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Elon Musk says he withheld Starlink over Crimea to avoid escalation

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Elon Musk has stated that he refused Kyiv’s request for access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea to avoid being complicit in what he viewed as a significant act of war. Kyiv had urgently requested to activate Starlink in Sevastopol, a major Russian naval port. This decision came to light following claims in a biography by Walter Isaacson that Musk had deactivated Starlink to thwart a drone attack on Russian ships, which a senior Ukrainian official argued allowed Russian attacks on civilians.

According to the official, Musk’s refusal to allow Ukrainian drones to use Starlink led to Russian naval vessels launching Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. The official questioned why some people were defending Musk’s actions, which he deemed as promoting evil and assisting war criminals.

The controversy emerged alongside the release of Walter Isaacson’s biography, which suggested that Musk had deactivated Starlink in Ukraine due to concerns that an ambush of Russia’s naval fleet in Crimea could trigger a nuclear response from Russia. Ukrainian forces had reportedly targeted Russian ships in Sevastopol with submarine drones carrying explosives, but they lost connection to Starlink, resulting in the drones washing ashore harmlessly. Starlink terminals connect to SpaceX satellites and have played a crucial role in maintaining internet connectivity in Ukraine amid the conflict.

Musk countered the book’s claims by stating that SpaceX had not deactivated anything, as Starlink had not been activated in those regions to begin with. He explained that there was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol, with the clear intention of sinking most of the Russian fleet at anchor. Musk believed that complying with this request would make SpaceX explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.

Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former prime minister, supported Musk’s stance, suggesting that Musk was the last reasonable mind in North America if Isaacson’s account was accurate.

In the past, Musk had emphasized that Starlink was not intended for use in wars and had been primarily designed to provide internet access for peaceful purposes, such as education and entertainment. He called for a truce, expressing his belief that Ukrainians and Russians were sacrificing their lives for small pieces of land, which he considered not worth the cost of human lives.

Musk had previously generated controversy by proposing a plan to end the conflict, which included recognizing Crimea as part of Russia and allowing residents of seized regions to vote on their preferred country. This proposal received criticism from figures like Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who called it morally flawed.

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Anne Perry: Murderer turned crime writer dies aged 84

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Anne Perry, a crime author, who was convicted for helping to murder her friend’s mother when she was 15, has passed away at the age of 84. Perry served five years in prison for bludgeoning Honorah Mary Parker to death in 1954 in Christchurch, New Zealand.

She was known as Juliet Hulme at the time and later adopted the name Anne Perry as her pen name for her writing career. Perry’s declining health had been ongoing for several months after suffering a heart attack in December.

Her agent confirmed her death, which was the inspiration for Peter Jackson’s 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures, featuring Kate Winslet. The murder plot was discovered through journals found by the police.

Honorah Mary Parker was bludgeoned to death with a brick about 20 times, and during the trial, it was revealed that the two teenage girls had planned the murder to avoid separation when Perry’s parents were sending her abroad.

Perry, who was 16 at the time, was supposed to go to South Africa to live with relatives, and the girls believed that Parker’s mother would interfere with their plan. As both girls were under 18 years old at the time of the murder, they were not eligible for the death penalty and were sentenced to prison instead.

Anne Perry was born in Blackheath, London, in October 1938, and after moving to the Bahamas at eight years old, she settled in New Zealand. She had a difficult childhood due to illness, and as a result, she missed a lot of school and was fostered. After her release from prison for her involvement in the murder, Perry returned to the UK and briefly worked as a flight attendant.

She later converted to Mormonism and lived in a small Scottish village called Portmahomack. Perry’s writing career started with the publication of her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman, in 1979. She authored numerous novels that were part of different series and sold 25 million copies worldwide.

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Filippo Bernardini: Italian admits stealing unpublished books

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A man from Italy has admitted to stealing over 1,000 unpublished manuscripts, many of which were written by well-known authors. Filippo Bernardini pretended to be prominent members of the publishing community to dupe people into turning over their work.

He made advantage of his insider knowledge of the business from his time working for Simon & Schuster, a major publisher in London. Although Bernardini, 30, admitted to wire fraud in New York, his motivation was never made explicit.

Neither manuscripts nor demands for ransom were discovered to have been leaked online. The FBI detained Bernardini in January of last year, and his conviction looks to put an end to a mystery that has perplexed the literary community for years, with novelists like Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, and Sally Rooney among those targeted.

From 2016, according to the prosecution, he registered more than 160 phoney internet domains.

In order to obtain manuscripts of books by authors including Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood, phishing scams using slightly altered official-looking email accounts were used to target agents, editors, and Booker Prize judges.

Atwood said there had been “concerted attempts to steal the manuscript” of her book The Testaments before it was published in a 2019 interview with The Bookseller.

“There were lots of phoney emails from people trying to winkle even just three pages, even just anything,” she noted.

Daniel Sandström, editor of Swedish publisher Albert Bonniers Förlag, who was among those targeted, said it was difficult to know what the motivation for the scam was.

“The literary answer to that question, I think, I mean somebody was doing it for the thrill of it and there’s a psychological enigma at the bottom of this story,” he told the BBC.

