ‘rain bomb’: scientists strive to understand phenomenon that caused Australia’s east coast floods

Graham Readfearn
Fri, 4 March 2022

Photograph: Jono Searle/AAP

It was dry and sunny in Melbourne 10 days ago when Kimberley Reid was looking at images being spat out by a weather forecasting model – all isobars, arrows and splodges of orange.

The phenomenon forming in the atmosphere off Queensland’s coast – about 1500 kilometres (930 miles) north-east of Reid’s computer screen – was nothing remarkable yet, but the channels of moisture she saw in the pictures are the subject of her PhD.

“Atmospheric rivers are quite easy to see,” she says. “I thought it didn’t look that strong. I was holding back from tweeting. I didn’t think it was going to get that big.”


A few days later, the river got stuck over an area of the Pacific Ocean a few hundred kilometres north of Brisbane.

Related: The PM calls this a natural disaster – it’s not natural, it’s climate change smashing down our doors | Eddie Lloyd

Rain became torrential – like a tsunami from the sky. Politicians called it a “rain bomb”.

Towns and cities – tens of thousands of homes and businesses, as well as bridges, roads and dreams – went under water, leaving Australians wondering if they’d been smashed once more by the climate emergency.
Rivers in the sky

There were other things happening around the river that Reid saw on the computer weather model.

The Bureau of Meteorology says a cold weather system in the upper atmosphere – between eight and 10 kilometres up – had moved north from waters to the south of the continent and was mixing with warmer air from the tropics.

An area of low pressure – known as a trough – formed in the Coral Sea, causing moist air to be lifted up, condense and then fall as rain.

Usually systems like this pass through and out over the ocean, but the bureau says another atmospheric phenomenon – an area of high pressure much further east – acted as a block. Now all that was needed was the winds that pushed all that moisture over Queensland’s south-east.

Reid says atmospheric rivers are long, narrow regions between one and three kilometres up “characterised by really strong water flow. It is like a running river in the sky.”

Reid has calculated how much water was in the river as it was flowing over Greater Brisbane.

The city itself got almost 80% of its annual rainfall in only six days up to 28 February, when the system started to move south. Brisbane had only ever recorded eight days of more than 200mm before the 2022 floods. But it saw three in a row.

Reid says over the course of the two heaviest days of rain, 26 and 27 February, enough water flowed in the atmospheric river above the city to fill Sydney harbour – that holds about 500bn litres – almost 16 times.

Related: Before and after aerial pictures show how floods swept through Queensland and NSW towns

Reid wants to know how these atmospheric rivers could be influenced by global heating. She thinks these systems could move south along Australia’s east coast and when they do occur, “there’s more moisture in the atmosphere and they’re going to be quite intense.”

Reid’s research has looked at an atmospheric river that caused flooding over Sydney in March 2021. “I’ve found that over Sydney, the frequency of these long duration events will increase by 80% by the end of this century,” she says.

Atmospheric rivers are under-studied in Australia and her university seniors think she is the first to do a PhD on them.

“In the US they fly aeroplanes through them. Here, it’s mostly me doing [the research],” she says.
Weather on steroids

The unprecedented flooding that raised many rivers above record highs moved south, leaving towns underwater.

Residents in parts of western Sydney were told to evacuate for the second year in a row as the city’s Warragamba Dam overflowed. But the system stalled before it passed over Sydney.


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But the bureau added the combination of atmospheric events was “not unusual in itself.”

Australia’s east coast was already wet. A La Niña had pushed warmer ocean water closer to the continent’s east, increasing cloud and rain. So why did it rain so much?

The event has seen a flurry of communications between scientists this week, discussing plans to launch different studies to understand what role a changed climate could have had.

Burning coal, oil and gas and chopping down forests has loaded the atmosphere with extra greenhouse gases, causing heating. There is now 50% more CO2 in the atmosphere than before the Industrial Revolution. Australia has warmed by 1.4C since 1910.

