Several YouTube channels run by separatist authorities in the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR) and Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) were inaccessible.

The Lugansk People’s Republic said on its official news website that its channels had been blocked “without explanation.”

The channel of the Lugansk information center was inaccessible on Friday and a service message said it “has been terminated for violating YouTube’s community guidelines.”

​​Several other separatist channels carried the same message, including those belonging to the ministry of information and the “people’s militia” of the Donetsk stronghold.

The video hosting platform hasn’t yet commented on the blocking.

Also on Friday, Facebook blocked the pages of the DNR and LNR’s “people’s militias.”

Ukraine has been at war with the DNR and LNR since 2014, a conflict that has claimed over 14,000 lives. Western countries accuse Russia of supporting the rebels with arms, troops and finances, claims that Moscow consistently denies.

The West also claims that Russia is planning to invade its pro-Western neighbor with over 100,000 of its troops stationed near the border. Russia has denied planning to invade, instead accusing the United States and NATO of increasing tensions and demanding “security guarantees” in eastern Europe.

The post YouTube, Facebook Block East Ukraine Separatist Accounts appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

The reaction process – which would generate vast amounts of low-carbon energy – has evaded scientists for decades, but a private company in Didcot, Oxfordshire says it’s now a question of if, not when.

Tokamak Energy is firing its nuclear reactor up to 50 million degrees celsius – almost twice the core temperature of the sun. By shooting 140,000 amps of electricity into a cloud of hydrogen gas, the team is trying to force hydrogen atoms to fuse, thereby creating helium. These fusion forces are the same ones that power the sun. While there’s no danger that Didcot could become the new center of the solar system, the industrial estate could spark the start of a cheap, clean energy supply.

Nuclear fusion poses huge technical challenges. Tokamak Energy

“We will crack it,” CEO Chris Kelsall told the BBC on a recent trip, “the answer is out there right now with Mother Nature as we speak. What we have to do is find that key and unlock the safe to that solution. It will be found.”

Having ramped the temperature up to mind-boggling degrees, the experiment’s next step is to see if nuclear fusion can produce more energy than it uses.

Is nuclear fusion safe?

In case it rings alarm bells to anyone in the vicinity, nuclear fusion is very different from nuclear fission and its associated disasters. The process occurs inside a ‘tokamak’ – a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to contain the swirling cloud of hydrogen gas. This stops the superheated plasma from touching the edge of the vessel, as it would otherwise melt anything it comes into contact with.

If anything goes wrong inside a fusion reactor, the device just stops – so there’s no risk of this astronomical heat being unleashed.

Magnetic fields trap the electrically-charged plasma particles in an 
'apple-core' shape, keeping the fusion fuels contained and hot. Tokamak Energy

The plasma has to be heated to 10 times the temperature of the sun to get it going and is capable of fusing two hydrogen nuclei into a helium nucleus.

Nuclear fission, on the other hand, is a dangerous kind. This creates energy by splitting one ‘heavy’ atom (typically uranium) into two. This breakdown generates a large amount of radioactive waste in the process, which remains hazardous for years.

Fusion cannot produce a runaway chain reaction, like the one that happened at Chernobyl in 1986, so no exclusion zone is needed around Milton Park, Didcot, where the reactor is based.

Laura Hussey, an editor who works minutes away at a publishing office on the business park, says she is “really encouraged to hear how safe it is and really happy to see this big investment in clean energy.”

The nuclear fusion reactor shares the park with a number of other businesses. 
Tokamak Energy

When will nuclear fusion become a viable source of energy?

It’s a question that scientists have been asking themselves (and have been asked by journalists) for decades. “It’s difficult,” Tokamak Energy physicist Dr Hannah Willett says, while explaining that “[we] get a lot more energy out of this reaction than out of just burning fossil fuels.”

If successful, the experiment could see a constellation of tiny suns created on Earth. Fusion energy would be a major pathway in the green transition – alongside natural sources like solar, wind and tidal. The hydrogen can be derived from seawater, meaning we have a virtually limitless supply of fuel.

Scientists have been trying to make fusion work for more than 50 years and it could still be a while before we can effectively power our homes using it.

Once fusion power is achieved, the scalable technology could be rolled out 
across the world tokamaks Energy

But as governments get more serious about renewable power – with the UK investing £10 million (€11.7 million) into Tokamak Energy last year, Kelsall’s “key” feels increasingly within reach.

Meanwhile, five locations in Scotland and England have been shortlisted as the potential future home of the UK’s prototype fusion energy plant – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) – with a decision due around the end of 2022.

Scientists hope the power station can be wired into the national electricity grid – eventually providing energy for people’s homes, and a template to be replicated around the world.

The post Is nuclear fusion the ‘hottest’ new renewable on the block? appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

The package, which Congress passed with bipartisan support on Monday after months of negotiations, would keep unemployment benefits in place until March and expand state benefits by $300 a week – as well as extending an evictions moratorium, providing federal loans to small businesses and $600 direct payments to many Americans.

But without Trump’s signature, the entire package – set to be the second biggest in US history – is stalled and the US government now faces a shutdown on Tuesday.

