Abram Leyzorek
10/24/2018
Current Events
1. Insider: Saudi officials spoke to the Associated Press anonymously in an article published on October 24, 2018, in which they confirmed Saudi Arabia’s use of a body double for journalist Jamal Khashoggi because they intended to kidnap him and wanted to use the body double to cover it up, but they claim that when Khashoggi was told he would be brought to a “safe house” for interrogation when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul he yelled for help and a member of the fifteen-person abduction team put him in a choke hold intending to silence him, but killing him instead; the Saudi’s said they brought a forensics expert to wipe away all traces of Khashoggi’s presence in consulate, but did not explain why this would be necessary if they had only planned to kidnap him, nor did they address allegations that Khashoggi was dismembered with a bone saw or say anything about the whereabouts of his body, which Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has demanded to see.
Date: October 24, 2018.
From: https://www.thisisinsider.com/saudi-admits-khashoggi-body-double-claim-it-was-for-kidnapping-2018-10.
Read more: https://www.businessinsider.com/rumor-claimed-khashoggi-found-in-a-well-turkey-erdogan-shot-it-down-2018-10?_ga=2.126960333.15476674.1540400177-692105802.1540400177&r=UK&IR=T.
2. ScienceAlert: East Island, a one kilometer long, 120 meter wide, strip of sand in the Hawaiian archipelago, that one provided vital nesting and breeding grounds for seabirds and endangered monk seals, respectively, has now been wiped off the map by Hurricane Walaka, as shown by satellite images released this week.
Date: October 24, 2018.
From: https://www.sciencealert.com/entire-hawaiian-island-was-just-erased-by-hurricane-east-walaka-chip-fletcher-monk-seals-green-sea-turtles.
Read more: https://www.civilbeat.org/2018/10/this-remote-hawaiian-island-just-vanished/.
3. NPR: A new study published in the Journal BMJ Open lead by Frank Elgar of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University in Montreal surveyed 400,000 young people from eighty-eight countries, finding a sixty-nine percent decrease in fighting among adolescent males and a forty-two percent decrease in fighting among adolescent females in countries with bans on corporal punishment of children in homes and schools, compared with countries without any prohibitions; Elgar notes that more research is needed to factor in variables like culture, but think that the correlation between decreased adolescent violence and bans on corporal punishment is “fairly robust.”
Date: October 25, 2018.
From: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/10/25/660191806/what-happens-when-a-country-bans-spanking.
Read more: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/9/e021616?int_source=trendmd&int_medium=trendmd&int_campaign=trendmd.
4. Reuters: China’s defense minister Wei Fenghe stated on October 25, 2018, at the Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, China, that China would pay “any cost” to prevent the island of Taiwan from gaining independence of China; Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen, elected in 2016, is of the Democratic Progressive Party, which favors independence.
Date: October 25, 2018.
From: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-defence/china-says-military-will-act-at-any-cost-to-prevent-taiwan-split-idUSKCN1MZ05L.
Read more: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/thousands-rally-for-taiwan-independence-vote.
5. CNBC: The Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care and health policy monitoring group, released a report on October 25, 2018, showing a 0.6 percent decrease in Medicaid enrollment, the first decrease in more than a decade, which states are attributing to the strong U.S. economy under President Donald Trump lifting people out of poverty.
Date: October 25, 2018.
From: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/strong-economy-halts-medicaid-growth-as-more-americans-make-too-much.html.
Read more: https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-enrollment-spending-growth-fy-2018-2019/.
6. New York Times: Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel announced on Monday that she will renounce leadership of her party and will not seek reelection after her current term expires in 2021.
Date: October 29, 2018.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/world/europe/angela-merkel-germany.html.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/world/europe/germany-hesse-election-merkel.html?module=inline.
