Author: Matthew Berry

Alaska — A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday halted a lower court ruling that would have shut down southeast Alaska’s chinook salmon troll fishery for the summer to protect endangered orca whales that eat the fish. The ruling by a three-judge 9th Circuit Court panel means the summer chinook, or king, salmon season will start as usual next week for an industry that supports some 1,500 fishery workers in southeast Alaska. The opinion said the state and others who were part of the appeal established a sufficient likelihood that certain and substantial impacts of the lower court’s decision “outweigh the…

Libya’s state-owned oil company, the National Oil Corporation (NOC), had established last month a new program office, but multiple foreign press reports claim that one of the staff running the office is embroiled in a major fraud case in Kazakhstan. Peter Sztyk, a Canadian lawyer and entrepreneur who also goes by the name “Petro”, has joined a group of foreign consultants who will manage the Office of Strategic Programs, which the NOC inaugurated in February 15 during a meeting with local oil industry executives in Benghazi. Who is Peter Sztyk? The Canadian lawyer graduated in 1993 from Concordia University with bachelor in…

A wayward and unresponsive business plane that flew over the nation’s capital Sunday afternoon caused the military to scramble a fighter jet before the plane crashed in Virginia, officials said. The fighter jet caused a loud sonic boom that was heard across the capital region. The Federal Aviation Administration says the Cessna Citation took off from Elizabethtown, Tennessee, on Sunday and was headed for Long Island’s MacArthur Airport. Inexplicably, the plane turned around over New York’s Long Island and flew a straight path down over D.C. before it crashed over mountainous terrain near Montebello, Virginia, around 3:30 p.m. It was…

KEY POINTS Senior officials from about two dozen of the world’s major intelligence agencies held a secret meeting on the fringes of the Shangri-La Dialogue security meeting in Singapore this weekend, five people told Reuters. Such meetings are organised by the Singapore government and have been discreetly held at a separate venue alongside the security summit for several years, they said. The meetings have not been previously reported. The U.S. was represented by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the head of her country’s intelligence community, while China was among the other countries present, despite the tensions between the two…

Turkish defence firm Baykar aims to begin production of its new unmanned combat aerial vehicle next year which is already attracting international interest, its chairman Selcuk Bayraktar said. Named “Kizilelma”, the drone expands the company’s product range from slow, ground attack drones to fast and agile autonomous ones that work alongside fighter jets. “It is designed to be a highly autonomous, under human purview of course, air-to-air combat vehicle,” said Bayraktar, who led the design of the 15-metre-long (49 feet) jet-powered weapon. “In a sense, the Kizilelma expresses a whole new future for combat aviation.” Baykar has come to prominence…

A top US general has issued a warning that despite significant losses in Ukraine, Russia’s ground forces are bigger than they were at the start of the 2022 invasion, a sobering assessment of the country’s military capabilities. “The Russian ground force has been degenerated somewhat by this conflict, although it is bigger today than it was at the beginning of the conflict,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of US European Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. “The air force has lost very little. They’ve lost 80 planes — they have another 1,000 fighters and fighter-bombers. The Navy has…

MOSCOW, April 28 (Reuters) – Russia’s foreign ministry on Friday criticised a nuclear agreement between the United States and South Korea, saying it would destabilise the region and the wider world, and warned of a potential arms race as a result. The United States on Wednesday pledged to give South Korea more insight into its nuclear planning, while Seoul promised not to seek nuclear weapons itself in an agreement both sides said was aimed against North Korea. Russia has repeatedly railed against what it sees as the United States’ growing military presence across Asia. “This development is clearly destabilising in nature and…

Top law enforcement officials from the United States and Canada met on Friday to talk about combatting the opioid crisis and reducing firearms trafficking across the border. Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino and Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti hosted U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in Ottawa on Friday for the second Canada–U.S. Cross-Border Crime Forum. “It is vitally important when two countries are neighbors that they also be partners,” Mayorkas said at a press conference after a day of meetings, noting it was his first official visit to Ottawa…

In particular, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have recently joined United States-initiated studies to research the most contagious biological activities. In Winter and Spring 2023, discussions over the origins of corona virus have been reignited one more time. An unexpected and purely coincidental leakage of the COVID biological agent from a laboratory is still being discussed. Against this rather gloomy background, several countries are continuing their overseas biological experiments, with post-Soviet Central Asia being at the core of such activities. In particular, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have recently joined United States-initiated studies to research the most contagious biological activities. A biological laboratory to research…

Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden Saturday for his latest international gaffe: an embarrassing shout-out to China when he meant to sing Canada’s praises during a state visit to Ottawa. “Mistakes like this, a really big one in Canada’s Parliament, are just not allowed to happen,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “We are a laughing stock all over the WORLD!” The 80-year-old president made the cringe-inducing flub in a speech before the Canadian Parliament. “Today, I applaud China for stepping up,” Biden said as he discussed a new US-Canada border agreement. “Excuse me, I applaud Canada,” he corrected himself, drawing laughs from…