Covid19 impact: Australia's Richardson quarantined, to miss 1st ODI vs NZ

Current Affairs
Australia's pacer Kane Richardson has been isolated subsequent to announcing an irritated throat and will miss the first ODI against New Zealand.
The pacer educated the group's clinical staff Thursday night of the grievance and has been tried for COVID-19, with the outcomes as yet pending. With Kane missing the first ODI, pacer Sean Abbott has joined the crew as spread.
"Our clinical staff are treating this a run of the mill throat disease however we are following Australian Government conventions that expect us to keep Kane away from different individuals from the crew and play out the proper tests given he has come back from universal travel over the most recent 14 days," cricket.com.au cited a Cricket Australia representative as saying.
"When we get the consequences of the tests and Kane recuperates in the following barely any days we expect he will re-join the group. We won't offer further remark until something transforms," he included.
Prior in the day, Cricket Australia had reported that the ODI arrangement among Australia and New Zealand will be played away from public scrutiny due to the coronavirus flare-up.
The first ODI will be played later today.
The coronavirus sickness was first recognized in Wuhan in China's Hubei region, in late December, and has since spread around the world.

In excess of 127,000 individuals have been tainted with COVID-19, with more than 4,700 having passed on and 68,000 recuperated. Around 600 individuals have tried positive for COVID-19 in the United Kingdom with eight fatalities, as per the Department of Health and Social Care.....Read More

Quarter of million Australians asked to evacuate as bushfires intensify

Current Affairs
Australian authorities urged nearly a quarter of a million people to evacuate their homes on Friday and prepared military backup as soaring temperatures and erratic winds were expected to fan deadly bushfires across the east coast.
Temperatures were expected to shoot well above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in several parts of the country on Friday, accompanied by high winds, threatening to inflame fires that have already left thousands of people homeless.
"If you can get out, you should get out, you shouldn't be in the remote and forested parts of our State," Andrew Crisp, emergency management commissioner for the state of Victoria, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Emergency alert text messages had been sent to 240,000 people in Victoria state alone, telling them to leave, Crisp said. People in high-risk regions in New South Wales and South Australia states were also urged to think about leaving, but authorities had not provided numbers.
Twenty-seven people have been killed and thousands subjected to repeat evacuations as monster - and unpredictable - fires have scorched through more than 10.3 million hectares (25.5 million acres) of land, an area the size of South Korea.
John White, Mayor of East Gippsland, an area that was ravaged by fires on New Year's Eve, told Reuters that residents were on the move: "people aren't taking any chances." Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he had given instructions to the military so "that they are to stand ready to move and support immediately" as firefighters battle 150 blazes across the country.

Australia's wildfires have dwarfed other catastrophic blazes around the world...Read More

Australia rushes to open roads, evacuate people amid respite from bushfires

Current Affairs
Australian officials used a respite on Monday from fierce wildfires that have killed 24 people across the country's southeast to race to reopen blocked roads and evacuate people who have been trapped for days.
A second day of light rain and cool winds brought some relief from heatwave-fuelled blazes that ripped through two states over the weekend, but officials warned the hazardous weather conditions were expected to return later in the week.
"There is no room for complacency," New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters on Monday morning. Two people remained missing as around 130 fires continued to burn in the state, though not at a high-alert level.Authorities redoubled their efforts on Monday to provide supplies and repatriate thousands of people who have been trapped by fire lines in coastal towns for several days.
"This morning it is all about recovery, making sure people who have been displaced have somewhere safe (to go) and it is making sure we have resources to build up the presence on the ground to clean up the roads, clean up where the rubble exists," Berejiklian said.Dean Linton, a resident of Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains, used the break from an immediate threat to his town to visit his wife and four children who had evacuated to Sydney. He also used the 870 kilometre round trip to pick up a fire-fighting pump and generator to help him protect the family home.

