News Burst 18 February 2020 ~ February 18, 2020

News Burst 18 February 2020

• Numbers from China are becoming worthless by the day.
• China has started to quarantine used banknotes to prevent the transmission of coronavirus. While this may be a setback for fiat currencies. While physical currencies can become the cause for disease transmission, virtual currencies are facing no problems in their operations.
• The Tokyo Marathon, which was set to begin later this month, has been cancelled.
• Based on a recent poll, only 24 percent of the people in the Iranian capital city will participate in the parliamentary elections on Friday, February 21, says the chairman of the University of Tehran’s Social Studies and Research Institute.
• Apple has issued a press released, admitting it does “not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter” due to coronavirus related issues. In other words, the guidance we issued 19 days ago – blowing off any impact from the virus – is completely worthless.

• “I could teach anybody, even the people in this room” to be a farmer, said Michael Bloomberg during a 2016 talk at Oxford University in a now-viral clip in which he called agriculture a “process”. “You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn, he added. Metal workers: “You put the piece of metal in the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job.”
• Ghana has become one of the world’s largest dumping grounds for electronic waste, creating a deadly industry that has put thousands at risk. The electronics scrapyard near Ghana’s capital, Accra, has left the surrounding region contaminated with hazardous toxins that have polluted the environment and created serious health problems for residents. According to one estimate, around 200,000 tons of the globe’s discarded electronics find their way to one slum in Accra.
• Cyberattack by Hamas, they tricked horny IDF servicemen into downloading spyware onto their phones by posing as young Israeli women on social media, promising to send nudes. The IDF does not believe Hamas gained any significant intelligence, though it admitted it will be checking the phones of all troops targeted as a precaution. The number of affected devices is reportedly in the “low hundreds.”
• The public campaign by Protect Democracy, founded in 2017 by former White House and DOJ officials and is headed by Ian Bassin, the ex-Associate White House Counsel under the Obama administration, and its supporters to get rid of Barr provoked some speculations that it could have been related not to Stone’s case, but rather to attempts to prevent the release of John Durham’s upcoming report, which is set to shed some light on alleged misconduct by the agencies during intelligence gathering on Donald Trump and his team.
• Jeff Bezos has announced he is investing $10 Billion in the fight against climate change with the newly launched Bezos Earth Fund.

• The Alta cargo vessel, which floated for thousands of kilometres since its crew was rescued by the US Coast Guard back in September 2018, was found washed ashore in Ireland due to the power of Storm Dennis. The Irish Coast Guard had reported that the vessel was found empty off the coast of County Cork near Ballycotton, shortly after the storm. The ship was abandoned back in 2018 about 1,300 miles (2,000 km) southeast of Bermuda, after calling for help while sailing from Greece to Haiti.
• Storm Dennis hammered Britain, bringing a month’s worth of rain in just 48 hours to parts of the UK. Dennis became the second storm in a week to hit Britain. It has prompted flooding alerts for many parts of the country, with flights and train services disrupted.
• Critics slammed the British government on Monday for allowing a US-blacklisted Chinese technology firm Hikvision specialising in surveillance to join a trade fair on policing and security. The US Department of Commerce blacklisted Hikvision and other Chinese firms last year over links to internment camps that rights groups said were used to forcibly “re-educate” some one million members of China’s mainly Muslim Uygur minority in the western region of Xinjiang.
• A syndicate at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport is providing priority entry into the Philippines for Chinese nationals who bribe immigration officials with wads of cash, a senator revealed on Monday. The group operates with such impunity that it uses tabulated payrolls to track income and how much should go to individual immigration agents. The cash is openly distributed in neat envelopes arranged in boxes. According to senator Risa Hontiveros, who presented CCTV footage and testimony from an unnamed whistle-blower, the syndicate charged 10,000 pesos (US$197) per clientand might have raked in 1 billion pesos (US$19.8 million) in the past few years. She called the officials involved “traitors to the country”.
• The Islamic authorities in Iran have repeatedly boasted in the past year that natural gas production has significantly increased in the country. In the past few days unannounced power cuts, as well as Internet disruptions, have affected many businesses, banks, homes and even caused heavy traffic jams in Tehran and Tabriz. Some of the country’s power plants rely on gas for fuel and high consumption of gas has starved the power plants.

Weekly Asteroid

• 282020 BA10 2020-Feb-18 12.3 LD 9 m.
• 29 2020 CX1 2020-Feb-19 14.1 LD 7.9 m.
• 53 2020 BL7 2020-Feb-19 13.9 LD 8.5 m.
• 36 2020 CO2 2020-Feb-19 3.9 LD 15.4 16 m.

LD > Lunar Distance = 384,401 km

Sun Activity

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 15 days
2020 total: 31 days (65%)

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.2 Italy
Strongest EQ in North America M4.7 Alaska
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.5 SSE of Japan
Deepest EQ M4.9 229 km Papua, Indonesia News Burst 18 February 2020