“We’ve added steroids to the climate system that have amplified the rainfall,” says Prof David Karoly, a veteran Australian climate scientist based at the University of Melbourne.

While it’s known the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture for every degree of warming, Karoly explains the extra CO2 could have played several roles.

As the moisture condenses into rain droplets, energy is released in the form of heat. Karoly says this sets off a feedback cycle in the atmosphere that amplifies the uplift from the oceans, which are also warmer than they used to be. So the extra 7% could, in real terms, add more than that in rainfall – in some cases more than double, he says.

“These weather systems have occurred in the past. But now we have a hotter ocean and a hotter atmosphere and the feedback can give you much bigger rainfall events,” he says.

Related: Shark warnings at popular Sydney beaches as rain and floods muddy the waters

Dr Andrew King, also at the University of Melbourne – a main centre for climate studies in Australia – says scientists will look at what happened from multiple angles.

“There’s a thermodynamic part – the moisture – and with that it’s easier to say climate change has enhanced that a bit.

“But you also need the lifting motion that produced the rainfall and that is so much more complicated. We don’t fully understand how these weather systems are changing.

“Fundamentally, we have altered the planet a huge amount. Every event that occurs in our altered system would look different if we hadn’t done that.”

Brisbane’s last major flood was 2011. The city’s river swelled and engulfed suburbs. The images and footage were seen around the world.

Mathematician Dr Kate Saunders was living in one of those suburbs. That extreme event was the catalyst for a decade of study into “extreme value theory” – a way to understand things that have never been witnessed. She’s applying that to extreme rainfall using climate models.

Saunders left Brisbane to study after the 2011 floods, via CSIRO and the University of Melbourne, and is now back in her home city at QUT in time to witness another tragedy.

“What’s really challenging from a statistical perspective is you only have about 11 years of data. But if that climate signal is only becoming stronger, then you’re getting more risk.

“For example, how many times have we had to evacuate Brisbane and parts of Sydney in the same week? When you look at how widespread this was, it makes it an outlier in our records.”

As the rain fell over Brisbane, houses, parks and $1m mansions around her street went under. This was going to generate a flood of scientific inquiry.

“I thought – uh, oh. There’s a lot of work coming here.”

Apple investors urge company to undergo civil rights audit

MICHAEL LIEDTKE
Fri, 4 March 2022


 In this Saturday, March 14, 2020, file photo, an Apple logo adorns the facade of the downtown Brooklyn Apple store in New York. Apple's shareholders have approved a proposal Friday, March 4, 2022, urging the iPhone maker to undergo an independent audit assessing its treatment of female and minority employees, delivering a rare rebuke to a management team that runs the world's most valuable company. 

(AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)
ASSOCIATED PRESSMore

SAN RAMON, Calif. (AP) — Apple's shareholders have approved a proposal urging the iPhone maker to undergo an independent audit assessing its treatment of female and minority employees, delivering a rare rebuke to a management team that runs the world's most valuable company.

The measure passed Friday during Apple's annual meeting is nonbinding, so the Cupertino, California, company isn't required to adopt the recommendation.

But rebuffing the wishes of its shareholders would thrust Apple into an uncomfortable position, especially since the company has long cast itself as a champion of civil rights. CEO Tim Cook reiterated that belief Friday in response to a question from a shareholder during the meeting held remotely.

“I have long believed that inclusion and diversity are essential in their own right," Cook said. “And that a diversity of people, experiences and ideas is the foundation for any new innovation."

Like other major technology companies, Apple's workforce — particularly in high-paid technical positions — consists primarily of white and Asian men, an imbalance that the industry has been trying to address for many years.

Apple's board had pushed against the shareholder proposal seeking a civil rights audit that eventually be made public. The company pointed to its recent strides in civil rights inside and outside Apple that have made a third-party audit of its practices unnecessary.

The initiatives included Apple making a $130 million commitment to a racial equity and justice fund after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The company also says it is raising the pay of women and minority employees while also hiring more female, Black and Hispanic workers.

