Saturday, September 12, 2020

In the news, Wednesday, September 2, 2020


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SEP 01      INDEX      SEP 03
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from Asia Times
LEAST BIASED, HIGH;  News & Media Website based in Hong Kong

China on Tuesday declined to explain why an Australian journalist working as an anchor for state TV has been detained without charge for at least two weeks, the latest case to fray relations between Beijing and Canberra. Cheng Lei, an anchor for CGTN, China’s English-language state broadcaster, has been held since at least August 14 but Australian diplomats say Beijing has given no reason for her detention. While the cause of her detention remains a mystery, she has written a number of Facebook posts critical of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Beijing’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak.

Owners will tell you that Toyota’s venerable FJ-Series Land Cruiser has a reputation for off-road 4×4 prowess in any kind of terrain or weather conditions — but what about off-planet adventures? Back in 2019, Toyota and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced plans for a hydrogen fuel-cell lunar rover. According to Green Car Reports, the vehicle now has a name — the Toyota Lunar Cruiser. Toyota and JAXA expect to launch the Lunar Cruiser in the latter half of this decade, the report said.

In 2001, finding the Pentagon at 500 knots in a commercial airliner may have been challenging for an al-Qaeda suicide pilot — but a dedicated cruise missile of today would have no trouble finding it. That attack killed 125 and forced a partial evacuation. The Defense Department showed impressive resilience: Even as one side of the building collapsed, its command center kept functioning, writes James Hasik of Defense News. In 2019, half of Saudi Arabia’s oil refining was temporarily incapacitated by a barrage of just two dozen Iranian missiles. More ominous was the total failure of the kingdom’s air defenses to defend against or even detect the attack before the first impact. Highly precise, long-range weapons are readily available to America’s enemies. In that context, contemplate the possibility of not a singular attack upon the Pentagon, but one with missiles slamming into all fives sides, and down through the “bullseye” center court, the report said. With its concentrated culture of scripted updates, hostility to analysis and mid-century office technologies, “The Building” is much of the problem. Emptying it permanently could help multiple, and hopefully better, military cultures flourish. What really matters is dispersing that concentration of leadership beyond one building in northern Virginia, lest someday America loses it all at once.

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from DW News (Deutsche Welle)
Broadcasting & Media Production Company in Bonn, Germany

Leaders from around the world have expressed condemnation over news that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was the target of an assassination attempt. Moscow, however, claims it knows nothing.

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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website

You almost certainly woke up this morning in a structure with artificial bedrock made from it. It is the abrasive compound in your toothpaste, in the porcelain basin, the tile grout, and the silicone of your bathroom. It is in the glass display of your mobile phone and in the road on which you drove to work. It is in the chip that powered your computer and in the optical fiber that transmitted the data. All of that and much more was made possible through the use of sand. The tiny grains of silicon dioxide that we commonly call quartz sand is used in tens of thousands of critical applications to advance civilization's flourishing. Humans have been using sand in the manufacturing of glass, the casting of metals, and as a building material for thousands of years; however, at no other point in history has sand been a more integral part of human civilization than during the modern age.

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from National Review  RIGHT BIAS

I keep getting reassured that House speaker Nancy Pelosi is a master strategist who earns all of that glowing press coverage. Today Pelosi insisted she had been “set up” by the hair salon where she had her hair done this week, and that the salon owes her an apology.

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from Orthodox Christianity – orthochristian.com
Religious Organization in Moscow, Russia

Turkish authorities on Wednesday demolished a historic Greek Orthodox church in the region of Bursa, north-western Turkey, which had been abandoned. The Georgios Greek Orthodox Church, known as the “Hagia Sophia” of Bursa, was destroyed amid warnings over the safety hazard posed by the structure seven years after the regional Directorate General of Pious Foundations took over the building from Bursa’s Nilüfer municipality, according to reports from the news website Duvar.

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from Reuters
International news agency headquartered in London, UK

Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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