News Burst 16 November 2019

• Pakistan on Friday began vaccinating millions of children against typhoid fever, a dangerous bacterial infection that can spread through contact or contaminated food and water, in an effort to contain a drug-resistant outbreak of the disease that has infected around 11,000 people since 2016.
• In response to escalated, student-involved violence during Hong Kong anti-government demonstrations and “riots,” Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has moved to evacuate over 500 students from the semi-autonomous city via government-chartered flight. As of Friday, nearly half of the Taiwanese student body attending universities in Hong Kong have returned to their home state, according to a November 15 announcement from Taipei.
• The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has purchased $3.9-billion worth of seats from Russia to transport its astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) since July 2011.
• As of December 10, 2019, “YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service, if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.” In other words, if you have a YouTube channel that YouTube employees decide isn’t profitable enough for Google, then the company has now granted itself the option to completely shut down your account without warning or consequence.
• US President Donald Trump has moved to issue at least two pardons to US military service members involved in multiple cases associated with charges of war crimes. The commander-in-chief granted Army Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn and Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance clemency and restored the rank of Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward Gallagher early Friday evening.
• Ankara recently raised the issue of the fate of captured Daesh terrorists, arguing that they must be sent back to their countries of origin, where they must be prosecuted in accordance with local laws. Many European states, however, have refused to accept those extradited from Turkey, claiming they were denationalised.

• Hermann Historica, an auction house in Munich, Germany, is facing backlash for planning to sell 147 items from the Third Reich on November 20. Some of the Third Reich memorabila to be auctioned off later this month includes an edition of “Mein Kampf,” the 1925 manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler; Hitler’s top hat; and dresses belonging to Hitler’s wife Eva Braun. The dresses were discovered in 40 trunks obtained by US military officials in 1945 in Salzburg, Austria.
• US Army tests grenade-slinging drone. The Pentagon has been seeking a weapon capable of flushing enemy forces out of cover positions for years, testing a variety of weapons, including other kinds of armed drones. The latest project, a three-rotor drone produced by Australian startup Skyborne Technologies, can be fitted with existing US Army weaponry, including a grenade launcher and shotgun.
• Syrian President Bashar Assad has scorned the official story of wealthy sex predator Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide, suggesting that people like him, or the late White Helmets founder, knew too much for the rich and powerful.
• Epstein “was killed because he knew a lot of vital secrets connected with very important people in the British and American regimes, and possibly in other countries as well,” Assad told Russian channel Rossiya-24 in an interview.
• Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno continues to occupy the Carondelet Palace despite a brief relocation to Guayaquil as he faced mass protests over an austerity package, while Chilean President Sebastian Pinera is hanging onto power despite over three weeks of massive, daily protests that have pushed his approval rating to nine percent.
• “Bolivia is very rich, it is said that it has 70 percent of the essential material [lithium] to make the new batteries. We all know that there is a change in energy taking place in the world,” former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica said.

Internet

• Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo heads the ranking of the most popular 2019 Instagram accounts. He is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with almost 182 million followers. Instagram’s own account was ranked first with almost 312 million followers.
• As of the first quarter of 2019, Twitter averaged 330 million monthly active users, a decline from its all-time high of 336 MAU in the first quarter of 2018. As of the first quarter of 2019, the company switched its user reporting metric to monetizable daily active users (mDAU).
• With 2.41 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2019, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. In the third quarter of 2012, the number of active Facebook users surpassed one billion, making it the first social network ever to do so.
• In 2018, companies in Italy lost over 8 million U.S. dollars to cyberattacks. This represented a 20 percent increase compared to the figure for 2017. As companies embrace digital innovation, they become increasingly dependent on the Internet.
• The U.S. states with the largest losses through reported cyber crime in 2018 was California that reported a loss of more than 450 million U.S. dollars through cyber crime, more than double the amount of second-placed New York, which reported 201 million U.S. dollars of losses to the IC3.