During Friday's meeting, Cook said Apple has achieved gender pay equity every year since 2017 and now has racial pay equity within the U.S. He also said 59% of Apple's leadership positions during the past year have been filled by people from “underrepresented communities."

But proponents of the civil rights proposal insisted Apple hasn't been doing enough, making it imperative for outsiders to investigate recurring reports of sexual harassment, discriminatory practices and other abuses within the company, which employs 154,000 worldwide.

The proposal gained momentum after Apple last year hired a former Facebook product manager, Antonio Garcia Martinez, to join its ad team __ a move that sparked an outcry among employees who accused him of making misogynistic and racist remarks in a 2016 book called “Chaos Monkeys." Apple quickly cut its ties with Garcia Martinez after the backlash.

Apple also raised widespread privacy concerns last year by announcing plans to scan iPhones for images of child sex abuse. Complaints about that scanning program prompted Apple to backtrack from that plan, but it provided another rallying point for the backers of a civil rights audit.

Most shareholder proposals are overwhelmingly rejected when they're opposed by the boards of publicly held companies. That was the case for five other shareholder proposals during Apple's meeting Friday.

Apple shareholders generally have been enthusiastic supporters of the company because of the tremendous wealth that it has created. Apple currently is worth nearly $2.7 trillion, with most of the gains coming during the past two years of a pandemic that has made its products and services even more popular.

Yet the proposal for a civil rights audit of Apple won the backing of two advisory firms that often sway the votes of institutional shareholders. The audit proposal was supported by 5.13 million shares and opposed by 4.45 million shares, with 131.2 million shares abstaining, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by Apple.

The outcome “shows that investors want to know if Apple is making a difference in tackling potential harms to key stakeholders stemming from its products and policies," said Dieter Waizenegger, executive director of SOC Investment Group, which was one of the shareholders that filed the civil rights proposal. “Investors heard from Apple’s corporate and retail workers who bravely spoke out against inequitable and harmful conditions even under the threat of retaliation.“

Similar shareholder proposals seeking civil rights audits have been adopted during the past year at several other publicly held companies, including CitiGroup.

Although he didn't say whether Apple intends to submit to a civil rights audit, Cook described gender and racial equity “essential to the future of our company."

Nasa’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ recalls Cold War tensions between Russia and the West

Jon Kelvey
Fri, 4 March 2022

Nasa’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ recalls Cold War tensions between Russia and the West

Three days into Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, Nasa tweeted a portrait of the Earth from afar — in which our planet can be seen as a pale blue dot just below the stunning gold of Saturn’s rings backlit by the Sun, next to the immense black semicircle of Saturn itself in silhouette.

“You are here,” the US space agency wrote in the tweet, before noting the image was taken nine years ago in 2013 by Nasa’s Cassini mission to the ringed gas giant.

But the significance of tweeting that image, at that time, runs deeper than a mere anniversary, whether Nasa intended it to or not.

The Cassini image is not the first “pale blue dot” portrait of Earth taken by a spacecraft. That honor belongs to Voyager 1, which on 14 February 1990, turned its cameras toward Earth as the Nasa probe was leaving the Solar System.

The Earth looks even paler, even smaller, a true dot in the vastness of space in the Voyager 1 image, and it was the famous planetary scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan who popularised the term “pale blue dot” in his 1994 book of the same name.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives, he wrote.

“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”



Sagan was an active proponent of nuclear disarmament and wrote about the horrors a nuclear war between the United States and the then Soviet Union could unleash upon the world, as well the horror of war more generally.

Nasa’s tweet over the weekend came as the Soviet Union’s successor state, the Russian Federation, was three days into an invasion of Ukraine that has once again raised the specter of global nuclear war, a ghost many had hoped was buried in the rubble of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin wall.

It also came as Nasa and the European Space Agency try to navigate a political minefield, trying to cooperate with international sanctions with Russia as they can, while also maintaining crucial cooperation with their Russian space agency counterparts to maintain joint operations on the International Space station, which currently hosts a crew of four US and one ESA astronaut, as well as two Russian cosmonauts.

