The US Navy sailed three destroyers into the Barents Sea off Russia’s Arctic coast Monday, the first time Navy ships have operated in the area since the mid-1980s, the height of the Cold War.
The purpose of the operation was “to assert freedom of navigation and demonstrate seamless integration among allies,” US Naval Forces Europe said in a statement.
The three destroyers — USS Donald Cook, USS Porter and USS Roosevelt — were joined by a UK Royal Navy frigate, HMS Kent.
The Barents Sea is part of the Arctic Ocean and borders northern Norway and Russia. The Russian port of Murmansk, which hosts the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, sits on the sea.
The US Navy said it had notified Moscow of the upcoming operation on Friday “to avoid misperceptions, reduce risk, and prevent inadvertent escalation.”
US officials have consistently said that Russia has boosted its military presence in the Arctic in recent years.
The Russian Foreign Ministry, in her words, notes the United States’ bigger biological presence beyond its borders, in particular in former Soviet republics.
“We cannot rule out that the Americans use such reference laboratories in third countries to develop and modify various pathogenic agents, including in military purposes,” she commented.
The diplomat recalled that the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Tbilisi, a Georgia-based US biological laboratory, is an official part of the US military system of global infectious diseases control. “Moreover, according to recent reports, top-ranking Pentagon officials have recently visited it to offer the Georgian authorities to expand the range of research,” she noted.
Ukrainian opposition urges probe into US biolaboratories in Ukraine 4-18-20 https://tass.com/world/1145423 In 2009, a virus caused a hotbed of hemorrhagic pneumonia, which claimed 450 lives. In 2011, Ukraine saw an outbreak of cholera, with 33 patients taken to hospital. Three years later another 800 patients were diagnosed with cholera. One year later more than 100 cases of cholera were identified in Nikolayev. In January 2016, at least 20 military servicemen died of a flu-like virus. Another 200 people were taken to the hospital. Two months later 364 died in Ukraine of the swine fever virus A (H1N1) pdm09, the very same strain that caused the 2009 pandemic, Medvedchuk and Kuzmin say. They recall that an outbreak of hepatitis A occurred in Nikolayev in 2017. Another one followed in the summer of that year in Zaporozhie and Odessa, one more in the autumn in Kharkov.
The first cross-river railway bridge connecting China with Russia has connected from both sides on Wednesday, further paving the way for the bridge to be operational within this year.
The bridge, across the Heilongjiang River, known as the Amur River in Russia, will connect the city of Tongjiang, in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province, with Nizhneleninskoye in Russia.
The main bridge spans 2,215 meters, with 1,886 meters of that standing in China. Construction of the bridge, which has a designed annual throughput capacity of 21 million metric tons, began in February 2014.
A new simulation called “Plan A,” by researchers at Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, shows how the use of one so-called tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon could lead to a terrifying worldwide conflict.
In the roughly four-minute video, a Russian “nuclear warning shot” at a US-NATO coalition leads to a global nuclear war that leads to 91.5 million deaths and injuries.
Under President Trump, the US is ramping up production of tactical nuclear weapons, ostensibly to target troops and munitions supplies. While advocates say these weapons would keep wars from escalating, the simulation finds the opposite outcome.
The dissolution of the INF treaty in August raised the stakes for nuclear war, as both the US and Russia were free to develop weapons previously banned under the treaty.
On Jan. 23, 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been, in a dire warning about the rising dangers of a nuclear catastrophe as Cold War-era treaties end.
The first highway bridge connecting #China and #Russia across the Heilongjiang River has recently passed the final acceptance test, the department of transport of Northeast China’s Heilongjiang province said Friday.
Experts with Harbin Institute of Technology and counterparts of the Russian side participated in the test on Tuesday. The maximum load capacity of the bridge reached 318 tonnes during the test.
The bridge is expected to open in April, according to the provincial transport department.
Measuring 1,284 meters long and 14.5 meters wide, the bridge across the Heilongjiang River, known in Russia as the Amur River, stretches from Heihe, a border city in Heilongjiang province, to the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk. Two sides of the bridge were joined together on May 31, 2019.
The first road bridge linking Russia and China is complete following the launch of a natural gas pipeline between the two countries.
The new bridge, which spans the River Amur and is expected to open in the spring, will link the city of Blagoveshchensk in Russia’s Far East with Heihe in northeastern China in an effort to move larger amounts of freight traffic and agricultural products between the two countries.
Construction started in 2016, and while it was completed on the Chinese side by October 2018, the Russian side took longer and was more expensive. The bridge itself required the construction of more than 12 miles of new roads, which was done by a Russo-Chinese company.
The project cost about $295 million and spans more than 1,700 feet, according to CBS News. About 2 million Chinese tourists and 4 million metric tons of goods are expected to cross each year.
Since August 2017, China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) 中国铁建 has been building a 4.6-km section and three stations on the “Large Circle Line” or the “Third Interchange Contour” in southwest Moscow, which will be completed by the end of 2020. The CRCC hires more than 100 engineering and managing staff and over 700 workers for the project, and about half of them are Russians. The first tunnel was bored through in early April, 2019 and the remaining eight tunnels by 2020. In February 2019, the CRCC won another contract worth over 5.64 billion rubles (about 88 mln USD) to build a 2.9 km section of the “Large Circle Line.” The city aims to increase metro lines from the current 300 km to 1,000 km by 2023. The company designed and produced five tunneling shields capable of coping with the city’s harsh winter and complicated geological condition. The “Shengli” 胜利号 tunnel shields, with a diameter of more than 10 meters, is independently developed, designed and produced by CCRC.
