Month: December 2020

China has urged Australia to do more to bring stability to the Asia-Pacific region, expressing concern over Canberra’s attachment to Washington and its use of the “China threat theory” as an excuse to develop hypersonic missiles.

Speaking on Thursday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told the gathered press that Beijing was concerned by Canberra’s destabilizing impact on regional security. 

Hua was responding to questions about a new US-Australian partnership to develop and test air-launched hypersonic cruise missiles. The two allies announced the accord under the bilateral Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment program, or SCIFiRE, on Monday. 

https://www.rt.com/news/508542-china-australia-canberra-missile-hypersonic/

But there seems to have been no panic among the locals, as light pillars aren’t too uncommon in northern latitudes.

The optical phenomenon happens after dusk and before dawn when the sun is near or below the horizon at temperatures below minus 20 degrees Celsius and in high humidity.

https://www.rt.com/russia/508458-light-pillars-sky-tyumen/

Yet another metallic monolith has been spotted by locals in California, the third such structure to pop up in recent weeks after two others were found in Utah and Romania, leaving netizens increasingly baffled as to their purpose.

The new monolith – resembling the ominous structure in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – was found on Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California by local residents on Wednesday morning.

NEW: Mysterious monolith appears in Atascadero, California pic.twitter.com/aPJxe0U13X

— Norbert Elekes (@NorbertElekes) December 3, 2020

Maradona’s psychiatrist on Tuesday, the latest twist in a probe into the soccer legend’s death last week, which has already seen files seized from his personal doctor.

Prosecutors, with a judicial order, carried out searches in the house and the private office of Agustina Cosachov in Buenos Aires, as they had done on Sunday with the properties of Maradona’s personal doctor Leopoldo Luque.

“These are routine measures when investigating the causes of death of a patient,” Cosachov’s lawyer, Vadim Mischanchuk, told local television. “What is being sought is a medical history on telephones and computers.”

At its peak over the summer, expanded federal unemployment benefits funneled some $12 billion weekly into individual bank accounts, money that propped up spending, padded savings and fueled rehiring.

But those benefits are expiring by the end of this year, prompting calls for a more extended safety net while a coronavirus vaccine is rolled out.

“Right now, the full Congress should come together and pass a robust package for relief to address these urgent needs,” Biden said as he presented his incoming administration’s economic team.

China’s announcement of new laws controlling the exports of ‘sensitive items’ in a way that mirrors the US Commerce Department’s ‘entity list’ is the latest example of escalating tensions between Beijing and Washington.

The new regulations are set to control items said to be vital to the country’s national security, including military items, strategic technologies, artificial intelligence algorithms, and, most strikingly, rare earth mineral exports. 

The announcement comes as Donald Trump’s administration uses its last days to double down on China, with media reporting that it is set to blacklist the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation as firms allegedly ‘controlled’ by the country’s military.

A member of the European Parliament and several diplomats were caught by police at an illegal lockdown “orgy” in a bar in central Brussels, with local media reporting that the lawmaker tried to flee the scene through a window.

Officers reportedly encountered 25 naked men enjoying a drink-and-drugs-fuelled “party of legs in the air” when they raided the venue on Rue des Pierres in the Belgian capital on Friday night. “We interrupted a gang bang!” a source told the Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heure (DH).

MEP József Szájer admitted in a statement on Tuesday that he was at the “private party” and the “misstep” was “strictly personal.” “I ask everyone not to extend it to my homeland, or to my political community,” he added. Szájer has resigned from Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party. 

The public prosecutor’s office said that a passer-by had reported to the police that he had seen a man that he was able to identify fleeing along the gutter.