News Burst 7 March 2020

• 2013 – Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. According to him, corporations should own every drop of water on the planet — and you’re not getting any unless you pay up. “Nestlé production of mineral water involves the abuse of vulnerable water resources. In the Serra da Mantiqueira region of Brazil, home to the “circuit of waters” park whose groundwater has a high mineral content and medicinal properties, over-pumping has resulted in depletion and long-term damage.” – Corporate Watch. “In 2001, Nestlé faced criticism for buying cocoa from the Ivory Coast and Ghana, which may have been produced using child slaves.[58] According to an investigative report by the BBC, hundreds of thousands of children in Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo were being purchased from their destitute parents and shipped to the Ivory Coast, to be sold as slaves to cocoa farms.” – Corporate Watch.

• A few days ago, the Turkish leader turned to Donald Trump, asking him to supply Ankara with weapons and ammunition. On March 4, the Russian Defense Ministry accused Turkey of violating international law in the Idlib zone and announced a practical merger of Turkish roadblocks and the positions of militants. The Turkish leader presents the actions of Ankara as an attempt to ensure national security. He repeatedly emphasized that he was trying to prevent the Kurdish formations from approaching their borders. ccording to the expert, in reality there are currently no Kurds in Idlib. In addition, Ankara’s actions only exacerbate the refugee problem.

• During the six-hour talks, Moscow and Ankara agreed on introducing a ceasefire in Idlib. In addition, the parties decided to create a security corridor near the strategically important M4 highway – this area will be patrolled by Russian and Turkish forces. Experts interviewed by Izvestia believe that the negotiations will contribute to the normalization of the situation in the region.

• Signs of progress against the coronavirus epidemic emerged in China on Friday with epicentre Hubei province reporting no new cases of infection outside the provincial capital and scientists pointing to advances in the development of vaccines and drugs. “According to our estimates, we are hopeful that in April some of the vaccines [that are being developed] will enter clinical research or they would be of use in emergency situations.” – National Health Commission.

• At least 27 people were killed in an attack on a political rally in Kabul on Friday, officials said, in the deadliest assault in Afghanistan since the US signed a withdrawal deal with the Taliban. The Taliban immediately denied responsibility for the assault, which occurred at the commemoration ceremony for Abdul Ali Mazari — a politician from the Hazara ethnic group, most of whom are Shiite. The US withdrawal hinges to a great extent on the Taliban being able to control jihadist forces such as the Islamic State group.

• Pakistani rescuers using their bare hands searched Friday for seven people missing after an apartment building collapsed in the port city of Karachi on Thursday, as more bodies were pulled from the rubble, taking the death toll to 16. The residential building had been constructed as a four-story complex, but another floor was added about a year ago, in violation of construction rules, officials said earlier. A building inspector said the sewage system appeared to have triggered the disaster.

• Foreign military attachés aboard a Myanmar military helicopter escaped serious injury when it crashed in eastern Myanmar. The helicopter was bound for the commercial capital Yangon when it crashed shortly after taking off. The foreigners from several countries had attended a press briefing in the area, where authorities recently seized US$37 million worth of narcotics, chemicals and equipment. Myanmar is the world’s biggest producer of methamphetamine, and authorities are often keen to show large-scale seizures to the media.

• Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has detained three members of the royal family, including a brother of the king and a former crown prince, a sign of how fully Crown Prince Mohammed has consolidated power, and that he may have seen a potential threat to it. The detentions were disclosed Friday by a member of the royal family and a person close to the royal family, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the danger of speaking out publicly about the crown prince.

Sun Activity

Earlier this week (March 2nd) NASA’s STEREO spacecraft saw a faint coronal mass ejection (CME) billowing away from the sun. The slow-moving cloud could hit Earth’s magnetic field on March 7th, bringing enhanced magnetic fields capable of sparking Arctic auroras. This is a very uncertain forecast; no guarantees!

