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Corruption concerns involving Ukraine are revived as the war with Russia drags on As it presses ahead with providing tens of billions of dollars in
military, economic and direct financial support aid to Ukraine and encourages
its allies to do the same, the Biden administration is now once again
grappling with longstanding worries about Ukraine's suitability as a
recipient of massive infusions of American aid.
More
Canada’s Boar War For a moment, everything was still. Then it wasn’t. “I call it the ‘ET in the cornfield moment,’” Ms. Delaney would say
later. “They look at each other, and then everybody yells and throws
up their hooves or their hands or whatever. Joe comes running to me,
and the boars turned and ran the other direction. And he goes – I won’t
use all the words he used – but he goes, ‘They’re right there! There’s
a whole bunch of them, and they’re right there!” More
NYC Issues New Nuclear Attack PSA, Here’s The Reaction To The Warning Before you respond with, “OMG, why didn’t someone tell me this on
Twitter,” keep in mind that this video was not a news update. Instead,
it was a new public service announcement (PSA) from the NYC Emergency
Management Department. In the video, the narrator walks along what appears
to be a NYC street, which you’ll soon hear is something that you shouldn’t
do immediately after a nuclear attack. In case you are wondering how
or why this supposed nuclear attack has occurred, the narrator says
preemptively, “Don’t ask me how or why. Just know that the big one has
hit. OK. So what do we do?”
More
Sudden Adult Death Syndrome baffles doctors Essentially, people are dying without displaying any prior sign of
illness. They simply do not wake up after going to bed, or collapse
during the day. Reports of SADS have been increasing in recent weeks.
A news.com web piece explains that, ‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome … is
an umbrella term to describe unexpected deaths in young people, usually
under 40, when a post-mortem can find no obvious cause of death.’
More
Inflation Is a Problem. The Solution Could Be Worse. Many strategists applauded the central bank’s decision to be more proactive in cooling inflation, especially after a flurry of bad inflation data dropped over the course of the last week. Consumer prices rose by 8.6% in May from a year earlier, faster than expected, while a separate report pointed to a sharp rise in consumers’ long-term inflation expectations. “The Fed needs to get out of its own way and stop doing nothing,”
said Christian Hoffmann, portfolio manager & managing director at Thornburg
Investment Management.
More
‘They have a right to be angry’: Trudeau says residential school legacy continuing Trudeau told reporters in Vancouver that Canada was responsible for “horrific things” happening to Indigenous people and the injustices are not isolated in the past. He says they continue today with socio-economic inequality, mental health challenges and other legacies of residential schools that require continuing action. Trudeau made the comments following a tense appearance Monday at a
memorial ceremony at the former residential school in Kamloops, where
he faced angry chants from some.
More
Protests against India's new military recruitment system turn violent India, which shares a heavily militarised border with Pakistan and
is involved in a high-altitude Himalayan stand-off with China, has one
of the world's largest armed forces with some 1.38 million personnel.
Soldiers have been recruited by the army, navy and the air force separately
and typically enter service for a period of up to 17 years for the lowest
ranks.
More
AP analysis finds growing number of poor, high-hazard dams Today, it’s three-quarters empty, intentionally kept low because of concerns it could fail under the strain of too much water. During “a big earthquake, you never know what’s going to happen, if
this is going to hold,” said Samuel Santos, a longtime resident who
frequently fishes near the dam. Seismic instability and a spillway in
need of “significant repair” led El Capitan to be added to a growing
list of dams rated in poor condition or worse that would likely cause
deaths downstream if they failed.
More
An algorithm that screens for child neglect raises concerns The job is never easy, but in the past she knew what she was up against when squaring off against child protective services in family court. Now, she worries she’s fighting something she can’t see: an opaque algorithm whose statistical calculations help social workers decide which families should be investigated in the first place. “A lot of people don’t know that it’s even being used,” Frank said.
“Families should have the right to have all of the information in their
file.”
More
Elon Musk: "The Real President Is Whoever Controls The Teleprompter," Biden Would Read Anything Like "Anchorman" "The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter," he added. "The path to power is the path to the teleprompter." "I do feel like if somebody were to accidentally lean on the teleprompter,
it's going to be like Anchorman, 'UUASDF123.'"
More
Half a tonne of cocaine seized at Swiss Nespresso factory The drugs were discovered by workers unloading bags of coffee beans on May 2 and the police were informed immediately. A subsequent search of five shipping containers turned up more than 500kg of cocaine, according to a police statement on May 5. The street value of the drugs, whose purity was over 80%, is estimated at over CHF50 million ($50.7 million). Preliminary investigations show that containers loaded with bags of
coffee arrived by sea from Brazil before being transferred onto a train,
the authorities said on May 5. The investigators believe that the drug
was destined for the European market. The batches were isolated and
the substance did not come into contact with any of the products used
in production.
More
Nearly 1,600 women volunteer for Finnish military service The last date to apply for recruits was 1 March. Volunteers could
apply online for the first time. Finland's Defence Forces have trained
over 11,000 women in the reserve over the years. The Chief of Staff
of the Army, Major General Kim Mattsson says that women are highly motivated
to serve in the military and perform "extremely well."
More
President Biden: There's Going To Be A New World Order, It Hasn't Happened In A While And America Has To Lead It "We're at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy, not just the world economy, the world, that occurs every three or four generations," the president said. "[A general told me that] 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946 and since then we've established a liberal world order, and it hasn't happened in a long while." "A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos." "Now is the time when things are shifting and there's going to be
a new world order out there, and we've got to lead it. We've got to
unite the rest of the free world in doing it."
More
Finland hit by cyberattack, airspace breach The country’s Ministry of Defense tweeted earlier Friday its website was under attack and it would shutter until further notice. A few hours later, after resolving the issue, the department clarified
that the cyberattack was a denial-of-service attack, which aims to shut
down a website so users are unable to access its information. The attack
also affected the Finnish foreign ministry’s websites, according to
the ministry’s Twitter.
More
There’s a WARMONGER-IN-CHIEF in the Oval Office & Nobody Seems To Care! The action comes as Russia warned the US on Tuesday to stay away from the area “for their own good” after the Biden administration said it was going to send two destroyers — the USS Roosevelt and the USS Donald Cook — to the Black Sea in response to Moscow’s increasing military presence near Ukraine. Putin will close the Kerch Strait beginning next week until October,
blocking foreign warships that are conducting military exercises, including
the US, the Ukraine foreign ministry said Thursday.
More
Mom sues Instagram, Snapchat companies after 11-year-old’s suicide She claims that her daughter, Selena, became addicted to the two apps — so much so that when she tried to limit her daughter’s access to them, she ran away from home. Selena was taken to a therapist, who told the girl’s mother that “she
had never seen a patient as addicted to social media as Selena,” the
lawsuit claims. News of the lawsuit was first reported by Bloomberg.
More
Hackers Just Leaked the Names of 92,000 ‘Freedom Convoy’ Donors The database of 92,845 donors is no longer available on the site, but VICE News was able to review a copy of the data. While some of the donors did not provide their names—such as the person behind the current top donation of $215,000—the vast majority did provide them, including American software billionaire Thomas Siebel, who donated $90,000 to the “freedom convoy.” While GiveSendGo does allow donors to make their donations public,
many chose to use their company’s name or omit their names entirely,
so the leaked database contains a lot of information that was never
meant to be shared, data like donors’ full names, email addresses, and
location.
More
The IRS Needs to Stop Using ID.me's Face Recognition, Privacy Experts Warn In a LinkedIn post published on Wednesday, ID.me founder and CEO Blake
Hall said the company verifies new enrolling users’ selfies against
a database of faces in an effort to minimize identity theft. That runs
counter to the more privacy- preserving ways ID.me has pitched its biometric
products in the past and has drawn scrutiny from advocates who argue
members of the public compelled to use ID.me for basic government tasks
have unclear information.
More
Study suggests Alberta First Nations people tend to get lower level of emergency care "If people have a long bone fracture, you might expect the treatment would be the same between groups," said Patrick McLane of the University of Alberta, a co-author of the study published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. "First Nations people in emergency departments were less likely to
get the higher triage score, which would result in higher urgency of
treatment." McLane and his colleagues analyzed more than 11 million
emergency room visits between 2012 and 2017 from all across Alberta.
More
Mother notices odd spot on banana, alarmed over deadly side effect At first, it wasn't obvious to her what it was. Curious, she posted her photo to Facebook and to her surprise learned that the spot could cause 4-hour erections. It turns out that the spot was from the deadly Brazilian wandering
spider. The venom of this spider is so powerful that it causes 4-hour
long erections that eventually result in death after a few hours. More
COVID-19 test shortage due to supply chain problems, surge in demand, health officials say In a call with reporters Tuesday morning, the department’s deputy director of epidemiology, Laurie Forlano, said the department is making progress in securing additional rapid tests. But she said Virginians who have a COVID exposure or symptoms of the virus should quarantine and try to get tested between three and five days after the exposure. COVID cases have hit historic highs in Virginia and across the United
States, with the country reaching over 1 million new cases reported
Monday as states cleared a holiday backlog.
More
Facebook groups topped 10,000 daily attacks on election before Jan. 6, analysis shows The barrage — averaging at least 10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously — turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed Biden’s election as the result of widespread
fraud that required extraordinary action — including the use of force
— to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.
More
Whistleblowers to play key role in enforcing vaccine mandate So the government will rely upon a corps of informers to identify violations of the order: Employees who will presumably be concerned enough to turn in their own employers if their co-workers go unvaccinated or fail to undergo weekly tests to show they’re virus-free. What’s not known is just how many employees will be willing to accept
some risk to themselves — or their job security — for blowing the whistle
on their own employers. Without them, though, experts say the government
would find it harder to achieve its goal of requiring tens of millions
of workers at companies with 100 or more employees to be fully vaccinated
by Jan. 4 or be tested weekly and wear a mask on the job.
More
CEOs of Target, Best Buy, CVS and other retail chains ask Congress for help amid crime surge The group called on Congress to pass legislation that would deter criminals from being able to easily resell stolen merchandise, specifically online. "As millions of Americans have undoubtedly seen on the news in recent
weeks and months, retail establishments of all kinds have seen a significant
uptick in organized crime in communities across the nation," the letter
said.
More
An ‘Alt-Jihad’ Is Rising On Social Media Unlike their predecessors, the post-September 11 generation of young
internet jihadists is no longer simply defined by their ideological
affinities. This is a generation that was born into a global war on
terror, came of age during the rise of the Islamic State, and witnessed
the Taliban taking back control of Afghanistan. A generation that no
longer trusts its self-appointed leaders, others within its communities,
or mainstream religious mores.
More
Stowaway in Landing Gear of Plane Lands in Miami From Guatemala Video from Only in Dade shows the man sitting on the ground as airport personnel tried to aid him and give him water. "The individual was evaluated by Emergency Medical Services and taken
to a Hospital for medical assessment," a spokesperson for U.S. Customs
and Border Protection said in a statement. "Persons are taking extreme
risks when they try to conceal themselves in confined spaces such as
an aircraft."
More
‘Cloak and dagger’ military-intelligence outfit at center of US digital vaccine passport push Known as MITRE, the organization is a non-profit corporation led almost entirely by military-intelligence professionals and sustained by sizable contracts with the Department of Defense, FBI, and national security sector. The effort “to expand QR code vaccine passports beyond states like
California and New York” now revolves around a public- private partnership
known as the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI). And the VCI has reserved
an instrumental role in its coalition for MITRE.
More
More than two-thirds of Congress cashed a pharma campaign check in 2020 Pfizer’s political action committee alone contributed to 228 lawmakers. Amgen’s PAC donated to 218, meaning that each company helped to fund the campaigns of nearly half the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Overall, the sector donated $14 million. The breadth of the spending highlights the drug industry’s continued
clout in Washington. Even after years of criticism from Congress and
the White House over high prices, it remains routine for the elected
officials who regulate the health care industry to accept six-figure
sums.
