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SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean authorities were combing through mobile phone data, credit card statements and CCTV footage on Tuesday to identify people who visited nightclubs at the centre of one of the capital’s biggest novel coronavirus clusters. More than 100 new cases linked to the nightclubs have brought fears of a second wave of infections in a country held up as a coronavirus mitigation success story. Health authorities have tracked and tested thousands of people linked to the nightclubs and bars in Seoul’s Itaewon nightlife neighbourhood, but want to find others who they have not been able to identify....

Here We Go Again: China Puts Entire County On Lockdown After New Corona Cluster Emerges China is no longer fixed.Having lied for the past month that it has the coronavirus crisis “under control” just so people return to work, full of hope and enthusiasm, rejoicing at the surge in China’s just as fabricated PMI numbers, and willing to work their asses off (with Beijing so generously willing to risk everyone’s lives as the alternative is a complete collapse in China’s economy), earlier today the US finally cracked down on the relentless barage of Chinese lies, when US intelligence accused China...

BRUSSELS - The leaders of European Union nations have agreed to institute a travel ban that prohibits most foreigners from entering the bloc for 30 days to discourage the spread of the new coronavirus. EU leaders agreed on Tuesday to shut down the 27-nation’s bloc’s external borders immediately. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the proposal by EU officials “got a lot of support by the member states. It’s up to them now to implement. They said they will immediately do that.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said late Tuesday that European leaders agreed in a conference call to...

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is deploying the National Guard to enforce a mile-radius coronavirus “containment area” in a Westchester County community dubbed perhaps the “largest cluster” of cases in America. “New Rochelle, at this point, is probably the largest cluster of these cases in the United States,” Cuomo said in a Tuesday afternoon press conference. “And it’s a significant issue for us.”

Brown University removed a news story it had published about research suggesting that young people’s decisions to transition from one sex to another is influenced by their peers and social media after angering the transgender community.

A rare form of eye cancer has struck a group of people in two locations in North Carolina and Alabama, confounding medical experts who are trying to determine whether the cases are linked. Ocular melanoma typically affects 6 out of every 1 million people, but doctors have found dozens of cases where those affected have ties to either Huntersville, N.C., or Auburn, Ala. Many of those diagnosed attended Auburn University between 1983 and 2001 — at least three of them were friends. At least 38 people who went to Auburn have reported being diagnosed with the disease, according to a...

A progressive and often fatal lung disease killed dentists at a much faster rate than that of the general population at a Virginia hospital over the past two decades, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC reported that idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis affected eight male dentists and a dental technician out of 900 patients studied, Newsweek reported. Although the dentists only represented 1 percent of the number with the disease, only 0.038 percent of people in the U.S. are dentists. Seven of the patients studied had already died of the disease, which causes...

It's floor vote eve, and many creatures are stirring in the House. In a potentially dramatic eleventh-hour gambit, Republicans are considering pushing further than they initially thought possible to repeal additional Obamacare regulations within the American Health Care Act (AHCA). Remember, part of the reason that the current bill does not attempt to tackle certain issues is that under "reconciliation," all provisions must be germane to the budget. That's why buying insurance across state lines and tort reform aren't included, for example. For this same reason, unraveling some of Obamacare's "essential health benefit" regulatory mandates was seen as beyond...

The probability of a magnitude-7 earthquake in Southern California briefly increased as much as 50-fold earlier this week, but has since been dropping back to normal, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and other quake experts. What changed things was a cluster of small quakes that began Monday near the southern end of the San Andreas fault. Seismologists believe that quake activity on one fault can lead to increased stresses on another, said Rob Graves, research seismologist based in the Pasadena USGS office. The cluster was epicentered beneath the Salton Sea, near Bombay Beach, within a handful of miles of...

A mysterious cluster of severe birth defects in rural Washington state is confounding health experts, who say they can find no cause, even as reports of new cases continue to climb. Federal and state officials won’t say how many women in a three-county area near Yakima, Wash., have had babies with anencephaly, a heart-breaking condition in which they’re born missing parts of the brain or skull. And they admit they haven't interviewed any of the women in question, or told the mothers there's a potentially widespread problem. But as of January 2013, officials with the Washington state health department and...