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.5 Greece
Strongest EQ in US M3.5 California
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.3 Chile
Deepest EQ M2.7 122 km PNG News Burst 16 November 2019

News Burst 15 November 2019

• Brutal Arctic fronts have engulfed Scandinavia over the past few weeks. The record for Finland’s lowest-ever Autumn temp has just been smashed (for the second time this week), as has Sodankylä’s all-time snow-depth record (for early Nov). The temperature in Enontekiö, in the Finnish part of Lapland, plunged to a Santa-freezing –28.2C(-18.8F), beating-out the nation’s previous all-time autumnal low.
• France Police are having difficulty warding off adventurous ‘beach combers’, some of whom reportedly traveled for miles to try and snatch a kilo or two of raw blow right off the beach. On Monday, police caught a 17 yo carrying five kilos of washed-up cocaine at Lacanau, a surfing beach near the city of Bordeaux that police had ordered closed because of the cocaine.
• Four men were jailed on Thursday, 14 November, after being convicted in London of being part of a “sophisticated” conspiracy to smuggle or produce £40 million worth of anabolic steroids.
• Investigators have completed the inquiry into the criminal case opened over a Boeing 737-500 passenger liner’s crash at Kazan airport in 2013, which claimed 50 lives. The investigation found that the air crash was due to mistakes made by the plane’s captain and co-pilot, Cpt. Salikhov (dead) lacked flying skills and had been allowed to run a passenger liner on the basis of false certificates. Salikhov in the process of the landing maneuver steered the plane into a precarious position. The co-pilot, Viktor Gutsul, did not intervene. In the emergency that followed Salikhov violated flying rules, thus causing the crash.
• Almost two million Syrian refugees have already returned to their homes, Head of Russia’s National Defense Control Center Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev said on Thursday at a joint meeting of the Russian and Syrian inter-agency coordination headquarters on the issue of resettling the refugees in Syria.

• Fifty Beluga Whales from Srednyaya Bay that were released this month in the Primorsky Region in Russia have migrated across the region’s coast in a 40-km radius from their point of release and are getting used to their new habitat.
• Ecologists from the “Free Russian Whales” coalition have raised the issue of releasing walruses kept in Srednyaya Bay in the Primorsky Region, from where Beluga Whales and Orcas had been released last week.
• Robots will outperform humans, we’re told – but Boeing engineers aren’t that convinced. After years of struggle with a robotic system that flubbed the assembly of its giant 777X jet, they’ve gone back to human labor again. America’s biggest aerospace corporation has finally dumped the robots that were used to assemble two main fuselage sections on the Boeing 777 and 777X long-haul airliners.
• Judges at the International Criminal Court on Thursday approved a prosecution request to investigate crimes against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar, the court said in a statement.
• Lack of forecast rains to prolong Australian bushfires threat. Official weather forecasts for Australia out on Thursday showed no substantial rains for at least three months, providing grim news as firefighters battle to get more than 100 bushfires raging across the east coast under control.

• An M7.2 quake occurred in Indonesia this afternoon, the epicenter is at sea but there were no tsunamis. In the days before we had seen a series of very deep shocks in the Western Pacific and a superficial shock of this magnitude, but also higher, was expected.
• New figures from a US military watchdog group have tallied the incredible costs of the US war on terror since September 11, 2001, finding that well over $6 trillion have been dropped on dozens of conflicts in which some 800,000 people have died.
• Indian Army asks officers to deactivate Facebook accounts, stay away from WhatsApp. According to the advisory issued by the Indian army, there have been numerous instances of information being lost through social media, which though inadvertent, suggest that despite multiple directives issued, army personnel have not been attentive to the existing threats and negative implications of using the online medium.
• The president of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations demanded that Fox News ban former federal prosecutor and Trump ally Joe diGenova for claiming that the Hungarian-American billionaire “controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department.”

Strongest EQ in Europe M3.4 Greece
Strongest EQ in US M2.8 Oklahoma
Strongest EQ on the Planet M7.1 Indonesia
Deepest EQ M4.5 599 km Fiji News Burst 15 November 2019