More
Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest Currently, most of us would have no choice but to retreat into isolation
in such a situation. But organizers and programmers with the Mycelium
Mesh Project are hoping to provide a solution by designing a decentralized,
off-grid mesh network for text communications that could be deployed
quickly during government-induced blackouts or natural disasters.
More
Fauci Oversees NIH Grants Must Answer for Beagle Research Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina explained why she fired off a letter
to Fauci last week ... in which she and 23 of her colleagues (from both
sides of the aisle) asked him to sit for a hearing on the subject. The
Congresswoman told "TMZ Live" ... Fauci handles a lot of the National
Institutes of Health's distribution of grants, and, therefore, he should
step up to explain why it's backing such a brutal study.
More
Video Shows U.S. Marshals Task Force Brutalizing Teenage Boys in Mississippi The FBI and the Justice Department are investigating the arrest. The
officers are part of the U.S. Marshals Service Gulf Coast Regional Fugitive
Task Force, a federally funded unit that shot and killed a 20-year-old
man in Memphis, Tennessee, while serving a warrant for a Mississippi
shooting in 2019. Established in 2006, the task force operates in Alabama
and Mississippi and deputizes state and local officers as marshals,
offering them expanded powers to target people wanted for violent crimes.
Their conferred status provides them with privileges including the ability
to work across jurisdictions and make arrests without warrants. The
marshals do not wear body cameras.
More
Road Deaths Keep Spiking in 2021 Despite People Driving Less According to a report released by the NHTSA, an estimated 8,730 people
were killed in car accidents during the first quarter of 2021—an increase
of 10.5 percent over last year's Q1 number of 7,900. For context, 2012
and 2016 saw increases nearly as high during the same respective period.
However, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled has
gone up to its highest level since the administration began tracking
that data point in 2009.
More
Julian Assange, Donald Trump, the CIA and a crazy plot for revenge Despite having served his time, Assange, 50, remains confined in Belmarsh prison in southeast London — where Sarah Everard’s killer, Wayne Couzens, has just been sent — as he awaits the outcome of extradition proceedings at the Court of Appeal. Having been refused bail as a flight risk he continues to be detained, despite no convictions for years. Last week, however, both he and the world learned that he could have
faced a worse fate, when Yahoo News revealed that under President Trump’s
appointed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, the agency discussed a variety
of plans to kidnap Assange and extract him from the embassy.
More
FBI Agent Accused Of Raping Women At Knife Point Now Arrested For Sodomizing Child Under Age 12 According to an April 27th report in local media, Christopher Bauer, an agent for the FBI's New Orleans office that became an Alabama state trooper, was arrested by the Montgomery police department for sexually abusing a young female relative. A story released yesterday found that Bauer was suspended without
pay from the FBI in late 2018 after an investigation found he had raped
a female colleague at knife point. Bauer was never formally fired from
the bureau or prosecuted. While suspended, he was able to get a job
as a state trooper in Alabama using a recommendation letter signed by
Performance Appraisal Unit chief Douglas E. Haigh from the FBI's headquarters.
More
Spreading HIV Is Against the Law in 37 States – With Penalties Ranging Up To Life in Prison These laws are enforced mainly on marginalized people living in poverty who cannot afford lawyers. The penalties – felony convictions and being placed on sex offender registries – are severe and life altering. It is difficult to know exactly how many people are affected by HIV
criminal laws, since a central database of such arrests does not exist.
The HIV Justice Network has collected a partial list of 2,923 HIV criminal
cases since 2008 based on media reports.
More
Facebook or Twitter posts can now be quietly modified by the government under new surveillance laws The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications
(Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement
agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the
Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, add, copy or
delete data when investigating serious online crimes. The Human Rights
Law Centre says the bill has insufficient safeguards for free speech
and press freedom. Digital Rights Watch calls it a “warrantless surveillance
regime” and notes the government ignored the recommendations of a bipartisan
parliamentary committee to limit the powers granted by the new law.
More
A former Marine was pulled over for following a truck too closely. Police took nearly $87,000 of his cash. Lara — a former Marine who says he was on his way to visit his daughters
in Northern California — insisted he was doing none of those things,
though he readily admitted he had "a lot" of cash in his car. As he
stood on the side of the road, police searched the vehicle, pulling
nearly $87,000 in a zip-top bag from Lara's trunk and insisting a drug-sniffing
dog had detected something on the cash.
More
Free Society Dwindles as Permission Requirements Grow It has accelerated the transformation of previously free societies
into permission-based states, where things once done as a matter of
right are now considered privileges to be dispensed or withheld by those
in power. Case in point: the Biden administration reportedly discussed
making travel within the United States conditional on vaccination status
but is holding back out of fear that the public has yet to be sufficiently
softened-up for such an intrusive restriction.
More
Council Confiscates and Destroys Homeless Woman’s Possessions During Lockdown 41-year old Vivian Porter, who is originally from Alice Springs, had been sleeping rough in Victoria Park, Perth with a group of other Indigenous people for about a year. She had just been released from a hospital when Premier Mark McGowan announced a city-wide lockdown. The next day, the group were approached by police and told to disperse. With nowhere to go, Ms Porter wandered the streets for a few hours
before returning to the park to find that her possessions – including
a mattress, pillows and clothing – were marked with infringement notices,
advising that a $5,000 applies for “illegal dumping”.
More
China bars for-profit tutoring in core school subjects The policy change, which also restricts foreign investment in a sector that had become essential to success in Chinese school exams, was contained in a government document widely circulated on Friday and verified by sources. The move threatens to decimate China's $120 billion private tutoring
industry and triggered a heavy selloff in shares of tutoring firms traded
in Hong Kong and New York including New Oriental Education & Technology
Group and Koolearn Technology Holding Ltd.
More
Ottawa outlines new legislation to define and crack down on online hate speech The proposed Bill C-36 includes an addition to the Canadian Human Rights Act that the government says will clarify the definition of online hate speech and list it as a form of discrimination. "These changes are designed to target the most egregious and clear
forms of hate speech that can lead to discrimination and violence,"
said Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada David Lametti
at a Wednesday evening news conference.
More
Bye, bye, baby? Birthrates are declining globally – here's why it matters Something is clearly going on. That something is that China has experienced
a fertility collapse. According to the latest census released in May,
China is losing roughly 400,000 people every year. China still claims
its population is growing, but even if these projections are taken at
face value, the population decline previously projected to start by
midcentury may now begin as early as 2030. This means China could lose
between 600 and 700 million people from its population by 2100. That’s
right: 600 and 700 million people, or about half of its total population
today.
More
Facsimile firearms create dangerous situations for Green Bay Police Department When police officers are sent out on a call involving a firearm, they respond, no questions asked. But from time to time the gun they are trying to locate, turns out to be what’s called a facsimile firearm. “Officers assume that that is a real firearm, and they will respond
accordingly,” said Commander Kevin Warych from the Green Bay Police
Department.
More
Okanagan business bans people vaccinated against COVID-19 from entering “We would rather not be exposed to people who have been vaccinated and who could shed the virus,” said Steve Merrill, Sun City Silver and Gold Exchange’s owner. Merrill says the ban on vaccinated people is to protect his clients and himself. “Shedding is real, it’s a problem now and it is going to be a bigger
problem as more and more people line up for these experimental vaccines,’”
said Merrill.
More
Deepfake pornography could become an 'epidemic', expert warns Prof Clare McGlynn said it made it much easier for perpetrators to
abuse and harass women.
More
Adobe Flash Shutdown Halts Chinese Railroad for Over 16 Hours Before Pirated Copy Restores Ops This message, however, didn't reach all corners of the IT globe, and
when Flash's "time bomb" code went off on January 12, it did more than
just make nostalgic browser games harder to revisit: It brought an entire
Chinese railroad to a standstill.
More
Long gas lines throughout Southeast South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced a price gouging statute is in place because of the disruption. Colonial Pipeline said Monday it hopes to have services mostly restored by the end of the week as the FBI and administration officials identified the culprits as a gang of criminal hackers. On Tuesday morning, the company’s website was down and unable to provide
updates on the progress of its repairs. On Tuesday, the White House
ordered the U.S. Department of Transportation to begin the process of
waiving the Jones Act, which would enable foreign-flagged vessels to
deliver fuel wherever there are shortages.
More
How the government can convince doubters to get a Covid-19 vaccine Experts say the government will need to use trusted leaders in different communities to reach vaccine sceptics, and a failure to do so will worsen health inequities. The government's information campaign about the vaccine is crucial - especially with misinformation to contend with - when considering the importance of a vaccination to dealing with the pandemic. Otago University associate professor Dr Sue Crengle, one of the leaders
of Te Ropu Whakakaupapa Uruta, the National Maori Pandemic Group, said
a government campaign would need to get a bit creative and not be seen
as coming only from the state.
More
Justice Department seeks to build large conspiracy case against Oath Keepers for Capitol riot In the wake of the short-lived insurrection, the Oath Keepers is the
most high-profile, self-styled militia group in the country. While members
use the jargon and trappings of a paramilitary organization, in daily
practice they are often more akin to a collection of local chapters
with a similar, conspiracy theory-fueled ideology about what they view
as the inevitable collapse of the U.S. government as it becomes more
tyrannical.
More
Fake accounts gain traction as they praise China, mock US Messages posted by the network, which also praised China, reached
the social media feeds of government officials, including some in China
and Venezuela who retweeted posts from the fake accounts to millions
of their followers. The international reach marked new territory for
a pro-China social media network that has been operating for years,
said Ben Nimmo, head of investigations for Graphika, the social media
analysis firm that monitored the activity.
More
Waukegan Latinx activists protest renaming Thomas Jefferson Middle School after Barack and Michelle Obama Jefferson, who was the nation's third president, owned slaves. Webster was a former senator who supported slavery. Renaming committees were formed for each school, and included people in the community, students and staff. The school board heard concerns from the public Tuesday night over
one of the finalists in the running to be the new name for Thomas Jefferson
Middle School. The country's first Black President and First Lady, Barack
and Michelle Obama, is one of the top three choices for the school's
new name, but is drawing opposition in the area with a large Latinx
population.
More
Family says county kicked them off their own land for living in RV Choi spent weeks looking into this after hearing from Tim Leslie of
Polk County. His plan was to buy land and live off it, after losing
his job due to the pandemic. He bought the land, but the county says
he can’t live there.
More
Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes In Indonesia, tofu is 30% more expensive than it was in December. In Brazil, the price of local mainstay turtle beans is up 54% compared to last January. In Russia, consumers are paying 61% more for sugar than a year ago. Emerging markets are feeling the pain of a blistering surge in raw
material costs, as commodities from oil to copper and grains are driven
higher by expectations for a “roaring 20s” post-pandemic economic recovery
as well as ultra-loose monetary policies.
More
SUV in crash where 13 died came through hole in border fence Surveillance video showed a Ford Expedition and Chevrolet Suburban
drive through the opening early Tuesday, said Gregory Bovino, the Border
Patrol’s El Centro sector chief. The Suburban carried 19 people, and
it caught fire for unknown reasons on a nearby interstate after entering
the U.S. All escaped the vehicle and were taken into custody by Border
Patrol agents.
More
How Woodrow Wilson Persecuted Hutterites Who Refused to Support His War Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. That was two months before the election that Wilson won. He garnered
slightly less than 42 percent of the popular vote in a four-way contest.
Over the next eight years, he proved to be the most repressive, anti-liberty
president to ever occupy the White House.
