1494: Radiation Tsunami

Hi Adam,

I've written you before (practicing Internist, medical&research for over 20 yrs, etc, you've verified me previously) - Listening to episode 1491 while doing chores & my reaction to the segment on athletes with heart conditions was to exclaim "What the F*&*?" in front of my 4 year old.

John is exactly correct in his observations - the rate of a young athlete dying does equate to hearing about it once a year - it is NOT a common thing. The artfulness of these news pieces along with others is that they weave truth in such a way that it becomes a lie. They don't outright state false medical statistics that you can look up an verify. Every single condition that leads to a young athlete dying are classified under "Rare" conditions. Every single serious heart condition a young person has is classified as "rare".

As physicians we are taught from day 1 to look at diseases and diagnosis based on demographics. I.e. how old is the person, male or female, etc. to help with diagnosis. Every single disease entity is classified in our minds as common or rare. To present young individuals dying or having heart conditions as something every parent should hear about is incredibly misleading. We of course know why they are doing this, but the fact that they are doing this scares and saddens me. It means that they're already covering their a$$, I mean agendas - and we will be seeing more young healthy people needlessly die.

The last few years has forced me to grow up in ways I did not anticipate - but you cannot un-know what you now know or un-see what you now see. I am a physician whom was taught by leaders in their fields. I read and believed what I read in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the CDC website, etc. My views and advice now classify me as a quack whom can lose my license and board status. I would like to say the web of special interests and monetary exchanges all started with COVID, but alas it did not.

TYFYC!

Link

Link

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:59

GCSE exam halls are ditching analogue clocks because children are struggling to read the time - preferring the digital format typically displayed on their iPhonesYoungsters are now struggling to tell the time on a traditional analogue clockEducation leaders say smartphones digital clocks are the main driver behind itAnd teachers worry that pupils could miscalculate the time left during exams By Eleanor Harding Education Editor For The Daily Mail

Published: 20:53 EDT, 9 October 2022 | Updated: 21:12 EDT, 9 October 2022

Children have to learn to tell the time using an analogue clock by the age of seven '' but it appears many quickly forget the skill.

Digital clocks are being displayed in GCSE exam halls because pupils struggle to tell the time on a traditional clock.

Education leaders say digital clocks on smartphones are the main driver behind youngsters losing the skill.

Teachers worry that pupils could miscalculate the time left during exams or waste time trying to work it out.

Children have to learn to tell the time using an analogue clock by the age of seven '' but it appears many quickly forget the skill

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: 'We're aware of some schools replacing analogue clocks with digital clocks in exam rooms.

'Young people taking exams have been brought up in a digital age and many just don't necessarily see analogue clocks and watches as much as older generations did when they were growing up. It's literally a case of changing times.'

Teachers have also described the problem on social media. One tweeted: 'Lots of students can really struggle in exams as very often there is still an analogue clock at the front and they can't understand it.'

Education leaders say digital clocks on smartphones are the main driver behind youngsters losing the skill

Another said: 'So many of our kids don't know how to read a clock. While they don't need it, it is a skill that they should know.'

Steve Chalke, founder of Oasis Charitable Trust, which runs about 50 schools, told The Times: 'We use a mix of digital and traditional clocks to overcome this potential problem.'

Jeremy Hobbins, from Birmingham City University, said the course was 'thriving, albeit niche' as young people were attracted by the micro-engineering behind mechanical timepieces. He added: 'Fears the Apple Watch might kill off the mechanical watch industry have proved unfounded and even they have representations of analogue time as an option on their screens.'

Advertisement

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:57

(C) Helayne Seidman Reports from the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools documented multiple cases of sexually-charged behavior by female teachers.

Schoolmarms are going wild in New York City.Newly released reports from the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools documented multiple cases of shocking sexually-charged behavior by female teachers and aides in city public schools '-- from bedding students to sending explicit photos to high schoolers to exposing bare breasts to remote-learning 5-year-olds.

Natalie Black, 27, a teacher at Hillside Arts and Letters Academy in Queens, sent at least 15 raunchy snaps of herself "in lingerie or nude" to a 17-year-old male student beginning in late 2021, an SCI report said. The boy was interviewed by the NYPD, but no charges were filed.

By March 2022, the report found, Black's bad behavior escalated: she showed male students photos of her vagina, pulled down her pants in a student's home and told him to "eat my ass," and sent kids videos of herself "deep throating" a liquor bottle and dancing naked from the waist down.

Danielle Medellin, then 24, exchanged nearly 5,500 ''very flirtatious'' texts with a boy in her class.

Hillside administrators never informed the school community of the investigation, students said.

Black refused to cooperate with SCI investigators. She was "removed from DOE service" while the probe was ongoing, the report noted '-- but remains a DOE employee, according to her active LinkedIn page, which also sends readers to self-created videos of Black's singing performances on YouTube.

The SCI report recommended that Black be permanently removed from the DOE workforce, "given her total unfitness as a pedagogue." The DOE declined to provide Black's employment status.

Michelle Zak, then 31, "engaged in an inappropriate relationship" with two of her underage students.

In another galling incident, Makita Brooks-Stanton, a paraprofessional at PS 160 in Queens, took her phone along to a May 2020 doctor's visit '-- then stripped down for a breast exam in full view of her remote-learning pre-kindergarten class.

(C) youtube.com Natalie Black sent at least 15 raunchy snaps of herself ''in lingerie or nude'' to a 17-year-old male student.

"She even had the doctor say hi to the class on Google Meet," said a mortified mother who was monitoring the session over her 5-year-old's shoulder.

"She was in her blue gown and that's when she was exposed," the mom told The Post last week. "It was a frontal view."

Brooks-Stanton flashed the tots for "about two minutes," said the mom, whose shouts eventually got the class' lead teacher to shut down the offending screen.

The "breast exposure to a pre-K class did not appear purposeful," SCI investigators concluded '-- but Brooks-Stanton's "actions showed a serious lack of professionalism."

"I felt really bad when I registered the complaint," the mother said. "I think this was just a poor judgment call on her part."

Brooks-Stanton remains at PS 160, families said.

In other cases substantiated by SCI: Danielle Medellin, then 24, exchanged nearly 5,500 "very flirtatious," "sexual tension"-filled texts with a boy in one of her 11th-grade math classes at Manhattan's Institute for Collaborative Education. She resigned before she could be fired, as SCI recommended '-- and then snagged a job as a New York Times data analyst, according to her LinkedIn page. Michelle Zak, then 31, "engaged in an inappropriate relationship" with two of her underage students at the Queens High School of Teaching, Liberal Arts, and Sciences, smoking pot with them and hosting them for sleepovers. She was assigned to a non-classroom DOE job while the investigation was underway and is now a self-employed tutor. Makita Brooks stripped down for a breast exam in full view of her remote-learning pre-kindergarten class.

Juliana Garofalo, another Institute for Collaborative Education teacher, told co-workers that she had a "sexual relationship" with a male student before he graduated in 2018. The then-33-year-old resigned from the DOE before SCI recommended her termination '-- but sued the city when word of the damning report got back to the private Connecticut school that had unknowingly hired her. A New York State Supreme Court judge dismissed her case in December, saying that Garofalo's behavior was "utterly disqualifying" for any teaching job. Zak declined to comment, as did Garofalo's attorney. The others did not respond to queries.

Seven of the 21 substantiated SCI reports on sexual misbehavior in city schools released to The Post in the last two months involve female perpetrators '-- a ratio in line with the national average, according to the advocacy group Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation (SESAME).

"I'm outraged," SESAME founder Terri Miller told The Post. "How dare these teachers '-- who are put in a position of trust over our children '-- violate that trust so egregiously? These incidents are going to put a mark of trauma on every single one of those children." Miller warned against the tendency to minimize the damage done by female teachers who prey on teen boys.

"Studies find that boys offended by a female are more likely to suffer more severe psychological trauma, more likely to become addicted to alcohol and drugs, and more likely to drop out of school," she said.

"This is a life-threatening trauma and injury that bad-apple teachers are inflicting on our children '-- and they are children," Miller added. "Damage done."

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:57

October 04, 2022 | Judicial Watch(Washington, DC) '' Judicial Watch announced today that it received 249 pages of records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailing the extensive media plans for a propaganda campaign to push the COVID-19 vaccine.

The records were received in in response to an August 2021 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)lawsuit filed after HHS failed to respond to a April 19, 2021 request for records related to the Biden HHS' ''COVID-19 Community Corps '' program (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:22-cv-02315)).

Judicial Watch is asking for all records regarding the application process; all organizations asking to be chosen to participate; all grants; and all communications of representatives of the Department of Health and Human Services regarding the program.

PGS 30- 34 The newly released records include a document titled ''PEC [Public Education Campaign] Plan April 19 -May 31 [2021],'' which includes the following media plans and action items:

Major [Public Education] Projects in April

Vaccine engagement package to all entertainment talent and management agenciesVaccine engagement package to all media companies and show producersOutreach to major culture event producersOutreach with WCDT [likely We Can Do This ] brand and engagement ideas to major businesses and associationsLaunch Community Corps Business ChapterStart celebrity Share the Mics***

POTUS May 1-31

Late night hosts vaccination video.***

Additional Ideas to be Considered

Digital Media

Produce HHS question-and-answer videos featuring local Black doctors discussing the vaccines, how they work, and why the public should get vaccinatedRequest that Tom Brady create a video with his parents encouraging vaccination (his parents had COVID last year and he has talked about their tough recovery).Create custom partnerships with the social media platforms with algorithms to hit the audience.Launch Hollywood comedy writers video content.***

Work with YouTube on an original special about vaccinations targeted to young people (similar to the YouTube's Dear Call of 2020 special).Work with Instagram to produce a series about vaccines for @Instagram (the largest social media account in the world, 387 million followers). Feature young creators doing in-depth pieces about young people's questions. Request a Stories Highlight on Vaccines on @Instagram to stay on the account through 2021.Request major TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram influences to create videos of themselves being vaccinated and start a special campaign of funny and/or musical videos about being vaccinate to encourage others to create content and post.Earned Media

Request a vaccination special on Christian Broadcast Network featur[ing] Evangelical leaders.Request that the major live TV entertainment shows feature hosts being vaccinated on air (ex: the hosts of The Voice).Request that the TV morning and daytime talk shows feature special vaccination reunion moments with everyday Americans talking about what this means to them (ex: hugging grandma for the first time).Convene an editorial meeting with the publishers of Catholic newspapers and newsletters across the country (ex: America Magazine, Florida Catholic, The Catholic Spirit, The Tablet).Dr. Biden interview with Chip and Joanna Gaines for Magnolia.Request vaccination specials with BET, The Undefeated, Desus & Mero, Sneaker Shopper. Hot Ones.Request a vaccination special With Christian Broadcasting Netflix and Evangelical leaders.Place a trusted messenger on the Joe Rogan Show and Barstool Sports to promote vaccination (work with outside expert to identify who will be most effective).Partnerships

Work with the NFL, NASCAR, MLB, CMA to request they create content with their talent and release through their broadcast and social channels. Also create a Share the Mic program where the talent elevates public health voices.Work with all major sports leagues to send vaccination information to ticket holdersWork with ESPN for hosts to provide vaccination information.Partner with Disneyland Parks for vaccination events when the amusement parks reopen.Work with the Hollywood guilds to work vaccination messaging into scriped and reality TV shows (ex: Writers Guild, Directors Guild.)''These records show a disturbing and massive campaign by the Biden administration to propagandize and politicize the controversial COVID vaccine,'' said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. ''It seems as if the entire entertainment industry was an agent for the government!''

