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Dylan Stableford, Rebecca Corey and Caitlin Dickson

Smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to trigger air quality alerts in U.S. states, with health officials warning people, especially those in sensitive groups, such as children, the elderly or with respiratory conditions, to limit their time outdoors.
Security council meeting discusses disaster as US, UK and French representatives call for an investigation
Patrick Wintour

Russia’s UN envoy was accused of floundering in a “mud of lies” after he claimed at an emergency session of the security council that Ukraine destroyed Kakhovka dam in a “war crime”.

Sergiy Kyslytsya, the Ukraine envoy to the UN, said it was typical of Russia to blame the victim for its own crimes, pointing out Russia has been in control of the dam for more than a year and it was physically impossible to blow it up by shelling. He said the dam was mined by the Russian occupiers and they blew it up. He accused Russia of “floundering again in the mud of lies”.

“By resorting to scorched earth tactics, or in this case to flooded earth tactics, the Russian occupiers have effectively recognised that the captured territory does not belong to them, and they are not able to hold these lands,” Kyslytsya said.

Neither the French, US or British representatives at the UN directly said there was evidence of Russian responsibility, but called for an investigation and insisted their support for Ukraine was unwavering.
Story by Dan Robinson

Disgruntled customers claim throttling happens any time of the day or night
Starlink users in the UK claim their download speeds appear to be getting capped at about 50Mbit/sec if they try to retrieve large files from the web. Some reckon this amounts to mis-selling, saying they are not being provided with the advertised speed for the service.…

In a Reddit thread highlighted by a reader, British customers of the Starlink satellite broadband service complained the speed of their connection was being limited if they were downloading anything for more than 10–15 minutes.

"My speedtest.net is over 200Mb here in rural Aberdeenshire but right enough the throughput reduces to slightly over 50Mb when downloading large files even though it starts off well over 150Mb for the first 10 minutes or so," one poster gripes.
Story by Alexander Motyl

Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam is, above all, a sign of desperation from President Putin. The Russians know they’re losing the war. They know they won’t be able to withstand the forthcoming Ukrainian counter-offensive.

And they are now engaging in a watery version of a scorched earth policy that, they hope, will stall the offensive by diverting Kyiv’s attention and resources from killing Russian soldiers to saving Ukrainian civilians.
That may work for a few days, but its major effect will be to harden Ukrainian resolve to drive the genocidaires from their land. Make no mistake about it. The destruction is unquestionably Russia’s doing.
Story by rpickrell@businessinsider.com (Ryan Pickrell)

The Allied invasion of Normandy, France on June 6, 1944 was the largest amphibious invasion in history. The scale of the assault was unlike anything the world had seen before or will most likely ever see again.

By that summer, the Allies had managed to slow the forward march of the powerful German war machine. The invasion was an opportunity to begin driving the Nazis back.

The invasion is unquestionably one of the greatest undertakings in military history. By the numbers, here's what it took to pull this off.
Story by Abby Jackson

Arelatively uncharted island entirely made of trash, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an enigma. Still, reducing its size is an even bigger mystery.

The Ocean Cleanup is an organization using high-tech tools to remove trillions of pieces of plastic pollution and other trash that make up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — but what happens to this waste once it gets collected from the ocean?

How big is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is a floating vortex of debris in the North Pacific Ocean. It spans 1.6 million square kilometers (or over 600,000 square miles) from California to Japan with Hawaii in the middle.

The trash found in the GPGP varies in type and size, but the majority of it is made of plastic. Microplastics — tiny pieces of plastic — make up only 8% of the GPGP’s total mass, but they have an outsized effect. Of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the GPGP, 94% are microplastics.
Yesterday 1:00 PM

Researchers have uncovered evidence that members of a mysterious archaic human species buried their dead and carved symbols on cave walls long before the earliest evidence of burials by modern humans. The brains belonging to the extinct species, known as Homo naledi, were around one-third the size of a modern human brain.

The revelations could change the understanding of human evolution, because until now such behaviors only have been associated with larger-brained Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. The findings are detailed in three studies that have been accepted for publication in the journal eLife, and preprints of the papers are available on BioRxiv.
Story by nrennolds@insider.com (Nathan Rennolds)

Russian President Vladimir Putin was likely never the elite Soviet spy that the world has been led to believe, an investigaton by the German news outlet Der Spiegel has revealed. Stories of Putin's exploits as an intelligence officer during the 1980s vary, and it is an era somewhat shrouded in mystery, as he has never commented on the period himself.

But many stories have painted him as a heroic figure, who, among other things, single-handedly defended the KGB's offices from looters and carried out top-secret secret missions such as meeting with members of the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group that wreaked havoc in West Germany and committed a series of kidnappings and assassinations.
NBC News

Authorities have released new details about the potential cause of a train derailment in India that killed hundreds of people, saying preliminary findings indicate that a signaling issue led to the crash. NBC News’ Jesse Kirsch has the latest.
Story by jma@insider.com (Jason Ma)

The Russian economy isn't just suffering from a record labor shortage, it's also losing some of its best and brightest workers. Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser at Russia's central bank, told NPR last week that many educated and skilled workers have fled the country.

