Latin phrase attributed to Julius Caesar, indicating events have passed a point of no return.
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Biopolitics is an intersectional field between human biology and politics. #Politics #Biology
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Tourists stay away as Egypt reopens oldest pyramid (al-monitor)
A guide sits on a stone as he looks at the Djoser's step pyramid, in Saqqara, Egypt, March 5, 2011. No tourists are in sight near Giza's pyramids as the coronavirus pandemic takes its toll on the country’s tourism industry, casting a shadow over the reopening of Egypt’s oldest pyramid after the completion of a major restoration project. Egypt has reopened its oldest pyramid, Djoser in Saqqara, south of Cairo, after a major restoration project that lasted 14 years. Djoser, a 4,700-year-old pyramid located in Memphis, the first Egyptian capital, is the oldest standing pyramid in Egypt.
According to official figures, tourism revenues in Egypt jumped by more than 28% to record about $12.6 billion in the fiscal year 2018-2019 ending last June 30, compared to $9.8 billion during the fiscal year 2017-2018.
Tourism has become the country’s third-largest source of national income after remittances from Egyptians abroad.
Egypt's Pyramids, Sphinx shine in red to mark Chinese New Year (2020, Xinhua)
A pyramid is illuminated in red in Giza, Egypt, on Jan. 23, 2020. The Great Pyramids and the Sphinx in Giza near the Egyptian capital Cairo have been shining in red in a ceremonial sound and light show on Thursday evening as part of the celebrations of the Chinese New Year. "Today, the Pyramids Plateau is distinguished by wonderful lights as the Chinese red lanterns integrate with the beautiful Egyptian pyramids, marking a meeting between the two old civilizations of China and Egypt," Shi Yuewen, cultural counselor of the Chinese embassy in Egypt and CCC chief, told the attendees.
Egypt sees surging number of Chinese tourists (2019)
Cultural counselor to Egypt, Shi Yuewen, says tourist visitations could exceed 500,000 in 2019
Egypt cancels Chinese flights amid coronavirus outbreak (egyptindependent)
An official statement published by the Association of Egyptian Travel Agencies announced that Egypt has suspended all flights from or to China amid an eruption of the deadly coronavirus outbreak. Trips for approximately 30,000 Chinese tourists expected to visit Egypt in the winter season were cancelled.
Coronavirus: Is Egypt suppressing the true outbreak figures? (March 2020, DW)
Cairo has severely underreported the number of positive cases in the country, according to researchers. But authorities have taken it a step further by arresting people circulating figures higher than the official tally.
China, Egypt inspect, seal smuggled ancient Chinese coins (Dec, 2019)
A delegation of Chinese officials from Chinese embassy in Egypt and officials from Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities inspected and sealed dozens of smuggled ancient Chinese coins in Egypt's coastal city of Alexandria, a Chinese official said on Monday. Egyptian customs in Alexandria seized in 2018 more than 30 ancient Chinese coins and most of them were from China's Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), while most ancient ones dating back to the fourth century B.C., said Chinese Cultural Counselor to Egypt Shi Yuewen, who was a member of the delegation. More than 20 of these coins were identified as national cultural relics by experts from the Chinese State Administration of Cultural Heritage and Egypt will officially return the coins to China in the near future, according to Shi Yuewen.
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‘Astounding new finds’ suggest ancient empire may be hiding in plain sight (sciencemag)
Teotihuacan was once a bustling, cosmopolitan metropolis, the center of an empire whose reach may have extended 1000 kilometers away to the Maya region.
New evidence from both Teotihuacan and the Maya region has brought the relationship between those two great cultures back into the spotlight—and hints it may have been more contentious than most researchers had thought. Evidence from Maya writing and art suggests Teotihuacan conquered Tikal outright, adding it to what some archaeologists see as a sweeping empire that may have included several Maya cities.
