News Burst 21 April 2020

• Jeffrey Epstein’s photographer friend Peter Beard’s remains found on Long Island after missing for weeks. Beard reportedly had a stash of compromising photographs of the rich and famous.

• “Europe” said the former Commission chief and a EU godfather, Jacques Delors, “is in “mortal danger”. If citizens feel themselves abandoned at the heart of the pandemic, said Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, the EU could “collapse”. [The truth is that there is no “Union”.]

• Richard Branson owns Virgin Atlantic. Richard is asking for a £500 million taxpayer funded bailout whilst simultaneously owning an Island and having a personal wealth of £4.4 billion.

• In the past week alone UK national newspapers including the Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Guardian have furloughed staff and announced further cost cuts after warning of a sharp drop in revenue. Enders Analysis, which forecasts a 50% fall in advertising revenues this year, estimates the total potential cost to the industry at about £650m once circulation declines are included.

• The editor-in-chief of Germany’s largest paper Bild on Thursday launched a full frontal attack on China’s communist president Xi Jinping for his regime’s failure to lying about the coronavirus outbreak and the massive human rights violations carried out by the Communist Party, and demanding no less that €149 billion in damages as a result of China’s actions. In an article titled “What China Owes Us”, Julian Reichelt, the prominent editor-in-chief of the Bild, wrote to Jinping that “Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper Bild whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the coronavirus is inflicting worldwide.” Addressing the Chinese president, the German editor wrote that, “You, your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.” Reichelt said that, “You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country. You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.”

• The European Union urgently requires financial injections (€1.5 trillion – $ 1.63 trillion) to stay afloat and survive the coronavirus epidemic currently ravaging the continent, the European commissioner for economy, Paolo 🤡 Gentiloni, has warned.

• Historic turmoil in the oil market is proving painful for investors who just piled into a $4.3 billion energy ETF. The United States Oil Fund LP, or USO, plunged more than 10% in pre-market trading, with crude tumbling below $12 a barrel amid an unprecedented supply and demand imbalance. USO’s slide came after investors plowed $1.6 billion into the fund last week – the biggest weekly influx on record for the exchange-traded fund. Well, this was few hours before – Now – West Texas Intermediate, one of the world’s main oil benchmarks, hit its lowest price ever in trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, with futures for May delivery hitting $0 per barrel after 2 pm EST and going negative, to as low as -$34.87 per barrel as of about 2:30 pm, according to market data. The benchmark is on track to its lowest-ever close since the inception of futures trading in 1983. The previous lowest-ever close of $10.42 was recorded on March 31, 1986. [Think Middle East cashflow and collapse…]

• “Despite the panic over the Wuhan virus, it now appears that the overall U.S. death rate this winter season is at a multi-year low, no worse than 2014, 2016, and 2019, and far better than 2015, 2017, and 2018 (when we were hit with one of the worst flu seasons in years).” [DNit: This is way dumber than what it seem – With the lockdowns and the extreme care people put in their lives the numbers are lower, why people are not able do even the most simple 1+1? Can you imagine without the distancing?]

• The Walt Disney Company has said it will stop paying nearly half of its workforce this week. Disney theme parks and hotels have been shut in Europe and the US for almost five weeks due to worldwide Covid-19 lockdowns. Scrapping payments for more than 100,000 of the so-called ‘cast members’ will help the company save $500 million a month, according to the Financial Times. Disney said it will provide full healthcare benefits for staff placed on unpaid leave and urged its US employees to apply for government benefits through the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package.

• Indian businessman and founder of the now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines, Vijay Mallya, has failed to overturn a 2018 court decision to extradite him to India where he is facing fraud charges. The UK High Court on Monday rejected Mallya’s appeal seeking to reverse the extradition ruling. The tycoon’s defense had cited “multiple errors” in the 2018 decision, which revolves around a fraud case opened after Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines went bankrupt in the early 2010. Mallya, who dealt with various business projects ranging from Formula 1 team Force India to pharmaceuticals and liquor, is accused of taking – but not repaying – sizable loans from Indian banks worth roughly $1.4 billion. The collapse of Kingfisher Airlines also triggered the fall of his other businesses. The tycoon fled to the UK back in 2016 and refused three summonses to return to India to face trial, which he calls politically motivated. A year later, he was arrested by UK police but was released on bail.

• The US government through its intelligence agencies has open an investigation to determine its creation and release into the wild of the virus, according to published reports. This is a critical point in the pandemic battle of the virus since medical professionals are believing they are battling a natural occurring virus. The Covid-19 is designed to combat the usual treatments. Immunity and vaccines have little success against this virus as it presents a multi-faceted envelope where antibodies of one facet will not aid in immunity for another facet. The outside envelope consists of an HIV, MERS and SARS facets with a new corona virus contained inside. Some researchers believe these differing facets explain the lethally for some while others do not realize they were even infected. An analogy would be spinning the wheel. If Covid-19 infects your body with MERS virus and then unleashes the corona virus that may produce one outcome for the patient, while another may get the SARS/corona virus combination that could be more deadly. The virus with a multi-faceted defense is a telltale sign of it being manufactured by splicing different pathogens into a combined payload. The odds of this contagion forming in the wild from multiple different animal species is off the charts.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief rival announced Monday that they have forged a deal to form an “emergency” government, ending months of political paralysis and averting what would have been a fourth consecutive election in just over a year. Netanyahu and former military chief Benny Gantz, leader of the Blue and White party, signed the agreement after weeks of negotiations for what they termed a “national emergency” government meant to steer the country through the outbreak caused by the CCP virus.

Sun Activity

The first geomagnetic storm of 2020 (category G1) took forecasters by surprise this morning when a CME impact sparked bright auroras over Canada and some northern-tier US states. After 6 hours of G1-class storming, Earth’s magnetic field is quieting now, lowering the odds of more auroras tonight.

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.8 Icealnd
Strongest EQ in North America M3.8 Alaska
Strongest EQ on the Planet 5.2 Solomon Islands
Deepest EQ M3.8 256 km Argentina