Josh Rogin gets this bombshell from two of the Senators in the closed-door meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry, who briefed them and thirteen other members of Congress on progress in Syria. In short, it doesn’t exist. The chemical-weapons inspection regime set up by Russia to protect Bashar al-Assad is nothing short of a joke, and the peace talks are going exactly where everyone else knew they would … nowhere. Kerry told his former colleagues that he has lost faith in Obama’s policies, and now the US must intervene to stop Syria from being taken over by radical Sunni...

Earlier this week, former President Bill Clinton advised President Obama to "honor the commitment" he made and to allow Americans to keep their health care plans, if they like them. That was a central promise Obama made when he sold Obamacare, but one that turned out not to be true when Obamacare began to be implemented last month. "So I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got," Clinton in an interview released Tuesday. Now President Obama...

Well well lookie what the cat dragged in. That's a link to the unsubsidized data dump -- all 78,437 records -- for each county and State under the Obamacare exchange program. I can verify that for at least my state and county the table is correct, since you can now look it up on Healthcare.gov without creating an account first (which I am not about to do.) There are several very interesting statistical facts that come from this. First, if you're "27", the average premium is $266.20/month or $3,194.40 per year. How many 27 year olds have an extra $3,200...

An American aviator has begun the first attempt to cross the Atlantic suspended by hundreds of coloured balloons. Jonathan Trappe took off from Caribou, Maine, on Thursday morning as his capsule was lifted by 370 helium-filled balloons in heavy fog and he headed east from the US. The concept may sound like the story from the Disney film Up but Trappe, 39, specialises in cluster ballooning and was the first person to cross the Channel and the Alps using the method. The transatlantic trip could be as long as 2,500 miles (4,000km) and take between three and five days. Depending...

Syria said on Tuesday it is ready to unveil and cease the production of chemical weapons, as Western powers prepared to discuss a Russian plan for the country to surrender its chemical arms. “We are ready to state where the chemical weapons are, to halt production of chemical weapons and show these installations to representatives of Russia, other countries and the U.N.,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said in a statement sent to Russia's Interfax news agency. Muallem made the announcement a day after he had welcomed in Moscow the Russian proposal for placing chemical weapons under international control.

Boise University PhD candidate Joshua Kiepert has built a 32-way Beowulf cluster from Raspberry Pis. Kiepert says his research focuses on “developing a novel data sharing system for wireless sensor networks to facilitate in-network collaborative processing of sensor data.” To study that field Kipert figured he would need a decent simulator, preferably a cluster so he could simulate lots of distributed sensors. The University possesses just such a cluster, comprised of 32 nodes each packing a quad-core Intel Xeon E3-1225 CPU humming away at 3.1GHz. That's a lovely facility and is therefore much in-demand, which meant Kiepert could not guarantee...

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has launched an internal investigation into a flawed storefront sting in Milwaukee marred by a series of missteps and failures. The review was launched this week after a Journal Sentinel investigation exposed a 10-month federal operation during which an agent's Colt M-4 machine gun was stolen and burglars ripped off $35,000 in merchandise from the agency's phony store. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) on Friday joined a chorus of public officials from both parties demanding accountability from the ATF. Two other congressional letters were sent to the agency Thursday, including one...

Explanation: Globular star cluster 47 Tucanae is a jewel of the southern sky. Also known as NGC 104, it roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy along with around 200 other globular star clusters. The second brightest globular cluster (after Omega Centauri) as seen from planet Earth, it lies about 13,000 light-years away and can be spotted naked-eye near the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) in the constellation of the Toucan. Of course, the SMC is some 210,000 light-years distant, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and not physically close to 47 Tuc. Stars on the outskirts of the...

Gingrich’s Ballot Miss Could Shake Voters’ Confidence By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE December 24, 2011 Newt Gingrich declared confidently the other day that he would get his name on the ballot for the Republican presidential primary in Virginia. In fact, he said he already had the requisite 10,000 signatures and an additional 2,000 to 3,000 for safety’s sake and would probably collect even more. Related But that turned out not to be the case. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the Virginia Republican Party announced via Twitter that Mr. Gingrich had failed to submit enough signatures by the Thursday deadline,...