The United States is sending more aid to Ukraine aimed at helping Ukrainian forces target, disrupt and destroy Russia’s ability to wage war in the Donbas region and beyond.

U.S. officials Friday unveiled a new $400 million package for Ukraine, including four more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and 1,000 rounds of 155 millimeter “precision capable” artillery ammunition, a type that had not been provided to Kyiv until now.

“These [weapons systems] are precise,” a senior U.S. defense official said, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon. “We expect them to be used by the Ukrainians to great effect given their success so far.”

That success, the official said, has played out with the ability of Ukrainian forces to slow and, at times, disrupt Russian attempts to advance by hitting Russian command and control centers and logistics hubs.

But the U.S. hopes the latest package, part of what is being described as a “steady drumbeat” of support, does more.

“A big element of what we are looking at now is that lift, which is vital for the Ukrainians to be able to continue the fight, and most importantly, I would say, for the Russians to know that the Ukrainians are going to be able to continue the fight,” the official said.

The announcement of additional U.S. aid came just days after Russian forces declared victory in Ukraine’s Luhansk province, with Ukrainian forces having retreated from their last stronghold in the city of Lysychansk.

Targeting Siversk

Western intelligence assessments believe Russian forces are now positioning themselves for a push into the Donetsk region.

Russia is “likely concentrating equipment on the front line in the direction of Siversk, approximately 8 km west of the current Russian front lines,” Britain’s defense intelligence arm said Friday.

“There is a realistic possibility that Russia’s immediate tactical objective will be Siversk, as its forces attempt to advance towards its most likely operational goal of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk urban area,” it said.

But U.S. officials continued to describe Russian gains as incremental and “highly costly.”

“They’re [Russian forces] way behind on their timelines They’re far behind on their objectives,” the senior U.S. defense official told reporters. “The Ukrainians are, in localized places, launching effective counteroffensive.

“We don’t see this at all as Russia winning this battle,” the official added. “But the fighting is hard.”

In addition to the four new HIMARS and the precision 155 millimeter artillery rounds, the new U.S security package also includes more ammunition for the eight HIMARS already in Ukraine, tactical vehicles, demolition munitions, counter-battery systems and spare parts to help Ukrainian forces maintain systems that are getting heavy use.

Earlier Friday, the war in Ukraine and its impact on energy and food supplies dominated G-20 talks in Bali.

Host country Indonesia called on ministers to “find a way forward” in discussing the war and its impact on rising food and energy prices.

“It is our responsibility to end the war sooner rather than later and settle our differences at the negotiating table, not at the battlefield,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said at the opening of the meeting, invoking the U.N. charter to urge multilateralism and trust.

The foreign ministers of the Group of 20 industrial and emerging-market nations shared concerns about getting grain shipments out of Ukraine and avoiding devastating food shortages in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. But talks were marked by sharp tension: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sat at the same table, though they did not speak directly.

Lavrov accused Western ministers of straying “almost immediately, as soon as they took the floor, to the frenzied criticism of the Russian Federation in connection with the situation in Ukraine.”

“You know, it was not us who abandoned all contacts,” Lavrov told reporters after the first session. “It was the United States … and we are not running after anybody suggesting meetings. If they don’t want to talk, it’s their choice.”

Lavrov walked out of the meetings twice Friday — first, as German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock addressed a session on strengthening multilateralism, and second, just before Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, addressed the session on food and energy security via video link.

At a plenary session, Blinken urged Moscow to release Ukrainian grain to the world, according to a Western official.

“He addressed Russia directly, saying, ‘To our Russian colleagues: Ukraine is not your country. Its grain is not your grain. Why are you blocking the ports? You should let the grain out,’ ” the official said.

Lavrov was not in the room when Blinken spoke.

Looming famine

The meetings follow the release of the latest World Food Program (WFP) report Wednesday. It showed a decline in global efforts to eliminate hunger and malnutrition.

Up to 828 million people, or nearly 10% of the world’s population, were affected by hunger last year, 46 million more than in 2020 and 150 million more than in 2019, agencies, including the WFP, Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization, said in the 2022 edition of the U.N. food security and nutrition report.

“There is a real danger these numbers will climb even higher in the months ahead,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley, adding that climbing prices of food, fuel and fertilizer stemming from the Russia-Ukraine war threaten to push countries into famine.

Ukraine’s agriculture ministry said Friday that in most regions of the country, farmers have begun the early harvest of wheat and legumes, gathering more than a million tons of grain so far, The Kyiv Independent media outlet reported.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he expected up to 60 million tons of grain to be harvested by fall, and that if blockades were not lifted, Ukraine would be in “a really difficult” situation.
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As the war enters its fifth month, Ukrainians around the world are keeping up efforts to obtain moral and financial support for their beleaguered country as it fights against Russian invaders. One of the largest communities is in Krakow, Poland, where, as Greg Flakus reports, Ukrainians have been rallying together with Polish supporters almost every evening in the city’s main square
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In a former gold mine a mile underground, inside a titanium tank filled with a rare, liquefied gas, scientists have begun the search for what so far has been unfindable: dark matter.

Scientists are pretty sure the invisible stuff makes up most of the universe’s mass and say we wouldn’t be here without it — but they don’t know what it is. The race to solve this enormous mystery has brought one team to the depths under Lead, South Dakota.

The question for scientists is basic, says Kevin Lesko, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “What is this great place I live in? Right now, 95% of it is a mystery.”

The idea is that a mile of dirt and rock, a giant tank, a second tank and the purest titanium in the world will block nearly all the cosmic rays and particles that zip around — and through — all of us every day. But dark matter particles, scientists think, can avoid all those obstacles. They hope one will fly into the vat of liquid xenon in the inner tank and smash into a xenon nucleus like two balls in a game of pool, revealing its existence in a flash of light seen by a device called “the time projection chamber.”

