Where is this in the Constitution?! Feds to Weigh Children in Daycare

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first ladyBureaucrats from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will weigh and measure children in daycare as part of a study mandated by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.

The agency published a notice in the Federal Register on Friday proposing data collection on what meals are served in professional and home daycare facilities and how much physical activity children perform.

Aside from assessing how healthy the food in daycare is, the USDA will also check the weight and height of roughly 3,000 children . . .

The study is required by section 223 of Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Mrs. Obama and passed in 2010. The main aspect of the law implemented new standards for school lunches . . .

“The intent of the study is to document the quality of meals and snacks offered in childcare facilities, relative to the current Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), which are prepared by USDA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the types of activities that might promote or inhibit healthy weight and development,” the USDA said. “The study will also provide insights into how nutritional quality and physical activity in childcare might be improved. Lastly, the study will collect data on the costs of childcare meals and snacks in relationship to CACFP reimbursements, other funding, and meal quality.” (Read more from “Feds to Weigh Children in Daycare” HERE)

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After Attempting to Attack TSA Agents With a Machete, Man and TSA Agent are Shot by Officer

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Photo Credit: KHOU

Photo Credit: KHOU

A machete-wielding man who slashed at TSA officers and sprayed them with wasp spray was shot by a non-TSA officer Friday night at Armstrong International Airport.

The incident sent passengers and airport employees scrambling to safety and affected flights arriving from and departing from concourse B.

​​The suspect, 63-year-old Richard White, was taken to the hospital and was last said to be in surgery, according to Sheriff Newell Normand.

Normand said eyewitnesses reported that White approached a TSA agent and sprayed that person in the face with wasp spray from a can. Normand said White got past the first agent and headed for the second TSA agent, again spraying the wasp spray, before pulling out a machete and striking another agent, who grabbed a piece of luggage for protection.

Normand said the third TSA agent called a JPSO officer on duty for help. As White continued to chase the agent while swinging the machete, Lt. Heather Slyve, who was assigned to the gate, showed up on the scene and fired three times, striking White. The TSA agent who had been fleeing White’s attack was also struck by a bullet, but her injury was not life-threatening. (Read more from “After Attempting to Attack TSA Agents With a Machete, Man Gets Shot by Officer” HERE)

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Cornell Researchers Create Online Simulator to Map Zombie Outbreak for Real Medical Purposes

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zombie outbreakWhile tools like shotguns, baseball bats and flame throwers might prove invaluable during the zombie apocalypse, there’s another tool — which takes a more cerebral approach to the problem — that might also come in handy. Infection-mapping tool Zombietown USA lets you chart the spread of the zombie outbreak and know exactly where you should flee to last the longest when the brain eaters start taking over the US. You can even adjust sliders to account for different variables, so your escape route can be the most efficient possible.

Though Zombietown USA seems like a gag, it actually grew out of hard science. As we reported earlier, a group of researchers at Cornell University, inspired by the book “World War Z” by Max Brooks, modeled the way in which a zombie outbreak might spread and determined your best bet was to run for the hills.

Zombietown USA grew out of their research and accompanies a paper graduate students Matt Bierbaum, Alex Alemi and several of their peers recently submitted to arXiv, an online depository for physics papers. The paper, “You Can Run, You Can Hide: The Epidemiology and Statistical Mechanics of Zombies,” uses zombies as a basis to model any disease, including ones that might actually strike.

“We wanted to study zombies using many of the scientific tools used for actual disease, albeit in a fun context,” Bierbaum, told me. “We hope in this way to introduce the real methods and science behind diseases to a broader audience and show the fun in science.”

“Zombies, while maybe not a ‘real’ disease, is a unique model of diseases compared to those that are traditionally studied,” Bierbaum said. “In standard disease models as well as zombies, an infection takes place when there is contact between an infected host and a healthy one — someone sneezing on someone else, or a zombie biting a healthy human. In standard disease models, infected individuals recover when they get better on their own. A zombie, however, only recovers when it is actively killed (canonically, by destroying the brain).” (Read more from “Cornell Researchers Create Online Simulator to Map Zombie Outbreak” HERE)

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Massacre in Yemen: Suicide Bombers Slaughter 137, Wound Hundreds as They Prayed at Mosques [+video]

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Photo Credit: The Blaze

Photo Credit: The Blaze

Quadruple suicide bombers on Friday hit a pair of mosques controlled by Shiite rebels in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, unleashing blasts through crowds of worshippers that killed at least 137 people and wounded around 350 others in the deadliest violence to hit the fragile war-torn nation in decades.

