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Excerpt from www.news24.com

President Vladimir Putin was sworn in for a new six-year term on Tuesday at a Kremlin ceremony that was boycotted by the United States and other Western countries at which he said he was potentially open to nuclear talks with the West.

Putin, in power as president or prime minister since 1999, begins his new mandate more than two years after he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, where Russian forces have regained the initiative after a series of reversals and are seeking to advance further in the east.

At 71, Putin dominates the domestic political landscape. On the international stage, he is locked in a confrontation with Western countries he accuses of using Ukraine as a vehicle to try to defeat and dismember Russia.

Putin told Russia’s political elite after being sworn in that he was not shutting down dialogue with the West but that it would have to make its own choice about how to engage with his country.

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Excerpt from cbs12.com

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Excerpt from www.foxnews.com

Chinese President Xi Jinping met Wednesday with the Serbian president, with both sides expressing optimism that the visit will further boost the “ironclad” friendly relations between China and the Balkan country.

Xi arrived in Serbia to a warm welcome on Tuesday evening from France, where he had a high-stakes state visit dominated by trade disputes and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Thousands of people chanting “China-Serbia” and waving flags were bused in from across Serbia to attend a welcoming ceremony for Xi on Wednesday in front of the Serbia Palace, in the new part of Belgrade where the talks are being held.

Serbia’s populist President Aleksandar Vucic addressed the crowd from a balcony, calling Xi an “ironclad” friend. He said hs visit to Serbia is “historic” because it opens the path for even closer ties.

“We are writing history today, although it doesn’t seem so to many (people),” Vucic said. “We thank President Xi. He hasn’t come to Europe in five years and he has again chosen our little Serbia.”

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Excerpt from www.cbsnews.com

Jerusalem — An Israeli tank brigade took control Tuesday of the Gaza Strip side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, authorities said, as Israel moved forward with an offensive in the southern city even as cease-fire negotiations with Hamas remain on a knife’s edge. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his country in a video address later Tuesday that he had ordered troops “to operate in Rafah” as his government rejected a cease-fire proposal backed by Hamas the previous afternoon.

The tanks moved in around the Rafah checkpoint after hours of whiplash in the Israel-Hamas war, with the militant group saying Monday that it had accepted an Egyptian-Qatari mediated cease-fire proposal. Israel quickly insisted the deal didn’t meet its core demands and rejected it, though officials said Israel would continue discussing the proposal.

The high-stakes diplomatic moves and military brinkmanship left a glimmer of hope alive — but only barely — for an accord that could bring at least a pause in the seven-month-old war that has devastated the Gaza Strip.

As for the proposal that brought brief hope of an imminent truce late on Monday, Netanyahu dismissed it in his video message as an attempt by Hamas “to torpedo the entry of our forces into Rafah,” which he had repeatedly vowed to order.

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Excerpt from amp.scmp.com

Her remarks come at a time of increased geopolitical uncertainty over a number of challenges, most notably an escalating rivalry between the US and China and the war in Ukraine.

Although economic fragmentation is not yet as severe as it was during the Cold War, Gopinath said, it carries a much greater potential cost thanks to higher global reliance on trade.

China’s share of US imports fell by 8 percentage points between 2017 and 2023 as trade and overall relations between the two countries fragmented, while the US’ share of China’s exports fell by about 4 percentage points during the same period.

Trade between blocs of countries aligned with either China or the US was also negatively affected, Gopinath said.

Between the middle of 2022 and 2023, the average weighted quarter-on-quarter trade growth between US-leaning countries and China-leaning countries fell by nearly five percentage points compared with the five-year period between 2017 and early 2022.

Similar patterns could also be observed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with trade and investment between blocs falling more than trade within blocs.

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Excerpt from www.foxnews.com

Anti-Israel protests linger across college campuses nationwide nearly three weeks after they first appeared at Columbia University.

In the chaotic weeks since April 18, more than 2,600 people have been arrested on 50 campuses. The protesters have said they want their schools to cut all ties with Israel over its war in Gaza.

Administrators have shown mixed reactions with some universities like UT Austin and Emory University cracking down almost immediately, while others have shown more restraint.

Police block pro-Palestinian protesters from returning to their encampment at the University of Chicago, on Tuesday, May 7.  (AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)

But many colleges in the latter camp have started to lose patience amid the increasing combativeness of some of the protesters. Anti-Israel agitators at a George Washington encampment for instance, have called for the “guillotine” for school administrators.

Campuses have tried tactics from appeasement to threats of disciplinary action to resolve the protests and clear the way for upcoming commencements.

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Excerpt from amp.theguardian.com

Extreme weather

Severe thunderstorms bring hail and structural damage, with tornadoes hitting cities including Kalamazoo and Battle Creek

Tornadoes that hit Michigan on Tuesday evening ripped the roof off a FedEx building in Portage, partially collapsing the structure and trapping 50 people inside, Kalamazoo county authorities said. Elsewhere in the state, thousands of residents are without power and face a deluge of hail and tornado warnings amid severe thunderstorms.

“TAKE COVER NOW,” the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids warned in a post directed at Portage residents on their Facebook page.

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Excerpt from www.ft.com

Disney shares tumbled 9.5 per cent on Tuesday even as it reported the first profit in its core streaming business since it leapt into a battle with Netflix five years ago.