Through FOIA, Judicial Watch has uncovered a substantial amount of information about COVID-19 issues:

Recently, NIH records revealed an FBI ''inquiry'' into the NIH's controversial bat coronavirus grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The records also show National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) officials were concerned about ''gain-of-function'' research in China's Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016. The Fauci agency was also concerned about EcoHealth Alliance's lack of compliance with reporting rules and use of gain-of-function research in the NIH-funded research involving bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.HHS records revealed that from 2014 to 2019, $826,277 was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research by the NIAID.NIAID records showed that it gave nine China-related grants to EcoHealth Alliance to research coronavirus emergence in bats and was the NIH's top issuer of grants to the Wuhan lab itself. The records also included an email from the vice director of the Wuhan Lab asking an NIH official for help finding disinfectants for decontamination of airtight suits and indoor surfaces.HHS records included an ''urgent for Dr. Fauci '' email chain, citing ties between the Wuhan lab and the taxpayer-funded EcoHealth Alliance . The government emails also reported that the foundation of U.S. billionaire Bill Gates worked closely with the Chinese government to pave the way for Chinese-produced medications to be sold outside China and help ''raise China's voice of governance by placing representatives from China on important international counsels as high level commitment from China.''HHS records included a grant application for research involving the coronavirus that appears to describe ''gain-of-function '' research involving RNA extractions from bats, experiments on viruses, attempts to develop a chimeric virus and efforts to genetically manipulate the full-length bat SARSr-CoV WIV1 strain molecular clone.HHS records showed the State Department and NIAID knew immediately in January 2020 that China was withholding COVID data , which was hindering risk assessment and response by public health officials.University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) records show the former director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), Dr. James W. Le Duc warned Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of potential investigations into the COVID issue by Congress.HHS records regarding biodistribution studies and related data for the COVID-19 vaccines show a key component of the vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), were found outside the injection site , mainly the liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries of test animals, eight to 48 hours after injection.Records from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) reveal safety lapses and violations at U.S. biosafety laboratories that conduct research on dangerous agents and toxins.HHS records include emails between National Institutes of Health (NIH) then-Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), about hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19.HHS records show that NIH officials tailored confidentiality forms to China's terms and that the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an unreleased, ''strictly confidential'' COVID-19 epidemiological analysis in January 2020.Fauci emails include his approval of a press release supportive of China's response to the 2019 novel coronavirus.###

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:56

Don't assume the worst is over, says investor Larry McDonald.

There's talk of a policy pivot by the Federal Reserve as interest rates rise quickly and stocks keep falling. Both may continue.

McDonald, founder of The Bear Traps Report and author of ''A Colossal Failure of Common Sense,'' which described the 2008 failure of Lehman Brothers, expects more turmoil in the bond market, in part, because ''there is $50 trillion more in world debt today than there was in 2018.'' And that will hurt equities.

The bond market dwarfs the stock market '-- both have fallen this year, although the rise in interest rates has been worse for bond investors because of the inverse relationship between rates (yields) and bond prices.

About 600 institutional investors from 23 countries participate in chats on the Bear Traps site. During an interview, McDonald said the consensus among these money managers is ''things are breaking,'' and that the Federal Reserve will have to make a policy change fairly soon.

Pointing to the bond-market turmoil in the U.K., McDonald said government bonds with 0.5% coupons that mature in 2061 were trading at 97 cents to the dollar in December, 58 cents in August and as low as 24 cents over recent weeks.

When asked if institutional investors could simply hold on to those bonds to avoid booking losses, he said that because of margin calls on derivative contracts, some institutional investors were forced to sell and take massive losses.

Read: British bond market turmoil is sign of sickness growing in markets

And investors haven't yet seen the financial statements reflecting those losses '-- they happened too recently. Write-downs of bond valuations and the booking of losses on some of those will hurt bottom-line results for banks and other institutional money managers.

Interest rates aren't high, historicallyNow, in case you think interest rates have already gone through the roof, check out this chart, showing yields for 10-year U.S. Treasury notes TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.962% over the past 30 years:

The yield on 10-year Treasury notes has risen considerably as the Federal Reserve has tightened during 2022, but it is at an average level if you look back 30 years. FactSet The 10-year yield is right in line with its 30-year average. Now look at the movement of forward price-to-earnings ratios for S&P 500 SPX, +1.73% since March 31, 2000, which is as far back as FactSet can go for this metric:

FactSet The index's weighted forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 15.4 is way down from its level two years ago. However, it is not very low when compared to the average of 16.3 since March 2000 or to the 2008 crisis-bottom valuation of 8.8.

Then again, rates don't have to be high to hurtMcDonald said that interest rates didn't need to get anywhere near as high as they were in 1994 or 1995 '-- as you can see in the first chart '-- to cause havoc, because ''today there is a lot of low-coupon paper in the world.''

''So when yields go up, there is a lot more destruction'' than in previous central-bank tightening cycles, he said.

It may seem the worst of the damage has been done, but bond yields can still move higher.

Heading into the next Consumer Price Index report on Oct. 13, strategists at Goldman Sachs warned clients not to expect a change in Federal Reserve policy, which has included three consecutive 0.75% increases in the federal funds rate to its current target range of 3.00% to 3.25%.

The Federal Open Market Committee has also been pushing long-term interest rates higher through reductions in its portfolio of U.S. Treasury securities. After reducing these holdings by $30 billion a month in June, July and August, the Federal Reserve began reducing them by $60 billion a month in September. And after reducing its holdings of federal agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $17.5 billion a month for three months, the Fed began reducing these holdings by $35 billion a month in September.

Bond-market analysts at BCA Research led by Ryan Swift wrote in a client note on Oct. 11 that they continued to expect the Fed not to pause its tightening cycle until the first or second quarter of 2023. They also expect the default rate on high-yield (or junk) bonds to increase to 5% from the current rate of 1.5%. The next FOMC meeting will be held Nov. 1-2, with a policy announcement on Nov. 2.

McDonald said that if the Federal Reserve raises the federal funds rate by another 100 basis points and continues its balance-sheet reductions at current levels, ''they will crash the market.''

A pivot may not prevent painMcDonald expects the Federal Reserve to become concerned enough about the market's reaction to its monetary tightening to ''back away over the next three weeks,'' announce a smaller federal funds rate increase of 0.50% in November ''and then stop.''

He also said that there will be less pressure on the Fed following the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 8.

Don't miss: Dividend yields on preferred stocks have soared. This is how to pick the best ones for your portfolio.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:56

By Associated Press ' Updated: 11/10/2022

Ukrainian refugees queue for food in the welcome area after their arrival at the main train station in Berlin, Germany, March 8, 2022. -

Copyright

AP Photo/Michael SohnThe German government pledged on Tuesday to provide more support to cities and towns struggling to house the more than 1.1 million refugees and migrants who have arrived in the country this year, mostly from war-torn Ukraine but also other countries such as Syria and Afghanistan.

After meeting with state and local officials, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said while the government already allocated federal real estate for tens of thousands of refugees earlier this year, it would immediately provide additional property for about 4,000 refugees to ease the current housing crisis.

Faeser also promised financial support but did not give any concrete figures.

Several cities have recently started putting up tents and turned convention centres into temporary accommodation as regular migrant centres have become overcrowded.

''I don't want to downplay this, we have a tense situation,'' Faeser told reporters in Berlin. "That's why we discussed today how to best coordinate our assistance to refugees ... also in view of the winter months that lie ahead.''

More than one million people have entered Germany from Ukraine since Russia attacked the eastern European country on Feb. 24. About a third of them are children and teenagers, and more than 70 per cent of the adults are women.

''It's a big humanitarian effort to take good care of the refugees from Ukraine, to provide shelters, to provide daycare centres and schools for the children and to give them social support,'' Faeser said. She added that Germany was expecting more refugees from Ukraine as Russia escalates its brutal attacks on Ukraine and people there may be struggling even more to survive during the cold winter months.

While the interior minister stressed that Germany was ready to welcome more Ukrainians despite the difficult housing situation, she struck a significantly different tone regarding asylum-seekers from other countries, especially those trying to reach Germany via the so-called Balkans migration route.

''The number of asylum applications has increased in recent months, as has the number of unauthorised entries. Not only in Germany, but overall along the European Union's external borders, the pressure is currently increasing," Faeser said. "That's why we also have to clearly ensure a limit.''

As of the end of September, 134,908 people had applied for asylum in Germany in 2022. That is around a third more than in the same period last year, according to figures from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. However, it's still a far call from 2015-16, when more than 1 million migrants from countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan applied for asylum in Germany.

The figures for asylum applications in 2022 are much lower than the total number of refugees because Ukrainians can enter Germany without a visa and do not need to apply for asylum.

In an effort to keep other migrants from crossing into the country, the interior minister said Germany would extend and increase its border controls to Austria for another six months and also intensify controls to the Czech Republic.

The move comes after Austria and the Czech Republic introduced temporary border controls to Slovakia last month to keep migrants from entering their countries.

Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia all belong to the European Union's visa-free Schengen zone, where residents of member nations typically can cross borders without presenting passports or visas. However, Schengen countries have adopted temporary border controls in the past for various reasons, including to curb illegal migration and to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Germany also sharply criticised Serbia '-- which is an EU candidate country but not a member yet '-- for its visa-free regime with some non-EU countries. Citizens from India, for example, are increasingly flying to Serbia, where they don't need visas unlike for EU countries, and then trying to cross into wealthier western European countries via the Balkans route.

''To be clear, Serbia's visa practice is unacceptable," Faeser said. "This also contributes to the movements on the Balkan route. Serbia must adapt its visa rules to those of the European Union. This is a clear expectation of the German government.''

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:55

CNN '--

Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered retired British spy Christopher Steele ''up to $1 million'' to prove the explosive allegations in his dossier about Donald Trump, a senior FBI analyst testified Tuesday.

The cash offer was made during an overseas October 2016 meeting between Steele and several top FBI officials who were trying to corroborate Steele's claims that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.

FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified that Steele never got the money because he could not ''prove the allegations.''

Auten also said Steele refused to provide the names of any of his sources during that meeting, and that Steele didn't give the FBI anything during that meeting that corroborated the claims in his explosive dossier.

Auten was testifying at the criminal trial of Igor Danchenko, a primary source for Steele's dossier, who is being prosecuted by special counsel John Durham. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty to five counts of lying to the FBI about his sourcing for some information that ended up in the dossier. His trial kicked off Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

Durham, a Trump-era prosecutor who is looking for misconduct in the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, handled most of the in-court arguments on Tuesday and personally questioned Auten on the witness stand '' a rare move for a special counsel and former US attorney.

In opening statements, prosecutors said Danchenko ''fabricated a source'' and ''concealed a source'' in his interviews with the FBI in January 2017, where investigators were furiously trying to ''corroborate or refute'' the details of the Trump-Russia dossier.

Prosecutor Michael Keilty said Danchenko's alleged lies ''corrupted'' the functions of the FBI.

Specifically, Danchenko's alleged deception tainted surveillance warrants that the FBI sought against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016 and 2017.

''Those lies mattered,'' Keilty said, because the FBI was essentially duped by Danchenko, and then included his inaccurate information in applications submitted to a judge to secure the Page wiretaps.

''This case is about protecting the functions and integrity of our institutions,'' Keilty said.

Danchenko's lawyers torched Durham during their own opening statements, accusing him of trying to dupe the jury into a conviction.

Attorney Danny Onorato criticized the prosecution's ''convoluted theory'' of the case, and told jurors that Durham will ''try to convince you that his truthful answer was somehow false.''

He told jurors that Durham wants them to ''defy common sense, logic and reality'' and to ''rewrite the dictionary'' to convict Danchenko.

''A truthful statement to an FBI agent '... cannot be a crime,'' Onorato added.

Things got heated when Onorato accused Keilty of lying in his own opening statement. Specifically, Onorato took issue with Keilty's comment that Danchenko was offered immunity during some of his FBI interviews.

''That's a lie '... he just lied to you,'' Onorato told the jurors. ''Think about that while you consider the government's case.''

Afterward, during a courtroom break, Keilty and Onorato got into a visible argument. Durham later asked District Judge Anthony Trenga to admonish Onorato. The judge told the jury that Onorato's assertions about the supposed immunity deal ''need to be clarified'' because the deal provided Danchenko partial immunity.

Durham was appointed in 2019 by former Attorney General Bill Barr to find government misconduct in the Trump-Russia probe. After three years, Durham only secured one conviction of a low-level FBI lawyer.

But his team used the Danchenko case Tuesday to put the FBI on trial, in some ways, and air some of the bureau's dirty laundry for all to see.

Keilty said in opening statements that the trial would cover the FBI's ''troubling conduct'' regarding the Page surveillance. He said the bureau ''should have uncovered'' Danchenko's alleged lies, ''but never did.''

Later, Durham spent a decent chunk of time showing jurors the warrant applications that the FBI submitted to surveil Page. Durham highlighted how the FBI kept using information from the Steele dossier to bolster its case for probable cause to secure the warrants '' even after the FBI came up empty in its efforts to corroborate Steele's claims.

Those FISA warrants were roundly criticized in a 2019 report from the Justice Department inspector general, which exposed a series of errors, flaws and omissions. Two of the four court-approved warrants were later deemed invalid.

