Abram Leyzorek
8/30/18
Current Events
- National Catholic Register: Apostolic nuncio to the United States from 2011-2016 Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, published a testimony over the weekend of August 25-26, calling for the resignation of Pope Francis along with a few other bishops and cardinals who, he alleged, were involved in a cover up of sexual abuse accusations against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who has not issued any response; Pope Francis says he will say no word regarding the testimony, but several of the accused have responded to Viganò, including Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, whom Viganò accuses of being complicit in the cover up of the sexual abuse allegations against McCarrick, who accuses Viganò of publishing the testimony for the sake of “partisanship, division and distortion” and having “massive participation in the covering up of sexual abuse by bishops.”
Date: 8/27/18.
From: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/vigano-testimony-receives-mixed-response-from-us-bishops.
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/msgr-pope/active-homosexuality-in-the-priesthood-is-at-the-root-of-this-crisis.
2. European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC): Several countries in Europe are reporting the largest measles epidemic in 2018, including Romania (4317 cases), Greece (2238 cases), France (2588 cases), and Italy (1716 cases); at least 31 people have died to date.
Date: 7/16/2018.
From: https://ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/measles-continues-circulate-eueea-new-outbreaks-reported.
Read more: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-03-science-europe-measles-outbreaks.html.
3. New York Times: Federal appeals court judge of Washington D.C. Brett Kavanaugh was nominated by U.S. President Donald Trump to serve on the Supreme Court on July 9, 2018, to replace former Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, now retired; Kavanaugh is fifty-three years old, was educated at Yale Law School, and holds generally conservative viewpoints, although he says he will drop any partisan allegiances when he becomes a Supreme Court justice.
Date: July 9, 2018.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/us/politics/brett-kavanaugh-supreme-court.html.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/09/politics/kavanaugh-on-the-issues/index.html.
4. Russia Today: The Syrian government is prepared to rout out the final vestiges of the Al-Qaeda affiliated rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is designated as a terrorist organization by both the US and Turkey, from Idlib; This has not stopped the New York Times from writing a piece sympathizing with the “fighters” in Idlib and denouncing the Syrian government’s effort as potentially very harmful to the three million civilians of Idlib, while denying that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is currently negotiating humanitarian corridors to separate civilians form terrorists in Idlib, because Syria and Russia are allied against the “rebels.”
Date: September 3, 2018.
From: https://www.rt.com/usa/437543-nyt-idlib-terrorists-coverage-rebels/.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/02/world/middleeast/syria-idlib-assad.html.
5. Fox News: Jon Kyl, a former republican senator from Arizona and 76 years old, was nominated to replace the late Senator John McCain, who died August 25, but has only agreed to serve for one full year, because, he says, when he left his seat at the Senate five years ago, after serving for eighteen years, he had not intended to return.
Date: September 4, 2018.
From: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/09/04/jon-kyl-will-be-john-mccains-successor-in-senate-cindy-mccain-says.html.
Read more: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2018/09/04/jon-kyl-named-john-mccain-replacement-senate-appointment-ducey/1148030002/.
6. NASA: As part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s program, the Centennial Challenges program, NASA is hosting a two-phase challenge open to all legal residents (eighteen or older) and organizations in the United States to synthesize the simple sugar glucose, C6H12O6, from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, because such an innovation would allow future settlers on Mars to harvest CO2 from the planet’s atmosphere, which is rich in the gas, and convert it to useful resources, allowing long term outposts on Mars; such a technological development would have a myriad of applications on Earth, too, such as converting excess CO2 in the atmosphere and waste products to energy.
Date: August 30, 2018
From: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/centennial_challenges/co2challenge/challenge-announced.html.
Read More: http://www.co2conversionchallenge.org.
7. Science: A team of wildlife biologists chronicling the lives of wolves in Yellowstone National Park published findings in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on September 3, 2018, that wolves target elk who have lost their antlers, meaning that the earlier an elk sheds his rack, the more likely it that he will be consumed, but the more successful he will be in the Fall mating season because of his larger antlers, if he survives; healthier males tend to shed their racks earlier, discrediting conventional wisdom about wolves saying that they target the weakest and sickliest prey.
Date: September 3, 2018.
From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/grow-bigger-antlers-these-elk-risk-life-and-limb.
Read More: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0657-5.
8. Axios: Officials of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) announced on September fourth that the current ebola outbreak has spread to another city, Butembo, which acts as a trading hub with other countries like Uganda and has a population of one million people; the good news is that the first case was detected quickly, according to the World Health Organization’s Peter Salama.
Date: September 5, 2018.
From: https://www.axios.com/congos-ebola-outbreak-spreads-to-new-city-butembo-1df94a00-7cb5-4478-97e6-0d2a57018523.html.
Read more: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/world-health-organization-ebola-congo-warning_us_5b9022cfe4b0162f47296009?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004.
