Havana — A 6.8 magnitude earthquake shook eastern Cuba on Sunday, after weeks of hurricanes and blackouts that have left many on the island reeling.  The epicenter of the quake was located approximately 40 km south of Bartolomé Masó, Cuba, according to a report by the United States Geological Survey.  The rumbling was felt across the eastern stretch of Cuba, including in bigger cities like Santiago de Cuba. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.  Residents in Santiago, Cuba's second largest city, were left shaken on Sunday. Yolanda Tabío, 76, said people in the city flocked to the streets and were still nervously sitting in their doorways. She said she felt at least two aftershocks following the quake, but that among friends and family she hadn't heard of any damages.  "You had to see how everything was moving, the walls, everything," she told The Associated Press.  The earthquake comes during another tough stretch for Cuba.  On Wednesday, Category 3 Hurricane Rafael ripped through western Cuba, with strong winds knocking out power island-wide, destroying hundreds of homes and forcing evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people. Days after, much of the island was still struggling without power.  Weeks before in October, the island was also hit by a one-two punch. First, it was hit by island-wide blackouts stretching on for days, a product of the island's energy crisis. Shortly after, it was slapped by a powerful hurricane that struck the eastern part of the island and killed at least six people.  The blackouts and wider discontent among many struggling to get by has stoked small protests across the island. 

LAPU-LAPU CITY, Cebu — A 37-year-old man was apprehended in an entrapment operation, after a 14-year-old girl lodged a complaint against him for sextortion on Tuesday, November 12, 2024, at around 9:50 a.m. in a lodge in Purok Jaguar, Brgy. Panadtaran, San Fernando town in southern Cebu. The suspect is a construction worker from Brgy. South Poblacion in San Fernando town. Meanwhile, the victim was a 14-year-old grade 9 student from Naga City. READ MORE: Sextortion: The sinister side of online romance Taiwanese jailed for attacking a transwoman; claims he was blackmailed Married man from Talisay City accuses single mom […]...

Keep on reading: 'Sextortion' in Naga: Man nabbed for trying to blackmail girl, 14

Slackliners set world record, balancing at 2,500 metres high between hot air balloons

Whether space and time are part of the universe or they emerge from quantum entanglement is one of the biggest questions in physics. And we are getting close to the truth

How did the supermassive black holes we’re now seeing in the early universe get so big so fast? Astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani is using sophisticated galaxy simulations to figure it out

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time

Information contained within quantum objects gets scrambled when they interact. Physicists have now derived a speed limit for this process, challenging the idea that black holes are the fastest data scramblers

When I heard Stephen Hawking extol the mysteries of black holes, I knew theoretical physics was what I wanted to do. There is still so much to learn about these strange regions, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Whether space and time are part of the universe or they emerge from quantum entanglement is one of the biggest questions in physics. And we are getting close to the truth

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time

Title: Health Care Gap May Raise Rates of Colorectal Cancer Death in Blacks
Category: Health News
Created: 8/25/2010 10:10:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/25/2010 12:00:00 AM

Title: Black Rice Is Cheap Way to Get Antioxidants
Category: Health News
Created: 8/27/2010 10:06:00 AM
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Title: New Drug Approved for Lack of Certain White Blood Cells
Category: Health News
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Title: 'Maintain, Don't Gain' May Work Best for Obese Black Women
Category: Health News
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Title: Lack of Protective Gear Leaves Medics at Risk in Ebola Outbreak: Study
Category: Health News
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Title: Too Few Blacks, Hispanics Becoming Doctors: Study
Category: Health News
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Title: Black Women at Raised Risk of Carrying Breast Cancer Genes
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Title: Black Eye
Category: Diseases and Conditions
Created: 9/11/2009 12:00:00 AM
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Patient expectations of receiving antibiotics for common symptoms can trigger unnecessary use. We conducted a survey (n = 564) between January 2020 to June 2021 in public and private primary care clinics in Texas to study the prevalence and predictors of patients’ antibiotic expectations for common symptoms/illnesses. We surveyed Black patients (33%) and Hispanic/Latine patients (47%), and over 93% expected to receive an antibiotic for at least 1 of the 5 pre-defined symptoms/illnesses. Public clinic patients were nearly twice as likely to expect antibiotics for sore throat, diarrhea, and cold/flu than private clinic patients. Lack of knowledge of potential risks of antibiotic use was associated with increased antibiotic expectations for diarrhea (odds ratio [OR] = 1.6; 95% CI, 1.1-2.4) and cold/flu symptoms (OR = 2.9; 95% CI, 2.0-4.4). Lower education and inadequate health literacy were predictors of antibiotic expectations for diarrhea. Future antibiotic stewardship interventions should tailor patient education materials to include information on antibiotic risks and guidance on appropriate antibiotic indications.

