Unlike the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the SVR does intelligence and espionage activities outside the Russian Federation. It works with the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate {the GRU), its military-affairs espionage counterpart. The SVR is also negotiates anti-terrorist cooperation and intelligence-sharing arrangements with foreign intelligence agencies. It gives analysis and dissemination of intelligence to the Russian president.
SVR RF is the official foreign-operations successor to many Soviet-era foreign intelligence agencies, from the original 'foreign department' of the Cheka under Vladimir Lenin, to the OGPU and NKVD of the Stalinist era, followed by the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.
Blanching (cooking)
Blanching is a cooking process in which a food, usually a vegetable or fruit, is scalded in boiling water, removed after a short timed break, and then dropped into cold water to stop the cooking process. Blanching foods helps reduce the loss of quality over time.
People usually use blanching to treat food before freezing, drying, or canning—heating vegetables or fruits to inactivate enzymes, change texture and remove the peel. Blanching is also used to preserve color, flavor, and nutritional value. The benefits of blanching include removing pesticide residues and killing of microorganisms. The disadvantages of blanching can include leaching of nutrients that dissolves in water and the production of effluent.
Blanching is a process mainly used to inactivate enzymes that cause browning as well as changes in texture and off-flavors. Blanching is used to peel fruits, vegetable, and nut as steam peeling produces less environmental pollution.
Blanching is also used to kill microorganisms, remove pesticide and toxic residues, surface cleaning, removing damaged seeds or foreign materials and killing parasites and their eggs.
Traditionally, blanching is done using either a water bath or saturated steam. In both methods, the food is heated for a short period of time and then dropped into either cold water or cold air to quickly stop the heating process. At the industrial level, foods move on a conveyor belt through preheating, holding, and cooling systems.
Steam blanching systems inject hot air onto food as it passes through the blanching system on a conveyor belt. This method reduces the leaching of water-soluble compounds from the product. It is more energy-efficient. This reduced heat exposure preserves color, flavor, and overall quality of the food.
Emerging technologies include ohmic, infrared, microwave, and radio frequency blanching.
Tthe times and temperatures are not enough to effectively destroy all microorganisms.
A limitation to hot water blanching is the leaching of water-soluble nutrients and the degradation of thermal sensitive compounds. Vitamins, minerals, and other water-soluble compounds, such as proteins, sugars, and flavor compounds, diffuse out of the food and into the water, lowering the overall quality of the food. The degree to which compounds diffuse out of food depends on the food's composition and characteristics, the water to food ratio, the blanching temperature, and other variables. Ascorbic acid, thiamin, and many aromatic compounds are heat-sensitive.
A complication in the food industry is the production of effluent from water blanching systems. Blanching with reused water can lead to a buildup of water-soluble compounds that are considered pollutants, and therefore must be properly treated before being discharged. This can increase capital costs at the industrial level and has been a main reason for the development of newer blanching technologies.
Sian Elias
Dame Sian Seerpoohi Elias (born 13 March 1949) is a New Zealand jurist. She served as the 12th Chief Justice of New Zealand from 1999 to 2019. She was the first woman to hold the position. She has also been the Administrator of the Government four times (2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016).
Elias was born in London. Her mother was Welsh and her father was of Armenian ancestry. In 1952, her family moved to New Zealand. They settled in Titirangi, Auckland. She married businessman Hugh Fletcher in 1970.
Perseus (spy)
Perseus was the code name of a hypothetical Soviet atomic spy that, if real, would have allegedly breached United States national security by infiltrating Los Alamos National Laboratory during the development of the Manhattan Project, and consequently, would have been instrumental for the Soviets in the development of nuclear weapons.
Among researchers of the subject there is some consensus that Perseus never existed and was actually a creation of Soviet intelligence.
A reference to the profile of a spy who can be identified with Perseus describes him as an American scientist of young age at the time of the Manhattan Project.
If they were real, Perseus would have supposedly participated in the Spanish Civil War.
In the early 1940s Perseus would have been in New York City visiting his sick parents. During his stay in that city, he would have managed to be recruited by the GRU after looking for and contacting Morris Cohen, an American who joined the Communist Party during the Great Depression and worked as a Soviet spy.
The meeting with Cohen must have been between September 1941 and July 1942, before Cohen enlisted in the army and left for the Western Front in Europe.
Perseus reportedly introduced himself to Cohen as a physicist who had been invited to join the work at Los Alamos research center. By 1942, Perseus was supposedly already working at Los Alamos, being that he would have started sometime at least 18 months before German physicist and also atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, who joined the investigation in mid-1944. However, Perseus appears to have been recruited by the Soviets around the same (or at least a nearby) time as Fuchs.
According to articles published in Russia by "The New Times", Perseus would have collaborated with the Soviet government for purely ideological reasons to the point that he refused any financial rewards in exchange for classified information, since he was convinced that the United States would use the atomic bomb against the Soviet Union, claiming that:
With Morris Cohen in Europe, his wife, Lona Cohen, took it upon herself to travel to Albuquerque on one or two occasions (depending on the source consulted) to serve as a carrier.
Once there, Lona Cohen would have received information allegedly directly from Perseus, and took it to the Soviet consul in New York, Anatoli Yatskov. This information allegedly included crucial details about the Trinity Test, which was detonated in July 1945.
In the 1950s, Perseus was supposedly under the control of Rudolf Abel.
According to one source, Perseus was supposedly still alive in 1991.
Perseus was also allegedly referred by or identified with the code names of «Mr. X», «Youngster», FOGEL, PERS and «Mlad».
This name is also given to a spy at White Sands Missile Range, located further south near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
In April 1991, KGB colonel and public relations officer Vladimir Chikov published articles in the Russian weekly "The New Times" in which he commented on the existence of a Russian spy who worked in the Manhattan project under the code name of Perseus, giving details of his recruitment and achievements.
Regarding the information published by Chikov in "The New Times", an article in The Washington Post comments:
In an interview published in 1992, the former Soviet consul in New York, Anatoli Yatskov, confirmed the existence of Perseus, as an important figure among scientists working on the Manhattan project.
During his tenure as consul, Yatskov used the pseudonym Anatoly Yakovlev and served as a Soviet intelligence agent, coordinating atomic spies in the United States.