A Downside to D.C.’s Population Growth? The Growing Number of Rats.

. . .Complaints to the city’s 311 phone line concerning rats are at a four-year high. There have been 3,286 calls this fiscal year, up 64 percent from fiscal year 2015, according to data from the Health Department.

“Even one rat is one rat too many,” said Gerard Brown, program manager for the District Department of Health’s rodent control division and no relation to Nate Brown.

Gerard Brown, who has been killing rats in D.C. for 30 years, said the recent uptick is noticeable.

Rodents cause property damage, chew on electrical wires that can start fires and can spread disease, although that is extremely rare in cities, he said.

The more trash, the more rats, he added. That’s why trash control has become a priority in D.C., where the number of restaurants and bars jumped about 30 percent from 1,729 in 2006 to 2,267 in 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Read more from “A Downside to D.C.’s Population Growth? The Growing Number of Rats.” HERE)

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15 Marines Injured After Amphibious Assault Vehicle Bursts Into Flames

Five of the 15 Marines injured Wednesday when their amphibious assault vehicle caught fire are in critical condition, Corps officials said.

The Marines are from 1st Battalion, 1st Marines and the 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion, said 1st Lt. Paul Gainey, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Division. They were conducting a combat readiness evaluation as part of a training exercise at Camp Pendleton, California, when the AAV burst into flames at 9:33 a.m. local time.

Eight of the Marines were sent to the Burn Center at University of California San Diego Health, where three are listed in critical condition and five are in serious condition, Gainey said in a news release.

Four other Marines were taken to the University of California Irvine Medical Center, where two of them are listed in critical condition and the other two are being treated for “an unknown medical condition,” he said. (Read more from “15 Marines Injured After Amphibious Assault Vehicle Bursts Into Flames” HERE)

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With IPhone’s New FaceID, Cops Can Unlock Your Phone by Pointing at Your Face—While You’re Cuffed

On Tuesday, the world watched as Apple unveiled their tenth-anniversary special edition iPhone, the iPhone X. While iPhone boasts a newer more secure phone—using its patented new facial recognition system—Internet sleuths were quick to point out the ominous implications behind the new tech.

As RT reports, the iPhone X replaces the iconic “home” button, featured on all previous versions, with a new “TrueDepth camera system.” A little black bar at the top of the phone contains several sensors, cameras, and even a dot projector that all work together to create a mathematical 3D model of the owner’s face.

However, there are some ways this technology can actually be used against you.

Imagine for a moment, you are one of the countless individuals who just filmed a gruesome act of police brutality. Many of those countless individuals, as TFTP has frequently reported, have found themselves subject to unlawful detainment and illegal search and seizure as cops attempt to erase any evidence of their wrongdoing. Now, imagine that the only thing standing in the way of a coverup of an innocent person being killed by police is the password on your phone to protect the video from police deleting it.

A secure phone, at this moment, is the only thing that can protect the documented evidence of criminal behavior. Luckily—for the police—if you have a new iPhone X, all they theoretically need to do is to handcuff you and point it at your face. Now they have access to all of your private information.

Think police won’t try to delete your video? Think again.

Just last week, in an exclusive report, TFTP exposed a case of alleged deleted evidence in Lincoln Parish, Louisiana, after a police officer killed a deaf electrical engineer. A security guard said he watched and filmed police kill Josh Cloud—an account which differs greatly from the official story—and he was detained and his video deleted.

Had his phone been locked and had the security guard resisted alleged police pressure to confiscate his phone, evidence of a police murder may still exist. However, if he had an iPhone X, even if he would’ve resisted, they need only point it at his face.

“With the iPhone X, your iPhone is locked until you look at it and it recognizes you. Nothing has ever been more simple, natural and effortless,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing said in his keynote speech Tuesday. “This is the future of how we’ll unlock our smartphones and protect our sensitive information.”

However, as many have pointed out, this simplicity is the device’s potential downfall.

