Beijing Flip-Flops, Asks Banks To Pause Loans To Sanctioned Refiners Days After Ordering Them To Ignore Sanctions

Mass Casualties In Large Russian Assault On Ukraine's Capital, Air Defenses Dwindle Ukraine started the week with near record-setting drone attacks on Moscow, with over 600 UAVs sent against the Russian capital Monday night into Tuesday. The expected major Russian retaliation has come overnight, with a huge missile and drone barrage on the Ukrainian capital. Many dozens were sent, killing over 16 people and injuring more than 40, local authorities report. Ukrainian media The casualty rate was high despite that Ukraine says it managed to intercept nearly 90% of inbound projectiles, which it...

China Plans Planetary Defense Test By Slamming Mach 26 Spacecraft Into Asteroid A new paper under peer review by the Chinese-language Journal of Deep Space Exploration lays out an ambitious plan to crash a spacecraft at Mach 26, or 20,000 mph, into a near-Earth asteroid to test new planetary defenses. The South China Morning Post reports that a team led by Li Mingtao, chief scientist for planetary defense at the China National Space Administration, is planning a mission even more ambitious than NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). That mission would...

US Removes Syria, Including Al-Nusra Front, From Its List Of Terrorism Sponsors Following a decade-and-a-half of a Washington-led full economic siege of the Syrian state, and after a fierce CIA-backed proxy war (Timber Sycamore) to oust Assad over that same period, this week has witnessed the huge milestone of the United States finally removing Syria from its state sponsors of terrorism list. The designation itself had stretched back several decades, and it placed major hurdles in the way of international investment, but with the Monday move by the State Department many of...