News Burst 12 May 2020

• Naval News earlier reported, citing local sources, that the Iranian Moudge-class frigate ‘Jamaran’ had accidentally fired at the friendly general-purpose ship ‘Konarak’ during live-fire exercises near Jask in the Gulf of Oman. At least 19 people were killed and 15 were injured in an incident with an Iranian support vessel in the Gulf of Oman, the Iranian Army’s press service said on Monday.

• Richard Branson is considering selling more than a quarter of his stake in Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc., in a move that would provide some $500 million to support his broader Virgin business empire. Branson is trying to save his Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd., which has struggled to qualify for a U.K.-supported loan program aimed at helping businesses survive the crisis brought on by the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. He’s seeking outside investors for the airline, while also weighing an infusion of his own funds. Credit Suisse Group AG has been appointed to manage any sales of the Virgin Galactic shares.

• Tanzanian President John Magufuli was growing suspicious of the organization, so he reportedly decided to investigate whether the organization was as trustworthy and reliable as it claimed to be. The president reportedly confronted the WHO, then kicked the organization out of the country. Though, to be sure, the WHO has yet to comment on the situation. The unreliability of COVID-19 tests manufactured in China has been a major problem for the US, and for Europe, as countries and states have been forced to discard PPE purchased in China – often after purchasing it at inflated prices – because only one-third of the masks actually work, and many of the tests have been found to produce positive and negative results more or less at random. But we’d love to hear Bill Gates regale us with “data-based arguments” about why the WHO is indispensable to the international effort to combat the coronavirus.

• Police in the UK are apparently investigating people online who post tweets critical of the coronavirus lockdown. Toby Young’s LockdownSceptics.org website was contacted by a reader who has been very critical of police over-reach on Twitter. “He saw a Tweet from another sceptic complaining the police had checked his profile on LinkedIn and thought, “That can’t possibly be true. Surely, they’ve got more urgent maters to attend to?” He then checked his own LinkedIn profile and found that LinkedIn profile was accessed nine times between April 28 and May 5, and that one of the visitors was someone working for Metropolitan Police in London. Not content with using surveillance drones to publicly shame remote countryside dog walkers, the authorities are now also apparently keeping tabs on anti-lockdown social media posts.

• A few days after China had announced it was sending medical supplies to Italy, Chinese state media aired pictures of Italians on balconies and streets applauding the Chinese national anthem. “In Rome, with the Chinese anthem playing, some Italians chanted ‘Grazie, Cina!’ on their balconies, & their neighbors applauded along”, wrote Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry. China presented itself in the role of the savior, willing to rush to the bedside of the sick patient Italy. Now a Financial Times investigation reveals that those videos were manipulated as part of Beijing’s coronavirus propaganda. Hashtags #ThanksChina and #GoChina&Italy were further generated by bots. A report by the Carnegie Endowment called Italy “a target destination for China’s propaganda”. Antoine Bondaz, a researcher at France’s Foundation for Strategic Research, told: “China considers Europe the soft belly of the West. In their logic, there is the West, and in it the U.S. that will oppose China for structural and ideological reasons, and their European allies that need to be neutral in case of conflict between China and the U.S.”

• KSA Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan, who warned that the world’s biggest oil exporter hasn’t witnessed “a crisis of this severity” in decades, adding that government spending will have to be cut “very deeply”, something we touched on previously. We didn’t have long to wait, because early on Monday, the Saudi government – which appears to be running out of money fast – ordered government spending cuts: “Cost of living allowance will be suspended as of June first, and the value added tax will be increased to 15% from 5% as of July first,” said the Saudi finance minister according to the state news agency, suggesting Saudi Arabia is on the verge of a full-blown fiscal crisis.

• Silvia Romano, an Italian aid worker who was kidnapped in Kenya 18 months ago, has been freed and is expected back in Italy on Sunday, the Italian government announced on Saturday. Asked about the release, Di Maio said he could not reveal any details. Italian daily Corriere della Sera reported on its website that Italy paid a ransom to free the woman. The girl’s conversion to Islam was confirmed by investigative sources and that it could be the result of “the psychological condition in which she found herself during the kidnapping”. A former militant from the al Shabaab organization who kidnapped the co-worker said that “Islamists practice brainwashing.” Breaking:  She is happily pregnant.

