Abram Leyzorek
28 April 2018
Current Events
- Washington Post: A summit between South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in and North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un on Friday received excellent, positive coverage by the media in both countries with its talk of an end to the seemingly endless war between the Koreas and denuclearization of North Korea, but despite many indications that this time might be different, skeptics remember the four previous times in 1992, 1994, 2005, and 2012 that North Korea signed agreements to denuclearize but never followed through.
From: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/talk-of-peace-with-north-korea-has-the-south-wondering-will-this-time-be-different/2018/04/28/d084d84c-4a5b-11e8-8082-105a446d19b8_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6670e2b91e1d.
2. Press Herald: NASA has informed developers to terminate by the end of May a project to build a resource prospecting moon rover that would have searched for volatile compounds such as hydrogen and oxygen on one of the Moon’s poles, a project lunar scientists say was key to setting up lunar research stations in the future, which is one of the goals of the Trump administration, because such a long term lunar outpost would need to utilize the resources on the Moon to sustain itself and the people in it.
From: https://www.pressherald.com/2018/04/28/nasas-only-moon-rover-just-got-canceled/.
3. Mashable: A partially crowd-funded project conducted by a team of scientists lead by Dr. Sam Fox, resulted in the discovery of a population of Tasmanian devils in the Southwest of Tasmania that appear, due to their advanced ages, to be immune to a contagious facial tumor disease that, called Devil Facial Tumor Disease, has decimated the marsupials, leaving only 20% alive.
From: https://mashable.com/2018/04/28/healty-tasmanian-devils-discovered/.
4. Daily Nation: Former Cuban vice president Miguel Diaz-Canel, 58 and a top figure in the Communist Party, was elected president on April 19, 2018, succeeding Raul Castro, Fidel’s younger brother (now 86), who has ruled since 2006, ending a six decade era of Castro rule, but Raul Castro will remain head of the all powerful Communist Party and keep an eye on the new president.
From: https://www.nation.co.ke/news/world/Cuba-marks-end-of-an-era-as-Castro-hands-over-to-Diaz-Canel--/1068-4489354-5k5quy/index.html.
5. Newsweek: Russia is sailing a floating nuclear power plant, called Akademic Lomonosov, to the Russian city of Murmansk, through the straits between Denmark and Sweden and the along the coast of Norway, without nuclear fuel to power its two reactors, in acquiescence to outcry from locals and foreign governments against Russia’s original plan to test it near the populous city of St. Petersburg in waters shared with Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden; if tests in the more secluded area go well, Russia will develop and deploy more, but several countries along with Greenpeace are concerned that it a disaster waiting to happen, no matter where the Russians place it.
From: http://www.newsweek.com/russias-nuclear-titanic-heads-west-raising-fears-chernobyl-ice-905577.
6. The Wall Street Journal: The first victim of a new Malaysian law prohibiting the creation or dissemination of “fake news” that can fine violators up to 128,00 dollars or sentence them to up to six years in prison was foreign visitor and Danish national of Yemeni origins Salah Salem Saleh Sulaiman, 46 years old, who was arrested at Kuala Lumpur and sentenced to one month in jail, instead of paying 2,600 dollars, for appearing in a YouTube video, since removed, in which he criticized medical services and police for what he alleged was a slow response to the shooting of Palestinian electrical engineer and university lecturer Fadi al-Batsh while he was walking to morning prayer by two men who have not been arrested on motorcycles on April 20, but Malaysian authorities vehemently disagreed with his opinion and arrested him.
From: https://www.wsj.com/articles/malaysia-wields-law-against-fake-news-for-first-time-1525087631.
7. Newsweek: French born Jean-Noel Frydman, now living in Miami, is suing the French Republic, French government tourist agency Atout France, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and internet company Verisign in a suit filed in Virginia charging defendants with “cybersquatting” and “reverse domain name hijacking,” because the French government three years ago claimed in had an intrinsic right to the domain name France.com that Frydman had owned since 1994 and operated as a website about travel to France and French culture, and seized it in March after a three year court battle; Frydman is confident that he will regain ownership of his website and be compensated for lost revenue while it was in the hands of the French government, revenue he says amounted to millions of dollars per year.
From: http://www.newsweek.com/new-york-man-sues-france-after-country-seizes-multi-million-dollar-francecom-905645.
8. An Australian Giaus villosus trap door matriarch spider, believed to be the world’s oldest spider, has died at age forty three, comfortably surpassing the age of the previous record holder, a Mexican tarantula that lived to twenty eight, and the normal lifespan of her species, five-twenty years, which is longer than most spiders’ due to their slow metabolism and sedentary lifestyles; females remain around the same burrow for most of their lives and this spider, called Number 16, was monitored in the wild by a Sydney research team and was killed by a wasp sting, not old age, according to the reporting study published in the Pacific Conservation Biology Journal by lead author Leanda Mason of Curtin University that also contained important information about the behavior of this common Australian spider, which has a painful but nonlethal bite.
From: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/australia-spider-believed-to-be-worlds-oldest-dead-at-43/.
9. The New York Times: Former Home Secretary of Britain Amber Rudd quit her job on Sunday because she “inadvertently misled” lawmakers when she denied the existence of deportation targets of the Windrush generation, the blanket term for generation of mostly Caribbean immigrants many of whom were transported on the passenger plane Windrush and have been living in Britain for decades , but now are called illegal immigrants and face deportation, and when that was found to be untrue, she claimed that she was unaware of them at the time, however that was a false statement as she had mentioned them in a letter to Prime Minister Theresa May; she has been replaced by the son of Pakistani immigrants and the first non-white to hold the home secretary position Sajid Javid.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/world/europe/amber-rudd-resigns-windrush.html.
10. Bloomberg: After French President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to the United States, he issued a joint statement with Iran’s supreme leader Hassan Rouhanni stating that he would like to save the highly criticized Iran Nuclear Deal by folding it into an even larger deal restricting Iran’s terrorist sponsorship and ballistic missile program and extend the ten year expiration date on the Iran Nuclear Deal, formerly known as JCPOA.
From: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-30/macron-s-new-iran-deal-deserves-a-chance