As a result, Russian firms are scaling back or shutting down, she said, citing a recent estimate that 1.3 million young workers left the labor force last year alone. "I don't think Russian authorities will admit it, but we've seen a massive brain drain," Prokopenko told NPR.
Story by Sushmitha Ramakrishnan, Deutsche Welle

Crucial science topics will no longer be taught to a large swath of Indian students, according to new government guidance.Most young learners in India will no longer be exposed to key science topics in school textbooks -- unless they voluntarily major in science in higher classes.

On June 1, India cut a slew of foundational topics from tenth grade textbooks, including the periodic table of elements, Darwin's theory of evolution, the Pythagorean theorem, sources of energy, sustainable management of natural resources and contribution of agriculture to the national economy, among others.

A small section explaining Michael Faraday's contributions to scientific understanding of electricity and magnetism has also been removed. Even as thousands of scientists across the country protested the decision to slash evolution last month, it did not deter India's National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) -- the public body that designs curriculum and textbooks -- from expanding its list of omitted topics.
By Hilary Whiteman, CNN

Brisbane, Australia CNN — Australia’s most decorated soldier lost a multi-million dollar defamation case against three newspapers who accused him of committing war crimes in Afghanistan – including the murder of unarmed prisoners – as a judge ruled their reports met the standards of truth.

The ruling, delivered by Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko on Thursday, brings a dramatic end to a long-running trial and delivers another blow to the reputation of the nation’s military, already damaged by revelations that emerged during 100 days of testimony.

Besanko found Thursday that The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Canberra Times established substantial truth in a number of claims about Ben Roberts-Smith, but not all of them. In some cases, he found the papers established contextual truth, which is also a defense under Australia’s Defamation Act. In others, he found that the papers had not established the truth.
Hindustan Times

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will not attend a key NATO foreign ministers meeting in Oslo this week. Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said that Ankara's absence means no immediate progress on Stockholm's application for NATO membership. Recently, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Turkey to immediately finalise Sweden's accession to the bloc. Watch this video to know more.
By Wendell Roelf

CAPE TOWN, June 1 (Reuters) - Foreign ministers from the BRICS countries are meeting in South Africa from Thursday as the five-nation bloc seeks to forge itself into a counterweight to Western geopolitical dominance in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The talks are a prelude to an August summit in Johannesburg that has already created controversy because of the possible attendance of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the target of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant.  It accused him in March of the war crime of forcibly deporting children from Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine. Moscow denies the allegations. South Africa had already invited Putin in January.

Moscow’s Defense Ministry said Thursday it had repelled an incursion attempt by “Ukrainian terrorist formations” into Russia’s Ukraine-bordering Belgorod region. “Russia’s Armed Forces together with units of the border service…foiled a fresh attempt by the Kyiv regime to conduct a terrorist attack against the civilian population of the city of Shebekino,” the ministry’s spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a daily briefing.

Konashenkov claimed that two Ukraine-linked military units attempted to cross the border into Russia near the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka early Thursday morning. To prevent the incursion, the Russian army allegedly conducted mass strikes, killing more than 30 members of the Ukraine-linked units.
By ISABEL DEBRE

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Jordan’s highly anticipated royal wedding day got underway on Thursday with the surprise announcement that Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate had arrived to witness the nuptials of Crown Prince Hussein and his Saudi Arabian bride. The attendance of the British royals had been kept under wraps, and was only confirmed by Jordanian state media a few hours before the start of the palace ceremony.

The wedding of Jordan’s 28-year-old heir to the throne and Rajwa Alseif, a 29-year-old architect linked to her own country’s monarch, emphasizes continuity in an Arab state prized for its longstanding stability. The festivities, which are to start Thursday afternoon, also introduce Hussein to a wider global audience.
Elliot Smith

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday that all NATO allies agree that Russia cannot prevent Ukraine’s eventual membership of the military alliance. Speaking to reporters ahead of an informal meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Oslo, Stoltenberg said all allies agreed that “NATO’s door is open for new members.”

“All allies also agree that Ukraine will become a member of the alliance, and all allies agree that it is for the NATO allies and Ukraine to decide when Ukraine becomes a member,” he said. “It is not for Moscow to have a veto against NATO enlargement, but most importantly, all allies agree that the most urgent and important task now is to ensure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent nation. President [Vladimir] Putin and Russia must not win this war.”
Story by Julian Jessop

The looming anniversary of the 2016 vote to leave the European Union is already prompting a flurry of assessments on the impact of Brexit on the British economy. These evaluations range from the sensible and balanced, through to the silly or even hysterical. It is unfortunate, but perhaps not surprising, that the latter seem to be the most popular.

Take the services sector. If one thinks back to all the apocalyptic claims made by Remainers, our services industry should be a smoking ruin by now. Instead, the opposite is true: it has been a success story, and that will only become more obvious. For a start, the UK’s exports of services have performed strongly over the last year.
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