• Conny Maritz, managing director of the Miss Namibia pageant, announced today both the Miss Namibia and Miss Teen Namibia pageants are canceled for this year. “We have carefully considered the effect of the pandemic on international pageantry, the Miss Namibia pageant for 2020, as well as the Miss Teen Namibia pageant for 2020, the health of members of the supporting public and of prospective participants, and in particular, the say financial influence of the pandemic on the pageants’ sponsors,” Maritz said.

• Buddhists, along with Nepalis belonging to different religions, marked the 2,564th birth anniversary of Gautam Buddha on Thursday amid restrictions imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Maya Devi Temple in Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, was decorated with flowers on Wednesday. But measures were taken to only allow a limited number of monks and priests inside the temple during worship and other rituals. Pujas were also performed at Buddhist shrines across the country. President Bidya Devi Bhandari visited the Swayambhunath Temple in Kathmandu and extended her best wishes for peace and prosperity to all. Buddha Jayanthi, as the birth anniversary of Gautam Buddha is known in Nepali, also marks the Ubhauli festival, which is celebrated by the Kirat community.

• People living in quarantine in a village in Lamjung – Nepal – are utilising their time by doing some repair work on a public playground. Bodh Bahadur Gurung, who has been staying in the quarantine facility for the last 10 days, said the playground needed repairs for a long time. “We thought it would be best to utilise our time doing something productive,” said Bodh Bahadur. The ward office has made it compulsory for every individual who enters the area from other parts of the country or abroad to stay in quarantine for 14 days. “We are in sound health. But, we have to stay in quarantine as a precaution,” said Bodh Bahadur. “And to make use of our time here, we decided to put some work on the playground.” Khim Bahadur Gurung, the ward chairman, said, “We have kept individuals who arrive in this ward from other parts of the country or abroad to stop the spread of novel coronavirus. We let them repair the playground since they wanted to pass their time here doing productive work.”

• Eco Green Education Park has welcomed two new members of its Humboldt penguin family at the zoo in Batu, East Java. Eco Green park said that the natural breeding program for the South American bird species, Spheniscus humboldti, had succeeded during its temporary closure during the outbreak. Operations manager Deny Rina Sari said that the part was elated about the good news: “The veterinarians and keepers only monitored the [hatching] process and provided [the animals] with a nest and food.” The parent penguins had been observed mating in early March, and the eggs were laid in late April.

• Indonesia is finalizing a US$1 billion financial bailout plan for its flag carrier to help it stave off a debt default after the coronavirus crisis forced the airline to ground most of its planes. The rescue plan includes a proposal to restructure PT Garuda Indonesia’s $500 million sukuk due next month and arrange new bridge loans of as much as $500 million to meet working capital requirements for three to six months, Deputy State-Owned Enterprises Minister Kartika Wirjoatmodjo said. Garuda will table the sukuk proposal to investors on May 18 that will include an option to extend the maturity of the securities by three years or a staggered repayment, Wirjoatmodjo said. Last month, the carrier asked bondholders to begin talks with its financial adviser, citing an “extremely challenging environment for airlines” following the virus outbreak.

• The Prince Andrew Charitable Trust (PACT) will close by the end of this year after concerns were raised by the Charity Commission about unauthorised trustee benefit. The accounts say: “In November 2019, the trustees became aware of the potential reputational risk by association following negative media coverage related to HRH The Duke of York.

• Moisés Escamilla May, a notorious Mexican gang leader, has died in prison after contracting coronavirus. Escamilla, 45, was the leader of a group within the feared criminal cartel Los Zetas. He was serving a 37-year sentence for organised crime, including his role in the decapitation of 12 people in Yucatán, Mexico.

• A member of the Iranian parliament has disclosed that “270 billion rials (6 million €) of people’s money” was paid to the United Kingdom as compensation for damages incurred in an attack by hardliners on London’s embassy in 2011 in Tehran. According to the pro-reformist MP Ahmad Mazani, the compensation which amounted to 1.3 million pounds was paid for the restoration of several pieces of art that had been destroyed during the attack on the embassy.

