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- Michael Jordan net worth: How he makes and spends his $2 billion fortune Insider
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The NBA’s New Social Justice Champion Has A Few Demerits – Defector
- The NBA’s New Social Justice Champion Has A Few Demerits Defector
- Stephen Curry Is Named The 2022-23 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion | NBA on TNT NBA on TNT
- Warriors’ Stephen Curry wins Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice award Yahoo Sports
- Steph Curry wins the Kareem Social Justice Award, FULL Interview | Inside the NBA House of Highlights
- Stephen Curry Celebrates Getting ‘Special’ Message From Kareem Abdul-Jabbar After Being Named Social Justice Champion: “It’s the Ultimate Honor!” The Sportsrush
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Whoopsies! Fossil From The Dawn Of Life Actually Just Bees – Defector
- Whoopsies! Fossil From The Dawn Of Life Actually Just Bees Defector
- New Evidence Suggests the Historic Dickinsonia Fossil Found At Bhimbetka Caves Was Actually A Beehive Print! The Weather Channel
- ‘Oldest animal fossil’ that rewrote India’s history turns out to be recently ‘decayed bee hive’ The Independent
- “Fossil” That Rewrote Indian Geologic History Is Actually A Beehive IFLScience
- ‘Beehive imprints’, not 550 mn-yr-old fossil: Bhimbetka find proven false, scientists accept mistake ThePrint
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‘There are maniacs who enjoy killing,’ Russian defector says of his former unit accused of war crimes in Bucha
CNN
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Nikita Chibrin says he still remembers his fellow Russian soldiers running away after allegedly raping two Ukrainian women during their deployment northwest of Kyiv in March.
“I saw them run, then I learned they were rapists. They raped a mother and a daughter,” he said. Their commanders, Chibrin said, shrugged when finding out about the rapes. The alleged rapists were beaten, he says, but never fully punished for their crimes.
“They were never jailed. Just fired. Just like that: ‘Go!’ They were simply dismissed from the war. That’s it.”
Chibrin is a former soldier from the Russian city of Yakutsk who says he served in the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, the notorious Russian military unit accused of committing war crimes during their offensive in Bucha, Borodianka and other towns and villages north of Kyiv.
He deserted from the Russian military in September and fled to Europe via Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Troops from Chibrin’s brigade were labeled war criminals by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in April after mass graves containing murdered civilians and dead bodies lying in the streets were discovered following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kyiv region.
Chibrin’s military documents, seen by CNN, show his commander was Azatbek Omurbekov, the officer in charge of the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade. Omurbekov, known as the “Butcher of Bucha” is under sanctions by the European Union and the United Kingdom. The United States have sanctioned the entire brigade.
The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the mass killings, while reiterating baseless claims that the images of civilian bodies were fake.
In a move that sparked outrage across the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the unit an honorary military title and praised it for its “heroism” and “bold actions.”
Chibrin said he didn’t see any of the supposed heroism, but many of the crimes.
Speaking to CNN in a European country where he has requested asylum, he detailed some of the crimes he says he witnessed and heard accounts of, and said he’d be prepared to testify against his unit at an international criminal court. He maintains he himself didn’t commit any crimes.
“I didn’t see murders but I saw rapists running away, being chased (by higher-ranking members of the unit) because they committed rape,” he said.
He also said that the unit had a “direct command to murder” anyone sharing information about the unit’s positions, whether military or civilians.
“If someone had a phone – we were allowed to shoot them,” he said. He claims there is little doubt some of the men in the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade were capable of killing unarmed civilians.
“There are maniacs who enjoy killing a man. Such maniacs turned up there,” he said.
Chibrin also described widespread looting, with Russian soldiers taking computers, jewelry and anything they liked.
“They didn’t hide this at all. A lot from my unit, when we left Lipovka and Andreevka in the end of March, they took cars, vehicles, they took civilian cars and sold them in Belarus,” he said. “The mentality is, if you steal something, you are good. If nobody catches you, good! If you see something that is expensive and you steal it and don’t get caught, you are good.”
As for the unit’s commanders, he said they were well aware of the alleged rapes and murders and of the looting, but took little interest in seeking justice.
