News
Venezuela congress to weigh 2020 PDVSA bond payment next week
CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela’s opposition-controlled National Assembly expects to vote on making a $71 million bond interest payment when it meets next week, a lawmaker and a member of state-run oil company PDVSA’s ad-hoc board of directors said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-pdvsa/venezuela-congress-to-weigh-2020-pdvsa-bond-payment-next-week-idUSKCN1RV11T
News
Montenegrin authorities seize drugs on navy training ship
PODGORICA (Reuters) - Montenegrin military police have seized around 50 kilograms of drugs on board a naval training ship, hours before it was scheduled to take students on a training cruise, the defence ministry and local media said on Friday.
In a pre-dawn raid prompted by a tip-off, the military police found “tens of kilograms of matter that appears to be a psychoactive substance” inside Jadran, a sailing ship which was moored in the Adriatic port of Tivat, the ministry said.
Montenegrin navy divers have also searched the hull of the ship, it said in a statement.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-montenegro-drugs/montenegrin-authorities-seize-drugs-on-navy-training-ship-idUSKCN1RV0XQ
News
Russian court puts ex-shareholder of Yugra Bank under house arrest
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian court said on Friday it had ruled that a former shareholder of Yugra Bank should be held under house arrest until June 18.
Alexei Khotin was detained earlier on Friday on suspicion of embezzling 7.5 billion rubles ($117 million) from Yugra Bank, whose license was withdrawn by the Russian Central Bank in 2017.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-detention-khotin/russian-court-puts-ex-shareholder-of-yugra-bank-under-house-arrest-idUSKCN1RV117
News
Attacks on hospital in Ebola zone kill Cameroonian doctor
GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - Attacks on a hospital at the epicenter of Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola outbreak have killed a Cameroonian doctor and injured several others, the local mayor said on Friday.
Two separate attacks on Thursday and Friday targeted the hospital in the city of Butembo, one of the locations where the second-largest Ebola epidemic in history is spreading at its fastest rate since being declared last August, said Mayor Sylvain Kanyamanda.
World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus confirmed on Twitter that one person had died and others had been injured at the hospital. He did not identify the deceased.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-ebola-congo/attacks-on-hospital-in-ebola-zone-kill-cameroonian-doctor-idUSKCN1RV11B
News
Mali government resigns after massacre, insecurity
BAMAKO (Reuters) - Mali’s prime minister and his whole government resigned on Thursday, four weeks after a massacre of some 160 Fulani herders by an ethnic vigilante group shocked the nation.
“The President accepts the resignation of the prime minister and that of the members of government,” a statement from President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s office said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mali-security/mali-government-resigns-after-massacre-insecurity-idUSKCN1RU2L0
California 'house of horrors' parents sentenced to life in prison
https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-house-of-horrors-parents-sentenced-to-life-in-prison
News
Hundreds of thousands back on Algeria's streets, demanding radical reform
ALGIERS (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators returned to Algeria’s streets on Friday to press demands for wholesale democratic change well beyond former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s resignation, chanting “we do what we want”, witnesses said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-algeria-protests/hundreds-of-thousands-back-on-algerias-streets-demanding-radical-reform-idUSKCN1RV0QG
notable?
News
Could Artificial Intelligence Solve Nuclear Fusion's Biggest Problem?
The predictive powers of artificial intelligence could help scientists bring nuclear fusion closer to actually working, researchers from Princeton and Harvard working with the Department of Energy hope.
The implications of a success here could be major: nuclear fusion can theoretically supply emissions-free electric power indefinitely. However, making the leap from theoretical to practical has proved challenging.
Nuclear fusion, unlike fission, which is what takes place in traditional reactors, involves smashing particles together and turning them into plasma to generate energy. This takes place in what is called a magnetic fusion machine, or a tokamak. The tokamak produces magnetic fields that keep the superhot plasma inside and keep it moving—and hot—but controlling it for ever-longer periods of time and making it move faster to produce more energy has been a challenge.
Many believe we will never be able to make nuclear fusion happen, but researchers are not giving up. Computer technology is a natural ally to scientists in this quest for infinite clean power, but the presence of data to feed into the computers has proved crucial.
The Princeton and Harvard scientists used data from two fusion reactors: the Department of Energy’s DIII-D National Fusion Facility in California, operated by General Atomics, and the Joint European Torus tokamak in the UK. What the team learns about predicting outages will be applied to the largest tokamak that is currently in construction in the ITER project in Europe. It may just help solve fusion’s biggest problem: why the particle smashing sometimes stops.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-19/could-artificial-intelligence-solve-nuclear-fusions-biggest-problem