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International News

Australia to spend US$1.2b on cyber security for private sector after rise in attacks

Cyber attacks on businesses and households are costing about A$29 billion $20.83 billion) or 1.5% of Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP), Morrison told reporters in Canberra.
Much of Australia’s cyber policy to date has focused on bolstering the defenses of government agencies after an attack on the parliament in 2019, but malicious cyber activity is increasing against small and medium businesses, universities and households,Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.

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Fauci warns COVID-19 vaccine may be only partially effective, public health measures still needed

“We don’t know yet what the efficacy might be. We don’t know if it will be 50% or 60%. I’d like it to be 75% or more,” Fauci said in a webinar hosted by Brown University. “But the chances of it being 98% effective is not great, which means you must never abandon the public health approach.”

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Beirut’s accidental cargo: how an unscheduled port visit led to disaster

The captain and lawyers acting for some creditors accused the ship’s owner of abandoning the vessel and succeeded in having it arrested. Months later, for safety reasons, the ammonium nitrate was unloaded and put in a dock warehouse.

On Tuesday, that stockpile caught fire and exploded not far from a built-up residential area of the city. The huge blast killed 145 people, injured 5,000, flattened buildings and made more than a quarter of a million people homeless.

The ship might have succeeded in leaving Beirut, had it managed to load the additional cargo.

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University of Washington forecasts 300,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths

“We’re seeing a rollercoaster in the United States. It appears that people are wearing masks and socially distancing more frequently as infections increase, then after a while as infections drop, people let their guard down,” Dr Christopher Murray, director of the IHME, said in announcing the university’s revised forecast.

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 stands at more than 159,000, the most of any country in the world, with nearly 4.9 million known cases

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Facebook’s dilemma: How to police claims about unproven COVID-19 vaccines

Determining what constitutes a false claim regarding the COVID-19 shot is much harder than fact-checking a claim about an established vaccine with a proven safety record, Facebook fact-checkers told Reuters.

“There is a lot of content that we see and we don’t even know what to do with it,” echoed Emmanuel Vincent, founder of Science Feedback, another Facebook fact-checking partner, who said the number of vaccines in development made it difficult to debunk claims about how a shot would work.

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