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Ecuadorian officials say Galapagos fuel spill from sunken barge is now 'under control'


France24
Mon, 23 Dec 2019 11:16 UTC
Galapagos fuel oil spill Dec 2019

The fuel spill in the Galapagos Islands was caused when a barge sank carrying 600 gallons of diesel fuel.
Ecuador officials announced Sunday that a fuel spill in the Galapagos Islands, caused when a barge sank carrying 600 gallons of diesel fuel, was "under control."

Authorities had activated emergency protocols earlier Sunday to contain the environmental impact of the spill in the Galapagos archipelago, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet.

"The situation is under control, and a series of actions have been deployed to mitigate the possible effects," the presidential communications office said in a statement, adding the response operation had "controlled" the spill.

The accident, in which one person was injured, occurred in a port on San Cristobal Island, the easternmost island in the chain, when a crane collapsed while loading a container holding an electric generator onto a barge.
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Biohazard

Hazardous green ooze found seeping onto Michigan highway - road closed

Julia Jacobo
ABC News
Sun, 22 Dec 2019 22:37 UTC
chemical spill highway michigan
© WDIV
Hexavalent chromium was found leaking onto a Michigan highway near Madison
The metal, hexavalent chromium, was made famous by the movie Erin Brockovich.

Michigan officials closed portions of a highway over the weekend after a hazardous greenish-yellow liquid was found oozing onto the roadway from a barrier.

Michigan State Police troopers were asked to block off the right lane of Interstate 696 in Madison Heights, about 13 mile north of Detroit, on Friday afternoon so the local fire department could clean up the spill.

Officials later discovered that a commercial business nearby had been leaking the chemical hexavelent chromium, which ran from the basement of the building into the ground and exited through the drain that empties onto the highway, police said.

Comment: Local station WZXYZ adds:
Macomb County Public Works engineers and staff worked with state and federal agencies to monitor the then bright green substance. While the spill took place outside Macomb County, any liquid that entered storm drains along I-696 eventually traveled to Lake St. Clair, officials advised.

"Pollution knows no county or city boundaries. Our first duty is to protect our local water and we stand ready to assist our federal and state partners to contain this material," said Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Candice S. Miller. "The federal EPA and state EGLE, as well as the Madison Heights Fire Department, are on site and my staff is in close communication with them to ensure that this material is captured before it can migrate to the lake. The chemical is currently being tested by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with results expected on Saturday.

.
"Our number one priority is protect and preserve the water quality in our magnificent Great Lakes," Miller said

Macomb County Public Works operates a 24-hour hotline that you can use to report pollution in local drains or waterways. Call at (877) 679-4337.


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Bullseye

Rex Murphy: Our not-so-brave new world has gone bananas

Rex Murphy
National Post
Mon, 23 Dec 2019 22:41 UTC
Banana taped to the wall - called Art

People attending the Art Basel Miami show on Dec. 6, 2019, take a photo of artist Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian" — a banana taped to the wall — which was purchased for $120,000.Cindy Ord/Getty Images
We live in interesting times. As tiresome as the phrase is, hardly a day passes when some story doesn't put the mind on pause, stuck in wonder at how strange things have become.

Almost a month ago, a prestigious art house presented a bizarre "work" of modern art at a Miami exhibition. It was a banana taped to a wall. There was no accompanying literature to explain why it was a banana, as opposed to say a kumquat or a watermelon, or for that matter something, anything non-citrus. Personally, I was at a loss to understand what duct tape and a piece of fruit contributed to the esthetic sense, or why people would travel to an art show to see it, when any five-year-old with some tape, access to a fruit bowl, and a sense of mischief could aspire to the same heights of inspiration and creativity.

