Day: December 24, 2020

Britain and the European Union have struck a provisional free-trade agreement that should avert New Year’s chaos for cross-border commerce and bring a measure of certainty to businesses after years of Brexit turmoil.

The breakthrough came Thursday with just over a week to go until the U.K.’s split is completed.

Now comes the race to approve and ratify the deal before the U.K. leaves the EU’s economic structures at the end of the year. The British and European parliaments both must hold votes on the agreement.

Months of tense and often testy negotiations gradually whittled differences between the two sides down to three key issues: fair-competition rules, mechanisms for resolving future disputes and fishing rights. The rights of EU boats to trawl in British waters remained the last obstacle before it was resolved.

U.K. and EU reach post-Brexit trade agreement

In a distinctly Russian take on The Italian Job, an official has reportedly been arrested after a daring heist at Moscow’s diplomatic headquarters. Around $1 million of state funds is said to have been snatched from a vodka box.

The REN TV network reported on Thursday that the funds were part of a $1.5 million payment from Iran in exchange for providing consular services. The money, which they say had been couriered by diplomats, was delivered to the office of the finance department’s top specialist, Natalia Agaltsova, in two bags and a sealed box of Swedish tipple, Absolut.

Agaltsova claims she sounded the alarm when she went to count the cash, and realized that, while on top of each pile was a $100 bill, the rest had been replaced with $1 notes, leaving more than $1 million missing.

https://www.rt.com/russia/510651-cash-stolen-ministry-vodka-box/

Queen’s University in eastern Ontario is urging students not to return to Kingston while a month-long, provincewide lockdown is in effect.

Queen’s says students should avoid returning to the university town until after the lockdown aimed at stemming COVID-19 cases ends on Jan. 23, “unless absolutely necessary.”

A Wednesday notice from the university says it’s giving the advice after Premier Doug Ford said people should not travel outside their regions during the 28-day lockdown that starts Dec. 26.

International students and those set to move into on-campus housing are “strongly encouraged” to postpone travel if they can.

Queen’s University students asked not to return to Kingston until after lockdown

More than a thousand refugees and migrants from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were left to sleep in the cold after their camp in northwestern Bosnia burned down amid a dispute among Bosnian politicians over where to house them.

On Wednesday, a fire destroyed the camp in Lipa housing about 1,200 people. Police and United Nations officials have said the blaze was probably started by people unhappy at the temporary closure of the camp, scheduled for the same day, and uncertainty about where they would be relocated in Bosnia.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/24/thousands-of-refugees-without-shelter-after-bosnia-camp-burns

It’s never aliens, until it is. Today, news leaked in the British newspaper The Guardian of a mysterious signal coming from the closest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, a star too dim to see from Earth with the naked eye that is nevertheless a cosmic stone’s throw away at just 4.2 light-years. Found this autumn in archival data gathered last year, the signal appears to emanate from the direction of our neighboring star and cannot yet be dismissed as Earth-based interference, raising the very faint prospect that it is a transmission from some form of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI)—a so-called “technosignature.” Now, speaking to Scientific American, the scientists behind the discovery caution there is still much work to be done, but admit the interest is justified. “It has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it,” says Andrew Siemion from the University of California, Berkeley.

Most curiously, it occupies a very narrow band of the radio spectrum: 982 megahertz, specifically, which is a region typically bereft of transmissions from human-made satellites and spacecraft. “We don’t know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency” such as this one, Siemion says. Perhaps, he says, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves. But “for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological.”

https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/12/23/alien-hunters-discover-mysterious-signal-from-proxima-centauri/

The Office for National Statistics has announced that an estimated 645,000 people had Covid-19 between December 12 and 18, representing a sharp increase from previous weeks.

One in 85 people in England had Covid-19 last week, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday. 

The figures represent a stark increase from the previous week when one in 95 people were thought to have the virus.

During the period studied, London has emerged as the new epicentre for Covid-19, with the highest percentage of people testing positive. The East and South East of England are also among the worst hit areas.

https://www.rt.com/uk/510633-covid19-christmas-britain-strain-grows/

Melbourne’s Monash University announced that a team of researchers found that antibodies guard against reinfection for at least eight months. Their paper, published in the journal Science Immunology, is the “strongest evidence” yet that coronavirus jabs could be a workable solution to the health crisis, the university said. Previous studies suggested that antibodies to Covid-19 begin disappearing within several weeks or months. However, the new Australian research shows that specific cells within the immune system, called memory B cells, “remember” infection by the virus, and trigger a protective immune response by producing antibodies if re-exposure occurs. 

https://www.rt.com/news/510631-australia-study-covid-immunity-vaccines/