Stephen Hawking’s 1971 work looks into the so-called gravitational lensing phenomenon, which presupposes that a bunch of black holes zipping around at estimated incredible speeds would by all means bend the light of objects they pass in front of.
Although we are still in the dark about what dark matter essentially is, scientists have now ruled out one possible option, according to the research published in Nature Astronomy — that it is a bunch of minute black holes, as per a theory proposed by the ingenious Stephen Hawking back in 1971.
When an international team led by researchers from Japan’s Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) was hunting for a particular flicker of stars in a neighboring galaxy, the way the light would make itself visible if a miniscule black hole was passing in front of it, allowed them to capture 190 consecutive images over seven straight hours, using the cutting edge Hyper Suprime Cam on the Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
(Photo by NASA)
If a primordial black hole, which Hawking suggested along with others, was a result of the Bing Bang, were to move between Earth and a star it’s expected that the star would brighten for a few minutes to hours as the black hole’s gravity magnified its light intensity.
Based on Hawking’s expanded hypothesis, which was notably first proposed by scientists Yakov Zel’dovich and Igor Novikov in 1966, the team assumed that the abundance of black holes smaller than the Moon required to produce the dark matter effect would lead to at least 1,000 lensing events. However, the observations arrived at just one potential event, which means that primordial black holes can account for no more than only 0.1 percent of dark matter.
The conclusion suggests that dark matter is something more massive than a plethora of teeny black holes, as proposed by the legendary scientist.
Although a great deal of further research is needed to rule out his theory altogether, one thing is clear for now – that we have to search for dark matter outside the domain of black holes.
Former White House Press Secretary and Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer Wednesday compared the immigration crisis to overseas passengers arriving at the nation's airports, not going through customs and “simply getting off their planes and blending into our communities.”
On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the Trump administration is treating the immigration crisis as a “Cat 5 hurricane disaster” and that she has directed agencies to “surge resources and personnel” toward border security and migration management.
“We are bringing all of the agencies together; we're asking everybody to chip in,” Nielsen said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“She’s right,” Fleischer said on "America's Newsroom" in response to Nielsen’s comparison of the border crisis to a natural disaster. “For decades the federal government has known we’ve had problems and for decades the federal government has failed to do anything about it. And now President Trump is stuck with this. And the heart of the problem, of course, is that if you bring children to the United States and you apply for asylum, you know you can get away with it so our system is incentivizing this.”
Fleischer, who served as President George W. Bush's press secretary from 2001-2003, offered what he said is another way of looking at the situation at the border, “Pretend that planes were landing at JFK, Newark, Chicago, LAX every single day, and instead of the people coming from foreign countries going through customs or immigration, they simply got off their planes and blended into our communities. That’s what’s happening at the southern border everyday.”
President Donald Trump has declared an emergency at the southern border, and in recent days has mulled closing it in response to the increase in illegal border crossings -- while calling for Mexico to increase efforts to stop the migration flows on their side.
The president also moved to cut aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
"We're going to have a strong border or we're going to have a closed border," he told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. "We're going to see what happens."
Meantime, Nielsen will travel to the southern border this week with plans to visit ports of entry and speak with law enforcement officials before joining President Trump in California on Friday near a section of border wall, DHS officials told Fox News.
On Wednesday Trump tweeted, “Congress must get together and immediately eliminate the loopholes at the Border! If no action, Border, or large sections of Border, will close. This is a National Emergency!”
According to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., closing the border completely would disrupt manufacturing supply lines and the flow of goods ranging from avocados to cars, making for a "potentially catastrophic economic impact."
Fleischer said it’s a “tough move and sometimes you have to take tough moves to make people get off their positions.”
“It would create economic pain on the Mexican side of the border and on the American side of the border. And on the Mexican side, the question is, would it create such economic pain that they start to put pressure on their government to stop people from getting into their country, traversing it to get into America?" Fleischer asked. "On the American side, would it put pressure on people (to) say ‘finally federal government, do something about this.' I just see no evidence that there’s a mood to compromise in Washington and that’s the magic word. The Democrats have got to support law enforcement, border enforcement. Republicans have got to welcome immigrants legally to this country. That’s called comprehensive immigration reform and it needs to be done.”
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Suddenly, it seems, much of the party is championing radical-sounding proposals with cool slogans, gargantuan price tags and little chance of becoming law.
I happen to think this is a major miscalculation, not because I'm taking a stand on this or that policy but because it tees things up for Donald Trump and the GOP to paint them as the party of socialism.
And this progressive branding, which is what it's becoming, makes life difficult for the more moderate Democrats who led the charge in the 40-seat pickup in the House.
Both parties face this dilemma at the start of the primary process. What excites the base (left or right) can become an albatross during the general, when candidates usually pivot to the center.
