- Italian Governor Zaia from the Veneto region said: “80% of all sick people heal by themselves, 15% need medication and 5% need to have hospital attention. All 17 people who died already, had advanced health issues. No healthy person who caught the coronavirus has died. It’s an alarm with no foundation. In the beginning they reacted the way they did because they didn’t have any real information about the virus. But after seeing what it is, the information is too exaggerated.”
- Joe Biden’s South Carolina win changed the Democratic primaries, which were threatening to become a Bernie Sanders show. But Pete Buttigieg’s sudden withdrawal invokes memories of 2016, when the DNC conspired to undermine Sanders. By suspending his campaign on the eve of Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg is hoping that his moderate supporters will cross over to Joe Biden and, in doing so, enable him to win enough delegates to prevent Bernie Sanders from achieving a majority during the first round of balloting at the Democratic National Convention in July.
- The United States will not provide air support to Turkey in the wartorn Syrian province of Idlib, Pentagon Chief Mark Esper has said, speaking to reporters in Washington on Monday.
- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has 53.3 million followers on Twitter. In September 2019, he was the third-most followed world leader on the microblogging site, behind only US President Donald Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama. The Prime Minister was the first Indian to cross the 50-million-followers mark on Twitter.
- A 23 yo Carabiniere, who shot a 15 yo man armed with a gun (resulted fake) who was trying to rob his watch while on the car in Naples, has been charged of voluntary homicide. The 15 year old, twice hit by the military weapon, died of serious injuries. The victim was on a scooter with a 17 year old who was arrested on charges of attempted robbery. In the hospital, in the pockets of the 15-year-old who died, were found a Rolex and a necklace, most likely from a robbery carried out immediately before the attack on the military and his fiancée.
- Cambodian rice exports to international markets grew sharply by more than 21 per cent in the first two months of this year. “What we saw for Cambodian rice in the European market is a better picture because Cambodian rice is branded as a non-toxic product because we market our rice as sustainable rice.” – Cambodia Rice Federation
- A team of physicists in the US believe they may have discovered the first extraterrestrial protein known to man, within a meteorite that fell to Earth some three decades ago. If verified, the find – which has yet to be peer reviewed – would be the latest in a series of milestones bringing us closer to discovering extraterrestrial life. Ribose, a type of sugar found in RNA, was recently identified on a meteor.
- The United States excluded Russia’s Independent Petroleum Company (IPC) and its subsidiary IPC-Primornefteprodukt from the list of sanctions related to North Korea, the US Treasury Department said on Monday. Earlier frozen assets of companies were unblocked.
- The ‘mini-moon’, named 2020 CD3, was picked up some time in 2017 but, given how vast the sky is and how dark the moon is, it never caught anyone’s attention, until now; according to orbital simulations, 2020 CD3 will depart some time in April 2020.
- The Popocatepetl volcano has been active for the last three days, with the most recent eruption being registered on early Tuesday when the volcano sent gas and a column of ash about a kilometer into the sky.
- India’s Supreme Court on 2 March dismissed a petition filed by Pawan Gupta, who was convicted of the rape and murder of 23-year-old woman in 2012. While the four convicts are set to be hanged, another accused committed suicide in jail, while another was set free after spending three years in a reform facility because he was a juvenile when the crime was committed.
- The voracious locust swarms that periodically wreak havoc on crops in various corners of the world, and which currently threaten numerous areas in eastern Africa, may finally meet their match in an insidious tiny organism, the Daily Star reports. According to the newspaper, scientists’ efforts to genetically modify the existing species of fungus have led to the creation of the so called “zombie green fungus” which penetrates the insects’ hardy exoskeleton and poisons them from the inside.
- Agricultural officers and soldiers from the Uganda People’s Defense Force have been called upon by the government to work together in coating crops with chemicals to ward off and eliminate the destructive desert locust swarms that have invaded the East African country.
- Cambodia’s famed Angkor Archeological Park received 341,494 foreign tourists in the first two months of 2020, down 37 percent over the same period last year. The ancient park made gross revenue of 16.2 million U.S. dollars from ticket sales during the January-February period this year, also down 35 percent over the same period last year, said the state-owned Angkor Enterprise in a statement.
- On Sunday, Greece announced emergency measures to tackle the crisis, including a further tightening of border controls to the maximum level, a temporary one-month suspension of asylum applications and the immediate return of undocumented migrants to their country of origin.
Sun Activity
March is the best month of the year for auroras? A 75-year study shows that March has more geomagnetically active days than any other month of the year. (October is a close second.) This is due to the Russell-McPherron effect. In short, cracks tend to form in Earth’s magnetosphere during weeks around equinoxes, allowing solar wind to spark Northern Lights. spaceweather.com
Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 29 days
2020 total: 45 days (73%)
Strongest EQ in Europe M3.3 Greece
Strongest EQ in North America M4.2 W of Vancouver Island
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.7 Aleutian Islands
Deepest EQ M4.5 533 km Ndoi Island, Fiji News Burst 3 March 2020
Rose Rambles... 