An unknown drone nearly struck President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's plane as it took off from Moldova on his way to King Harald's funeral in Oslo. Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who received him the next morning, told the broadcaster NRK that his plane "was nearly hit by a drone during takeoff."

The account, so far only Norway's, points to how far Russia's air war now reaches. If confirmed, it means a Russian drone came close to a head of state as he left the region, somehow reaching Moldova, Ukraine's neighboring state.

"That is the reality he faces," Støre added.

A drone shadows the president's flight

Details of the near-miss remain thin. Støre did not say how close the drone came or what happened to it, and Ukraine has not commented publicly.

While the drone could come from the territory of Ukraine, it may also echo an episode from five weeks earlier in Leipzig that Germany has since formally pinned on Moscow.

On the night of 4 August, an airport worker at Leipzig/Halle found a drone carrying roughly 800 grams of explosive parked near a Ukrainian An-124 cargo plane.

Zelenskyy arrives after a hard night

Støre said he asked Zelenskyy how the night had been.

"He said it hadn't been a good night, because he had been on the phone receiving information about where the missiles had hit," Støre said, calling the situation in Ukraine "very dramatic."

Zelenskyy met Støre, Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg, the former NATO secretary general, and Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide soon after landing.

The drone war reaches into Moldova

The reported near-miss fits a widening pattern on Ukraine's southwestern edge. Russian drones have struck the border crossings that tie Odesa Oblast to Moldova and Romania and have strayed into Moldovan and Romanian airspace during strikes on Ukraine, forcing both countries to close their skies and scramble jets.

Moldova, which lacks the air defenses to stop such incursions, has been investing in building them. On 27 August, the Institute for the Study of War said the crossings show Russia working to normalize the threat its strikes pose to European states.

Des financements pour le logement, l’emploi, la sécurité et les services d’urgence sont demandés.

La Kazakhe affrontera la gagnante du duel opposant Coco Gauff à Mirra Andreeva.

C'est ce que rapporte le premier ministre norvégien, Jonas Gahr Støre.

Scientists have identified the submerged remnants of a giant lost supercontinent that played a pivotal role in the explosion of complex life more than 500 million years ago, reports a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances.

By gathering over 25,000 rocks from ancient continental fragments, a team reconstructed the past contours of Gondwana, a massive landmass that formed between 800 and 500 million years ago in the Southern Hemisphere. Gondwana’s true size has long been a matter of contentious debate, but it is generally thought to have taken up two-thirds of Earth’s land at the time, falling short of “supercontinent” status.

Now, scientists led by Tao Wang, a professor of geoscience at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, have revealed that Gondwana accounted for roughly 80 percent of Earth’s landmass between 550 and 500 million years ago, confirming that it was a supercontinent. 

The formation of this colossal realm helped fuel the Cambrian explosion, a rapid proliferation of complex life that began about 538 million years ago, establishing a fundamental link between “deep-Earth processes” and “the most profound expansion of life in Earth history,” according to the new study.

The discovery of these ancient Gondwanan remains was “serendipitous,” said William Collins, a professor of geosciences at Curtin University and an author on the study, in a call with 404 Media. “We weren't looking for this.”

Wang added in the same call that the team’s ongoing research is likely to yield more surprises and insights in the future. “If we expand our database, maybe we will have new, unexpected results,” he said.

For much of his career, Wang has studied the Central Asian Orogenic Belt, a region that stretches from Russia’s Ural Mountains across Asia to the Pacific Ocean that is shaped by the collision of continental plates. 

In recent years, his team has assembled a database of thousands of magmatic rocks from this region, and others, as part of an international collaboration called Deep-time Digital Earth. Using AI in combination with new techniques, the researchers were able to identify the origins of many of these samples for the first time, allowing them to place them into a global map that could be used to reconstruct the continents of the deep past.   

“We used special techniques to get coordinates and locations,” Wang said. “In this way, we expanded our research from Asia to globally.”

“If you collect enough data, you can then map out where these ancient crustal blocks were,” said Collins. “This is how we came across this new map of the Earth—this deep crustal map extending back 500—and more—million years ago.”