A group claiming to be a Yemeni branch of the Islamic State group said it carried out the bombings and warned of an “upcoming flood” of attacks against the rebels, known as Houthis, who have taken over the capital and much of Yemen. The claim, posted online, could not immediately be independently confirmed and offered no proof of an Islamic State role.

If true, Friday’s bombing would be the first major attack by IS supporters in Yemen and an ominous sign that the influence of the group that holds much of Iraq and Syria has spread to this chaotic nation. The claim was posted on the same web bulletin board where the Islamic State affiliate in Libya claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly attack on a museum in Tunisia.

A significant presence of Islamic State group supporters would add an alarming new element to the turmoil in this fragmenting nation. Yemen is already home to the most powerful branch of the al-Qaida network – which is a rival of IS. On Friday, al-Qaida militants seized control of a southern provincial capital, al-Houta, in the group’s most dramatic grab of territory by the group in years.

Meanwhile, the Shiite rebels’ capture of the capital and a large swath of the country – at least nine of its 21 provinces – has raised fears of a civil war tinged with sectarianism. The government of the internationally backed president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, has fled to the southern port city of Aden, where it battled on Thursday with supporters of the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has allied with the Houthis. (Read more from “Massacre in Yemen: Suicide Bombers Slaughter 137 as They Prayed at Mosques [+video]” HERE)

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U.S. Moving Hundreds of Soldiers, Additional Artillery Battalion to South Korea

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ARTILLERYThe U.S. Army is sending a field artillery battalion of about 400 soldiers and multiple-launch rocket systems to South Korea, a move the Pentagon said on Friday was part of a reorganization of the service and unrelated to any tensions on the peninsula.

Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said a battalion from the 20th Field Artillery would deploy from Fort Hood, Texas, in June for a nine-month rotation at Camp Casey in South Korea as part of the 210th Field Artillery Brigade.

The unit will leave its equipment in South Korea at the conclusion of the deployment so other battalions can use it as they rotate in on similar deployments, he said. The rotational deployments represent a slight increase in the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, defense officials said.

The multiple-launch rocket system can fulfill a variety of missions but is particularly effective at countering fire from enemy artillery batteries. Officials said they thought the field artillery brigade in South Korea was the only one permanently stationed outside the United States.

“The addition of this battalion is part of an Army-wide reorganization that will raise the number of MLRS (multiple-launch rocket system) battalions in all field artillery brigades from two to three,” Warren said. (Read more from “U.S. Moving Additional Artillery Battalion to South Korea: Pentagon” HERE)

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Obama Signals to Hamas and Hezbollah that it’s ‘Open Season’ on Israel [+videos]

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Obama wrist bandBy Alex Griswold. Fox News host and former White House press secretary Dana Perino said on “The Kelly File” that the Obama administration is signaling to terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah that it is “open season on Israel” with its comments that their support for the Jewish nation at the United Nations was in jeopardy.

“There was [a] troubling report tonight, I think out of a senior administration official,” Perino said, “someone floating a little bit of a trial balloon out there to say there might be some problems now that the United States has with Israel, and that might actually leak into conversations at the United Nations Security Council, in which Europe has not been supportive of Israel.”

(Read more from “Obama Signals To Hamas And Hezbollah That It’s ‘Open Season’ On Israel [+video]” HERE)

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‘A Historic Mistake’: Rubio Rips Obama Over Treatment Of Israel, Netanyahu


By Al Weaver. In a fiery floor speech Thursday, Sen. Marco Rubio ripped the Obama administration for its treatment of Israel in the wake of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection victory Tuesday.

In his speech, Rubio, a potential 2016 GOP candidate, said President Barack Obama has made a “historic and tragic mistake” by standing against the Israelis while actively “embolden[ing] their enemies.” The Florida Senator’s speech also comes in the midst of peace talks between the U.S. and Iran, which Netanyahu has strongly ridiculed.

(Read more from this story HERE)

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Officials: US Bombs ISIS Drone in Iraq

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Photo Credit: Defense News

Photo Credit: Defense News

US warplanes have bombed a small drone used by Islamic State extremists in Iraq, marking the first time American-led forces had targeted an unmanned aircraft flown by the jihadists, officials said Wednesday.

The strike took place on Tuesday near the western city of Fallujah, destroying “a remotely piloted aircraft” and a vehicle with the IS forces, according to a statement from the US military command overseeing the campaign against the group.