More
Man arrested for using radio to redirect air traffic, police helicopters As one German man recently learned, using your spare time to mess
with air traffic is not a great decision. The unnamed 32-year-old man
reportedly spent six months using his two-way radios to access the frequencies
used by aircraft. He used those radios to send instructions and directions
to planes and even police helicopters. He effectively impersonated an
aviation official, and while none of his erroneous directions led to
anything super serious (like a crash), police still needed to track
him down.
More
Virginia Health Commissioner says he’ll mandate a COVID-19 vaccine Virginia state law gives the Commissioner of Health the authority to mandate immediate immunizations during a public health crisis if a vaccine is available. Health officials say an immunization could be released as early as 2021. Dr. Oliver says that, as long as he is still the Health Commissioner,
he intends to mandate the coronavirus vaccine.
More
US detained migrant children for far longer than previously known She’d been shuttled around the country for a good part of her childhood, living in refugee shelters and foster homes in Oregon, Massachusetts, Florida, Texas and New York, inexplicably kept apart from the grandmother and aunts who had raised her. Cut off from contact with her family, she had begun to self-harm and
was prescribed a cocktail of powerful psychotropic medications. She
hadn’t been taught English or learned to read or acquired basic life
skills like cooking. She hadn’t been hugged in years
More
Why the Bill Gates global health empire promises more empire and less public health The US abandonment of the WHO means that the organization’s second-largest
financial contributor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is soon
to become its top donor, giving the non-governmental international empire
unparalleled influence over one the world’s most important multilateral
organizations.
More
As pandemic lifelines expire, Americans in housing free fall His downstairs tenant owes him nearly $50,000 in back rent on the four-bedroom duplex he owns in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Without those rental payments, Hamer has been unable to pay the thousands he owes in heat, hot water and property taxes. In September, after exhausting his life savings, he stopped paying the mortgage, too. “I don’t have any corporate backing or any other type of insurance,”
said Hamer, a 46-year-old landlord who works for the city of New York.
“All I have is my home, and it seems apparent that I’m going to lose
it.”
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Army spies to take on antivax militants The defence cultural specialist unit was launched in Afghanistan in 2010 and belongs to the army’s 77th Brigade. The secretive unit has often worked side-by-side with psychological operations teams. Leaked documents reveal that its soldiers are already monitoring cyberspace
for Covid-19 content and analysing how British citizens are being targeted
online. It is also gathering evidence of vaccine disinformation from
hostile states, including Russia,
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‘Sovereign Citizens’ are claiming ownership of occupied Seattle mansions The individuals identify themselves as Moorish Sovereign Citizens, CBS Seattle affiliate KIRO-TV reported. The group believes they are independent from any government interference and own all the land between Alaska and Argentina, according to Edmonds police Sgt. Josh McClure. “They have basically come to say that they’re from this particular
group and they’re there to repossess the home and want the people to
vacate the premises,” McClure said.
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Conflict beef from Nicaragua feeds US market amid pandemic Someone was sending a message to the Miskito community in Santa Clara, according to the girl’s family. Leave.
More
In a pandemic, no one wants to touch it. Why cash has become the new Typhoid Mary But legal tender won’t be accepted to play at one of the city of Los
Angeles’ dozen public golf courses. Or for the $15 charge to enter the
Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Gardens in Arcadia. More than
30 Armstrong Garden Centers around California also ask for “touchless”
payment options, as does the Beehive clothing boutique in Manhattan
Beach and the Munch Company sandwich shop in South Pasadena.
More
A history of American anti-immigrant bias, starting with Benjamin Franklin’s hatred of the Germans People of non-WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) descent were crossing the ocean to start new lives in the new world, and earlier Colonial settlers were none too happy about it. Among them, with ferocious conviction, was Benjamin Franklin, noted inventor, eventual American founding father—and hater of Germans. In short, they were not to be liberally admitted to Pennsylvania, because
as Franklin argued, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English,
become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize
us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language
or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
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‘Morality pills’ may be the US’s best shot at ending the coronavirus pandemic Among other things, that means keeping safe social distances and wearing masks. But many people choose not to do these things, making spread of infection more likely. When someone chooses not to follow public health guidelines around
the coronavirus, they’re defecting from the public good. It’s the moral
equivalent of the tragedy of the commons: If everyone shares the same
pasture for their individual flocks, some people are going to graze
their animals longer, or let them eat more than their fair share, ruining
the commons in the process. Selfish and self-defeating behavior undermines
the pursuit of something from which everyone can benefit.
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Cop Back on Duty After Executing Unarmed Woman in Her Parked Car Over Speeding Ticket The Pettis County sheriff’s department claimed that the officer shooting an unarmed woman during a traffic stop — dumping five rounds into her as she sat in her car — did not violate any department policies. After receiving nearly four months of paid vacation and the benefit
of anonymity from the press and his department, the Pettis County sheriff’s
deputy was reinstated last week. He shot and killed an unarmed woman
over a stop for speeding and he is back on the streets to potentially
do it again.
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In 1914, US Military Slaughtered Kids in Colorado and JD Rockefeller Had Media Cover It Up The largest of these tent cities was in Ludlow, just outside of John
D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The tent city in Ludlow
housed over 1,200 people, and entire families, including children, were
living in these tents. The strike had been going on for months before
the massacre, with tensions rising between the military and the strikers
with every passing day.
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Ohio Football Mom Tased and Arrested for Not Wearing Mask at a Game In the first quarter she was approached by an officer from the Logan Police Department because she was not wearing a mask. According to Tiffany Kennedy, the woman who shot the above video,
Kitts had not been warned for not wearing a mask prior to the officer
approaching her. Kennedy also said that Kitts has asthma and that’s
why she was not wearing a mask. “There is no reason to tase someone
and arrest them for not wearing a mask,” Kennedy said.
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The Media Has Conveniently Forgotten George W. Bush's Many Atrocities Bush’s declaration was greeted with thunderous applause by the usual
suspects who portray him as the virtuous Republican in contrast to Trump.
While the media portrays Bush’s pious piffle as a visionary triumph
of principle, Americans need to vividly recall the lies and atrocities
that permeated his eight years as president.
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'We are not guinea pigs,' say South African anti-vaccine protesters Last Wednesday, the University of the Witwatersrand in partnership with Oxford University rolled out South Africa’s first clinical trial, which will consist of 2,000 volunteers. The involvement of South Africa in vaccine trials is intended to ensure the continent will have access to an affordable vaccine and not be left at the back of the queue. About 50 people held protests at the University of the Witwatersrand
in Johannesburg, saying they did not want Africans to be used as guinea
pigs, reflecting concerns among some on the continent over testing drugs
on people who do not understand the risks.
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Coronavirus: Governments slammed for 'treating celebrities different to residents' in quarantine Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman, as well as Dannii Minogue, have all been granted quarantine exemptions to self-isolate in their mansion homes in NSW and Queensland. The celebrities were allowed to pay for their own security teams to
ensure they could stay in their own homes while filming television programs.
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Forced sterilization policies in the US targeted minorities and those with disabilities – and lasted into the 21st century She was a single mother with one child who lived at the segregated O'Berry Center for African American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. According to the North Carolina Eugenics Board, Bertha had an IQ of 62 and exhibited “aggressive behavior and sexual promiscuity.” She had been orphaned as a child and had a limited education. Likely because of her “low IQ score,” the board determined she was not capable of rehabilitation. Instead the board recommended the “protection of sterilization” for
Bertha, because she was “feebleminded” and deemed unable to “assume
responsibility for herself” or her child. Without her input, Bertha’s
guardian signed the sterilization form.
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Chad slows down internet to curb 'hate speech' on social media Government spokesman Mahamat Zene Cherif said late on Monday a "temporary measure" to slow the internet was introduced on July 22 because of "the dissemination of messages inciting hate and division". The measure will be lifted soon, said Cherif, who is also the communications
minister. But telecoms officials, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said the restrictions had been triggered by a video showing a Chadian
military officer in a dispute with two young mechanics.
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Food bank doles out tons of food as Texans, like many Americans, fight to feed themselves At the North Texas Food Bank in Plano, government relations director Valerie Hawthorne sees up close the toll Covid-19 has taken on the 13 counties it serves, and she's working to keep food on tables. On Tuesday, she and about 100 volunteers handed out much-needed grub at Fair Park in Dallas, where they hoped to help out about 2,000 households, or about 8,000 people. It's a new way of giving for the food bank, but it's the fourth time
since the pandemic that volunteers have doled out food at Fair Park,
the last time coming in May. Since then, conditions in Texas -- like
the rest of the country -- have gotten worse, Hawthorne said.
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Why Colleges May Be Able To Order Students To Get Covid-19 Vaccinations “If you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor’s office and plunge a needle into your arm,” explained Alan Dershowitz in an interview earlier this week. Dershowitz is a Harvard Law school professor emeritus known for his
civil liberties defense work. This law only applies to those vaccines
which prevent the spread of contagious disease, Dershowitz further explained.
It does not apply to those vaccines for diseases which only threaten
the individual. A coronavirus vaccine, should one be developed, would
fall under this category.
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Protesters Say Tear Gas Caused Them to Get Their Period Multiple Times in a Month “People thought that they could bring their children” because it was
during the day, Stewart says. “Every radical organization that I know
was there, as well as other organizations that are more politically
affiliated; a lot of establishment Democrats were out.”
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The booze in blue: Free State cops arrested for drinking on duty While most employers take a dim view on drinking on the job, being
drunk on duty is especially damning when you’re donning a police badge.
Under normal circumstances, it’s bad enough that six police officers
in Phuthaditjhaba were caught red-handed at a local tavern while still
on the clock; during a time of lockdown, however, with the sale of alcohol
strictly forbidden, these tanked-up cops face fierce criminal charges.
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The War on Drugs Drug Spurred America's Current Policing Crisis Apparently, the police had gotten a tip that someone might be stealing the brass placards from the gravestones and we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We didn't have any ID, so my friend handed a stuffed animal with his name on it to the officer. The policeman laughed, realized that we weren't up to any serious
mischief, made sure we were OK to drive home, and sent us on our way.
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How to stop the coming meat shortage Amid the coronavirus crisis, some are calling attention to the coming meat shortages the United States faces as the virus continues to ravage our economy. Rep. Thomas Massie has been sounding the alarm for weeks, and the Kentucky Republican recently introduced the “PRIME Act” in an effort to address the coming crisis. The congressman is right to be concerned. Tyson Foods, one of the nation’s largest producers of meat, confirmed
Massie’s predictions just this week as it announced a halt in production
at many of its plants in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Its CEO
warned of a coming break in the supply chain.
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The Great Land Robbery: How Federal Policies Dispossessed Black Americans of Millions of Acres
FBI raids Allure Medical Spa in Shelby Township for alleged fraudulent COVID-19 treatments The clinic has been offering high dose, intravenous injections of vitamin C as treatment against the virus, according to a recent magazine article. FBI spokeswoman Mara Schneider said the investigation also includes allegations that the clinic "did not observe proper protocols to protect patients and staff from the virus." "If any patients or staff have any concerns about their health or
exposure to COVID-19, we urge them to consult a trusted health care
provider immediately," she said in a statement.
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Ghana Minister Invites African-Americans to Re-settle in Africa If They Feel Unwanted in the U.S. A ceremony marking the death of Floyd was held at the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture in the capital Accra during which Barbara Oteng Gyasi made the plea that her country is open to those fleeing racial tensions. "We gather in solidarity with brothers and sisters to change the status
quo. Racism must end. We pray and hope that George Floyd's death will
not be in vain but will bring an end to prejudice and racial discrimination
across the world," Oteng Gyasi said, according to Ghana Web.
