News Burst 22 December 2023 – Get The News! – December 21, 2023

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• [Chemtrails] Artificial rain was used for the first time in Pakistan on Saturday in a bid to combat hazardous levels of smog in the megacity of Lahore, the provincial government said. In the first experiment of its kind in the South Asian country, planes equipped with cloud seeding equipment flew over 10 areas of the city, often ranked one of the worst places globally for air pollution. The “gift” was provided by the United Arab Emirates, said caretaker chief minister of Punjab, Mohsin Naqvi. He said the team would know by Saturday night what effect the “artificial rain” had. The weather modification involves releasing common salt — or a mixture of different salts — into clouds.

• One particular reference caught the eye of Lawrence Sullivan, known to many as the ‘Florida Joker.’ Sullivan, a tattoo model who rose to internet fame in 2017 after his mugshot went viral, noticed a character in the GTA 6 trailer bearing a striking resemblance to himself, complete with distinctive face tattoos. Taking to TikTok, Sullivan addressed the game developers directly with a playful yet pointed message, “GTA, we gotta talk.” His reaction has sparked a flurry of discussions among the gaming community, with fans debating whether Rockstar intentionally drew inspiration from Sullivan’s unique look for their character design.” Florida Joker demands $2 million from Rockstar Games. 

• The number of retractions issued for research articles in 2023 has passed 10,000 — smashing annual records — as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud. Among large research-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades, a Nature analysis has found. The bulk of 2023’s retractions were from journals owned by Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley (see ‘A bumper year for retractions’). So far this year, Hindawi journals have pulled more than 8,000 articles, citing factors such as “concerns that the peer review process has been compromised” and “systematic manipulation of the publication and peer-review process”, after investigations prompted by internal editors and by research-integrity sleuths who raised questions about incoherent text and irrelevant references in thousands of papers. 

• Demonstrators outside the Congress in Buenos Aires protesting deep cuts to the government are nostalgic for a system that brought them to poverty, Argentinian President Javier Milei said on Thursday. Thousands had turned out late on Wednesday to protest Milei’s emergency decrees. The newly sworn-in president has moved to abolish 11 government ministries and enact sweeping deregulation with the intent to kick-start the economy plagued by hyperinflation and debt. In an interview with Radio Rivadavia on Thursday, Milei described the emergency measures as being “for the people” and “in favor of the market, not of the corporations.” “It may be that there are people who suffer from Stockholm syndrome,” Milei said when asked about the protesters who banged on pots and pans outside the Palace of Congress. “They embrace and love the model that has impoverished them. There are people who look at communism with nostalgia, love, and affection.” 

• An organization of British priests has released an open letter in which it said that the teachings of the Catholic Church were “unchangeable,” in response to a landmark ruling approved by Pope Francis declaring priests can now issue blessings to same-sex couples, under certain conditions. On Monday, a document issued by the Vatican’s doctrinal office said Roman Catholic priests could choose to deliver blessings to same-sex couples on a “case-by-case basis.” However, it stressed that the process is not intended to supersede the sacrament of heterosexual marriage. Nor could it happen during a regular church ritual or liturgy. In the Roman Catholic Church, a blessing is when a priest or minister asks God to protect or grant favor to a person or people. The Vatican’s declaration, it said, would reflect that God welcomes all types of people, but that such blessings would not legitimize “irregular” situations or relationships. 

• This week’s decision by Colorado’s Supreme Court to disqualify Donald Trump from holding office is the first of several legal challenges that could derail the former US president’s bid to return to the White House, the New York Times has reported. At least 17 states are currently processing legal challenges to Trump’s eligibility, the newspaper claimed on Wednesday. The Times, which cited Lawfare – a website which tracks US national security issues – added that four of these lawsuits have been filed in state courts in Michigan, Oregon, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. A further eleven lawsuits, in states including Arizona, Nevada, New York, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming, have been filed in federal district courts. Trump’s legal team has said they intend to appeal the Colorado decision to the US Supreme Court.

