News Burst 16 March 2020 – Live Feed

News Burst 16 March 2020

• Saved by the virus: The corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which was scheduled to start on Tuesday at Jerusalem District Court, will not be able to proceed and has been postponed until at least May 24. Earlier this week, the court rejected a request for a 45-day postponement of the trial, which Netanyahu’s defense team requested in order to get more time to review the evidence.

• A French report on Princess Diana’s death may be kept secret until 2082 due to an “obscure rule”, Article L.212-2 of the country’s heritage code, which states that certain documents should be kept secret from the public for 75 years from their completion date. The investigation was finished in 2007. A source, who had viewed part of the investigation dossier, told the Daily Star the decision “stinks of cover-up and conspiracy at the highest level and is typical of French bureaucracy”. Dodi Fayed’s father claimed the couple was murdered as the crash was planned.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has castigated the exorbitant salaries paid to the top management of public companies. “Honestly speaking, I find this annoying and preposterous. I agree,” Putin told in an interview for the project entitled “20 Questions with Vladimir Putin,” when asked whether he agreed that a public corporation’s status and its top management’s free market salaries were mismatched. Putin believes that to a certain extent this was a result of the general free market value of services provided by the managerial personnel of this level. “Many things are not as simple as they might look at first sight,” he said. He remarked that he had a discussion with some top managers on that score and they said that “they hire many foreign specialists, who work effectively and are worth something on the market, that is on the international labor market.” Putin explained that public companies had to hire them and pay them a wage equivalent to the cost of their services on the international labor market, while maintaining a certain gap between the level of incomes of bosses and their subordinates. He added that there was no place in the world where a boss was paid less than his subordinates. Putin drew a parallel with the salaries of military and civil aviation pilots, in particular, the situation where civil aviation pilots began to be paid better for the simple reason that airlines started hiring foreign personnel. “They were forced to hire foreign pilots, in particular, those with experience of flying Boeings and European planes. They had to raise their pay to meet European and US standards.” Currently, he said, military air pilots eagerly take the jobs of co-pilots, because in the Air Force they were paid less. “This distorted the labor market,” he noted.

• Greece on Friday placed 5-foot concrete blocks at its Kastanies border crossing with Turkey to stop the entry of asylum seekers. Interestingly, the dominant Syrian identity of the migrants has been widely questioned given video from the clashes often shows asylum-seekers speaking all kinds of regional languages from Pashtun to Urdu to Farsi, and not Syrian Arabic (Levantine dialect).

• It’s safe to say the new crisis just killed the Schengen Treaty. That ridiculous document which guaranteed freedom of movement across the European Union finally hit something it couldn’t bully, COVID-19. The lockdown of Italy isn’t a temporary thing. Oh, the suspension of free movement is temporary, but it portends something far bigger.

• German finance minister, Olaf Scholz, unleashed the full force of Germany’s sovereign wealth fund to offer unlimited support to German businesses facing troubles because of this virus. This is as good a cover story for the gargantuan holes in the balance sheets of zombie German banks as they were likely ever going to get.

• The former Trump team official Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to making “false and fraudulent statements” to the FBI regarding his contacts with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak in 2016. Despite this, he has still not been sentenced and has been attempting to withdraw his plea since mid-January 2020. US President Donald Trump slammed the FBI’s handling of the case and added that he is “strongly considering” pardoning the former administration official. FBI, working in conjunction with the Justice Department, has “lost” the records of General Michael Flynn.

• [Soft Disclosure] The most basic component that all living things have in common is ribonucleic acid, or RNA. Professor Totani looked at how life’s building block could spontaneously form in the universe through a process known as abiogenesis. “Like many in this field of research, I am driven by curiosity and by big questions. Combining my recent investigation into RNA chemistry with my long history of cosmology leads me to realise there is a plausible way the universe must have gone from an abiotic (lifeless) state to a biotic one. It’s an exciting thought and I hope research can build on this to uncover the origins of life”, said Totani.

• SpaceX’s Starlink project will make the detection of killer asteroids very difficult, said Dr Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in an interview with the Express. McDowell noted that while the current number of satellites launched by Elon Musk’s company is merely a “pain in the neck” the scientific community can handle it, but the final number will make scientific research impossible. “It’s unclear just how bad it’s going to be right now, but it’s not an order of magnitude away from the really bad case. So while a constellation of 300 is a pain in the neck, we can handle it – 12,000 is going to make it very difficult, especially for these asteroids”, McDowell said. SpaceX has already launched 180 satellites and hopes to finish the project in 2027. By then, it hopes to have launched 42,000 satellite.

Sun Activity

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 5 days
2020 total: 55 days (73%)

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.4 500 km depth Italy
Strongest EQ in North America M3.5 Akutan, Alaska
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.3 Iran
Deepest EQ M4.5 520 km Ndoi Island, Fiji

March 15 2020 – Antipode Earthquakes