American Airlines Captain DIES While Flying Plane With Over 100 Passengers

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An American Airlines pilot died after becoming ill on an overnight “red eye” flight from Phoenix to Boston, American Airlines confirmed to Today in the Sky.

The incident occurred about four hours into Flight 550, which then diverted to Syracuse and landed there around 7:10 a.m. Monday morning, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware . . .

While the death of a pilot during a flight could raise concern among uneasy fliers, the captain and first officer are each capable of flying commercial airliners alone. The Federal Aviation Administration requires two crew members in the cockpit at all times for just such an emergency.

“Pilots train for the incapacitation of another crew member,” said John Cox, a former airline pilot and now a consultant as head of Safety Operating Systems, “This would have been something the first officer was trained to deal with” . . .

Flight 550 was on an Airbus A320 and had 147 passengers and five crewmembers, according to American. The flight spent about four hours on the ground in Syracuse and then continued on to Boston after a replacement crew arrived to the aircraft in Syracuse. (Read more from “American Airlines Captain DIES While Flying Plane With Over 100 Passengers” HERE)

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Snowden: I’d Go to Prison to Return to the US

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Edward Snowden says he has offered to return to the United States and go to jail for leaking details of National Security Agency programs to intercept electronic communications data on a vast scale.

The former NSA contractor flew to Moscow two years ago after revealing information about the previously secret eavesdropping powers, and faces U.S. charges that could land him in prison for up to 30 years . . .

Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, Britain’s GCHQ and other intelligence agencies set off an international debate about spies’ powers to monitor personal communications, and about the balance between security and privacy. (Read more from “Snowden: I’d Go to Prison to Return to the US” HERE)

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Medical Miracle: Doctors Reattach Toddler’s Decapitated HEAD After Horrific Car Crash

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This child has made a miracle recovery after his HEAD was internally decapitated in a car crash . . .

The 16-month-old toddler was with his mum and nine-year-old sister Shayne when they collided head on with another vehicle at 70mph on September 15.

The child was airlifted from the site of the crash to a hospital in Brisbane.

The force from the collision was so intense that Jaxon’s head pulled apart from his neck in an internal decapitation, according to spinal surgeon Dr Geoff Askin.

Incredibly , the medics now have been able to reattach his head, reported 7NewsMelbourne. (Read more from “Medical Miracle: Doctors Reattach Toddler’s Decapitated HEAD After Horrific Car Crash” HERE)

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Author: Hillary Has a Long History of Beating up Bill Behind Closed Doors

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She’s on a mission to be a softer, warmer, funnier candidate — but according to a new book, the real Hillary Clinton is so volatile and prone to violent outbursts that she terrorizes staff, Secret Service agents and even her own husband.

In “The Clintons’ War On Women” (Skyhorse), out Oct. 13, political strategist Roger Stone details Hillary’s abusive behavior — dating back to the Clintons’ days in Arkansas, where Bill served as governor.

“Hillary Clinton has a long history of being domestically violent with Bill,” Stone writes. “Hillary has beaten Bill, hit him with hard objects, scratched and clawed him, and made him bleed.”

Stone, a controversial figure who recently decamped from Donald Trump’s campaign, also delves into the more fantastical rumors that have dogged the Clintons for years.

Accounts of marital discord, however, have been well-reported for decades. Even Bill Clinton’s former press officer Dee Dee Myers later admitted that she covered for the first lady. (Read more from “Author: Hillary Has a Long History of Beating up Bill Behind Closed Doors” HERE)

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‘World’s Biggest’ Snake Has Been Discovered – and It Will Send Chills Down Your Spine [+video]

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A new contender for the title of world’s biggest snake has been discovered.

With a head that dwarfs any human’s and a seemingly neverending body the terrifying beast is sure to send chills down your spine.

Footage has emerged of the snake bound up in chains after it was captured in the wild, but that doesn’t make it any less fearsome.

As the camera pans along the snake its body is swollen in places as evidence of its voracious appetite. (Read more from “‘World’s Biggest’ Snake Has Been Discovered – and It Will Send Chills Down Your Spine” HERE)

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Here Are the ‘Official’ Amount of Ways to Get Sick or Die

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There are 70,000 ways to get sick, hurt or mortally injured, and the U.S. is making them official.

On Thursday, U.S. hospitals, doctors and other care providers have to start using internationally developed standards called ICD-10 codes to bill government programs and private insurers in the nation’s $2.9 trillion-a-year health-care system. The codes cover everything from parrot bites to getting sucked into a jet engine.

Doctors have already begun mocking the diagnostic list, picking out the most absurd and arcane, such as Z63.1, “Problems in relationship with in-laws,” or V91.07XA, “Burn due to water skis on fire.” Yet for health-care providers who have payments at stake, the complex change is no joke.

