News Burst 26 May 2020 – Live Feed

News Burst 26 May 2020

• North America’s largest single coronavirus outbreak started at an Alberta meat-packing plant. The 67-year-old Hiep Bui was one of around 2,000 workers at the plant, located near the town of High River, south of Calgary, according to outbreak data from Canadian and U.S. health authorities. A total of 1,560 cases have been linked to the plant, provincial health officials say, with 949 employees testing positive and two deaths — Bui was the first.

• Colonel Luca Parmitano, officer of the Italian Air Force and astronaut on the ISS with six missions reveals “… on the space station (ISS) we followed what was happening on Earth: even before my return, already in November, we were aware of this probable pandemic infection and above all the gravity that was spreading like wildfire in Europe just before my return from Expedition 61 (9 May 2020). The information normally circulated among all members of the mission, also consisting of Russian cosmonauts.”

• The Greek government recently accused Turkey of seizing some of its territory along its eastern border. Turkey responded on Saturday by stating that it would not allow de facto borders after Athens complained to Ankara that Turkish forces had seized land at the course of the Evros River that separates the two countries. A statement by the Turkish Foreign Ministry said, “Ankara informed Greece that the river course has changed significantly for natural and artificial reasons, since 1926 when the borders were established, and that the solution requires technical coordination.”

• A gun battle unfolded at a residential complex called “Yasny” in the south region of Moscow on Sunday. Residents saw men firing AK-47s and other weapons on the streets below their windows. The law enforcement agency spokesperson said at least eight people were involved in the shootout. “They shot at each other with traumatic pistols and, presumably, from the Saiga and Vepr hunting rifles.”

• Survey work will soon begin on an ambitious plan to export power from a giant solar farm in Australia to Singapore via a 3,800 kilometre undersea cable. The Sun Cable project, which is backed by Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and Fortescue Metals’ founder Andrew Forrest, has awarded a contract to Perth-based Guardian Geomatics to conduct a route survey for the high voltage direct current cable. Cannon-Brookes has championed the “lighthouse” project as a demonstration of how Australia can harness its natural advantages in clean energy and wean off its reliance on coal and gas export revenues.

• China is targeting a July launch for its ambitious plans for a Mars mission which will include landing a remote-controlled robot on the surface of the red planet, the company in charge of the project has said. Beijing has invested billions of dollars in its space programme in an effort to catch up with its rival the United States and affirm its status as a major world power. The Mars mission is among a number of new space projects China is pursuing, including putting Chinese astronauts on the moon and having a space station by 2022. Beijing had been planning the Mars mission for sometime this year, but China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) has confirmed it could come as early as July.

• Privacy concerns over Qatar’s coronavirus contact tracing app, a tool that is mandatory on pain of prison, have prompted a rare backlash and forced officials to offer reassurance and concessions. Like other governments around the world, Qatar has turned to mobile phones to trace people’s movements and track who they come into contact with, allowing officials to monitor coronavirus infections and alert people at risk of contagion. Qatar’s version goes considerably further — it forces Android users to permit access to their picture and video galleries, while also allowing the app to make unprompted calls.

• A pair of premium Japanese melons last year were sold for five million yen ($ 46k). This year a pair of melons from Yubari on the northern island of Hokkaido were sold for only 120,000 yen ($ 1.100) at the season’s first auction — 40 times less than last year’s record price tag. An official at the wholesale market blamed the coronavirus for keeping away rich corporate clients who compete to outbid each other for the most expensive fruit.

• The Guardian has reported that in 2017, major pharmaceutical companies rejected a proposal that could have sped up the development of vaccines against viruses like COVID-19 ahead of an outbreak. The newspaper referred to a report issued by the Brussels-based think tank Corporate Observatory Europe (COE), which examines decisions made by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a body tasked with improving the EU’s pharmaceutical research. According to the report, European Commission representatives sitting on the IMI claimed that research could “facilitate the development and regulatory approval of vaccines against priority pathogens [which are similar to the novel coronavirus], to the extent possible before an actual outbreak occurs”. However, the proposal was dismissed by large pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer, Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson, which are part of IMI.

• After weeks of “intensive negotiations” between Berlin and Germany’s flagship carrier Lufthansa, an agreement has been reached on €9 billion state bailout aid. As part of the deal, the government will take a 20 percent stake in Lufthansa, as well as a convertible bond worth five percent plus one share. That would allow Berlin to claim a blocking minority shareholding to protect the airline against a takeover.

• The World Health Organisation (WHO) is putting its coronavirus treatment trial of hydroxychloroquine on pause to review its benefits and harmful effects, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday.

• Up to 130 people have come out to claim they could be a child of deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein in a bid to inherit part of the late paedophile’s $635 million estate. A website created by a DNA company to find any possible heirs to deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein’s estate has heard from as many as 130 people claiming to be the convicted paedophile’s children.

• Apple and Google on Wednesday released long-awaited smartphone technology to automatically notify people if they might have been exposed to the coronavirus. The companies said 22 countries and several U.S. states are already planning to build voluntary phone apps using their software. It relies on Bluetooth wireless technology to detect when someone who downloaded the app has spent time near another app user who later tests positive for the virus.

• A Malaysian state that is a major nesting site for turtles will ban the trade in their eggs, authorities said Thursday, in a boost for the threatened creatures. Turtles regularly crawl ashore to lay their eggs on beaches in northeastern Terengganu state, and the spectacle of babies hatching and scurrying into the sea is a major draw for tourists. But numbers have declined rapidly over the decades as they are hunted for their meat and shells, while rampant poaching of their eggs is also a major threat. Despite pressure from conservation groups, Terengganu continued to allow the trade in some species’ eggs, which are a popular local delicacy and are sold openly in markets. But authorities have decided to ban all egg trade by the end of the year due to a “sharp decline in arrivals of all types of turtle species in Terengganu.”

• The webpage archive service Wayback Machine’s decision to additionally label already-deleted articles as ‘disinformation’ is internet history revisionism that comes at a time when critical thinking is desperately needed. Earlier this month, Wayback Machine took heed of MIT Technology Review’s protests that they are breathing life into debunked coronavirus ‘hoaxes’, and took to retroactively labelling past web pages and content removed from their original pages with warnings decrying the information presented as false.

• Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit failed Monday on its first attempt to launch a test satellite into space aboard a rocket carried aloft by a Boeing 747 and released over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California. The inaugural launch had appeared to be going well until moments after the rocket was dropped from beneath the left wing of the jumbo jet dubbed Cosmic Girl. There was no immediate word on what went wrong.

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