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Olaszország Italy
2019. III. 20. Őrizetbe vették azt az olasz állampolgársággal rendelkező 47 éves szenegáli buszsofőrt a Milánó melletti San Donato Milanese településen, aki március 19-én benzint locsolt szét és felgyújtott egy 51 gyereket szállító iskolabuszt. A rendőrök a hátsó ajtót és az ablakokat betörve mindenkit ki tudtak menekíteni a járműről. A Sy névre hallgató sofőr szexuális erőszak és ittas vezetés miatt már ismert volt a hatóságok előtt, kihallgatása során pedig beismerte, hogy előre eltervezte a tettét, a Földközi-tengeren hánykolódó afrikai menekültek miatt cselekedett. (Forrás: Index)
12 March 2019 Parents risk being fined up to €500 if they send their unvaccinated children to school. Children under six can be turned away. The new law came amid a surge in measles cases - but Italian officials say vaccination rates have improved since it was introduced. Under Italy's so-called Lorenzin law - named after the former health minister who introduced it - children must receive a range of mandatory immunisations before attending school. They include vaccinations for chickenpox, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella. Children up to the age of six years will be excluded from nursery and kindergarten without proof of vaccination under the new rules. Those aged between six and 16 cannot be banned from attending school, but their parents face fines if they do not complete the mandatory course of immunisations. (Source: BBC)
The Netherlands
18 March 2019 A gunman shot dead three people and wounded nine on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht and police said they were hunting for a 37-year-old Turkish man in an apparent terrorist attack. (Source: Reuters)
Ukraine
18/03/2019 Eleven people have died and more than 30,000 including 17,000 children have been infected this year in a major measles outbreak in Ukraine, the European country worst hit by the disease. Shortages of vaccine in previous years and anti-vaccination sentiment, often driven by online campaigns spreading false information about the alleged risks, were the main reasons behind the outbreak. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a 95-percent vaccination rate to prevent mass hospitalisations and fatalities. In Ukraine, just 42 percent of one-year-olds had been vaccinated as of end-2016. Europe as a whole saw nearly 83,000 cases last year. The Ukrainian government reported 54,000 cases in 2018. (Source: France24)
European Union
03.20.19. The European Union slapped Google with a €1.5 billion fine, which comes to a little over $1.7 billion. This latest fine was over its antitrust practices with its advertising business. Essentially, for years Google didn’t allow its AdSense customers to feature rival search engines on their sites. (Source: FastCpmpany)
Mozambique
March 18, 2019 More than 1,000 people were feared dead in Mozambique four days after cyclone Idai slammed into the country, submerging entire villages and leaving bodies floating in the floodwaters. (Source: APNews)
Iran
March 14, 2019 Iran’s Defense Ministry announced that it had launched a massive exercise involving 50 drones that are based on a US Sentinel drone the Iranians captured in 2011. (Source: TheJerusalemPost)
Philippines
11.03.2019 The Filipino president regularly ends up in the media spotlight over his controversial remarks regarding women, rape, Catholic clergy, drug users, and producers. In one of his latest remarks he alleged that rape will continue to exist as a crime as long as beautiful women exist on Earth. Duterte advised women against approaching priests in church warning that they can't resist the call of basic human nature during a speech on 8 March. (Source: SputnikNews)
Syria
19 March 2019 isis 'caliphate' is reduced to a few hundred square yards of bombed-out scrapyard. The battle for Baghouz has dragged on for weeks - and the encampment has proven a major battleground, with tents covering foxholes and underground tunnels. The siege has also been slowed by the unexpectedly large number of civilians in Baghouz, most of them families of is members. Over past weeks they have been flowing out, exhausted, hungry and often wounded. The sheer number who emerged - nearly 30,000 since early January according to Kurdish officials - took the Kurdish-led SDF by surprise. Commanders say they don't know how many more may still be left, hiding in tunnels beneath the war-scarred village. Over the past two months, more than 60,000 people have poured out of the dwindling enclave, nearly half of whom surrendered as isis supporters, including some 5,000 fighters, according to the SDF. (Source: DailyMail)
New Zealand
15 March 2019 New Zealand mosque attacker's plan began and ended online. Online accounts linked to gun attacks that killed 49 people and wounded at least 20 at two New Zealand mosques had in recent days circulated. The Facebook livestream of the attack, apparently recorded with a head-mounted camera, began about 1:40 p.m. local time. The attacker plays music as he drives to the mosque, including a British grenadiers march and a Serbian anti-Muslim hate anthem called "Remove Kebab". Once he arrives in the Hagley Park district of Christchurch, the attacker parks the car and opens the rear hatch, revealing a cache of guns, ammunition and what appear to be red fuel containers. Picking up two guns, both covered in names and slogans, he walks around the corner to the entrance of a mosque and begins shooting. The livestream ended less than 20 minutes later. The suspected shooter was arrested about 3 p.m. (Source: Reuters)
