News of the World

[kyonides]

Commentary

Even if I strongly disagree with some forumers' opinions on how "politicized" the news might look like, it's still true most of them were focused on politics. I rarely found news not linked to some sort of political event. Well, that's not a surprise at all!  This transition was one of the most controversial ever in the US and really changes the way geopolitics are now handled around the globe. Since things aren't as stormy as a few days ago, it should be easier to find other news that are still relevant but not political at all than in the last couple of weeks. Nonetheless, I was wrong.  Even sites like BBC are filled with politics.

Still, I managed to find a few eye catching or curious articles online.

Tokyo 2020 Games may have to be held behind closed doors

The rescheduled Tokyo Games may have to be held behind closed doors if they are to go ahead in Japan this year, athletics chief Lord Coe has admitted.
The World Athletics president remained confident the Olympics and Paralympics would take place despite a Times report suggesting they would be cancelled.
"I would love to have fans, noisy and passionate," Coe told the BBC.
"But if the only way we're able to deliver it is behind closed doors, I think everybody is accepting of that."
Coe, who headed the London 2012 organising committee and is also an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member, said, in the event of a cancellation, it was "not a realistic solution" to push back Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028 in order for Tokyo to host the Olympics in three years' time.

This might not be the large and colorful and joyful event everybody might have been expecting for so long but there are ways not to cancel it. At least athletes won't feel they wasted a great opportunity to test their strength or speed or agility.

Elephants counted from space for conservation

At first, the satellite images appear to be of grey blobs in a forest of green splotches - but, on closer inspection, those blobs are revealed as elephants wandering through the trees.
And scientists are using these images to count African elephants from space.
The pictures come from an Earth-observation satellite orbiting 600km (372 miles) above the planet's surface.
The breakthrough could allow up to 5,000 sq km of elephant habitat to be surveyed on a single cloud-free day.
And all the laborious elephant counting is done via machine learning - a computer algorithm trained to identify elephants in a variety of backdrops.

Since illegal hunt has hit large zones of African conservation areas, this seems to be an improvement on the methods to detect unusual movements in a specific region or a system capable of alerting authorities on other (natural) threats affecting wild animals.

You can find a similar article focused on cattle here: The drones watching over cattle where cowboys cannot reach

$1B Mega Millions prize a result of long odds, slow sales

The jackpot for the Mega Millions lottery game has grown to $1 billion ahead of Friday night’s drawing after more than four months without a winner thanks to bad luck, poor odds and reduced play partially blamed on the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s only the third time a lottery jackpot has grown so large, but much has changed since the last time such a big prize was up for grabs in 2018. The odds of winning a jackpot remain the same — incredibly small — but for a variety of reasons fewer people are playing Mega Millions or Powerball, the two lottery games offered in most of the country.
And even as the huge Mega Millions prize and a $731.1 million Powerball jackpot won Wednesday by a single ticket sold in Maryland have juiced sales for the games, Maryland lottery director Gordon Medenica noted: “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
Medenica acknowledged sales were dramatically lower before the pandemic, and they tanked even further in the spring and summer.

Even if sales weren't that good, you can't deny it'd be quite interesting to test your luck and see if you can earn lots of cash  any time soon. You wouldn't reject one billion dollars... would you?

Pfizer to supply 40M COVID-19 shots for poor countries

If you were feeling guilty about living in a developed country where you could surely get access to vaccines, this might be the time to stop worrying about that.  You see, Pfizer already announced a large shipment is heading to poor countries in the upcoming days and weeks.

Pfizer on Friday committed to supply up to 40 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine this year to a World Health Organization-backed effort to get affordable shots to poor and middle-income countries.
The deal is a boost to the global program known as COVAX, as wealthy nations have snapped up most of the millions of coming shots.
The commitment, announced at a virtual press conference held by the Geneva-based WHO, is seen as important because Pfizer and its partner BioNTech last month won the first vaccine emergency authorizations from WHO and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Pfizer’s 40 million doses — for a vaccine requiring two doses — are a tiny sliver of what’s needed for COVAX, which aims to vaccinate billions of people in 92 low- and middle-income countries.

It's true this won't be enough to cover the needs of the poor, but take into consideration they weren't supposed to get them this semester.  Somehow we could say the process to "democratize" mass vaccination has begun already.

Germany to ban practice of killing newly hatched male chicks

The German government plans to ban the practice of killing male chicks after they hatch, which results in the death of around 45 million birds per year in the country.
The Cabinet on Wednesday approved legislation that will prohibit the practice from Jan. 1 next year. Government spokeswoman Martina Fietz said that Germany will be the first country in the world to do so.
In a second step, the killing of chick embryos in the egg will be prohibited after the sixth day of incubation starting on Jan. 1, 2024.
Fietz said the government has invested over 8 million euros ($9.7 million) over recent years to help research into alternative procedures to identify the sex of chicks before they hatch.

Err, this might not solve all the issues behind that strange practice that affects male chicks but it's a first step to stop mass killings based only on economic benefits. At least Germany is doing something to change that industry.