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The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a document that became the "last prelude" before the outbreak of World War II. After 80 years, we’ll try again to look back into the past and remember how it all happened. At the end of June 1939, negotiations on the normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Germany began. In July, there was the talk of a trade agreement and a plan to improve relations between countries, which included political rapprochement. During a meeting with the military on August 14, Adolf Hitler announced his intention to start a war with Poland, since "UK and...

Our country is being colonized by the Chinese. I will explain with the example of Kotelnich, the southern city of the Kirov region (Vyatka). Fifteen years ago, the Chinese began to come here, young (20-30 years old) healthy and ideologically stable. They came alone, without children and women, but with money in cash. The goal of the arrivals were not to "help the starving relatives in China", but to find a Russian woman who was ready to marry him. What did he get after that? Russian citizenship and 4 million yuan from China. Yes, he took the Russian woman -...

The Russian deep-water submersion on which the fire occurred on July 1 is the nuclear submarine AS-12, known as "Losharik." The incident occurred on July 1 at about 20.30. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported the death of 14 submariners in the "deep-water apparatus" based inSeveromorsk.

Kenya runs the risk of losing control of the Port of Mombasa if it should default on loans from state financial institution China Exim Bank, according to a new report from Kenya's auditor general. The terms of a $2.3 billion loan for Kenya Railways Corporation (KRC) specify that the port's assets are collateral, and they are not protected by Kenya's sovereign immunity due to a waiver in the contract. "The payment arrangement agreement substantively means that the Authority's revenue would be used to pay the Government of Kenya's debt to China Exim bank if the minimum volumes required for [rail]...

A man and woman found unconscious in Wiltshire were exposed to Novichok - the same nerve agent that poisoned ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal, police say. The couple, believed to be Charlie Rowley, 45, and Dawn Sturgess, 44, fell ill at a house in Amesbury on Saturday and remain in a critical condition. Police say no one else has presented with the same symptoms. There was "nothing in their background" to suggest the pair were targeted, the Met Police said. Home Secretary Sajid Javid will chair a meeting of the government's emergency Cobra committee later to discuss the developments

A quiet wager has taken hold among researchers who study artificial intelligence techniques and the societal impacts of such technologies. They’re betting whether or not someone will create a so-called Deepfake video about a political candidate that receives more than 2 million views before getting debunked by the end of 2018. The Deepfake technology in question first gained notoriety in December 2017 when a person going by the pseudonym “DeepFakes” showed how deep learning—a popular AI technique based on neural network computer architecture—could digitally stitch the faces of celebrities onto the faces of porn actors in pornography videos. Since that...

Special “conquest” prayers were held across all of Turkey’s 90,000 mosques on Jan. 20 and Jan. 21 for the victory of the country’s military, which launched a cross border operation in Syria’s northwestern Afrin region on Jan. 20 against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). “Sessions will be held after the isha prayer tonight [Jan. 20] and the morning prayer [on Jan. 21] due to Operation Olive Branch,” said Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) head Ali Erbas in a message sent on Jan. 20 to all offices of muftis and religious officials across the country. “The Surah Conquest [Surah al-Fath]...

Nearly half of Russian citizens approve of 1939's Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a Levada Center poll released on Wednesday has found. Thirteen percent of Levada’s respondents said they “definitely approve” of the pact, while 32 percent they “somewhat approve” of it. A combined 17 percent said they “definitely” or “somewhat” disapprove of the treaty that the USSR and Nazi Germany signed on Aug. 23, 1939. Two-fifths of the 1,600 people polled said they had “heard of” the pact and “think that it happened in real life,” the survey revealed. One-third said they’ve never heard of...

The rapid improvement in DNA sequencing has sparked a big data revolution in genomic sciences, which has in turn led to a proliferation of bioinformatics tools. To date, these tools have encountered little adversarial pressure. This paper evaluates the robustness of such tools if (or when) adversarial attacks manifest. We demonstrate, for the first time, the synthesis of DNA which — when sequenced and processed— gives an attacker arbitrary remote code execution. To study the feasibility of creating and synthesizing a DNA-based exploit, we performed our attack on a modified downstream sequencing utility with a deliberately introduced vulnerability. After sequencing,...