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 33 days
2020 total: 49 days (74%)

Strongest EQ in Europe M3.1 Iceland
Strongest EQ in North America M3.4 Oklahoma
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.9 Southwest Indian Ridge
Deepest EQ M4.1 249 km Argentina News Burst 7 March 2020

News Burst 4 March 2020

• Moralizing the way diseases and viruses are transferred is a very human, and particularly nasty trait.
  • “We don’t need this kind of riff-raff on our shores,” screamed The New York Times in 1892 in response to Russian Jewish immigrants arriving at Ellis Island by boat. (The occupants hosted lice which, in turn, led to typhus.)
  • Italian immigrants in the United States would be also accused as being the bearers and spreaders of polio in 1916. Given that many, as a study by Alan Kraut from 2010 documents, lived in “tightly concentrated neighbourhoods, and because immigrants were viewed by many as a marginal and potentially subversive influence upon society, the incidence of Italian polio made a dramatic impact upon the imagination of a public already shaken by the virulence of the epidemic and the youth of its victims.”
  • The jaundiced eye nervously looked to the origin of AIDs, seeing dark Africa, exotic primates, bestiality. Ebola, as sociologist Kevin J.A. Thomas notes, received much the same press. When it infected some 28,000 across 10 countries some five years ago, “many people were surprised to learn that four of these cases were diagnosed on US soil.”
• Trump campaign files libel suit against Washington Post over Russia conspiracy stories. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia by the law firm Tobin, O’Connor & Ewing, noted that former special counsel Robert Mueller’s April 2019 report on the investigation into alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government conclusively disproved those allegations, finding there was no evidence of collusion. Further, the suit notes that no Trump campaign official has ever spoken with the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), much less invited either North Korea or Russia to assist Trump’s re-election campaign.
• At an animal park in the Pakistani city of Lahore, four lions killed a 17-year-old grass reaper. However, how Muhammad Bilal Hussain managed to get near the lions in the evening was yet to be ascertained. Safari officials said Hussain climbed a 3.7m high fence on Tuesday night and jumped into the safari zoo to cut grass from the rear end of the enclosure which looks like a thick jungle. Four lions devoured him and the next morning parts of his skeleton were found in the lions’ enclosure.

Sun Activity

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 30 days
2020 total: 46 days (73%)

Movements continue to favor North Africa towards the Azores skipping Central Europe. The European plate felt the push, shown by movements both in Iceland, M3.2, and towards the North Pole with a M5.0 in the Svalbard Islands, home of the Global Seed Vault… all the seeds would have vibrated. The border of the African plate, not only in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, has been under constant pressure for weeks, in recent months in Europe the shocks have only sporadically occurred in Africa, most have been in Europe, now it is the opposite.

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.8 Azores
Strongest EQ in North America M4.0 California
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.0 North of Svalbard
Deepest EQ M3.5 217 km Argentina News Burst 4 March 2020

• Italian Governor Zaia from the Veneto region said: “80% of all sick people heal by themselves, 15% need medication and 5% need to have hospital attention. All 17 people who died already, had advanced health issues. No healthy person who caught the coronavirus has died. It’s an alarm with no foundation. In the beginning they reacted the way they did because they didn’t have any real information about the virus. But after seeing what it is, the information is too exaggerated.”
• Joe Biden’s South Carolina win changed the Democratic primaries, which were threatening to become a Bernie Sanders show. But Pete Buttigieg’s sudden withdrawal invokes memories of 2016, when the DNC conspired to undermine Sanders. By suspending his campaign on the eve of Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg is hoping that his moderate supporters will cross over to Joe Biden and, in doing so, enable him to win enough delegates to prevent Bernie Sanders from achieving a majority during the first round of balloting at the Democratic National Convention in July.
• The United States will not provide air support to Turkey in the wartorn Syrian province of Idlib, Pentagon Chief Mark Esper has said, speaking to reporters in Washington on Monday.
• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has 53.3 million followers on Twitter. In September 2019, he was the third-most followed world leader on the microblogging site, behind only US President Donald Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama. The Prime Minister was the first Indian to cross the 50-million-followers mark on Twitter.
• A 23 yo Carabiniere, who shot a 15 yo man armed with a gun (resulted fake) who was trying to rob his watch while on the car in Naples, has been charged of voluntary homicide. The 15 year old, twice hit by the military weapon, died of serious injuries. The victim was on a scooter with a 17 year old who was arrested on charges of attempted robbery. In the hospital, in the pockets of the 15-year-old who died, were found a Rolex and a necklace, most likely from a robbery carried out immediately before the attack on the military and his fiancée.
• Cambodian rice exports to international markets grew sharply by more than 21 per cent in the first two months of this year. “What we saw for Cambodian rice in the European market is a better picture because Cambodian rice is branded as a non-toxic product because we market our rice as sustainable rice.” – Cambodia Rice Federation