• If you own a Xiaomi smartphone or have installed the Mi browser app on any of your other brand Android device, you should enable a newly introduced privacy setting immediately to prevent the company from spying on your online activities. The aggregated data is then transferred to the servers located in China and Russia, counting servers the company rented from another Chinese tech giant Alibaba, ostensibly to better understand its users’ behavior.

Sun Activity

2020 is not even 5 months old. Already there have been 100 days without sunspots. This is a sign that Solar Minimum is underway.

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 9 days
2020 total: 100 days (76%)
2019 total: 281 days (77%)

Strongest EQ in Europe M3.1 Roma,Italy
Strongest EQ in North America M3.5 Mono Lake, California
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.8 Japan
Deepest EQ M4.4 315 km Vostok, Russia

News Burst 10-11 May 2020

• German airline giant Lufthansa said Friday it will fly twice as many aircraft in June as in recent weeks and return to some European destinations, but the flight plan remains a shadow of pre-coronavirus operations. Spots beloved of holidaymakers like Spanish island Mallorca, Crete and German North Sea retreat Sylt will return to the timetable, with 160 aircraft aloft bearing Lufthansa’s crane or the logos of subsidiaries Swiss and Eurowings. More details of the 106 planned destinations will be published next week, Lufthansa said.

• Moroccan police seized 3.5 tons of cannabis resin onboard a truck at the Tit Mellil motorway toll station near the city of Casablanca today, May 10. On May 4, police seized 7.2 tons of cannabis resin from a truck bearing false license plates at the station. According to the DGSN’s 2019 report, security services seized a total of 179,657 tons of cannabis and its derivatives.

• Hundreds of riot police have descended on protests in Hong Kong shopping centres as hundreds of demonstrators voiced their anger with the authorities they say are abusing social distancing laws to restrict civil liberties. In Moko mall in Mong Kok on Sunday (local time), a policeman shot pepper balls at protesters and journalists who were one floor above after a water bottle was thrown towards a group of officers from that level. Police arrested at least 11 people, including a 12-year-old girl.

• The Maltese ambassador to Finland Michael Zammit Tabona has stepped down in the wake of a Facebook post where he compared German chancellor Angela Merkel to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. In a Facebook post on Friday – which was Victory in Europe Day – Zammit Tabona said that “75 years ago we stopped Hitler. Who will stop Angela Merkel? She has fulfilled Hitler’s dream to control Europe.” [Qualis pater, talis filius]

• The German Constitutional Court made an unexpected and significant ruling last week against the ECB and Quantitative Easing. In the midst of a pandemic and an important presidential election, it is very easy to miss globally significant events. Here is one that is way under the radar: The German Constitutional Court ruled the ECB’s QE Program Could be Illegal. That is a landmark ruling that challenges the independence of the ECB and the authority of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

• The EU has attempted to defend the fact that it allowed the communist Chinese government to censor a letter it wrote before it was published in a Chinese newspaper, erasing a sentence that stated the coronavirus originated in China. The letter, co-written by the bloc’s 27 ambassadors, was published in China’s English-language newspaper China Daily on Tuesday. However, the EU agreed to allow censors to remove the sentence, which stated “But the outbreak of the coronavirus, in China, and its subsequent spread to the rest of the world over the past three months…” It is the second time in the space of two weeks that the EU has rolled over for Chinese censorship, having previously softened criticism of the communist regime in a report documenting how governments have pushed “disinformation” about the coronavirus pandemic.

• Patriotism is Russia’s national idea, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday, cautioning, however, against flag-waving moods. “Yes, it’s patriotism, I think there can be nothing else here,” Putin said when asked about the Russian national idea. But patriotism should not be spurious, he stressed in an interview with the program ‘Moscow. Kremlin. Putin”. According to the president, “patriotism means devoting oneself to the development of the country, its progress”. “But this does not mean that we must keep clinging to our heroic past, we must look ahead, into our no less heroic and successful future, and this is the ticket to success,” the Russian leader stressed.

• Spokesperson for the government of Iran Ali Rabiei has stated that the Islamic Republic is ready for a prisoner swap with the US, and sets no preconditions, according to a news agency. “We are ready to exchange Iranian and American prisoners and we are prepared to discuss this issue, but the Americans have not responded yet”, Rabiei said.

• Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependen on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA. ~ Elon Musk

• As he stated he was going to do yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk filed an 18-page lawsuit that asked a federal judge to allow him to re-open his factory in Fremont. “Alameda County’s power grab not only defies the governor’s orders, but offends the federal and California constitutions,” the lawsuit said. The suit argues that Alameda County “had violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment and sought an injunction that would allow the company to operate.”

• The Department of Justice has dropped all charges against Lt. Gen Mike Flynn putting another nail in the Russia, Russia, Russia coffin. So what comes next? Well look for US federal attorney John Durham to bring criminal charges against the FBI’s bad actors. Charges could be brought against FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. These two reconstructed the damning interview narrative against Flynn. Then there is Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe who set up the plan to take down Flynn as well as his boss FBI chief James Comey. That’s the chain of command when it comes to the Flynn trial. However once the FISA declassification is released by Durham we will discover the bad actors in the intelligence agencies. The FISA declassification release could include a number of indictments of intelligence chiefs for spying on Americans. The biggest boom could be that President Obama was updated on all these nefarious actions in his Daily Intelligence briefings. Time will tell how expansive this attempted coup radiated.

• The Afghan government has released 1,000 members of the Taliban movement and expects the group to respond by setting free government security forces personnel and speeding up the preparation of direct talks, the Afghan National Security Council said on Saturday. The prisoner exchange and launch of the intra-Afghan talks became possible after the Taliban and Washington reached a peace deal in Qatar in February. Under the agreement, the US and NATO troops are to be pulled out from the country within 14 months, and the intra-Afghan talks between the militant group and the government have been set to start on March 10. However, the talks have been delayed due to Afghanistan’s electoral crisis and mutual disagreements over the release of prisoners.

• Ethiopia has admitted that they shot down on Monday a Kenyan plane carrying humanitarian and medical supplies, killing all six people onboard. In a statement to the African Union, the Ethiopian military said they interpreted the plane’s “unusual flight” as a “potential suicide mission,” adding the crew did not inform authorities of any aircraft flying to the country. “Because of lack of communication and awareness, the aircraft was shot down,” the military said. “The incident was performed by non-Amisom troops of Ethiopia, which will require mutual collaborative investigation team from Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya to further understand the truth,” it added. All six passengers onboard died on Monday after the plane was shot down in the southwestern town of Bardaale in Somalia. Kenya expressed its shock over the incident, saying the plane was on a humanitarian mission amid the coronavirus pandemic.

• German intelligence has revealed that Chinese President Xi Jinping asked World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Thebreyesus to cover up the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in January, according to Der Spiegel. During a January 21 conversation – one week after the WHO assured the world there was ‘no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission’ – Xi reportedly asked Tedros not to reveal that the virus was in fact transmissible between humans, and to delay declaring that the coronavirus had become a pandemic – despite the virus qualifying as one by the WHO’s own former guidelines. And while the WHO announced on the 22nd that data collected through their own investigation “suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan,” which they said more analysis was required “to understand the full extent,” they waited all the way until March 11 to declare the virus a pandemic.

• Earth is about to cross a fold in the heliospheric current sheet, a vast wavy structure in interplanetary space separating regions of opposite magnetic polarity. The crossing, called a “Solar Sector Boundary Crossing,” is expected on May 11th and could trigger geomagnetic activity around Earth’s poles.

Sun Activity

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 8 days
2020 total: 99 days (76%)
2019 total: 281 days (77%)

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.4 Crete, Greece
Strongest EQ in North America M4.7 Vancouver Island, Canada
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.5 Chile
Deepest EQ M3.9 750 km Indonesia (Let’s look at Ecuador on the opposite side of the Planet) News Burst 10-11 May 2020

News Burst 8-9 May 2020

• The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a major toll on the American food supply chain, with some companies reducing slaughter capacity. However, many of these companies are owned by foreign investors. According to a May 2019 NPR report, “nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades.” Smithfield Foods, Inc., owns more than 500 farms on 146,000 acres of U.S. soil. Smithfield was purchased by the Chinese company WH Group (then known as Shuanghui Group/Shineway Group), China’s largest meat producer, for $4.72 billion in 2013. Meanwhile, German investors own 71,000 acres of farmland in Ohio, according to that same NPR report. Out of all foreign investors, Canadians own the most farmland in the U.S. American farmers and corporations also invest in foreign agriculture, owning billions of dollars of farmland across the globe.