This global map revealed disparate chunks of Gondwana that had been broken apart and strewn across the planet by eons of tectonic activity and shifting continental permutations. In particular, the team looked at isotopes of the elements samarium and neodymium, which Collins described as “fingerprints” of the lost Gondwanan supercontinent that have ended up embedded inside much younger rocks.

“The samarium-neodymium isotope maps that we're looking at are not only a step back in time—they're like a time machine—but they have this spatial character that allows us to recognize an ancient continental landmass that formed 500 million years ago, even though the mountains that the rocks are in are only 20 million years old,” Collins explained.

The results show that Gondwana made up the vast majority of the continental landmass of the Cambrian period, an era that featured the sudden appearance of large and complex life, following billions of years of simple microbial organisms. Almost all major animal families first emerged in this Cambrian “explosion” of life, setting the stage for the incredible abundance and diversity of species that has inhabited our planet ever since.

This massive supercontinent was shaped by a “subduction girdle” of tectonic activity that stretched across 79 percent of Earth’s circumference. The geological upheaval produced by the structures supercharged volcanic activity, which in turn belched out greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and warmed the planet from its previous “Snowball Earth” phase. 

The combination of this warmer climate, along with an enrichment in new ingredients for life, paved the way for the Cambrian explosion, according to the team.

“This Ring of Fire that formed straight after Gondwana was a source of a huge amount of volcanic gasses, just like the volcanoes around the Circum-Pacific are today,” said Collins. “Those volcanic gasses—particularly water and [carbon dioxide]—are absolutely vital, for climate change, and also for biodiversity.” 

In this way, planet-scale geological dynamics powered the lush biosphere that we still occupy today, as well as the 500-million-odd years of phantasmagorical ecosystems that preceded it. To reconstruct this process in even more detail, the team plans to expand their rock database and map out the remnants of this long-lost supercontinent with more precision.

“Maybe we can find other new directions, and solve other fundamental Earth science problems,”

Wang concluded.

Le risque de décès serait plus élevé pour les hommes consommant plus de graisses saturées et animales.

The US president seized a nation’s natural wealth in a modern-day version of gunboat diplomacy to feed his ego – not to lower Americans’ fuel bills

Imperialism does not require a flag to be planted or a governor dispatched. It can be a powerful nation deciding who governs a smaller, weaker country, and on what terms and for whose benefit its resources will be developed. Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, putting his deputy – Delcy Rodríguez – in his place as president, and then her signing a deal handing a fifth of the country’s proven oil reserves to the US, amount to a modern version of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy. Regime change supplied America’s commercial concession.

This won’t bother Mr Trump. But it should. The US president has oversold his neocolonial spoils. The additional production Venezuela is supposed to bring online might bring down oil prices eventually, but not anytime soon. Crucially, what Mr Trump calls “the biggest oil deal in history” won’t cause the price at the pump to fall before November’s midterms. When so many American voters are struggling to pay energy bills, it’s hard to see how unrealised Orinoco Belt riches are going to help Republican candidates.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Ses effets sont plutôt neutres, estime Jean-Michel Marcoux, professeur adjoint en études internationales.

Over the weekend, more than a dozen local TV news stations ran a video report called “Far-left network behind ‘No Kings’ protests targeting AI data centers, Flock cams.” The report paints those opposing Flock not as a diverse, decentralized, bipartisan group of ordinary citizens who oppose mass surveillance, but as well-funded radical leftists who are spreading propaganda at the behest of China and rich billionaires. The opposite is true, of course: The entities defending Flock and painting their opponents as cynical, paid influencers have a specific agenda, have deep pockets, and are connected to some of the most powerful people in the world.

Many of the most vocal defenders of Flock are attempting a strategy that Flock itself tried soon after evidence of the abuse of its automated license plate reader camera systems was reported by 404 Media and other local news outlets: They are suggesting that anyone who opposes this technology or points out its shortcomings must be part of a coordinated group of people who hate the police and want the United States to fail by picking out a few generally inconsequential social media posts by people on the fringes. Some of Flock’s defenders—a mix of people who work for billionaire-funded think tanks or have direct financial investments in Flock—have suggested that the people who oppose Flock are being quietly funded by billionaires or shadowy organizations to do so. 

