Dear Readers,

I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration last week, but the stream of consequential world events unfortunately did not stop flowing while we partook of autumnal festivities. Here is a list of my picks for the fourteen most interesting stories from the past week that you may have missed. 

As soon as this evening you could see photographs of an intriguing, bright orange spider and the jack o' lantern that I carved for Halloween up on the website. Additionally, there will be a profile essay of my father as a "prepper." He has a very interesting story that I think you all will enjoy and draw some measure of wisdom from. It will be filed under the "Narratives" section in the "Prose" tab. 

Enjoy!

Sincerely,

Abram Leyzorek

DISCLAIMER:

The opinions, sentiments, and/or intentions presented in the report below do not have any relation to the opinions, sentiments, and/or intentions of Abram Leyzorek.

Abram Leyzorek

11/19/2018

Current Events

1. RT: According to a report by the Associated Press, two thirds of the people killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen in 2018, approximately sixty people, have been innocent civilians and 215 civilians have been killed since 2002.                                                                                                                               Date: November 18, 2018.                                                                                      From: https://www.rt.com/news/444308-us-drone-casualties-civilians/,                      Read more: https://www.apnews.com/9051691c8f8a449e8bb6fd684f100863.
2. RT: On November 19, 2018, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) announced that it will exchange 200 billions of its yuan currency, the equivalent of 281 billion US dollars, for 440 trillion Indonesian rupiah over a three year period in an attempt to increase investment in both countries and keep their shared financial markets stable.  Date: November 19, 2018.                                                                                              From: https://www.rt.com/business/444370-china-indonesia-currency-swap-deal/.    Read more: https://www.rt.com/business/441641-russia-china-national-currencies-payment/.
3. RT: The BRICS, an association of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, is considering establishing a gold standard for its currencies according to Russian officials, something that Claudio Grass of Precious Metal Advisory Switzerland says would radically change the global economy because it would cause the current “paper gold” exchanges to disintegrate and also result in a rapid increase in gold price and since it would make BRICS currencies much more stable and valuable, they would soon replace the fiat U.S. dollar as the dominant currency in the world.  Date: October 17, 2018.                                                                                              From: https://www.rt.com/business/412546-china-russia-gold-standard-dollar/.          Read more: http://nomadcapitalist.com/2018/08/30/gold-backed-currency/.
4. New Scientist: In October of 2018, a firm called Genomic Prediction began communicating with In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinics around the country about offering their service, a test that examines a subject’s DNA thoroughly and derives something called a polygenic risk score that can indicate its risk of diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and both types of breast cancer, which are all influenced by hundreds of genes, as well as intelligence, to screen embryos for genetic diseases and potential for IQ twenty-five points below average, but they will not screen for genes indicating a likelihood of high intelligence for ethical reasons even though, according to the company founder Stephen Hsu, if they do not do it, another company will; even without legal restriction in countries like the U.K., this application of polygenic testing may not be as revolutionary as it sounds, because IVF clinics usually only have a small number of embryos to choose from for each potential parent and the genes of those embryos will most likely be similar to those of the mother.                                                                                                                           Date: November 15, 2018.                                                                                         From: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032041-900-exclusive-a-new-test-can-predict-ivf-embryos-risk-of-having-a-low-iq/?utm_medium=WEB&utm_source=NSNS&utm_campaign=TopContentWidget-Trending.                                                                                                                    Read more: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603633/us-panel-endorses-designer-babies-to-avoid-serious-disease/.
5. Phys.org: Researchers at the Army’s corporate research laboratory (ARL) published a study on November 6, 2018, in the journal npj Quantum Information documenting their discovery of a new method to reduce noise that interferes with the clarity of quantum signals, or signals involving quantum bits of information or qubits, transferred by fiber optic cables and produced by the inherent properties of the cables that filters at the noise not at the receiving end of the signal as in classical radio communications, but by altering qubits traveling along other paths, which is made possible because the qubits are pairs of quantumly entangled photons; they hope that their research will greatly increase cybersecurity for soldiers on the battleground. Date: November 21, 2018.                                                                                            From: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-scientists-revolutionize-cybersecurity-quantum.html.                                                                                                              Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41534-018-0107-x.
6. Ars Technica: At the Johnston Indoor Track at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a team of researchers launched the first heavier-than-air, functional aircraft without moving parts that was propelled by an ionic drive, a mode of propulsion that relies on a so called ionic wind that is created by two electrodes, one with a high positive charge that ionizes the nitrogen in the air and one with a negative charge of the same degree that accelerates the nitrogen ions towards it, which, in turn, accelerate some of the neutral air molecules in between the electrodes which account for the majority of the thrust as most of the ions are absorbed by the negative electrode, which was powered by a battery bank integrated into its five-foot wingspan and enabled the craft to fly over sixty meters, a figure only limited by the size of the facility, vs. the ten meters it flew when the drive when only the bungee cord propelled it; a paper published in the journal Nature on November 21, 2018, detailed the project.                                                                                                       Date: November 21, 2018.                                                                                              From: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/small-drone-soars-on-an-ionic-wind-with-no-moving-parts/.                                                                                                                              Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9.                                 
7. KTLA 5: A paper published November 2018 in the journal Current Biology documented the discovery of 200 million termite mounts in Northern Brazil, some ten feet tall and thirty feet wide, that cover an area the size of the United Kingdom and date back from between 690 and 3820 years ago.                                            Date: November 22, 2018.                                                                                            From: https://ktla.com/2018/11/21/ancient-termite-megapolis-as-large-as-britain-found-in-brazil/.                                                                                                               Read more: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31287-9.