“They reacted like: ‘Whatever. It happened. So what?’ Actually, there was no reaction,” he said. “Discipline goes [down the drain], there’s no discipline.”
CNN has asked the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment on the allegations, but has not received a response.
Chibrin has no doubt that Russia will eventually lose its war against Ukraine, but not until many more lives are lost.
“Because Russia won’t stop until big blood is spilled, until everyone dies. Soldiers are cannon fodder to them. They don’t respect them,” he said.
Having seen the fighting first hand, he said the equipment Russian soldiers have is no match for the weapons to which Ukraine has access. He says that while Ukraine is receiving some of the most advanced weaponry available from its Western allies, the Russian army is relying on Soviet-era equipment used during the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
“Of course Russia will lose. Because the whole world is supporting Ukraine. To think that they (the Russians) will win is stupid,” he said. “They thought they would occupy Kyiv in three days. What day is it now [of the war]? 260th? They thought they would come to Ukraine and be met with flowers. But they were told to f*** off and thrown Molotov cocktails at.”
Men in his unit were also extremely ill-prepared for combat, according to Chibrin. He said the training his unit received consisted of commanders giving them a weapon, a target and 5,000 bullets.
“Keep shooting and then you are free to go. No one was doing anything. There was no actual training. I worked with a computer, at the office, worked as a lawnmower…” he said.
The lack of training became obvious once in Ukraine. The same men who were boasting about being “like Rambo” before they were deployed came back broken, he said. “Those who said they’d be shooting Ukrainians easily, when they come back from the front lines … they could not even speak to me. They saw the war, they saw defeat, saw their [fellow] combatants being murdered, saw corpses. They realized – but they couldn’t run away.”
He said many of the men were poorly trained and most had no idea where they were headed.
“It was a big lie. It was a military training with the Belarusian army. And they lied to us. On February 24 they just said everyone will go to war,” Chibrin said, adding that he initially refused to go.
“The first thing I said was, ‘Commander, f*** you, I don’t want to go to the war’ and he said, ‘Hey you, you will have big problems, you will go to jail and your family will have big problems’ … and he attacked me and put me in a special vehicle and closed the door. And I couldn’t open [it] from inside. So, that’s how I went to Ukraine.”
Chibrin went on to spend months in Ukraine, on and off. When the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade withdrew at the end of March from the area northwest of Kyiv, following the failed offensive there, he and his unit returned to Belarus.
He said he was suffering from a back injury and went to a military hospital in Russia, but was forced to go back to Ukraine in May. This time he was sent to the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine, and then spent time in the forests around Izyum.
It was then that he finally found a chance to escape, he said. He noticed that commanders of other units were leaving the area for Russia in a truck and jumped in.
“I jump in [the bed of the truck] and I see, wow, other guys, also leaving Ukraine. And they say we don’t want to [fight the] war, we paid the commander money (to drive). And I am waiting and waiting and then we are near to the Russia border and the car is stopped and the guys are jumping off and I am also jumping off. And I go to the Russia border and I say I need the medical help,” he said.
Once back in Russia, Chibrin said he spent nearly a month in hospital, most of that being bedridden with terrible back pain. But he said he was unable to get proper treatment. “They said that if I wanted to go to a special sanatorium, I needed to sign a paper that said I’d go back to war,” he said.
Refusing to sign, Chibrin said he was getting ready to submit paperwork to get his military contract canceled when the Russian government announced a partial mobilization in September.
“And my friends told me I needed to hide. ‘You need to find place and hide, your contract will not be canceled because of the mobilization,” he said. Knowing he needed to get as far as possible from the far east city of Khabarovsk where he was stationed, Chibrin first fled across Russia to St. Petersburg and then took a train to Belarus. Once there he was able to find an intermediary who helped him get to Kazakhstan from where he ultimately traveled to his current location.
Now he is determined to speak up about the events he witnessed in Ukraine, even writing an anti-war song. “Hundreds of souls, hundreds of bodies of lost people. Hundreds of mothers without children,” the chorus goes.
