Day: April 6, 2024

PENTAGON — Russian microchip company AO PKK Milandr continued to provide microchips to the Russian armed forces at least several months after Russia invaded Ukraine, despite public denials by company director Alexey Novoselov of any connection with Russia’s military.

A formal letter obtained by VOA dated February 10, 2023, shows a sale request for 4,080 military grade microchips for the Russian military. The sale request was addressed from a deputy commander of the 546 military representation of the Russian Ministry of Defense and the commercial director of Russian manufacturer NPO Poisk to Milandr CEO S.V. Tarasenko for delivery by April 2023, more than a year into the war.

The letter instructs Milandr to provide three types of microchip components to NPO Poisk, a well-established Russian defense manufacturer that makes detonators for weapons used by the Russian Armed Forces.

“Each of these three circuits that you have in the table on the document, each one of them is classed as a military-grade component … and each of these is manufactured specifically by Milandr,” said Denys Karlovskyi, a research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies. VOA shared the document with him to confirm its authenticity.

In addition to Milandr CEO Tarasenko, the letter is addressed to a commander of the Russian Defense Ministry’s 514 military representation of the Russian Ministry of Defense named I.A. Shvid.

Karlovskyi says this inclusion shows that Milandr, like Poisk, appears to have a Russian commander from the Defense Ministry’s oversight unit assigned to it — a clear indicator that a company is part of Russia’s defense industry.

Milandr, headquartered near Moscow in an area known as “Soviet Silicon Valley,” was sanctioned by the United States in November 2022, for its illegal procurement of microelectronic components using front companies.

In the statement announcing the 2022 sanctions against Milandr and more than three dozen other entities and individuals, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, “The United States will continue to expose and disrupt the Kremlin’s military supply chains and deny Russia the equipment and technology it needs to wage its illegal war against Ukraine.”

Karlovskyi said that in Russia’s database of public contracts, Milandr is listed in more than 500 contracts, supplying numerous state-owned and military-grade enterprises, including Ural Optical Mechanical Plant, Concern Avtomatika and Izhevsk Electromechanical Plant, or IEMZ Kupol, which also have been sanctioned by the United States.

“It clearly suggests that this entity is a crucial node in Russia’s military supply chain,” Karlovskyi told VOA.

Novoselov, Milandr’s current director, told Bloomberg News last August that he was not aware of any connections to the Russian military.

“I don’t know any military persons who would be interested in our product,” he told Bloomberg in a phone interview, adding that the company mostly produces electric power meters.

The U.S. allegations are “like a fantasy,” he said. “The United States’ State Department, they suppose that every electronics business in Russia is focused on the military. I think that is funny.”

But a U.S. defense official told VOA that helping Russia’s military kill tens of thousands of people in an illegal invasion “is no laughing matter.”

“The company is fueling microchips for missiles and heavily armored vehicles that are used to continue the war in Ukraine,” said the defense official, who spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivities of discussing U.S. intelligence.

Milandr’s co-founder Mikhail Pavlyuk was also sanctioned during the summer of 2022 for his involvement in microchip smuggling operations and was caught stealing from Milandr. Pavlyuk fled Russia and has claimed he was not involved.

Officials estimate that 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian troops have been killed or injured in the war, with tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians killed in the fighting.

“There are consequences to their actions, and the U.S. will persist to expose and disrupt the Kremlin’s supply chain,” the U.S. defense official said.
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THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Climate activist Greta Thunberg was among dozens of people detained Saturday by police in The Hague as they removed protesters who were partially blocking a road in the Dutch city.

Thunberg was seen flashing a victory sign as she sat in a bus used by police to take detained demonstrators from the scene of a protest of Dutch subsidies and tax breaks to companies linked to fossil fuel industries.

The Extinction Rebellion campaign group said before the demonstration that the activists would block a main highway into The Hague, but a heavy police presence, including officers on horseback, initially prevented the activists from getting onto the road.

A small group of people managed to sit down on another road and were detained after ignoring police orders to leave.

Extinction Rebellion activists have blocked the highway that runs past the temporary home of the Dutch parliament more than 30 times to protest the subsidies.

The demonstrators waved flags and chanted: “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.”

One held a banner reading: “This is a dead-end street.”

In February, Thunberg, 21, was acquitted by a court in London of refusing to follow a police order to leave a protest blocking the entrance to a major oil and gas industry conference last year.

Her activism has inspired a global youth movement demanding stronger efforts to fight climate change since she began staging weekly protests outside the Swedish parliament starting in 2018.

She has repeatedly been fined in Sweden and the U.K. for civil disobedience in connection with protests.
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washington — In recent weeks, the United States, Britain and the European Union have issued the strictest regulations yet on the use and development of artificial intelligence, setting a precedent for other countries.