Durham appeared to break new ground on the well-trodden topic of the dossier, with his revelation about the $1 million offer to Steele. CNN previously reported that the FBI reimbursed some expenses for Steele, who had been an FBI informant.

But the special counsel also debunked a prolific Trump lie about the Steele dossier '' that it was the reason why the FBI started investigating his campaign in 2016 for potentially conspiring with Russian agents.

This false claim has been refuted dozens of times over the years, in official Justice Department documentation, bipartisan reports from Congress, and numerous court filings. It was refuted again Tuesday, when Durham asked Auten, the FBI official, to tell jurors the reason why the Trump-Russia investigation was opened in late July 2016.

Auten confirmed what has been known for many years: the probe was launched after the US government got intelligence from a friendly country that a Trump campaign aide had bragged to one of its diplomats that the Russians had offered to help Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

The situation was all the more interesting because Trump has repeatedly acted as a cheerleader for Durham and has said Durham will validate his suspicions about massive government misconduct regarding the Russia probe. On Tuesday, Durham inadvertently affirmed a basic truth about the Russia probe that Trump has lied about for years.

The Steele dossier contained unverified allegations about Trump's connections to Russia, including his alleged business dealings, rumors of lurid trysts in Moscow and claims that his campaign collaborated with the Kremlin in 2016.

Trump vehemently denied the claims, and Steele's work has lost a significant amount of credibility over the years. Today, the dossier is largely seen as an unproven collection of rumors and gossip.

Regarding the collusion claims, special counsel Robert Mueller uncovered dozens of ties between Trump's campaign and Russia, but did not establish a criminal conspiracy.

This story has been updated with additional details.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:54

FSB says Ukrainian military intelligence blew up bridgeRussia arrests 5 Russians, 3 from Ukraine and ArmeniaUkraine has not taken responsibilityMOSCOW, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Russia's Federal Security Service said on Wednesday that it had detained five Russians and three citizens of Ukraine and Armenia in connection with the bombing of a vital bridge to Crimea, an attack it said was masterminded by Ukraine.

The FSB said the attack was organised by Ukrainian military intelligence and its director, Kyrylo Budanov - echoing accusations by President Vladimir Putin over what he has called a "terrorist attack" against critical civilian infrastructure.

"The organizer of the terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge was the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, its head Kyrylo Budanov, its employees and agents," said the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

Ukraine has not officially confirmed its involvement in the bridge blast on Saturday, but some Ukrainian officials have celebrated the damage and an unidentified Ukrainian official told the New York Times that Kyiv was behind the attack.

The FSB said the explosive device was camouflaged in rolls of construction polyethylene film on 22 pallets with a total weight of 22.7 tonnes, and moved from Ukraine to Russia via Bulgaria, Georgia and Armenia.

"Control over the movement of the cargo along the entire route and contacts with participants in the criminal transportation scheme were carried out by an employee of HUR MO," the FSB said in a statement, using the acronym for Ukrainian military intelligence.

The 12-mile (19 km) road and rail bridge, a prestige project personally opened by Putin in 2018, had become logistically vital to his military campaign, with supplies to Russian troops fighting in south Ukraine channelled through it.

The explosion wrecked one section of the road bridge, temporarily halting traffic. It also destroyed several fuel tankers on a train heading towards the annexed Crimean peninsula from neighbouring southern Russia.

On Monday Russian forces launched mass missile strikes against Ukrainian cities, including power supplies, in what Putin said was retaliation for the bridge bombing.

The FSB, headed by Putin ally Alexander Bortnikov, also said that it had prevented Ukrainian attacks in both Moscow and the western Russian city of Bryansk.

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:53

Japan's ancient sport might lose its fans if Sumo wrestlers continue to show disappointing performances in the ring.

Critics slammed poor technique, weak physical strength and the large number of top-ranked wrestlers who pulled out of the recent Autumn Grand Sumo Tournament in Tokyo with injuries.

One editorial even predicted that spectators would soon turn their back on Japan's national sport, reducing it to irrelevance, unless improvements are forthcoming.

To underline their argument, critics pointed out that the overall victor after 15 days of bouts at Tokyo's Ryogoku Kokugikan Stadium was Tamawashi, who at the start of the tournament was ranked "hiramaku" '-- the fifth-highest classification for wrestlers.

Born in Mongolia, Tamawashi had been a largely unspectacular fighter battling in the middle ranks of the sport, but whose September 25 victory made him the oldest winner of a "basho" tournament since 1958.

Three days after the 37-year-old accepted the Emperor's Cup, an editorial in the Sankei Shimbun insisted that the "slump in quality in sumo matches cannot go on."

US President Donald Trump presents the Presidents Cup to Asanoyama at Ryogoku Kokugikan Stadium in 2019

'Poor performance'The newspaper pointed out that virtually every wrestler in the top two ranks '-- "yokozuna" and "ozeki" '-- lost early bouts that effectively ruled them out of the running for the cup, with the "poor performance of the ozeki-ranked wrestlers being nothing but serious."

The situation was compounded by the highest-ranked wrestler in the tournament, Terunofuji, withdrawing on the 10th day due to injuries to both knees. The wrestler is understood to have required surgery and will likely miss at least two more tournaments '-- dealing another blow to the sport. The commentary also took issue with training regimens.

The Sankei warned, "Hollowing out of the upper ranks will be inevitable. If this situation continues, the national sport cannot escape the slander of merely being a signboard" of what the sport used to be, adding that unless the Japan Sumo Association (JSA) takes urgent action, fans of the sport will show their displeasure by no longer attending tournaments.

Sports journalist Yoichi Igawa, who covers the sport that dates back more than 1,300 years, echoed that sentiment and cautioned that sumo's reluctance to modernize may be its undoing.

"I fear it is becoming an obsolete sport in Japan," he told DW. "We say sumo is our national sport, but crowds are thinner than in the past and the vast majority of people who do go are old."

"This is not a sport that appeals to young people, so what happens when the older fans are all gone?"

Resisting change Yet too many people in the sumo world resist change, he continued.

"It's a very small, conservative world where all the decisions are made by veterans of the ring according to a strict hierarchy," he said. "They do not like to see changes, they don't like outside critics and they don't much like to see foreign wrestlers being the best at a 'Japanese sport.'"

Sumo is tough and physical demanding, especially for young and lower-ranked wrestlers

Fred Varcoe, a British journalist who has written about sumo for publications around the world, agreed that sumo "is stuck in its sense of traditionalism, to the point that the people who oversee sumo are simply unable to adapt, update or refine the sport."

Many successful wrestlers who had retired and joined the JSA made efforts to introduce changes to make the sport more accessible and appealing, Varcoe pointed out. But these relatively young "elders" of the sport are outnumbered and politically outmaneuvered in the association by its deeply conservative members.

One such wrestler with a reformist agenda was Takanohana, who won 22 tournaments in the space of 19 years (the sixth-best record in history). He joined the JSA board in 2010 but resigned in 2018.

Adding to sumo's issues are a number of scandals that have dogged its recent history '-- including assault allegations and illegal gambling on bouts '-- as well as drug-taking among wrestlers and links to organized crime groups.

Most sumo wrestlers must live in communal "stables," where their lives are strictly dictated by tradition. In 2007, stable-master Junichi Yamamoto was arrested over the death of a novice wrestler, 17-year-old Takashi Saito, and it later emerged that Yamamoto hit him on the head with a beer bottle after he tried to run away due to bullying.

'May not survive'"The quality of wrestlers will fluctuate up and down, just as it does in any sport," Varcoe described. "The bigger problem that sumo faces right now is that Japan has a rapidly aging population and there are not enough children coming through to take up the sport," he said.

"Young Japanese want to play on their mobile phones; they don't want to get up early and train for a physically demanding sport like sumo."

In the past, one effective solution has been in the past is to bring in more wrestlers from overseas, he continued. "There have been Hawaiians and Mongolians who have risen to the top of the sport," Varcoe said. But he cited continued reluctance among many "as they want to keep it Japanese."

"It's a tradition as much as a sport. But if things don't start changing, then it's not going to grow," he said. "And it may not even survive."

Edited by: Keith Walker

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'Zaido'Devastated by a series of tragic accidents, Yukari Chikura followed a dream in which her deceased father appeared, asking her to go to a remote village in Tohoku. There she took part in a 1,300-year-old festival called Zaido, capturing it with her camera. "Seeing people fight again and again to preserve heritage gave me the courage to live again," she said of the experience.

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'Sawasawato'From 1959-84, around 93,000 people left Japan for North Korea as part of a repatriation program. Some 1,800 were Japanese women who had married Korean men. Noriko Hayashi portrays these women in her series "sawasawato." "I visited these elderly women, interviewed them, and took photos. I traced their memories as I traveled back and forth between Japan and North Korea," Hayashi (above) said.

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'New Skin'Mayumi Hosokura's digital collages compose a new world where distinctions of sex are dissolved. Her works use her past photos of male nudes and male museum sculptures, as well as selfies found on the internet and magazine pictures. "Not only in artworks but in our daily lives, gender might be a bit more neutral and connected closer," Hosokura commented.

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'Eagle and Raven'After a trip to Iceland, where she was fascinated by water landscapes and their unique lights, Ariko Inaoka started to photograph twin sisters she had met there, returning every year for eight years. They became her muses: "They told me ... 'We dream the same dreams together.' They made me think that even though we don't dream the same in our sleep, we share the same dreams," Inaoka said.

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'A New River'When the cherry blossom viewings that usually take place each spring in Japan were cancelled due to COVID, Ai Iwane captured the trees blooming in the dark. Her photos reflect the ambiguous borders between nature and human: "When I walk under the cherry blossoms in the dark, I often hear the voice of wild animals '... the boundaries between human and nature became blurred," the artist explained.

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'Ilmatar'Momo Okabe's series Ilmatar '-- the name of a Finnish goddess of air '-- is inspired by her own experience. Okabe, who considers herself asexual, became pregnant through IVF. As fertility treatments become standard, she believes the process is worth recording: "Impossible things happen ... If we pay more attention to such things, and photograph them, life would be even more beautiful."

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'Mutation / Creation'Harumi Shimizu's series documents human fascination with mutations. Her work, an inventory of animal and vegetable strangeness, sublimates the weirdness and questions the concept of beauty: "People have long responded to mutant animals and plants. This kind of curiosity is universal to some extent. I want to know more about [it] ... so I collect these mysterious things and take pictures of them."

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'Hojo'In "Hojo," Mayumi Suzuki uses her personal experience of undergoing infertility treatment to talk about the complexity of women's bodies. "When I went to the market when after I gave up, I found '... all these odd-shaped unsold things. I thought they were just like me. I wanted to express this vague feeling with my own body," Suzuki said.

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'Die of love'Hideka Tonomura explores relationship intimacy through blurry and sensorial pictures, thereby depicting her own "theater of love." Photography became cathartic for her while she was dealing with traumatic experiences: "I kept shooting to live, to keep me alive." Tonomura also initiated the Shining Woman Project, which sheds light on women fighting cancer and combats the prejudices they face.

Japan through the eyes of women photographers 'Negative ecology'In Tamaki Yoshida's pictures, stunning landscapes and wild animals from the island of Hokkaido are eroded by detergents, shampoos and other chemicals contaminating water and environment. "I always believe the animal world and human world are both equal. Rather than invading or being invaded, it is best to coexist symbiotically. I think humans are capable of that," Yoshida commented.

Author: Aimie Eliot

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:52

The House committee investigating Jan. 6 will reportedly unveil new Secret Service communications during a televised hearing on Thursday, showing how former President Donald Trump stoked the attack on the Capitol even after being warned about the unfolding violence.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the panel, said the hearing would also ''tell the story about a key element of Donald Trump's plot to overturn the election.''

The hearing is expected to include never-before-seen interview footage of witnesses the committee has deposed since late July. That could include Virginia ''Ginni'' Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was interviewed behind closed doors. The committee asked Thomas about her role in trying to help Trump overturn his election defeat, including her correspondence with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election.

Then-President Donald Trump speaks during a rally protesting the electoral college certification of Joe Biden as president in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. (Evan Vucci/AP)

The seven Democrats and two Republicans on the panel also want to get to the bottom of missing Secret Service texts from Jan. 5-6, 2021, which could shed further light on Trump's actions during the insurrection, particularly after earlier testimony about his confrontation with security as he tried to join supporters at the Capitol.