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Jesus' Secret Revelations? Copy of Forbidden Teachings Found in Egypt (2017, livescience)
The oldest known copy of a text claiming to be Jesus' teachings to his brother James has been discovered in an ancient Egyptian trash dump, scattered among piles of fifth-century papyrus, ancient tax receipts and bills of sale for wagons and donkeys. The manuscript is a rare, Greek-language edition of an apocryphal New Testament story called The First Apocalypse of James, that, until now, was thought to only be preserved in the Coptic language. The text was likely written in the fifth or sixth century. Gnostic texts like The First Apocalypse of James were likely banned because of their "different understanding" of what Jesus' importance was, Landau said.
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Oumuamua is the first known interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System.
- Interstellar object may have been alien probe, Harvard paper argues, but experts are skeptical (CNN)
- Proposed Mission Would Explore Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua (futurism)
- Should Earthlings Chase ‘Oumuamua Into Interstellar Space? (Wired)
- Could Alien Life Travel on Interstellar Asteroids and Comets like 'Oumuamua? (Discover)
- Could solar radiation pressure explain ‘oumuamua’s peculiar acceleration? (arxiv)
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How Systems Collapse
Societal collapse is the fall of a complex human society. Such a disintegration may be relatively abrupt, as in the case of Maya civilization, or gradual, as in the case of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The subject of societal collapse is of interest in such fields as history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and, more recently, cliodynamics and complex-systems science. Common contributing factors are economical, environmental, social and cultural, and disruptions in one domain sometimes cascade into another. In some cases a natural disaster may precipitate a collapse.
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The world after the pandemic - by Thierry Meyssan (voltairenet)
Europe in 1921, after the Spanish flu Geopolitics after the pandemic: The epidemic of hysteria that accompanies that of Covid-19 masks the political news. When the crisis is over and the people recover their spirit, the world may be a very different place. Last week we spoke of the existential threat that the Pentagon was making to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both destined to disappear. The response of both was to threaten the United States with the worst calamities - the collapse of the shale oil industry for the former, a war with Russia for the latter; two very risky bets. These threats are so serious that they must be answered quickly and will probably not wait three months.
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New device accelerates development of extraordinary quantum networks (U.S. Army CCDC)
Army scientists have developed a radically new quantum device that can store many quantum excitation patterns at once, opening the door for the creation of a quantum network. A quantum network is the Holy Grail for scientists because it likely can never be wiretapped and it would offer extraordinarily powerful computing and sensing capabilities. Researchers from the Quantum Science Group at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory constructed a test-bed quantum networking apparatus, consisting of millions of rubidium atoms trapped within laser beams and cooled to nearly absolute zero. There is a worldwide race between research groups to develop quantum devices that can perform ultra-secure networking and computation. The lab's new results are a big step toward achieving these goals, researchers said.
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New coronavirus infections may drop to zero by end-March in Wuhan: Chinese government expert (reuters)
Wuhan, the epicenter of China’s coronavirus epidemic, will likely see new infections drop to zero by the end of this month, an expert with the country’s top panel on battling the illness said on Thursday, even as the city reported a quicker rise in new confirmed cases.
In China, life returning to normal as coronavirus outbreak slows (aljazeera)
Even in Hubei, where some 10,000 cases remain, the pressure on front-line medical workers has eased. On March 17, the first batch of nearly 4,000 medical workers who were parachuted into Wuhan to help control the outbreak were able to leave. With so many provinces having downgraded their emergency response levels, China is slowly - and cautiously - returning to normal lif
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Pentagon halts domestic travel for military due to coronavirus (CNN)
The Pentagon announced Friday that members of the armed services, Defense Department civilian employees and their family members who are living on or serving at military properties can no longer travel domestically starting Monday, to curtail the spread of the coronavirus. "The continuing spread of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) necessitates immediate implementation of travel restrictions for domestic Department of Defense (DoD) travel," according to a Defense Department memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist. According to a second memo from the department, all unofficial and international visitors will be "restricted" from the Pentagon grounds. No military or government employees or contractors will be allowed to enter the Pentagon grounds "if they have traveled within the previous 14 days" from countries for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued the highest or second highest travel warnings, per the memo.