This month, the United States and the U.K. signed a memorandum of understanding allowing for the two countries to partner in the development of tests for the most advanced artificial intelligence models, following through on commitments made at the AI Safety Summit last November.

These actions come on the heels of the European Parliament’s March vote to adopt its first set of comprehensive rules on AI. The landmark decision sets out a wide-ranging set of laws to regulate this exploding technology.

At the time, Brando Benifei, co-rapporteur on the Artificial Intelligence Act plenary vote, said, “I think today is again an historic day on our long path towards regulation of AI. … The first regulation in the world that is putting a clear path towards a safe and human-centric development of AI.”

The new rules aim to protect citizens from dangerous uses of AI, while exploring its boundless potential.

Beth Noveck, professor of experiential AI at Northeastern University, expressed enthusiasm about the rules.

“It’s really exciting that the EU has passed really the world’s first … binding legal framework addressing AI. It is, however, not the end; it is really just the beginning.”

The new rules will be applied according to risk level: the higher the risk, the stricter the rules.

“It’s not regulating the tech,” she said. “It’s regulating the uses of the tech, trying to prohibit and to restrict and to create controls over the most malicious uses — and transparency around other uses.

“So things like what China is doing around social credit scoring, and surveillance of its citizens, unacceptable.”

Noveck described what she called “high-risk uses” that would be subject to scrutiny. Those include the use of tools in ways that could deprive people of their liberty or within employment.

“Then there are lower risk uses, such as the use of spam filters, which involve the use of AI or translation,” she said. “Your phone is using AI all the time when it gives you the weather; you’re using Siri or Alexa, we’re going to see a lot less scrutiny of those common uses.”

But as AI experts point out, new laws just create a framework for a new model of governance on a rapidly evolving technology.

Dragos Tudorache, co-rapporteur on the AI Act plenary vote, said, “Because AI is going to have an impact that we can’t only measure through this act, we will have to be very mindful of this evolution of the technology in the future and be prepared.”

In late March, the Biden administration issued the first government-wide policy to mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence while harnessing its benefits.

The announcement followed President Joe Biden’s executive order last October, which called on federal agencies to lead the way toward better governance of the technology without stifling innovation.

“This landmark executive order is testament to what we stand for: safety, security, trust, openness,” Biden said at the time,” proving once again that America’s strength is not just the power of its example, but the example of its power.”

Looking ahead, experts say the challenge will be to update rules and regulations as the technology continues to evolve.
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BRASILIA, Brazil — Many Yanomami, the Amazon’s largest Indigenous tribe in relative isolation, have been contaminated with mercury coming from widespread illegal gold mining, according to a report released on Thursday by Brazil’s top public health institute.

The research was conducted in nine villages along the Mucajai River, a remote region where illegal mining is widespread. Mercury, a poison, is commonly used in illegal mining to process gold.

The researchers collected hair samples from nearly 300 Yanomami of all ages. They were then examined by doctors, neurologists, psychologists and nurses.

The vast majority, 84% of Yanomami tested, had contamination equal to or above 2 micrograms per gram, a level of exposure that can lead to several health problems, according to standards by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization.

Even more worrying, a smaller part of this group, 10%, surpassed the 6 micrograms per gram threshold, a contamination level often associated with more severe medical conditions.

Research teams also tested fish in the area, finding high levels in them. Eating fish with high mercury levels is the most common path of exposure.

Exposure studies usually test for methylmercury, a powerful neurotoxin formed when bacteria, in this case in rivers, metabolize inorganic mercury. Ingestion of large amounts over weeks or months damages the nervous system. The substance also can pass through a placenta of a pregnant woman, exposing a fetus to developmental abnormalities and cerebral palsy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health effects can include decreased sensitivity in the legs, feet, and hands, overall weakness, dizziness, and ringing in the ears. In some cases, a compromise of the central nervous system can lead to mobility issues.

“Chronic exposure to mercury settles in slowly and progressively,” Paulo Basta, an epidemiologist with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, which led the testing, told The Associated Press. “There’s a wide spectrum of clinical actions that range from mild to severe symptoms.”

Concerted global efforts to address mercury pollution led to the 2013 Minamata Convention, a U.N.-backed agreement signed by 148 parties to curb emissions. The treaty is named after the Japanese city of Minamata, whose population was contaminated by decades-long emissions of mercury dumped along with wastewater. Brazil and the United States were among the signatories.

The Brazilian government report has not been peer reviewed but synthesizes three papers published recently in the journal Toxics, all based on the same field work. One of the studies noted that determining what long-term mercury exposure levels constitute a significant risk for health remains a challenge.

The study’s findings align with prior research in other areas of the Amazon, said Maria Elena Crespo López, a biochemist at the Federal University of Pará who was not involved in the report and has studied the subject for 20 years.