"I hear journalists are wondering if I’ve put my name in for the Scottish Parliament. Big news re 2026 coming in the next hour…watch this space."

Sony has released the US and European PlayStation Store downloads charts for September 2024.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 topped the PlayStation 5 charts in the US and Canada, as well as on the European charts. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero was number two in the US and Canada, as well as in Europe. Undisputed was number three in the US and Canada, while it was EA Sports FC 25 in Europe.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was the most downloaded game on the PlayStation 4 charts in the US and Canada, while it was EA Sports FC 25 on the European charts. Minecraft was number two in the US and Canada, while it was Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in Europe. Red Dead Redemption 2 was number three in the US and Canada, while it was The Forest in Europe.

Arizona Sunshine Remake topped the PlayStation VR2 charts in the US and Canada, as well as in Europe. Beat Saber VR was number two in the US and Canada, while it was The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR in Europe. The Dark Pictures: Switchback VR was number three in the US and Canada, while it was Metro Awakening in Europe.

ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission topped the PlayStation VR charts in the US and Canada, while it was Batman: Arkham VR in Europe. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR was number two in the US and Canada, while it was The Exorcist: Legion VR in Europe.

Throne and Liberty topped the free-to-play US and Canada charts, and in Europe. Fortnite was number two in the US and Canada, and in Europe.

Here is the complete list of charts:

PS5 Games

PS4 Games

PS VR2 Games*

PS VR Games

Free to Play (PS5 + PS4)

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463025/call-of-duty-black-ops-6-tops-the-ps5-ps-store-download-charts-in-october/

The PlayStation 5 was the best-selling console in the UK in October, according to GfK Entertainment data reported by GamesIndustry. 

The Xbox Series X|S was the second best-selling console for the month, followed by the Nintendo Switch in third. The Xbox Series X|S has also surpassed the Switch in year-to-date sales.

Sales for the PS5 are up 27 percent month-on-month and down 18 percent year-on-year. Sales for the Switch are up 13 percent month-on-month and down 18 percent year-on-year. Sales for the Xbox Series X|S are down seven percent month-on-month and down 17 percent year-on-year. 

Overall, there were just under 144,000 video game consoles sold (NielsenIQ/GfK panel data) in the UK in October 2024. This is down 18 percent year-on-year.

GSD data shows there were 2.9 million games sold in October 2024, which is up 3.2 percent year-on-year. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 debuted in first place on the software charts (digital and physical combined). Sales are 11 percent lower than the launch month of 2023's 2023's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, however, this is most likely due to the number of people playing the game via Xbox Game Pass.

Sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 are up 24 percent year-on-year on PlayStation consoles, while sales dropped on Xbox consoles and PC. 75 percent of total sales were on PlayStation consoles, followed by 15 percent on PC, and just under 11 percent on Xbox consoles.

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero debuted in third place with the first four week of sales up 80 percent compared to 2020's Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot.

Undisputed debuted in fourth place and had the second biggest launch for a sports title in 2024. Only EA Sports FC 24 had a bigger launch.

The remake of Silent Hill 2 debuted in fifth place. Launch sales are 32 percent lower than the remake of Dead Space and 62 percent lower than the remake of Resident Evil 4.

