News Burst 15 October 2021 – Get The News!

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• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg funneled hundreds of millions of dollars during the 2020 election into nominally nonpartisan nonprofit organisations that manipulated election-office funding to tip the scales in favour of the Democratic vote, according to a study published by The Federalist. Analysis carried out by William Doyle, Ph.D, principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, shows the private resource funding targeted key battleground states to increase then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s vote margin against his rival, Republican Donald Trump.

• Earlier in the year, a report from the Costs of War Project, a collaboration between Brown and Boston Universities, claimed that four times more American active military personnel and veterans involved in post-9/11 wars had died by suicide than had been killed in combat during that time. More US Army active-duty service members have died from suicides in the last quarter (Q2 ) of 2021 than since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent Pentagon report cited by AP.

• “For our country, for the entire Russian society, traditional family values ​​are extremely important. Oddly enough, this sometimes causes controversy, we are even criticised because of this. Of course, it is absolutely necessary to ensure everyone’s freedoms, including the freedom of self-expression. However, I am still convinced that traditional family values ​​are the most important moral pillar and the key to successful development both in the present and in the future,” Putin said at the Eurasian Women’s Forum.

• Beijing has never recognised New Delhi’s sovereignty over the state of Arunachal Pradesh, a mountainous state located in the eastern section of the India-China border. Indian media reported recently that around 200 Chinese troops “intruded” into Arunachal Pradesh before some of them were “briefly detained” by the Indian Army and sent back. Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday presided over the “breakthrough blast” on the main tube of the upcoming Sela Tunnel, an all-weather connectivity project in India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, which borders China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. Singh said that the tunnel was important not only for bolstering India’s “national security” but would also lead to the “socio-economic development” of the entire region by boosting tourism and employment opportunities for the locals. The minister also lauded the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) for “playing a crucial role in enhancing operational readiness” of the Indian security forces.

• Algerian police arrested 17 members of a separatist group on Wednesday, claiming they were planning an armed attack with Israeli help. According to Bir Mourad Raïs-based Ennahar TV, those arrested were members of the Movement for Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), an Imazighen separatist group that seeks self-government for the Kabylie region in Algeria’s Tell Atlas mountains. They were charged with criminal acts targeting homeland security. The news outlet noted that police had seized weapons and political agitation flyers in the raid, as well as documents indicating continuous contact with “the Zionist entity,” or Israel.

• Washington itself is undermining the US dollar’s long-time status as the world’s largest reserve currency by using the greenback as an instrument of sanctions abroad, while raising the national debt and driving inflation at home. That’s according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was speaking after a panel discussion at the Russian Energy Week, in Moscow, on Wednesday. “It seems to me that the United States is making a very big mistake by using the dollar as a sanctions instrument… by preventing payment in dollars for the sanctioned products,” he told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble. Countries facing US sanctions, like Russia, “have no other choice, we are simply forced to switch to settlements in other currencies,” he added. Gamble had asked about the possibility of using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to sell oil and gas, something Putin welcomed in principle but said it was “too early,” citing crypto’s volatility.

• “I wouldn’t be surprised if Planet Nine has already been imaged in one of the large sky surveys currently underway, but, if not, it will be hard for it to hide from the Vera Rubin Observatory once it starts operations in a few years,” Caltech’s Michael Brown told The Daily Galaxy. Brown, along with Caltech’s Konstantin Batygin, presented the first evidence that there might be a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit through the outer solar system in 2016. “At five Earth masses, Planet Nine is likely to be very reminiscent of a typical extrasolar super-Earth,” says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science and Van Nuys Page Scholar at Caltech. Super-Earths are planets with a mass greater than Earth’s, but substantially less than that of a gas giant. “It is the solar system’s missing link of planet formation. Over the last decade, surveys of extrasolar planets have revealed that similar-sized planets are very common around other sun-like stars. Planet Nine is going to be the closest thing we will find to a window into the properties of a typical planet of our galaxy.”

• In Mars and the Mind of Man, Ray Bradbury, foreshadowed the goal of the Mars Perseverance Mission when he wrote “We are all … children of this universe. Not just Earth, or Mars, or this system, but the whole grand fireworks. And if we are interested in Mars at all, it is only because we wonder over our past and worry terribly about our possible future.” (A digitized copy of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles reached the Red Planet in 2008, aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander).

• “It seems that each time we speculate about the composition of the Martian surface, Mars has other ideas. I, therefore, suspend both hope and conjecture on this matter. I try to rid myself of pet theories, for they can grow into formidable and dangerous pests. Instead, I wait with an open mind and many open questions, the most pressing of which is: will the sample that returns to Earth be the same as the sample that left Mars, or is the surface metastable?” Elizabeth Sklute at the Planetary Science Institute, observed.

News Burst 15 October 2021