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One day before President Donald Trump arrives in China as part of his Asian tour, the country has banned tourism to North Korea, hitting one of the hermetic nation's few reliable revenue streams. Tour companies operating in the Chinese city of Dandong, which borders North Korea, were told by the Dandong Tourism Bureau to halt trips to Pyongyang ahead of Trump's visit to China. They will only be allowed to offer one-day tours of Sinuiju, a smaller city right across the broder. The order was “very unexpected” and “devastating news,” one Chinese tour operator told Reuters. Dandong is home to most of the tour operators offering trips to North Korea, with some lasting for days. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now As the United Nations over the past year has ratcheted up sanctions on North Korea, the country testing nuclear weapons and threatening the U.S. has lost currency from its exports like coal, seafood and textiles due to sanctions. Tourism generates about $44 million in revenue per year for North Korea and 80 percent of all foreign visitors are from China, according to the South Korea-based think tank the Korea Maritime Institute. More than 237,000 Chinese traveled to North Korea in 2012, the last year that China tracked the visitor data. The U.S. banned travel to North Korea this summer after the death of Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old University of Virginia student who was kept in captivity for more than a year and died soon after arriving back in the U.S. in a coma. He had entered North Korea through the China-based Young Pioneer Tours company. North Korea’s nuclear missile tests and threats will be the centerpiece of discussion when Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Wednesday. The U.S. has asked China and other nearby nations to step up pressure on Kim Jong Un's regime. Former Secretary of State John Kerry in a CNN interview aired Monday said that Trump’s meetings with leaders in Asia are “extremely important.” “I hope the president can find that other countries are coming together now with constructive thoughts about how to maximize the pressure, get to the table, have a serious discussion that (addresses) North Korea’s concerns about aggression, about regime change, about the existential threat that they feel,” Kerry said. Tags:Overhead Line Monitoring, Distribution Power Line Monitoring, Grid Analytics System, overhead Line sensor, grid fault detection |
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It seems the kids who showed up to an open mic event in Chicago Monday got a little present alongside the entertainment: a fresh pair of Jordan 11s, courtesy of Chance the Rapper. Andrew Barber—who created the popular Chicago-focused hip-hop site Fake Shore Drive—posted video of Chance gifting the sneakers, writing he "gave every kid who attended his #OpenMike tonight a pair of Jordan 11s. You can't tell me he's not the [greatest of all time]." The video, which Chance himself retweeted, was originally posted by Twitter user @Marty2621, who shared multiple videos of kids receiving the Jordans. It's unclear which sneakers they are exactly, but they appear to be the yet-to-be-released "Win Like ’96" Jordans and Chance himself retweeted a post claiming the kicks were unreleased. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now The open-mic event was organized by Social Works Chicago, described on its website as "Chance the Rapper's youth empowerment charity." The monthly event, officially called Open Mike, is named after the Chicago poet Brother Mike who passed away three years ago at 38 years old. Mike was a mentor to a number of young folks in Chicago, including Chance and fellow rapper Noname. Chance told Chicago Magazine in 2015 that open mics hosted by Brother Mike gave him his first platform to grow as an artist. "Brother Mike was just invested," Chance told the magazine. "He wanted to know what I was writing and what I was working on. He was the kind of person to tell me not to perform the same poem twice." The Open Mikes are often pretty special, and have featured celebrity guests like Dave Chappelle and Kanye West. But Chance had seemingly hinted Monday's Open Mike would be something extra. "Different kinda @OpenMikeChicago today," he tweeted before the event. Chance actively helped kids in Chicago for a while, including raising more than $2 million in donations for the city's public schools. The artist himself gave $1 million. "As a parent and proud product of CPS, I’m committed to helping Chicago’s children have quality learning experiences that include the arts," he said to reporters in September. "Over the past month, I’ve crisscrossed the city, from Chatham to Chinatown, Humboldt Park to Hyde Park, visiting students and one thing is clear: if we invest in Chicago’s children, we’ll change the world." |
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Imagine if E.T., Yoda, and the Na’vi were more than just fictional beings—and what if we could talk to them from Earth? It might be possible one day, thanks to astronomers who sent a message to a star system that may have the ability to support life. The message, which included music and math, was sent in October, but it was announced to the public on Thursday, according to Scientific American. Although we could hear back in 25 years, it’s unlikely we will, Douglas Vakoch, president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) International, told New Scientist. But, what if we did? Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now A person dressed as an alien attends the Mars Encounter exhibit at the Chabot Space and Science Center August 26, 2003 in Oakland, California. Hundreds of astronomy enthusiasts visited the Chabot Space Center in hopes of viewing the red planet Mars through high-powered telescopes. Mars will be 34,646,418 miles from earth at 5:51 AM EST, the closest the two planets have been in 56,619 years. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images If we hear back, there’s limited guidance in place on how to communicate with the extraterrestrial beings, according to Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. “There are some protocols, but I think that’s an unfortunate name, and it makes them sound more important than they are,” Shostak told Live Science. The guidelines—which date back to the 1980s—were designed with governments and scientists in mind. Shostak and his colleagues updated the protocol in the 1990s, in hopes to advise researchers what to do if a detection is made. "They say, 'If you pick up a signal, check it out ... tell everybody ... and don't broadcast any replies without international consultation,' whatever that means," he told Live Science. “But that's all that the protocols say, and they have no force of law. The United Nations took a copy of the early protocols and put them in a file drawer somewhere, and that's as official as they ever got." But, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking doesn’t think we should answer, as it may lead to some serious consequences. “Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn't turn out so well,” Hawking said in his 2016 documentary series, “Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places,” Space.com reports. However, Shostak argues that there’s a problem with the Columbus analogy. “The analogy isn’t terribly apt. These folks weren’t doing exploration for its own sake. They found something new by accident,” Shostak said, according to NBC. “A better analogy might be the discovery of Antarctica or the source of the Nile. These really were exploration efforts.” A car topped with a model spacecraft, and encouraging people to welcome extraterrestrial beings, is parked on property near Jamul, CA, October 15, 2000, purchased by the Unarius Academy of Science to serve as a future landing site for 'space brothers' from other planets. According to the academy, a spaceship carrying 1,000 alien scientists from the planet Myton will arrive on Earth in the year 2001, landing on a raised landform that was once part of an Atlantean continent in the Caribbean Sea. If humans are spritually ready, a total of 33 flying saucers from different planets will land in a towering stack near Jamul, CA to create an international university and introduce new technologies to save planet Earth from self-destruction. David McNew/Newsmakers Still, this doesn't answer the question of what would actually happen and we likely won't have an answer until the day it does. But when it occurs, it's sure to be an eye-opening moment. "We’ll immediately know something very important. We’ll know that we are neither unique nor special," Shostak concludes in his NBC article. "But if you ask what the legacy of such a discovery will be hundreds or thousands of years from now, there’s simply no way to arrive at an answer that’s either useful or accurate." Tags:iot, industrial-iot, industrial-internet-of-things, m2m, industrial-m2m, m2m-communication, remote-communication, wireless-m2m |