Boom! New Theory on Global Mystery Blasts

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. . .The loud sounds were shaking buildings and rattling nerves from Alabama to Michigan, Idaho to California, Russia to Denmark . . .

But there now may be an explanation for at least some of the events.

A report in the U.K.’s Daily Star said “it is thought supersonic aircraft are most likely responsible.”

The report came after a number of “booms” were heard Wednesday in Texas . . .

The Air Force, however, did not confirm or deny whether the jets were in the regions where other anomalies had been noted. (Read more from “Boom! New Theory on Global Mystery Blasts” HERE)

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What’s Going on in Cuba? US Embassy Workers Found to Have Brain Abnormalities

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By Nicole Darrah. Brain abnormalities have been found in the U.S. diplomats who were victims of suspected attacks at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, according to a new report.

Doctors discovered that white matter in the brains of Embassy workers had “developed changes,” The Associated Press reported. White matter allows different areas of the brain to communicate.

At least 24 U.S. Embassy officials in Cuba had reported hearing loud, grating noises before experiencing ear issues, hearing loss, dizziness, headache, fatigue, cognitive issues and difficulty sleeping.

Some victims knew immediately that the attack was affecting their bodies, while some developed physical symptoms within 24 hours.

Other Americans who were not working but were traveling in Cuba had also reported experiencing weird symptoms similar to those that the U.S. officials reported, the State Department said. (Read more from “What’s Going on in Cuba? US Embassy Workers Found to Have Brain Abnormalities” HERE)

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Mysterious Cuba Embassy Attacks Left Victims With Brain Anomalies

By Avery Thompson. Back in September, a strange mystery was unfolding in Cuba. American officials and their spouses were experiencing some kind of attack, but nobody was really sure what was going on. People experienced a wide range of symptoms, from headaches and difficulty concentrating to hearing loss and brain damage. Many reported hearing high-pitched, painful noises prior to experiencing the symptoms.

Medical experts have been unable to explain what kind of weapon is affecting these officials, or even what’s wrong with them. But new results from doctors at the University of Miami and the University of Pennsylvania have provided a valuable clue: The victims appear to have abnormalities in their brains’ white matter.

White matter refers to the sections of the brain filled with dense nerve connections, which are primarily responsible for learning and higher brain functions. Doctors often see white matter damage when people suffer concussions or other brain damage, which likely means the victims are suffering something similar. (Read more from “Mysterious Cuba Embassy Attacks Left Victims With Brain Anomalies” HERE)

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Mueller Probe ‘as Partisan a Hack Job as I’ve Ever Seen’

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LevinTV host Mark Levin began his radio show Tuesday highlighting the extreme bias of “special impeachment counsel” Robert Mueller in his investigation of alleged Russia collusion in the 2016 election.

“This is as partisan a hack job as I’ve ever seen,” Levin commented, reacting to the revelations that several members of Mueller’s team have had a great anti-Trump bias. “Mr. Mueller is completely out of control. Mr. Mueller is a hack — I don’t care if he’s registered as a Republican or not. What does that have to do with anything?”

Levin reminded his audience that when Mueller was first nominated for FBI director, one of his “primary sponsors” was former California Sen. Barbara Boxer, known for her far-left stances and ideology.

“He’s hired a bunch of hacks,” Levin said of Mueller and his special counsel team. “Disgusting left-wing pukes.”

Levin also discussed the breaking Judicial Watch story regarding another top Mueller deputy, prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who cheered on former administration official Sally Yates in her efforts to fight President Trump’s agenda. Listen:

(For more from the author of “Mueller Probe ‘as Partisan a Hack Job as I’ve Ever Seen'” please click HERE)

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Israeli PM Netanyahu Praises ‘Historic’ Decision by Trump

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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and directed the State Department to begin the process of relocating the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to the holy city.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to Trump’s decision, expressing profound gratitude on behalf of the people of Israel.

Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer also thanked President Trump, tweeting an image of an Israeli flag and a U.S. flag displayed proudly next to each other on the old city wall of Jerusalem.

Other countries have expressed an interest in following the United States’ lead and recognizing Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the sovereign nation of Israel.

This is a historic day for the sovereign nations of the United States and Israel. (For more from the author of “Israeli PM Netanyahu Praises ‘Historic’ Decision by Trump” please click HERE)

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Warning: TSA Facial Recognition Plan Likely to Become Part of Growing Biometric Surveillance System

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The federal government plans to use a TSA program advertised as a way to avoid lines at airport security checkpoints to harvest photos and other biometric information that will ultimately end up in multiple federal databases.