This abuse, as Snowden points out, can come in many forms.

While some folks expressed concern that the iPhone X will allow someone to unlock your iPhone while you sleep, Apple directly countered that claim, noting that the feature will only work when the user looks at the device with their eyes open. Schiller also explained that FaceID will recognize a user even when they change their hairstyle, put on glasses, wear a hat or change their appearance in other ways—perhaps when an unconscious person has their eyes pulled open.

The good news, however, is that while this technology has these ominous implications for abuse, it is far more secure than any of the previous devices. According to Schiller, the Touch ID had a false unlock rate of one in 50,000, whereas the new FaceID only had an error rate of one in 1 million.

Apple also has an extensive history of resisting the police state attempts at creating back doors to their technology. Just last year, in a landmark case, Apple refused to help the government break the law and allow for the various spy agencies to monitor iPhone users with a special decryption key for the State.

Had the government successfully forced Apple into unlocking the phone or creating a backdoor to their encryption, experts in the technology field warned that this could be the end of privacy as we know it. For now, however, privacy is still winning—that is, until we see the first case of police unlocking an iPhone X by pointing at a handcuffed person’s face. (For more from the author of “With IPhone’s New FaceID, Cops Can Unlock Your Phone by Pointing at Your Face—While You’re Cuffed” please click HERE)

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Planned Parenthood Teams up With Satanists

Missouri has reportedly doubled its abortion capacity this year “thanks to the Satanic Temple and Planned Parenthood,” who have worked in tandem to fight the state’s restrictions on abortion.

With some of the most clearly defined regulations on abortion in the nation, Missouri had managed to lower the number of abortion facilities to a single clinic, but a second Missouri clinic opened its doors recently and two others plan on following soon.

Planned Parenthood has battled against state regulations requiring abortion clinics to meet the same surgical center standards as full hospitals and for their doctors to have hospital privileges, and in April a federal court sided with the abortion giant.

U.S. District Judge Howard Sachs granted a preliminary injunction invalidating requirements for the state’s abortion clinics to meet standards for surgical centers and for their doctors to have hospital privileges, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down similar restrictions in Texas, which deemed those laws unnecessary and unconstitutional. (Read more from “Planned Parenthood Teams up With Satanists” HERE)

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Amazon Deletes 1 Star Review of Hillary Clinton’s New Book

Amazon has been monitoring and deleting reviews after Hillary Clinton’s new book was greeted with a torrent of criticism on the day it was released . . .

Reviews of What Happened have been mixed, with some suggesting it Clinton uses it as an opportunity to blame others – such as Bernie Sanders and Vladimir Putin – for her failure, rather than herself. In The New York Times, which supported Clinton’s campaign, Jennifer Senior writes that the book is “a score-settling jubilee”.

The readers on Amazon, meanwhile, are even more divided – but not all of them have read the book. The online retail giant has a “verified purchase” option to signpost whether reviewers have bought a product, and none of the 42 reviewers leaving comments on Tuesday had done so.

Few of the one-star reviews remain on the website, but reports and screengrabs show that reviewers used the space to criticize the former First Lady and spread conspiracy theories about her and Bill Clinton. (Read more from “Amazon Deletes 1 Star Review of Hillary Clinton’s New Book” HERE)

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Action Taken on Teacher Who Booted Kids for Trump Slogan

A high-school math teacher in Woodstock, Georgia, has been removed from her classroom after she ordered two of her students to cover the “Make America Great Again” slogan of President Trump and compared it to a swastika.

As WND reported, Lyn Orletsky was a math teacher at River Ridge High School on Aug. 31 when she told her students: “Just like you cannot wear a swastika in school, you cannot wear [Make America Great Again] like that.”

She asked them to flip their shirts inside out or leave.

The Cherokee County School District apologized and said the teenagers were not in trouble.