• An advanced group of Chinese hackers has recently been spotted to be behind a sustained cyber espionage campaign targeting government entities in Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Brunei—which went undetected for at least five years and is still an ongoing threat. The group, named ‘Naikon APT,’ once known as one of the most active APTs in Asia until 2015, carried out a string of cyberattacks in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in search of geopolitical intelligence. According to the latest investigation report Check Point researchers shared, the Naikon APT group had not gone silent for the last 5 years, as initially suspected; instead, it was using a new backdoor, called “Aria-body,” to operate stealthily.

• In a new report on Thursday, the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI) announced that the inflation rate in the 12-month period ending March 20, 2020 in for foodstuff, drinking water, beverages and tobacco products passed the 42 percent mark. The new overall inflation rate is up from 34 to 37 percent in comparison with the previous year for various subcategories according to the report. The SCI report also set the rate of inflation in the non-food and services categories at 31.4 percent during the same period.

• Shortly after Brandon Van Grack, chief of the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act division, filed a notice of his withdrawal in federal court in Washington, The Justice Department has this morning filed a motion to drop the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, abandoning the critical leg of many leftists’ belief in the Russia collusion bullshit.

• Texas salon owner Shelley Luther has been ordered released from jail after the governor and attorney general protested her imprisonment over violating the state’s lockdown and modified the shutdown orders to exclude imprisonment. Luther, who became a symbol of the movement to end Texas’ lockdown when she was arrested for refusing to shutter her Dallas salon despite a district judge’s restraining order, was ordered released from jail on Thursday by the Texas Supreme Court after serving two days of a seven-day sentence.

• A gas leak at a chemical plant in India has killed several people and put hundreds in hospital with breathing difficulties. Chilling images have emerged showing victims lying motionless on the ground in the wake of the tragedy. The gas, believed to be Styrene, is highly toxic when inhaled in high enough concentrations.

• US President Donald Trump told his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Thursday that the US was ready to provide assistance to any country amid the coronavirus pandemic, including Russia, White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said.

• Indian-origin identical twin brothers, who were stranded at the Dubai airport for nearly 50 days due to the Covid-19 lockdown, finally boarded their flight to Kozhikode in Kerala today.The twins – Jackson and Benson Andrews – were among the 177 Indian passengers who were stranded at the Dubai International Airport’s terminal 3 since March 19 while they were returning from Lisbon, Portugal. They were among the 19 Indian passengers who were stuck inside the airport for over a month.

• The sale of used clothing is a billion-dollar global industry. According to some estimates, almost 70% of garments that are donated globally end up on the African continent. Donated items that cannot be sold in thrift shops in high-income countries are resold in bulk to commercial textile recyclers. The garments are then sent to sorting centers, often located in the Middle East or Eastern Europe. These are then graded and sorted into bales. The bales are in turn resold to wholesalers on the African continent. East Africa alone imports over $150 million worth of used clothes and shoes, largely from the US and Europe. In 2017, USAID estimated that the industry employed 355,000 people and generated $230 million in government revenue. It also supported the livelihoods of an additional 1.4 million in the East Africa Community bloc. In Malawi, where used clothes are known as “kaunjika” (meaning “clothes sold in a heap”). It is a popular and resilient business. A recent report predicts that the global second-hand clothing market is set to double to $51 billion in the next five years, exceeding fast fashion within a decade.

• Uganda’s Finance Minister Matia Kasaija has said the EU grants, totalling U.S.$50 million, will support three projects and programs that are meant to improve the standards of local products. It will include the funding of the inclusive green economy uptake program, which involves developing innovative products and projects that reduce environmental risks – a key benchmark for gaining access to the EU market.

Sun Activity

Sunspot number: 0
Spotless Days
Current Stretch: 7 days
2020 total: 98 days (75%)
2019 total: 281 days (77%)

Strongest EQ in Europe M4.8 Ionian Islands, Greece
Strongest EQ in North America M3.6 Idaho
Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.5 Mid-Indian Ridge
Deepest EQ M4.1 448 km Kermadec Islands News Burst 8-9 May 2020