Russia has been a partner in the space station since 1993 and contributed to the building of the ISS and its being continually crewed for the past 21 years, an outpost of peaceful international cooperation above what, with some perspective, is a relatively small, pale blue dot.

Stop Russia’s Imperialist War on Ukraine!  Solidarity with the Ukrainian People’s  Resistance! Statement on Ukraine, by Richard Abernethy Approved as Official Statement by the International Marxist-Humanist Organization In a blatant act of aggression, imperialism and chauvinism, Russia’s autocratic president – and former KGB officer – Vladimir Putin, has launched a massive invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine’s armed forces, heavily outnumbered, are resisting. Thousands of civilians are enlisting to join the fight or support the defenders. In Russia, despite Putin’s almost total control of the media and general suppression of dissent, many citizens have bravely taken to the streets in protests. Already on 24 February, there were protests in more than fifty cities, with 1,740 arrests reported. Marx said that a nation that oppresses another forges its own chains. Magnificently, the Russian protesters are struggling to break the chains. Putin’s actions are a violation of the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination – as well as a direct threat to their lives and homes. The invasion also signals a return to Cold War between Russia and the West. While NATO’s leaders have made it clear that they will not go to war over Ukraine, but impose economic sanctions instead, the heightened tensions greatly increase the danger that a miscalculation by either side could lead to actual war, even nuclear. In the weeks of military build-up that preceded the attack, Putin’s stated demands were a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO, and a pull-back of NATO forces from countries bordering Russia. Ukraine joining NATO was not a real prospect, as it was a known red line for Russia. And the present crisis has led to an increase, not a reduction, of NATO forces in proximity to Russia. It seems that Putin’s demands were a smokescreen for his real aim: domination of Ukraine. Far from keeping Russia secure, Putin has conjured up new risks for Russia and the world. Putin has also claimed that his actions were necessary to prevent genocide (of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine). If there were any truth in this, it might justify a limited intervention to protect lives and prevent atrocities – not a massive attack on the whole country. But the claim was a complete lie, even though the Ukrainian government had just brought in a discriminatory law restricting use of the Russian language (any publication had to be accompanied by a full translation in Ukrainian). Our condemnation of Russian imperialism does not imply support for NATO. The United States and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003, on an equally false and fabricated pretext. Turkey, a NATO member, is no less dictatorial than Russia. The U.S., the UK, the European Union, and their allies deny self-determination to the Palestinians, the Kurds and others, and exercise direct or indirect imperialist domination over much of the globe. Nor does our support for Ukraine’s national self-determination, including independence from Russia or any outside power, imply political support for the existing, bourgeois Ukrainian regime. But we also note that the working class is a core part of the resistance to Russian occupation, and of the support for the democratic republic. While Putin prepared to invade Ukraine, a smaller drama was enacted in the Indian Ocean. The small, postcolonial island nation of Mauritius sent a chartered vessel to the remote Chagos Islands, and raised the Mauritian flag there. Despite a ruling of the International Court of Justice and a UN resolution, Britain still rules the islands as the British Indian Ocean Territory – all to allow the US its military base on Diego Garcia. The whole population of the islands, a small community of about 1,560 people, was forcibly removed by Britain fifty years ago. They are still campaigning for the right to return. Russia and the West are both parts of the capitalist world system, in which cooperation, competition and conflict, order and chaos are combined in complex ways. States compete with each other for wealth and power – and for the minds of human beings – by economic competition, diplomacy, ideology and propaganda, espionage, cyber-attacks, arms race and ultimately war. It is a system that cannot meet the real needs of humanity, like peace, food security, housing, sanitation, health care and education for all. It denies the majority of humankind control of their own lives. The International Marxist-Humanist Organization recently affiliated to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (based in the UK). www.ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign seeks to organise solidarity and provide information in support of Ukrainian socialists and trade unionists, campaigning for working class, and democratic rights, against imperialist intervention and national chauvinism. It seeks to co-ordinate socialist and labour movement organisations who agree on this task, regardless of differences and opinions on other questions. Basic aims are: • to support and build direct links with the independent socialists and the labour movement in Ukraine. • to support the right of the Ukrainian people to determine their own future free from external intervention from Russian or Western imperialism IMHO has also signed the statement No to War – Russia’s Hands Off Ukraine.     Sponsored by the International Marxist-Humanist Organization