There are volumes of documents and testimony from Trump allies and former aides about his actions before and during the Capitol assault, including internal White House logs and thousands of texts turned over by his chief of staff Mark Meadows. Also included: a million and a half documents turned over by the Secret Service.

[ 5 things to watch at the Jan. 6 committee hearing ]

Another decision for the committee, which includes two Republican critics of Trump, is how aggressively to pursue testimony from Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence. Some members have downplayed the value of their testimony or the feasibility of success.

The panel's final report is likely in December, but it's uncertain how much of the source material will accompany it '-- such as emails and text exchanges turned over by witnesses, internal White House memos, calendars, handwritten notes, surveillance video, law enforcement radio transmissions, taped interviews and more.

With a little more than two months to go, committee members aren't yet saying what they will do. But they say they are confident their work will last.

''We're going to make sure that everything is taken care of,'' said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who sits on the panel.

With News Wire Services

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:51

A s an appellate judge , Merrick Garland was known for constructing narrow decisions that achieved consensus without creating extraneous controversy. As a government attorney, he was known for his zealous adherence to the letter of the law. As a person, he is a smaller-than-life figure, a dry conversationalist, studious listener, something close to the opposite of a raconteur. As a driver, his friends say, he is maddeningly slow and almost comically fastidious.

And as the nation's chief law-enforcement officer, he is a hyper-prudential institutionalist who would like nothing more than to restore'--quietly and deliberately'--the Justice Department's reputation for probity, process, and apolitical dispassion. Which is why it is so difficult for me to imagine him delighting in the choice he now faces: whether to become the first attorney general in American history to indict a former president.

But this is what I believe he is preparing himself to do.

I have been observing Garland closely for months. I've talked with his closest friends and most loyal former clerks and deputies. I've carefully studied his record. I've interviewed Garland himself. And I've reached the conclusion that his devotion to procedure, his belief in the rule of law, and in particular his reverence for the duties, responsibilities, and traditions of the U.S. Department of Justice will cause him to make the most monumental decision an attorney general can make.

Let me be absolutely clear: Garland did not tell me he was going to indict Donald Trump. In fact, he did not tip his hand to me in any way'--he is far too cautious to signal his intentions to even his closest friends, much less a reporter. Nor did his top aides suggest the announcement of an indictment. When his department says that it doesn't discuss ongoing cases, it means it'--at least in this case.

Before I lay out the reasons I believe I am correct in this assessment, I want to discuss why it is entirely possible I am not. The main reason to disbelieve the argument that Garland is preparing to indict is simple: To bring criminal charges against a former president from an opposing political party would be the ultimate test of a system that aspires to impartiality, and Garland, by disposition, is repelled by drama, and doesn't believe the department should be subjected to unnecessary stress tests. This unprecedented act would inevitably be used to justify a cycle of reprisals, and risks turning the Justice Department into an instrument of never-ending political warfare.

And an indictment, of course, would merely be the first step'--a prelude to a trial unlike any this country has ever seen. The defendant wouldn't just be an ex-president; in all likelihood, he'd be a candidate actively campaigning to return to the White House. Fairness dictates that the system regard Trump as it does every other defendant. But doing so would lead to the impression that he's being deliberately hamstrung'--and humiliated'--by his political rivals.

Garland is surely aware that this essential problem would be evident at the first hearing. If the Justice Department is intent on proving that nobody is above the law, it could impose the same constraints on Trump that it would on any criminal defendant accused of serious crimes, including limiting his travel. Such a restriction would deprive Trump of one of his most important political advantages: his ability to whip up his followers at far-flung rallies.

In any event, once the trial began, Trump would be stuck in court, likely in Florida (if he's charged in connection with the Mar-a-Lago documents matter) or in Washington, D.C. (if he's charged for his involvement in the events of January 6). The site of a Washington trial would be the Prettyman Courthouse, on Constitution Avenue, just a short walk from the Capitol. This fact terrified the former prosecutors and other experts I talked with about how the trial might play out. Right-wing politicians, including Trump himself, have intimated violence if he is indicted.

Trump would of course attempt to make the proceedings a carnival of grievance, a venue for broadcasting conspiracy theories about his enemies. The trial could thus supply a climactic flash point for an era of political violence. Like the Capitol on January 6, the courthouse could become a magnet for paramilitaries. With protesters and counterprotesters descending on the same locale, the occasion would tempt street warfare.

The prospect of such a spectacle fills Merrick Garland with dread, his friends say. Indeed, for much of his tenure he's been attacked by critics who claim he lacks the fortitude to meet the moment, or to take on an adversary like Trump. Members of the House committee charged with examining the events of January 6 have publicly taunted Garland for moving tentatively when compared with their own aggressive and impeccably stage-managed hearings. Representative Adam Schiff has complained, ''I think there's a real desire on the part of the attorney general, for the most part, not to look backward.'' Privately, even President Joe Biden has grumbled about the plodding pace of Garland's investigations.

But I believe, if the evidence of wrongdoing is as convincing as it seems, he is going to indict Trump anyway.

Over the course of my reporting, I came to appreciate that the qualities that strike Garland's critics as liabilities would make him uniquely suited to overseeing Trump's prosecution. The fact that he is strangely out of step with the times'--that he is one of the few Americans in public life who don't channel or perform political anger'--equips him to craft the strongest, most fair-minded case, a case that a neutral observer would regard as legitimate.

United States v. Donald Trump would be about more than punishing crimes'--whether inciting an insurrection, scheming to undermine an election, or absconding with classified documents. An indictment would be a signal to Trump, as well as to would-be imitators, that no one is above the law. This is the principle that has animated Garland's career, which began as the Justice Department was attempting to reassert its independence, and legitimacy, after the ugly meddling of the Nixon years. If Garland has at times seemed daunted by the historic nature of the moment, that is at least in part because he appreciates how closely his next move will be studied, and the role it will play in heading off'--or not'--the next catastrophe.

I have also come to see that the Garland of 2022 is not the same man who was sworn into office as attorney general in March of the previous year. At the age of 69, his temperament is firmly fixed, but a year and a half on the job has transformed him.

It was just a few months ago that I saw a different version of the attorney general begin to emerge. While his investigation of January 6 continued at its slow pace, his sparring with Trump over the documents at Mar-a-Lago escalated quickly. The former president is no longer a figure on television, but his adversary in court. Garland approached him with an aggression that suggested he was prepared to do the very thing that critics said he didn't have the guts to do.

The Merrick Garland who took over the Justice Department may have hoped he could restore its reputation without confronting Trump, or dragging him to a courtroom. But the nation has changed in the intervening months, and so has he.

President Barack Obama's announcement for his Supreme Court nomination is shown on a TV in an empty Senate Radio TV studio on March 16, 2016, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong / Getty)B efore he became attorney general, Merrick Garland's life was defined by a job he has never held.

Twice, Barack Obama considered lifting him from the D.C. Circuit onto the Supreme Court, and twice Obama passed him over. After those failed attempts to move beyond the short list, Garland seemed to age out of the possibility, past the point where the actuarial tables suggest that an appointment is a worthwhile investment. Then, in 2016, Antonin Scalia died; Garland got his nomination after all'--only to see it scuttled in the Senate by the obstructionist tactics of Mitch McConnell.

When Garland returned to the Court of Appeals after his nomination was blocked, he was greeted with an ovation from his colleagues. No doubt it was heartwarming, but the truth was that he was returning to an old routine after having been taunted with the job of his dreams. It would have only been human for his mind to ponder a fresh start.

In the fall of 2020, with polls showing Joe Biden primed to defeat Donald Trump, friends began asking, Would you ever want to be attorney general?

When Garland's name showed up on the list of Biden's potential AGs, it was fair to assume that he hoped the job would nudge the Supreme Court debacle out of the first paragraph of his obituary. But Garland told friends that he wanted to return to the Justice Department, where he'd worked as a young lawyer and first found his sense of professional purpose, to restore an institution that he revered. It had been damaged by a succession of Trump appointees, who carried out the policy of separating migrant children from their parents, distorted the findings of Robert Mueller's investigation, and allegedly brought cases in order to settle the president's political scores.

From the September 2022 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on the secret history of the U.S. government's family-separation policy

As Garland prepared to take the job, he often sounded nostalgic for his first stint at DOJ, in the final years of the Carter administration, when he worked as a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. Nobody thinks of the late '70s as the height of idealism, but that's how Garland remembers the time.

In the aftermath of Watergate, he sat by Civiletti's side as he continued the work of reforming the Justice Department: writing new rules and procedures to prevent another president from ever abusing the institution. They were preserving the rule of law by bubble-wrapping it in norms, so that it would be thoroughly insulated from political pressure. This June, I visited Garland in his wood-paneled office, one of the cozier rooms in DOJ's cavernous building. He wore a navy suit that looked as if it had been purchased at Brooks Brothers in 1985. A tray of coffee with demitasses was laid out on a coffee table, but he sipped from a mug.

As Garland spoke about his approach to his job, he asked an aide to pass him a copy of a tattered blue book that was sitting on a side table, Principles of Federal Prosecution, published during his time with Civiletti. He kept extolling the neutrality of the department, how it should never favor friends or penalize foes, how it should only bring cases that persuade juries and survive appeals. ''What I'm saying isn't novel,'' he said. ''It's all in here.''

Thumbing through the document, he seemed briefly distracted. I asked him if he'd had anything to do with its publication. ''I helped edit it,'' he said, and then wistfully recalled his mentors in the department who oversaw its production. It struck me that Garland isn't just by-the-book. In some profound sense, he is the book.

This unbending fidelity to rules and norms has often looked impotent in the face of the democratic emergency that is Donald Trump. In his quest to avoid the taint of politics, Garland allowed certain Trump-era policies to remain in place. He ordered the DOJ to continue defending Trump against a defamation lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused him of raping her. He has permitted the Special Prosecutor John Durham's investigation of the origins of Russiagate to persist, despite a raft of Democrats clamoring for him to shut it down. (I should note here that Durham mentioned my reporting on Trump and Russia in court filings, and his lawyers asked witnesses about it in his prosecution of a Clinton campaign lawyer, whom a jury acquitted.) Those flash points created an impression of passivity; instead of rushing to confront the legacy of Trumpism, he seemed to be meekly deferring to it.

It is not difficult to see why anti-Trump partisans could grow frustrated with Garland's obdurate commitment to the traditions of the department when Trump is so intent on trampling them. His faith in them feels antiquated'--and detached from the Democratic Party's broad reconsideration of norms that were once seen as pillars of the American system. Not so long ago, expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court or eliminating the filibuster seemed like subversive thought experiments. Now they are touted as necessities for preserving majoritarian politics.

But the post-Watergate reforms that Garland wants to defend weren't aimed at abstract threats. They emerged as responses to very real abuse committed within living memory. And they arguably did an effective job at blunting Donald Trump's desire to turn the Justice Department into his plaything, even if they couldn't prevent every transgression. Norms held and prevented nightmare scenarios from unfolding.

These norms may not hold the next time, but that doesn't obviate their ethical power. No matter how much one fears Trump, the prosecution of a former president can't be undertaken lightly. The expectation that political enemies will be treated fairly is the basis for the legitimacy of the entire legal system. That's why Garland's hand-wringing and fussiness matter. Any indictment he brings against Trump will have survived his scrutiny, which means that it will have cleared a high bar.

Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick takes a meeting with Amy Jeffries (left), counsel to the DAG, and Merrick Garland (right), principal associate DAG, in her office at the Justice Department, in September 1995. (Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post / Getty)W hen Garland talks about how he handles complex, emotionally fraught investigations, there's a historical antecedent that he likes to cite as his formative experience. On the morning of April 19, 1995, the Department of Justice's leadership learned that a bomb had destroyed much of a massive federal office building in Oklahoma City, ripping off its facade and killing 168 people, including 19 children in the building's day-care center.

At the time, Garland held a job known as the PADAG, or the principal associate deputy attorney general. It's a mystifying title, but one of the most prized offices in the department: It afforded him a seat in the attorney general's morning meeting and access to DOJ's most closely held secrets. Garland used his privileged position to ask if he could travel to Oklahoma City to oversee the investigation.

Before Garland left, Attorney General Janet Reno pulled him aside. Of all things, she wanted to talk about O. J. Simpson. The football star's trial was going to be running on a split screen alongside the Oklahoma City investigation. Everything the public was about to witness in a Los Angeles courtroom would make the justice system look like a tawdry joke. She told Garland that his job was to show how the legal system could be the antithesis of that circus.