9. Live Science: Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a Cambridge graduate student when she discovered pulsars, and important discovery that earned her supervisor Antony Hewish, who had built the radio telescope that Burnell used to make the discovery, the 1974 Nobel Prize, not her; this year, however, she received the largest scientific award in the world, the Breakthrough Prize, which is worth 3,000,000 dollars, funded by Mark Zuckerburg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, Priscila Chan, Sergey Brin, and Ma Huateng, but gave it all away to support women and ethnic minorities curious about science.
Date: September 6, 2018.
From: https://www.livescience.com/63515-jocelyn-bell-burnell-breakthrough-prize.html.
Read More: https://www.livescience.com/62436-neutron-star-pulsar-width-quantum.html.
10. Extreme Tech: A small hole was detected last week in the ISS capsule Soyuz MS-09” caused a drop in cabin pressure, but no significant damage before it was repaired by the crew of six Russian cosmonauts; it was initially identified as a “micrometeoroid puncture,” but Russian Space Agency chief Dmitry Rogozin said that the hole was caused instead by a drill, an intential act of sabotage, the cosmonauts have been asked to gather more evidence, which will be presented in October when the first shuttle comes down to Earth.
Date: September 7, 2018.
From: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/276551-russian-investigators-suggest-iss-damage-could-have-been-sabotage.
Read More: https://sputniknews.com/science/201809051067757729-iss-air-leak-hole-made-on-earth/.
11. RT: Mustafa Şahin, head of Bursa Uludağ University’s archaeology department in Turkey, had been doing field surveys of Lake Iznik since 2006 but had never discovered the remains of a church, one that may have been the site of the pivotal Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, until he was contacted by Bursa City Hall photography team member Saffet Yilmaz who had aerial photographs of the lake clearly showing the church that was destroyed and submerged three meters underwater by an earthquake in 740 AD; ironically, the Bursa City Hall photography team had been taking aerial photographs since 2013, but never thought to contact an expert until recently, but now Sahin has plans to turn the church into underwater museum while his excavation is ongoing.
Date: September 7 , 2018.
From: https://www.rt.com/news/437896-archeologists-christianity-site-underwater/.
Read More: https://www.britannica.com/event/Council-of-Nicaea-Christianity-325.
12. RT: On September 6, 2018, the Indian Supreme Court overruled a 2013 decision which upheld a law that makes homosexuality a criminal offense, with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, that dates back to the colonial era; the justices ruled that the law discriminates against gay and transgender individuals and is therefore unlawful.
Date: September 7, 2018
From: https://www.rt.com/news/437745-gay-sex-decriminalized-india/.
Read More: https://www.rt.com/news/415346-india-gay-sex-ban/.
13. Wall Street Journal: On September 8, 2018, Egyptian judge Hassan Farid announced a verdict at the Tora Prison of Cairo, the capital of Egypt, that sentenced 75 people to death out of a group of over 700 defendants, the rest of whom received prison sentences of varying lengths, who were charged with various crimes including murder, inciting terror, and possessing weapons because of their participation five years ago in a Muslim Brotherhood protest at the Rabaa al-Adawiya square, also in Cairo, in support of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader, Muhammad Morsi, who had been “ousted” by the Egyptian army; gunfire broke out when the Egyptian security force descended upon the protesters, killing hundreds.
Date: September 8, 2018.
From: https://www.wsj.com/articles/egypt-court-sentences-75-to-death-in-mass-trial-of-protesters-1536433254.
Read More: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/egypts-muslim-brotherhood.
14. NPR: Several studies indicating that Alzheimer’s disease may be caused by a germ, including two published in 2010, one in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society showing that in married couples where one spouse has Alzheimer’s disease the other spouse is six times more likely than normal to contract Alzheimer’s, and another published in the Journal of Neurosurgery showed that neurosurgeons die seven times faster from Alzheimer’s disease than from other disorders, have impelled Dr. Leslie Norins to offer a 1,000,000 dollar prize to anyone who can show whether or not Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a germ, a claim that several years ago would have been outrageous because the leading theory was that Alzheimer’s is caused by a buildup of a protein called amyloid, which may be an immune reaction to fight infection according to Harvard neuroscientist Rudolph Tanzi, which by itself is harmful to the brain, which triggers the production of another protein called tau which further harms the brain, but this theory is losing steam as researchers gain interest in what Norins calls the “Alzheimer’s Germ,” because if this theory is validated it may lead to new treatments such as vaccines and anti-viral drugs ( because, according to a study published in the journal Neuron in June 2018, herpes viruses interact with genes known to increase risk of Alzheimer’s); working with Norins, the Infectious Diseases Society of America offered two 50,000 dollar grants to search for an Alzheimer’s causing microbe in July of 2018.
Date: September 9, 2018.
From: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/09/645629133/infectious-theory-of-alzheimers-disease-draws-fresh-interest.
Read More: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/21/621908340/researchers-find-herpes-viruses-in-brains-marked-by-alzheimers-disease.