“I simply want to get our great people $2,000, rather than the measly $600 that is now in the bill. Also, stop the billions of dollars in ‘pork’”, he tweeted on Saturday morning.

It comes after he indicated on Tuesday that he might veto the bill, describing it as a “disgrace”.

Larry Sabato, director of the Centre for Politics at the University of Virginia, said Trump’s motivation for increasing the payments to $2,000 is “so he looks good”.

“And maybe he sees this as the crowning achievement as he leaves office, where he is defeating Congress and his own party,” he added. “He’s probably more resentful toward members of his own party than he is the Democrats … He’s a hurt creature and he’s going to make all the other creatures hurt.”

With the support of senator Lindsey Graham, he said Republicans could yet be swayed to vote for a bill including $2,000 payments, at which point Trump will “claim a great victory”.

He added: “I think he actually now believes his own lies about the election. It was stolen because he has said it so many times.”

But with the eviction moratorium due to expire on 31 December he said any deal will have to be done this week.

“Hundreds of thousands of people who could lose the roof over their head if they don’t get this eviction prohibition. There are just so many pieces to this that are damaging. But of course, Trump will blame it all on Congress and his followers will then attack Congress, not realising it all comes down to Donald Trump.”

The 5,000-page bill was reportedly flown to Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach club, on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Day he was pictured playing golf – his 309th visit to one of his golf courses of his presidency – despite having vowed to be “working tirelessly” over the festive period. On Saturday morning the bill remained unsigned.

As the country continued to reel from the surging pandemic, and amid an explosion in Nashville, he also took time to enter a debate over the first lady’s legacy, responding to a Christmas Day tweet by Breitbart News accusing “elitist snobs in the fashion press” of not featuring Melania Trump on their covers for four years.

“The greatest of all time. Fake News!” he tweeted.

Around 24 hours after Congress passed the bill, Trump released a surprise video in which he criticised the bill and called for direct payments to be raised to $2,000 per adult – despite his own party opposing it – and denounced spending on foreign aid and arts venues.

“Made many calls and had meetings at Trump International in Palm Beach, Florida,” he tweeted on Friday. “Why would politicians not want to give people $2,000, rather than only $600? It wasn’t their fault, it was China. Give our people the money!”

Following his loss to president-elect Joe Biden in November, an election in which he has still not conceded, Trump appears even more willing to oppose his own party and its leadership.

After Republican Senator Mitch McConnell acknowledged Biden’s win after the Electoral College vote, Trump had an email sent to Republicans hitting out at the Senate majority leader.

A graphic attached to the email reportedly showed a timeline of McConnell’s polling numbers and said: “Sadly, Mitch forgot. He was the first one off the ship!”

On Christmas Day, Trump was joined on the golf course by Graham who, having previously been supportive of the relief package, subsequently appeared to change his mind.

“After spending some time with President @realDonaldTrump today, I am convinced he is more determined than ever to increase stimulus payments to $2,000 per person and challenge Section 230 big tech liability protection,” he tweeted.

“Both are reasonable demands, and I hope Congress is listening. The biggest winner would be the American people.”

But with insufficient support for $2,000 payments – an attempt was blocked by Republicans on Thursday – a solution to the relief bill is unclear.

Previously Trump has made his annual address to overseas service members public and attended evening mass on Christmas Eve at Bethesda-by-the-Sea, near Mar-a-Lago, but this year he has kept to his club or golf course, refraining from inviting the press to his speech and did not comment on the Christmas Day explosion in Nashville though he was reportedly briefed on it.

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In a letter obtained by RealClearPolitics, Cruz, from Texas, urges both Trump and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, to plant the seeds of an eventual showdown over the two critical international agreements in the early days of the Biden administration.

As Cruz describes it, by submitting the pacts to the Senate, Trump could pave the way for a vote that would fail to achieve the two-thirds needed to ratify them – thus blocking Joe Biden’s efforts to bring the US back in line with international allies.

Cruz sets out the cynical ploy in his letter. He begins by praising Trump’s decision to pull America out of both the 2015 Iran deal, which restricted its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, and the 2016 Paris accords on reducing global emissions of pollution responsible for the climate crisis.

“I urge you now to remedy the harm done to the balance of powers by submitting the Iran deal and the Paris agreement to the Senate as treaties,” Cruz writes. “Only by so doing with the Senate be able to satisfy its constitutional role to provide advice and consent in the event any future administration attempts to revive these dangerous deals.”

Biden has pledged to rejoin the Paris agreement “on day one of my presidency”. He has similarly indicated he would revive the Iran nuclear deal as a top foreign policy objective – in both cases using his executive powers rather than relying on Congress.

Cruz hopes that his tactic would cut across Biden’s intentions by declaring the accords foreign treaties which require two-thirds ratification in the Senate. Failure to achieve that margin – an impossible target in a narrowly divided chamber – would undercut any unilateral Biden move.

Graham has been ploughing a similar furrow. In a stream of tweets last week the senator from South Carolina said he had been working hard “to secure a vote in the US Senate regarding any potential decision to reenter the Iran nuclear deal”.

He added: “The Senate should go on the record about whether it would support or oppose this decision. Also believe Senate should be on record in support or opposition to any decision to reenter Paris climate accord.”

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