It also struck me that Art, capital A, has wandered a long way downhill since Michelangelo blessed the world with his Pietà, or closer to our time, Turner crafted the explosive wonder of The Slave Ship. Time was, art required executive skills, unique imagination, deep study and practice, and in many cases extreme, self-devouring dedication.
Art has wandered a long way downhill since Michelangelo blessed the world with his Pietà
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Yellow Vest

France's striking workers take 19th day of protests to busiest railway station, clash with riot police


RT
Mon, 23 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC
Protests at Gare de Lyon

Protests at Gare de Lyon
Minor scuffles broke out on Monday between French protesters and police at Paris' Gare de Lyon station, as a nationwide strike against plans by President Emmanuel Macron to change the country's pension system dragged on into a 19th day.


Comment: Lest we forget the Gilet Jaunes, who share the grievances of the striking workers, have been leading well attended protests for over a year now.


French TV station BFM showed pictures of riot police scuffling with a group of about 30 protesters at the Gare de Lyon, which is one of the capital's busiest stations and is often used to travel to skiing resorts near the Alps.

The protesters let off flares and fireworks, with the smoke drifting down into the station concourse.

Comment: RT collated footage of the incident:







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Arrow Down

Your car is collecting and transmitting a lot more data than you think!

Sebastian Blanco
Car and Driver
Tue, 17 Dec 2019 21:53 UTC
Data Collection
© Washington Post via YouTube
Engineer Jim Mason removes the computer from the dashboard of the 2017 Chevy Volt to download its contents.
  • The Washington Post published an investigative report today in which it gets a hacker to figure out just what kind of information OnStar and a randomly selected 2017 model car's internal computers are collecting.
  • A lot, it turns out, including saving pictures of your contacts and logging where you go.
  • There are ways to limit how much data your car collects, but they're not obvious, the paper concludes — and the tinfoil treatment humorously shown in the accompanying photo won't do the trick.
Geoffrey Fowler
© Washington Post
It's easy to count up the benefits to connected cars. From using your phone to warm up the cabin on a winter day to setting speed limits for the new teenage drivers in your household, telematics can make life a bit easier. But you're probably not surprised to hear that these upsides come with some potential downsides as well.

This was proven in a big way by Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler (pictured right), who dug into just how much information his test car, a 2017 Chevrolet Volt, is collecting. Perhaps more important, though, Fowler wanted to see just how much information GM is getting from its connected cars. It's one thing for your car to store your favorite Starbucks in the nav system. It's another if the car company collects that information. The reporter made it clear that this is not a Volt thing, or a Chevy thing; nearly all new cars now have connectivity, including onboard internet connections.

For now, exactly what information goes where is a bit of an unknown by anyone other than the automakers themselves. As Fowler writes, "My Chevy's dashboard didn't say what the car was recording. It wasn't in the owner's manual. There was no way to download it."
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Propaganda

Surveillance Valley author Yasha Levine's Twitter frozen after post objecting to US pushing for war with Russia in Ukraine


RT
Mon, 23 Dec 2019 18:56 UTC
Donetsk
© Global Look / Sandro Maddalena
Ukrainian troops manning roadblock in Donetsk
Yasha Levine, a journalist who exposed the US government surveillance origins of the internet and its symbiotic relationship with Big Tech, was locked out of Twitter after criticizing Washington's Ukraine policy with clear satire.

"We gotta kill Russians in Ukraine or they'll come and kill us here!" Levine tweeted on Saturday, mocking what he described as the US' policy of using Ukraine as a "forward operating base" - a policy expressed in only slightly more euphemistic terms during the impeachment hearings earlier this month. The journalist even included a link to an article he'd written excoriating the policy he dubbed the "Ukraine Doctrine," in case anyone actually took the tweet seriously.

Twitter management apparently didn't bother to click on the link, however. Levine claimed he woke up Sunday morning to "a nice dose of corporate censorship" in the form of a demand from Twitter that he delete the tweet if he wanted to be able to keep using his account, from which he had been locked out "for violating [Twitter's] rules against hateful conduct."

Comment: As of right now it seems like Levine's suspicious ban has been lifted.

See also: Social media: Can we take back power from the tech giants and their government overlords?