United States
03.18.19 His campaign motto, “Humanity First.” Yang, an entrepreneur whose candidacy is fueled by grassroots donations, appears to be the first presidential candidate in history to take a public position on circumcision. He now has his eye on a new demographic: circumcision opponents who call themselves “intactivists” - a reference to their desire to keep penises “intact.” Yang’s anti-circumcision platform has also been a hit with the racist 4Chan posters who have embraced Yang’s call for a monthly $1,000 payment to every American, which they’ve dubbed “Yangbux.” (Source: TheDailyBeast)
March 15, 2019 About 553,000 people were homeless at the end of 2018, and nearly one-quarter of homeless people live in California. There were 167 cases of typhus from Jan. 1, 2018, through Feb. 1 of this year, up from 125 in 2013 and 13 in 2008. There were 948 cases of hepatitis A in 2017 and 178 in 2018 and 2019. Twenty-one people have died as a result of the 2017-18 outbreak. Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus - a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals - in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building. People in Washington state have been infected with Shigella bacteria, which is spread through feces and causes the diarrheal disease shigellosis, as well as Bartonella quintana, which spreads through body lice and causes trench fever. Hepatitis A, also spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. The disease also has erupted in New Mexico, Ohio and Kentucky, primarily among people who are homeless or use drugs. Many also have mental illness and substance abuse disorders, which can make it harder for them to stay healthy or get health care. (Source: ScientificAmerican)
March 14, 2019 Defense officials want to test a neutral particle-beam in orbit in fiscal 2023 as part of a ramped-up effort to explore various types of space-based weaponry. They’ve asked for $304 million in the 2020 budget to develop such beams, more powerful lasers, and other new tech for next-generation missile defense. They’re also pouring money into a study of space-based neutral particle beams, a different form of directed energy that disrupts missiles with streams of subatomic particles traveling close to light speed - as opposed to lasers, whose photons travel at light speed. The other study is a $15 million exploration of whether satellites outfitted with lasers might be able to disable enemy missiles coming off the launch pad. On July 13, 1989 the U.S. launched a neutral particle beam into space, as part of an experiment called BEAR, for Beam Accelerator Aboard a Rocket. The U.S. is a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits placing nuclear weapons in space. The treaty does not provide an obstacle to the deployment of either lasers or neutral particle beams in orbit. (Source: DefenseOne): https://tinyurl.com/y4h3m9m4
A comment: "Defense news conditions the population, it does not inform.'
14 March 2019 Scientists at Harvard University uncovered the DNA switch that controls genes for whole-body regeneration. They have discovered that in worms, a section of non-coding or ‘junk’ DNA controls the activation of a ‘master control gene’ called early growth response (EGR) which acts like a power switch, turning regeneration on or off. They were able to decrease the activity of this gene and they found that if you don't have EGR, nothing happens. Humans also carry EGR, and produce it when cells are stressed and in need of repair, yet it does not seem to trigger large scale regeneration. Non-coding or junk DNA was once believed to do nothing, but in recent years scientists have realised is having a major impact. (Source: Telegraph))
March 14, 2019 The Republican-run Senate rejected President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southwest border, setting up a veto fight and dealing him a conspicuous rebuke as he tested how boldly he could ignore Congress in pursuit of his highest-profile goal. The Senate voted 59-41 to cancel Trump’s February proclamation of a border emergency, which he invoked to spend $3.6 billion more for border barriers than Congress had approved. In a measure of how remarkable the confrontation was, this was the first time Congress has voted to block a presidential emergency since the National Emergency Act became law in 1976. It came just a day after the Senate took a step toward a veto fight with Trump on another issue, voting to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition’s war in Yemen. (Source: APNews)
March 11, 2019 Pentagon investigating army two-star general for retaliation against Green Berets. In October 2017, USA Today reported that the Army, amid recruiting challenges, was accepting more low-quality recruits. SWCS was graduating on average 380 to about 400 Green Berets a year, but Sonntag needed to get it up to 580 in order for him to outfit all the Special Forces teams and groups. “I have to produce 580,” he allegedly told instructors. Cadre were also told, “We are getting ready to go to Korea, and … we need numbers.” (Source: Breitbart): https://tinyurl.com/yyngpwlr
Globalization