8. Science: Sarah E. Gullbrand et al have shown that “tissue-engineered” spinal cord discs display mechanical properties almost the same as natural ones in mice and goats five months and two months after implantation, respectively.                                                                                                                     Date: November 21, 2018.                                                                                              From: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/468/eaau0670.                                   Read more: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/science-education/science-topics/tissue-engineering-and-regenerative-medicine.
9.   CBS News: Polish researchers published a paper on November 22, 2018, in the journal Science about their discovery of an elephant-sized, lizard-like creature that lived 200 million years ago in the late Triassic called Lisowicia bojani, after a town in Poland where the bones were uncovered, and belongs to a group of animals called dicynodonts that occupy the same branch as mammals in the evolutionary tree; the reptoid animal with a beak-like mouth upends a longstanding hypothesis that there were no large herbivores besides dinosaurs at that time.                                          Date: November 22, 2018.                                                                                      From: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lisowicia-bojani-scientists-find-remains-huge-ancient-herbivore-poland/.                                                                                          Read more: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/ancient-mammal-cousin-looked-cross-between-rhino-and-turtle.
10. USA Today: Research published in the Journal Science on November 23, 2018, attributes the disappearance of much of Africa’s megafauna, animals weighing more than one ton, twenty-eight lineages specifically, beginning around 4.6 million years ago not to humans as has been long thought, but to decreasing CO2 levels which favored the growth of grasses rather than the woody plants that had been a megafaunal staple for millions of years, so the extinction of these animals seems to correspond to the decrease in availability of their primary food sources.                      Date: November 23, 2018.                                                                                      From: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/11/23/humans-didnt-cause-animal-extinctions-africa-science-study-says/2090400002/.                                        Read more: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6417/938.full.
11. Voice of Europe: An eighteen-year-old refugee from Bangladesh living in France who in 2015 sexually assaulted one young girl and raped another who attended the same high school has been sentenced to two years in prison for the former offense in a final court ruling handed down on November 21, 2018, but has been acquitted of the rape because he may have been influenced by “different cultural norms.”              Date: November 22, 2018.                                                                                          From: https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/11/refugee-acquitted-of-rape-as-he-has-different-cultural-norms-his-female-victim-attempted-suicide/?utm_source=samizdat&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=free.                    Read more: https://www.lamanchelibre.fr/actualite-619701-proces-pour-viol-sur-mineure-dans-la-manche-une-enquete-mal-menee.
12. USA Today: Scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have received “promising results” from an experimental vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease, the most prevalent form of dementia, that was shown to reduce the accumulation of amyloid and tau proteins in the brain, known contributing factors to the deadly disease, according to a paper published in the journal Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy on November 20, 2018; if the vaccine proves effective in humans, the researchers say it could reduce Alzheimer’s disease cases to one half of their current number, 5.7 million.                                                                                                  Date: November 24, 2018.                                                                                              From: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/science/2018/11/24/alzheimers-vaccine-aims-cut-dementia-half-may-see-human-trials/2097609002/.                                  Read more: https://alzres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13195-018-0441-4.
13. NPR: On November 25, 2018, Russian vessels took control of three Ukrainian ships, two armored gun-boats and one tug boat, that Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, says were encroaching on Russia’s territorial waters when they attempted to pass underneath Russia’s Kerch Bridge that spans the Kerch Strait which connects the Black Seas and the smaller Sea of Azov, even though the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov are shared territorial waters according to a 2003 treaty; Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko will petition parliament to green-light the imposition of martial law in response to the incident, which would allow Poroshenko to, among other things, postpone the upcoming presidential election in March.                                              Date: November 26, 2018.                                                                                      From: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/26/670746252/ukraine-considers-martial-law-after-russia-seizes-its-ships-near-crimea.                                                                  Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia/russia-fires-on-and-seizes-ukrainian-ships-near-annexed-crimea-idUSKCN1NU0DL.
14. NPR: He Jiankui, a scientist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China,, claims to have used CRISPR-Cas9, a recently-developed gene editing tool, to genetically modify sixteen human embryos, eleven of which He inserted into wombs in an attempt to make babies which resulted in twin girls Lulu and Nana who, as a result of the gene editing, lack the gene CCR5 which allows human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to develop which means that despite their father being HIV positive, the girls will not develop HIV; fellow geneticists criticize He’s experiment as anecdotal, because his experiment has not been published in any journal and only in videos he has posted online, and potentially dangerous, because now the girls are much less resistant to West Nile Virus, and premature at the current level of technology, because any mistake in gene editing could lead to new diseases that could be passed down for generations, and He conducted the experiment before the Second International Summit on Human Gene Editing which will take place in Hong Kong and attempt to decide what the ethical applications of CRISPR-Cas9 on humans are.                                                                                                                    Date: November 26, 2018.                                                                                          From: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/26/670752865/chinese-scientist-says-hes-first-to-genetically-edit-babies.                                                    Read more: https://www.apnews.com/4997bb7aa36c45449b488e19ac83e86d.