Russia’s economic development ministry says that the country’s GDP growth will be approximately half of one percent lower each year because of projected declines in the number of workers in Russia in the coming decades, a decline that the ministry says must be fought by increasing immigration. But any immigration sufficient to cover that decline in the size of the working-age cohort will not only increasingly consist of people who are culturally, linguistically and religiously dissimilar to the current residents of Russia and accelerate the shifting balance between Orthodox and Muslims in its population. Russia could avoid this problem by...

State officials are investigating the theft last week of equipment from a Cobb County precinct manager’s car that could make every Georgia voters’ personal information vulnerable to theft. The equipment, used to check-in voters at the polls, was stolen Saturday evening, Secretary of State Brian Kemp said Monday.

At least six entities in the United States or Canada (TerraPower, ARC, GE Prism, LeadCold, Oklo and Westinghouse) are investing significant sums of corporate or venture capital to pursue an elusive technical achievement; commercially viable nuclear power systems that achieve substantially greater fuel economy than conventional reactors. Though nuclear fuel is “cheap,” substantially better fuel use provides improved longevity and produces less waste material. Efforts to achieve fuel economy objectives have reopened a discussion whose historical roots extend back more than 50 years into the middle of the 1960s. Given that there are United States entities that believe there is...

Since Oct. 2016, China has seen an increase in human infections with avian influenza A(H7N9) virus and the World Health Organization (WHO) looked at some of the recent scientific information in several categories. Sudden increases in the number of human A(H7N9) cases reported during December and January have been observed in previous years. Compared to earlier waves of infection, further geographic spread of the virus was observed in this fifth wave. Of the cases where information on exposure history was known, as previous waves, most reported prior exposure to live poultry or potentially contaminated environments, including in LPMs. (live poultry...

The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called “50c party” posts vociferously argue for the government’s side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of the vast majority of posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet, almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim, or,...

Suggestion that Egypt would enter Syria and support a Syrian National Army to stabilize war-torn Syria. SNA would be a replacement for the now-defunct and disgraced Syrian Arab Army with the SNA being a melting pot to assimilate all ethnicities and all emergent armed groups in Syria after a process of national reconciliation. The article is written from the point of view of the As'Sissi administration of Government of Egypt towards the war in Syria.

The Royal Air Force will reportedly be on high alert in the coming days in order to intercept and track flights from the Arctic region. The move has been prompted by an incident around a year ago in which Typhoon aircraft escorted a Lapland registered aircraft (flying from the Arctic region) over the UK’s major cities, the pilot of the craft was said to be under the influence of alcohol and very “festive”, this is especially dangerous due to the sheer volume of cargo the aircraft was carrying. This is expected to happen again. An MoD spokesman had this to...

Dear President-Elect Trump: Congratulations on a winning a hard-fought campaign. I haven’t always been your biggest fan (I wasn’t your opponent’s either) but you will soon enter the Oval Office facing more diverse security challenges, in more corners of the globe, than perhaps any of your predecessors. You’ll need help. The world you’re about to encounter as our commander-in-chief is more dangerous and discombobulated than any new president has encountered in many decades. Your bumbling predecessor hasn’t exactly done you many favors either. Let’s walk through some must-dos, with a healthy dose of geopolitical reality. See link for: Russia, Europe/NATO/,...

If you have ever gone for a swim in a lake and later found your arms and legs covered in red itchy welts resembling mosquito bites, it is quite likely that you have encounter parasites related to the one being featured today. Trichobilharzia szidati is an avian blood fluke, and it has relatives living all over the world in both freshwater and marine environments. While they usually infect waterbirds like duck, they are not very good at telling birds apart from humans. To them, any warm-blooded terrestrial vertebrate animal is fair game, which is rather unfortunate for both humans and...

A short video in Turkish.