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Eye 1

Daesh children about to be repatriated to Sweden 'disappear' from Syrian camp


Sputnik
Mon, 23 Dec 2019 09:56 UTC
Mothers with children
© AFP 2019 / DELIL SOULEIMAN
Previously, over a dozen Daesh children have been brought home to the Nordic countries, including the seven siblings of notorious Swedish-Norwegian Daesh recruiter Michael Skråmo.

While everything was ready for a new group of Daesh orphans to be brought back to Sweden from the Kurdish-controlled al-Hol camp for terrorists' widows and children, it turned out that the children have disappeared without a trace, and the authorities don't know where they might be, Swedish Radio reported.

According to Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde, fewer than five orphans were to be brought back Sweden from al-Hol a few weeks ago. Linde didn't comment on when exactly when and how the handover would occur. But according to her, the children could not be found at the camp within the designated time-frame, and their whereabouts remain unknown.

"A couple of weeks ago, there were all permits, all legal bases were clarified, permissions from authorities ready, security clear, reception in Sweden ready, but when the handover would happen the relatives have moved the children and we do not know now where they keep the children hidden. And the authorities don't know that either," Ann Linde told Swedish Radio.
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Dollar

Spain dishes out $2.43 billion in bumper Christmas lottery

Joseph Wilson
ABC News
Sun, 22 Dec 2019 06:31 UTC
A man buys a Christmas lottery ticket
© AP Photo/Paul White
A man buys a Christmas lottery ticket from a street seller in Madrid, Spain, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2019. Spain's bumper Christmas lottery draw known as El Gordo, or The Fat One, will be held on Dec. 22.
The lucky holders of ticket number 26590 struck it rich in Spain on Sunday when they won the top prize in the nation's bumper Christmas lottery.

The top-prize winning number, known as El Gordo (The Fat One), worth 400,000 euros ($436,000) fell out of the enormous metallic shuffling bins in a live televised event. The winners won 20,000 euros for each euro spent on a 20-euro ticket.

The incredibly popular lottery dishes out a total of 2.24 billion euros ($2.43 billion) in prizes this year, including lots of smaller prizes.

Other lotteries have bigger individual top prizes but Spain's Christmas lottery, held each year on Dec. 22, is ranked as the world's richest for the total prize money involved.
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Stock Up

Surging Russian stocks continue to drive investor interest despite US sanctions


RT
Mon, 23 Dec 2019 18:23 UTC
red square
© Pexels.com
Global investors have been returning to Russian assets this year, pouring more money into the country over signs of its strengthening economy. The growth comes despite US sanctions targeting Russia's financial sector.

The ruble-based MOEX Russia Index has surged over 27 percent so far this year, while the dollar-denominated RTS was up over 40 percent. Russian equities have outpaced most other emerging market stocks and kept pace with the S&P 500, an index of the top 500 US corporations.

The MSCI Russia Index, which tracks the 23 largest Russian publicly-listed companies, has surged 44 percent since the start of the year, according to Sberbank analyst Cole Akeson.
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Jet2

Russia to design 6th-gen long-range UNMANNED strategic bomber - top general


RT
Mon, 23 Dec 2019 18:21 UTC
Tu-95 Strategic Bombers
© REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko
Tu-95 Strategic Bombers
Russia's Aerospace Forces are undergoing a major overhaul, looking forward to welcome a 5th generation subsonic bomber into its fleet as well as a long-range bomber drone, to be developed in the next 20 years, the military said.

Russia's Aerospace Forces (VKS), which marked their 105th birthday on Monday, have been making rapid strides in an effort to upgrade the fleet of long-range bombers and to develop new advanced aircraft, Lieutenant-General Sergey Kobylash, chief of Russia's Long-Range Aviation told Russian Moskovsky Komsomolets daily on Sunday.

"Our aircraft and their weapons are subject to constant improvement. Further development of the long-range aviation is being carried out not only by upgrading Tu-160, Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3 bombers to extend their service life, but also by developing the Prospective Aviation Complex for Long-range Aviation - a 5th-gen strategic bomber," Kobylash said.
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