The Disney+ and Hulu streaming unit earned an operating profit of $47mn in the quarter to the end of March, compared with a $587mn loss a year earlier. Disney achieved the milestone months earlier than expected thanks to cost-cutting and the popularity of Hulu programmes including Shogun and The Bear.

But investors appeared to be more focused on a potential slowdown in the company’s theme parks, which have rebounded strongly since the pandemic restrictions began to lift.

Bob Iger, chief executive, highlighted the quarterly improvement in streaming and its experiences division, where theme parks outside the US, including Shanghai Disney, performed well. “We are turbocharging growth in our experiences business with a number of near- and long-term strategic investments,” he said.

In a call with investors, Hugh Johnston, Disney’s chief financial officer, said higher expenses from the launch of two new cruise ships would limit growth in the current quarter. He also said the post-pandemic travel boom could be running out of steam.

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Excerpt from www.washingtontimes.com

China’s Communist rulers intend to replace America, establish new world order  Washington Times

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Excerpt from nebraskaexaminer.com

The top lawyers for Arkansas and Missouri on Tuesday announced the filing of a lawsuit with four other states, including Nebraska, against the U.S. Department of Education’s change to Title IX that, among other things, codifies protections for LGBTQ+ students.

The federal rule, announced in April, protects students and school employees from sex-based discrimination, requires schools to offer support for people who make complaints, sets guidelines for schools and includes transgender students in the law’s protections. It is expected to go into effect Aug. 1.

The 60-page lawsuit alleges the education department has exceeded its authority by rewriting the statute. It also claims the rule violates the First Amendment, is arbitrary and capricious by going against “decades” of understanding of Title IX and presents “an actual controversy” by redefining “sex” to include gender identity.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, seeks to ultimately stop the federal rule’s effective date.

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Excerpt from ca.movies.yahoo.com

• A FedEx driver dropped off boxes containing .30 caliber M1 rifles at Chester High School.
• The guns sat inside the school over the weekend before the driver returned to collect them.
• The error was caused by the school having an address similar to the intended recipient’s.

A FedEx driver mistakenly left boxes containing a half-dozen military-style rifles at a public high school outside Philadelphia last Friday, according to police and school officials.

The guns, identified as .30 caliber M1 rifles, sat inside the Chester High School loading dock over the weekend, staff believing the unopened boxes to contain textbooks, CBS News reported.

The driver returned on Monday to collect the packages.

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Excerpt from abcnews.go.com

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk says he is calling a special meeting of the secret services to discuss alleged Russian and Belarusian influence

May 7, 2024, 1:24 PM ET

• 3 min read

WARSAW, Poland — WARSAW, Poland (AP) —

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk called Tuesday for a special meeting of the secret services to discuss alleged Russian and Belarusian infiltration after a Polish judge who had access to sensitive state information defected to Belarus.

Authorities in NATO and European Union member Poland are investigating the judge, Tomasz Szmydt, on suspicions that he was acting on behalf of a foreign intelligence service.

The Polish government said in a statement Tuesday that “Szmydt had constant and direct access to classified information. He has also been in contact with Belarusians for a long time. This situation should be of the utmost concern.”

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Excerpt from www.army-technology.com

China stands accused of hacking the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in a major cyberattack on armed forces’ SSCL payroll data system.

The data breach compromised the names and bank details of current military personnel and veterans, Sky News reported.

When addressing the House of Commons today (7 May), UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said a “malign actor” was responsible for the attack, but that the government “cannot rule out state involvement”. He added that there was “no evidence that any data has been removed”.

Shapps has announced a “multi-point plan to support and protect personnel”, an MoD spokesperson told Army Technology.

The MoD has been working urgently to grasp the scale of the cyberattack over the last three days since discovering the data breach.

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Excerpt from tvpworld.com

Russia may incite provocations ahead of Victory Day: Lithuanian intelligence  TVP World

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Excerpt from www.independent.co.uk

A new vaccine could be effective against coronaviruses which have yet to emerge, with hopes it could be used to battle future pandemics, research suggests.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Caltech in the US are developing a novel approach called “proactive vaccinology”, which aims to train the body’s immune system to recognise several different coronaviruses.

The vaccine used antigens – a substance that triggers an immune response in the body – found in eight different coronaviruses, including those circulating in bats. This trains the immune system to go after the parts of the antigens that are shared across the viruses and other similar ones, including those not included in the vaccine.

The vaccine, for instance, does not include the Sars-CoV-1 virus, which led to the 2003 SARs outbreak, but can produce an immune response to it.

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Excerpt from www.technologyreview.com

But bovines may not be far behind. There’s a large assisted-reproduction industry in cattle, with more than a million IVF attempts a year, half of them in North America. Many other beef and dairy cattle are artificially inseminated with semen from top-rated bulls. “Cattle is harder,” says Jiang. “But we have all the technology.”

ANTONIO REGALADO

The thing that came out of cow #307 turned out to be damaged, just a fragment. But later that day, in Jiang’s main laboratory, students were speed-walking across the linoleum holding something in a petri dish. They’d retrieved intact embryonic structures from some of the other cows. These looked long and stringy, like worms, or the skin shed by a miniature snake.

That’s precisely what a two-week-old cattle embryo should look like. But the outer appearance is deceiving, Jiang says. After staining chemicals are added, the specimens are put under a microscope. Then the disorder inside them is apparent. These “elongated structures,” as Jiang calls them, have the right parts—cells of the embryonic disc and placenta—but nothing is in quite the right place.