News Headlines - 07 August 2019

▽Cathay Pacific forward bookings drop amid Hong Kong protests - Reuters

Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd is facing a decline in forward bookings for travel to Hong Kong “in the region of double digits” due to widespread protests in the Asian financial center, a senior company executive said on Wednesday.
There is also some weakness in outbound traffic, Chief Customer and Commercial Officer Paul Loo said, adding that transfer traffic had been hit less but that the overall situation was placing pressure on average fares.

▽LDP lawmaker Koizumi, TV personality Takigawa to tie knot - The Mainichi

Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Shinjiro Koizumi and TV personality Christel Takigawa said Wednesday they will get married.
The 38-year-old son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Takigawa, a former anchorwoman known as the multilingual presenter in Tokyo's 2013 Summer Olympic and Paralympic bid, told reporters they are also due to have a baby early next year.
Takigawa, 41, and Koizumi said they decided to make the announcement after her condition stabilized in the second trimester.

▽Japan's FamilyMart convenience chain apologises for rats in store - BBC News

FamilyMart said it had shut a store and was sorry if the "unsanitary" footage had made customers feel "uneasy".
A video circulated on social media on Monday appears to show as many as six rodents scurrying through a store, near sushi displays and down aisles... The footage shows several rats racing down the side of a refrigerated cabinet storing fresh food like sushi and rice boxes, while another rodent rushes under shelves holding packaged items.

▽SpaceIL’s Crashed Spacecraft Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon | WIRED

The spacecraft was carrying the foundation’s first lunar library, a DVD-sized archive containing 30 million pages of information, human DNA samples, and thousands of tardigrades, those microscopic “water bears” that can survive pretty much any environment-including space... The promising thing about the tardigrades, says Spivack, is that they could hypothetically be revived in the future. Tardigrades are known to enter dormant states in which all metabolic processes stop and the water in their cells is replaced by a protein that effectively turns the cells into glass.

▽FDA investigating 127 reports of seizures after vaping

The Food and Drug Administration is investigating 127 cases of people suffering from seizures after vaping, the agency announced Wednesday.
The agency received about 92 new reports of people, especially kids and young adults, experiencing seizures after using e-cigarettes since it first announced its investigation into the issue in April. The FDA said it’s unclear whether e-cigarettes caused the seizures and cautioned these cases occurred over a 10-year period.