News Burst 21 May 2020 – Live Feed

News Burst 21 May 2020

• Covid-Covid-Covid-Covid

• China’s Chifeng Jilong Gold Mining Co has said it will begin processing gold ore from its mine in Sepon, Laos, after a six-year hiatus. According to a report, the restart of gold production at the mine is due to gold prices hitting a seven-year high last month, making the process profitable once again. The previous owner of the copper and gold mine, MMG Ltd, stopped gold production in 2013, citing depletion of ore and lower profitability of the metal compared to copper. Chifeng Jilong purchased a 90% interest in the operator of the mine, Lane Xang Minerals, from MMG in 2018 at US 275 million. According to the report by Reuters, Chifeng Jilong plans to produce 1-1.6 tonnes of Gold at the Sepon mine this year, and up to 7 tonnes in 2021.

• British low-cost airline EasyJet today admitted that the company has fallen victim to a cyber-attack, which it labeled “highly sophisticated,” exposing email addresses and travel details of around 9 million of its customers. In an official statement released today, EasyJet confirmed that of the 9 million affected users, a small subset of customers, i.e., 2,208 customers, have also had their credit card details stolen, though no passport details were accessed. The airline did not disclose precisely how the breach happened, when it happened, when the company discovered it, how the sophisticated attackers unauthorizedly managed to gain access to the private information of its customers, and for how long they had that access to the airline’s systems.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has outlawed Microsoft’s Bill Gates and his corporation. Furthermore, both culprits have been placed on a Federal Security Service watch list due to ‘concerns over security and reliability.’ The removal of all Microsoft software has now begun in Russia with immediate effect. Government spokesman Sergei Zheleznyak explained that Microsoft had been caught carrying out minute-by-minute surveillance on millions of Russian citizens, as well as citizens of other countries. Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ being placed on a Federal Security Services (FSB) watch list has also been raised for a revue, pending further investigation, with expectations in the Kremlin that he will join George Soros and Jacob Rothschild on the Russian Federation’s blacklist.

• Johnson & Johnson will halt all sales of its talc-based baby powder in North America, after years of lawsuits claiming the product causes cancer – but, undeterred, the firm says it won’t stop selling it to the rest of the world.
  The company announced the move in a statement on Tuesday, noting that it had decided to “permanently discontinue” the baby powder in the US and Canada to “prioritize high-demand products” amid the Covid-19 pandemic, attributing the fall in sales in part to “misinformation.”

• Singapore sentences man to death by hanging via Zoom conference, Punithan Genasan, a 37-year-old Malaysian man who was sentenced Friday to death by hanging for masterminding a 2011 heroin transaction between two drug couriers in Singapore, a city-state known for having a zero tolerance policy for illicit drugs.

• Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who pleaded guilty for his role in the September 11 attacks, recently revealed that he has renounced terrorism, al-Qaeda and Daesh. “I denounce, repudiate Usama bin Laden as a useful idiot of the CIA/Saudi. I also proclaim unequivocally my opposition to any terrorist action, attack, propaganda against the US,” Moussaoui wrote in a handwritten court motion filed with a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, last month

• Cyclone Amphan made landfall in coastal areas of West Bengal at around 2.30 pm on Wednesday, killing at least 10 people, and leaving a trail of destruction behind.

• The Ukrainian police have arrested a hacker who made headlines in January last year by posting a massive database containing some 773 million stolen email addresses and 21 million unique plaintext passwords for sale on various underground hacking forums. In an official statement released on Tuesday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it identified the hacker behind the pseudonym “Sanix,” who is a resident of the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine, but it did not reveal his actual identity to the media. In January last year, the hacker tried to sell the massive 87-gigabyte database labeled as “the largest array of stolen data in history,” which, according to security experts, was just a fraction of the stolen data Sanix collected.

• President Trump once said about Senator Lindsey Graham that he “would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years with thousands of soldiers and fighting other people’s wars.” This statement is critical to understanding why Senator Graham has announced that he won’t bring Barack Hussein Obama before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain his role in Russia-gate. Graham knows that Obama targeted Trump National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn because Flynn was opposed to the Obama policy of using the CIA to destabilize the Middle East and bring the Muslim Brotherhood and other Jihadist forces to power. Graham and the late Senator John McCain were blood brothers with Obama in promoting the “Arab spring” uprisings in the Middle East that left 560,000 dead in Syria alone when a civil war ensued. To make matters worse, the Russians won anyway. This is a real scandal, in contrast to the phony allegations against Trump that Graham friend and collaborator John McCain gave to the FBI in the form of the Steele dossier. What’s more, it was Graham who actually encouraged McCain to go to the FBI with this bogus document, which was based on Russian disinformation.

• On June 3rd, Venus will pass almost directly between Earth and the sun–an event astronomers call “inferior conjunction.” This is changing the face of Venus in an extraordinary way. The planet has become an slender crescent, growing thinner every night.

• Rapidly rising water overtook dams and forced the evacuation of about 10,000 people in central Michigan, where the governor said one downtown could be “under approximately 9 feet of water” by Wednesday. For the second time in less than 24 hours, families living along the Tittabawassee River and connected lakes in Midland County were ordered to leave home. The National Weather Service on Tuesday evening urged anyone near the river to seek higher ground following “catastrophic dam failures” at the Edenville Dam, about 140 miles (225.31 kilometres) north of Detroit, and the Sanford Dam, about seven miles (11.26 kilometers) downriver.

Sun Activity

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 18 days
2020 total: 109 days (77%)
2019 total: 281 days (77%)

Active Weather

Severe Cyclone Amphan – India Bangladesh Border w/v 50 kts↓ 988 hPa↑Moving N-NE 14 kts Weakening

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.4 Crete, Greece
Strongest EQ in North America M5.0 Nevada
4th Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.3 Vanuatu
Deepest EQ M4.9 182 km Philippines