7. Scientific American: Chiara Marletto of Oxford University, United Kingdom, led a study, published October in the Journal of Physics Communications, of an experiment conducted by David Coles of the University of Sheffield et. al. in 2016 that consisted of some photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria sandwiched between two mirrors the gap between which was steadily decreased to a distance less than the thickness of a human hair at which point white light was bounced between the mirrors in a successful attempt to cause the bacteria to continuously emit and reabsorb the photons; Marletto et. al. analyzed the experiment and concluded that the behavior between the mirrors could indicate that photons were simultaneously hitting and missing the bacteria, suggesting that some bacteria were quantumly entangled with the photons, a finding that, if true, would be the first observed instance of a living organism displaying quantum effects.
Date: October 29, 2018.
From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/schroedingers-bacterium-could-be-a-quantum-biology-milestone/.
Read more: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2399-6528/aae224/meta.
8. USA Today: A U.S. official announced on October 29, 2018, that up to 5,000 U.S. Military troops will be deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border in order to prevent members of the migrant caravan currently in Mexico and heading for the United States from entering the U.S. illegally.
Date: October 29, 2018.
From: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/10/29/migrant-caravan-troops-border/1805864002/.
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/10/23/migrant-caravan-how-many-sought-asylum/1741030002/.
9. Vox: Sixty-three year old former army captain Jair Bolsonaro one fifty-five percent of the Brazilian vote on October 28, 2018, becoming president of Brazil; he was a far-right candidate of the once marginal Social Liberal Party (PSL) and has been likened to U.S. President Donald Trump for his controversial sexist and racist claims and his promise to “break the system” and restore law and order.
Date: October 29, 2018.
From: https://www.vox.com/2018/10/29/18037530/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-president-elections.
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45982501.
10. New Zealand Herald: Helen Bailey, a marine biologist at the University of Maryland, published a study in the journal Biology Letters that showed that dolphins’ calls become flatter and poorer in information in response to increased underwater noise levels caused by ships, showing that animal communications are affected even if the man-made background noise does not match the frequency of their calls.
Date: October 28, 2018.
From: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12150130.
Read more: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/10/20180484.
11. Express: Andrei Belousov, deputy head of the Department of Nonproliferation and Arms Control at the Russian Foreign Ministry, stated after the First Committee of the United Nations voted against Russia’s proposed resolution to preserve the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty on October 26, 2018, that Russia was preparing for a war with United States and claimed that the U.S. was the aggressor.
Date: October 28, 2018.
From: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1037059/Russia-INF-treaty-world-war-3-Donald-Trump-Vladimir-Putin-Mikhail-Gorbachev-US-violence.
Read more: https://sputniknews.com/world/201810271069259764-un-inf-treaty-vote/.
12. Science: Researchers have developed a method to convert thirty-five percent of chemical energy stored in salt water into useable electricity, a conversion efficiency comparable to that of wind turbines, using a special “two-faced” membrane, called a Janus membrane after the Roman god of passages, placed between salt and fresh water that has different sized pores on each side so that charged particles from the salt water can flow by osmosis through the membrane one way, but not the other way; if these new membranes hold up under natural conditions, they could be used to power remote communities with renewable energy.
Date: October 26, 2018.
From: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/two-faced-membrane-can-create-electricity-nothing-salty-water.
Read more: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-two-faced-janus-membrane-applications.html.
13. Newsweek: Donald Trump said in an interview with Axios that he plans to end the longstanding birthright citizenship of children of immigrants by signing an executive order, something that many say is blatantly unconstitutional and won’t fly.
Date: October 30, 2018.
From: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-he-plans-sign-executive-order-terminate-birthright-citizenship-1192823.
Read more: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-he-plans-sign-executive-order-terminate-birthright-citizenship-1192823.
14. USA Today: A new World Health Organization (WHO) report revealed that ninety-three percent of children under age fifteen, or about two billion children, breathe air polluted enough to cause health risks and, as a result, over 600,000 children died of respiratory infections in 2016.
Date: October 30, 2018.
From: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/10/30/air-pollution-93-percent-worlds-children-breath-polluted-air/1811587002/.
Read more: http://www.who.int/ceh/publications/air-pollution-child-health/en/.