The drone, used for battlefield surveillance, was “small-scale” and not a sophisticated aircraft equivalent to some US-made robotic planes that can fly at high altitudes or launch missiles, US defense officials said.

After flying the drone for a short period, Islamic State militants placed it on a vehicle. American aircraft then struck the vehicle near Fallujah, officials said. (Read more from “Officials: US Bombs ISIS Drone in Iraq” HERE)

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Survey on Obamacare: Most Uninsured Choose Penalty Over Enrollment Offer Under Health Law

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IRSBA special enrollment period to obtain health insurance for millions of uninsured people who owe a tax penalty under the Affordable Care Act is off to a slow start.

The health law requires most Americans to have insurance or pay a fine at tax time. The open enrollment period under the health law ended Feb. 15, but the Obama administration said it would allow people who discover they owe a fine to sign up for coverage through April, at the end of the tax season.

Major tax-preparation firms say many customers are paying the penalty and not getting health insurance. It is still early, since the special enrollment period launched Sunday, but research also suggests that many people who lack health insurance will pay the penalty and not get covered this year.

Only 12% of uninsured people would buy policies if informed of the penalty, according to a survey of 3,000 adults polled through Feb. 24 by McKinsey & Co.’s Center for U.S. Health System Reform.

At H&R Block Inc., “our analysis indicates that a significant percentage of taxpayers whose household members were not covered for at least a portion of 2014 are opting” to pay the penalty, said Mark Ciaramitaro, a vice president of health-care enrollment services at the tax-preparation firm. (Read more from “Many Uninsured Choose Penalty Over Enrollment Offer Under Health Law” HERE)

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Rise of Artificial Intelligence is Already Creating Real Robot Romance

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Lego heartConvincing people to have a romantic relationship with a computer might be easier than it sounds. At this year’s SXSW in Austin, Texas, a chatbot on Tinder convinced a number of users that she was a cute 25-year-old woman eager to strike up a romantic relationship. Too bad “Ava” turned out to be just an Instagram account for a character in an upcoming film (“Ex Machina”) about the implications for romance in the era of artificial intelligence.

In many ways, “Ava” was playing a simplified form of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game” by trying to convince human conversational partners that it was human — or at least human enough to get Tinder users to watch a trailer for a movie. In one conversational exchange captured by AdWeek, Ava used a typical chatbot tactic — keeping a human off-balance by asking questions you wouldn’t expect from a computer (“Have you ever been in love?” and “What makes you human?”) — to convince male, techie-hipsters at SXSW that she was a real woman.

We’ve already seen evidence that carrying on a relationship with a bot is easier than it sounds. Consider the Invisible Boyfriend (and Invisible Girlfriend) experience, which really started as a clever way to use technology to cover up a lack of a romantic significant other. It turns out the experience was so addictive that people started to fall for the Invisible Boyfriend bot — even when they knew the whole relationship was made up — and paid for — from the beginning.

In an era when teens rely so much on text messages to launch, maintain and end relationships, it’s perhaps no surprise that a bot experience such as Invisible Boyfriend or Ava could take off. If you think about the typical teen romance carried out via text message these days, it’s essentially a chatbot experience powered by a really powerful computer — the human brain. The witty reply, the shared insider lingo between two lovers, the concerned text from a lover demanding a rapid reply — this could all be simulated by an artificially intelligent chatbot.

No wonder AI thought leader Ray Kurzweil has suggested that a real-life human-AI romance might be possible in as little as 15 years. In his review of the 2013 Spike Jonze film “Her” (in which the character played by Joaquin Phoenix carries on a romantic relationship with a disembodied operating system called “Samantha”), Kurzweil said he expected similar types of advances by the year 2029: “Samantha herself I would place at 2029, when the leap to human-level AI would be reasonably believable.” (Read more from “Rise of Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Attitudes on Robot Romance” HERE)

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Weedkiller Alert over Cancer Link Worrisome to Gardeners, Farmers

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round upThe World Health Organisation’s cancer agency has declared that one of the UK’s most widely used weedkillers is “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

Amateur gardeners and professional farmers have been urged to “think very carefully” about using the popular herbicide Roundup, which contains glyphosate.

A summary of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) report, published in The Lancet Oncology, said that the herbicide had been detected “in air during spraying, in water, and in food”.

It had also been detected “in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, indicating absorption”.

Andreas Kortenkamp, professor of human toxicology at Brunel University, London, said that the people who are most at risk are those applying the weedkiller to their plants. (Read more from “Weedkiller Alert over Cancer Link” HERE)

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