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Senate votes down anti-surveillance amendment, as both parties back warrantless spying on Americans' browser history The US Senate met on Wednesday to debate the reauthorization of some
provisions of the USA Freedom Act, an expansive domestic surveillance
bill that expired in March. As Majority Leader Mitch McConnell brought
the Act to the floor, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced an
amendment that would explicitly bar law enforcement from snooping on
Americans’ internet browsing and search histories without a warrant.
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These 30 Regimes Are Using Coronavirus to Repress Their Citizens Authoritarian leaders from Belarus to Venezuela have all looked to
take advantage of the outbreak and the ensuing chaos to give themselves
extraordinary new powers, while elections get delayed or forced to go
ahead, depending on what suits the incumbent rulers. Security forces
have been empowered to conduct brutal crackdowns, free speech has been
censored, privacy has been eroded.
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Here's Who Just Voted to Let the FBI Seize Your Online Search History Without a Warrant Twenty-seven Republicans and 10 Democrats voted against the amendment
to H.R. 6172, which will reauthorize lapsed surveillance powers under
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The amendment offered
up by Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Sen. Steve Daines, Republican
of Montana, would have forced the government to get a warrant before
obtaining the internet search history of Americans.
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28 Million Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail. States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to
these ballots since they were mailed – and the figure of 28 million
missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country,
notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency’s survey questions.
This figure does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable,
or came back for any reason.
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Can the Feds Close State Borders to Stop COVID-19? "I'm thinking about that right now. We might not have to do it but
there's a possibility that sometime today we'll do a quarantine," Trump
said, according to the White House transcript. "Short-term, two week
on New York, probably New Jersey and certain parts of Connecticut."
Trump soon afterward reiterated the idea in a tweet, saying that "a
decision will be made, one way or another, shortly."
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Arizona Bill Would Require Conviction Before Asset Forfeiture Rep. Bob Thorpe (R-Flagstaff) filed House Bill 2149 (HB2149) on Jan. 9. Under the proposed law, Arizona prosecutors would not be able to proceed with the asset forfeiture process without a criminal conviction. HB2149 is similar to another bill prefiled for the upcoming session (HB2032) An AZCIR analysis in 2017 found that Arizona agencies seized nearly
$200 million in property between 2011 and 2015 from people who may never
have been charged or convicted of a crime.
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‘Officers are scared out there’: Coronavirus hits US police For the 2,200-person department, that has meant officers working doubles and swapping between units to fill patrols. And everyone has their temperature checked before they start work. An increasing number of police departments around the country are
watching their ranks get sick as the number of coronavirus cases explodes
across the U.S. The growing tally raises questions about how laws can
and should be enforced during the pandemic, and about how departments
will hold up as the virus spreads among those whose work puts them at
increased risk of infection.
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Federal Government trying to Outlaw Tiny Homes and RV Living The proposed regulations, entitled “FR–5877–P–01 Manufactured Home
Procedural and Enforcement Regulations; Revision of Exemption for Recreational
Vehicles”, will redefine the industry, and force HUD regulations on
those that live the lifestyle. The new regulations are set to modify
a current exemption in the Manufactured Home Procedural and Enforcement
Regulations. According to the proposed docket information, RVs would
be defined as “a factory build vehicular structure, not certified as
a manufactured home, designed only for recreational use and not as a
primary residence or for permanent occupancy.”
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When the U.S. Used 'Fake News' to Sell Americans on World War I When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, President
Woodrow Wilson faced a reluctant nation. Wilson had, after all, won
his reelection in 1916 with the slogan, “He kept us out of the war.”
To convince Americans that going to war in Europe was necessary, Wilson
created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), to focus on promoting
the war effort.
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Afghanistan Papers Confirm That the Longest War Is a Lie What the Afghanistan Papers do offer is a confirmation of what critics
had already been asserting for nearly two decades: that there is no
clearly defined goal or endpoint to the war to help determine when to
stop fighting, and that our efforts have been futile at best and deeply
destructive at worst.
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Tables and chairs removed from Cumberland St. Tim Hortons “It does suck, you can’t come and enjoy a coffee in the morning but I understand where they’re coming from to be honest,” said customer Mario Brisson. Tim Hortons said it wants to provide a safe environment for guests and staff. “This restaurant has recently had several occurrences of inappropriate
customer behaviour in the dining area, some of which have been violent
and have required police intervention,” the company said in a statement.
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Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm The China Cables, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, include a classified list of guidelines, personally approved
by the region’s top security chief, that effectively serves as a manual
for operating the camps now holding hundreds of thousands of Muslim
Uighurs and other minorities. The leak also features previously undisclosed
intelligence briefings that reveal, in the government’s own words, how
Chinese police are guided by a massive data collection and analysis
system that uses artificial intelligence to select entire categories
of Xinjiang residents for detention.
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9 Farm attacks in South Africa, 1-15 January 2020 There were forty six farm attacks and three farm murders in South
Africa during the month of November 2019, whilst only one farm attack
was successfully averted. From January 2019 to December 2019 there were
472 farm attacks and 49 farm murders.
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Mysterious drones flying nighttime patterns over northeast Colorado leave local law enforcement stumped The drones, estimated to have six-foot wingspans, have been flying over Phillips and Yuma counties every night for about the last week, Phillips County Sheriff Thomas Elliott said Monday. The drones stay about 200 feet to 300 feet in the air and fly steadily
in squares of about 25 miles, he said. There are at least 17 drones;
they emerge each night around 7 p.m. and disappear around 10 p.m., he
said. “They’ve been doing a grid search, a grid pattern,” he said. “They
fly one square and then they fly another square.”
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For 20 years, a Tennessee baby thief kidnapped more than 5,000 children from Memphis Shutting the Children's Home Society down may have cast it into obscurity, but by then the home had already permanently changed the lives of more than 5,000 children. The unimaginable horror of the place still reverberates today not
because many of the children were orphaned or abused but because they
were stolen. The little-known story caught the attention of fiction
author Lisa Wingate when she saw a late-night episode of "Deadly Women"
on the Discovery Channel about the children's home matriarch, Georgia
Tann.
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About That Che Guevara T-Shirt If you later found out that the guy on your T-shirt was a mass murderer,
you might ask your oppression studies professor why she left out a few
important details. This hypothetical resembles a real-world phenomenon
seen today on numerous college campuses. Fifty-two years after his demise
in Bolivia – on October 9, 1967 – the maniacal socialist Ernesto “Che”
Guevara is still making headlines and spoiling perfectly good clothes.
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London Bridge terror attack: 'the police rolled him over and saw he had a bomb vest' Those attending an event marking the five-year anniversary of a Cambridge University criminal justice initiative called Learning Together had just returned from their lunch break when a tall, bearded man burst in through the doors brandishing two large knives. Around 100 attendees, including outreach workers, academics and criminologists,
were caught up in the ensuing chaos, many unable to get out of his path.
The group had spent the morning attending various workshops at the Grade
II listed building, headquarters of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers,
one of the livery companies of the City of London.
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Dollar Tree gets FDA warning over ‘potentially unsafe’ drugs The discount retailer has received acne treatment pads and other products from foreign manufacturers that have committed “serious” violations of federal standards, the US Food and Drug Administration said in a Nov. 6 warning letter to the company. The letter, released Thursday, demands the Virginia-based company
put together a plan to make sure it does not import or deliver any more
“adulterated” drugs.
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Black Friday backlash: Protests against Amazon erupt across France Protesters also tried to blockade a shopping centre in Paris and a logistics centre near the eastern city of Lyon. In video from Lyon riot police can be seen dragging activists away. The protests aimed to disrupt Black Friday, a discount shopping day
that activists have blamed for environmental damage.
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Homeland Security will soon have biometric data on nearly 260 million people That’s about 40 million more than the agency’s 2017 projections, which estimated 220 million unique identities by 2022, according to previous figures cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based privacy rights nonprofit. A slide deck, shared with attendees at an Oct. 30 DHS industry day,
includes a breakdown of what its systems currently contain, as well
as an estimate of what the next few years will bring. The agency is
transitioning from a legacy system called IDENT to a cloud-based system
(hosted by Amazon Web Services) known as Homeland Advanced Recognition
Technology, or HART.
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NASA Astronaut Accused of Identity Theft in First Criminal Allegation from Space Anne McClain, a NASA astronaut and lieutenant colonel in the Army, is facing accusations that she committed identity theft through the "improper access" of her estranged wife's "private financial records," The New York Times reported. Former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Worden didn't understand how her estranged wife, McClain, still knew details of her spending. Worden recently noticed, though, that a computer owned by NASA had
accessed her bank account, using her own login information. McClain
admitted to doing so in space, aboard the International Space Station.
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The Endless Propaganda To Keep The Endless Wars Going George W. Bush did it ... Obama did it ... and so did Trump. Yet, despite the empty promises and Nobel Peace Prizes, neither Bush, nor Obama delivered. They expanded the forever wars with reckless abandon. While President Trump is still in the thick of it, he has made a very bold move to remove 1,000 American troops from Syria. The propaganda against Trump's decision has been immense. The desire
to keep the endless wars...well, endless...cannot be more apparent.
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Activists angry police who shoot can wait to face questions In many states, that so-called cooling off period is carved out in
state law or in a police department’s contract. That opportunity to
take some time before undergoing questioning by investigators angers
community activists and others seeking reforms of police departments
around the country who believe it gives officers time to reshape their
story to justify a shooting and avoid getting fired or charged. Law
enforcement officials and experts say officers need to be able to collect
their thoughts, so they don’t provide details that are tainted by the
trauma of the shooting.
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Israeli intervention in US elections ‘vastly overwhelms' anything Russia has done, claims Noam Chomsky In comments in which he accused much of the media of concentrating on stories he considered marginal and ignoring issues such as the “existential threat” of climate change, the 89-year-old linguist said in much of the world, the US media’s focus with Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 was "a joke". “First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our
elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs
in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly
and with enormous support,” he said.
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Weaponizing women: how feminism is being used to sell guns On Tuesday, a 22-year-old Kent State University graduate, Kaitlin
Marie, garnered headlines after posting graduation photos in which she
was holding a semi-automatic rifle. Marie wrote: “As a woman, I refuse
to be a victim & the second amendment ensures that I don’t have to be.”
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It's Not Just Hurricanes: America Wanted to Nuke Mines, the Moon and the Panama Canal The raw power of a hurricane is several orders of magnitude greater
than that of a nuclear weapon and launching a missile into a tropical
storm will probably just create a radioactive hurricane. It’s a question
the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration gets so often, it
has created a page explaining why it’s a terrible idea.
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Mexico gang leaves 19 bodies, some hanging from bridge, as a warning Seven more corpses were found hacked up and dumped by the road nearby in the western city of Uruapan, and just down the road were three more, making a total of 19. The killing spree marked a return to the grisly massacres carried
out by drug cartels at the height of Mexico's 2006-12 drug war, when
piles of bodies were dumped on roadways as a message to authorities
and rival gangs.
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FBI document warns conspiracy theories are a new domestic terrorism threat The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs. The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes
in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the
theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being
run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which
didn’t actually have a basement).
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Fake honey still pouring into Canada, and local beekeepers are feeling the sting The producers, who pride themselves on turning out the real thing, have been abuzz about the food fraud for years. They say they are feeling the sting and consumers should be aware. Since June 2018, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has been
zeroing in on fake honey, using "targeted surveillance."
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What is "domestic terrorism" and what can the law do about it? But the individuals who commit these violent acts will ultimately be indicted on different federal charges — hate crimes or weapons possession. Here's why: Domestic terrorism is defined in the U.S. legal code but it is not codified as a law that can be prosecuted. "It's confusing to the public to call someone a domestic terrorist
but not charge them with a crime of terrorism," said Mary McCord, a
former Department of Justice official who served as acting assistant
attorney general for national security from 2016 to 2017.