''I want you to be meticulous,'' she told him. ''I don't want to have any chance of losing a conviction. I want this to be picture perfect, so that the public understands what justice is.''

The bombing case triggered a strong emotional reaction across America, particularly those who feared the emergence of right-wing militias. Although much more straightforward than the chaotic events of January 6, the crime ignited a similarly intense desire to quickly punish the perpetrators. But Garland vowed to Reno that he would take the long way around.

Paying strict attention to procedure came naturally to Garland, even when the FBI seemed inclined to take shortcuts. He ordered agents to obtain warrants and subpoenas from courts even when they weren't unambiguously necessary. In his quest for immaculate justice, his investigators conducted 28,000 interviews.

These decisions arguably made the prosecution's case harder and certainly delayed the gratification of a conviction. But they also guarded against humiliating slipups that might have provided the basis for an appeal. In the end, Timothy McVeigh's attempt to overturn his conviction failed and he was executed in 2001. His co-conspirator Terry Nichols was sentenced to life, a sentence that an Appeals court affirmed.

David A. Graham: How did the Oklahoma City bombing shape Merrick Garland?

Garland has taken a similarly meticulous approach to Trump. Rather than starting with the offenses of the president himself, the department has devoted its resources to tediously building cases against every gym teacher and accountant who breached the Capitol on January 6, some 900 indictments in total. The volume of cases has risked overtaxing prosecutors'--and pushing back the work of building more-complicated cases against Trump's inner circle.

But what looks like donkeywork is a necessary step in a formulaic approach, a set of prescribed practices that have their own embedded wisdom. As Garland explains it, the department has no choice but to begin with the most ''overt crimes,'' and slowly build from there. To start with Trump would have reeked of politics'--and it would have been bad practice, forgoing all the witnesses and cellphone data collected by starting at the bottom.

By focusing on Trump, Garland's critics tend to underestimate the importance of the other arms of the January 6 prosecutions. The Justice Department has made an example of the foot soldiers of the insurrection, and has thus deflated attendance at every subsequent ''Stop the Steal'' rally. Evidence supplied by the minnows who invaded the Capitol helped the Justice Department indict leaders of the Oath Keepers (Elmer Stewart Rhodes) and Proud Boys (Henry ''Enrique'' Tarrio) on charges of seditious conspiracy, the most meaningful steps that the government has taken to dismantle the nation's right-wing paramilitaries. (Both men have pleaded not guilty.)

From the November 2020 issue: Mike Giglio on the pro-Trump militant group that has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans

Based on subpoenas and the witnesses seen exiting the grand jury, the department is clearly moving up the ladder, getting ever closer to Trump's inner circle and to Trump himself. But there comes a moment when the rule book that Garland reveres ceases to provide such clear guidance. That's the juncture that allows for prosecutorial discretion. In the case of Donald Trump, the prosecutor is Merrick Garland and discretion would allow him to decide that an indictment is simply not worth the social cost, or that the case is strong but not strong enough. Garland's critics fret that when confronted with this moment, his penchant for caution will take hold.

O ver the course of his career, institutions were good to Merrick Garland'--and he was good to institutions. He was a true believer in the American system. That's why he struggled to come to terms with the reality of Mitch McConnell.

For 293 days after Obama announced his selection to fill Scalia's seat, Garland was trapped in limbo, waiting for Senate Republicans to provide him a fair hearing. The whole world knew that they never would; Garland remained patient. One of his old teachers from Harvard Law School, Laurence Tribe, told me, ''What was heartbreaking was to see that the system really wasn't as good as he hoped it was.''

The human response to McConnell's brazen tactics was rage. Garland's wife and daughters certainly channeled that emotion, as did his friends and former clerks. The people around Garland couldn't contain their fury, but he did. When friends would call to vent, he would try to comfort them, to tamp down their ire. ''Don't feel too sorry for me,'' he told them. ''I've had a great run. Don't worry.''

Such placidity wasn't anomalous. He was always the calm one, his friend Jamie Gorelick told me. Ever since college, he had counseled her to not let emotions roil her. Back then, she was enraged that Harvard gave free football tickets to men, not women. After a contentious meeting where she railed against the injustice, he took her aside: ''You're right to be upset, but you shouldn't be this upset. Over time, this will get fixed.'' Gorelick valued his circumspection so highly that she hired him to serve as her deputy in the Clinton Justice Department. Even then, his advice was the same. He encouraged her to put angry letters she wrote in a drawer, until she restored her sense of equilibrium.

This tendency could be described as repression. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had another name for it. He called it the ''spiritual discipline against resentment,'' a phrase from his theory of political persuasion. He urged victims of injustice to resist the self-defeating instinct to righteously trumpet their own victimhood. That's not a personal credo for Garland, or anything like it. But with his preternatural self-control and his sense of rectitude, he seems to regard anger, especially on his own behalf, as a dangerous emotion.

This can make him seem out of step with the zeitgeist, which is defined by rage. On January 7, 2021, when Joe Biden unveiled him as his nominee, he seemed strangely detached from the depredations of the previous day, which he referred to only once, as ''yesterday's events in Washington.'' He argued that the insurrection showed that ''the rule of law is not just some lawyer's turn of phrase.'' Even accounting for Garland's tendency to overthink his choice of words, his conclusion felt like a massive underreaction.

With the investigation of Trump, the legitimacy of the judicial system is at risk. Of course, the MAGA set will never regard an indictment of their leader as anything other than a sham. But the perceptions of the rest of the country matter too. And it's important that, if DOJ moves forward with an indictment, the public views it as the product of a scrupulous examination of facts, not the impulse for revenge. Indicting the candidate of the opposing party, if it occurs, should feel reluctant, as if there's no other choice.

The attorney-general nominee Merrick Garland is sworn in during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 22, 2021. (Al Drago / The New York Times / Redux)I t's hard not to think of Garland as a character from another time. When I suggested this to him, he protested, jokingly (I think), citing a marker of cool highly significant to males in their 60s. ''You know, I was there at the Bruce Springsteen concert in 1974, the one Jon Landau wrote about in his famous column in The Real Paper. 'I've seen the future of rock and roll.'''

When he was on the bench, Garland would occasionally orient new clerks to his idiosyncrasies by playing a song by the band Vampire Weekend which contains the refrain, ''Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?'' It was amusing because the band was so distant from his range of expected cultural references, and because the strait-laced attorney general would never utter that sentence himself. It was also funny because Garland does care about punctuation, deeply.

Garland likes everything in its place. When, as a judge, he asked his clerks to prepare reading material, they would comb through it with a ruler in hand. The margins needed to be just so, with space for them to draw lines next to matters of import. A single line drawn parallel meant the clerks had material worthy of his attention; a triple line signaled the crux of the argument. When he found methods that worked, he clung to them. He may have been the last American to use WordPerfect.

Garland took office as attorney general with old-fashioned ideas about what was possible. He told his aides that he hoped he might help lower the temperature in the nation. He believed that he could use the department to restore a measure of civility that seemed to slip away during the Trump years.

One of the exhilarations of the new job was the sense of agency it offered. As a judge, he couldn't pick and choose the matters that came across his desk. The docket was the docket. Now he could get exercised about an article in the morning newspaper, walk into his 9 a.m. meeting with deputies, and then insist that the department do something about it.

Every day, Garland kept encountering stories about appalling instances of harassment, a national epidemic of rudeness and rage. Flight attendants risked physical assault for asking passengers to wear masks. School-board officials received death threats. Police officers were harangued for doing their job.

Garland wanted to make an example of such behavior. The department began to aggressively prosecute illegal threats of violence, seeking stiff penalties for the sake of deterrence. But to his dismay, these efforts proved ineffective. No matter how many cases he brought, the DOJ couldn't stanch the flood of invective. There was something profoundly wrong with the national culture, a dyspepsia that undermined the possibilities for collective coexistence and healthy democratic practice.

This year, as he came to understand the limitations of the job'--all the broken facets of American life that the department is incapable of repairing'--he began to appreciate the depths of the nation's crisis. His public comments began to betray a sense of alarm. In May, he returned to Harvard to deliver a commencement address, issuing a grim report on the health of democracy. The historic metaphor he used to capture the urgency of the moment was the Justice Department's founding in 1870, when its task was crushing the nascent Ku Klux Klan. Although the speech had grace notes of hope'--the rousing calls to service that are de rigueur for the genre'--it was hard to avoid its underlying pessimism, his warning that ''there may be worse to come.''

At one point during my June visit, I called Garland an ''institutionalist,'' which I thought was an unobjectionable description of his political temperament. Upon hearing this, he turned to his aides, ''I don't think I've ever used the word to describe myself.'' If I wanted, they would check, he said. But he was certain he had never uttered it.

I was surprised he would resist the term. I think he wanted me to understand that he is alive to the perils facing democracy'--and isn't naive about what it will take to defeat them. Norms alone are not enough to stop a determined authoritarian. It wasn't quite a reversal in his thinking; radicalizing Merrick Garland would be impossible. But it was an evolution. His faith in institutions had begun to wobble.

With his optimism bruised, and his heightened sensitivity to the imminent threats to democracy, he's shown a greater appetite for confrontation. There is no sharper example of this than his willingness to spar with Trump over the sensitive documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago. Searching the home of a former president is unprecedented. The warrant was executed knowing that Trump would demagogue the event'--and that he might even encourage his supporters to respond violently.

With Trump, Garland has lately shown a pugnacity that few had previously associated with him. When Trump began to assail the search of Mar-a-Lago, Garland asked the court to unseal the inventory of seized documents, essentially calling out the ex-president's lies. Rather than passively watching attacks on FBI agents, whom Trump scurrilously accused of planting evidence, Garland passionately backed the bureau. As Trump's lawyers have tried to use a sympathetic judge to slow down the department's investigation, Garland's lawyers have responded with bluntly dismissive briefs, composed without the least hint of deference. (''Plaintiff again implies that he could have declassified the records before leaving office. As before, however, Plaintiff conspicuously fails to represent, much less show, that he actually took that step.'')

The filings can be read as a serialized narrative, with each installment adding fresh details about Trump's mishandling of documents and his misleading of investigators. On August 31, the department tucked a photo into a brief, showing classified documents arrayed across a Mar-a-Lago carpet. This was both a faithful cataloging of evidence and sly gamesmanship. Garland permitted the department to release an image sure to implant itself in the public's mind and define the news cycle. Lawfare described the entirety of that filing as ''a show of force.''

In the Mar-a-Lago case, Garland is facing Trump in court for the first time. He arguably dillydallied on his way to the fight. But now that he's entered it, he's battling as if the reputation of the DOJ depends on winning it. During our interview, Garland reminded me that he was once a prosecutor himself. The unstated implication was that he knows what it takes to prevail.

T here's a date on the calendar when excessive meticulousness potentially precludes holding Trump to account. On January 20, 2025, Merrick Garland might not have a job. His post could be occupied by an avatar of the hard right. And any plausible Republican president will drop the case against Donald Trump on their first day in office.

The deadline for indicting Trump is actually much sooner than the next Inauguration Day. According to most prosecutors, a judge would give Trump nearly a year to prepare for trial, maybe a bit longer. That's not special treatment; it's just how courts schedule big cases.

If Trump is indicted for his role on January 6, he might get even more time than that, given the volume of evidence that the Justice Department would pass along in discovery. And if the evidence includes classified documents, the court will need to sort out how to handle that, another source of delay.

Depending on the charges, a trial itself could take another week'--or as long as six months. That means Garland has until the late spring of 2023 to bring an indictment that has a chance of culminating in a jury verdict before the change of administration.

The excruciating conundrum that Garland faces is also a liberating one. He can't win politically. He will either antagonize the right or disappoint the left. Whatever he decides, he will become deeply unpopular. He will unavoidably damage the reputation of the institution he loves so dearly with a significant portion of the populace.

Faced with so unpalatable a choice, he doesn't really have one. Because he can't avoid tearing America further apart, he'll decide based on the evidence'--and on whether that evidence can persuade a jury. As someone who has an almost metaphysical belief in the rule book, he can allow himself to apply his canonical texts.

That's what he's tried to emphatically explain over the past months. Every time he's asked about the former president, he responds, ''No one is above the law.'' He clearly gets frustrated that his answer fails to satisfy his doubters. I believe that his indictment of Trump will prove that he means it.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:50

Online screening is one of the quickest and easiest ways to determine whether you are experiencing symptoms of a mental health condition.