Last year, Flock CEO Garrett Langley told Forbes that DeFlock, an open-source, crowdsourced map of ALPR cameras, was a “terroristic organization whose primary motivation is chaos, they are closer to ANTIFA than anything else.” In December, emails obtained via a public records request and shared with 404 Media showed Langley told the police chief of Staunton, Virginia, which was considering canceling its Flock contract, that “Flock and the law enforcement agencies we partner with are under coordinated attack […] from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.” 

The strategy to paint ordinary citizens opposing Flock and the journalists who report factual information about how Flock has been used as radicals did not work out well for Langley, who recently apologized for his remarks. But parts of the conservative media, several well-funded think tanks, the former head of the National Security Agency, and Flock’s investors are trying to run the playbook back. 

Last week, a lobbying group called Consumer Action for a Strong Economy published a report called “The Compute War At Home.” The report itself features a cover with obvious AI-generated imagery, and the AI writing detector Pangram detected nearly everything except the end citations of the report as being likely written by AI. The foreword of the report was written by Rob Joyce, the former head of the NSA. This report suggests that opposition to Flock (and to data centers) is being driven by “China-linked activists networks and aligned organizations connecting opposition to data centers with surveillance, policing, and immigration.” The report suggests that opposition to data centers and to Flock is partly being driven by groups it says have received funding from Neville Roy Singham, an American tech billionaire who now lives in China and who has become a George Soros-like figure in conservative media (a recent Fox News headline, for example, has the headline “DOJ launches grand jury probe into Marxist mogul Neville Roy Singham’s funding of leftist groups.”)

Opposition to Flock, the report says, is the result of “socialist organizers” being partially driven by the People’s Republic of China who found an issue that people on the right could agree with them on as a “wedge issue” they could use to “discredit the broader technologies, companies, and infrastructure underpinning America’s AI expansion.” As evidence of this, it points to the fact that Breakthrough News, an organization that has gotten money from Singham, who happens to live in China, wrote an article about Flock last year. This article was not particularly popular judging by its performance on social media, was one in a sea of thousands of articles about Flock, and is one I have not seen cited in any meaningful way. It also notes that members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a leftist political party funded by Singham, have posted about Flock on social media and have held information sessions on it. It is literally true that these groups have received funding from Singham and that they have posted about Flock or AI data centers, but there is nothing to suggest that their posts are particularly influential in a sea of millions of social media posts and thousands of deeply reported articles about Flock and the ways it has been abused.

The report is difficult to follow but basically attempts to suggest that far left socialist organizers have manipulated conservatives into opposing Flock and data centers. The report says that conservatives now make up the bulk of the online opposition to Flock: “81 percent of politically classifiable fused Flock-data center posts came from right-wing/conservative or libertarian accounts,” even though, it says, opposing Flock is a viewpoint that originated with far-left interests that align with China. This mechanism, where the left has supposedly incepted the right into agreeing with them, is “strategically important.”

“An argument introduced through left-wing organizing channels was able to travel through a much larger conservative audience once packaged around privacy, surveillance, and distrust of government technology,” the report says. 

“A conservative does not need to share PSL’s [Party for Socialism and Liberation’s] socialism, CODEPINK’s worldview or Beijing’s strategic interests to advance an outcome all three can welcome. He only needs to accept the surveillance-state frame and repeat it,” the report adds.

CASE, the group that published this study, is a lobbying organization that does not make the vast majority of its funding sources public, however, previous IRS records show it has taken money from big pharmaceutical and the telecom industries. The think tank’s interests are primarily around deregulation by “promoting consumer interests through the advancement of free-market principles.”

The anti Donald Trump “No Kings” protests are not actually mentioned in the CASE report, but the study still served as the basis of two major pieces of conservative media, the first being a report in Fox News called “No Kings protest network behind fight against AI data centers and Flock cameras: Pro-China communist groups funded by tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham expand protests against data centers to Flock cameras.” 