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This isn’t the first time concentration camps have appeared on American soil Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) touched off the debate on Monday, saying on Instagram that “the fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it.” Ocasio-Cortez has since stood by her remarks, tweeting Wednesday that she “will never apologize for calling these camps what they are.” To be sure, the camps currently in the U.S. remain qualitatively different
from the extermination camps seen during the Holocaust in places like
Dachau or Auschwitz. They also remain far cries from those experienced
by Boers in South Africa, which saw tens of thousands die in British
concentration camps, or Cubans under Spanish rule, where hundreds of
thousands perished.
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Rising Conservatives Are as Hostile to Freedom as the Leftists They Disdain Yes, there's a deep rift within the Democratic Party between its traditional-liberal
and progressive wings, with the latter moving in some troubling ideological
directions. But Republicans, who have gleefully warned the public about
Democratic flirtations with socialism, shouldn't be quick to gloat given
the emergence of an anti-freedom movement on the Right.
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Armed Antifa group calls for “revolutionary resistance” against Trump Now, they are escalating their rhetoric and have called for “revolutionary
resistance” against Donald Trump. In a recent declaration that explicitly
called for “revolutionary resistance”.
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Minneapolis’ ‘Little Mogadishu’ Sees 56 Percent Increase in Violent Crimes Caused by Somali Gangs Buried in a recent Star Tribune article was the fact that violent crimes jumped from 54 in 2010 to 84 in 2018, an increase in roughly 56 percent. Authorities attribute the violence to rivalries between Somali gangs, such as the Somali Mafia, the Somali Outlaws, the Hot Boyz, and Madhibaan with Attitude, Alpha News reports. According to a 2014 Southside Pride article, the Outlaws and Madhibaan
with Attitude have a rivalry that stretches back years, and likely resulted
in the murder of two Somali men in April 2014. That article notes that
the summer of 2013 was a particularly bloody season for gang warfare,
which produced at least 4 killings.
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Millennials in China are Twice as Likely to Own Homes as Young Americans Seventy percent of young adults in China are homeowners, according to a recent HSBC survey. The study, which looked at more than 9,000 people born between 1981 and 1998 in nine countries, found that the home ownership rate of Chinese millennials is nearly double the global average. Mexico, with 46% of millennials owning their own homes, was the next highest country. By comparison, only 35% of American millennials are property owners. Not only are Chinese youngsters more prone to own real estate, more
renters there aspire to become homeowners than their U.S. counterparts.
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Another member quits body that awards Nobel literature prize Jayne Svenungsson is the eighth person to quit or to be forced off the 18-member board of the Swedish Academy since the scandals broke last year. Swedish broadcaster SVT reported that Svenungsson, who joined in December,
left after “careful consideration.” The broadcaster quoted her as saying
she wanted to focus on her full-time job as a university theology professor.
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Potentially dangerous antibiotics “Her life was all about love and teaching us how to love others,” said Keith Whiteside. Keith Whiteside is reflecting on what happened last Spring with his mother. Kathy Whiteside had just returned from a beach vacation with her husband, Randy. Her family says she was excited about making plans for Easter. With
six grandchildren, she was preparing for a celebration that included
a big meal. “She’d contracted a cold and it dropped to her chest,” said
Randy Whiteside.
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What Would You Say About A Nation That Lets The Poor Die From Diabetes? Fast forward to the present and Americans are dying from Type 1 diabetes — not for lack of a cure but lack of the funds to obtain it. Since 2012, the price of insulin has more than doubled, leaving those
with the least resources struggling to obtain the treatment they need
to stay alive.
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Ford government will now require gas stations to display Trudeau carbon tax price They will also be mandating that heating bills clearly indicate the cost of the federal carbon tax. This is part of what Ford Nation refers to as “transparency measures.”
It will help consumers see exactly how much the carbon tax is costing
them.
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Two men charged with beating, robbing man in MAGA hat The Montgomery County Department of Police said in a press release
Monday that Jovan Crawford, 27, and Scott Duncan Roberson, 25, were
arrested and charged over the weekend after they harassed a man for
wearing the pro-President Trump and then beat him to the ground and
robbed him in Germantown.
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US government spent over $500m on fake Al-Qaeda propaganda videos that tracked location of viewers The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that the PR firm, Bell
Pottinger, worked alongside top US military officials at Camp Victory
in Baghdad at the height of the Iraq War. The agency was tasked with
crafting TV segments in the style of unbiased Arabic news reports, videos
of Al-Qaeda bombings that appeared to be filmed by insurgents, and anti-insurgent
commercials – and those who watched the videos could be tracked by US
forces.
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More Canadians in U.S. overstayed visas than any other foreigners last year The report, which covers the period from October 2016 to September
2017, tracked overstays by citizens of countries that require a visa
to enter the U.S., as well as those that participate in the visa-waiver
program, which allows citizens to visit the U.S. without a visa provided
those trips do not exceed 90 days.
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Government Criminalizes Off Grid Living: Tiny Homes Banned In US At Increasing Rate However, it appears that the United States’ government is not too
happy about the challenge this new movement is posing to some of the
biggest companies in America and now it looks as though this new way
of life may be squashed before it has even taken off the ground.
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How an Experimental Billion-Dollar Privacy Lawsuit Could Clobber Facebook
State police unions unanimously oppose legalizing marijuana “We wanted to be on the record that we oppose it because it’s an act of total irresponsibility,” Michael Palladino, the head of the New York State Association of PBAs, said Wednesday. “The Governor and lawmakers are trading public safety for a money grab to plug a budget deficit arising from mismanagement of taxpayer funds." " Jeopardizing the public’s safety is not something cops support.”
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Al Gore’s dark past is an inconvenient truth But it’s not just the political, corporate and entertainment titans of today who are being called out; many sins of the past are being re-examined in the context of our new sensitivities regarding gender relations. You don’t have to look any farther than the pages of the New York
Times or the airwaves of MSNBC to hear liberal voices openly opining
that they blew it in the 1990s by not calling on former President Bill
Clinton to step down after he admitted to an ongoing sexual relationship
with a much younger intern.
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ICE set up a fake university enrolling hundreds of foreign students as part of a sting operation It was part of a sting by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents
who were secretly running the fake university in Farmington, Michigan,
in an attempt to crack down on immigration fraud.
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China creates app to tell you if you are near someone in debt and encourages you to report them News of the app has caused quite a bit of controversy after it was
originally reported by the state-run China Daily. It is an extension
to China's existing "social credit" system which scores people based
on how they act in public. It's no secret that China keeps a very close
watch on its citizens, but this new public shaming approach takes it
one step further.
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US Military Occupations Now Supported by Far More Democrats Than Republicans To the question “As you may know, President Trump ordered an immediate
withdrawal of more than 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria. Based on what
you know, do you support or oppose President Trump’s decision?”, 29
percent of Democrats responded either “Somewhat support” or “Strongly
support”, while 50 percent responded either “Somewhat oppose” or “Strongly
oppose”. Republicans asked the same question responded with 73 percent
either somewhat or strongly supporting and only 17 percent either somewhat
or strongly opposing.
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The FBI is Trying Amazon’s Facial-Recognition Software The pilot kicked off in early 2018 following a string of high-profile counterterrorism investigations that tested the limits of the FBI’s technological capabilities, according to FBI officials. For example, in the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas carried out by
Stephen Paddock, the law enforcement agency collected a petabyte worth
of data, much of it video from cellphones and surveillance cameras.
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Barwon Heads community seeks answers over cancer concerns The Barwon Heads Association has written to Bellarine MP Lisa Neville following reports in The Age about fears raised by residents about the deaths of 10 young adults in recent years, most of whom grew up in the town and attended Bellarine Secondary College at nearby Drysdale. In its latest newsletter, the association asked Ms Neville to arrange
a briefing at the association's next meeting, on February 18, about
"concerns that are now being very strongly expressed".
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Six Mexican states are running short on gasoline, prompting frantic rush to the pumps State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos said the use of more secure transportation methods has resulted in delays for fuel delivery to gas stations in the states of Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Jalisco, Michoacan, Mexico and Queretaro. It is urging consumers not to panic or hoard gasoline, promising that supply will soon stabilize. Frantic consumers have made a run on the pumps and social media has
been filled with images of gas station signs saying they are out of
fuel, and consumers comparing the thin supplies to scarcity for basic
goods like bread and milk that plagued Mexico during the 1970s.
More
Private Companies Are Paying To Keep Roads Groomed, Bathrooms Cleaned In Yellowstone But in the nation's oldest national park, Yellowstone, local businesses
are pitching in to pay park staff to keep it open — or at least parts
of it. Temperatures in the park regularly drop below zero this time
of year, and the park is blanketed in snow. But still, between 20,000
to 30,000 people a month still come to Yellowstone in wintertime, and
the snow is actually a big attraction.
More
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's tax plan would supply tens of billions of dollars, but how much would it cost Americans? The New York's representative said in a "60 Minutes" interview set to air Sunday that a new marginal tax rate would affect Americans making more than $10 million to help pay for the "Green New Deal." "Once you get to the tippy-tops, on your $10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 percent or 70 percent," Ocasio-Cortez said. "That doesn't mean all $10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely
high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should
be contributing more."
More
Trump Says US Military Spending Is ‘Crazy’ High — Then Calls for Billions More Having met with committee chairs, and Defense Secretary James Mattis, Trump has now completely reversed his position, and is calling on the Pentagon to seek an even bigger spending increase in the next budget. Administration officials are now saying Mattis was assured that Trump
will support a budget of $750 billion. This would be a substantial increase
over the previous year’s budget, and over the requested budget.
More
China's social credit system has blocked people from taking 11 million flights and 4 million train trips The numbers, from the end of April, were included in a report by China's state-run news outlet Global Times, but it is unclear what offenses those targeted in the travel ban have committed. The social credit system is actually a collection of blacklists, of
which there are more than a dozen at the national level. Each list is
based on similar offenses — such as misbehavior on planes and trains,
or failing to abide by a court judgment — and determines the punishments
people face, from throttling internet speeds to blocking loans.
More
U.S. military project could be seen as a bioweapon, scientists warn In an opinion paper published Thursday in the journal Science, the
authors say the U.S. needs to provide greater justification for the
peacetime purpose of its Insect Allies project to avoid being perceived
as hostile to other countries. Other experts expressed ethical and security
concerns with the research, which seeks to transmit protective traits
to crops already growing in the field.
More
Belong to 'Quiet Skies'? Better Hope Not
Venezuela prepares for war with U.S. with ‘rifles, missiles and well-oiled tanks at the ready’ "We have been shamelessly threatened by the most criminal empire that ever existed and we have the obligation to prepare ourselves to guarantee peace," said Maduro, who wore a green uniform and a military hat as he spoke with his army top brass during a military exercise involving tanks and missiles. "We need to have rifles, missiles and well-oiled tanks at the ready....to defend every inch of the territory if needs be," he added. The Trump administration has taken a hard stance against Maduro's
regime by banning money lending to Venezuela's government or its state
oil company PDVSA, and passing sanctions against Maduro and his top
officials.
More
Massive stockpile of bottled water found in Puerto Rico a year after Maria A photo showing the bottles in boxes and covered in a blue tarp on a runway in Ceiba was shared widely on social media Tuesday evening. “Although you don’t believe it… almost a million boxes of water that
were never delivered to the villages,” posted Abdiel Santana, a photographer
working for a Puerto Rican state police agency who took the pictures.
“Is there anyone who can explain this?”
More
New Mexico Solar Observatory to Reopen after Mysterious Closure The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) made the decision on September 6 to vacate the 170-strong workforce from the research institute, a move that led to intense speculation—and conspiracy theories. In a statement Sunday, officials said residents forced from their
homes close to the site could now return and all employees will now
come back to work. The center was shut due to concerns a suspect in
a police probe "posed a threat to the safety" of those on Sacramento
Peak, where the observatory is located.
