News Burst 29 August 2020 – Live Feed

• On Wednesday, the US slapped sanctions on five Russian institutes, accusing them of developing chemical and biological weapons. The restrictions were specifically imposed on a research institute of the Russian Defence Ministry that developed the first COVID-19 vaccine together with the Gamaleya Institute. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Friday said that the US sanctions against Russian institutes working on a COVID-19 vaccine are aimed at promoting their own pharmaceutical companies. “We are not sure that this is the right step towards cooperation in the fight against the [coronavirus] pandemic, the importance of which, we think, is not disputed even in Washington”, she stressed. Referring to the US, Zakharova added that “one gets the impression that it is all about the trivial use of sanctions pressure in the interests of promoting their own companies, now pharmaceutical ones, as is the case with the ongoing promotion of their gas on the European market”.

• A government official in the Philippines has been booted from his job after being caught having sex with his secretary during an online conference call. The Fatima Dos village council in the province of Cavite had gathered online for another routine Zoom meeting when something entirely out of the ordinary happened. The boss, Captain Jesus Estil, appeared on screen in the midst of an all-consuming sex session with his secretary. Reports in Phillippine news outlets reveal that Estil was known to struggle with technology and the hapless official hadn’t realised he’d left his camera on. The steamy tryst was witnessed by several members of the council’s staff. One of the witnesses recorded the romp and the footage soon went viral across the Philippines.

• Researchers at Google claim to have run the first-ever simulation of a chemical reaction using quantum technology, in a move which may mark a new era in our understanding of the universe around us. The Google AI Quantum team used their 54-qubit quantum processor, Sycamore, to simulate changes in the configuration of the admittedly rather basic molecule called diazene, which consists of two nitrogen atoms and two hydrogen atoms. Sycamore, like all quantum computers, uses logical units called qubits which exist in the hazy, ‘either/or’ realm of theoretical physics, which allows quantum computers to carry out unfathomably complex calculations of a type and on a scale that traditional computers cannot handle – essentially performing the erstwhile impossible. The research was published in the journal Science and may mark the humble beginnings of an entirely new approach to chemistry.

• Another sewage discharge reported in Acapulco, it is the second in two months in the resort city. The coastline of famed Mexican beach resort Acapulco was sullied by a large discharge of raw sewage. Acapulco’s wastewater system appears to have failed again.

• Facebook on Monday blocked access within Thailand to a group with 1 million members that discusses the country’s king, after the Thai government threatened legal action over failure to take down content deemed defamatory to the monarchy. The move comes amid near daily youth-led protests against the government led by the former military junta chief and unprecedented calls for reforms of the monarchy. The “Royalist Marketplace” group was created in April by Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a self-exiled academic and critic of the monarchy. On Monday night, the group’s page brought up a message: “Access to this group has been restricted within Thailand pursuant to a legal request from the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society.” Pavin, who lives in Japan, said Facebook had bowed to the military-dominated government’s pressure. “Our group is part of a democratization process, it is a space for freedom of expression,” Pavin told Reuters. “By doing this, Facebook is cooperating with the authoritarian regime to obstruct democracy and cultivating authoritarianism in Thailand.”

• In Sweden, God is a woman. Her white clergy robes flowing behind her, Sandra Signarsdotter walks down the aisle of Stockholm’s Gustaf Vasa church greeting parishioners, a ritual of hers and a familiar sight in Sweden, where women now outnumber men as priests. In the Scandinavian country, often hailed as a champion of gender equality, the statistics are clear. As of July, 50.1 percent of priests are women and 49.9 percent are men. It’s very likely the first Church in the world to have a majority of women priests, according to the World Council of Churches. In the Protestant Lutheran Church of Sweden, which has 5.8 million members in a country of 10.3 million, since 2014, even the head of the Church is a woman, Archbishop Antje Jackelen.

• In India, waste collectors look for recyclable materials among bags of disposed medical waste at a landfill site, during the COVID-19 outbreak.Criminal networks are profiting from an “overwhelming” surge in plastic waste being shipped from rich countries to Asia and stoking pollution by burning and dumping waste that was supposed to be recycled, a report by Interpol said Thursday. Plastic consumption has exploded in the last decade, with some 360 million metric tons of waste generated just in 2018, mainly by wealthier nations, Interpol said. At least 8 million tons of plastic are thought to end up in oceans every year. The France-based intergovernmental crime-fighting agency said organized criminal networks use legitimate pollution management businesses as a cover for illegal operations, and that waste crime was behind environmental destruction and even murder. Interpol said some major destination countries report high waste mismanagement rates, including India (87 percent), Indonesia (83 percent) and Malaysia (57 percent). As the market shrank in China, which previously processed almost half the world’s plastic waste, firms moved their business to neighboring countries and the quantities of waste had proved “overwhelming” for some nations.

• Thieves have stolen the painting “Two Laughing Boys” by Dutch golden age artist Frans Hals from a museum in the Netherlands, the third time it has been taken, police said Thursday. The canvas by the 17th century master was taken during a burglary at the Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden museum in Leerdam in the early hours of Wednesday, they said. The painting, featuring two laughing boys with a mug of beer, was previously stolen from the same museum in 2011 and 1988, being recovered after six months and three years respectively. Dutch police said in a statement that officers rushed to the museum in the town 40 miles (60 kilometres) south of Amsterdam after the alarm went off around 3:30 am but they failed to find the suspects.