The TSA touts its PreCheck program as a way to avoid the hassle of security screening. Members of the program do not have to remove shoes, laptops, liquids, belts and light jackets. But according to a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Department of Homeland Security has developed this program with a broader purpose in mind. PreCheck will facilitate the collection of face images and iris scans on a nationwide scale. Once that happens, this biometric data will almost certainly be widely shared with other federal agencies and even private corporations.

DHS’s programs will become a massive violation of privacy that could serve as a gateway to the collection of biometric data to identify and track every traveler at every airport and border crossing in the country.

The TSA currently collects fingerprints during the PreCheck application process. Over the summer, the agency ran a pilot program at the Atlanta Airport using fingerprints to verify passengers’ identities. According to the EFF, the TSA wants to roll out the program to airports across the country and expand it to include facial recognition, iris scans, and other biometric data.

This TSA will almost certainly share this information with other federal agencies, including the FBI.

In 2014, the FBI rolled out a nationwide facial recognition program. According to information obtained by Georgetown Law last year, the Next Generation Identification Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS), already contains some 25 million state and federal criminal photos, mostly mugshots shared by state and local law enforcement agencies. Photos remain in the system even if a court never convicts the individual of a crime. It remains unclear what other types of photos end up in NGI-IPS, but it seems almost certain TSA pre-check photos will end up in that database.

According to the EFF, “private partners” will also have access to biometric information gathered by the TSA.

For example, TSA’s PreCheck program has already expanded outside the airport context. The vendor for PreCheck, a company called Idemia (formerly MorphoTrust), now offers expedited entry for PreCheck-approved travelers at concerts and stadiums across the country. Idemia says it will equip stadiums with biometric-based technology, not just for security, but also “to assist in fan experience.” Adding face recognition would allow Idemia to track fans as they move throughout the stadium, just as another company, NEC, is already doing at a professional soccer stadium in Medellin, Columbia and at an LPGA championship event in California earlier this year.

These biometric systems create the potential for the federal government to track people all over the United States for virtually any reason.

Customs and Border Protection began rolling out facial recognition last year. The agency demonstrates how these programs expand over time.

In pilot programs in Georgia and Arizona last year, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) used face recognition to capture pictures of travelers boarding a flight out of the country and walking across a U.S. land border and compared those pictures to previously recorded photos from passports, visas, and ‘other DHS encounters.’ In the Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) for those pilot programs, CBP said that, although it would collect face recognition images of all travelers, it would delete any data associated with U.S. citizens. But what began as DHS’s biometric travel screening of foreign citizens morphed, without congressional authorization, into screening of U.S. citizens, too. Now the agency plans to roll out the program to other border crossings, and it says it will retain photos of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents for two weeks and information about their travel for 15 years. It retains data on ‘non-immigrant aliens’ for 75 years.

The federal government is in the process of creating an integrated biometric database that will ultimately have the capability to track people virtually anywhere they go. State and local law enforcement agencies also feed into this system. According to the Georgetown Law Perpetual Lineup report, the Department of Defense, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the U.S. Marshals Service have all had access to one or more state or local facial recognition systems.

Perpetuallineup.org describes the shocking breadth of FBI facial search capabilities.

Over 185 million of these photos are drawn from 12 states that let the FBI to search their driver’s license and other ID photos; another 50 million are from four additional states that let the FBI to search both driver’s license photos and mug shots. While we do not know the total number of individuals that those photos implicate, there are close to 64 million licensed drivers in those 16 states. In 2015, the FBI launched a pilot program to search the passport database. It remains unclear if the system can access the entire 125 million passport database or just a subset.

In a May 2016 report, the Government Accountability Office reported that the FBI was negotiating with 18 additional states and the District of Columbia to access their driver’s license photos. In August, the GAO re-released the report, deleting all references to the 18 states and stating that there were “no negotiations underway.” The FBI now suggests that FBI agents had only conducted outreach to those states to explore the possibility of their joining the FACE Services network.

If you value your privacy, you should avoid submitting any kind of biometric data to federal agencies if at all possible – including the TSA.

State and local action can also help limit the scope of these federal biometric databases. They can limit the information they collect and prohibit sharing that information with federal agencies. The feds depend on state and local cooperation, particularly from law enforcement. Prohibiting help would hamper federal action. (For more from the author of “Warning: TSA Facial Recognition Plan Likely to Become Part of Growing Biometric Surveillance System” please click HERE)

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Gone With the Wind: Los Angeles Burns

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Drivers on their way to work in Los Angeles were faced with terrifying scenes along a major freeway after the fifth California wildfire this week left the hillside next to their road ablaze.