"There's a lot of fuel in that national park; it would only take one lightning strike," Linton told Reuters.The bushfire season started earlier than normal this year following a three-year drought that has left much of the country's bushland tinder-dry and vulnerable to fires. More than 5 million hectares (12 million acres) of land have been destroyed....Read More

US and China are fighting a trade war and Australia is reaping the benefits

International News

Luckily for Australia, the U.S.-China trade war happened.
Australia faced a personal-credit crunch, housing slump and weak business confidence, threatening to derail the longest-running growth streak in the developed world. Then it got a trade boost as U.S.-China relations soured.
Australia ships around a third of its exports to China, mostly commodities such as iron ore and coal that are used by heavy industry and in the building of apartments. Those exports are in demand as Beijing accelerates construction spending to head off damage caused by Washington raising tariffs.
Trade has been so buoyant that Australia logged its first current-account surplus—a measure of trade and financial flows with other countries—since 1975 in the second quarter of this year. That has provided some much-needed juice to Australia’s economy, on a 28-year run without a recession, as other headwinds to growth intensify. Australia’s gross domestic product expanded at its slowest pace since the financial crisis in the second quarter.
“It seems like a contradiction,” said AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver. “We are hearing all this talk about trade wars, which should obviously affect trade, and yet we have a record trade surplus that’s been far greater than anyone expected.”
Australia’s trade experience is unusual for a U.S. ally, some of whose economies have become collateral damage in the trade dispute. Germany’s exports in June fell 8% on a year earlier, and its current-account surplus has declined.

 Global trade volumes grew 4.4% in the first quarter of 2018, when the first U.S. tariffs were imposed, from the same period a year before, according to the International Monetary Fund...Read More

Women yet to step on moon but well intertwined with it in literature

International News

In the late 17th century, the female English playwright Aphra Behn wrote a smash hit play about a man obsessed with the moon, who was constantly travelling there in his imagination. Exactly 282 years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually made that dream a reality.
Their astonishing achievement on July 20, 1969 led some to worry that the moon would become an object of purely scientific study – a barren and lifeless body, no longer a source of romantic inspiration. Fortunately, this fear did not come to pass.
For example, in the year that marked the 40th anniversary of the landings ten years ago, the then poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy edited To the Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems which gathered together works from ancient to modern, and included her own poem, The Woman in the Moon.
And while no woman has yet stepped on to this celestial body, women have long been associated with the moon – with its tidal pull, and the binary thinking that places it secondary in majesty to the sun. It is no wonder, then, that the moon has stimulated some incredible literature by female writers.
The moon is often envisaged as a female entity, which inspired poems on the theme of her gaze as she looks down on Earth benignly. Way back in antiquity, the Greek poet Sappho did just this in her short song describing how:
When, round and full, her silver face, Swims into sight, and lights all space.

 This trope continued for millennia and into the 19th century. Louisa May Alcott (author of Little Women) wrote The Mother Moon in 1856, imagining a benevolent maternal moon looking down on the Earth, occasionally hidden but ultimately undiminished by clouds...Read More

How big is moon and how far is it? Let's put facts into perspective

International News

Even though we can see the Moon shining brightly in the night sky – and sometimes in daylight – it’s hard to put into perspective just how large, and just how distant, our nearest neighbour actually is.
So just how big is the Moon?
The Moon passing in front of Earth, captured by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), more than a million kilometres away from our planet.
That answer isn’t quite as straightforward as you might think. Like Earth, the Moon isn’t a perfect sphere. Instead, it’s slightly squashed (what we call an oblate sphereoid). This means the Moon’s diameter from pole to pole is less than the diameter measured at the equator.
But the difference is small, just four kilometres. The equatorial diameter of the Moon is about 3,476km, while the polar diameter is 3,472km.
To see how big that is we need to compare it to something of a similar size, such as Australia.
From coast to coast
The distance from Perth to Brisbane, as the crow flies, is 3,606km. If you put Australia and the Moon side by side, they look to be roughly the same size.
The Moon vs Australia. NASA/Google Earth

 But that’s just one way of looking at things. Although the Moon is about as wide as Australia, it is actually much bigger when you think in terms of surface area. It turns out the surface of the Moon is much larger than that of Australia.The land area of Australia is some 7.69 million square kilometers...Read More