The tight web of lawyers and PR firms who oil the wheels for billionaires

Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Margot Gibbs
Sat, 5 March 2022

Photograph: Steve Vidler/Alamy

Many of Russia’s super rich have made London the centre of their business dealings, enabled by a willing services sector

In November 2017, a bank with close links to the Kremlin was revealed to have funded a £140m investment in Twitter.

The share acquisition made by DST Global, founded by the Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner, was financed by the Kremlin-controlled VTB Bank, now under UK sanctions, leaked documents revealed.

Milner said at the time it was a “fairytale” to suggest the investment bought in May 2011 may have been used to influence social media on Russia’s behalf. He said DST Global was a “passive investor”.

While the Twitter shares are now sold, corporate filings reveal the “care of” address for the DST Global entities holding the shares was a four-storey townhouse in Mayfair, London. This stucco-fronted property is the base of Alistair Tulloch, one of the best-connected lawyers among Russia’s super-rich.

Over the years, those who have tried to unpick the financial paper trails of Russian investments, oligarchs and officials have found it is Tulloch’s name – or the address of his legal firm, Tulloch & Co – that frequently pops up on the paperwork.

An investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in October last year, based on the leaked offshore documents known as the Pandora Papers, reported that Tulloch’s law firm helped manage offshore companies for former Russian deputy finance minister Andrey Vavilov and Vitaly Zhogin, a Russian banker.

Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s former deputy prime minister.

 Photograph: Kommersant Photo Agency/REX/Shutterstock

Property records and company filings involving Tulloch’s firm also lead to other former Kremlin politicians and Russian business figures. These include Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s former deputy prime minister, who was last week sanctioned by the UK government after pressure from Labour leader Keir Starmer.

Shuvalov owns two flats in Whitehall, fitted with chandeliers and marble furnishings. A previous filing on Land Registry records reveals the “care of” address for the registered property owner was Tulloch’s legal firm.

Oxford-educated Tulloch is also a trustee of various charities. These include the Mamut Foundation, linked to the Moscow-based billionaire Alexander Mamut.

In 2014, Mamut fired Galina Timchenko, the editor of his Russian news site Lenta.ru, over an interview she published with a far-right Ukrainian nationalist. She was replaced by a pro-Kremlin journalist.

Charity Commission records show the Mamut Foundation made two grants of £100,000 each to Eton College in 2016 and 2017 in support of its library. Eton College said last week it had received no further funds from the charity. It did not comment on whether it had established Alexander Mamut was behind the charity.

Tulloch said: “We fully comply with UK regulations. And obviously, in today’s world, we are incredibly sensitive to people from Russia, and we make sure that everybody is properly assessed.”

It is claimed such regulations have been too lax because politicians have long been reluctant to disrupt the links that were being forged with Russia. It has meant that London – called “Londongrad” by critics – has become a nexus for Russian money and a global professional services hub for the country’s oligarchy.

Ben Elliot, co-chair of the Conservative party.

 Photograph: James Veysey/REX/Shutterstock

At a Conservative summer ball in June 2013, a London-based public relations firm, New Century Media, was revealed to have invited two prominent Russians – Vasily Shestakov, an MP in the Russian Duma and a friend of Vladimir Putin, and Andrei Klyamko, a Russian billionaire. Both men were pictured with then prime minister David Cameron.

Legal filings also reveal that New Century Media acted for the oligarch Vladimir Makhlay, who entered the UK on a golden visa. The fee for services, including “reputation management”, was £75,000 a month. New Century Media has given more than £200,000 to the Conservative party, and is chaired by the former Ulster Unionist MP David Burnside.

