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Published 18 February 2020

·  Extreme Weather to Overload Urban Power Grids, Study Shows

·  This Israeli Cyber Billionaire Battles Hackers in China, Russia and Iran: ‘It Will Only Get Worse’

·  Civilians Bear Brunt of Terror as Kenya’s Operation Against Al-Shabab Continues in Forest

·  Wuhan-400 Bioweapon in Dean Koontz Thriller and Coronavirus: More than Just Coincidence?

·  Critics Decry Proposed Cuts in Hanford Nuclear Cleanup Plan

·  The Coronavirus Spreads Racism Against—and Among—Ethnic Chinese

Extreme Weather to Overload Urban Power Grids, Study Shows (AFP)
Extreme hot spells made increasingly likely by climate change could overload urban power grids and cause roving blackouts as an ever-greater share of humanity opt to live in cities, scientists said Monday.

This Israeli Cyber Billionaire Battles Hackers in China, Russia and Iran: ‘It Will Only Get Worse’ (Zak Doffman, Forbes)
“It’s like that joke,” Gil Shwed tells me, “you don’t need to run faster than the lion, you just need to run faster than your friend.” He is referring to the malicious cyber threats now facing governments and private organizations alike—if you’re easy to attack, you will be attacked, it’s a simple as that. “So just make your network and systems harder to penetrate than those around you.”
Shwed should know. He’s the CEO of Check Point, one of the largest and most influential cybersecurity firms in the world. His fortune has been generated from enterprise security software and, more recently, researching threat actors and their methods, as well as weaknesses in the consumer software platforms used by us all.

Civilians Bear Brunt of Terror as Kenya’s Operation Against Al-Shabab Continues in Forest (Mohammed Yusuf, VOA)
Kenya launched an operation to flush out al-Shabab terrorists from the northeast Boni Forest on the border with Somalia in 2015. The operation was meant to last a few months but — nearly five years later — security forces are still struggling to stamp out the Islamist militants. Villagers are afraid to venture into the forest and a deadly January attack on a joint Kenya-U.S. military base has highlighted ongoing insecurity.

Wuhan-400 Bioweapon in Dean Koontz Thriller and Coronavirus: More than Just Coincidence? (Parvathy Rajagopal, International Business Times)
he book talks about a lab in Wuhan where the disease breaks out killing thousands, while in reality the Wuhan Institute of virology is just 32 kms away from the epicenter. Dean Koontz has not commented about the parallels between the book and the virus

Critics Decry Proposed Cuts in Hanford Nuclear Cleanup Plan (By Nicholas Geranio. Associated Press / Register Guard)
Advocates for cleaning up a former nuclear weapons production site in Washington state are outraged that the Trump administration is proposing a $700 million budget cut next year.
The proposal released by President Trump called for cutting the annual Hanford cleanup budget from about $2.5 billion to about $1.8 billion.
Critics say that large a cut is almost certain to delay the cleanup, which is on a legally-enforced schedule.

The Coronavirus Spreads Racism Against—and Among—Ethnic Chinese (The Economist)
Fear of covid-19 makes people behave badly, including some Chinese.