Super Mario Party Jamboree debuted in ninth place. Sales are 11 percent higher than 2018's Super Mario Party, but are four percent lower than 2021's Mario Party Superstar. It should be noted Nintendo doesn't share digital sales with these charts.

Sonic X Shadows Generations debuted in 10th place. Sales for the game are 150 percent compared to 2023's Sonic Superstars, but are down 21 percent compared to 2022's Sonic Frontiers.

Metaphor: Refantazio debuted in 12th place and the new version of Until Dawn debuted in 30th place.

EA Sports FC 25 came in second place with sales down 14 percent year-on-year.

There were over 681,000 accessories and add-on products sold in the UK in October, which is up nearly 16 percent year-over-year, but is down over eight percent month-on-month.

The White DualSense controller was the best-selling accessory, followed by the Midnight Black DualSense controller. The PlayStation Portal Remote Player is up four spots to take fourth place.

Here are the top 10 best-selling games in the UK (Digital + Physical):

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463042/ps5-best-seller-in-the-uk-in-october-black-ops-6-leads-strong-month-of-new-releases/

Nintendo has announced its Black Friday 2024 deals. 

Dozens of games will be discounted including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Maker 2, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Pikmin 4, Nintendo Switch Sports, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Super Mario Odyssey, Pikmin 1 + 2, and more.

The Neon Red and Neon Blue Joy-Con controllers and the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller will be discounted by $20, while the Nintendo Switch Carrying Case & Screen Protector - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Edition will be discounted by $10.

The Nintendo Switch: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Bundle will once again return for $299.99, while the new Nintendo Switch – OLED Model: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Bundle will be available for $349.99. Both bundles include a digital download of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online Individual Membership.

The Nintendo Switch Lite: Hyrule Edition with Bonus Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack will be available for $209.99. The bundle includes a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack Individual Membership.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463045/nintendos-black-friday-2024-deals-revealed/

People have asked me, a Call Of Duty liker, "How's the new COD?" - such is the mass appeal of Call Of Duty that even a lot of my non-industry pals are invested in whether Black Ops 6's shooty really does bang. And every single time my brain clunks into gear and I turn inwards, where I struggle to come up with anything meaningful to say. So much so that a fog develops and out of the fog emerges a figure - it's me. I'm holding an M4A1 with an extended barrel and a vertical foregrip. My brain and body perform a pincer movement of physical response: 1) I shrug 2) I say, "It's like Call Of Duty".

Read more

Early reactions to Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 multiplayer range from frothing dislike through omnimovement hype to our own Ed Thorn's dead-eyed appraisal that it's "a good one, I think. Not a bad one. If you like Call Of Duty, you will like this. If you don't like Call Of Duty, you will not like this." I feel like we need to emergency-deploy a supply crate of smelling salts, because the sheer OK-ness of Black Ops 6 appears to have tumbled Ed into a stupor.

Perhaps it would be a different story if he'd encountered some of the spawning issues and glitches people are talking about, with players joining games and materialising right into a hail of fire. The players in question include Black Ops 6's developers, who comically note in the latest Black Ops 6 patch notes that "Yes, we saw ourselves in a Killcam before selecting a Loadout too." The latest patch seeks to address this, naturally. As regards the campaign side of things, it also resets your safehouse currency to 5000, if you've had your single player funds stolen (or multiplied) by technical gremlins.

Read more

As a yearly blockbuster, Call of Duty, through sheer expense and effort, would like you to think it is the Die Hard of video games. Or, depending on the setting, the Saving Private Ryan of video games. But it is barely Black Hawk Down. This latest campaign in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 reminds me more of the forgettable Netflix shootfests that thumbnail their way across your TV screen as you try to find some gritty nothing to aid you in zoning out of life. Still, there is an anecdotal contingent of casual sofa sitters for whom Call Of Duty is the game. A balls-to-the-wall shooter to return to every winter and rinse through in a weekend. Ed has already gestured at its multiplayer, announcing: "yup, it's COD", like a deeply tired Captain Birdseye inspecting the day's catch, wondering when his life will change. But never mind that. How does the single player story mode hold up? Some are calling it the best campaign in years. And I guess that's true, in the sense that it is the least worst.