• Prison psychologists are secretly watching Ghislaine Maxwell for hours every day, her lawyers have claimed in court documents. “The defense recently learned that some of these guards were, in fact [Bureau of Prisons] psychologists who were observing Ms Maxwell and evaluating her for hours each day without her knowledge,” the former British socialite’s lawyers wrote in a letter to District Court Judge Alison Nathan on Monday. “We are aware of no other pretrial detainee receiving such treatment.” The lawyers say Ms Maxwell is receiving different treatment because of her status and the circumstances surrounding the death Epstein.

• A former model has claimed her friend slept with Prince Andrew on the orders of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Lisa Phillips, 42, who now lives in Los Angeles, alleged that she then confronted the billionaire paedophile who told her: “It’s nice to have things on people.” But there is no suggestion that the Duke of York had non-consensual sex or knew of Epstein’s demands – and sources close to him dismissed the ‘baseless’ allegation. She claimed she first met Epstein after a photoshoot in the Caribbean 20 years ago, where he invited her and another friend to his island, Little St James. She told The Sun: “I found Jeffrey very charming and he seemed really nice. I had mentioned I had lived in England and he said, ‘Oh, would you like to meet a prince?’.” Ms Phillips, who now runs a modelling agency, added: “This man walked up and I recognised him as Prince Andrew. He was very nice. It was very brief.” She said she witnessed no wrongdoing on the island and met with Epstein in the years that followed at the likes of charity events, parties and theatre shows.

• Japan’s SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of “flying car” projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard. In a video shown to reporters on Friday, a contraption that looked like a slick motorcycle with propellers lifted several feet off the ground, and hovered in a netted area for four minutes. Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who heads the SkyDrive effort, said he hopes “the flying car” can be made into a real-life product by 2023, but he acknowledged that making it safe was critical. The machine so far can fly for just five to 10 minutes but if that can become 30 minutes, it will have more potential, including exports to places like China, Mr. Fukuzawa said.

• German Chancellor Angela H. Merkel has doubled down on her controversial open borders immigration policy, saying she would make “essentially the same decisions” if presented with similar circumstances to the 2015 migrant crisis. In another million or two.

• [Wrong Glue] A total of eight recently-manufactured 787 Dreamliners have been yanked from the skies after Boeing said the batch of aircraft left the assembly line with potentially dangerous flaws. Boeing informed United Airlines, Singapore Airlines and Air Canada that aircraft they were operating suffered from a manufacturing issue that affected the strength of the jet’s carbon fiber composite structure. The American firm confirmed the issue to aviation outlet the Air Current, stating that the current condition of the planes “does not meet our design standards.”

​Altai Region

The Burlinskoye salt lake in the Slavgorod region in the Altai Territory, Russia. Commercial salt mining is carried out in the lake, for which a rail track has been laid along the bottom of the lake.

Altai is often called “the land of a thousand lakes” and “the country of blue lakes”, as this area has been endowed by Mother Nature with countless beautiful bodies of water. Each of the lakes in the region is unique in its own way.

Gotham City… waiting for Batman!

Minor Geomagnetic Storm

A minor (G1-class) geomagnetic storm is underway as Earth enters a stream of fast-moving (~500 km/s) solar wind. Arctic sky watchers should be lert for auroras mixed with waning summer twilight.

Sunspot number: 0

Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 7 days
2020 total: 163 days (68%)
2019 total: 281 days (77%)

Severe Tropical Storm MaySak

This significant weather become quickly from Tropical Depression to Severe TS and clearly with a name. The storm is expected to become Typhoon MaySak in the next few hours with wind gusting up to 100 knots. The forecast is for a sharp turn toward north and Okinawa, Japan, where it is expected to blow at a maximum of 140 kt in the UTC evening of August 31.

Present position: West of northern Philippines. Moving slowly SW – Wind 50-70 kt – Pressure 990 hPa

28 August 2020

Europe – M3.8 Romania

Atlantic – M5.8 Bouvet Island

North America – M3.7 California Mexico Border

Central America – 2x M3.6 Virgin Islands

South America – M4.5 North Chile

Asia – M4.5 North Pakistan

Pacific – M5.6 New Zealand

Deepest EQ – M4.8 407 km Fiji

​Europe

Italy which was the fulcrum point without earthquakes, surrounded by three movements of the mid M4, finally released all the seismic force with a series of earthquakes on the M3 that were distributed in the center north regions as mentioned in the previous days. It also appears that the seismic wave also reached the final release point in the Azores with two movements on the mid M3.

Zealandia

In this image the older earthquakes are red circled, the more recente orange and the latest are white circled. What we have here is, two M5s on Aug. 27, one south of Australia and another in the Solomon Islands; than we have these two M4s deep earthquakes on Aug 28, between 400 and 600 km deep, very early morning UTC; than we can see the latest two movement exactly at the fulcrum point, in the middle of the other EQ. The New Zealand one of M5.6 struck at 15:47 UTC off the coast of North Island.