“A less romanticised answer would be that… this was somebody who liked to feel important and pulling strings, and that this was a trick in order to achieve that.”

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Annie Ernaux: ‘Uncompromising’ French author wins Nobel Literature Prize

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The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to French author Annie Ernaux for her “uncompromising” 50-year body of work that examines “a life marked by vast discrepancies regarding gender, language, and class.”

The coveted award, which is worth 10 million Swedish kronor (£807,000), is given out by the Swedish Academy. It was “a huge honour,” she remarked.

The committee’s leader, Professor Carl-Henrik Heldin, praised the 82-year-work old’s as “admirable and enduring.”

In her semi-autobiographical works, he claimed she employed “courage and clinical clarity” to expose “the inconsistencies of social experience [and] convey shame, humiliation, jealousy, or the inability to know who you are.”

Her books, including A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, are considered to be contemporary classics in France.

Ernaux is the first French woman to win the literature prize, and told Swedish broadcaster SVT it was “a responsibility”.

“I was very surprised… I never thought it would be on my landscape as a writer,” she said. “It is a great responsibility… to testify, not necessarily in terms of my writing, but to testify with accuracy and justice in relation to the world.”

Over the course of her 20 novels, “she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life,” The New Yorker stated in 2020.

Since 1901, the Nobel Prizes have recognised excellence in literature, science, peace, and, more recently, economics. Abdulrazak Gurnah, a novelist from Tanzania, received the literary award the previous year.

Other winners have included playwrights Harold Pinter and Eugene O’Neill, as well as novelists Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison, poets Louise Gluck, Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky, and Rabindranath Tagore, and novelists Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison.

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Some Russians’ songs will be banned in Ukraine’s media and public venues

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The Ukrainian parliament has approved a ban on some Russian music in the media and public venues. The prohibition will not apply to all Russian music; rather, it will apply to music made or performed by Russian residents or those who lived in Russia after 1991.

Artists who have spoken out against Russia’s war in Ukraine may be excluded from the ban. The Act also makes it illegal to import books from Russia and Belarus. Many people in eastern and southern Ukraine have long felt a deep bond with Russia, and many of them speak Russian as their first tongue.

However, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many Ukrainians have expressed a desire to distance themselves from Russian culture.

Some Russian music is prohibited from being aired or performed on television, radio, schools, public transportation, hotels, restaurants, cinemas, and other public venues, according to a measure voted by MPs on Sunday. It received 303 of the 450 lawmakers in the Ukrainian parliament’s approval.

According to BBC Monitoring, the paper claims that the ban will “minimise the risks of possible hostile propaganda through music in Ukraine” and “raise the volume of national music products in the cultural arena.” Except for individuals who are Ukrainian nationals or were at the time of their death, the prohibition will apply to musicians who have or had Russian citizenship at any time after 1991, the year Ukraine declared independence.

By submitting an application to Ukraine’s security service, Russian artists who oppose the war in Ukraine might request an exemption for their songs. According to the BBC’s Ukrainian Service, they must affirm that they support Ukraine’s sovereignty and integrity, call on Russia to immediately cease its aggression against Ukraine, and promise not to take any actions that contradict these written remarks.

According to Ukraine’s official broadcaster (Suspilne), the document also includes legislation to boost the share of Ukrainian music aired on the radio to 40% and to expand the use of Ukrainian in daily programmes to 75%.In a bill that runs concurrently with the one regulating music, books imported from Russia, Belarus, and the occupied Ukrainian territory, as well as Russian-language material imported from other nations, will be prohibited.

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The Eagle Has Landed author, Henry Patterson, died at 92 years

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The best-selling author of The Eagle Has Landed, Henry Patterson, has died at the age of 92, according to his publisher.

Between 1959 and 2017, Patterson, who began writing as a teacher, published 85 novels. Patterson died at his Jersey home, surrounded by family, according to HarperCollins. The Eagle Has Landed, a novel written under the pseudonym Jack Higgins about a Nazi plot to kidnap Sir Winston Churchill during World War II, sold more than 50 million copies and was adapted into a film. Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, and Sir Michael Caine starred in the 1976 adaptation.

Patterson’s other works include Comes the Dark Stranger, Hell is Too Crowded, and To Catch a King, and he has sold over 250 million books in his career. Patterson grew up in Belfast before moving to Leeds. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. After becoming a teacher, he wrote novels in his spare time and received a £75 advance for his first novel, Sad Wind from the Sea, in 1959.

His final book, The Midnight Bell, was a Sunday Times bestseller when it was released in 2017. HarperCollins stated that by the time his last novel was published, he was simply referred to as “the legend.”

Patterson’s novels “were and remain absolutely unputdownable,” according to HarperCollins CEO Charlie Redmayne, who described him as a “classic thriller writer: instinctive, tough, relentless.”

“I had the privilege of being at Collins Publishers when we received the manuscript of The Eagle has Landed,” Patterson’s literary agent Jonathan Lloyd said.

“With rare certainty, we all knew we’d be publishing an instant classic.”

Patterson is survived by his wife, Denise, and four children from his first marriage: Sarah, Ruth, Sean, and Hannah.

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