Read more

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been out for a little while already, what with me giving its multiplayer largely a thumbs up. Still, it's an ever-evolving thing and Activision have announced the game's first seasonal drop. It's a hefty one with a lot of additions, so I'll try my best to break down the good stuff. TLDR: there's some new maps for multiplayer and zombies, new modes, and a few extra bits. I'm mildly excited for more. More in this case is good.

Read more

The developers who remade Half-Life as Black Mesa are working on a new roguelite co-op shooter. It will feature no physicists celebrating Bring Your Shotgun To Work Day, but instead let up to four players tactically breach oil rigs and airports occupied by corporate-sponsored mercenaries. In Rogue Point the richest CEO on earth has croaked it, causing various megacorps to compete in a violent bum rush for control of that wealth. Which is where your team of renegade shooterists come in. They don't want to win this contest, they just want everyone else to lose.

Read more

In America, there’s a significant kind of public insistence that one’s “freedom” is fundamentally tied to one’s wealth.

Much of the country views America through an aspirational and transformative lens, a colorblind and bias-free utopia, wherein wealth conveys equality and acts as a panacea for social and racial ills. Once an individual achieves massive financial success, or so the message goes, he or she will “transcend” the scourge of economic and racial inequality, truly becoming “free.”

Working in parallel with this reverence for this colorblind version of the “American Dream” is the belief that economic privilege mandates patriotic gratitude. Across industries and disciplines, Americans are told to love their nation uncritically, be thankful that they are exceptional enough to live in a country that allows citizens the opportunity to reach astronomical heights of economic prosperity.

For the nation’s black citizens, there’s often an additional racialized presumption lurking under the surface of these concepts: the notion that black success and wealth demands public silence on systemic issues of inequality and oppression.

These are durable and fragile ideologies that prop up the concept of the American Dream – durable because they are encoded in the very fabric of American culture (most Americans, including African Americans, have readily embraced these ideologies as assumed facts); yet fragile because it’s all too easy to see that one’s economic privilege is a lousy barrier against both individual and systemic discrimination and oppression.

Consequently, black people have also been among the most vocal challengers of these ideologies, as we’ve seen most recently with the Colin Kaepernick and the NFL #TakeAKnee demonstrations. In a show of solidary with the free agent quarterback, professional football players – the vast majority of whom are black – have been kneeling during the National Anthem as a means of protesting racial injustice and police brutality.

WATCH: NFL players team up in defiance and solidarity

Over the past few weeks, the president of the United States has brought renewed attention to the inherent tensions that define the ideologies of the “American Dream” through his repeated public criticisms of these kneeling NFL players.

“If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues,” Trump recently tweeted, he or she should not be allowed to kneel. Labeling the protestors actions “disrespectful” to the country, flag and anthem, President Donald Trump has called for players to be fired, encouraged a boycott of the NFL, insisted that the league pass a rule mandating that players stand for the anthem and derided the protestors as “sons of bitches.”

In a dramatic ploy more befitting of a scripted reality television show, the president gloated that he had instructed Vice President Mike Pence to walk out of an Indianapolis Colts game the moment any player kneeled. This was an orchestrated show of power and outrage, designed to send a flamboyant political message given that Trump and Pence knew in advance that on that particular day, the Colts were playing the San Francisco 49ers – the team that currently has the most protestors. The NFL’s announcement this week that the league has no plans to penalize protesting players is the most recent event to provoke the president’s fury; taking to social media during the early morning, he once again equated kneeling with “total disrespect” for our country.

As many have pointed out, the president’s moralizing outrage toward the NFL players is selective and deeply flawed – his apparent patriotic loyalty hasn’t stopped the billionaire politician from criticizing the removal of Confederate statues, or attacking a Gold Star family, or mocking Sen. John McCain’s military service.

The NFL players and their defenders have repeatedly stated that the protests are intended to highlight racial inequality and oppression. They’ve also explained that their decision to kneel emerged from a desire to protest peacefully and respectfully after a sustained conversation with military veterans.

