News Burst 29 May 2020
- Nepal does not have adequate stocks of chemical fertilizer, with imports stuck at Kolkata for the last two months due to the lockdown. As Nepal is completely dependent on imports for chemical fertilizers, any shortage could lead to food insecurity, affect the incomes of farmers, and dampen economic growth prospects for the next fiscal year.“This year, Nepal has more mouths to feed than ever before, but it doesn’t have adequate fertiliser to grow more,” said Bhola Man Singh Basnet, a former agricultural scientist from the Nepal Agricultural Research Council.Thousands of people, including migrant workers, are returning home as they have lost jobs abroad and the country needs to produce additional food to feed them.
- “Internet Platforms Aren’t Arbiters Of Truth” – Zuckerberg Blasts Twitter For Tagging Trump Tweets As “Misinformation”. As President Trump prepares to sign an executive order targeting “left-leaning bias” on American social media platforms, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on a round of interviews with cable news – ostensibly to discuss Facebook’s new Work From Home policy – where he castigated Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for voluntarily transforming Twitter into an “arbiter of truth”. Asked to comment in Twitter’s decision to tag two Trump tweets as “misinformation” by CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, Zuckerberg replied that “I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth…Political speech is one of the most sensitive parts in a democracy, and people should be able to see what politicians say.”
- The flow of natural gas from Russia to Europe via the Yamal-Europe pipeline crossing Poland completely stopped on Tuesday after a two-and-a-half-decade-old transit deal between Russia and Poland expired and after the COVID-19 pandemic battered gas demand in Europe. The Russia-Poland transit deal for natural gas from the Yamal peninsula to Germany, via Belarus and Poland, expired on May 17. With the end of the gas transit agreement with Russia, Poland is moving to a more liberalized natural gas market, but it expects that Russia will continue to send similar volumes of gas before the transit deal expired, a Polish official told Reuters last week.
- The drugs have become household names in Australia: oxycodone, codeine, morphine and tramadol. But from next week they will become even harder for people to access, as pack sizes are halved and doctors are told to dispense only to patients whose other treatments have failed. The crackdown is in response to thousands of deaths linked to prescription opioids – almost 100 each month in Australia. While doctors and pain experts strongly back the changes, they also warned that patients needed to be given support to avoid the unintended consequences, such as overdoses, of people turning to illicit or black market alternatives. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’ chairwoman of addiction medicine Hester Wilson said reduced pack sizes meant people would only receive a day or two’s worth of painkillers.
- A treasure of millions and millions of euros kept in some bank in Dubai. Over the years, the drug traffickers Fabrizio Fabietti and Fabrizio Piscitelli have created enormous capital. The city of the United Arab Emirates is a safe for anyone who wants to transfer and store dirty money. There is no collaboration between Italian and Dubai law enforcement agencies. The police managed to intercept a 200 thousand euro transfer in favor of Alessandro Telich’s Imperial Eagle, the gang’s hacker, whose headquarters is in Dubai. Narcotic drugs sold them by the ton. Between February and March 2018 Fabietti had stored 3,000 kilograms of hashish in a shed. 700 kilograms of hashish and 641 kilograms of marijuana were seized. The supply could not miss cocaine, 19 kilos were seized by the police in Rome.
- With swarms of immature locusts sweeping across 13 districts in four states in India, the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare is considering the use of aircraft for spraying insecticides to control the spread of the crop-devouring insects. “A committee under the chairmanship of the Additional Secretary of the Department has been constituted to procure services and goods for spraying insecticides through drones and airplanes,” the ministry said in a statement on Thursday. The statement said: “Drones will be used to spray pesticides on tall trees and inaccessible places for effective control of locusts, while plans are afoot to deploy helicopters for aerial spray.”
- The US has stepped up diplomatic pressure against China’s move to impose a national security law on Hong Kong, forming a common position with the UK, Australia and Canada. In a four-nation statement, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his counterparts called on China to work with Hongkongers on forging a way forward to honour its commitments made under the Sino-British Joint Declaration. “China’s decision to impose the new national security law on Hong Kong lies in direct conflict with its international obligations under the principles of the legally binding, UN-registered Sino-British Joint Declaration,” said the statement, which was also signed by UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne and François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s foreign minister. The four foreign ministers said Thursday the national security law would undermine the “one country, two systems framework”. If the Chinese Communist Party thinks that they’re going to continue to break their promises to the world, to openly defy the rule of law, the United States of America is going to stand up and tell them no.
- Last week, application security company ImmuniWeb released a new free tool to monitor and measure an organization’s exposure on the Dark Web. To improve the decision-making process for cybersecurity professionals, the free tool crawls Dark Web marketplaces, hacking forums, and Surface Web resources such as Pastebin or GitHub to provide you with a classified schema of your data being offered for sale or leaked. All you need to launch a Dark Web search is to enter your domain name.
- Looks like WHO’s days in Africa are over. Days after Tanzania kicked WHO out of the country, now Burundi becomes the second African country to expel entire WHO Coronavirus team from his nation for interference in internal matters. In a letter addressed to WHO’s Africa headquarters, the foreign ministry says the four officials must leave by Friday. Meanwhile, in a shocking development the President of Madagascar has claimed that the WHO offered $20m bribe to poison COVID-19 cure.
- Meanwhile, in another African nation Bill Gates has been caught bribing forced Coronavirus program. Based on an intercepted human intelligence report, a controversy has erupted in Nigeria whereby it is revealed that Bill Gates offered $10 million bribe for a forced vaccination program for Coronavirus to the Nigerian House of Representatives. The opposition political parties rejected the “foreign-sponsored Bill” mandating the compulsory vaccination of all Nigerians even when the vaccines have not been discovered and demanded the Speaker be impeached if he forces the bill on members. The development comes a month after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former American President John F. Kennedy, in a lengthy piece exposed Bill Gates agenda in India and his “obsession with vaccines”.
- Indonesia has started cloud seeding to induce rain as the archipelago moves to head off annual forest fires blamed for blanketing swathes of Southeast Asia in toxic haze. Last year’s fires were the worst since 2015 due to dry weather, with some 1.6 million hectares of land, mostly on Sumatra and Borneo islands, razed by the out-of-control blazes. Authorities deployed tens of thousands of personnel and water-bombing aircraft to tackle the fires, which are intentionally set to clear land for agriculture — including on palm oil and pulp plantations. Over the past two weeks, Indonesia has started cloud seeding — a technique that uses chemicals to induce rain — in hotspot Riau province on Sumatra, with plans to roll it out in other parts of the island and in Borneo. The operations were to last throughout the dry season, which is expected to end around September.
Sun Activity
Farside Solar Flare: An active region, possibly a sunspot, is hiding just behind the sun’s northeastern limb. Late yesterday it exploded, producing a long duration B1-class solar flare (May 27 @ 18:39 UTC). The blast site will rotate into view in ~2 days. If it is still flaring at that time, Earth could be affected.
Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 26 days
2020 total: 117 days (79%)
2019 total: 281 days (77%)
Strongest EQ in Europe M4.2 Greece
Strongest EQ in North America M3.8 Nevada
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.9 Tonga
Deepest EQ M4.3 350 km Kermadec Islands News Burst 29 May 2020