• A team of physicists in the US believe they may have discovered the first extraterrestrial protein known to man, within a meteorite that fell to Earth some three decades ago. If verified, the find – which has yet to be peer reviewed – would be the latest in a series of milestones bringing us closer to discovering extraterrestrial life. Ribose, a type of sugar found in RNA, was recently identified on a meteor.
• The United States excluded Russia’s Independent Petroleum Company (IPC) and its subsidiary IPC-Primornefteprodukt from the list of sanctions related to North Korea, the US Treasury Department said on Monday. Earlier frozen assets of companies were unblocked.
• The ‘mini-moon’, named 2020 CD3, was picked up some time in 2017 but, given how vast the sky is and how dark the moon is, it never caught anyone’s attention, until now; according to orbital simulations, 2020 CD3 will depart some time in April 2020.
• The Popocatepetl volcano has been active for the last three days, with the most recent eruption being registered on early Tuesday when the volcano sent gas and a column of ash about a kilometer into the sky.
• India’s Supreme Court on 2 March dismissed a petition filed by Pawan Gupta, who was convicted of the rape and murder of 23-year-old woman in 2012. While the four convicts are set to be hanged, another accused committed suicide in jail, while another was set free after spending three years in a reform facility because he was a juvenile when the crime was committed.

• The voracious locust swarms that periodically wreak havoc on crops in various corners of the world, and which currently threaten numerous areas in eastern Africa, may finally meet their match in an insidious tiny organism, the Daily Star reports. According to the newspaper, scientists’ efforts to genetically modify the existing species of fungus have led to the creation of the so called “zombie green fungus” which penetrates the insects’ hardy exoskeleton and poisons them from the inside.
• Agricultural officers and soldiers from the Uganda People’s Defense Force have been called upon by the government to work together in coating crops with chemicals to ward off and eliminate the destructive desert locust swarms that have invaded the East African country.
• Cambodia’s famed Angkor Archeological Park received 341,494 foreign tourists in the first two months of 2020, down 37 percent over the same period last year. The ancient park made gross revenue of 16.2 million U.S. dollars from ticket sales during the January-February period this year, also down 35 percent over the same period last year, said the state-owned Angkor Enterprise in a statement.
• On Sunday, Greece announced emergency measures to tackle the crisis, including a further tightening of border controls to the maximum level, a temporary one-month suspension of asylum applications and the immediate return of undocumented migrants to their country of origin.

Sun Activity

March is the best month of the year for auroras? A 75-year study shows that March has more geomagnetically active days than any other month of the year. (October is a close second.) This is due to the Russell-McPherron effect. In short, cracks tend to form in Earth’s magnetosphere during weeks around equinoxes, allowing solar wind to spark Northern Lights. spaceweather.com

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 29 days
2020 total: 45 days (73%)

Strongest EQ in Europe M3.3 Greece
Strongest EQ in North America M4.2 W of Vancouver Island
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.7 Aleutian Islands
Deepest EQ M4.5 533 km Ndoi Island, Fiji News Burst 3 March 2020