Another firm which benefited from Russian links is the concierge firm Quintessentially, co-founded by Ben Elliot, co-chair of the Conservative party. “It is not enough to simply have money,” states a recently deleted webpage for potential Russian clients on the company’s site. “One has to have proper contacts to maximise the use of that money.” The firm said it condemned the Ukraine invasion and had vetted its clients, ensuring none were on the sanctions list.

Related: Dodgy Russian money has destabilised Britain’s democracy. We have to crack down on it | Gina Miller

Lawyers who have been hired to pursue legal actions against journalists involved in scrutiny of the Russian oligarchy are also in the spotlight. The Conservative MP Bob Seely used parliamentary privilege last week to name lawyers who had worked in connection with Russian oligarchs.

A spokesperson for New Century Media said: “We fully condemn the military action in Ukraine. Neither Mr Shestakov nor Mr Klyamko were ever clients of New Century Media. New Century Media has no Russian billionaire or Russian state-owned clients. We have never worked with any sanctioned individuals.”

DST Global said the international firm, with offices in London, New York and Beijing, had not raised capital from Russian limited partners since 2011. It said less than 3% of capital it had raised from inception was from VTB Bank and all such capital was returned by 2014. The firm said Milner had been an Israeli citizen since the late 1990s and had relocated to the US in 2014.

The Mamut Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.

The Observer view on Ukraine and the climate emergency

Observer editorial

Sat, 5 March 2022,

Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters

The crisis must not become a reason to drop our commitment to net zero target


The report last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the need to adapt to global warming made stark, unpleasant reading. Described by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, as “an atlas of human suffering”, it revealed that billions of people now live in parts of the world where they are highly vulnerable to climate change.

Death tolls from droughts, floods and storms are destined to increase in these regions as extreme heat events and inundations become more frequent. Only urgent action today can halt the worst impacts and prevent a global calamity, argued the IPCC.

Related: Q&A: Has the IPCC’s bleak warning of climate breakdown been heard?

In a normal news week, warnings as dire as these would have made front-page headlines in British newspapers. Events in Ukraine ensured they were pushed inside, however. It is not surprising that the unfolding humanitarian crisis occurring in eastern Europe should be the prime focus of our attention and concern. However, there is a danger that the battle for Ukraine may divert attention from the approaching climate change crisis. Even before Russia launched its invasion and triggered a leap in fuel prices, some Conservative backbench MPs had been pressing for the government to cut back its green agenda, a move that has since been followed with calls for fracking to be resumed in the UK in order to boost fossil fuel production and help curb fuel price increases.

These manoeuvres are being mounted by a collection of MPs and peers known as the Net Zero Scrutiny Group. They have tried to blame the government’s green agenda for a cost-of-living crisis, which they say would be better addressed not by raising national insurance payments and imposing green levies but by cutting taxes, resuming UK shale gas extraction, and slowing down the rate at which we impose carbon emission cuts.

Nor are these campaigns confined to the UK. Across the EU, calls have been made for the bloc to reactivate old, decommissioned coal plants “as a precaution and in order to be prepared for the worst”, as the German economy minister, Robert Habeck, said last week.

Across the EU, calls have been made for the bloc to reactivate old, decommissioned coal plants ‘as a precaution’

Such proposals are alarming and the threats they pose should be made clear to the public. In the case of shale gas production, there is simply not enough in the UK to make up for the decline in our reserves of North Sea gas, which have been occurring for more than a decade. Fracking is also deeply unpopular with the public and given that any shale gas extracted would have to be sold at international market prices, it would have no impact on UK fuel bills. Shale gas has no part to play in the generation of power in a Britain committed to playing a leading role in the battle against global warming.

Nor is it realistic to consider reopening coal plants. Coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and any return to its widescale burning across Europe would send the worst possible message to developing nations currently resisting pressure to close down mines and ancient power plants as part of the international programme aimed at cutting back carbon emissions.