But the complicating factor for the Democrats is that their social-media stars, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are also grabbing all sorts of attention, even though they wield little power in Washington.
And make no mistake, we're talking about policies that were too far left for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Here's the lead of a Washington Post piece on the "head-snapping list" embraced by the 2020 Democrats: "Tear down the border wall. Pay slavery reparations. Upgrade every building in America. Tax the assets of rich people, and pack the Supreme Court with four new liberal judges."
Kamala Harris, seeking to solidify her African-American base, has come out for slavery reparations, and Elizabeth Warren matched that and said Native Americans should also be included. Most of them are signing onto the Green New Deal. And with a few exceptions like Amy Klobuchar, they love Medicare for All, with Harris saying it should replace all private health insurance plans.
It doesn't take much to imagine the 30-second ads.
The New York Times finds Democratic lawmakers in conservative districts fending off questions from voters about whether they stand with the "socialism" and "anti-Semitism" they see coming out of the House.
And in a geographical piece on whether the Dems should focus on the Midwest or the Sun Belt, the Times says "there is a growing school of thought that Democrats should not spend so much time, money and psychic energy tailoring their message to a heavily white, rural and blue-collar part of the country when their coalition is increasingly made up of racial minorities and suburbanites." In short, focus on more liberal areas.
They may be taking a leaf from the Trump playbook, using bombastic rhetoric and sweeping promises as an alternative to Clintonian incrementalism. But there's a price to be paid for that.
I suppose there's an argument that galvanizing a surge of liberal voters in such states as Arizona and Georgia would be the party's best bet. But the Democrats lost to Donald Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and given the vagaries of the Electoral College, I doubt they can win the White House without getting at least two of those states back. Why surrender their claim as the blue-collar party?
While AOC is only 29, she generates so much media attention, positive and negative, that she's become a definite factor in this national debate.
As Jim Geraghty writes in National Review, "There is ample evidence that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is over-covered by both the mainstream media and conservative media ... But she embodies what a loud section of the online Left wants to see and what a loud section of the online Right loves to denounce and probably fears."
Conservatives don’t need to pick a fight with her on every little issue. AOC recently announced that to pay her staff a good wage, no employee will make less than $52,000 and none more than $80,000 — meaning she'll probably hire fewer workers and forego the highly paid chief of staff types.
On "Fox & Friends," Pete Hegseth called this "socialism and communism on display." That enabled AOC to fire back that "the GOP is so disconnected from the basic idea that people should be paid enough to live that Fox actually thinks me paying a living wage in my office is 'communism.'"
Such spats will be quickly forgotten, but unless there's a course correction, the debate over the Democrats' image as an increasingly left-wing party will echo for a long time to come.
MEXICO CITY – Prosecutors in western Mexico say they have opened a criminal investigation into complaints of sexual harassment aired by the country's exploding "#MeToo" movement.
The prosecutors' office in Michoacan state said Wednesday that some of the complaints published on social media constituted possible crimes that occurred in the state and therefore fall under its jurisdiction.
Mexico had a tepid response to the original #MeToo movement that sprang up in 2017. Only a few Mexican actresses said they had been harassed, despite reports that abuse was widespread.
But over the last few days, the United Mexican Journalists group says it has gathered over 120 allegations of sexual harassment across the country's biggest media outlets.
Similar campaigns have sprung up on social media for Mexican writers, academics and activists to share their stories.
An employee roasts pork at a Korean BBQ restaurant in Seoul, South Korea, March 13, 2019. Picture taken on March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Jane Chung
March 20, 2019
By Jane Chung
SEOUL (Reuters) – Whenever dust particles hang thick in the air in South Korea, sales of pork rise.
This quirky correlation in Asia’s fourth-largest economy, where air pollution outstrips industrialized peers, stems from an old belief attributed to coal miners, that the slippery pork oil helped cleanse dirt from their throats.
For middle school student Han Dong-jae, eating greasy barbecued pork belly on a smoggy day is a life lesson imbibed from his mother.
“I eat more pork when fine dust is dense like today,” said the 15-year-old as he dug in over a sizzling grill at a barbecue restaurant in Seoul with his mother after school.
“I think it’s somewhat helpful, because pork meat has oil and the oil soothes my throat.”
Scientists say there is no rationale for the belief, but pork sales jumped about a fifth on the year from Feb. 28 to March 5, when pollutants blanketed most areas, data from major retailers E-Mart and Lotte Mart showed.
SOCIAL DISASTER
South Korea faces a battle against unhealthy air, a combination of domestic emissions from coal-fired power plants and cars, and pollutants wafted in from China and North Korea.
