Opioid Sellers in China Exploit U.S. Postal Service Flaw

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U.S. Congressional investigators said Wednesday that Chinese opioid manufacturers are exploiting weak screening at the U.S. Postal Service to ship large quantities of illegal drugs to American dealers.

In a yearlong probe, Senate investigators found that Chinese sellers, who openly market opioids such as fentanyl to U.S. buyers, are pushing delivery through the U.S. postal system. The sellers are taking advantage of a failure by the postal service to fully implement an electronic data system that would help authorities identify suspicious shipments.

At a time of massive growth in postal shipments from China due to e-commerce, the investigators found that the postal system received the electronic data on just over a third of all international packages, making more than 300 million packages in 2017 much harder to screen. Data in the Senate report shows no significant improvement during 2017 despite the urgency. (Read more from “Opioid Sellers in China Exploit U.S. Postal Service Flaw” HERE)

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Kerry Tells Palestinian Authority: Do Not Give in to Trump

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While the White House has confirmed that since the Jerusalem Declaration there has been a complete disconnect between the Palestinian Authority and the Trump administration, it turns out that the previous administration has maintained contact with PA officials.

Maariv reported that former US secretary of state John Kerry met in London with a close associate of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Hussein Agha, for a long and open conversation about a variety of topics. Agha apparently reported details of the conversation to senior PA officials in Ramallah. A senior PA official confirmed to Maariv that the meeting took place.

Agha is one of Abbas’s closest associates and one of the veteran peacemakers with Israel.

He conducted the “London Track,” secret negotiations held from 2010 to 2013 between the emissaries of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, attorney Yitzhak Molcho and Brig.-Gen. Mike Herzog, under the supervision and presence of Dennis Ross. Agha also authored with Yossi Beilin the Beilin-Abbas agreement in the 1990s. He is considered a staunch supporter of the peace process, very close to Abbas, and maintains an extensive network of contacts, including Israelis.

During the conversation, according to the report, Kerry asked Agha to convey a message to Abbas and ask him to “hold on and be strong.” Tell him, he told Agha, “that he should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, that he will not break and will not yield to President [Donald] Trump’s demands.” (Read more from “Kerry Tells Palestinian Authority: Do Not Give in to Trump” HERE)

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Scientists Clone Monkeys, Break Barrier to Human Cloning

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By Reuters. Chinese scientists have cloned monkeys using the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep two decades ago, breaking a technical barrier that could open the door to copying humans.

Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, two identical long-tailed macaques, were born eight and six weeks ago, making them the first primates — the order of mammals that includes monkeys, apes and humans — to be cloned from a non-embryonic cell.

It was achieved through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which involves transferring the nucleus of a cell, which includes its DNA, into an egg which has had its nucleus removed.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai said their work should be a boon to medical research by making it possible to study diseases in populations of genetically uniform monkeys.

But it also brings the feasibility of cloning to the doorstep of our own species. (Read more from “Scientists Clone Monkeys, Break Barrier to Human Cloning” HERE)

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In a Scientific First, Cloned Monkeys Are Born

By Sharon Begley. There have been mice and cows and pigs and camels, bunnies and bantengs and ferrets and dogs, but ever since Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal in 1996, the list has had a conspicuous hole: primates. Now that hole has been filled.

Scientists in China reported on Wednesday in Cell that they had cloned two healthy long-tailed macaque monkeys from the cells of another macaque, using the Dolly technique. The two clones, born 51 and 49 days ago, were created from a fetus’s cells; so far, the scientists have not been able to make the tricky procedure work when they used cells from adult macaques. That would seem to postpone the dystopian day when cloning children and grown-ups becomes as mainstream as IVF. But because “the technical barrier [to cloning primates] is now broken,” co-author Mu-ming Poo of the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai told reporters, the technique “could be applied to humans” — something he said his team has no intention of doing and sees no reason for.

Cloning pioneers said the monkey clones represented, as Dr. Robert Lanza put it, “an impressive breakthrough, which overcomes the last major hurdle in the field.” Lanza co-led teams that cloned a gaur in 2000 and in 2014 used the Dolly technique to produce human embryos (but not pregnancies) from the cells of an adult. (Read more from “In a Scientific First, Cloned Monkeys Are Born” HERE)

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Oxford University Extended Exam Times for Women to Improve Their Grades: Report

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Prestigious Oxford University in Britain extended exam times exclusively to women in a bid to improve their scores, reports on Monday said.

Female students taking math and computer science tests in the summer of 2017 were given an additional 15 minutes to finish, according to the documents obtained by the London Times.

No changes were made to the difficulty or length of questions. The university reportedly said women performed better as a result of the extension.

The move came after university officials deemed female candidates more likely to suffer from “the undue effects of time pressure” and thought the time extension could “mitigate the … gender gap that has arisen in recent years.”

The officials also said they believed the exam “should be a demonstration of mathematical understanding and not a time trial.” (Read more from “Oxford University Extended Exam Times for Women to Improve Their Grades: Report” HERE)

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ISIS Calling Again for Assassinations, Ambushes

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Islamic State is far from defeated in Iraq and Syria, actively sending out messages to its extremists to revert to the terrorist group’s tactics of assassinations, bombs and ambushes.

The Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which monitors jihadi chatter, reports that the orders have gone out in online publications and social media for a new way of fighting after the loss of the territory that protected the caliphate.

Other analysts are saying that, while the Iraqi government declared full liberation of all territories last month, Islamic remains adaptable and deadly.

“The end of the physical caliphate does not equal an end of the war or an end to their strategic goals,” retired Army Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik, who led troops in Iraq, told The Washington Times.

Islamic State is the remnant of a semiconventional army of over 40,000 terrorists who rose up in Syria and invaded Iraq in 2014. But the organization still claims hundreds of fiercely committed fighters and thousands of loyalists in those two countries. (Read more from “ISIS Calling Again for Assassinations, Ambushes” HERE)

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Study Reveals How Migrants Really Feel About Non-Muslims

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Muslim migrants in Austria tend to express “Medieval” attitudes toward Jews, homosexuals, women and non-Muslims, according to an academic survey.

The study by Ednan Aslan, professor of Islamic Religious Education at the University of Vienna, interviewed a sample of 288 of the approximately 4,000 predominantly Afghan asylum seekers in state care in the southeastern Austrian city of Graz, according to the Austrian daily Kurier, Breitbart reported.

The survey found that some 54.5 percent believe Jewish people don’t care about anyone but themselves, and 44.2 percent think Judaism is actively harmful to the world.

Aslan observed: “For certain refugees anti-Semitism is a matter of course, which has given the refugee movement a new dimension.”

Strikingly, nearly 50 percent said Islam played a bigger role in their lives in Austria than it did in their native countries. (Read more from “Study Reveals How Migrants Really Feel About Non-Muslims” HERE)

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Trump Considering Big Punishment for China

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President Donald Trump said Wednesday he is considering a “fine” against China as part of his administration’s probe into China’s alleged theft of intellectual property.

The comments, made in an interview with Reuters, appear to signal an increased willingness to take retaliatory trade action against China.

The U.S. launched a formal investigation this summer into allegations that China facilitates the theft of U.S. technology and intellectual property, in some cases forcing U.S. companies into delivering technology into Chinese hands as a cost of doing business. Under U.S. trade law, the administration can impose retalitory tarrifs and other trade sanctions against China if it concludes China is engaged in wrongdoing. Earlier reports from the U.S. government found China to be the worst infringer of intellectual property rights in the world.

Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser, told Reuters that the U.S. Trade Representative, who is directing the investigation, would be making a report and recommendations to the White House soon. (Read more from “Trump Considering Big Punishment for China” HERE)

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A Study Just Revealed the Truth About ‘Worst-Case’ Global Warming Scenarios

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Earth’s surface will almost certainly not warm up four or five degrees Celsius by 2100, according to a study released Wednesday which, if correct, voids worst-case UN climate change predictions.

A revised calculation of how greenhouse gases drive up the planet’s temperature reduces the range of possible end-of-century outcomes by more than half, researchers said in the report, published in the journal Nature . . .

How effectively the world slashes CO2 and methane emissions, improves energy efficiency, and develops technologies to remove CO2 from the air will determine whether climate change remains manageable or unleashes a maelstrom of human misery.

But uncertainty about how hot things will get also stems from the inability of scientists to nail down a very simple question: By how much will Earth’s average surface temperature go up if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is doubled?

That “known unknown” is called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), and for the last 25 years the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the ultimate authority on climate science — has settled on a range of 1.5 C to 4.5 C (2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit). (Read more from “A Study Just Revealed the Truth About ‘Worst-Case’ Global Warming Scenarios” HERE)

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Pope Apologizes for Pedophile Priests

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On Tuesday, the first day of a week-long Latin-America trip, Pope Francis asked “for forgiveness” for the “irreparable damage” done to children who were raped and molested by Catholic priests in Chile.

The pontiff met with a small group of abuse survivors at a “strictly private” gathering at the Vatican’s Apostolic Nunciature embassy in the capital, Santiago, the Vatican said.

Francis listened to their stories, “prayed with them and wept with them,” spokesman Greg Burke told reporters.

Earlier in the day, the pontiff made his first public remarks about abuse in a speech at La Moneda presidential palace.

Addressing Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, lawmakers, judges and other authorities, the pope said he felt “bound to express my pain and shame” that some of Chile’s clergy had sexually abused children who were in their care. (Read more from “Pope Apologizes for Pedophile Priests” HERE)

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New Scandal in Obama’s War Against Netanyahu

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. . .Last October, WND CEO Joseph Farah pointed out the Obama administration sent money in 2015 to a non-profit U.S. group that sought to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from forming a coalition government to remain as prime minister.

Now there’s new information, according to the American Center for Law and Justice, that the Obama administration’s intervention was even worse.

ACLJ said that in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, it “uncovered a startling revelation.”

“Yasser Mahmoud Abbas, son of Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the terrorist-allied Palestinian Authority, was also a senior leader and advisor to OneVoice – and, as demonstrated by the contents of the documents themselves, the Obama administration knew this,” ACLJ said in a report Wednesday.

“In short, the Obama State Department gave U.S. taxpayer dollars to a terrorist-affiliated organization (the PA recently united with the terrorist group Hamas) to unseat the democratically elected leader of the only free democracy in the Middle East and a vital U.S. ally.” (Read more from “New Scandal in Obama’s War Against Netanyahu” HERE)

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