Welcome To Jurassic Puke | Defector
The word fossil might conjure the bones of a creature itself—a towering T. rex, a tiny trilobite, an average-sized giant sloth. But life can be immortalized in other, more oblique ways: in the traces an organism leaves behind while going about their life. Some trace fossils are almost poetic. Footprints left behind by a dinosaur or a burrow carved by an ancient worm asks the question: Who left this behind? Other trace fossils are less poetic but even more mysterious. A roundish smattering or small lump of bones raises not one but two questions: Who left this behind, and what from what end did it emerge? In other words: poop or barf?
All fossils require some deciphering, but anything excreted or regurgitated by an animal millions of years ago can be a real enigma. The former, called coprolites, are much more common, and they often look exactly how you might expect expect: nubbly brown lumps. But just as modern poop is a many-splendored thing, ancient excrement can take on many forms. Some squiggly brown fossils that might appear to be unmistakably poop are actually imposters, also called pseudocoprolites. (The Wilkes Formation in southwestern Washington is a trove of such pseudo-poops, formed inorganically when silt and clay filled hollow fragments of wood.)
Even rarer than coprolites are regurgitalites, or fossilized vomit. “It’s kind of rare to find direct evidence of who is eating who, or who is vomiting up who, in the fossil record,” said Brian Engh, a paleoartist and filmmaker. Although the soft, vegetal barf of an ancient herbivore would have less of a chance of geological immortality, a predator’s yakking might at least have some bones in it, according to John Foster, a curator with the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum.
Foster and colleagues described a new fossil regurgitalite in a paper recently published in the journal Palaios. The newly described regurgitalite is tiny—about as long as a staple—but contains the scattered remains of at least two frogs and a fragment of a salamander
When Foster’s team first excavated the rock, they thought little of it. They were working in Utah’s renowned Morrison Formation, a Late Jurassic site containing hordes of dinosaur bones including the sauropod Diplodocus, whose cruciferous barf would likely not survive the ravages of time. But Foster and colleagues were focused on a lesser-known swath of the Morrison whose abundance of fossilized plants gave it the nickname the “Salad Bar.” “There’s a lot to be found in this formation still, and some of it is going to be barf,” Engh said.
The researchers brought the specimen back to the museum, where it sat for a year among an assortment of mysteries—”things that we just can’t tell what they are,” Foster said. Some of these mysteries require two or three turns under a microscope until their identity becomes clear. For example, one of the Salad Bar’s mysteries turned out to be a fossil water bug, whose venous wings initially appeared to be the veins of a leaf.
With a microscope, Foster realized what he was looking at was not a plant at all, but a jumble of amphibian bones, some of which were just three millimeters long. And the bones didn’t come from just one, tragically disassembled amphibian, but was rather a loose pile of different amphibians. The frogs were tiny—an inch or two long at most. “We knew we had a minimum of two frogs,” Foster said. “We found at least a single bone of a salamander.”
But then came the real question of the specimen. “To figure out,” Foster paused, “whether the thing had been vomited up or pooped out, basically.”
There were some visual cues. “Most coprolites that you find are basically little ovals or little tubes or something like that,” Foster said. “They retain a kind of three-dimensional character.” But the jumble of bones was flat, without the ground mass typical of coprolites, and the stone surrounding it had several laminations—buildups of sediment that probably accumulated each year surrounding the little pile. But to be certain, the researchers had to do a geochemical analysis. An X-ray fluorescence scan of the specimen revealed the specimen did not have elevated levels of phosphorous, which generally indicate a coprolite. The only elevated phosphorous was found in the bones, demonstrating that phosphorous had not been removed from the fossil in the process of turning into a rock.
The specimen has several splotches of a mysterious gray mass, which also did not contain phosphorous. Foster hopes to scan the fossil with a more precise machine at the University of Utah, which would allow him to zero in on specific areas. “It’ll be able to give us a pretty good indication of what that unidentified material is,” Foster said.
But if the fossil was vomit, who did the vomiting? For now, the culprit’s identity is lost to time. The researchers’ best guess is a fish, perhaps one similar to a modern bowfin, due to scales they found around the site. Other predators, such as turtles and semiaquatic mammals, are also a possibility, but they haven’t been discovered near the site yet, Foster said. Anything larger, like a prehistoric crocodile, would not have bothered chomping on frogs the size of limes. “The barf gives us a window into what else was going on in the ecosystem,” Engh said.
