Whmovie News: reports on the latest developments in the World,World news, the latest hot news, hot news events, Fashion news, and celebrity news

Russia’s Minister of Transport reportedly killed himself just hours after being fired by President Vladimir Putin, according to the country’s state-run news agency, which cited the national Investigative Committee. A second senior Transport Ministry official reportedly died soon after, for reasons which remain unclear.

Roman Starovoy fatally shot himself Monday in his car in Odintsovo, a city west of Moscow, according to a statement from the committee that was reported by Russia’s TASS news agency.

“The circumstances of the incident are being established,” TASS cited the Investigative Committee as saying. “The main hypothesis is suicide.”

Forbes Russia reported that Starovoy, 53, died “presumably overnight between Saturday and Sunday,” citing an anonymous source close to state investigators. It was not possible to explain the discrepancy between the times of death reported by Forbes and the official Russian media.

Putin had dismissed Starovoy just hours earlier, according to a decree published by the Kremlin. No official reason was given, but ongoing Ukranian drone attacks on Russia caused chaos for air traffic in the country over the weekend, prompting the cancellation of hundreds of flights and stranding passengers.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed to have intercepted at least 120 drones over 10 different regions of the country between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Officials in Ukraine, meanwhile, said Monday that at least 11 civilians were killed and more than 80 others injured, including seven children, in Russian drone attacks. Russia has intensified its missile and drone strikes, including many that hit civilian areas, in recent days.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday that over the past week alone, Russia had launched about 1,270 drones, 39 missiles and nearly 1,000 glide bombs at Ukraine.

Starovoy became Russia’s Transport Minister in 2024, before which he was the governor of the Kursk region on the border with Ukraine.

Another official reportedly “stood up sharply… and fell dead”

Soon after Starovoy’s death was reported by Russian media, a lower-ranking official whose job fell within the remit of the Transport Ministry, 42-year-old Andrei Korneichuk, was said to have died suddenly during a meeting.

At his office in eastern Moscow, Korneichuk, who was the deputy head of the Federal Road Agency’s Land Fund Department, “stood up sharply during a meeting and fell dead,” according to the SHOT news outlet, which is said to be close to the military.

“The medics could not help him,” SHOT added. The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta said at least two other Russian government-linked news outlets had reported the same basic details.

The preliminary cause of death was determined to be cardiac arrest, according to the media outlets cited by the Gazeta.

The two deaths come just days after that of the vice-president of Russian state oil company Transneft.

The body of Andrei Badalov, 62, was found “beneath the window of a house” in western Moscow on Friday, TASS cited law enforcement officials as saying. The state news agency said he had written a farewell message to his wife.

The cases are just the latest in a string of high-profile, powerful Russians dying suddenly, often in apparent falls from windows or other incidents.

For paleontologist Ben Kligman, the question was: Is this fragile jawbone a pterosaur or not?

Other researchers also had questions about the fossil, unearthed along with thousands of others during a decades-long archaeological dig at a remote bone bed in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Some thought the bone could’ve been a mammal, Kligman told CBS News.

Now, their new research offers insight into North America’s oldest known flying reptile that Kligman and other paleontologists say was the size of a “small seagull.”

The Smithsonian-led paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, details the new pterosaur fossil discovery along with several others, providing insight into the late Triassic period.

Kligman remembers looking at the jawbone under a microscope at the Smithsonian — where he is a Peter Buck postdoctoral fellow and where the fossil had been sent — and running through his “Rolodex” of Triassic jaw anatomy, thinking about what species could have a similar jaw. He wanted to solve the mystery of where the delicate jawbone belonged.

Through the process of elimination, and thinking of the features pterosaurs have that no other animal has, Kligman said he and other researchers were able to conclude that, “Oh yeah, this is definitely a pterosaur — therefore, this is a very important discovery.”

The team named the pterosaur the Eotephradactylus mcintireae, which means “ash-winged dawn goddess.” The species name references its discoverer, Suzanne McIntire, who volunteered in the Smithsonian’s FossiLab for 18 years.

McIntire discovered the pterosaur fossil, which had been brought to the museum from the Petrified Forest National Park along with 1,200 other individual fossils, including bones, teeth, fish scales and coprolites, or fossilized excrement.

Volunteers painstakingly clean each fossil, flag ones of interest and perform other fossil conservation tasks. McIntire unearthed the jawbone and noticed the teeth were still in the bone, making it easier to identify.

The winged reptile — a close cousin of dinosaurs and the first animals after insects to evolve powered flight — would’ve been small enough to comfortably perch on a person’s shoulder.

“It could’ve sat on your shoulder, like a small seagull,” Kligman said of the species.

Researchers were able to date the fossil back to 209.2 million years ago — an unusually precise date, Kligman said, because of the level of volcanic ash where the fossil was found. The finding helps fill in a gap in the fossil record that predates the end-Triassic extinction, he said. Very few pterosaur fossils exist, Kligman said. After their extinction, their fragile bones preserved poorly, so pterosaur fossils are frequently incomplete. They also did not live close to places where fossils tend to form.

“It helps us understand what a pterosaur was and how they became what they would become,” Kligman said.

Along with the pterosaur, the study also detailed other findings, including one of the world’s oldest turtle fossils, giant amphibians and armored crocodile relatives, which lived alongside evolutionary upstarts like frogs, turtles and pterosaurs.