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News Burst Live Feed – Jun 28, 2020Last Updated 2020-06-27 17:00:15
| With the onset of the monsoon season, several districts in the northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. Most of the victims were out working in the fields at the time of the incident. More than 100 people have reportedly died in various districts in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar after being struck by lightning during a thunderstorm over the last 24 hours. Gopalganj, Darbhanga, Siwan, Madhubani, and West Champaran remain the worst hit districts in Bihar, as per local media reports. In Uttar Pradesh, Deoria and eastern districts recorded deaths from lightning.Many people have been injured after sustaining burn injuries. The Bihar government has announced $5,293 (Rs 400,000) to each family of the deceased. |
| Major mining companies have given a “low priority” to grievances of mine-workers and mining affected communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a network of labour, environmental and human rights activists. The London Mining Network, an alliance of human rights, development and environmental activists, work in collaboration with mine workers and Indigenous communities affected by extractivist industries. Their new report Voices from the Ground: How the Global Mining Industry is Profiting from the COVID-19 Pandemic sets out what they say are worrying trends of mining corporations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which represents “an immediate threat to the health and safety of communities” around the world. While several Annual General Meetings were replaced with online or remote events (see our write ups of the recent Rio Tinto and Anglo American AGM’s) to protect executives and shareholders from possible infection, similar care has not been taken at the majority of mines to protect mine-workers or local communities. |
| More than 30% of civilian pilots in Pakistan have fake licenses and are not qualified to fly, the country’s aviation minister revealed. Addressing Pakistan’s National Assembly, Ghulam Sarwar Khan said 262 pilots in the country “did not take the exam themselves” and had paid someone else to sit it on their behalf. “They don’t have flying experience,” he said. Pakistan has 860 active pilots serving its domestic airlines, including the country’s Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flagship, as well as a number of foreign carriers, Khan said. PIA has grounded all its pilots who hold fake licenses, effective immediately. “PIA acknowledges that fake licenses is not just a PIA issue but spread across the entire Pakistani airline industry,” spokesperson Abdullah Khan said, adding that some of the fake pilots also fly for foreign carriers. |
| Last year, the US Navy officially confirmed reports of its pilots encountering unidentified aircraft travelling with great speed in the area of a military exercise, later releasing official videos of the incident. The military has admitted to being unaware as to what that aircraft could have been and who controlled it. The US Senate Intelligence Committee has requested that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies unify their efforts in order to investigate all UFO encounters faced by the military so far, and then to make their findings public. The voting, which took place on 17 June but was only revealed recently, includes the request for an authorisation bill that is yet to be approved by the Senate. If passed, the Pentagon and intelligence community will have 180 days to draft a public report, which can still contain classified parts. “The Committee understands that the relevant intelligence may be sensitive; nevertheless, the Committee finds that the information sharing and coordination across the Intelligence Community has been inconsistent, and this issue has lacked attention from senior leaders”, the committee commented on the proposed bill. |
| A huge mushroom-shaped cloud spotted 96 kilometres from Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, has sparked hysteria among residents of nearby areas. After photos of the cloud were posted online, concerned residents of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, which is located less than 100 kilometres from the nuclear power plant, claimed that there was another nuclear accident. Others insisted that the mysterious looking cloud was of extraterrestrial origin. “Is that a UFO?”, wrote one netizen. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service rushed to soothe residents saying that the sighting has nothing to do with nuclear accidents. “Dear Friends, we urge everyone, who saw the mushroom-shaped cloud, not to panic. On the contrary you should be happy as you were lucky to witness a rare natural phenomenon called the anvil. Tell us, which one of you got scared?”, the ministry wrote in a statement on Facebook. |
| Over the past month, the tiny Iceland has experienced increased seismic activity amid warnings of a looming eruption of Grimsvotn volcano, Iceland’s most active. About 3,000 tremors have been registered over the northern coast of Iceland since 19 June, the country’s meteorological service IMO reported. In particular, three quakes measuring over magnitude 5 were recorded in recent days, one of them being felt in the capital Reykjavik, located some 265 kilometres from the epicentre. Arnar Sigurðsson, the skipper of a whale watching boat who was out at sea, described the quakes as “a blow to the boat”. “I found it surprising, because we were moving very slowly. I thought the engine had malfunctioned, or something had gotten stuck in the propeller”, he said. No major injuries or damage were reported from the tremors. The series of earthquakes came amid warnings of a possible eruption from Grimsvotn, the country’s most active volcano, as scientists recorded high levels of sulfur dioxide, indicating the presence of so-called shallow magma. |
| Despite the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Jakarta government is slated to begin construction of the new capital city in North Penajam Paser regency, East Kalimantan, as scheduled in 2021. “We’re still in the planning phase. We’re currently focusing on the basic design of the new capital city and drafting a capital city relocation bill with the House of Representatives,” Public Works and Housing Minister Basuki Hadimuljono said on Wednesday as quoted by kompas.com. “We hope next year we can commence construction of the new capital city.” Basuki explained that the government had cooperated with domestic and foreign investors for the capital city relocation project. The new capital city, he added, would adopt smart city technology and be eco-friendly. |
| Overall meat consumption began to decrease in Finland in 2019, according to Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). Mari Niva, a professor of food culture at the University of Helsinki, believes the statistics reflect the widespread public debate witnessed in the past couple of years about the climate and environmental effects of meat. There are nevertheless signs that the role of animal-based products in diets is beginning to be questioned in Finland, added Niva. The preliminary statistics indicate that the consumption of non-fat milks has plummeted by 40 per cent in five years, while that of cheese has dropped to the levels of 2014. Oats, by contrast, is an increasingly popular ingredient on the plates of Finns. Its consumption surged by almost 30 per cent from the previous year to 9.5 kilos per capita in 2019. |
| Microsoft said it would permanently close all its retail stores around the world, leaving only four locations in New York, London, Sydney, and Redmond, which the company said will be “reimagined”. The company said that the staff currently working in retail stores will be offered new jobs and “serve consumers, small-business, education, and enterprise customers, while building a pipeline of talent with transferable skills”. Microsoft initially planned this move for next year, but the process was accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. |
| NASA has launched a crowdsourcing campaign offering $20,000 to the individual who designs a toilet that will be used in the upcoming mission to the Moon. The agency said the design should not be based on current waste management technology, as it wants to make the space toilets that are currently used lighter and smaller. At the same time, NASA noted that one should not reinvent the wheel and noted that anything which is “time intensive and complicated to use” will be less attractive. “The process for using proposed toilet designs must be relatively straightforward”, the agency said in a statement. |
| A group of hacktivists and transparency advocates has published a massive 269 GB of data allegedly stolen from more than 200 police departments, fusion centers, and other law enforcement agencies across the United States. Dubbed BlueLeaks, the exposed data leaked by the DDoSecrets group contains hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents from the past ten years with official and personal information. DDoSecrets, or Distributed Denial of Secrets, is a transparency collective similar to WikiLeaks, which publicly publishes data and classified information submitted by leakers and hackers while claiming the organization itself never gets involved in the exfiltration of data. According to the hacktivist group, BlueLeaks dump includes “police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more,” which “provides unique insights into law enforcement and a wide array of government activities, including thousands of documents mentioning COVID19. |
| In Acapulco bay in Icacos Beach, Mexico, on Thursday (June 25) the shocking scene of polluted water being discharged and fouling the beach on a rainy day. A very dark sprout came out suddenly, and it had an unpleasant odor that lasted approximately 20 minutes, it was tons of black water. Later that black water stopped coming out, it was at that moment when the authorities arrived to see when the damage had already happened. |