13 March 2019 The microwave auditory effect. Up to 4% of people are said to hear a strange low-pitched noise known as the Hum, but no source has ever been found. This results from radiant energy interacting with soft tissue in the skull that stimulates the auditory nerve. The effect has apparently been researched by the Pentagon as a sonic weapon. (Source: TheGuardian): https://tinyurl.com/y67posf8
See also: Bioeffects of selected non-lethal weapons (Source: Wired): https://tinyurl.com/yb5e59lm
March 12, 2019 Did IBM use your photos? Enter your Flickr username and see if your photos are in IBM’s facial recognition dataset. Today, the company sells a system called IBM Watson Visual Recognition, which IBM says can estimate the age and gender of people depicted in images and, with the right training data, can be used by clients to identify specific people from photos or videos. (Source: mbcNews): https://tinyurl.com/y6oavp7a
Moon
March 19, 2019 The equinox supermoon. At 19:45 UT on March 19, the moon will be a mere 223,309 miles away from our planet, making for an especially close perigee. Then, at 1:43 UT on March 21, the moon will officially reach its full phase. As a result of these combined events, the full lunar disk will appear 14 percent larger and 12 percent brighter than usual - a spectacle widely known as a supermoon. Astronomers Without Borders will be showcasing the super worm moon rising above Rome, Italy, starting at 16:45 UT on March 20 via the Virtual Telescope Project. (Source: NationalGeographic)
Microspace
March 20, 2019 More than one versions of reality exists (in quantum physics). Two individuals observing the same photon could arrive at different conclusions about that photon's state - and yet both of their observations would be correct. The two conflicting realities could both be true. Wigner, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1963 in 1961 had introduced a thought experiment that became known as "Wigner's friend." It begins with a photon - a particle of light. When an observer in an isolated laboratory measures the photon, they find that the particle's polarization - the axis on which it spins - is either vertical or horizontal. However, before the photon is measured, the photon displays both polarizations at once, as dictated by the laws of quantum mechanics; it exists in a "superposition" of two possible states. Once the person in the lab measures the photon, the particle assumes a fixed polarization. But for someone outside that closed laboratory who doesn't know the result of the measurements, the unmeasured photon is still in a state of superposition. That outsider's observation - their reality - therefore diverges from the reality of the person in the lab who measured the photon. Yet, neither of those conflicting observations is thought to be wrong, according to quantum mechanics. Ringbauer, a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbrück in Austria and his colleagues tested Wigner's original idea with an even more rigorous experiment which doubled the scenario. They designated two "laboratories" where the experiments would take place and introduced two pairs of entangled photons, meaning that their fates were linked, so that knowing the state of one automatically tells you the state of the other. (The photons in the setup were real. Four "people" in the scenario - "Alice," "Bob" and a "friend" of each - were not real, but instead represented observers of the experiment). The two friends of Alice and Bob, who were located "inside" each of the labs, each measured one photon in an entangled pair. This broke the entanglement and collapsed the superposition, meaning that the photon they measured existed in a definite state of polarization. They recorded the results in quantum memory - copied in the polarization of the second photon. Alice and Bob, who were "outside" the closed laboratories, were then presented with two choices for conducting their own observations. They could measure their friends' results that were stored in quantum memory, and thereby arrive at the same conclusions about the polarized photons. But they could also conduct their own experiment between the entangled photons. In this experiment, known as an interference experiment, if the photons act as waves and still exist in a superposition of states, then Alice and Bob would see a characteristic pattern of light and dark fringes, where the peaks and valleys of the light waves add up or cancel each other out. If the particles have "chosen" their state, you'd see a different pattern than if they hadn't. Wigner had previously proposed that this would reveal that the photons were still in an entangled state. The authors of the new study found that even in their doubled scenario, the results described by Wigner held. Alice and Bob could arrive at conclusions about the photons that were correct and provable and that yet still differed from the observations of their friends - which were also correct and provable, according to the study. Quantum mechanics describes how the world works at a scale so small that the normal rules of physics no longer apply; over many decades, experts who study the field have offered numerous interpretations of what that means. In contrast to classical physics, measurement results cannot be considered absolute truth but must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement. (Source: LiveScience): https://tinyurl.com/y5ldufuv
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