“Her actions were wrong, as the ‘Make America Great Again’ shirts worn by the students are not a violation of our school district dress code,” Cherokee County Schools spokeswoman Barbara Jacoby said at the time. (Read more from “Action Taken on Teacher Who Booted Kids for Trump Slogan” HERE)

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Man ‘Shouting Allahu Akbar’ Attacks 7

A former psychiatric patient viciously punched four passers-by then attacked three police officers while screaming Allahu Akbar in Toulouse today.

The enraged man, 42, began beating shoppers in the French city at around 4pm before police who were only metres away swooped in.

The assailant kicked and punched the officers before they managed to contain and arrest him.

He continued to shout Allahu Akbar – Arabic for God is Great – as he was wrestled to the ground before bursting into tears.

Footage shows the man being handcuffed and lifted on to a stretcher before being taken [to the] hospital. (Read more from “Man ‘Shouting Allahu Akbar’ Attacks 7” HERE)

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While Christianity Dies in Germany, Islam Springs up in It’s Place

By Paul Bremmer. Christianity in Germany, and indeed in all of Europe, is dying.

There are about 47 million Catholics and Protestants combined in Germany, representing roughly 60 percent of the German population, but that number is falling by 500,000 a year through deaths alone, according to the Gatestone Institute . . .

In the year 2016 alone, the German Catholic Church lost 162,093 faithful attendees and closed 537 parishes, according to data from the German Bishops’ Conference. One quarter of all German Catholic communities that existed in 1996 have now closed . . .

While Christianity is dying in Germany, Islam is on the rise. Historian Walter Laqueur wrote that Germany had about 700 “little mosques and prayer rooms” in the 1980s but “more than 2,500 at the present time” – and that was in 2009. (Read more from “While Christianity Dies in Germany, Islam Springs up in It’s Place” HERE)

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Christian Student, 17, Is Beaten to Death by Muslim Classmates After Drinking From the Same Glass as One of Them

By Gareth Davies. A Christian teenager has been beaten to death by his classmates for drinking from the same glass as a Muslim.

High-flying Sharoon Masih, 17, was battered by fellow students in a classroom in the Vehari District in Punjab, Pakistan, on just his fourth day at a new school.

Shockingly, the boy’s teacher was in the room when the brutal attack took place, but claims he didn’t see anything because he was reading a newspaper.

Sharoon’s parents had saved money to send their son to MC Model Boys Government High School Burewala and District Vehari in an attempt to pursue higher education.

From the day he started, on August 25, he was subjected to abuse from Muslim boys for being a Christian. (Read more from “Christian Student, 17, Is Beaten to Death by Muslim Classmates After Drinking From the Same Glass as One of Them” HERE)

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‘Shape-Shifting’ Bacteria Spotted on International Space Station

Bacterial cells treated with a common antibiotic have been spotted changing shape to survive while aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The way bacteria act in near-zero gravity environments could pose a serious problem for treating astronauts with infections.

The “clever shape-shifting” was detected in bacteria being experimented on in the near-weightlessness of space, and is believed to help the bacteria survive.

An experiment on the common E coli bacteria subjected it to different concentrations of the antibiotic gentamicin sulfate, a drug which kills the bug on Earth.

However, in comparison to a control group on Earth, the space bacteria showed a 13-fold increase in cell numbers and a 73% reduction in cell column size. (Read more from “‘Shape-Shifting’ Bacteria Spotted on International Space Station” HERE)

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Surge! Illegals Rush the Border for Trump’s Promise of Amnesty

During the first few months of Trump’s presidency, border crossings declined to the lowest level in a generation. Now, new data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows that border crossings have spiked for the past four consecutive months, despite the hot weather, which usually causes an annual drop in border crossings in the summer. It’s quite obvious that the initial perception of Trump as a strict law enforcer has been revised in the eyes of potential migrants, following Trump’s promise to pass amnesty within the next six months. When will the political class finally learn the lessons of failed amnesty and place the security of Americans first — before any discussion of amnesty?

