I’m always early on the signals! Those who know me and work with me know that very well! I stopped using Zoom at the beginning of March and introduced #Eyeson by @A1 instead! #Velsighttps://t.co/Ck11nUUsoF
[Jpost] The sister of North Korea ...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche... n leader Kim Pudge Jong-un ...the overweight, pouty-looking hereditary potentate of North Korea. Pudge appears to believe in his own divinity, but has yet to produce any loaves and fishes, so his subjects remain malnourished... is taking a leading role in a new, more hard-line pressure campaign against South Korea, highlighting what analysts say is a substantive policy role that goes beyond being her brother's assistant.
Believed to be in her early 30s, Kim Yo Jong is the only close relative of the North Korean leader to play a public role in politics.
During the 2018-2019 flurry of international diplomacy, Kim Yo Jong garnered global attention by leading a delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. Later, she was often seen dashing about to make sure everything went well for her older brother, including holding an ashtray for him at a train station on his way to a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump ...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US... in Vietnam.
But this year, Kim has taken on a more public policy role, cementing her status as an influential political player in her own right.
"Prior to this, Kim Yo Jong was portrayed in state media as Kim Jong-un's sister, his protocol officer, or one of his accompanying officials," said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a former North Korea open source intelligence analyst in the U.S. government. "Now, North Koreans know for sure there is more to her than that."
Kim has worked behind the scenes in North Korea's propaganda agencies, a role that led the United States to add her to a list of sanctioned bigwigs in 2017 because of human rights ...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty... abuses and censorship.
[IsraelTimes] Upending current coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague) ...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men... outbreak assumptions, Harvard Medical School study shows significant spike in car traffic at Wuhan medical centers as early as last summer.
Satellite images of hospital parking lots in the Chinese city of Wuhan suggest the coronavirus may have already begun to spread as early as last August, according to a new study from Harvard Medical School.
The yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, led by Boston Children’s Hospital chief innovation officer John Brownstein, found a significantly higher number of cars in parking lots at five Wuhan hospitals in the late summer and fall of 2019 compared to a year earlier.
Researchers said they saw "a steep increase in volume starting in August 2019 and culminating with a peak in December 2019," far earlier than the prevailing assessment that the outbreak began in late November.
The paper added that the findings from the satellite images also "coincided with" an increase in queries on Chinese internet search engines for "certain symptoms that would later be determined as closely associated with the novel coronavirus."
They wrote: "Individual hospitals have days of high relative volume in both fall and winter 2019. However, some men learn by reading. A few learn by observation. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves... between September and October 2019, five of the six hospitals show their highest relative daily volume of the analyzed series, coinciding with elevated levels of Baidu search queries for the terms ’diarrhea’ and ’cough.'"
Brownstein, speaking on ABC News, said: "Something was happening in October... clearly, there was some level of social disruption taking place well before what was previously identified as the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic."
"This is all about a growing body of information pointing to something taking place in Wuhan at the time," Brownstein said. "Many studies are still needed to fully uncover what took place and for people to really learn about how these disease outbreaks unfold and emerge in populations. So this is just another point of evidence."
On Sunday, senior Chinese officials released a lengthy report on the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, defending their government’s actions and saying that China had provided information in a timely and transparent manner.
China "wasted no time" in sharing information such as the genome sequence for the new virus with the World Health Organization as well as relevant countries and regional organizations, according to the report.
"The Chinese government did not delay or cover up anything," National Health Commission Chairman Ma Xiaowei said upon the release of the report. "Instead, we have immediately reported virus data and relevant information about the epidemic to the international community and made an important contribution to the prevention and control of the epidemic around the world."
The report, which ran 66 pages in the English version, lauded China’s success in reducing the daily increase in new cases to single digits within about two months and the "decisive victory ... in the battle to defend Hubei Province and its capital city of Wuhan" in about three months.
[SN] NASA confirms JWST will miss March 2021 launch date.
The head of NASA’s science directorate confirmed June 10 that the James Webb Space Telescope will miss its March 2021 launch date, a slip that was all but inevitable as the coronavirus pandemic slowed work on the spacecraft.
In a presentation to an online meeting of the Space Studies Board of the National Academies, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said that work on JWST had been going well in months before the pandemic but that the slowdown in work since March made it impossible to keep the mission on its previous schedule.
“We will not launch in March,” he said, which had been the target launch date for the mission. “That is not in the cards right now. It’s not because they did anything wrong.”
When NASA started closing its field centers in March because of the pandemic, personnel that had been overseeing integration and testing of the space telescope at a Northrop Grumman facility in Southern California returned home. Despite initial comments by NASA officials that work would be suspended entirely on the telescope, activities did continue there, including a test announced by NASA June 9 of its Deployable Tower Assembly that separates the mirror from the spacecraft bus.
That work, though, has been at a slower pace than before the pandemic. At a session of an American Astronomical Society meeting June 2, Jonathan Gardner, deputy senior project scientist for JWST at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that Northrop at the time had five eight-hour shifts a week devoted to JWST work. Before the pandemic, the company had 12 shifts a week of 10 hours each.
Work had recently started to ramp back up on JWST, with some NASA personnel returning to the Northrop facility and the company preparing to resume a second daily shift. Nonetheless, Gardner said last week the project expected to miss that March 2021 launch date. “We’re expecting a delay,” he said.
NASA hasn’t set a new launch date yet for JWST. “What we need to do is learn the new efficiency” of working in current conditions, Zurbuchen said. “We need to calibrate that through a schedule review and go forward.” A schedule assessment, he said, was planned for July.
He remained hopeful that JWST will still launch some time in 2021 on an Ariane 5 from French Guiana. “I’m very optimistic of this thing getting off the launch pad in ’21.”
#2
This is of a piece with it would be impossible to build the Golden Gate Bridge or Hoover Dam today due to institutional rot and red tape mania. In cosmic terms, it wasn't that long ago they put the Hubble up, found a problem with the mirror and went up and fixed it. I'll take infinity as the under on when JWST gets deployed.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/11/2020 8:44 Comments ||
Top||
#3
By the time it launches, there'll just be a few photons bopping around.
I was going to snark "Lighten up! The universe ain't going anywhere".
But on a longer timeline, charger is correct. And they'll probably be cold photons, too.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.