• Special counsel Jack Smith told the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 21 that former President Donald Trump is “misguided” to ask the high court to review his case on a regular, rather than expedited, schedule. Mr. Smith, who’s prosecuting President Trump in two separate federal criminal cases, urged the Supreme Court to review a key defense in one of those cases on an expedited basis on Dec. 11. President Trump opposed the request on Dec. 20, arguing it brings up issues for the presidency for the first time in the nation’s history and that the case should be slowed down. The prosecutors cited the same issues as a reason to speed up the case.

• The New York Times has come out with a scathing article, analyzing five instances of plagiarism committed by Harvard President Claudine Gay. To review, Gay has been credibly accused of more than 40 acts of plagiarism during her tenure at Harvard – which the university secretly investigated, threatened journalists over, and ultimately concluded was no big deal – clearing her of breaching Harvard’s “standards for research misconduct.” The Times, looking at just five examples of Gay’s plagiarism, wrote: “her papers sometimes lift passages verbatim from other scholars and at other times make minor adjustments, like changing the word “adage” to “popular saying” or “Black male children” to “young black athletes.””

• “They are advancing messenger RNA for RSV, for Epstein-Barr, for influenza. … This biopharmaceutical complex appears to be hell-bent on messenger RNA technology, no matter how unsafe it is,” says Dr. Peter McCullough. In a further development, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently sued Pfizer, accusing the drugmaker of exaggerating the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine.

• Mexico’s army appears to be raiding only a handful of active drug labs every month, despite U.S. pressure to crack down on fentanyl trafficking, with facilities that were already out of use accounting for 95% of seizures this year, according to defense ministry figures obtained by Reuters. Reuters revealed in March that Mexico had dramatically revised upward the number of lab raids by including hundreds of inactive labs on its seizures list since President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in 2018. At the time, the news agency was unable to establish what percentage of the raided labs were operational when they were captured.

• A group of 3,000 doctors and medical professionals is suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over a mandate that broadens the term “sex” in federal civil rights statutes to include “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” The group argues that the rule, among other things, forces physicians who see Medicaid patients or receive federal funding to provide “gender-affirming” care to children who want to transition to the opposite sex. This includes prescribing hormone treatments and puberty blockers and performing surgery such as removing girls’ breasts. The doctors challenging the rule say it will force them to provide that kind of treatment, even if they think it’s medically wrong for the patient or if it goes against their religious beliefs. That makes it unconstitutional, they say.

• Bird flu is likely to spread further in the Antarctic region, causing immense damage to wildlife, according to experts on the highly contagious disease that has killed hundreds of millions of birds worldwide in recent years. The spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), commonly called bird flu, to the remote southern region has raised concerns for isolated populations of species including penguins and seals that have never been exposed to the virus.

• Winter in the Northern Hemisphere officially arrived on the night of December 21st with the sun’s rays shining directly on the Tropic of Capricorn – latitude 23.43 degrees south – at 10.27pm. Eastern time. At that time, if you were in Western Australia somewhere near Lake MacKay, the sun will shine directly overhead and its six-month southward migration will end, marking the start of summer for the Southern Hemisphere . Indeed, the word “solstice” is derived from sol, the Latin word for “sun.” The ancients added sol to sistere, which means “to stand still” and came up with solstitium. Middle English speakers shortened solstitium to solstice in the 14th century. The effect is an artifact brought about by the change of the seasons, which can be readily explained today by astronomers. Our planet is tilted on axis by 23.4-degrees. So, as Earth moves around the sun once each year, there comes a time when the sun shines more on the Northern Hemisphere — summer for us; sometimes more on the Southern Hemisphere — that’s winter for us. And between each of these two extremes, there comes a time when the sun shines in equal amounts for a whole day on all parts of the planet — the equinoxes.

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