An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Internet connectivity and cellular service in Belarus have been down since Sunday evening, after sporadic outages early that morning and throughout the day. The connectivity blackout, which also includes landline phones, appears to be a government-imposed outage that comes amid widespread protests and increasing social unrest over Belarus’ presidential election Sunday. The ongoing…
Tag: controversial
Airbus To Build ‘First Interplanetary Cargo Ship’
Airbus-France will build the huge satellite that brings the first Martian rock samples back to Earth. The BBC reports: This material will be drilled on the Red Planet by the US space agency’s next rover, Perseverance, before being blasted into orbit by a rocket. It’ll be the Airbus satellite’s job to grab the packaged samples and then ship them home. The…
Full Text of US State Department Cables Finally Released, Showing Safety In Chinese Lab
Slashdot reader destinyland writes: On April 7th, a Trump campaign advisor told the Los Angeles Times “One way we still win this election is by turning it into a referendum on China.” Within weeks the Washington Post noted “reports that the Trump administration has sought to pressure U.S. intelligence agencies to search for proof of a link between the Wuhan lab…
Police Surveilled Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Leveraging close ties to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the protests that swept the country following the killing of George Floyd, tipping off police to social media posts with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept and a source…
Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro Tests Positive for Covid-19 After Months of Dismissing the Seriousness of the Virus
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive for Covid-19, following months of downplaying the virus. From a report: Bolsonaro himself announced the result, speaking on Brazilian TV channels Tuesday. “Everyone knew that it would reach a considerable part of the population sooner or later. It was positive for me,” he said, referring to the Covid-19 test he took Monday. “On Sunday,…
Study Finds Hydroxychloroquine May Have Boosted Survival. Other Researchers Have Doubts
“A surprising new study found the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine helped patients better survive in the hospital,” reports CNN. “But the findings, like the federal government’s use of the drug itself, were disputed.”
A team at Henry Ford Health System in southeast Michigan said Thursday their study of 2,541 hospitalized patients found that those given hydroxychloroquine were much less likely to die….
To Keep Trump From Violating Its Rules…Facebook Rewrote the Rules
“Starting in 2015 Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook rewrote their rules in order to not sanction then-candidate Donald Trump,” writes Rick Zeman (Slashdot reader #15,628) — citing a new investigation by the Washington Post. (Also available here.) After Trump’s infamous “the shooting starts” post, Facebook deputies contacted the White House “with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or…
Covid-19 spreads through the air. That’s a big challenge for reopening
Clear, straightforward information on how a virus spreads, from a scientist who studies infectious disease Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/coronavirus-covid19-how-virus-spreads-through-air-reopening…
Controversial Theory Claims Forests Don’t Just Make Rain — They Make Wind
sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world’s great forests are often referred to as the planet’s lungs. But Anastassia Makarieva, a theorist at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia, says they are its beating heart, too. They recycle vast amounts of moisture into the air…
Forget 2012 – is the Mayan doomsday this year ?
A controversial new theory going around on social media suggests that the Mayan doomsday is actually this year. There’s no denying that 2020 hasn’t be… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/337598/forget-2012–is-the-mayan-doomsday-this-year…