Several hundred Russian troops reportedly rushed to a special medical facility in Belarus after digging in radioactive soil in a forest near the infamous nuclear plant.
Barbie Latza Nadeau
Correspondent-At-Large
SeanGallup
Several hundred Russian soldiers were forced to hastily withdraw from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine after suffering “acute radiation sickness” from contaminated soil, according to Ukrainian officials.
The troops, who dug trenches in a contaminated Red Forest near the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, are now reportedly being treated in a special medical facility in Gomel, Belarus. The forest is so named because thousands of pine trees turned red during the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area is considered so highly toxic that not even highly specialized Chernobyl workers are allowed to enter the zone.
Energoatom, the Ukrainian agency in charge of the country’s nuclear power stations, said the Russian soldiers had panicked and fled.
“It has been confirmed that the occupiers who seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and other facilities in the Exclusion Zone set off in two columns towards Ukraine’s border with Belarus. The occupiers announced their intentions to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant this morning to the Ukrainian personnel of the station,” the agency said in a statement on Telegram, adding that a small number of Russians still remained at the facility.
The agency said it had also confirmed reports of Russian forces digging trenches in the Red Forest, “the most polluted in the entire exclusion zone.”
“Not surprisingly, the occupiers received significant doses of radiation and panicked at the first sign of illness. And it showed up very quickly.”
Local reports suggest that seven buses with the zapped troops arrived in Gomel early Thursday. Journalists on the ground have also reported “ghost buses” of dead soldiers being transported from Belarus to Russia under the cover of dark.
U.S. intelligence reported Wednesday that Russian forces began withdrawing from the defunct site. Russia said the withdrawal from Chernobyl was part of a pledge to scale back the invasion. But Ukrainian media says it is actually because the troops were “irradiated” from the contaminated soil.
“Another batch of Russian irradiated terrorists who seized the Chernobyl zone was brought to the Belarusian Radiation Medicine Center in Gomel today,” Yaroslav Yemelianenko, who works for the Public Council at the State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management, posted on Facebook. “There are rules for dealing with this territory.”
The Chernobyl facility fell to Russian control on Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion. Workers were on duty for more than 600 hours before being allowed a shift change. International concern grew immediately when Russian troops moved heavy military hardware through the area, kicking up radioactive dust without any protective equipment. Forest fires in the area also raised concern about environmental contamination.
Digging trenches in the forest—considered the most contaminated area of the site—drew widespread ridicule from Ukrainians who work at the site.
As the Russian president signs a decree to call up another 134,500 conscripts, his troops in Ukraine want out.
Allison Quinn
News Editor
Reuters
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is calling up another 134,500 conscripts even as more and more of his own soldiers appear to be turning on him over humiliating losses in Ukraine.
According to a decree published on a Russian government portal Thursday, the troops will be called to begin service on April 1 until July 15. The Defense Ministry promised earlier this week that they “will not be sent to any hot spots,” and that all those called up in last spring’s draft will be sent home.
But those assurances seem likely to be overshadowed by a multitude of reports that say Russia’s senseless war against Ukraine has been marred by lies from the top down, with Russian troops claiming they were misled into the war and Putin’s own advisers said to be shielding him from the extent of the devastating losses.
Even as Putin signed the decree on Thursday, Ukraine’s Security Service released an intercepted call said to capture a Russian soldier railing against the incompetence of his own army.
“Our brigade has totally shit themselves. There are losses, many wounded,” he tells his wife.
Asked if the losses are a result of someone screwing up, he offers a blunt response: “The whole army with us is stupid morons.”
“It’s unclear why we are even here,” he says.
Another recording shared by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, captures a man identified as a Russian soldier named Maksim asking his mother what is being shown on Russian television, and if there are reports “they’re saying they will change anything.”
“Everything’s bad, almost no one among us is left. They said we will keep going until the very end, until everyone is killed,” he tells his mother.
Asked if his senior officer was still with the unit, he replies: “No, he dumped us yesterday. We’re all dead in the water if he left.”
The new recordings come just hours after Western officials said there was growing evidence of disarray and disillusionment among Russian troops, with Britain’s spy chief citing reports of troops “refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.”
It was against this backdrop that Russian defense officials claimed they would cut down hostilities around the Ukrainian capital and shift their focus instead to the east of the country—an announcement met with mockery and skepticism among Ukrainian officials, who said the Kremlin was trying to spin their numerous setbacks into a “mission accomplished” scenario.
Perhaps as part of that long game, the Kremlin has now reportedly begun implementing plans to send psychologists from the FSB into Kherson, a city in the south of Ukraine where residents continue to resist the Russian forces who took over after the Feb. 24 invasion.
“To implement a scenario for the creation of another pseudo-republic in the territory of the Kherson region, there is work underway by employees of the FSB, 652 groups of information and psychological operations and officers of the 12th Main Directorate of the [Russian] General Staff,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a statement Thursday.
Ukrainian officials said the FSB effort is an attempt to brainwash residents into supporting their new Russian authorities.