Mental health conditions, such as depression or anxiety, are real, common and treatable. And recovery is possible.

How does it work?After your mental health test, you will see information, resources, and tools to help you understand and improve your mental health.

How can online mental health testing help me?

What do my mental health test results mean?

Please note: Online screening tools are meant to be a quick snapshot of your mental health. If your results indicate you may be experiencing symptoms of a mental illness, consider sharing your results with someone. A mental health provider (such as a doctor or a therapist) can give you a full assessment and talk to you about options for how to feel better.

This website is an informational resource. We are not a crisis support line. If you need immediate help, you can reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 or using the chat box at 988lifeline.org/chat. You can also text ''MHA'' to 741-741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. Warmlines are an excellent place for non-crisis support.

For all other screening-related questions and non-emergency support, please use MHA's Contact Us form.

Mental Health America Inc., sponsors, partners, and advertisers disclaim any liability, loss, or risk incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of these screens.

Work Health SurveyThis is a not a mental health screening but a survey meant to help us identify strategies to help companies do better. The survey is updated annually.

Take the work health Survey

Learn about mental health conditionsMHA Screening is made possible through the generous contributions of individuals and organizations that share our vision of mental health for all. This program is supported, in part, through philanthropic contributions from Abbvie, Alkermes, The Anthem Foundation, The Faas Foundation, Janssen, Neurocrine Biosciences, The NFL Foundation, Sage Therapeutics, Takeda Lundbeck Alliance, and Teva.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:06

CNN '--

More than a dozen public-facing airport websites, including those for some of the nation's largest airports, appeared inaccessible Monday morning, and Russian-speaking hackers claimed responsibility.

No immediate signs of impact to actual air travel were reported, suggesting the issue may be an inconvenience for people seeking travel information.

''Obviously, we're tracking that, and there's no concern about operations being disrupted,'' Kiersten Todt, Chief of Staff of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said Monday at a security conference in Sea Island, Georgia.

The 14 websites include the one for Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. An employee there told CNN there were no operational impacts.

The Los Angeles International Airport website was offline earlier but appeared to be restored shortly before 9 a.m. Eastern. A spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.

The hacking group known as Killnet listed multiple US airports as targets. It stepped up activity to target organizations in NATO countries after Russia's February invasion of Ukraine. The loosely organized ''hacktivists'' are politically motivated to support the Kremlin but ties to Moscow are unknown.

The group claimed responsibility last week for knocking offline US state governments websites. Killnet is blamed for briefly downing a US Congress website in July and for cyberattacks on organizations in Lithuania after the country blocked shipment of goods to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in June.

The type of cyberattack used by Killnet is known as ''distributed denial of service'' (DDoS), in which hackers flood computer servers with phony web traffic to knock them offline.

''DDoS attacks are favored by actors of varying sophistication because they have visible results, but these incidents are usually superficial and short lived,'' John Hultquist, a vice president at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, told CNN.

A Transportation Security Administration spokesperson said the agency is monitoring the issue and working with airport partners.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 15:44

The Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday that it had granted emergency use authorization for updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters for Americans as young as 5 years old, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially signed off on their use. The boosters can be given at least two months after their previous shot of the vaccine.

"FDA's authorization of updated (bivalent) COVID-19 vaccines for this younger age group, and CDC's recommendation for use, are critical next steps forward in our country's vaccination program'--a program that has helped provide increased protection against severe COVID-19 disease and death," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement.

"Since children have gone back to school in person and people are resuming pre-pandemic behaviors and activities, there is the potential for increased risk of exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19," Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA's top vaccines official, said in a statement.

The FDA said it had considered data on the immune response and safety from the shots in children who had gotten a booster of the previous formulation to make its decision.

These new bivalent shots are manufactured in a nearly identical process from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, aside from adding in a component designed to target the BA.4 and BA.5 variants.

"As families across the country take part in fall festivities and plan for the upcoming holiday season, we aim to provide school-aged children with additional protection against the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 subvariants, which continue to account for more than 80% of cases in the U.S.," Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement.

Pre-ordering wrapped up last week for the new vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech formulated for this younger age group. A spokesperson for Pfizer said they have the ability to ship up to 6 million doses for younger children within the coming week, following their final quality-control checks.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on how many shots were requested of the new Pfizer vaccines for younger ages.

Moderna's booster for kids is simply a smaller dose of the same formulation that is already being distributed for older age groups, and did not need to be pre-ordered.

Compared to adults, a smaller share of children will be eligible to get the updated booster, because fewer have gotten the vaccine to begin with.

Only around 60.8% of adolescents 12 and older and 31.5% of children 5 and older have so far received even their first two COVID vaccine doses, according to CDC data.

Marks acknowledged that the virus "tends to be less severe in children than adults," but warned that kids still faced a risk of hospitalization or long-term effects from the virus and would benefit from the shots.

The CDC recently estimated that some 86.3% of children in the U.S. have survived at least one COVID-19 infection, based on surveying for antibodies in blood samples.

"We encourage parents to consider primary vaccination for children and follow-up with an updated booster dose when eligible," said Marks.

Wednesday's decision leaves only children under 5 years old ineligible to receive the updated COVID booster.

Federal health officials have previously said they expected these shots could be made available for the next youngest age group, down to 6 months old, by the winter.

Moderna said Wednesday in a release that it expected to complete its application for emergency use authorization in this youngest age group "later this year."

More In: Booster Dose COVID-19 Vaccine COVID-19 Alexander TinCBS News reporter covering public health and the pandemic.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 15:42

Dutch firm ASML makes one of the most important pieces of machinery required to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world. U.S. chip curbs have left companies, including ASML, scrambling to figure out what the rules mean in practice.

Emmanuel Dunand | AFP | Getty Images

ASML , one of the world's most important semiconductor toolmakers, told U.S. employees to stop servicing Chinese customers, as Washington's latest export restrictions begin to hit the global chip industry.

The Dutch firm said in a memo that any U.S. staff, including American citizens, green card holders and foreign nationals living in the U.S., "are prohibited from providing certain services to advanced fabs in China."

ASML's U.S. employees "must refrain '-- either directly or indirectly '-- from servicing, shipping, or providing support for any customers in China until further notice, while ASML is actively assessing which particular fabs are affected by this restriction." A fab is a another name for a chip manufacturing plant.

The ASML memo, which was circulating on social media, was confirmed as authentic by a spokesperson for the company.

ASML is one of the most critical players in the semiconductor supply chain because it produces a machine required to make the most advanced chips in the world. The Netherlands-headquartered firm is the only company in the world that makes these extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, which are used by the likes of TSMC , the most advanced chip manufacturer in the world.

Last week, the U.S. government enacted sweeping rules that aimed to cut off China from key chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

As part of those rules, "U.S. persons" that support the development or production of certain chips in China, including those for military uses, require a license to do so.

The rule appears quite wide-ranging and companies are scrambling to figure out what it means in practice.

"We are working diligently to evaluate the new regulations and their impact on ASML," the company said in its memo.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has also granted exemptions from its new curbs to some of the biggest chipmakers in the world.

TSMC has obtained a one-year license to continue buying American chipmaking equipment and send it to its manufacturing facility in China, the Nikkei reported Friday. TSMC's operations at its Nanjing, China, plant are for less sophisticated chips.

Washington is concerned in particular about China obtaining access for the most advanced chips that can be used in military applications, artificial intelligence or super computing.

TSMC did not respond to a request for comment.

South Korean chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix have also obtained one-year waivers from the U.S. so they can keep sending equipment to their China factories without getting a license, the Korea Times reported Thursday.

Samsung declined to comment.

SK Hynix confirmed in a statement that the company as well as current suppliers and business partners are authorized "to engage in activities necessary to maintain current production of integrated circuits in China for one year without further licensing requirements."

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 14:32

UK gov investigating TV program critical of COVID vaccine

Mike CampbellOctober 12, 2022

The UK broadcast regulator announced it's investigating comments critical of the COVID vaccine made on Mark Steyn's GB News program.

UK gov investigating TV program critical of COVID vaccine.''We consider that comments made during an interview with author and journalist Dr. Naomi Wolf about the Coronavirus vaccine rollout raise potential issues under our Broadcasting Code,'' stated Ofcom, the UK broadcasting regulator.

Wolf dropped nuclear statements on Steyn's show while discussing the mRNA COVID vaccine and its rollout. She said the control public health authorities have over doctors is akin to the 1930s in Germany.

''It was the doctors in pre-Nazi Germany in the early 30s who were co-opted by the national socialists and sent to do exactly what we're seeing kind of re-playing now.''

Wolf said doctors are under threat to comply with COVID vaccine talking points relating to the risks and benefits of immunization. Doctors who don't comply risk their medical associations revoking their license to practice.

Ofcom said it received 411 viewer complaints about Wolf's comments.

Wolf also dug into some of the findings around the COVID vaccine and noted that 3,500 medical experts examined the Pfizer documents.

''They're finding horrific harms against human reproduction. 360 degree harms,'' she alleged.

''Who should be stepping up to announce this? The [American Medical Association] '-- who's announcing it? It's people like you and me.''

''This is a scandal like we've never seen before, of this magnitude.''

Wolf also pointed to studies that show men have lower sperm counts and other cell damage for boys that impact masculinity following inoculation.

Referring to a study that found the mRNA vaccine in women's breast milk, Wolf alleged the vaccines are damaging women's placentas, which she said is causing chromosomal abnormalities.

''This is why I believe these are bio weapons,'' she stated.

Interestingly, criticism of Wolf's comments come as UK health officials are restricting access to the COVID vaccine. For example, the UK is no longer offering the COVID-19 vaccine to children under 12, saying kids don't need it and they likely already have natural immunity.

And, the UK government has released a report stating that pregnant and breastfeeding women should under no circumstance get the Pfizer COVID vaccine due to a lack of trial data on the vaccine's effect on reproductive health.

It's crucial we stay in touch

Big Tech wants to censor us, that's why you need to stay in touch.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE THESE...

Police officers in France are checking civilians' tanks at the pumps and sending away those with too much fuel to be eligible for a top-up.

Jorgen SobyOctober 11, 2022

Elon Musk will proceed with his proposed takeover of Twitter.

Rachel EmmanuelOctober 4, 2022

Instagram has said it permanently banned Pornhub from having a profile on its social media platform.

TCS WireSeptember 30, 2022

US President Joe Biden has condemned Italy's first female Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, suggesting her historic election win threatens democracy.

Mike CampbellSeptember 30, 2022

The World Economic Forum (WEF) made a big move in the digital currency space this week with the launch of the Crypto Sustainability Coalition.

Keean BexteSeptember 26, 2022

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being criticized for his lack of decorum after a video of him emerged singing Queen while in London to pay his respects for Queen Elizabeth II's funeral.

Rachel EmmanuelSeptember 19, 2022

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 14:20

The bloc's top diplomat says that Brussels has relied too heavily on Moscow's energy and Beijing's production

For too long the EU's prosperity has been dependent on China and Russia, while security has been outsourced to the US, top EU diplomat, Josep Borrell, has said.

The statement comes amid soaring energy prices and attempts to curb Russian oil and gas supplies as part of sanctions over Moscow's military operation in Ukraine.

''Our prosperity has been based on cheap energy coming from Russia. Russian gas '' cheap and supposedly affordable, secure, and stable. It has been proved not [to be] the case,'' Borrell said in a speech at an EU ambassadors' conference on Monday.

The diplomat added that the 27-member bloc also relied too much on trade with China, as well as Chinese investment and ''cheap goods.''

''I think that the Chinese workers with their low salaries have done much better and much more to contain inflation than all the Central Banks together,'' Borrell argued.

So, our prosperity was based on China and Russia '' energy and market. Clearly, today, we have to find new ways for energy from inside the European Union, as much as we can, because we should not change one dependency for another.

Borrell added, that while growing economically dependent on Moscow and Beijing, ''we delegated our security to the United States.'' The over-reliance on Washington creates a sense of uncertainty in Brussels, especially if the next US leadership would be less favorable to the EU, he said.

''Who knows what will happen two years from now, or even in November? What would have happened if, instead of [Joe] Biden, it would have been [Donald] Trump or someone like him in the White House? What would have been the answer of the United States to the war in Ukraine? What would have been our answer in a different situation?''

