Inter-Island Communications News Brief – January 13, 2020

A small but vocal protest group picketed outside of a Paget hotel against a controversial pastor returning to occupy the lead position in a new church. This all happened outside Elbow Beach hotel, where Gary Simons was heading his second service with Grace Point Church that was being held at the resort. Two protesters planted themselves with picket signs on the sidewalk of South Road at the entrance of the property – a legally appropriate decision since the pair of protesters were not impeding access or obstructing movement for passersby.

As you’ll recall, Gary Simons was a prominent member of Bermuda’s faith community as the pastor at Cornerstone Bible Fellowship in Hamilton and, perhaps more crucially in this instance, the former deputy chair of Preserve Marriage, a pressure group created to oppose the marriage equality movement. Mr. Simons stepped down from both roles in 2017. After being away from both positions in particular and public life generally, he’s started in the role of senior pastor at GracePoint Church at Elbow Beach Hotel. Due to Mr. Simons’s history and activism, key members and allies of the island’s LGBTQ+ community may be concerned with GracePoint’s – which is not publicly known at this point – position on same-sex marriage.

Despite how it may feel sometimes, Bermuda remains another world, populated by a community that can come together and care for our young people when they need support most. Last Friday, Bermudian mother Devon Moss made a post on a Bermuda-centric Facebook forum that has since go on to receive several hundred replies and get screenshotted and shared across the local Whatsapp network. Her post details how her 14-year-old son had his Xbox stolen, with the text reading quote “This is for the guy who crushed my son’s heart today. My 14-year-old was trying to sell his Xbox that he had bought with his own money that he’s worked very hard to upgrade. Someone responded when he met him at Arnold’s on St. John’s Road the guy drove up and snatched it and took off. He had tape over his license plate.”

The post generated hundreds of replies of folks expressing their sadness and anger over the incident, with several posters suggesting that donations could be taken to get the Xbox replaced. However, that wasn’t necessary since, according to another post from Mrs. Moss on the following day, quote “I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness and support of people on social media. Want to give huge props to Joe and Al at Red Laser. They kindly donated my son a new Xbox. Truly amazing. The last twenty hours have taught my son a few lessons. The most important being that there are so many more good people on this little island that we love.

Bummy Symonds is the quintessential cricket ambassador for Bermuda, and his country has chosen to honor him appropriately. This from Minister of Labour, Community Affairs and Sports Lovitta Foggo who, along with the Premier, Cabinet members and Mr. Symonds himself participated in a ceremony naming the Northlands Primary School courtyard after the sporting legend.

If you’re one of the people who always forget to charge their phone, researchers in Australia may have just designed the product that’ll help you most of all. The research team, based at Monash University in Melbourne, has developed a battery with five times the capacity of lithium-ion batteries, the current standard for smartphones. The battery maintains an efficiency of 99 per cent for more than 200 cycles, and a smartphone-sized version would be able to keep a phone charged for five days. To date, the problem with lithium-sulphur batteries has been that the capacity of the sulphur electrode is so large that it breaks apart over cycles of charging and discharging, and the energy advantage rapidly disappears. The electrode will fall apart, and then the battery dies fast. That happens because the sulphur electrode expands and contracts as it cycles, with a volume change of about 78 per cent.

Volume change also occurs in electrodes in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars and smartphones but is about eight times smaller. To prevent the electrode disintegrating in their lithium-sulphur battery, the researchers gave the sulphur particles more space to expand and contract. The researchers highlighted the fact that lithium-sulphur batteries would drastically reduce the cost of batteries for electric cars and grid energy storage because sulphur is abundant and extremely cheap.