Health insurers and government programs stopped accepting the old set of codes, called ICD-9, in the early morning hours Thursday, completing the switch. In a study released last month, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said “little is known” about how much it will cost the health-care system to make the transition. HCA Holdings Inc., the Nashville, Tennessee-based hospital chain, said 2015 costs for the transition to the new codes will be about $30 million.

Insurers began preparing for ICD-10 in 2010 and have been ready since the government first delayed implementation in 2012, said Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a Washington-based industry group. “Every deadline that has come up, we were ready.” (Read more from “Here Are the ‘Official’ Amount of Ways to Get Sick or Die” HERE)

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Obama’s New Ozone Standard Has Green Groups Seeing Red

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The Obama administration handed a win to industry groups Thursday on a fiercely debated rule for smog-causing ozone pollution — leaving green groups feeling betrayed once again and threatening legal action.

The new EPA standard is stricter than one the George W. Bush administration had set in 2008, but it’s far laxer than what environmental and public health groups consider necessary to lessen illnesses like childhood asthma.

Thursday’s action came four years after the White House abruptly squelched an earlier EPA attempt to tighten the ozone rule, a move that greens still regard as one of the great betrayals of Obama’s presidency.

David Baron, the managing attorney with Earthjustice, called the standard “weak-kneed” and “a betrayal of the Clean Air Act’s promise of healthy air.” He said it is likely his group and other environmentalists would sue.

“Lowering the smog standard … is a modest step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough to protect the millions of Americans living in communities with dangerously high levels of smog pollution,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune. (Read more from “Obama’s New Ozone Standard Has Green Groups Seeing Red” HERE)

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Google Exec: With Robots in Our Brains, We’ll Be Godlike [+video]

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I suspect a few of you are looking forward to being robots.

Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the idea of becoming someone other than themselves? We do get so tired of being the same dull soul every day.

What kind of robots will we be? Happily, I can provide an answer. For living inside my head all day have been the words of Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil.

For more than a curt while, he’s been keen on humans going over to the bright side. He’s predicted that humans will be hybrid robots by 2030.

But what will this be like? More importantly, what will this feel like? Are you ready to engage what’s left of your humorous humanity when I offer you the information that Kurzweil believes we’re going to be quite wonderful people when we’re part robot? (Read more from “Google Exec: With Robots in Our Brains, We’ll Be Godlike” HERE)

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NASA Announces Incredible Discovery on the Surface of Mars

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In a groundbreaking announcement Monday, NASA officials confirmed their discovery of liquid water on the surface of Mars.

“Today,” NASA Director of Planetary Science Jim Green said, “we’re revolutionizing our understanding of the planet.”

While scientists have largely agreed that the planet consists of ice, the discovery of salty, flowing water represents a new chapter in our understanding of Mars.

“Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past,” Green continued.

While he went on to qualify that the liquid water was observable “under certain circumstances,” Green described the discovery as “tremendously exciting” and “a great opportunity” to learn even more. (Read more from “NASA Announces Incredible Discovery on the Surface of Mars” HERE)

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DARPA Is Implanting Chips in Soldiers’ Brains, According to This New Book

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For decades, DARPA, the secretive research arm of the Department of Defense, has dreamed of turning soldiers into cyborgs. And now it’s finally happening. The agency has funded projects that involve implanting chips into soldiers’ brains that they hope will enhance performance on the battlefield and repair traumatized brains once the fog of war has lifted.

“Of the 2.5 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, 300,000 of them came home with traumatic brain injury,” journalist Annie Jacobsen told NPR. “DARPA initiated a series of programs to help cognitive functioning, to repair some of this damage. And those programs center around putting brain chips inside the tissue of the brain.”

In her new book about the history of DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” Jacobsen writes that scientists are already testing “neuroprosthetics” brain implants, but that despite her multiple appeals to the Defense Department, she was not allowed to interview any of the “brain-wounded warriors.”

However, Defense One, an online magazine that covers the military, reported last year on DARPA’s work on brain chips to treat PTSD, and said that DARPA was not yet in the testing phase. “The military hopes to have a prototype within 5 years and then plans to seek FDA approval,” according to Defense One. When DARPA launched its RAM (Restoring Active Memory) program last year, it projected it would be about four years until researchers were implanting chips in human.

Creating super soldiers isn’t the only thing that DARPA is trying to do. According to Jacobsen’s new book, published by Little, Brown, government scientists hope that implanting chips in soldiers will unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence, and allow us to give machines the kind of higher-level reasoning that humans can do. (Read more from “DARPA Is Implanting Chips in Soldiers’ Brains, According to This New Book” HERE)

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