South America

Amid a media frenzy over the spread of the Zika virus worldwide, the CDC have been forced to admit that people are able to self-immunize against the virus, and have also suggested that Zika itself does not cause Microcephaly.  On their own website, the Center for Disease Control, say: People usually don’t get sick enough to go to the hospital, and they very rarely die of Zika. For this reason, many people might not realize they have been infected. Once a person has been infected, he or she is likely to be protected from future infections.

At the beginning of May the planet Mercury is set to travel in front of the sun in a rare event that we will be able to see from Earth.  The planet will not travel between our planet and the sun again for another three and a half years. Businessinsider.com reports: Here’s everything you need to know to watch. The transit of Mercury occurs when Mercury passes between the Sun and Earth, and happens around 13 or 14 times each century. This year the event kicks off on May 9 just after 7am EDT (9pm AEST, 11am UTC), with the planet taking around 8 hours to make its glorious way across the Sun.

A new virus that attacks both farmed and wild tilapia has been identified by a team of international researchers. Tilapia is one of the most widely consumed inexpensive proteins globally. The virus, called the Tilapia Lake Virus (TiLV), is said by the researchers to be the cause of the mass die-offs of the fish which occurred in Israel and Ecuador in the last few years. A paper produced on the virus by the research team lays out a plan for developing a vaccine to protect the global tilapia supplies from contracting TiLV.

Submitted by Clarice Palmer via TheAntiMedia.org,

As online publications have hailed the major protests overtaking the streets of Brazil at the outset of an apparent political revolution, few discuss the problems that have been brewing for decades in South America’s largest nation.

On Thursday, March 24, the 40th anniversary of the last Argentine coup d’état, a large crowd filled Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires with shouts of “nunca más,” “never again.” They were referring to the U.S.-supported Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983 and the repression that characterized it: the imprisonment, torture, and murder of political opposition on a mass scale. “Never again,” then, to such oppression, and “never again” to the overthrow of democracy—the last coup was the sixth in Argentina’s brief history. But President Obama’s visit to Argentina, the first such U.S.