More
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently
by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had
"provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number
of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management
system ES&S sold them.
More
Google, Mastercard cut a secret ad deal to track retail sales That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for. But most of the 2 billion Mastercard holders aren't aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That's because the companies never told the public about the arrangement. Google and Mastercard brokered a business partnership during about
four years of negotiations, according to four people with knowledge
of the deal, three of whom worked on it directly. The alliance gave
Google an unprecedented asset for measuring retail spending, part of
the search giant's strategy to fortify its primary business against
onslaughts from Amazon.com and others.
More
These Academics Spent the Last Year Testing Whether Your Phone Is Secretly Listening to You Some computer science academics at Northeastern University had heard
enough people talking about this technological myth that they decided
to do a rigorous study to tackle it.
More
New Mexico compound mysteriously destroyed by authorities
Google is embracing evil The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans. Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom
Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and
“Longfei.” The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government;
the finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months,
pending approval from Chinese officials.
More
The billionaires trying to control Saskatchewan's cannabis industry Pat Warnecke told us about his shock upon finding his face on the
front page; the shadiness of Saskatchewan’s dispensary license lottery
where people won multiple licenses (the chances of which were 1 in millions!);
the shadowy billionaire family trying to control Saskatchewan’s cannabis
industry; setting up dispensaries on First Nations’ land; why Saskatchewan
wants to destroy its homegrown cannabis industry; and so much more.
More
Teardown Of USB Fan Reveals Journalists Lack Of Opsec Understandably, the computer security crowd on Twitter had a great laugh. You shouldn’t plug random USB devices into a computer, especially if you’re a journalist, especially if you’re in a foreign country, and especially if you’re reporting on the highest profile international summit in recent memory. Doing so is just foolhardy. This is not a story about a USB fan, the teardown thereof, or of spy
agencies around the world hacking journalists’ computers. This a story
of the need for higher awareness on what we plug into our computers.
In this case nothing came of it — the majority of USB devices are merely
that and nothing more. One of the fans was recently torn down (PDF)
and the data lines are not even connected. More
Baby blues - no EU nation will replace itself on current trend Across Europe, no country is producing enough children to replace their parents. France, where pro-family tax policies have been in place for more than
a decade, is the nearest thing to an anomaly. Figures compiled by Eurostat,
the EU statistics agency, show the country recorded both the highest
absolute number of births - 799,700 in 2015, and the highest fertility
rate.
More
‘Minority Report’ China: Railway police use facial recognition glasses to fight crime Officers deployed at Zhengzhou East high-speed rail station in the Henan province are the first in the country to don the cutting-edge, tinted glasses in the name of catching criminals. The glasses contain in-built facial recognition software that allows
police to scan passengers travelling through the station. Specifically
designed for police use, the smart spectacles are connected to a tablet-like
device that allows officers to take mugshots and compare them to a police
database.
More
Italy: "The Party is Over" for Illegal Migrants "Open doors in Italy for the right people and a one-way ticket out for those who come here to make trouble and think that we will provide for them," Salvini said in the Lombardy region, home to a quarter of the total foreign population in Italy. "One of our top priorities will be deportation." Salvini, leader of the nationalist League (Lega) party, formed a new coalition government with the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) on June 1. The government's program, outlined in a 39-page action plan, promises to crack down on illegal immigration and to deport up to 500,000 undocumented migrants. "The party is over for illegal immigrants," Salvini said at a June
2 rally in Vicenza. "They will have to pack their bags, in a polite
and calm manner, but they will have to go. Refugees escaping from war
are welcome, but all others must leave."
More
Investigative strategy of police prompts debate on DNA privacy rights Then he received a phone call about investigators getting a break
in the cold case. It involved a controversial new investigative technique
that American police have been using to comb through the genetic family
trees of potential suspects in such unsolved crimes. The technique is
raising questions about privacy of a person’s DNA on both sides of the
border.
More
Website flaw exposed most U.S. cellphones’ real-time locations The company involved, LocationSmart of Carlsbad, operates in a little-known business sector that provides data to companies for such uses as tracking employees and texting e-coupons to customers near relevant stores. Among the customers LocationSmart identifies on its website are the
American Automobile Association, FedEx and the insurance carrier Allstate.
LocationSmart did not immediately respond to emails and telephone messages
seeking comment on the flaw and its business practices.
More
The State That Foreshadows America’s Future Crockett never got to put down roots in Texas — he died two months later defending the Alamo — but his faith in Texas’ exceptionalism, a much-maligned term today, would become a fixture of Lone Star culture. No state can match its swagger or eccentricities; no state generates more loyalty within its borders, or more controversy beyond. If the title of Lawrence Wright’s superb new book, “God Save Texas,”
seems a bit clichéd, consider this: A few months ago, long after Wright’s
manuscript had gone to press, a district judge in Texas was removed
from a case after informing the jury that the Lord had visited him to
say the defendant was innocent. Far from apologizing, the judge insisted
he had a duty to relay such celestial edicts. “When God tells me I gotta
do something, I gotta do it,” he explained.More
Surge in Child Exploitation in UK Sees Record Number of Slavery Victims The NCA recently published an update on the drug dealing model known
as county lines, revealing, "dealers will usually use a single phone
line to facilitate the supply of class A drugs — primarily heroin and
crack cocaine — to customers. The county line becomes a recognized and
valuable brand and is therefore protected with violence and intimidation.
More
'Booby trap' set up to deter Haiku Stairs trespassers "It was wet, it had been raining out, and my right foot slipped which brought me down and I just did a direct kind of neck plant on the nails," Jonathan McWillie said, who added that he was taken to an ER after the incident about 2 a.m. on Feb. 17. He underwent two hours of surgery to stitch up two inch-deep puncture
wounds after falling on the contraption, affixed to a homeowner's fence
on Kuneki Street.
More
London murder rate is HIGHER than New York's for the first time ever February marked the first month in history books that London had more murders than the American city with a total of 15 homicides. Out of the 15 killed, nine were aged 30 or younger. In March, there were 22 murders, which is likely to match if not beat out New York's numbers. The murder epidemic continued on Sunday when a man in his twenties
was fatally stabbed after leaving a bar in Wandsworth, marking the 12th
person to be murdered in London in 19 days.
More
Horror on streets of Germany: State of emergency declared as 80 men brawl with MACHETES
Airline Orders Stranded Passengers to Delete Videos Shuffled into Boston's Logan Airport, Wegler says frustrated passengers
waited two more hours before learning the flight would be canceled.
Some began taking video of what they considered to be poor customer
service, and that's when officials "started threatening us," saying
they would "have us arrested" unless the videos were deleted, Wegler
tells Global News.
More
Facebook logs SMS texts and calls, users find as they delete accounts The #deletefacebook movement took off after the revelations that Facebook
had shared with a Cambridge psychologist the personal information of
50 million users, without their explicit consent, which later ended
up in the hands of the election consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Facebook
makes it hard for users to delete their accounts, instead pushing them
towards “deactivation”, which leaves all personal data on the company’s
servers. When users ask to permanently delete their accounts, the company
suggests: “You may want to download a copy of your info from Facebook.”
It is this data dump that reveals the extent of Facebook’s data harvesting
– surprising even for a company known to gather huge quantities of personal
information.
More
How Iraq War destabilized the world and why the neocons aren't finished yet Last week marked the 15th anniversary of the American invasion of
Iraq in 2003. April 9 will be the 15th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.
The consequences of these events are still playing out today, from Mali
to Niger, to the Philippines. Iraq has never recovered and is only beginning
to emerge from the trauma, while American officials plan the next military
adventure.
More
Grooming still rife in Britain: Major report says police gave gangs 'green light' to sexually abuse girls and women Efforts to stop the exploitation have been hampered by the authorities’ failure to understand why abusers target vulnerable white girls, the investigation found. The author of a report into the latest abuse scandal yesterday urged
the Government to order a national study into the ‘cultural influences’
on the offenders, predominantly from an ‘Asian British’ background.
More
Welcome to the neighbourhood. Have you read the terms of service? But before long, Quayside may be one of the most sensor-laden neighbourhoods in North America, thanks to Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs, which has been working on a plan to redevelop the area from the ground up into a test bed for smart city technology. It's being imagined as the sort of place where garbage cans and recycling
bins can keep track of when and how often they're used, environmental
probes can measure noise and pollution over time and cameras can collect
data to model and improve the flow of cars, people, buses and bikes
throughout the day.
More
How the baby boomers, not millennials, screwed America But is the millennial hate justified? Have we dropped the generational baton, or was it a previous generation, the so-called baby boomers, who actually ruined everything? That’s the argument Bruce Gibney makes in his book A Generation of
Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The boomers, according
to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s
economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with
deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s
manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess
they created.
More
Big Brother on wheels: Why your car company may know more about you than your spouse Honda wanted to track the location of his vehicle, the contract stated, according to Dunn — a stipulation that struck the 69-year-old Temecula, Calif., retiree as a bit odd. But Dunn was eager to drive away in his new car and, despite initial hesitation, he signed the document, a decision with which he has since made peace. “I don’t care if they know where I go,” said Dunn, who makes regular trips to the grocery store and a local yoga studio in his vehicle. “They’re probably thinking, ‘What a boring life this guy’s got.’?”
More
Head of German intelligence agency says the return of brainwashed ISIS families poses a 'massive danger' 'There are children who have undergone brainwashing in the ISIS areas and are radicalised to a great extent,' said Hans-Georg Maassen. He said Germany should consider repealing laws restricting surveillance of minors under the age of 14 to prepare for the increased risk of attacks by children as young as nine. 'We see that children who grew up with Islamic State were brainwashed
in the schools and the kindergartens of the Islamic State,' he said.
'They were confronted early with the ISIS ideology ... learned to fight,
and were in some cases forced to participate in the abuse of prisoners,
or even the killing of prisoners.'
More
Anger, dejection grows as only half of Puerto Rico has power It's the first time the government of the U.S. territory has provided that statistic, which was released as authorities warned that a lot of work remains and that crews were still finding unexpected damage after Maria hit on Sept. 20 with winds of up to 154 mph, knocking power out to the entire island. Officials said 55 percent of Puerto Rico's nearly 1.5 million customers have power. "It's just extraordinary that it is still so far away from being 100
percent recovered," said Susan Tierney, a senior adviser for Denver-based
consulting company Analysis Group who testified before a U.S. Senate
committee on efforts to restore power in Puerto Rico. "I'm not aware
of any time in recent decades since the U.S. has electrified the entire
economy that there has been an outage of this magnitude."
More
China tightens screws on social media The continuing crackdown targets not only explicit depictions of sex and violence, but even rap music, crude cartoons, dirty jokes, celebrity gossip and tattoos. Sina Weibo has failed to comply, Beijing’s Cyberspace Administration said Saturday on its official WeChat social media account, berating the site for letting users post “content of wrong public opinion orientation, obscenity, low taste and ethnic discrimination”. The company “has violated the country’s laws and regulations, led
online public opinions to wrong direction and left a very bad influence,”
it said.
More
New Reuters Poll Proves That Many Americans Can’t Think for Themselves After all, one need only look at the fallout from the last election to test this theory: both liberals and conservatives are convinced that their ideas and principles are the best and should be followed. But a recent survey by Reuters casts a bit of doubt on how well people really know their own minds and understand the political principles they say they adhere to. It appears that many Americans base their views on whether a particular authority figure holds them. As Reuters explains, surveyors read a variety of political statements
which Donald Trump made on the campaign trail to mixed groups of Republicans
and Democrats. One group was told that each statement was made by Trump;
the other omitted that important detail.