Its air quality was the worst among its industrialized peers in 2017, data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) grouping of wealthy nations showed.
South Korea registers 25.1 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers on average each year, just over double the OECD figure of 12.5, but far lower than the world average of 44.2.
The pollution has affected South Korean policy and businesses, driving up shares of companies that make air purifiers and masks.
Legislation this month included a measure designating the problem a “social disaster”, which could unlock emergency funds.
Cho Seog-yeon, an environmental engineering professor at Inha University, called for more study of the exact damage wrought by high levels of concentrated pollutants, adding, “We don’t know now where the damage is done (by air pollution).”
People battle the air pollution by wearing masks and staying indoors. But in a country where 28 percent of all households have a pet, furry companions are a priority too.
Sales of pet masks surged more than five times in early March, said Suh Hyuk-jin, director of pet products maker Dear Dog.
Cho Eun-hye, who lives in the northwestern city of Incheon, bought a mask for her 18-month-old brown Korean Jindo dog, Hari, who needs to be walked two times a day.
“It’s inconvenient, but I think we have to keep living with that,” said the 36-year-old office worker.
(Reporting by Jane Chung; Editing by Karishma Singh and Clarence Fernandez)
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FILE PHOTO: Jet Airways aircraft are seen parked at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai, India, April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas/File Photo
April 26, 2019
By Aditi Shah and Abhirup Roy
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI (Reuters) – The grounding of India’s Jet Airways is turning into a quick windfall and long-term opportunity for international airlines keen to scoop up nearly a million outbound passengers from what was once the nation’s biggest airline.
Jet, which previously had a fleet of around 120 largely Boeing Co planes, was forced to indefinitely halt all flight operations on April 17 after its banks rejected the carrier’s plea for emergency funds.
The carrier’s descent into crisis has benefited international airlines in the form of rising fares and demand, data showed.
Fares from India to cities such as Dubai, London, New York, Singapore and Bali in the first quarter of 2019 rose between 4 percent and 32 percent from a year ago, according to Indian travel portal MakeMyTrip Ltd.
In the peak travel months of May and June, fares to London have spiked as much as 36 percent and tickets to San Francisco are up nearly 20 percent from a year ago, according to data from travel portal Yatra.com.
“For the next three months it’s actually bonanza time for international players,” said Ashish Nainan, a research analyst at CARE Ratings. “At least until the middle of June, the fares are not going to come down.”
Due to rising demand, even before Jet’s lessors grounded planes, carriers such as British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, Singapore Airlines Ltd and United Airlines saw an up to a 27 percent increase in passenger numbers from India in the last quarter of 2018, data from India’s aviation regulator showed. That is the latest period for which the data is available.
India is one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets, clocking 15-20 percent domestic growth in recent years. It has long had only two full-service long-haul carriers, state-run Air India and Jet.
Jet is now hoping to be bailed out by a new investor, with final bids due on May 10.
INCREASING CAPACITY
Before its grounding, Jet had the biggest share of India’s outbound international air traffic, carrying 12 percent of the 7.8 million passengers headed overseas in the Oct-Dec quarter, down from 14 percent a year earlier, data from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation showed.
For an interactive graphic on Jet’s market share, click https://tmsnrt.rs/2WvDQYi
For an interactive graphic on average daily flights by the airline, click https://tmsnrt.rs/2FeFDel
The total number of passengers traveling overseas with Jet fell 10 percent during the last quarter of 2018 even as the outbound travel market grew about 5 percent.
Meanwhile, Singapore Airlines posted a 27 percent increase in passengers from India, Cathay registered 17 percent growth and British Airways saw a 10 percent rise in the same period.
Cathay said the events at Jet combined with increasing demand for travel had led it to deploy larger aircraft with more seats on some Indian routes.
“In the long term we would certainly like to be able to offer more capacity into India, not just on our existing routes but by establishing new services to secondary cities,” Cathay said in a statement.
Singapore Airlines, in an email to Reuters, said the Indian market is “very promising” but declined to give details of airfare levels or demand patterns in the wake of Jet’s exit, citing a quiet period before the release of its annual results.
DOMESTIC GAINS
Jet’s grounding has also had a big impact on the domestic market, with inter-city air fares to major cities such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata soaring more than 20 percent in May and June, according to Yatra.com.
The spike in fares is expected to underpin strong earnings for IndiGo and SpiceJet Ltd, which are set to report results for the quarter ended March 31 in the coming weeks.
“Domestic Indian carriers are the main benefactors, but I suspect if Jet fails to be revived by May 10 then Vistara and other airlines that ply international routes, particularly the lucrative Gulf market, are the main winners,” said Shukor Yusof, the head of aviation consultancy Endau Analytics. Vistara is a joint venture of India’s Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines.
