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Estonian authorities detained and boarded a ship in the Baltic Sea that belongs to Russia’s shadow fleet, Prime Minister Kristen Michal said Friday. The vessel, which Michal said did not sail under any nation’s flag but was previously registered to Djibouti according to publicly available records, was detained near Tallinn Bay in an operation involving helicopters. “Early this morning, the Estonian Navy detained a sanctioned vessel with no flag state,” Michal said in a post on social media. “Our authorities are currently on board, inspecting its legal status and safety.” The ship was heading to the port of Ust-Luga, a...

Last Monday (December 23rd) three explosions rocked the Russian cargo ship "Ursa Major" in the western Mediterranean Sea. The vessel went down with 14 crew members rescued and two missing. The site of what the ship's owners called a "targeted terrorist attack" not too far away from the British outpost of Gibraltar... And then we have the seizure of a Russian affiliated oil tanker off Finland on Christmas Day. The vessel accused of sabotaging an underwater electricity link between Finland and Estonia. There have been other such incidents reported involving other merchant vessels of Hong Kong and Chinese ownership. The...

"hostile and egregious misconduct"...US Justice Department ethics complaint against... Video platform Rumble blocked in Brazil... acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Caleb Vitello removed... A federal judge ruling against President Donald Trump's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion executive orders... New York City courtroom today a hearing for Luigi Mangione accused in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO... The Associated Press filing a lawsuit seeking access... Oval Office and Air Force One... In Berlin...30-year-old Spanish tourist stabbed...Holocaust memorial... Australia's Foreign Minister Penny Wong expressing her dismay to Chinese Foreign Minister...live fire exercise warning from Chinese naval ships... A federal judge ruling to...

A state of emergency in the Catatumbo Region of Colombia near the border with Venezuela...deadly violence... Falling debris from Ukrainian drones causing fires... A US Border Patrol shot an killed during a traffic stop on Interstate 91 in Vermont near the Canadian border... Israeli nationalists attacking Palestinians in Samaria (The West Bank) shot by a police officer... The US Senate voting 99-0 confirming former Senator Marco Rubio... President Trump taking action on his first day in office...Around 1500 people fully pardoned in connection with January 6th...others getting commuted sentences... Trump saying he is likely to impose 25 percent tariffs on...

Taiwan is investigating a Chinese-owned ship suspected of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable north of the island. While the incident caused minimal disruption to internet services, analysts say it reflects the vulnerability of Taiwan and its undersea infrastructure in the event of a Chinese military attack or blockade. “It’s a vulnerability shared by a lot of countries in a globalized world,” said Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and a former Pentagon official. “The real challenge for Taiwan is how do they increase their resilience now [that] there is growing awareness...

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.

Ships are not responsible for damaging undersea internet cables in the Mediterranean, Egypt's Government says. Two cables were damaged earlier this week in the Mediterranean sea and another off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and South Asia. A fourth cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged on Sunday causing yet more disruptions, telecommunication provider Qtel said. Egypt's transport ministry said footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged....

The country’s prime minister said the incident, the latest in a series of disruptions to undersea infrastructure, underscored the danger of a so-called Russian shadow fleet.The Finnish police on Thursday boarded an oil tanker that the authorities said they suspected was involved in damaging vital undersea cables. They suggested the tanker was part of a shadow fleet used by Russia to avoid Western sanctions.The Estlink 2 submarine cable, which carries electricity between Finland and Estonia, was cut on Wednesday, Finland’s police said in a statement, the latest in a slew of disruptions to undersea infrastructure that are being investigated as...

European investigators believe a Chinese-owned commercial ship deliberately dragged its anchor to sabotage the two undersea telecommunications cables cut in the Baltic Sea earlier this month. However, Western law enforcement and intelligence officials told The Wall Street Journal that they don’t believe the Chinese government was involved. Instead, the probe is focused on whether Russian intelligence persuaded the vessel’s captain to carry out the operation. For the past week, NATO warships from Denmark, Germany and Sweden have surrounded the 225-meter-long Yi Peng 3. The ship’s Chinese owner, Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, is reportedly cooperating with investigators. The shipper allowed the commercial...

The successful targeting of the four cables, which are believed to belong to the AAE-1, Seacom, EIG, and TGN systems, marks a serious disruption of communications between Europe and Asia.Four underwater communications cables between Saudi Arabia and Djibouti have been struck out of commission in recent months, presumably as a result of attacks by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, according to an exclusive report in the Israeli news site Globes. The successful targeting of the four cables, which are believed to belong to the AAE-1, Seacom, EIG, and TGN systems, marks a serious disruption of communications between Europe and Asia. Most...