DOD Officials Explain New Coronavirus Domestic Travel Restrictions (defense.gov)
Pentagon officials are also closing employee fitness centers and said they are looking at other measures to lessen the chances of transmission.
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Democratic Party's donkey symbol replaced by a rat in Google search (Mashable)
Image: Screenshot / google A Google spokesperson suggested that if only the Democratic Party had taken the time to claim its Knowledge Panel then we wouldn't be in this mess. "Most images in Knowledge Panels are automatically generated from pages on the web," wrote the spokesperson over email. "When errors are reported, we fix them quickly. We encourage people and organizations to claim their Knowledge Panels, which allows them to select a representative image."
Social media giants warn of AI moderation errors as coronavirus empties offices (Reuters)
Alphabet Inc’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter warned on Monday that more videos and other content could be erroneously removed for policy violations, as the companies empty offices and rely on automated takedown software during the coronavirus pandemic. In a blog post, Google said that to reduce the need for people to come into offices, YouTube and other business divisions are temporarily relying more on artificial intelligence and automated tools to find problematic content.
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"India plans to build an all-seeing database to track citizens’ every move by 2021" (nextweb)
India, the world’s biggest democracy, built a massive database containing information and biometrics of its citizens in the form of Aadhaar back in 2009. Now, it’s planning to build a new database that will continually track the lives of 1.2 billion people living in the country — and further enable surveillance without legal frameworks to prevent its misuse.
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Israel Takes Step Toward Monitoring Phones of Virus Patients (abcnews, alt)
Israel's Cabinet has authorized the Shin Bet internal security agency to use mobile-phone tracking technology to monitor the movements of coronovirus patients, despite an outcry from privacy advocates.
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Denmark Passes Law Enabling Forced Coronavirus Vaccinations (the local)
Denmark's parliament on Thursday night unanimously passed an emergency coronavirus law which gives health authorities powers to force testing, treatment and quarantine with the backing of the police. The far-reaching new law will remain in force until March 2021, when it will expire under a sunset clause. Jens Elo Rytter, law professor at Copenhagen University, said the measures were unlike anything passed in the last 75 years "It is certainly the most extreme since the Second World War," Initially, the government wanted to the law to give the police the right to enter private homes without a court order if there is a suspicion of coronavirus infection. But this was dropped after opposition from parties in the parliament.
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YC graduate Genecis Bioindustries turns food waste into compostable plastics (techcrunch)
#Comment: The biotech industry continues their go-to "we must control and engineer life on all levels, or all die" narrative, under the implicit "Everything is IP & Money" paradigm . It illustrates, that the industry by and large still has not comprehended the power of "scaling out" systems , instead of the legacy "scaling up". In short, greedy control freaks disregarding the flexibility and resilience of natural ecosystems which have been evolutionary fine-tuned for aeons.
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npm is joining GitHub/Microsoft
#Comment: The brute force attacks by the late capitalistic kleptocrats on the free software / open source movement is notably picking up speed. The famous saying "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” comes to mind...
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Employee At BIS' Basel Headquarters Infected With Coronavirus, Nine Others Exposed (FT)
The Bank for International Settlements has said a member of staff working at its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, has tested positive for Covid-19. This afternoon the organisation reported that the individual had received medical treatment and was currently recovering at home. A further nine staff members who had been working in close proximity to the infected employees had been told to to work from home temporarily.
Italian army chief tested positive for coronavirus
Italian Chief of Army Staff Salvatore Farina has tested positive for the coronavirus and will remain quarantined in his home, with a replacement taking on his official duties. Farina announced he is self-isolating after not feeling well and then testing positive for the disease. He will be replaced in his role as chief of staff by General Federico Bonato, reported foreign media on Sunday.