The inferno – named the Skirball Fire – has consumed more than 50 acres of land and threatens LA’s exclusive Bel Air neighborhood, UCLA and the Getty Center for the arts alongside the I-405 freeway.

The freeway is now shut down as 125 firefighters and several helicopters attempt to get the blaze under control – but early-morning commuters managed to capture this stunning footage.

As they traveled gingerly passed the ferocious fire, their cars passed just feet away from the deadly – and ever-spreading – flames.

Several people captured the surreal moment on video and shared them on social media. (Read more from “Gone With the Wind: Los Angeles Burns” HERE)

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America Faces One of the Worst Flu Seasons Ever

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America is set to endure one of the most perilous flu seasons in years – with doctors warning it could be similar to the deadly 2014 outbreak.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the US will be hit by a particular strain of influenza called H3N2, the same strain which has just wreaked havoc in Australia, and was responsible for the four most deadly flu seasons in the last 10 years.

Early assessments suggest the current vaccine – which was produced in spring after scientists made an educated guess at what strain to expect – will be just 10 percent effective.

While some seasons don’t kick off until February, we are already seeing a surge in people hospitalized with influenza-like symptoms – at a rate even faster and earlier than we saw in 2014.

‘I’m anticipating this being a bad flu year,’ infectious diseases specialist Dr Pritish Tosh, of the Mayo Clinic, told Daily Mail Online. (Read more from “America Faces One of the Worst Flu Seasons Ever” HERE)

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The Military Is Using Falcons to Build a Drone Killer

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Throughout history, humans have employed falcons as lethal hunters of other animals. Now those raptors are being sent after drones.

It turns out that many of the skills feathered predators use to find a tasty lunch can be applied to the developing field of drone defense. A U.S. Air Force-funded study by zoology researchers at Oxford University suggests that the means by which a peregrine falcon tracks its quarry could be effective in defending against drones that threaten troops, police or airports.

The researchers fitted the falcons with miniature video cameras and GPS receivers to track their angle and method of attack on other birds, or on bait being towed through the air by a drone. In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S., the falcons’ approach to intercepting its target aligned closely with the rules of proportional navigation, a guidance system used by visually-directed missiles.

The principle is such that a missile—or a falcon on the hunt—will reach a target as long as its line-of-sight remains unobstructed while it closes in. The earliest AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles, dating to the 1950s, used this technique with a rotating mirror to “see” the target.

A key difference, however, is that falcons adjust their angle of attack to compensate for their slower speeds—which is where drones come in. The work, the researchers suggested, could be applied to the development of small, visually-guided drones that can disable other drones. (Read more from “The Military Is Using Falcons to Build a Drone Killer” HERE)

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How the Law Responds When Emoji Are the Weapon of Choice

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Nearly everyone is familiar with emoji, those popular icons that appear in text messages, emails and social media platforms. Emoji are often used as lighthearted adjuncts to text, or to soften the blow of a message . . .

Perhaps the most troubling use of emoji has come through their use in interpersonal messages where it is unclear whether they modify or amplify a prima facie criminal threat.

In New Zealand, a judge considered the role of emoji in a Facebook message sent by a man to his ex-partner. The man wrote, “you’re going to get it” followed by an aeroplane emoji.

Concluding that the message and emoji generally conveyed that the defendant was “coming to get” his ex-partner, the judge sentenced the accused to 8 months jail on a charge of stalking . . .

The issue has also arisen in several cases in the US. In Virginia in 2015 a high school student was charged with computer harassment and threatening school staff. She had posted several messages to her Instagram account, combining text with emoji (a gun, a knife and a bomb). (Read more from “How the Law Responds When Emoji Are the Weapon of Choice” HERE)

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Inside China’s Big Tech Conference, New Ways to Track Citizens

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An artificial intelligence company touted a robot that could help doctors with diagnoses. A start-up displayed a drone designed to carry a single passenger 60 miles per hour.

And in a demonstration worthy of both wonder and worry, a Chinese facial recognition company showed how its technology could quickly identify and describe people.

If there were any doubts about China’s technological prowess, the presentations made this week at the country’s largest tech conference should put them to rest. The event, once a setting for local tech executives and leaders of impoverished states, this year attracted top American executives like Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google, as well as executives of Chinese giants like Jack Ma of Alibaba and Pony Ma of Tencent.

Yet all the advancements exhibited at the event, the World Internet Conference, in the picturesque eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen, also offered reason for caution. The technology enabling a full techno-police state was on hand, giving a glimpse into how new advances in things like artificial intelligence and facial recognition can be used to track citizens — and how they have become widely accepted here. (Read more from “Inside China’s Big Tech Conference, New Ways to Track Citizens” HERE)

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