''And the answer for me is clear: we need to shoulder more responsibilities ourselves. We have to take a bigger part of our responsibility in securing security,'' Borrell stated.

Concerns over gas prices and fears of possible shortages have also prompted some major companies to shift production from the EU to the US. Volkswagen, Europe's biggest carmaker, revealed last month that it was considering relocating manufacturing plants from Germany due to rising energy costs.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 14:18

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:05 '-- 16.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

More evidence '-- including whistleblower information '-- has confirmed that the U.S. Navy did indeed shoot down TWA Flight 800 in the Atlantic as it left New York on July 17, 1996, and the CIA and The New York Times worked to cover it up, explained renowned investigative reporter Jack Cashill in this interview on Conversations That Matter with The New American magazine's Alex Newman.

Families of the victims have now filed a lawsuit against the government as a result of the FOIA documents that have emerged thanks to the tireless work of researchers.

According to Cashill, this was a tragic accident by the U.S. Navy as it was testing out new technology to shoot down planes and missiles. Under pressure from the CIA, the FBI played a key role in covering up the truth, and the dishonest New York Times carried water for the cover-up, highlighting the power of the ''Deep State.'' Cashill thinks Bill Clinton's re-election was one of the major reasons why the cover-up was so extreme. There must be accountability, he said.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:57

October 10, 2022 08:56 PM

| Updated Oct 10, 2022, 10:20 PM

T ransgender women, who were born male, are still required to sign up for the Selective Service in the event of a military draft.

The policy, which has already been in effect for some time, gained new attention after the Selective Service System issued a reminder for men between the ages of 18 and 25 to register for the service. "Parents, if your son is an only son and the last male in your family to carry the family name, he is still required to register with SSS," the SSS said in a now-viral tweet sent on Friday.

Many of the comments reflected social commentary about changing views on gender, as well as remarks about the timing, as Russia's war in Ukraine escalates. "Parents, we may kill your son and end your bloodline and family name for the sake of defending some irrelevant pile of sand in some godforsaken corner of the globe that holds no worth whatsoever to you or your family," tweeted conservative commentator Matt Walsh, the man behind the What Is a Woman? documentary.

A transgender section on the SSS's website, to which its tweet links, stressed that all biological males are required to sign up for the draft, and this applies to citizens or immigrants of the United States who were born male and had their gender changed to female.

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY HALTS TRANSGENDER SURGERIES FOR MINORS

For transgender men who were listed as female at the time of their birth, the SSS does not require them to register. People who have changed their gender to male are required to complete a Status Information Letter request form and provide a copy of their birth certificate to the SSS.

The Office of Personnel Management describes transgender people as those "whose gender identity and/or expression is different from the sex assigned to them at birth."

In January 2021, shortly after President Joe Biden took office, the president signed an executive order allowing for all citizens to serve in the military. A 2016 study requested by the Department of Defense found that enabling transgender people to serve openly in the military would only have "a minimal impact on military readiness and healthcare costs," according to a statement from the White House.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

"The study also concluded that open transgender service has had no significant impact on operational effectiveness or unit cohesion in foreign militaries," the statement read.

The Biden administration issued a statement in September that said it supports "the registration requirement for all citizens, which further ensures a military selective system that is fair and just.''

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:56

Below is my column in the New York Post on the increasing use of Hunter Biden's history of addiction as a defense or excuse for his conduct as possible charges are reportedly under consideration in Delaware. The use of the addiction defense omits a few salient points in the record of influence peddling by Hunter Biden. His cocaine addiction is now the ''seven-percent solution'' to avoid any public airing of the corrupt multimillion dollar enterprise connected to the Biden family.

Here is the column:

For years, President Biden repeated the same mantra when asked about Hunter Biden's influence peddling and alleged crimes: ''My son did nothing wrong.'' It was always implausible '-- as was his denial of any knowledge of these dealings despite emails and pictures to the contrary.

So the president and the press have been shifting to a new defense. As the father recently insisted of his son, ''He fought an addiction problem. He overcame it. He wrote about it.''

The family and the media have been cultivating the angle for months as they anticipated possible criminal charges. Such charges would not only be an embarrassment for the president but also many in the media, which have been actively complicit in covering up the multimillion-dollar influence-peddling schemes of the Biden family, including Hunter and his uncle James. With possible criminal conduct exposed, all that's left is the addiction defense.

Hunter Biden's autobiographical book laid the foundations for this final line of defense. While the book did not do particularly well in sales with the public, the media offered fawning interviews about his account of addiction. The narrative was ramped up by many of the same media outlets that buried the scandal, including articles on how the family fought ''to keep him alive.''

Now The Post reports prosecutors are second-guessing charges in light of the addiction and how it might undermine any criminal case. While there's no question the defense would likely use such an addiction, it's usually more of a concern for sentencing than charging. Addiction can be cited as a mitigating factor to the court in determining the defendant's level of culpability.

The most obvious problem for the addiction defense is that Hunter did not appear to have any chemical-based challenge in maintaining a global, multimillion-dollar influence-peddling scheme. The image of a crackhead holed up in high-end hotels with call girls is undermined by thousands of emails on international money transfers and complex deals stretching from Moscow to Kyiv to Beijing.

The fact is you can be an addict or alcoholic and still be a criminal. Addiction did not appear to inhibit prosecutors in cases like the murder trial involving Lillo Brancato, the actor from ''The Sopranos'' series and the movie ''A Bronx Tale.'' Brancato was a drug addict when he participated in a burglary that ended in a shooting. He was convicted and given 10 years.

Indeed, in some cases, prosecutors use addiction is as a motive for committing crimes, particularly in paying for or acquiring more crimes.

Not only is this possible prosecution not based on a drug offense, it would feature a high-functioning defendant who earned millions in influence peddling. Indeed, the now-sober Hunter has repeatedly acknowledged that while his family name may have led to some of his past positions, he is a lawyer with experience that was useful in work like serving on the board of Ukrainian energy conglomerate Burisma Holdings.

It will be difficult for Hunter to switch from the privileged-but-capable defense to the hopeless-addict defense. Most hopeless addicts are trying to hock property or score a few bucks for their next hit. Hunter was flying around the world, arranging meetings with his father and coordinating multiple global accounts.

Moreover, using the addiction to defeat the gun and tax charges will only heighten questions about the influencing-peddling allegations. If Hunter was a hopeless addict incapable of criminal intent or sound decision-making, why were foreign interests clamoring at his door to give him millions of dollars as a board member, lawyer or consultant? Without skill or capabilities to sell, you are left with raw and open corruption to gain access to or influence with his father.

For President Biden, the hopeless-addict defense will also fall short with most people outside the mainstream media. During this period, Joe had some of his own bills paid for by Hunter, including with accounts tied to his foreign dealings.

Of course, the defense may be more effective as an excuse for the Justice Department agreeing to a generous plea deal than it would be in an actual trial. Attorney General Merrick Garland has already protected both Joe and Hunter Biden by refusing to appoint a special counsel despite the obvious need for such an appointment under the governing rules. Democrats in Congress have continued to block any investigation into the Biden family's influence-peddling schemes.

The best-case scenario is a plea bargain that does not involve charges under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Indeed, the reported emphasis on gun and tax charges is strikingly similar to what I described weeks ago as as the ideal ''controlled demolition'' of the Hunter Biden scandal.

The Justice Department has used FARA aggressively in past prosecutions like that of Paul Manafort. However, such a charge would likely reveal details on past foreign dealings by Hunter Biden and possibly his uncle James. A plea bargain on a gun-registration count and tax counts would allow political and media allies to declare the matter closed.

That's why raising the addiction is both predictable and telling. By suggesting it would make a trial difficult, the family and its allies can portray a plea deal as a good deal for the public. But there has never been a lack of evidence of criminality, just a lack of interest in covering and prosecuting Hunter Biden's corrupt practices.

.Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:27

MOSCOW, October 12. /TASS/. Russia is ready to start gas supplies to Europe over the single remaining string of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday at the Russian Energy Week forum.

"Its [surviving string - TASS] capacity is 27.5 bln cubic meters per year, about 8% of total gas imports to Europe. Russia is ready for a start of such supplies. The ball is on the European Union's side, as the saying is. We do not limit anyone, including readiness to supply extra volumes during the winter season," the President said.

Russia is prevented from participating in the investigation of gas pipeline incidents, Putin said. "I regret saying we are not allowed to survey [the remaining] string but pressure is maintained [in it]," he noted. "Pressure is kept, meaning that it is in the operable condition, to all appearance," the President said.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:18

Peachkyss October 12, 2022 News

Looks like things are continuing to go downhill for Kanye West after his anti-Semitic comments and other social media antics. Those actions has resulted in 'Ye having to find another bank for his Yeezy brand.

Earlier Wednesday, Candace Owens took to her Twitter to announce the news of JP Morgan Chase cutting ties with Kanye West.

Owens tweeted, '' Earlier today I learned that @kanyewest was officially kicked out of JP Morgan Chase bank. I was told there was no official reason given, but they sent this letter as well to confirm that he has until late November to find another place for the Yeezy empire to bank.''

According to the letter Owens posted, Kanye has until November 21 to find another banking institution for his Yeezy brand.

Kanye has yet to respond to the closing of his account.

Earlier today I learned that @kanyewest was officially kicked out of JP Morgan Chase bank. I was told there was no official reason given, but they sent this letter as well to confirm that he has until late November to find another place for the Yeezy empire to bank. pic.twitter.com/FUskokb6fP

'-- Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) October 12, 2022

Check Also

Alex Jones Ordered to Pay Nearly $1B to Sandy Hook Shooting Victims' FamiliesA Connecticut jury has ordered Infowars host Alex Jones to pay $965 million to people '...

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:11

');});jQuery('.entry-content p.watermarked > div.watermarked_image > img').each( function() {if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('alignnone') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'alignnone' );}if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('alignleft') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'alignleft' );}if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('alignright') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'alignright' );}if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('size-medium') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'has-size-medium' );}if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('aligncenter') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'aligncenter' );jQuery(this).parent().children().wrapAll('

');}});}});});

Among its many impacts, the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced a crucial truth about threats to global health '' they require rapid, effective, and sustained international cooperation. It is in that context that we are pleased to announce that Ambassador Pamela K. Hamamoto has been selected to be lead U.S. Pandemic Negotiator on the proposed accord on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response currently being discussed at the World Health Organization.

This announcement reflects the commitment by the United States to take a whole-of-government approach to the negotiating process by putting into place a strong team, led by the Departments of State and Health and Human Services, with active engagement across U.S. departments and agencies responsible for development, security, economic, and other issues.

As lead U.S. Pandemic Negotiator, Ambassador Hamamoto will assume management and oversight of U.S. engagement in these important discussions, which we believe must yield an accord that effectively strengthens global health collaboration, improves systems for monitoring disease or pandemic outbreaks, bolsters national health security capacities, and enhances equity in pandemic preparedness and responses.

Prior to this assignment, Ambassador Hamamoto served as U.S. Permanent Representative to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva (2014-2017), where she engaged regularly with international leaders on a wide range of global issues, including humanitarian affairs, sustainable development, global health, human rights, peace and security, women's empowerment, internet governance, and climate change.

Ambassador Hamamoto also helped coordinate early responses to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2015, working across regions and institutions to rally support to the three affected countries and a strengthened WHO response.

In 2015, she co-founded International Gender Champions, a global network of leaders committed to advancing gender equality through specific actions and policy changes. She was also instrumental in the 2014 launch of the Global Health Security Agenda, a global effort that has grown to more than 70 partners focused on strengthening the world's ability to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats.

We believe Ambassador Hamamoto is ideally suited for this role, and look forward to supporting her efforts to develop and achieve a pandemic accord that promotes American health and security, as well as that of the globe.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:07

Image source, Getty Images Image caption, Facebook has been unavailable in Russia since March

The Russian authorities have added Meta - which owns Facebook and Instagram - to a list of terrorist and extremist organisations, the country's Interfax agency reports.

The two platforms were banned in Russia in March for "Russophobia".

It followed Meta's announcement it would permit posts such as "death to Russian invaders" but not credible threats against civilians

Meta appealed against the ban but it was upheld by a Moscow court in June.

The ban did not apply to WhatsApp, which Meta also owns.

Violent sentiments

The US technology giant has rejected accusations it promotes anti-Russian sentiment.

In March, a Meta official told BBC News it was making a temporary exception to its normal policies, "in light of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine", to allow those affected to "express violent sentiments towards invading armed forces".