Russian law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges are also said to be on their way to occupied territories in Ukraine, with reports of Russian police officers being asked to take “business trips” to parts of the Donbas in Ukraine’s east.
Catherine and his cousin Carla, Guevedoces in the Dominican Republic
The discovery of a small community in the Dominican Republic, where some males are born looking like girls and only grow penises at puberty, has led to the development of a blockbuster drug that has helped millions of people, writes Michael Mosley.
Johnny lives in a small town in the Dominican Republic where he, and others like him, are known as “Guevedoces”, which effectively translates as “penis at twelve”.
We came across Johnny when we were filming for a new BBC Two series Countdown to Life, which looks at how we develop in the womb and how those changes, normal and abnormal, impact us later in life.
Like the other Guevedoces, Johnny was brought up as a girl because he had no visible testes or penis and what appeared to be a vagina. It is only when he approached puberty that his penis grew and testicles descended.
Johnny, once known as Felicita, remembers going to school in a little red dress, though he says he was never happy doing girl things.
Find out more
Watch the second episode of Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You, Against the Odds, on BBC Two at 21:00 on Monday 21 September, or catch up afterwards on iPlayer.
“I never liked to dress as a girl and when they bought me toys for girls I never bothered playing with them – when I saw a group of boys I would stop to play ball with them.”
When he became obviously male he was taunted at school, and responded with his fists.
“They used to say I was a devil, nasty things, bad words and I had no choice but to fight them because they were crossing the line.”
We also filmed with Carla, who at the age of seven is on the brink of changing into Carlos. His mother has seen the change coming for quite a while.
“When she turned five I noticed that whenever she saw one of her male friends she wanted to fight with him. Her muscles and chest began growing. You could see she was going to be a boy. I love her however she is. Girl or boy, it makes no difference.”
So why does it happen? Well, one of the first people to study this unusual condition was Dr Julianne Imperato-McGinley, from Cornell Medical College in New York. In the 1970s she made her way to this remote part of the Dominican Republic, drawn by extraordinary reports of girls turning into boys.
When she got there she found the rumours were true. She did lots of studies on the Guevedoces (including what must have been rather painful biopsies of their testicles) before finally unravelling the mystery of what was going on.
When you are conceived you normally have a pair of X chromosomes if you are to become a girl and a set of XY chromosomes if you are destined to be male.
For the first weeks of life in womb you are neither, though in both sexes nipples start to grow.
Then, around eight weeks after conception, the sex hormones kick in. If you’re genetically male the Y chromosome instructs your gonads to become testicles and sends testosterone to a structure called the tubercle, where it is converted into a more potent hormone called dihydro-testosterone This in turn transforms the tubercle into a penis. If you’re female and you don’t make dihydro-testosterone then your tubercle becomes a clitoris.
When Imperato-McGinley investigated the Guevedoces she discovered the reason they don’t have male genitalia when they are born is because they are deficient in an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase, which normally converts testosterone into dihydro-testosterone.
This deficiency seems to be a genetic condition, quite common in this part of the Dominican Republic, but vanishingly rare elsewhere. So the boys, despite having an XY chromosome, appear female when they are born. At puberty, like other boys, they get a second surge of testosterone. This time the body does respond and they sprout muscles, testes and a penis.
Imperato-McGinley’s thorough medical investigations showed that in most cases their new, male equipment seems to work fine and that most Guevedoces live out their lives as men, though some go through an operation and remain female.
Another thing that Imperato-McGinley discovered, which would have profound implications for many men around the world, was that the Guevedoces tend to have small prostates.
This observation, made in 1974, was picked up by Roy Vagelos, head of research at the multinational pharmaceutical giant, Merck. He thought this was extremely interesting and set in progress research which led to the development of what has become a best-selling drug, finasteride, which blocks the action of 5-alpha-reductase, mimicking the lack of dihydro-testosterone seen in the Guevedoces.
My wife, who is a GP, routinely prescribes finasteride as it is an effective way to treat benign enlargement of the prostate, a real curse for many men as they get older. Finasteride is also used to treat male pattern baldness.
This is still a controversial topic and one I explore later in the film when I meet Mati, who decided from the earliest age that though “he” looked like a boy, Mati was really a girl.
As for Johnny, since he developed male genitalia he has had a number of short term girlfriends, but he is still looking for love. “I’d like to get married and have children, a partner who will stand by me through good and bad,” he sighs wistfully.
More from the Magazine
The number of children aged 10 and under who have been referred to NHS support services to help deal with transgender feelings has more than quadrupled in the last six years, the Victoria Derbyshire programme has learned. Here is the story of two of the youngest transgender children in the UK – with permission from their parents and with the support of the children’s schools.
Texas Congressman Pete Sessions (R) appeared on a far-right podcast where he embraced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
Sessions was speaking with Stew Peters, a right-wing shock jock who has been de-platformed by Spotify and Apple after pushing coronavirus conspiracy theories, calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s execution, and participating in the recent white nationalist conference led by Nick Fuentes.
The replacement theory is a conspiracy espoused by white nationalists who claim Democrats want to fundamentally transform American by “replacing” the white population through a combination of immigration and asymmetric birthrates.