Trump has chosen to ignore these rationales and the structural issues of inequality that motivate the protests and instead, advance a narrative exclusively concerned with overt displays of American patriotism and the “privilege” of the NFL players. As one of president’s advisors explained, by aggressively targeting the NFL players, Trump believes that he is “winning the cultural war,” having made black “millionaire sport athletes his new [Hillary Clinton].”

READ MORE: As ‘America’s sport,’ the NFL cannot escape politics

It’s a cynical statement, revealing the president’s perception of the jingoism of his base of supporters who envision him as a crusader for American values and symbols.

In casting the black protestors as the antithesis of all of this, Trump has marked the players as unpatriotic elites and enemies of the nation. For a president who has consistently fumbled his way through domestic and foreign policy since he was elected, a culture war between “hard-working” and “virtuous” working-class and middle-class white Americans and rich, ungrateful black football players is a welcome public distraction.

Trump’s attacks on the NFL protestors are rooted in those competing tensions inherent to the American Dream: that wealth equals freedom; that economic privilege demands patriotic gratitude; and most importantly, that black people’s individual economic prosperity invalidates their concerns about systemic injustice and requires their silence on racial oppression.

Among the protestors’ detractors, this has become a common line of attack, a means of disparaging the black NFL players’ activism by pointing to their apparent wealth. The fact that systemic racism is demonstrably real and that individual prosperity does not make one immune to racial discrimination appears to be lost on the protestors’ critics.

Theirs is a grievance that suggests that black athletes should be grateful to live in this country; that racism can’t exist in America since black professional athletes are allowed to play and sign contracts for considerable sums of money; that black players owe the nation their silence since America “gave” them opportunity and access; that black athletes have no moral authority on issues of race and inequality because of their individual success; and that black athletes’ success was never theirs to earn, but instead, was given to them and can just as easily be taken away.

This culture war being waged over black athletes is not new. Black athletes – and entertainers – have long been hyper-aware of their peculiar place in American society as individuals beloved for their athletic and artistic talents, yet reviled the moment they use their public platform to protest systemic racial inequality. The parallels between the #TakeAKnee protests and the protests of Muhammad Ali or John Carlos and Tommie Smith are readily apparent; so too are there important similarities to the case of Paul Robeson.

An outspoken civil rights activist, collegiate and professional football player, lawyer, opera singer and actor, Robeson had his passport revoked in 1950 because of his political activism and speech – actions that all but destroyed his career. The star athlete and entertainer, “who had exemplified American upward mobility” quickly “became public enemy number one” as institutions cancelled his concerts, the public called for his death and anti-Robeson mobs burned effigies of him.

During a 1956 congressional hearing, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities beat a familiar refrain with Robeson, challenging the entertainer’s accusations of American racism and racial oppression. He saw no sign of prejudice, he argued, since Robeson was privileged, having gone to elite universities and playing collegiate and professional football.

READ MORE: Poll: Americans divided on NFL protests

Black athletes, even the silent ones, largely understand that their economic privilege doesn’t insulate them from the realities of racial discrimination. They also understand that their wealth and success is precarious and is often dependent not only upon their athletic performance, but also upon them remaining silent on issues of racial injustice, especially those that appear to question the “American Dream” or implicate the American public by association.

It should come as no surprise then that Colin Kaepernick, whose protests turned him into a national pariah despite his on-the-field talents, has filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing the league and its teams of blackballing him because of his political beliefs. “Principled and peaceful political protest,” Kaepernick’s lawyers argued in a statement, “should not be punished and athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government.” Whether the ostracized Kaepernick will win his grievance is unknown, but it is certainly telling that he and his lawyers have rooted their claims in contested definitions of freedom and the precarious economic privilege of outspoken NFL players.

