News Burst 22 February 2022 – Get The News!

• New social network TRUTH Social, created by former US President Donald Trump, has been published on the Apple App Store. The application can now be downloaded but yet cannot be used as all possible users are put on a waiting list upon creating an account “due to a massive demand.” The network is expected to be fully operational for users in the United States by late March. According to Trump, his network will fight against Big Tech censorship and protect the right to free speech and expression. The launch of TRUTH Social came on the Presidents Day, celebrated on the third Monday of February each year.

• Italian Ambassador to Australia Francesca Tardioli died on 19 February after falling from a balcony of a house in the town of Foligno, according to Corriere di Umbria, a local news outlet. The incident reportedly took place in the province of Perugia, in the hometown of the diplomat, where she had arrived for a vacation. “She allegedly lost her balance while leaning over her balcony,’’ Italian news agency AGI reported. Francesca’s death is being investigated by the police. Francesca Tardioli has worked in embassies and consulates in Albania, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and in the NATO mission.

• The dead birds, ranging from guillemots to puffins and gulls, appear to have been hit by an unlucky combination of starvation and stormy weather. Hundreds of dead birds have washed ashore on the the island of Fanø in the North Sea off the coast of Jutland in Denmark in recent days. Researcher Kim Fischer alone has collected some 200 different seabirds at Fanø, Danish Radio reported. Ib Krag Petersen, a senior researcher at the Department of Ecoscience at Aarhus University and a specialist in seabirds, called the situation on Denmark’s West Coast serious. In 2007, marine biologists in Northern Europe sounded the alarm because the North Sea’s fish-eating seabirds, ranging from gulls to puffins and guillemots over a huge area from Iceland to the Faroe Islands, Scotland and Norway, lacked food to the point where many colonies failed to bring out nestlings.

• After agreeing to pay an unspecified amount to accuser Virginia Giuffre’s charity, Prince Andrew is reportedly attempting to move on with life, according to biographer Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine. The biographer detailed in a new article that Andrew, who has been stripped of his royal titles and patronages, has been likening his situation to that of his nephew, Prince Harry, although their situations are very different. Although Andrew has been accused of multiple sex crimes, the 62-year-old reportedly believes that there could be a future career for him in “broadcasting, public speaking, television and even publishing.”

• The massive trove of data on more than 18,000 bank accounts, opened between the 1940s and the 2010s, was leaked by a self-described whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared it with a nonprofit journalism group, the Organsed Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Credit Suisse emphasised that it had reviewed a large volume of accounts potentially associated with the leak, and approximately 90% had already been closed or were in the process of closure. “Of the remaining active accounts, we are comfortable that appropriate due diligence, reviews and other control related steps were taken in line with our current framework. We will take additional steps if necessary, to data protection and data leakage prevention controls in place to protect our clients,” stated Сredit Suisse Group.

• Joe Biden could block US financial institutions from processing transactions for Russian banks as part of a sanctions package that will be implemented if Moscow decides to “invade” Ukraine, Reuters reports, citing anonymous sources. The sanctions would cut the “correspondent” banking relationships between targeted Russian banks (possibly Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank) and US banks that enable international payments. In addition, certain Russian individuals could be cut off from the US banking system: they would be placed on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list and their US assets would be frozen.

• The possibility of a fourth COVID-19 shot for the general public is being weighed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pfizer began testing the efficacy of a fourth dose in January.

• The efforts of one father to limit his kids’ use of Internet and social networks after bedtime resulted in the disruption of telecommunications in an area straddling two municipalities in France, according to France Bleu. This situation reportedly came to light when one mobile phone operator noticed that one of their antennas located in Messanges, a town in the Landes department in south-western France, had stopped working at night, usually between midnight and 3 am. A technician from France’s National Frequency Agency (ANFR), which manages all radio frequencies in the country, equipped with special gear was dispatched into the region to investigate the matter, and quickly identified a house that appeared to be the source of the interference. When questioned, the man living in that house admitted to using a multi-band wave jammer, capable of neutralising both cell phone and wi-fi signals, which he claimed he bought to prevent his children from using the Internet and social networks at night.

• The Chinese Foreign Ministry has rejected Australia’s accusation that a Navy vessel belonging to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA-N) aimed a laser at a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) plane last week. Responding to Canberra’s accusations, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a press briefing on Monday that Canberra’s charge didn’t “square with facts”. Wang also urged Australia to “stop maliciously spreading such information”.

• “Israel has successfully completed the first series of live-fire tests of the ‘C-Dome’—an advanced naval configuration of the Iron Dome Aerial Defense System—aboard the Israeli Navy Ship Sa’ar 6 ‘Magen’ Class Corvette,” the IDF tweeted. The C-Dome system, designed to intercept advanced threats, was developed by the army jointly with the Israeli Defence Ministry and the Israeli-based defence company Rafael. Israel obtained four Sa’ar 6 warships, considered to be vital pillars in the country’s maritime protection of its waters and gas resources in the sea, from Germany, where the vessels were built, over the past several years.

• Bernie Madoff, the notorious ex-financier who masterminded the biggest investment fraud in US history and received a maximum sentence of 150 years in prison in 2009, died aged 82, in April 2021. The sister of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, Sondra Wiener, and her husband Marvin Wiener, have been found dead at their Boynton Beach, Florida home in an apparent murder-suicide, according to a news release from Florida police. When responding to a 911 call concerning a man and woman who were unresponsive in their home, police discovered the 87-year-old woman and her 90-year-old spouse dead from gunshot wounds on 17 February, according to a Sunday press release by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. Over decades, Madoff defrauded thousands of investors while amassing a $65 billion fortune using a Ponzi scheme, whereby profits were paid to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.

News Burst 22 February 2022