GOP Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas appeared Monday on”The Stew Peters Show,” where he agreed with Peters’ assertion that the “Democrat Party embraces racism against white people.”
Sessions went on to complain about an unnamed “white student” who is captain of the football team and “scored a perfect score of 36 on his SAT” and has been deferred by every Ivy League school to which he has applied.
“He’s being deferred by every single one of these schools.” Sessions griped. “And it makes you wonder whether education has caught on also on being woke.”
Sessions memorably appeared on JMG in 2016 when he claimed that Orlando’s Pulse nightclub wasn’t really a gay venue because “it was mostly Latinos” who were murdered. Watch the clip.
Far-right broadcaster Stew Peters promoted the white nationalist "great replacement" conspiracy theory and then got GOP Rep. Pete Sessions to agree that "the modern Democrat Party embraces racism against white people." https://t.co/mj89j4NEM0pic.twitter.com/n4vkA5THTo
Oklahoma GOP U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Markwayne Mullin Tuesday is introducing a resolution to expunge former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment – saying Democrats didn’t prove “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Mullin’s nine-page resolution, if passed by the House, would declare “expunged” Trump’s 2019 impeachment over allegedly leveraging U.S. military aid to Ukraine for political favors involving investigations of the Bidens.
It accused Democrats of “flippantly exercising one of the gravest and most consequential powers with which the House of Representatives is charged.”
Mullin is seeking to replace retiring GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe and Trump has not yet made an endorsement in that race.
Mullin, a former MMA fighter, last appeared on JMG in September 2021 when he threatened US Embassy staff who objected to his mission to personally rescue five US citizens in Afghanistan.
I’ve introduced a resolution to expunge the first impeachment of President Trump. The entire charade was an unimaginable abuse of our Constitution & exactly what our Founders warned against. We must restore credibility to the process. Let’s make it right.https://t.co/i2LSgEDDoM
Wild story: A Republican congressman has been asking US diplomats for help moving large amounts of cash to fund an amateur helicopter rescue mission into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Former President Donald Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release dirt on President Joe Biden amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In an interview with Just the News founder John Solomon published on Tuesday, Trump reiterated his unproven claim that Yelena Baturina, a Russian oligarch and the wife of former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, gave $3.5 million to a business that Hunter Biden, a son of Joe Biden, helped found.
“She gave him $3.5 million so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that,” said Trump. “I think he should release it. I think we should know that answer.”
“How is it that the mayor of Moscow, his wife gave the Biden family three and a half million dollars?” he added. “I think Putin now would be willing to probably give that answer. I’m sure he knows.”
This is not the first time Trump has called on Russia to release damaging information on a political rival. While running for president in 2016, Trump called on Moscow to release the hacked emails of then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Additionally in the interview, Trump remarked, “I’m the best thing that ever happened to NATO, because I made them pay. So NATO has plenty of money now.
“And by the way, that’s another, I’m the one who brought up Nord Stream 2 … . I’m the one that blocked it. I terminated it. They weren’t gonna have it. [Biden] then opened it.”
While Biden did waive sanctions against Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, in 2021, he implemented them last month following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Trump claimed Yury Luzhkov gave $3.5 billion to a business Hunter Biden helped found. The claim holds Luzhkov gave $3.5 million.
It’s “Russia if you’re listening” all over again, and essentially makes good on what he told @GStephanopoulos before the 2020 election: he’d be happy to collude with any foreign government if it’d help him win a U.S. election. pic.twitter.com/V33tWb19mC
Use tax revenues to rebuild America. Increase tax rates on the uber-wealthy for poisoning our society for decades with their greed.
Republicans and conservatives have created a world where all their crimes go unmentioned on their own media. Then those crimes are projected in their rivals.
The Republicans tried to have a gotcha moment and a sound bite for right wing media. KBJ did not give it to them as she is far smarter than they are. But her answer was true, legally what a woman is doesn’t follow what the average maga cult member thinks a woman is. For them if it has inside sex parts if is female. That is their criteria. They go on looks, it is pretty and has boobs so much be a woman. That stupidity I thought was long behind us, but the education system in the US has been hijacked to promote right wing ideology instead of reasoning and research.
The right wing wants you to think that what Biden said was a gaff. I don’t think it was. I think it was planned, and so was the statements afterwords. Biden got to put a lot of emotion, a lot of outrage into the speech exciting the world and getting people talking about what he was saying without doing any real harm. Biden gets to look tough, look morally angry at the harm to the people. He looked good, and that the right hates.
Do you ever notice that right after tRump gives an off the wall outrageous speech or sends out a crazy press release the right wing media immediately tries to portray Biden as out of touch and as a doddering old man. I think it is more right wing projection.
Putin, who sent death squads into a neighboring country to assassinate their leader whilst simultaneously invading that country without provocation, is sure having a hissy fit because someone said something to offend his fragile ego. The Republicans are getting nervous because Biden is saying some of the things that they expect a Republican to say and it may play well with part of their base.
Scottie's Playtime 