“The mercury problem is widespread throughout the Amazon,” she told the AP. “Since the 1970s, when the first major gold rush happened here, mercury has been released for decades and ends up being transported over long distances, entering the food chain.”

A global review of mercury exposure in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives in 2018 identified Amazon river tributary communities as one of four communities of most concern.

The World Health Organization ranks small-scale gold mining as the single largest source of human-led contamination. The Yanomami territory, which spans the size of Portugal and has a population of 27,000, has endured decades of this illegal activity.

The mining problem significantly expanded during the four-year term of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, which ended in 2022. He defanged Brazil’s environment protection agencies amid rising gold prices. The combination caused a rush of thousands of miners onto Yanomami lands. Basta said that during the fieldwork, which took place near the end of Bolsonaro’s term, Mucajai was teeming with illegal miners.

Upon arrival by plane, the 22-strong team had to wait for about hours to proceed by boat due to heavy gold barge traffic in the Mucajai River. During ten days of testing, researchers were guarded by four military police carrying machine guns and grenades. Basta recalls counting 30 to 35 small planes flying to and from illegal mining sites each day.

“The tension was present throughout our entire stay in the village. I have been working in Indigenous villages for 25 years, and it was the most tense work I have done,” he said.

Current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pledged to expel gold prospectors from Yanomami territory and improve health conditions, but the task is far from complete.

“Mining is the biggest threat we face in Yanomami land today,” Yanomami leader Dário Kopenawa said in a statement. “It’s mandatory and urgent to expel these intruders. If mining continues, so will contamination, devastation, malaria, and malnutrition. This research provides concrete evidence of it.”
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paris — The universe is still expanding at an accelerating rate, but it may have slowed down recently compared with a few billion years ago, early results from the most precise measurement of its evolution yet suggested Thursday.

The preliminary findings are far from confirmed, but if they hold up, it would further deepen the mystery of dark energy – and likely mean there is something important missing in our understanding of the cosmos.

These signals of our universe’s changing speeds were spotted by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is perched atop a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the U.S. state of Arizona.

Each of the instrument’s 5,000 fiber-optic robots can observe a galaxy for 20 minutes, allowing astronomers to chart what they have called the largest-ever 3D map of the universe.

“We measured the position of the galaxies in space but also in time, because the farther away they are, the more we go back in time to a younger and younger universe,” Arnaud de Mattia, a co-leader of the DESI data interpretation team, told AFP.

Just one year into its five-year survey, DESI has already drawn up a map that includes 6 million galaxies and quasars using light that stretches up to 11 billion years into the universe’s past.

The results were announced at conferences in the United States and Switzerland on Thursday, ahead of a series of scientific papers being published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

DESI is on a mission to shed light on the nature of dark energy – a theoretical phenomenon thought to make up roughly 70 percent of the universe.

Another 25 percent of the universe is composed of the equally mysterious dark matter, leaving just 5 percent of normal matter – such as everything you can see.

An inconstant constant?

For more than a century, scientists have known that the universe started expanding after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

But in the late 1990s, astronomers were shocked to discover it has been expanding at an ever-increasing rate.

This was a surprise because gravity from matter – both normal and dark – was thought to have been slowing the universe down.

But obviously something was making the universe expand at ever-faster speeds, and the name “dark energy” was given to this force.

More recently, it was discovered that the acceleration of the universe significantly sped up around 6 billion years after the Big Bang.

In the push-and-pull between matter and dark energy, the latter certainly seems to have the upper hand, according to the leading model of the universe called the Lambda CDM.

Under this model, the quickening expansion of the universe is called the “cosmological constant,” which is closely linked to dark energy.

DESI director Michael Levi said that so far, the instrument’s early results were showing “basic agreement with our best model of the universe.”

“But we’re also seeing some potentially interesting differences, which could indicate that dark energy is evolving with time,” Levi said in a statement.

In other words, the data seem to show “that the cosmological constant Lambda is not really a constant,” because dark energy would be displaying “dynamic” and changing behavior, De Mattia said.

Slowing down in old age

This could suggest that – after switching into high gear 6 billion years after the Big Bang – the speed at which the universe has been expanding has been “slowing down in recent times,” DESI researcher Christophe Yeche said.

Whether dark energy does in fact change over time would need to be verified by more data from DESI and other instruments, such as the space telescope Euclid.

But if it was confirmed, our understanding of the universe will likely have to be changed to accommodate for this strange behavior.

For example, the cosmological constant could be replaced by some kind of field linked to some as-yet-unknown particle.

It could even necessitate updating the equations of Einstein’s theory of relativity “so that they behave slightly differently on the scale of large structures,” De Mattia said.

But we are not there yet.

The history of science is full of examples in which “deviations of this type have been observed then resolved over time,” De Mattia said.

After all, Einstein’s theory of relativity has withstood more than a century of scientific poking and prodding and still stands stronger than ever.
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