News Burst 2 February 2020 ~ February 2, 2020

News Burst 2 February 2020

• The widely-read news blog ZeroHedge, boasting as many as over 673,000 subscribers, has been suspended from Twitter, with no grounds for the move explicitly provided on behalf of the social network. They have been tweeting conspiracy theories claiming that 2019-nCoV is a bioweapon.
• If you’re among those millions of customers who shopped at any of 850 Wawa stores last year but haven’t yet hotlisted your cards, it’s high time to take immediate action. That’s because hackers have finally put up payment card details of more than 30 million Wawa breach victims on sale at Joker’s Stash, one of the largest dark web marketplaces where cybercriminals buy and sell stolen payment card data.
  On 10th December Wawa learned that its point-of-sale servers had malware installed since March 2019, which stole payment details of its customers from potentially all Wawa locations.
• Over half a million Americans are currently homeless. Top-6 worst cities for homelessness across the U.S.
  1. New York City 78.6k
  2. Los Angeles City & County 56.2k
  3. Seattle & County 11.2k
  4. San Jose/Santa Clara & County 9.8k
  5. San Diego & County 8.1k
  6. San Francisco 8.0k
• Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has taken several privacy measures in the past one year with an aim to give its users more control over their data and transparency about how the social media giant and other apps on its platform use that data.
  Now in its new effort, Facebook has launched a new privacy feature that allows its users to control data that the social media platform receives from other apps and websites about their online activity. Dubbed “Off-Facebook Activity,” the feature was initially announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year as “Clear History,” allowing users to clear the data that third-party websites and apps share with Facebook.
• French fishermen were among the first to feel the direct effects of Britain’s exit from the European Union,they are temporarily barred from waters around Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy. Guernsey, a British crown dependency, has announced that it is implementing a new system that will give boats individual authorization to enter its waters.

• Apple to close all China mainland stores.
• Al-Qaida leader Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri arrested in Phoenix; Al-Nouri, a 42-year-old Phoenix resident, is wanted to stand trial in Iraq on charges of the premeditated murder of two Iraqi police officers.
• As African swine flu – better known as ‘pig ebola’ – continues to ravage Chinese pig farms, triggering a massive surge in pork prices, we’ve written about how consumers’ search for alternatives to the dietary staple has turned duck farmers into millionaires overnight. But duck isn’t the only protein alternative that Chinese consumers are buying up in droves as pork prices have climbed nearly 70% over the past year, to near-unprecedented levels.
• It appears that Qasim al-Rimi, leader of the Yemen-based AQAP, was the individual targeted and killed in a U.S. drone strike on Saturday, January 25 in Wadi Ubaidah, east of Sanaa – a longtime stronghold for the group. AQAP has yet to officially confirm his death.
• In a bid to pull out the economy from its worst slowdown in more than a decade, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday slashed income tax for individuals, abolished dividend tax for companies and announced record spending in agriculture and infrastructure sectors.

• Alarmingly, very few large and commercially valuable fish were seen on the reefs in Tonga during a scientific survey conducted by the Global Reef Expedition, which released its online report on 30 January 2020. “Tonga’s coral reef fish communities are dominated by small fish, considered low on the food chain, raising concern for the long-term sustainability of the fishery.”
  Evidence of overfishing was apparent. “We saw very few fish that are particularly important to local fishers, such as parrotfish, emperors, snappers, and groupers.”
• A strain of the H5N1 bird flu has been reported in China’s Hunan province, Chinese officials said. The outbreak was reported on a farm in the city of Shaoyang in the Hunan province, according to China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Of the 7,850 chickens on the farm where the outbreak occurred, 4,500 died of the H5N1 avian flu, Reuters reported. The Chinese government said it culled 17,828 chickens as a result of the H5N1 outbreak.

Weekely Asteroid

• 2013 BA74 2020-Feb-04 3.7 Lunar Distance 7.4 km/s 28 m.

Lunar Distance = 384,401 km

Sun Activity

Today, Earth is exiting a minor stream of solar wind, and for the rest of the weekend wind speeds will ebb. The next stream is due on Feb 5th. Arctic sky watchers can expect an uptick in auroras when the gaseous material arrives next week. spaceweather.com

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.9 Greece
Strongest EQ in US M4.4 California
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.3 Japan
Deepest EQ M5.0 226 km South of Fiji Islands News Burst 2 February 2020