The real lesson from the battlefields of Ukraine is that Britain needs to rid itself of its fossil fuel addiction entirely and become self-reliant on electricity that is generated cleanly and efficiently. We need to do that to protect our energy supplies, while at the same time sending a message to the rest of the world that we take the coming crisis extremely seriously. The need to follow this course of action is reflected in the final words of last week’s IPCC report: “Any further delay in concrete anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”

Defiant to the last, Moscow’s media star takes aim at Putin’s brutal clampdown

Natalya Sindeyeva, the founder of Dozhd, struggled to the last but her TV station has been silenced – for now

Two Sundays ago I wrote in the Observer about the last remaining Russian independent TV station, Dozhd (“TV Rain”), and the irrepressible spirit of Natalya Sindeyeva, the woman who pioneered and ran it. Keeping the station alive had cost Sindeyeva her home and her marriage and her health and her security. A dozen years ago when she launched Dozhd she had been a vivid Russian celebrity, a “dancing queen” of Moscow’s elite party circuit, now her mugshot is posted on street corners as a “foreign agent”. The defiant struggles of Dozhd to stay on air and to continue to report the truth in Russia despite years of intimidation and sanction from the Kremlin were the subject of an inspiring documentary, “F@ck This Job (Tango with Putin)”, made by London-based Vera Krichevskaya, which was released in the UK last week and broadcast on the BBC.

A few days after “F@ck this Job” came out, on Friday, the decade-long defiance of Dozhd was silenced, at least for a while, by a brutal new law, passed unanimously in the Russian parliament, which bans news organisations from reporting anything except state approved press releases (it is now illegal for any broadcaster to call events in Ukraine, for example, “a war”). The new legislation, which has also caused the BBC and most other news organisations to suspend its reporting in Russia, will see journalists and media owners who contravene it jailed for up to 15 years. BBC director general Tim Davie said the law “appears to criminalise the process of independent journalism”. Its most chilling effects have been felt among the few surviving liberal Russian media outlets like Dozhd and Novaya Gazeta, whose editor, Dmitry Muratov, winner of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, announced that the paper’s website had been forced to remove all of its material on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “there is no doubt that the threat [of prosecution] will be realised”.

On Friday afternoon I spoke by Zoom to Natalya Sindeyeva and Dozhd’s deputy news editor, Dmitry Elovsky, and the documentary maker Vera Krichevskaya. They appeared ashen-faced on screen, all still struggling to process exactly what had happened. The law against what the Kremlin inevitably described as “fake news” had, they said, “changed everything overnight” within Russia. How did the authorities define “fake news”? I asked. “Anything that is true,” Sindeyeva said.

Last weekend Sindeyeva had been in London to attend the first sold-out screenings of “F@ck this Job”. She had returned hurriedly to Moscow on Monday after sanctions against Russia had been announced, to be with her children when it first seemed likely that borders might close. On the plane back home, she suggested, she still believed that Dozhd could continue to broadcast to its millions of Russian viewers – at least on the YouTube channel to which it had long been confined.

By Wednesday, that no longer felt possible. Dozhd’s editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzaydko and his wife had been receiving vicious death threats all week, after their contact details had been distributed online. They decided they had no choice but to leave the country. Sindeyeva was hearing a number of reports that “special police forces were heading to our newsroom along with pro-Kremlin mobsters”. Krichevsakya had crossed the border from Finland by car the previous day to attend a planned premiere of “F@ck this Job” at Moscow’s largest cinema. Only a few hours before that event was due to begin she received a call that the premiere – and the screening of the film across the country – had been cancelled in light of bomb threats. When we spoke, the director had managed to escape Russia and get a flight to Istanbul and then another to Tel Aviv. Sindeyeva and Elovsky did not disclose their locations.

