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Europe
European Council
10.10.2024 The European Council announced that member states have agreed on a new financial aid package which includes an exceptional €35 billion macro-financial assistance loan to Ukraine and a mechanism to support the country in repaying up to €45 billion in loans provided by the EU and G7 partners. Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Western countries have frozen approximately $300 billion worth of Russian assets, with around $200 billion of that held in EU countries. The frozen assets generate billions of dollars in interest each year. (Source: aa *)
* Anadolu Agency (Turkey)
European Union
10-10-2024 06:00 Hungary’s Orbán faces increasing unease among EU member states ahead of November summits. Some member states are mulling coordinating against Hungary ahead of the summit, or even withdrawing altogether. (Source: euractiv *)
* Euractiv, a news website. Headquarters Brussels, with other offices in Paris and Berlin. Its ournalists are staffed in Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
by Brzozowski
Russia
October 10, 2024, 6:08 AM Russia has recruited about 200 women ages 18-22 from across Africa to work in a factory in what is called the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, in Russia's republic of Tatarstan, about 1,000 kilometers east of Moscow, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine. (Source: apnews)
Ukraine
10 October 2024 08:00 (UTC+04:00) According to a statement by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, an attack was carried out by Ukraine's Navy and units of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU): The Ukrainian military hit a base storing drones that Russia uses for daily attacks against Ukraine near the village of Oktyabrsky in Russia's Krasnodar Krai. According to the release the base was used as a storage of Iranian Shahed-type drones. The general staff says that Russia has used more than 1,300 such drones in September against Ukraine daily in a month. About 400 attack drones were reportedly stored at the Russian base. (Source: azernews)
North America
United States
Oct 10, 2024 at 10:15 AM EDT A group linked to a pro-Palestinian hacktivist movement has launched a catastrophic cyberattack revealing the details of 31 million people, compromising their email addresses and screen names. An account on X under the name SN_BlackMeta claimed responsibility for the attack on The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, and implied that further attacks were planned. The Internet Archive is known for its digital library and the Wayback Machine. (Source: newsweek)
October 10, 2024 5:30 AM Flooded electric cars going up in flames. Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer and state fire marshal, issued a statement on Monday detailing a string of fires in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which flooded much of the Gulf Coast just two week ago. The state found 50,000 EV and hybrid registrations in the path of Hurricane Milton’s storm surge and counted at least 64 lithium battery fires after Hurricane Helene. EVs accounted for 17 of those but the rest were devices like scooters, hoverboards and golf carts. One fire was even sparked by an electric wheelchair. (Source: msn / Miami Herald)
October 10, 2024 The ’far-right’ conspiracy site Gateway Pundit boosted Greene’s claims with a grab-bag set of testimonials from other merchants of paranoia. The piece highlights the findings of no less an authority than Kennedy Jr., who declared that nefarious deep-state actors have seized control of the weather via the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. “They aggravate the problem, and sell us the solution,” Kennedy breathlessly announced. “The solution they want is more social controls.” (Source: thenation *)
* The Nation, a ’progressive’ American monthly magazine based in New York City, U.S.
Space
United States
Oct 10, 2024 1:08 PM EDT In 2022, the U.S. government announced a self-imposed moratorium on destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite weapon testing and called on others to do the same. Such testing, like one Russia conducted in 2021, creates clouds of debris that pose significant threats to other objects in orbit. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying one of two X-37B reusable spaceplanes was launched from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on December 28, 2023. The U.S. Space Force, to which the two X-37Bs are now assigned, announced planned orbital maneuvers as part of the current Orbital Test Vehicle 7 (OTV-7) mission earlier today. One of America’s secretive X-37Bs is set to perform a series of aerobraking maneuvers – a series of passes using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere – that will significantly change its orbit, around Earth while expending minimal fuel and safely dispose of its service module components in accordance with recognized standards for space debris mitigation which is said to be a first-of-its-kind event for the mini-space shuttle. This is part of the seventh known X-37B mission, which began last December, and has already involved the reusable spaceplane operating in a much higher orbit than ever before. As noted, the mini-shuttle will have to pass relatively close to the Earth to drag in the atmosphere to execute the maneuver at all. “Since December 28, 2023, the United States Space Force, supported by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, has conducted radiation effect experiments and has been testing Space Domain Awareness technologies in a Highly Elliptical Orbit,” in its release today, Space Force cited. “This novel and efficient series of maneuvers demonstrates the Space Force’s commitment to achieving groundbreaking innovation as it conducts national security missions in space,” Secretary of the Air Force Kendall said in a statement. The reusable spaceplane has a truckbed-sized main payload bay and can carry additional payloads on a service module adapter attached to its tail end. Space Delta 9 is the specific unit within the Space Force that now oversees the X-37Bs. It has an “orbital warfare” mission for preparing, presenting and projecting assigned and attached forces for the purpose of conducting protect and defend operations and providing national decision authorities with response options to deter orbital threats. Space-based early warning satellites are the most commonly cited capabilities in this ecosystem. Currently, the Air Force only acknowledges having only one “counter-space” system, a terrestrial electronic warfare jammer called the Counter Communications System (CCS). “We … are looking at the role of EW [electronic warfare], particularly against some of the space threats that are coming out. So the space-based side of it’s very important to us,” Air Force Secretary Kendall told on the sidelines of the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) main annual conference last month. In the face of the ever-expanding threats to U.S. assets in orbit, including Russian work on a new space-based nuclear-armed anti-satellite weapon, Space Force is “creating counter-space capabilities that allows us to be more resilient… and then when they [adversaries] have offensive capabilities of their own, our ability to either maneuver, to deny, to hide, to run,” Chief of Space Operations Saltzman said. Aerobraking maneuvers could be one means for space-based assets to evade hostile attacks. (Source: twz *)
* The Warzone, an online magazine (U.S.)
by Trevithick
.4 10 25 02:07