Inadequate bilateral traffic rights between India and other countries, however, could be an impediment to foreign carriers’ hopes of winning business lost by Jet, some analysts said.
“Even before Jet’s operational shutdown, international capacity was significantly constrained,” said Kapil Kaul, CEO for South Asia of consultancy CAPA. “We have now more serious capacity challenge … this is unlikely to be stabilized in the near term.”
A new national government likely to be in place sometime after elections end in May is expected to address the international capacity constraints, and once bilateral agreements are eased airlines including Emirates, Turkish and Qatar would immediately benefit, said Kaul.
“We would love to add more flights but we are at the limit of the allocation granted to us for traffic rights,” Emirates Chief Commercial Officer Thierry Antinori told reporters in Dubai on Wednesday.
(Additional reporting by Alexander Cornwell in Dubai, Jamie Freed in Singapore and Tanvi Mehta in Mumbai; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
FILE PHOTO: The company logo for pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is displayed on a screen on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., April 8, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
April 26, 2019
By Pushkala Aripaka and Ankur Banerjee
(Reuters) – AstraZeneca Plc beat first-quarter sales and earnings expectations on Friday as the British drugmaker benefited from a push into cancer drugs and emerging markets including China.
Newer treatments such as lung cancer drug Tagrisso, now the company’s top selling medicine, have helped the drugmaker’s return to growth after years of crumbling sales due to patent losses on older drugs.
Sales in China have shown explosive growth, more than doubling since 2012, but AstraZeneca executives on Friday said that may not be sustained.
“The enormous growth you currently see in China, 28 percent, probably is not sustainable, but we feel very bullish that the growth will continue to be at a pace of between 15 percent and 20 percent,” Ruud Dobber, executive vice president, BioPharma, told Reuters.
Shares of the company were down 0.2 percent at 5,878 pence at 1031 GMT.
The turnaround in AstraZeneca’s fortunes has been powered by a push into cancer treatments led by Chief Executive Pascal Soriot, who saw off a 2014 takeover bid from Pfizer in part by promising annual sales of $45 billion by 2023.
In the first quarter, sales from its oncology unit rose 59 percent to $1.89 billion, accounting for 35 percent of total product sales.
The company has moved deeper into cancer therapy market through wide-ranging deals, including those for immunotherapy and targeted therapy. Last month, it agreed a multi-billion dollar oncology deal with Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo Co Ltd.
Interactive graphic on AZN’s top 10 drugs by sales – https://tmsnrt.rs/2W5XIRX
“We’re reaching that point where after years of having to keep faith, we have actually got something tangible to believe in,” Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Nicholas Hyett said.
AstraZeneca also backed its annual sales and earnings forecast and said it has extensively prepared for UK’s anticipated exit from the European Union, even in the event of a no-deal exit.
The company has already spent more than 40 million pounds ($52 million) on Brexit preparations, including stockpiling six weeks’ worth of drugs in the UK and four weeks in continental Europe to guard against shortages.
AstraZeneca said product sales rose 14 percent at constant currency to $5.47 billion in the quarter, led by its lung cancer drug Tagrisso and respiratory treatment Pulmicort.
Interactive graphic on AZN’s quarterly oncology sales – https://tmsnrt.rs/2W9tbCD
China sales increased by 28 percent to $1.24 billion in the quarter, accounting for nearly a quarter of overall product sales.
Core earnings came in at 89 cents per share in the quarter. Analysts on average were expecting core earnings of 85 cents per share and product sales of $5.29 billion, according to a company provided consensus of 19 analysts.
(Reporting by Pushkala Aripaka and Ankur Banerjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernard Orr/Keith Weir)
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It’s the type of crime that doesn’t happen every day.
Police in the suburbs of Philadelphia say three suspects broke into a medical facility in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, last Saturday and fled with 18 colonoscopies – devices used for examining the health of patients’ colons.
Suspects are seen leaving a medical facility in Wynnewood, Pa., allegedly carrying 18 colonoscopes worth about $450,000. (Lower Merion Police Department)
The devices were reportedly worth a total of about $450,000, authorities said.
But police were perplexed about what the suspects might have planned to do with the instruments.
“This is not something that a typical pawn shop might accept,” Lower Merion Police Detective Sergeant Michael Vice told Philadelphia’s WCAU-TV. “My feeling would be that it was some type of black market sales.”
Such a market apparently does exist, Lower Merion Police Superintendent Michael J. McGrath told Philly.com.
“They appeared to know precisely where to go, and they pried the door open,” McGrath said of the suspects, who were captured on surveillance video leaving the facility, carrying bulging backpacks.
Police are hoping the suspects will be caught in the end.
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