Cables lying on the seafloor bring the internet to the world. They transmit 99 percent of international data, make transoceanic communication possible in an instant, and serve as a loose proxy for the international trade that connects advanced economies.Their importance and proliferation inspired Telegeography to make this vintage-inspired map of the cables that connect the internet. It depicts the 299 cables that are active, under construction, or will be funded by the end of this year. In addition to seeing the cables, you'll find information about "latency" at the bottom of the map (how long it takes for information...

Scientists are reporting what they say is the longest sediment avalanche yet measured in action. It occurred underwater off West Africa, in a deep canyon leading away from the mouth of the Congo River. Something in excess of a cubic kilometre of sand and mud descended into the deep. This colossal flow kept moving for two whole days and ran out for more than 1,100km across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The event would have gone unrecorded were it not for the fact that the slide broke two submarine telecommunications cables, slowing the internet and other data traffic between...

The presence of Russian submarines and spy ships near undersea cables carrying most global Internet communications has U.S. officials concerned that Russia could be planning to sever the lines in periods of conflict, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The Times said there was no evidence of cable cutting but that the concerns reflected increased wariness among U.S. and allied officials over growing Russian military activity around the world. The newspaper quoted naval commanders and intelligence officials as saying they were monitoring significantly greater Russian activity along the cables' known routes from the North Sea to Northeast Asia and...

Telecom firms linked to the UN-recognised Yemen government have said they fear Houthi rebels are planning to sabotage a network of submarine cables in the Red Sea critical to the functioning of the western internet and the transmission of financial data. The warning came after a Houthi-linked Telegram channel published a map of the cables running along the bed of the Red Sea. The image was accompanied by a message: “There are maps of international cables connecting all regions of the world through the sea. It seems that Yemen is in a strategic location, as internet lines that connect entire...

HELSINKI (AP) — Damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia appears to have been caused by “external activity," Finnish officials said Tuesday, adding that authorities were investigating.

We live in a world created in 1945. The United States is the world’s dominant political, economic, and military power. We treat those facts as if they are somehow immutable. They are not. We are standing on the brink of losing it all. The Biden administration continues to blunder forward with its reckless policy of escalation in Ukraine treating the entire enterprise as if it were a video game of some sort. There are in the minds of these men and women no consequences for their actions. Only the other side takes losses. Only the other side feels pain. ......

An undersea fiberoptic cable located between mainland Norway and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean has been put out of action in a still-mysterious incident. The outage on the subsea communications cable — the furthest north of its kind anywhere in the world — follows an incident last year in which different cables linking an undersea surveillance network off the Norwegian coast were severed, a story that we covered in detail at the time. The latest disruption involves one of two fiberoptic cables that enable communications between the Norwegian mainland and Norwegian-administered Svalbard that lies between the mainland and...

Russian President Putin vowed to 'knock the teeth out' of nations who grab pieces of the state's vast territory Secretary of State Blinken warned Moscow the North Pole must remain 'free of conflict' at Thursday's summit His Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov hit back, saying the Kremlim saw 'no grounds' for conflict in the Arctic, but warned the West about militarising on Russia's doorstep and said the country would defend itself Comes as Russia revealed a massive polar military airbase, Nagurskoye, in the Franz Josef Land archipelago It has been heavily militarised with missiles, a radar system and a runway handling...

Saboteurs in the U.S. intelligence community posing as patriots have been working hard to drive President Donald Trump from the White House. Former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and former War College professor John R. Schindler bragged on Twitter last week about the spy-led plot his friends are conducting against the president. “Now we go nuclear,” he tweeted. “IC [intelligence community] war [is] going to new levels. Just got an [email from] senior IC friend, it began: ‘He will die in jail.'” “US intelligence is not the problem here,” Schindler added. “The President’s collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details,...

A French crew has begun to repair two undersea cables in the Mediterranean that were severed on Friday, disrupting internet and phone communications. A robot submarine will locate the ends of the cables on the sea bed and bring them to the surface to be re-connected. They were cut somewhere between Sicily and Tunisia, probably by an anchor. Egypt says it has been able to restore most of its communications by re-routing services, but other parts of the Middle East remain badly affected. Experts have warned that it may be days before the fault is fixed and that the knock-on...