More
The 1 habit that keeps 99% of people from ever becoming rich I am 27 years old, and one habit in particular I notice the vast majority of society (but specifically starting with 20-somethings) nurtures is the habit of making more to spend more. As my father would say, "Expenses rise to meet income." This is an (intentionally) overly simplified example, but unfortunately
it's fairly spot on. The average savings amount for working-age families
is around $95,000.
More
Dollar stores are dominating retail by betting on the death of the American middle class The Wall Street Journal reported that Dollar General has become one of the most profitable retailers in the US by opening more locations in places across the country that have continued to struggle economically. "The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer," Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos told the WSJ. The company's target shopper comes from a household making $40,000 or less a year. "We are putting stores today [in areas] that perhaps five years ago
were just on the cusp of probably not being our demographic, and it
has now turned to being our demographic," Vasos said.
More
Doug Jones May Have Won, But White Women Lost in Alabama Last Night But while Jones won big, white women definitively lost the night,
as CNN exit polls revealed that a majority of white female voters—an
estimated 63 percent—picked Moore, compared to the overwhelming 97 percent
of African-American women voters who supported Jones. A resounding takeaway
from Jones’s big upset is that African-American women (and men) and
the youth vote are the ones who clinched it, while an estimated two-thirds
of white women voters preferred a white supremacist–leaning alleged
child molester to a Democrat.
More
43 States Suspend Licenses for Unpaid Court Debt, But That Could Change Tennessee is one of 43 states, plus the District of Columbia, that
suspends driver's licenses for people with unpaid court debt, according
a recent report by the Legal Aid Justice Center, a Virginia-based organization
that filed a lawsuit there challenging the practice. Although Tennessee
says it gives drivers 30 days notice before suspending a license, Sprague
and her lawyers say she was not told about her suspension and the state
does not notify people in every case.
More
Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite's hidden wealth The details come from a leak of 13.4m files that expose the global environments in which tax abuses can thrive – and the complex and seemingly artificial ways the wealthiest corporations can legally protect their wealth. The material, which has come from two offshore service providers and
the company registries of 19 tax havens, was obtained by the German
newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian, the
BBC and the New York Times.
More
Embracing New Cultures: Sweden Condones Child Marriage for Immigrants One of the cases involves an underage wife who came to Karlskrona with
her husband and a small child. In the other case, the girl was pregnant
upon arrival. Despite these obvious violations of Swedish law, Karlskrona
Social Committee chairperson Ingrid Hermansson of the Center Party defended
the municipality's decision. The rule of the thumb in such cases, the
community acts "for the child's best" interest.
More
Drone stalking several women in rural Port Lincoln community Police are yet to find the offender, and some of the women have told the ABC they are living in constant fear of another visit which usually happens late at night or very early morning. One of the women, who like the rest of the group did not want to be
identified, was asleep and alone at home on her relatively remote hobby
farm.
More
Unmasking Puerto Rico’s Biggest Debt Holders
Russian-linked campaign used Pokémon Go to meddle in election One Russian-linked campaign posing as part of the Black Lives Matter movement used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Pokémon Go and even contacted some reporters in an effort to exploit racial tensions and sow discord among Americans, CNN has learned. The campaign, titled "Don't Shoot Us," offers new insights into how
Russian agents created a broad online ecosystem where divisive political
messages were reinforced across multiple platforms, amplifying a campaign
that appears to have been run from one source -- the shadowy, Kremlin-linked
troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.
More
Ann Coulter calls for Trump impeachment, Death squads for those who ruined America Recently, Coulter suggested that Mike Pence would be a better president and called for Trump’s ouster for not being tough enough against immigration. Now, she has taken it one step further and has called for death squads to go after those who “ruined America” with immigration. “We have made as clear as you can possibly make it, we want less immigration,”
Coulter opined on Fox Radio. “Stop dumping the third world on the country.”
She continued on: “If he continues down this path, well I guess there
are three options. There’s the organizing the death squads for the people
who ruined America, because there will be no more hope.”
More
A Federal Judge Put Hundreds of Immigrants Behind Bars While Her Husband Invested in Private Prisons
Mexico offers aid to Puerto Rico after Donald Trump's 'terrible and abominable' visit The US's southern neighbour plans to ship experts from its state-run power company to the island, where large numbers of people are without electricity, along with 30 tonnes of water and mosquito repellent. The offer came on Wednesday, a day after President Donald Trump visited
Puerto Rico. He told islanders they could be “very proud” that more
people had not perished in the storm, compared to the toll from “a real
catastrophe” like Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
More
The IRS Just Hired Equifax To Handle Our Personal Information. No, Seriously.
Why Didn't FPL Do More to Prepare for Irma? Many of those powerless residents are now asking hard questions of the area's power monopoly, which has spent millions of dollars fighting policies that would have strengthened the grid in the event of a major storm like Irma and, more broadly, stemmed the carbon-fueled climate change likely fueling monster storms. "I am one of the many that has now been without power for more than
two days as a result of Hurricane Irma," Elise McKenna, a West Palm
Beach resident, told New Times via email. "My confusion came when so
many of us lost power during the early hours of the storm that basically
avoided us. We've been told time and time again that rate increases
were to help prepare us for future storms."
More
12 things you should delete from Facebook immediately But with anything that powerful, you have to be careful how you deal with it. While Facebook says protecting the privacy of its users is of utmost
priority, there are certain pieces of information you might want to
consider not having on there, like your home address, or where you went
to school.
More
The flight attendant did nothing wrong. Still, he was ordered: ‘Pull down your pants’ “You need me to do what?” My eyes shifted to the other customs officer, hoping he would explain that this was just a cruel joke. Instead, his glare made my stomach churn. I had been hustled into a detention room at São Paulo-Guarulhos International
Airport in Brazil, where I was facing a traveler’s worst nightmare:
a customs strip search.
More
Equifax security breach leaks personal info of 143 million US consumers Cyber criminals have accessed sensitive information -- including names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and the numbers of some driver's licenses. Additionally, Equifax said that credit card numbers for about 209,000
U.S. customers were exposed, as was "personal identifying information"
on roughly 182,000 U.S. customers involved in credit report disputes.
Residents in the U.K. and Canada were also impacted.
More
When He Was 16, This Man Threw One Punch—and Went to Jail for Life The defendant, Taurus Buchanan, stood charged with second-degree murder—accused
of throwing, at the age of 16, a single, deadly punch in a street fight
among kids. If convicted, an automatic sentence would fate him to spend
the rest of his life in prison, with no hope for parole. A section chief
in the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office had told Clayton
that securing a murder conviction under these circumstances would be
a tough task. But Clayton had told her, “Ah, man, I can convict. I can
do it. Just give me the damn case.
More
‘Australian women need Muslim men to fertilize them,’ says halal food chief in Facebook rant Mohamed Elmouelhy, the head of the Halal Certification Authority in Australia, wrote on his Facebook page that Australian women needed male Muslims because men in the country “are a dying breed.” “Australian women need us to fertilize them and keep them surrounded
by Muslim babies while beer swilling, cigarette smoking, drug injecting
can only dream of what Muslim men are capable of,” his post read. He
added that Muslims “have a duty to make your [Australian women] happy.”
Elmouelhy concluded that the white race in the country “will be extinct
in another 40 years” if Australia “is left to bigots.”
More
The U.S. fertility rate just hit a historic low. Why some demographers are freaking out. According to provisional 2016 population data released by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday, the number of births fell
1 percent from a year earlier, bringing the general fertility rate to
62.0 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. The trend is being driven
by a decline in birthrates for teens and 20-somethings. The birthrate
for women in their 30s and 40s increased — but not enough to make up
for the lower numbers in their younger peers.
More
A Story of Slavery in Modern America Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot
11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking
into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather
gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United
States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed
the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended
after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house,
waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents
never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in
leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way
to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against
a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle
of folding.
More
Antifa Website Encourages All Manner of Physical Violence Against Trump Supporters and Capitalists It features posters for self-identified anarchists that call for Trump supporters to be stabbed. A poster published in April shows the silhouette of a man with a Make America Great Again hat and a Pepe the Frog lapel pin being cornered by a bayonet. Behind him is the transparent silhouette of a Nazi.
More
Canadians Could Face Hate Crimes Over Using The Wrong Gender Pronouns Critics say that Canadians who do not subscribe to progressive gender theory could be accused of hate crimes, jailed, fined, and made to take anti-bias training. Canada’s Senate passed Bill C-16, which puts “gender identity” and “gender expression” into both the country’s Human Rights Code, as well as the hate crime category of its Criminal Code by a vote of 67-11, according to LifeSiteNews. The bill now only needs royal assent from the governor general. “Great news,” announced Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister. “Bill
C-16 has passed the Senate – making it illegal to discriminate based
on gender identity or expression. #LoveisLove.”
More
Minneapolis Muslims protest 'sharia' vigilante in Cedar-Riverside area Abdullah Rashid, 22, a Georgia native who moved to Cedar-Riverside last year, has been making the rounds in the Somali-dominated neighborhood, telling people not to drink, use drugs or interact with the opposite sex. If he sees Muslim women he believes are dressed inappropriately, he
approaches them and suggests they should wear a jilbab, a long, flowing
garment. And he says he's recruiting others to join the effort.
More
How Real Are Homeland and House of Cards? We Ask the Spy Chief McLaughlin, a fellow TV junkie when it comes to political thrillers,
gets glued to the screen whenever his favorites come on. Yes, there’s
House of Cards, but also The Americans, Homeland and Veep. Only, unlike
many of us, he has far deeper insight into just how real those latest
plot twists and love stories really are. More
Thieves now using Bluetooth devices at gas pumps to steal your data So how do they do it? Thieves are putting skimmers on the inside of gas pumps. “Once they get the credit card on the magnetic strip…they can encode those numbers,” said Corey Schwartz with the Franklin County Auditor’s Office. Thieves are known to try to put skimmers on the outside of gas pumps
where you put your card in, but now the Franklin County Auditor’s Office
says thieves are sneaking into pumps by unlocking them with universal
keys they buy online. Then they attach the skimmer inside, and wait
for unsuspecting victims. They don’t even have to return to the pump
to get your numbers.
More
Wild boars overrun Islamic State position, kill 3 militants Sheikh Anwar al-Assi, a chief of the local Ubaid tribe and supervisor of anti-ISIS forces, told The Times of London the militants were hiding on the edge of a field about 50 miles southwest of Kirkuk when the boars overwhelmed them Sunday. Five other militants were injured, al-Assi said. He said the group was poised to attack a band of local tribesmen who had fled to nearby mountains since militants seized the town of Hawija three years ago. “It is likely their movement disturbed a herd of wild pigs, which
inhabit the area as well as the nearby cornfields,” he said.
More
After Challenging Red Light Cameras, Oregon Man Fined $500 for Practicing Engineering Without a License Since then, his research into red light cameras has earned him attention in local and national media—in 2014, he presented his evidence on an episode of "60 Minutes"—and an invitation to present at last year's annual meeting of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. It also got him a $500 fine from the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying. According to the board, Järlström's research into red light cameras
and their effectiveness amounts to practicing engineering without a
license. No, really. Järlström had sent a letter to the board in 2014
asking for the opportunity to present his research on how too-short
yellow lights were making money for the state by putting the public's
safety at risk. "I would like to present these fact for your review
and comment," he wrote.
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Unsettled leadership could hurt federal disaster response Last summer, a few thousand acres of forest burned in the foothills
above Duarte, a town just northeast of Los Angeles. The charred remains
of trees still stand among new vegetation that sprouted after a winter
of unusually heavy precipitation. The fire left loose soil, which, when
heavy rainstorms hit in January, became mud that slid down into neighborhoods.