For the loudest and most vocal critics of black protestors, in particular, outspokenness is tantamount to treason, grounds for the harshest of punishments. Perhaps they would benefit from a close reading of James Baldwin, who once argued: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

The post Column: For black athletes, wealth doesn’t equal freedom appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

In the centre of a distant galaxy, a supermassive black hole has swallowed up a star 9 times the sun’s mass in the biggest and brightest such cosmic meal we’ve ever seen

The Milky Way may be home to strange black holes from the first moments of the universe, and the best candidates are the three closest black holes to Earth

The long-standing mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so huge so quickly could be solved by decaying dark matter

Spanning 23 million light years, or 220 Milky Way galaxies, a set of giant, newly discovered black hole jets known as Porphyrion may change our understanding of black holes and the structure of the universe

How did the supermassive black holes we’re now seeing in the early universe get so big so fast? Astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani is using sophisticated galaxy simulations to figure it out

General relativity teaches us that observing a black hole is all a question of perspective – and technique, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Black Ops 6 is here, and fans have been itching to know what's included in Season 1 - and now we have an answer. Here's what's included, and when you can play

Black Ops 6 is here, and it's Black Ops 2's anniversary, so what better time than to rank the Call of Duty Black Ops titles? Here's our ranking of every mainline version.

Amazon's Black Friday sales event starts Friday, Nov. 22. Kurt the CyberGuy offers some tips on how to get the best deals on merchandise.

The ongoing saga of the BlackCat/AlphV ransomware gang continues, with a news report that the crew has shut down its servers after a controversial hack of an American healthcare services provider. Bleeping Computer says the gang’s data leak blog shut on Friday and the sites it uses to negotiate ransom payments closed today. This comes […]

Its latest roadmap suggests that if you want white fans, you should wait for an announcement in Q1 2022.

Azerbaijan next week will garner much of the attention of the climate tech world, and not just because it will host COP29, the United Nation’s giant annual climate change conference. The country is promoting a grand, multi-nation plan to generate renewable electricity in the Caucasus region and send it thousands of kilometers west, under the Black Sea, and into energy–hungry Europe.

The transcontinental connection would start with wind, solar, and hydropower generated in Azerbaijan and Georgia, and off-shore wind power generated in the Caspian Sea. Long-distance lines would carry up to 1.5 gigawatts of clean electricity to Anaklia, Georgia, at the east end of the Black Sea. An undersea cable would move the electricity across the Black Sea and deliver it to Constanta, Romania, where it could be distributed further into Europe.

The scheme’s proponents say this Caspian-Black Sea energy corridor will help decrease global carbon emissions, provide dependable power to Europe, modernize developing economies at Europe’s periphery, and stabilize a region shaken by war. Organizers hope to build the undersea cable within the next six years at an estimated cost of €3.5 billion (US $3.8 billion).

To accomplish this, the governments of the involved countries must quickly circumvent a series of technical, financial, and political obstacles. “It’s a huge project,” says Zviad Gachechiladze, a director at Georgian State Electrosystem, the agency that operates the country’s electrical grid, and one of the architects of the Caucasus green-energy corridor. “To put it in operation [by 2030]—that’s quite ambitious, even optimistic,” he says.

Black Sea Cable to Link Caucasus and Europe

The technical lynchpin of the plan falls on the successful construction of a high voltage direct current (HVDC) submarine cable in the Black Sea. It’s a formidable task, considering that it would stretch across nearly 1,200 kilometers of water, most of which is over 2 km deep, and, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, littered with floating mines. By contrast, the longest existing submarine power cable—the North Sea Link—carries 1.4 GW across 720 km between England and Norway, at depths of up to 700 meters.

As ambitious as Azerbaijan’s plans sound, longer undersea connections have been proposed. The Australia-Asia PowerLink project aims to produce 6 GW at a vast solar farm in Northern Australia and send about a third of it to Singapore via a 4,300-km undersea cable. The Morocco-U.K. Power Project would send 3.6 GW over 3,800 km from Morocco to England. A similar attempt by Desertec to send electricity from North Africa to Europe ultimately failed.

Building such cables involves laying and stitching together lengths of heavy submarine power cables from specialized ships—the expertise for which lies with just two companies in the world. In an assessment of the Black Sea project’s feasibility, the Milan-based consulting and engineering firm CESI determined that the undersea cable could indeed be built, and estimated that it could carry up to 1.5 GW—enough to supply over 2 million European households.