New surge of border crossings

According to the CBP, the number of arrests at the southwest border rose 22 percent in August, the fourth monthly increase in a row from the low point in April. From January through April, on the heels of Trump’s inauguration and the perception of an “America first” approach to immigration, border crossings plummeted every month, eventually falling by an astounding 73 percent. However, the total crossings since April have now doubled again.

While the numbers are still below the recent average, the trend is very concerning and demonstrates what we should expect once Congress seriously considers amnesty and the president’s support for it becomes more evident to Mexico and to Latin American countries. More disturbing, the number of family units crossing has jumped by 261 percent, which reveals that the promise of amnesty for children will always incentivize families to make the trek across the border. Further endangering Americans is the fact that the number of unaccompanied children (UACs) has spiked 206 percent since the April low point. As we’ve noted before, 30 percent of them have ties to gangs, some aren’t even children, and many of them are trafficked by their own family members.

This new data further drives home the point lost on our political class — that it is immoral to focus on the plight of illegal aliens before focusing on the plight of Americans.

A Senate that truly represents us would hold hearings on shutting down the border surge, fixing the asylum and UAC loopholes, and cutting off all the magnets that incentivize border crossings. Such senators would investigate why, after giving Mexico $2.8 billion over the past decade to stem the border flow and fight the drug cartels, it is pocketing the money while openly violating our sovereignty and protesting our enforcement of our own laws. Instead, Sen. Grassley is holding a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “DACA” amnesty, with only one conservative witness invited to the panel.

The president is no better. White House legislative affairs director Marc Short has now said that the border wall will not even be a precondition for amnesty. Worse, the rationale he gave for caving on the border wall was that it would “bind us into a construct that would make the conclusion on DACA impossible.” Thus, amnesty for illegals is now the main entrée, a guarantee, an entitlement, and a right; whereas border security for Americans is just a side dish that could get in the way of amnesty. Which means that the White House will definitely never fight for any of the other 20 or so enforcement items as a precondition for amnesty. “Dream” amnesty, which will easily metastasize into broader amnesty for millions more illegal immigrants, has now become the new “we can’t shut the government down” imperative, while the urgency to prevent a new wave of immigration is ignored.

This is a complete violation of every campaign promise Trump made on immigration, not to mention the entire social compact of government: governance by the consent of the citizenry. Obviously, no government would place the interests of foreign nationals and foreign governments ahead of its own national sovereignty, and yet here we are.

What about addressing the root cause of the border crisis from the Mexican side?

But this is not about us.

And it’s not even about helping Mexican nationals. For if that were the case, we’d focus on holding the Mexican government accountable and rooting out the drug cartels so that Mexicans could live securely in their own land. We spend trillions of dollars nation-building in Kabul and Baghdad, but for some reason we have no interest in securing stability on our border, where thousands are brutalized by drug cartels just a stone’s throw across the river from El Paso, Texas.

Indeed, open borders and the amnesty agenda are not only contrary to the interests of our own citizens, it’s harmful to the long-term interests of Mexicans as well. While we welcome legal immigrants from all over the world, there is something wrong when almost 10 percent of Mexico’s population is in America and the Mexican government is encouraging even more people to emigrate. The Mexican government has no regard for its people and is corrupt through and through. The best way to help Mexicans in the long run is by using our leverage of statecraft to secure a strong and stable Mexico, not by repeating the mistakes that fuel the cycle of violence and empowerment of the smuggling cartels.

It’s quite evident, therefore, that endless amnesty serves one interest and one interest only: it creates a permanent voting bloc for Democrats. With this impending amnesty, Democrats hope to turn Texas and Arizona blue the same way they did to California with the 1986 amnesty.

Why in the world Trump and Republicans would enthusiastically support something that is bad for America, bad for Mexicans, and suicide for their own political future, who knows? Then again, the craven Republicans have already adopted almost every other Democrat policy so far. (For more from the author of “Surge! Illegals Rush the Border for Trump’s Promise of Amnesty” please click HERE)

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