Engh, the paleoartist tasked with illustrating what the regurgitalite may have looked like in real life, had a challenge before him. At first, he said, he planned simply to illustrate a fish barfing. “But then all the questions would be about, why is this fish barfing? And also that won’t show what the fish was eating.” To preemptively answer that question, Engh tried another sketch of a fish being chomped by a crocodilian and barfing defensively—a way of distracting the predator. But without evidence of crocodilians in this corner of the Morrison, that version was scrapped, too.
The final illustration was inspired by the Jaws poster: a bowfin fish approaching the oblivious frog from underneath, ready to chomp. “I realized that I still wanted to show the barfing, so I added another bowfin barfing in the background,” Engh said. When Engh’s wife, an evolutionary biologist who studies fish, mentioned that lungfish chew by encapsulating whatever they’re eating in a glob of mucus and slurp it all in, Engh added a viscous coating of mucus to his regurgitated frog.
The bones inside the regurgitalite were not super fragmented, indicated they may have been only partially digested by the predator. It’s possible the predator may have barfed up the swallowed frogs defensively or after digesting frog meat in an attempt to purge the frog bones, Foster said. A mucusy blob would have helped the bones stick together and get preserved, perhaps isolating the bones from scavengers or microbes, he added.
Foster is amazed that the fragile pile of tiny, mostly hollow bones was preserved at all. But his favorite part of the fossil is how it captures the interactions of modern-looking animals that happened to live 150 million years ago. “It kind of helps illustrate how not everything back at the time of the dinosaurs was really weird and wacky,” Foster said. “Some of it would have been very familiar to us.” If we had been sitting on the shores of this Jurassic pond, we probably would have heard a chorus of frogs, Foster said, and maybe even the distinct, timeless sound of a carnivore upchucking a frog that would chorus no more.
North Korean defector spends six hours walking around heavily guarded border unnoticed | South Korea
South Korea’s military is facing criticism over security lapses along the country’s heavily armed border with North Korea after a man was able to cross into the South despite being spotted multiple times by surveillance cameras.
The man, wearing a wetsuit and flippers, reportedly swam to South Korea in the early hours of 16 February, but evaded capture for more than six hours, according to the Yonhap news agency.
After arriving on the South Korean coast via the East Sea, he reportedly crawled through a drainage tunnel inside the demilitarised zone (DMZ), hid his wetsuit and flippers and walked, undetected, along a road for about 5km.
He was apprehended after a guard spotted him via a CCTV camera and alerted his superiors.
By the time the manhunt began, the man had been picked up five times by coastal surveillance cameras. They twice triggered alarms, but soldiers failed to notice the warnings and took no action. He was able to continue his journey after three fence cameras near a frontline military post failed to trigger an alarm.
“Service members in charge of the guard duty failed to abide by due procedures and failed to detect the unidentified man,” an official from the joint chiefs of staff [JCS] told Yonhap.
An investigation into the incident found that a guard in charge of coastal surveillance equipment was addressing a computer issue and dismissed the alarms as technical errors, while a second guard at the military post had been distracted by a phone call.
The military’s embarrassment was compounded when it emerged that it had not even known about the drainage tunnel the escapee passed through during his flight from North Korea.
The man, who has reportedly said he wants to defect, made the perilous journey in the depths of winter, raising questions about how he survived for so long in freezing waters. The JCS said he had worn a padded jacket inside his wetsuit, adding that the tides would have worked in his favour.
Officials refused to give his name, describing him only as a fisheries worker in his 20s. Reports said he may have been attempting to hand himself in to South Korean civilians, fearing that border guards would immediately force him to return to the North.
South Korea’s military was already facing criticism over security breaches after a North Korean civilian evaded capture for hours after crossing barbed wire fences last November.
He was apprehended after surveillance equipment spotted him near the town of Goseong at the eastern end of the DMZ, a 248km-long (155-mile) strip of land strewn with mines that has separated the two Koreas since the end of their 1950-53 war.
In 2019, four North Koreans crossed the maritime border undetected in a wooden boat before arriving at a port on South Korea’s east coast.
Only a handful of the 31,000 North Koreans who have defected to the South did so via the heavily guarded DMZ. The vast majority escape via North Korea’s long border with China and arrive in the South via a third country, often Thailand.