“Organizations from the Singham network—including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, CodePink, the People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition and affiliated groups—appeared repeatedly across [the No Kings] movement, working with nonprofits more aligned with the Democratic Party, including Indivisible, a nonprofit network funded in part by billionaire Democratic megadonor George Soros,” the Fox News report reads. “The organizations deny any wrongdoing as agents of alleged foreign influence and say they are addressing legitimate community grievances.”

More insidiously, the CASE report was picked up by The National News Desk, which is a Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned news production team that runs on dozens of local news stations nationwide, is owned by a billionaire, and has a history of pushing Republican and conservative viewpoints. 

The Sinclair-produced package is called “Report: Far-left network behind ‘No Kings’ protests targeting AI data centers, Flock cams.” Neither piece of coverage indicates how “No Kings” is involved, but both seem to imply that some of the groups that showed up at the No Kings protests have also posted about Flock. The package ran in at least 40 different local news markets that we were able to easily identify, which include:

• Birmingham, Alabama
• Mobile, Alabama
• Little Rock, Arkansas
• Bakersfield, California
• Chico, California
• Fresno, California
• Washington, D.C.
• West Palm Beach, Florida
• Boise, Idaho
• Cedar Rapids, Iowa
• South Bend, Indiana
• Flint, Michigan
• Montana
• Central Nebraska
• Las Vegas, Nevada
• Rochester, New York
• Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• Asheville, North Carolina
• Columbus, Ohio
• Cincinnati, Ohio
• Dayton, Ohio
• Steubenville, Ohio
• Tulsa, Oklahoma
• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Portland, Oregon
• Roseburg, Oregon
• Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
• Johnstown, Pennsylvania
• Charleston, South Carolina
• Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
• Chattanooga, Tennessee
• Bristol, Tennessee
• Austin, Texas
• San Antonio, Texas
• Abilene, Texas
• El Paso, Texas
• Salt Lake City, Utah
• Lynchburg, Virginia
• Green Bay, Wisconsin

It should be noted that the “No Kings” protests are definitively not a “far-left” movement, and that there have been numerous examples of Flock being used against No Kings protesters. It is true that groups on the left have been posting about Flock, just as groups on the right have been posting about Flock, because huge swaths of the internet are posting about Flock, because it has become a huge, controversial topic. 

I have been covering Flock for years and the DeFlock movement for nearly two years. I have watched dozens of city council meetings in small towns, big cities, liberal enclaves and rural communities. The people showing up to protest against Flock (and against data centers) come from all backgrounds, all economic classes, and all political perspectives. The politicians now opposing Flock are also a diverse set, ranging from conservatives Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, and Thomas Massie (among others) to Democrats Josh Shapiro, Ron Wyden, and Ed Markey. 

Many people who show up to city council meetings to oppose Flock are “organized” in that they are incredibly informed on the issue, share reporting about Flock, and are good at making social media content that resonates with people about the ways Flock has been abused. This movement is obviously not a leftist movement or a far right movement; it is an organic movement that has arisen out of legitimate concerns of mass surveillance and legitimate objections to how this technology has proliferated throughout America. Some of the people pointed out as being apparently bad actors are, essentially, random people who feel strongly about mass surveillance. DeFlock was created by a single 20-something programmer who opposed surveillance; HaveIBeenFlocked, a database of Flock lookups, was much the same (and has led directly to police being arrested for abusing the system). 

The people who show up at city council meetings or who protest Flock are taking time away from their days, their jobs, their lives, in order to stand up for something they believe in. But the CASE report is part of a broader move to paint people who oppose Flock as being part of far-left movements who are potentially being paid to do so. They come alongside less specific claims that interest in Flock is not organic, and that social media influencers have only recently started to care about Flock (this is also a main claim of the CASE report—that the number of posts about Flock have skyrocketed in a suspicious way). These claims are being made almost exclusively by people who are being paid for their work or who do have a financial stake in it in some way (this includes people who are being paid in the broadest sense possible, like people who work for think tanks and take a salary from them to write about these issues, as well as people who directly work for Flock or are directly invested in it). 

Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow for the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute associated with billionaire hedge fund manager and staunch conservative donor Paul Singer, tweeted Tuesday, for example, that an account called “Orwell Day” only began posting about Flock recently: “Trevor Lyman, who runs the Orwell Day website, appears to have launched this account in late May. That's also when he registered the site. Based on its YouTube and blog content it posted very briefly about non-Flock content, then pivoted almost entirely to posting clips and stories about Flock. Lyman used to be a politico. He was the small-dollar fundraiser who helped Ron Paul smash records in 2008 and 2012. It's not clear what he was doing between now and then,” Lehman posted. “So why did he resurface now and start running an anti-Flock brand? Where did that come from?” 

It is impossible to know the motivations of every single person or account who posts on social media, and it is easy to point at the most extreme people posting online and use them to fashion a narrative to undermine legitimate concerns about that thing. The leftists who have posted about Flock are certainly not driving the conversation any more than any other group, and the same argument could be made about far right groups; government surveillance centers have warned that “the neo-Nazi accelerations group Private Aryan Resistance began recruiting members on neo-Nazi forum Fash Front to sabotage Flock cameras.” It would be equally possible and equally disingenuous to write an article saying that the anti-Flock movement is being driven by neo-Nazis. 

It’s simply the case that lots of people are talking about Flock now, which is how the news and, notably, social media algorithms work. People learn about a thing, they post about it, people care about that thing and the algorithm amplifies it. More people begin posting about it and people who see success with that topic post about it more. This is a very simple phenomenon that has existed for many years; I would not impugn people who are using the internet in the way it is currently designed or question their motives, so it is interesting that Lehman and the Manhattan Institute is levying these accusations about other people’s interest in Flock considering that the Manhattan Institute had not mentioned Flock in any serious way until August, when the Institute’s Rafael Mangual wrote “These Cameras Save Lives, But Some Want Them Banned.” Lehman followed this up with a piece in The Atlantic called “In Defense of Flock” on August 10. Since then, Lehman has tweeted about Flock more than a hundred times, which includes posts accusing people of opposing Flock of being paid to do so: “Posts about Flock that used to get hundreds of angry responses are now mostly getting likes. Maybe the money stopped flowing!” a16z employees have also repeatedly made tweets defending Flock in recent weeks, and a16z venture capitalist David Ulevitch tweeted implying that 404 Media is funded by, or working with, the DSA and defund the police movements (we are funded by our individual subscribers; Ulevitch has since deleted his tweet). 

I have no doubt that The Manhattan Institute’s fellows are genuinely interested in defending Flock, but this is not an affordance that they make to people they perceive as having the wrong opinion about Flock.

"What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes. These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders. ln short, it is democracy in action."

If Flock defenders want to point to coordination from financially-invested interests, they should look no further than what Flock itself does. The company regularly holds private meetings with police about how to defend the company, how to advocate for the company and ‘own the narrative’ at city council meetings, and how to handle (or avoid) meetings with journalists. It throws conferences specifically for police that it does not allow outside journalists into, and has repeatedly tried to publicly and privately question the motives of people who oppose it. Flock’s lobbying spending has also skyrocketed, according to a report in The Intercept. The government and its surveillance apparatus, meanwhile, surveils people who post negative things about Flock on social media.  

In Joyce’s interview with Fox News, he says that a “foreign influence operation can simply identify an existing division, amplify the most combustible narratives, and it pushes Americans farther apart. It polarizes us.” 

But opposition to Flock, and to data centers, is not an issue that “divides” Americans. These are some of the very few issues in American society that people across political, class, and regional lines actually agree with each other on. The people and entities trying to drive Americans against each other are the ones trying to paint normal American citizens as coordinated paid protesters and who themselves work for extremely well-funded, politically-slanted organizations or are directly affiliated with Flock itself. 

Flock CEO Langley’s attempt to smear people who opposed Flock as propagandists and leftists to the police chief in Staunton, Virginia, didn’t work. 

“As far as your assertion that we are currently under attack, I do not believe that this is so. I have dedicated the last 41 years of my life to serving the citizens of the City of Staunton as a police officer, the last 22 as the police chief,” he wrote. “What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes. These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders. ln short, it is democracy in action.” 

There’s no indication that this broader campaign will work, either. But that hasn’t stopped Flock’s proponents from trying.