Journalists working in the newsroom of Dozhd (Rain TV) in August 2021. Photograph: Denis Kaminev/AP

When Sindeyeva had launched Dozhd as “the optimistic channel” a dozen years ago, during the brief window of greater openness that attended Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, she sought to create a vivid space in which a vision of a progressive Russia might exist. The channel would celebrate youth and tolerance. It remained a champion of gay rights when new laws were brought in that criminalised the “promotion” of same-sex relationships. It courageously reported from Chechnya and Ukraine and gave a platform to opposition leaders Boris Nemtsov (before his murder in 2015) and Alexei Navalny. Sindeyeva’s inextinguishable sense of a brighter future kept it going. Two weeks ago, she told me “I’ve always been optimistic and I’m still optimistic. For me, this means that the good guys will take over eventually. But also there is one more important thing to say about that. Optimism is not dreaming, it also says, ‘Get your ass up from the chair and try to make things happen.’”

A fortnight on a lot of that spirit had been drained from her, at least temporarily. “Now,” she told me on Friday, “for the first time ever, I have no hope. I cried all morning on Wednesday, before going into the office for the meeting at which we decided to cease broadcasting.” Her tears had given way to characteristic solidarity with her station’s staff who had never before missed a news bulletin despite, over the years, being kicked off networks and hounded out of their offices. They had even for a while set up a full news studio in Sindeyeva’s Moscow apartment. Closing down felt, Sindeyeva said, “like the decision a mother has to make in a war, to hide her kids in the basement”.

Related: Eminent writers urge Russian speakers to tell truth of war in Ukraine

For their last broadcast Sindeyeva joined the entire news team in front of the camera to say goodbye to viewers. “No to war,” she said, as a farewell, with a bleak smile. The station then cut to some old footage from the ballet Swan Lake, an ironic gesture to the films that Soviet state television had once routinely broadcast when news was censored.

By Wednesday night, Sindeyeva and Elovsky were watching the lights go out on information channels and websites in Moscow one by one, first YouTube feeds then Facebook. “It was so sad,” Krichevskaya said, “to wake up on Thursday morning with none of my usual notifications from Dozhd.” Overnight, the only source of independent news in Russia had become Telegram posts on which friends and colleagues shared fears that the borders would soon be closed. A plane on which Krichevskaya’s mother was travelling from St Petersburg was diverted and grounded for 13 hours while passenger details were checked. All the talk between journalists, Elovsky said, was how to effectively erase media histories from phones and computers in light of the new law. “It feels like an iron curtain is returning,” he said.

Sindeyeva, with a weary note of defiance, insisted that she saw the closure of Dozhd as a pause rather than anything more permanent. She had seen imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s call for Russian citizens to take to the streets to protest Putin’s war, but she doubted it had been heard widely. “People are panicking, they don’t know what will happen next,” she said, “And now there is no way for them to hear news that might tell them.”

Russia ally Kazakhstan permits large pro-Ukraine rally amid sanctions fears

Demonstrators showed their support for Ukraine at a rally in Almaty, capital of Russian ally Kazakhstan (Photo: AFP/Malika AUTALIPOVA)

Issued on: 06/03/2022 - 
Almaty (Kazakhstan) (AFP) – Russia's ally Kazakhstan permitted a large peace rally in its biggest city Saturday as authorities in the Central Asian country look to distance themselves from Moscow's sanctions-triggering military invasion of Ukraine.

Ex-Soviet Kazakhstan's regime regularly blocks political demonstrations but has appeared spooked by suggestions that unprecedented Western sanctions against Russia over Ukraine should target Moscow's allies too.

The Kazakh foreign ministry has stressed its neutrality in the conflict and this week invited Britain's ambassador for talks after a UK lawmaker on Monday appeared to call for sanctions against individuals in the country "complicit and supporting" Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The protest in Almaty, a financial hub of 1.8 million people, gathered over 2,000 demonstrators, who stood for the Ukrainian national anthem and chanted pro-peace slogans and insults against Putin.

Kazakhstan's foreign ministry on Saturday said it had received assurances from London that the country would not be sanctioned by the United Kingdom over Russia's invasion.