50th anniversary of Apollo 11: How we came to know a lot about the Moon

International News

The Moon has been a subject of fascination since time immemorial. It has always found a place among all kinds of stories through astrology, poetry, myths, religion et al. More than two and a half millennia before man set his foot on the Moon, he set his mind towards understanding it.
There are references in the works of ancient Babylonian, Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers around 500 BCE. Throughout the next two thousand years, the Moon was studied by various astronomers. The big breakthrough, however, happened in 1609, when Galileo Galilei drew one of the first telescopic drawings of the Moon in his book Sidereus Nuncius and noted that it was not smooth but had mountains and craters. After Isaac Newton discovered gravitation, astronomy picked up speed. Over the next few centuries, science not only devised means of looking at faraway objects clearly, but also started dreaming of travelling to them one day.
Here's a brief timeline of the landmark moments of lunar exploration in modern times:
The Space war era
During the late 1950s at the height of the Cold War, the United States Army conducted a classified feasibility study that proposed the construction of a manned military outpost on the Moon called Project Horizon with the potential to conduct a wide range of missions from scientific research to nuclear Earth bombardment. The study included the possibility of conducting a lunar-based nuclear test.
1959: Soviet Union touches the Moon

 The Moon was first visited by the Soviet Union’s uncrewed Luna 1 and 2 in 1959..Read More

Facebook, Google face widening crackdown over online content

Company News

Tech giants like Facebook and Google came under increasing pressure in Europe on Monday when countries proposed stricter rules to force them to block extreme material such as terrorist propaganda and child porn.

Britain called for a first-of-its-kind watchdog for social media that could fine executives and even ban companies. And a European Union parliamentary committee approved a bill giving internet companies an hour to remove terror-related material or face fines that could reach into the billions.
"We are forcing these firms to clean up their act once and for all," said British Home Secretary Sajid Javid, whose department collaborated on Britain's proposal.

Opponents warned the British and EU measures could stifle innovation and strengthen the dominance of technology giants because smaller companies won't have the money to comply. That, in turn, could turn Google and Facebook into the web's censors, they said.

The push to make the big companies responsible for the torrent of material they carry has largely been driven by Europeans. But it picked up momentum after the March 15 mosque shootings in New Zealand that killed 50 people and were livestreamed for 17 minutes. Facebook said it removed 1.5 million videos of the attacks in the 24 hours afterward.

The US, where government action is constrained by the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of the press, has taken a more hands-off approach, though on Tuesday, a House committee will press Google and Facebook executives on whether they are doing enough to curb the spread of hate crimes and white nationalism.


 Australia last week made it a crime for social media platforms not to quickly remove "abhorrent violent material."...Read More

Apple has News: Launches $10 monthly magazine, subscription service

Technology News
Apple Inc. presented its long-anticipated magazine subscription service on Monday, bundling access to selected glossy titles, websites, and newspapers for $10 a month.

The new service, called Apple News+, will be incorporated into the existing Apple News app that comes pre-installed on iPhones, iPads, and Macs, Roger Rosner, vice president of applications, said Monday at an event at Apple’s Cupertino, California, headquarters.

More than 300 magazines will be part of the service, he said. It will also include The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, but not The Washington Post or The New York Times. Bloomberg Businessweek will be part of the magazine section. A demonstration showed that some magazines, like National Geographic, have dynamic, moving covers.

The service launches today for $9.99 a month, with the first month free. It will be available in the U.S. and Canada, with the U.K. and Australia coming later in the year.

The News+ service will be its own tab in the existing News app and won’t interrupt the free section, the demo showed. Magazines can be downloaded automatically for offline reading. The News+ tab features access to magazine cover stories, new issues, and individual articles. Magazine creators are tweaking their issues depending on whether the story is read on an iPhone or the bigger iPad screen.
The magazine bundle is part of a collection of new services Apple is rolling out as it seeks to boost revenue from sources other than the iPhone.


 The magazine service is based on an application called Texture, which Apple acquired about a year ago. Texture had agreements with more than 200 magazines...Read More