But to fill that pipe, countries in the Caucasus region would have to generate much more green electricity. For Georgia, that will mostly come from hydropower, which already generates over 80 percent of the nation’s electricity. “We are a hydro country. We have a lot of untapped hydro potential,” says Gachechiladze.

Azerbaijan and Georgia Plan Green Energy Corridor

Generating hydropower can also generate opposition, because of the way dams alter rivers and landscapes. “There were some cases when investors were not able to construct power plants because of opposition of locals or green parties” in Georgia, says Salome Janelidze, a board member at the Energy Training Center, a Georgian government agency that promotes and educates around the country’s energy sector.

“It was definitely a problem and it has not been totally solved,” says Janelidze. But “to me it seems it is doable,” she says. “You can procure and construct if you work closely with the local population and see them as allies rather than adversaries.”

For Azerbaijan, most of the electricity would be generated by wind and solar farms funded by foreign investment. Masdar, the renewable-energy developer of the United Arab Emirates government, has been investing heavily in wind power in the country. In June, the company broke ground on a trio of wind and solar projects with 1 GW capacity. It intends to develop up to 9 GW more in Azerbaijan by 2030. ACWA Power, a Saudi power-generation company, plans to complete a 240-MW solar plant in the Absheron and Khizi districts of Azerbaijan next year and has struck a deal with the Azerbaijani Ministry of Energy to install up to 2.5 GW of offshore and onshore wind.

CESI is currently running a second study to gauge the practicality of the full breadth of the proposed energy corridor—from the Caspian Sea to Europe—with a transmission capacity of 4 to 6 GW. But that beefier interconnection will likely remain out of reach in the near term. “By 2030, we can’t claim our region will provide 4 GW or 6 GW,” says Gachechiladze. “1.3 is realistic.”

COP29: Azerbaijan’s Renewable Energy Push

Signs of political support have surfaced. In September, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania, and Hungary created a joint venture, based in Romania, to shepherd the project. Those four countries in 2022 inked a memorandum of understanding with the European Union to develop the energy corridor.

The involved countries are in the process of applying for the cable to be selected as an EU “project of mutual interest,” making it an infrastructure priority for connecting the union with its neighbors. If selected, “the project could qualify for 50 percent grant financing,” says Gachechiladze. “It’s a huge budget. It will improve drastically the financial condition of the project.” The commissioner responsible for EU enlargement policy projected that the union would pay an estimated €2.3 billion ($2.5 billion) toward building the cable.

Whether next week’s COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, will help move the plan forward remains to be seen. In preparation for the conference, advocates of the energy corridor have been taking international journalists on tours of the country’s energy infrastructure.

Looming over the project are the security issues threaten to thwart it. Shipping routes in the Black Sea have become less dependable and safe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To the south, tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan remain after the recent war and ethnic violence.

In order to improve relations, many advocates of the energy corridor would like to include Armenia. “The cable project is in the interests of Georgia, it’s in the interests of Armenia, it’s in the interests of Azerbaijan,” says Agha Bayramov, an energy geopolitics researcher at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. “It might increase the chance of them living peacefully together. Maybe they’ll say, ‘We’re responsible for European energy. Let’s put our egos aside.’”

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, whose country is hosting the COP29 climate summit this week, lashed out at Western media and climate activists on Tuesday for criticizing his country’s oil and gas industries.

The post U.N. Climate Summit Host Azerbaijan: Fossil Fuels a ‘Gift from God,’ Environmentalists Engaging in ‘Blackmail’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Breitbart News exclusively on Tuesday evening that she is supporting Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) for Senate GOP leader in the upcoming vote on Wednesday morning in the Senate GOP conference.

The post Exclusive—Marsha Blackburn Backs Rick Scott for Senate GOP Leader appeared first on Breitbart.

Credit the franchise's popularity, sure—but also its ludicrous file sizes.

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Jason, 84, said senior actors had a ‘tremendous amount to offer’