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Poachers kill rhino at French zoo; cut off horn with chainsaw The rhinoceros, named Vince, was found dead today at the Thoiry Zoo, west of the French capital, according to The Independent. The animal had been shot three times in the head. The animal's second horn was partially cut off, the paper said. That
means the poachers likely ran out of time or their equipment failed.
Two other rhinos at the zoo are safe and healthy.
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America may miss out on the next industrial revolution The takeaway was that America, which has outsourced much of its manufacturing
and lacks serious investment in industrial robotics, may miss out on
the world’s next radical shift in how goods are produced. That’s because
the robot makers — as in, the robots that make the robots — could play
a key role in determining how automation expands across the globe.
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GOP senators’ new bill would let ISPs sell your Web browsing data As expected, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and 23 Republican co-sponsors introduced the resolution yesterday. The measure would use lawmakers' power under the Congressional Review Act to ensure that the FCC rulemaking "shall have no force or effect." The resolution would also prevent the FCC from issuing similar regulations in the future. Flake's announcement said he's trying to "protect consumers from overreaching
Internet regulation." Flake also said that the resolution "empowers
consumers to make informed choices on if and how their data can be shared,"
but he did not explain how it will achieve that.
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'Black Hitler' to stand for election for far-right party in Finland Joao Bruno Putulukeso will stand for the ultra-nationalist True Finns party (also known as simply The Finns) in an attempt to moderate its uncompromising image. Putulukeso, who came to Finland from Angola, will stand in the eastern city of Vaasa under the slogan "love is the weapon of victory," according to news agency EFE. He has said: "I want immigrants to understand that the True Finns are not enemies of the immigrants. Immigrants must respect the law and the rules, and then they can integrate in peace." Despite his stated intentions, Putulukeso's decision to stand for
the far-right party has caused uproar on social media and led some to
call him "the black Hitler."
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FBI Used Best Buy's Geek Squad To Increase Secret Public Surveillance To sidestep the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against warrantless
invasions of private property, federal prosecutors and FBI officials
have argued that Geek Squad employees accidentally find and report,
for example, potential child pornography on customers' computers without
any prodding by the government. Assistant United States Attorney M.
Anthony Brown last year labeled allegations of a hidden partnership
as "wild speculation." But more than a dozen summaries of FBI memoranda
filed inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse this month
in USA v. Mark Rettenmaier contradict the official line.
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Marijuana Grow Lights Interfering with Ham Radio Transmissions Marijuana grow lights can be powerful enough to generate the same
amount of radio interference as a 1,000 watt AM radio station, and one
of the cheap ballasts popular among home marijuana growers was found
to produce 640 times as much interference as a legal, FCC-approved unit.
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Electronic Media Searches at Border Crossings Raise Concerns The issue gained attention recently after at least three travelers, including a Canadian journalist, spoke out publicly about their experiences. The episodes have gained notice amid an outcry over President Donald Trump's travel ban and complaints of mistreatment of foreign travelers, but the government insists there has been no policy change in the new administration. Border Protection says searches increased fivefold in the final fiscal
year of the Obama presidency, but still amounted to less than one-hundredth
of 1 percent of all international arrivals.
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The Other WWII American-Internment Atrocity This week marks the 75th anniversary of Japanese-Americans being subsequently rounded up and interned as suspected enemies of the state. But there's another tragic and untold story of American citizens who
were also interned during the war. I'm a member of the Ahtna tribe of
Alaska and I've spent the better part of 30 years uncovering and putting
together fragments of a story that deserves to be told.
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Swedish, Danish citizens arrested on terror accusations in Turkey The pair are said to have been trained by Isis since 2014. "We have received information from Turkish security services stating that a Swedish citizen has been arrested in Turkey," Nina Odermalm Schei, press chief with Swedish security agency Sapö, told news agency TT. The 45-year-old Danish citizen is of Lebanese heritage, while the
38-year-old Swede has links to Iraq. According to the Anatolia news
agency and other Turkish media, the pair have received training in terrorism
during visits to Syria over several years, where they claimed to be
participating in relief work.
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Berkeley Riots: How Free Speech Debate Launched Violent Campus Showdown When the Berkeley College Republicans invited inflammatory Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus, over 100 faculty members signed letters of protest, urging the administration to cancel his visit, while an op-ed by veterans of the free-speech movement defended his right to speak. The university decided that the Berkeley College Republicans, a separate
legal entity from the school itself, had the right to host Yiannopoulos
– but many in the community didn't agree with that decision, pointing
to other schools that have successfully prevented his appearances.
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More states confirm suspected cyberattacks sourced to DHS The two states reporting the suspected cyberattacks were West Virginia and Kentucky. "We need somebody to dig down into this story and figure out exactly what happened," said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp. In the past week, the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office has confirmed
10 separate cyberattacks on its network over the past 10 months that
were traced back to DHS addresses.
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The New Dark Age – Exploiting Faith to Coerce Climate Obedience For much of the history of civilisation, during the Dark Age, ordinary people were prey to the unscrupulous – to tyrants who exploited the honest faith of ordinary people, to coerce acceptance of inequity and injustice. Then along came the Age of Reason, and the Age of Enlightenment. Instead of simply accepting whatever they were told, ordinary people started to question, to demand answers, to know the evidence. People started to demand rational government, justice, liberty and fair treatment. The Climate activist appeal to reason has failed – their evidence
sucks, their models don’t work, public interest is plummeting, and their
habit of calling people names, when their shoddy science is questioned,
is starting to wear thin.
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Why cheap, outdated Android phones widen the digital security divide The malware, which can find its way onto phones via phishing links
or apps downloaded outside the Google Play store, can steal authentication
token information and use it to access Google-related accounts – including
Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, G Suite and more – without entering
a password. Gooligan also can install and rate apps from Google Play
and even install adware to generate revenue. The malware, which has
been found in at least 86 apps outside the Google Play store, could
affect users running versions 4 or 5 of the Android operating system,
which were released between 2011 and 2014.
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An Entire Town's Police Force Just Resigned In his letter of resignation, town marshal Michael Thomison accused
the council of asking him and his deputies to "be involved in illegal,
unethical, and immoral things," according to the Kokomo Tribune. Those
activities included requests for confidential information and criminal
background checks on fellow council members. Thomison tells Fox 59 deputies
were threatened when they refused those requests and were forced to
share one set of body armor while dealing with criminals.
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For Many Low-Wage Workers, Retirement Is Only a Dream The photo and his story went viral and thousands of people donated more than $384,000 for his retirement. His story is a window into a dark reality: Many low-wage workers say they can’t afford to retire. With no money saved for retirement, home care worker Gwen Strowbridge,
71, of Deerfield, Florida, plans to stay on the job until she can’t
physically work anymore.
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The UN doesn’t like the way you live According to speakers addressing the conference, only by transforming cities and other human settlements into densely populated urban centers will future generations have any prospect of meeting the challenges facing them, first and foremost climate change (formerly known as “global warming”). An endless parade of people described as “urban experts, “ warned that whatever plans were adopted at Quito would be pointless unless they were accompanied by comprehensive monitoring. But what would be the criteria by which a city’s performance could be evaluated? Not to worry, said Michael Cohen of the New School in New York , his
graduate students had developed the criteria that would assess cities’
compliance with the UN’s plans to ensure that urban areas take the lead
in combating climate change.
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We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one. We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered
anonymously. So we brought in some professional help.
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The nasty rise of ‘flash mob robbers’ Groups known as “flash-mob robbers” storm a store, steal thousands
in merchandise in minutes and bolt as quickly as they arrive. Among
the most notorious are the Rainbow Girls — a group of female thieves,
named for their brightly hued hair — who’ve hit dozens of stores in
the Bay Area. Their high-stakes heists have included Ulta where the
beauty burglars stole an estimated $11,000 worth of goods in less than
two minutes. The mostly girl gang has also walked off with a combined
more than $130,000 worth of luxury goods from Ferragamo, Louis Vuitton
Christian Dior and Sunglass Hut according to charges filed against a
dozen members of the Rainbow Girls in the Bay Area in October.
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DEA regularly mines Americans' travel records to seize millions in cash Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration
seize a small fortune in cash. DEA agents have profiled passengers on
Amtrak trains and nearly every major U.S. airline, drawing on reports
from a network of travel-industry informants that extends from ticket
counters to back offices, a USA TODAY investigation has found. Agents
assigned to airports and train stations singled out passengers for questioning
or searches for reasons as seemingly benign as traveling one-way to
California or having paid for a ticket in cash.
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The great Mexican wall deception: Trump’s America already exists on the border Once again, the zero tolerance border enforcement program known as
Operation Streamline has unfolded just as it always does here in Tucson,
Ariz. Close to 60 people have already approached the judge in groups
of seven or eight, their heads bowed submissively, their bodies weighed
down by shackles and chains around wrists, waists and ankles. The judge
has handed out the requisite prison sentences in quick succession —
180 days, 60 days, 90 days, 30 days.
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Just how secure are electronic voting machines? "There's not even a doubt in my mind that there are other actors out there that have yet to be found," Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz told CNNMoney. "I'm sure there will be other hacks that come out over the course of this election and certainly beyond that." Kurtz, whose firm was brought in by the DNC to investigate the hack,
called the hack a watershed moment. He said Crowdstrike has been fielding
calls from Washington as political parties wrap their heads around a
new type of threat: Hackers trying to manipulate the U.S. election.
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This Guy Trains Computers to Find Future Criminals The episode was unremarkable compared with the deaths of Philando
Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of police, which were captured
on camera and distributed widely online. But Loomis’s story marks an
important point in a quieter debate over the role of fairness and technology
in policing. Before his sentence, the judge in the case received an
automatically generated risk score that determined Loomis was likely
to commit violent crimes in the future.
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G20 to set up forum to combat world oversupply- EU diplomat The final communique will say that "measures like subsidies are a root cause of market distortions" and a forum will be set up "to monitor the process" of cutting overcapacity, the official told reporters. The global steel industry is assailed by huge oversupply with Chinese
demand plummeting as its economic growth has slowed.
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A Stability Police Force for the United States The study considers what size force is necessary, how responsive it
needs to be, where in the government it might be located, what capabilities
it should have, how it could be staffed, and its cost. This monograph
also considers several options for locating this force within the U.S.
government, including the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Secret Service,
the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL)
in the Department of State, and the U.S. Army's Military Police. The
authors conclude that an SPF containing 6,000 people — created in the
U.S. Marshals Service and staffed by a “hybrid option,” in which SPF
members are federal police officers seconded to federal, state, and
local police agencies when not deployed — would be the most effective
of the options considered.
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Asylum center placed with a view of naturist camp In Germany, 400 naturists have been told to get dressed when a new asylum center for Muslim men opens next month. The asylum center is namely placed with a view of the naturist camp. The German naturist camp was founded 111 years ago. The 400 members of the Familiensport-und FKK-Bund Waldteichfreunde
Moritzburg nudist group have been told they will not be able to skinny
dip in the lake that will separate them from the prying eyes of residents
in the new £1.2million facility.
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US Airstrikes Kill Up to 200 Civilians in Northern Syria Villages, ‘Mistook Them for ISIS’ The villages are ISIS-held villages near the city of Manbij, which US-backed rebels are attacking. This civilian toll comes less than 24 hours after an incident in which US airstrikes against Manbij itself killed 20 civilians. The village attacks, however, have really raised eyebrows, and as the death toll is still getting sorted out, it could well stand as the deadliest US coalition attack on civilians in the entire war. The Pentagon rarely accounts for civilians killed in airstrikes in
Iraq and Syria, occasionally issuing statements with dramatic undercounts
of the number of civilians they’ve killed since the war began. US attacks
in and around Manbij alone had killed over 100 before the village incidents.
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