Scientists announced Thursday that the five-year, $60 million search finally got underway two months ago after a delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, the device has found nothing. At least no dark matter.

That’s OK, they say. The equipment appears to be working to filter out most of the background radiation they hoped to block.

“To search for this very rare type of interaction, job number one is to first get rid of all of the ordinary sources of radiation, which would overwhelm the experiment,” said University of Maryland physicist Carter Hall.

And if all their calculations and theories are right, they figure they’ll see only a couple fleeting signs of dark matter a year. The team of 250 scientists estimates they’ll get 20 times more data over the next couple of years.

By the time the experiment finishes, the chance of finding dark matter with this device is “probably less than 50% but more than 10%,” said Hugh Lippincott, a physicist and spokesman for the experiment in a Thursday news conference.

While that’s far from a sure thing, “you need a little enthusiasm,” Lawrence Berkeley’s Lesko said. “You don’t go into rare search physics without some hope of finding something.”

Two hulking Depression-era hoists run an elevator that brings scientists to what’s called the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment in the Sanford Underground Research Facility. A 10-minute descent ends in a tunnel with cool-to-the-touch walls lined with netting. But the old, musty mine soon leads to a high-tech lab where dirt and contamination is the enemy. Helmets are exchanged for new, cleaner ones and a double layer of baby blue booties go over steel-toed safety boots.

The heart of the experiment is the giant tank called the cryostat, lead engineer Jeff Cherwinka said in a December 2019 tour before the device was closed and filled. He described it as “like a thermos” made of “perhaps the purest titanium in the world” designed to keep the liquid xenon cold and keep background radiation at a minimum.

Xenon is special, explained Aaron Manalaysay, experiment physics coordinator, because it allows researchers to see if a collision is with one of its electrons or with its nucleus. If something hits the nucleus, it is more likely to be the dark matter that everyone is looking for, he said.

These scientists tried a similar, smaller experiment here years ago. After coming up empty, they figured they had to go much bigger. Another large-scale experiment is underway in Italy run by a rival team, but no results have been announced so far.

The scientists are trying to understand why the universe is not what it seems.

One part of the mystery is dark matter, which has by far most of the mass in the cosmos. Astronomers know it’s there because when they measure the stars and other regular matter in galaxies, they find that there is not nearly enough gravity to hold these clusters together. If nothing else was out there, galaxies would be “quickly flying apart,” Manalaysay said.

“It is essentially impossible to understand our observation of history, of the evolutionary cosmos without dark matter,” Manalaysay said.

Lippincott, a University of California, Santa Barbara, physicist, said “we would not be here without dark matter.”

So while there’s little doubt that dark matter exists, there’s lots of doubt about what it is. The leading theory is that it involves things called WIMPs — weakly interacting massive particles.

If that’s the case, LUX-ZEPLIN could be able to detect them. And scientists want to find “where the WIMPs can be hiding,” Lippincott said.
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A 27-year-old Haitian man has been charged in the United States for his alleged role in last year’s kidnapping of 16 American Christian missionaries, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Jean Pelice, also known as “Zo,” an alleged member of the powerful 400 Mawozo gang, was brought to the United States in May to face charges, the department said in a statement.

Pelice is accused of involvement in the October 2021 kidnapping near Port-au-Prince of 17 Christian missionaries, 16 of whom were U.S. citizens, by 400 Mawozo.

The gang made ransom demands and asked for the release from a Haitian prison of Joly Germine, a 400 Mawozo leader who allegedly continued to run the gang from his cell.

Two of the hostages were released in November 2021. Three were freed in December 2021 and the remainder escaped captivity later that same month.

Germine, 29, also known as “Yonyon,” was extradited to the United States in May and has been charged with conspiracy to commit hostage taking and other offenses.
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President Joe Biden on Thursday awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, to 17 people. Recipients included two Olympic athletes — footballer Megan Rapinoe and gymnast Simone Biles — as well as Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington.

“On Monday, we celebrated the independence of our nation, a nation always a work in progress in creation of possibilities, the fulfillment of promises,” Biden began. “That’s the American story. It’s not a simple one. It’s never been a simple one, but the Fourth of July week reminds us what brought us together long ago and still binds us, binds us at our best.”

The president first spoke about Biles, a 25-year-old gold-medal-winning Olympic gymnast, who, he noted, was the youngest recipient of the medal. “Everyone stops everything every time she is on camera, just to watch.”

As for Rapinoe, two-time World Cup winner and Olympic gold medalist, Biden not only applauded her incredible athletic abilities but also acknowledged her impact as a role model for people across America. He also described her as “a champion for [an] essential American truth that everyone — everyone — is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.”

Three people received awards posthumously: Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple; former Senator John McCain; and former AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Cindy McCain, John McCain’s widow, accepted the medal on his behalf. Biden reminisced about the friendship he shared with the Republican senator despite their opposing political beliefs. “We agreed on a lot more than we disagreed on,” Biden said. “We both wanted to make things better for the country.”

The rest of the medal recipients were Sister Simone Campbell, Julieta Garcia, Gabrielle Giffords, Fred Gray, the Reverend Alexander Karloutsos, Khizr Khan, Sandra Lindsay, Diane Nash, Alan Simpson, Wilma Vaught and Raúl Yzaguirre.

One of the award winners was unable to attend the ceremony at the White House because of an infection with COVID-19. “There’s a man who couldn’t be here today but wanted to be: Denzel Washington, one of our greatest actors in American history,” Biden said. The president added that he would give Washington the Medal of Freedom at a later date.

After all the individuals received their medals, Biden turned to them and said, “This is America.”
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