The company has been approached for comment about the latest developments

According to Interfax, being placed on a list of extremist organisations means banks can freeze Meta's funds in Russia.

The battle lines between Western technology platforms and Russia were drawn months ago.

Facebook has not been missed as much as it might have been - because of the popular Russian clone, VK.

But Instagram remains huge in Russia - and the widespread use of virtual private networks (VPNs) means the ban on the platform has not actually stopped people accessing it.

This new official "terrorist" designation could change that though.

It might mean it is now a criminal offence to use Instagram, even via a VPN.

It is also unclear whether the designation includes WhatsApp.

Banning this, the most popular messaging app in Russia, would cut citizens off from the outside world in a truly profound way.

Other groups on the list include the Taliban and Russian opposition parties.

Twitter has also been restricted in Russia.

Russia has faced international isolation and strict economic sanctions since invading Ukraine and has responded by clamping down on the means of spreading dissent.

It has passed laws restricting what can be reported in the country - punishable by long prison sentences.

One of the country's few remaining independent news organisations, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, suspended operations in March, after receiving warnings from Russia's media watchdog.

A number of high-profile international journalists, including BBC News correspondents Clive Myrie, Orla Guerin and Nick Robinson, have also been barred from working in Russia.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:04

''This has now proven to be a big lie.''

That is how Rob Roos, Dutch member of the European parliament, described the stunning confession of a Pfizer executive on video that the company had no evidence its mRNA 'vaccines' were able to stop Covid transmission. Janine Small, president of international developed markets at Pfizer, said during a Covid hearing at the European parliament in October that ''no'' the company did not have any evidence that the Covid shots stopped transmission because the company was working at the ''speed of science.''

Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, recently pulled out of a scheduled hearing for Oct. 10 before the same Covid-19 committee that revealed the recent bombshell revelation. The sudden withdrawal follows an audit report on the EU's COVID-19 vaccine procurement strategy.

Dutch MEP Roos appeared on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' on Tuesday and elaborated further on ''one of the biggest scandals of our time.''

''This has massive implications,'' he said. ''Governments pushed millions of people worldwide to get vaccinated by telling them, telling you, to do it for your grandmother. Perfectly healthy young people [compelled] into taking this jab using false arguments.''

''Our government loves to talk about institutional discrimination,'' Roos added. ''But this was real institutional discrimination. In many countries, like the U.S. And Italy, vaccine mandates were introduced for certain professions. Many people lost their job, their livelihood, their business because they stood by their principles. Austria even had a locked down for the unvaccinated because of this reason. The government literally imprisoned people within their own homes. All of this was based on the idea that vaccination helped prevent the spread of the virus. Otherwise why should people [be] out of society?''

" * " indicates required fields

''This has now proven to be a big lie,'' he said. ''Even the president '' for international development market of Pfizer admits there was no scientific basis to say vaccination would stop the transmission of the virus. And I find this one of the biggest scandals of our time. The politicians responsible for this will be angry that people are looking back at this time, but I won't forget what they did to millions of people, and if we are a democracy, we should have accountability, and that's what I'm calling for.''

Republican senators are now publicly agreeing with the call to hold Big Pharma executives accountable for misleading the American people at tremendous cost to their lives and livelihoods.

Outrageous. These CEOs need to testify'--under oath'--before Congress.

Next year, they will.

And everyone who lied to the American people should be held accountable. https://t.co/LiXmyFw2iz

'-- Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 12, 2022

''Outrageous,'' Sen. Ted Cruz responded to the report. ''These CEOs need to testify'--under oath'--before Congress. Next year, they will. And everyone who lied to the American people should be held accountable.''

This will prove to be a tall order. As shown in a compilation by independent researcher Kanekoa, numerous politicians and public health officials lied to the American people when they claimed without evidence that the vaccines stopped the spread.

President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and Bill Gates are among the prominent voices that misled the American people.

Sen. Cruz's demand for Big Pharma CEOs to testify under oath before Congress follows upon Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's promise to hold top Covid doctor Dr. Anthony Fauci accountable for similarly deceiving against the American public.

Fauci's resignation will not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic. He will be asked to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the lab leak.

'-- Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 22, 2022

''Fauci's resignation will not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic,'' Dr. Paul said. ''He will be asked to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the lab leak.''

Senator Paul also demanded to know the National Institute of Health's conflicts of interest regarding Big Pharma royalties that have been hidden from the public.

''But I tell you this,'' Paul warned Fauci at a hearing. ''When we get in charge, we're going to change the rules and you will have to divulge where you get your royalties from, from what companies. And if anybody in the committee has a conflict of interest, we're going to learn about it. I promise you that.''

There are Republican congressmen who are also poised to hold pharmaceutical companies responsible for allegedly committing fraud against the American public.

Lastly, I have called for an end to the PREP Act, the medical malpractice martial law that prevents people like my fellow panelists from holding pharmaceutical companies and medical establishments responsible for the pain and suffering they have caused.

'-- Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) October 11, 2022

''Lastly, I have called for an end to the PREP Act, the medical malpractice martial law that prevents people like my fellow panelists from holding pharmaceutical companies and medical establishments responsible for the pain and suffering they have caused,'' Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie said on Twitter.

Rep. Massie has also called the ''Biden-Fauci-Pfizer'' position on Covid vaccine injuries ''immoral.''

What's the Biden-Fauci-Pfizer position on COVID vaccine injuries?

(A) no one has ever been injured by COVID vaccines.

(B) Some people have been injured by COVID vaccines, but they are not entitled to compensation for their injuries.

A is a lie, and B is immoral.

'-- Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) October 10, 2022

Despite accumulating evidence that the Covid shots pose a significant increased risk of heart inflammations for young persons, the Food and Drug Administration again granted an ''Emergency Use Authorization'' for this age group to receive ''boosters'' during a ''Covid pandemic'' that the president said was ''over.'' If the pandemic is ''over,'' there is no justification for ''emergency use authorization,'' particularly for an age group that is not statistically at significant risk from severe Covid.

The 2022 midterm elections provide an opportunity for the American people to get a fresh start at putting the nation's increasingly authoritarian and dishonest biomedical establishment back in its box. But it will take more than mere hearings in order to accomplish that. There must be payback for those public health experts who can be shown to have knowingly committed fraud against the American people.

OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:02

Video games can trigger heart attacks in children with undiagnosed cardiac issues, a study has found.

Some children are born with an irregular heartbeat known as cardiac arrhythmia and may never know unless detected by a scan.

About two million people in the UK live with such a condition, and they can lead relatively normal lives. However, a flare-up can occur at any point and lead to severe consequences, such as loss of consciousness, cardiac arrest and potentially death.

These undiagnosed heart issues have previously been linked to sudden deaths of people playing sports, but now a link has also been seen for computer games.

Scientists said that the excitement, adrenaline and emotional investment can trigger the condition.

Research from the Heart Centre for Children in Sydney, Australia, looked at data from different studies and found the link.

War games most common cause of problemsDr Claire Lawley, the study's lead investigator, explained: ''Video games may represent a serious risk to some children with arrhythmic conditions. They might be lethal in patients with predisposing, but often previously unrecognised arrhythmic conditions.

''Children who suddenly lose consciousness while electronic gaming should be assessed by a heart specialist as this could be the first sign of a serious heart problem.''

The analysis identified 22 cases where video games triggered a loss of consciousness in children, with multi-player war games the most common game played at the time of the incident.

The researchers believed that the dormant underlying heart condition is triggered by the rush of adrenaline children get from the high-octane games they play.

At times of maximum emotional investment, such as after a win or loss, vulnerable children are particularly at risk of cardiac episodes, the researchers said.

Scientists now want any children who have a history of blacking out while gaming to get checked out for potential heart issues as it can be an early warning sign.

'Staggering' discoveryChristian Turner, the study's co-author, said: ''We already know that some children have heart conditions that can put them at risk when playing competitive sports, but we were shocked to discover that some patients were having life-threatening blackouts during video gaming.''

He added: ''Video gaming was something I previously thought would be an alternative 'safe activity'. This is a really important discovery. We need to ensure everyone knows how important it is to get checked out when someone has had a blacking-out episode in these circumstances.''

Dr Jonathan Skinner, the study's co-author, said he was ''staggered'' to see how widespread the issue is and that it has led to some children dying.

''All of the collaborators are keen to publicise this phenomenon so our colleagues across the globe can recognise it and protect these children and their families,'' he added.

The findings are published in the journal Heart Rhythm.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:00

Prices consumers pay for a wide variety of goods and services rose more than expected in September as inflation pressures continued to weigh on the U.S. economy.

The consumer price index for the month increased 0.4% for the month, more than the 0.3% Dow Jones estimate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On a 12-month basis, so-called headline inflation was up 8.2%, off its peak around 9% in June but still hovering near the highest levels since the early 1980s.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, core CPI accelerated 0.6% against the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.4% increase. Core inflation was up 6.6% from a year ago.

The report rattled financial markets, with stock market futures plunging and Treasury yields moving up.

Another large jump in food prices boosted the headline number. The food index rose 0.8% for the month, the same as August, and was up 11.2% from a year ago.

That increase helped offset a 2.1% decline in energy prices that included a 4.9% drop in gasoline. Energy prices have moved higher in October, with the price of regular gasoline at the pump nearly 20 cents higher than a month ago, according to AAA.

Closely watched shelter costs, which make up about one-third of CPI, rose 0.7% and are up 6.6% from a year ago. Transportation services also showed a big bump, increasing 1.9% on the month and 14.6% on an annual basis. Medical care costs rose 1% in September.

The rising costs meant more bad news for workers, whose average hourly earnings declined 0.1% for the month on an inflation-adjusted basis and are off 3% from a year ago, according to a separate BLS release.

Inflation is rising despite aggressive Federal Reserve efforts to get price increases under control.

The central bank has raised benchmark interest rates 3 full percentage points since March. Thursday's CPI data likely cements a fourth consecutive 0.75 percentage point hike when the Fed next meets Nov. 1-2, with traders assigning a 98% chance of that move.

The chances of a fifth straight hike three-quarter point hike also are rising, with futures pricing in a 62% probability following the inflation data.

This is breaking news. Please check back here for updates.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 12:52

Former Facebook employee and ''whistleblower'' Frances Haugen is heading a new initiative, featuring a slew of former intelligence officials and bankrolled by a left-wing billionaire, that aims to influence how social media companies moderate speech and content.

Haugen will co-chair the Council for Responsible Social Media, according to a Wednesday press release from Issue One, a non-profit sponsoring the initiative. The council's members includes Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defense secretary under Barack Obama, Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Donald Trump, and Bush administration CIA director Porter Goss; members also include the Biden administration's former Director for Legislative Affairs at the National Security Council Nicole Tisdale and Obama administration Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

The group intends to lobby lawmakers and officials to enact legislation and regulations governing online platforms, according to a project fact sheet, and also hopes to pressure social media companies to moderate their platforms in accordance with the group's demands. The council is focused on the effect of social media on children's mental health, as well as safeguarding democracy from ''propaganda'' and ''conspiracy theories.'' (RELATED: Facebook Whistleblower Backed By Left-Wing Tech Billionaire Pierre Omidyar)

(Photo by Brian Harkin/Getty Images)

The Omidyar Network, the Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust and the Wend Collective collectively funded the council with $250,000 in grants, Issue One spokesperson Cory Combs told The Washington Post. Issue One received $100,000 from the Omidyar Network in 2022, according to the network's website.

Pierre Omidyar, the network's billionaire co-founder, is a long-time supporter of left-wing causes and efforts to police content on social media platforms; in 2020 the Omidyar Network donated $700,000 to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Democrat-aligned dark money group, while Omidyar himself made a whopping $45 million contribution to the Civic Action Fund, a project of the liberal outfit, according to Politico.

Omidyar also provided strategic communication support to Haugen in the fall of 2021 through his philanthropic firm Luminate.

Haugen has previously pushed for social media companies to crack down on ''misinformation'' and ''hateful'' speech, calling for a government regulator to oversee social media platforms.

''Throughout Issue One's work to strengthen democracy, we've found ourselves up against the anti-democratic forces that social media amplifies '-- including disinformation, polarization, and foreign interference in our elections,'' Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One, said in the press release, adding that ''social media companies are actively harming our civic, mental, and physical wellbeing.''

While the council includes several Republicans, such as ex-CIA director and GOP congressman Porter Goss and Denver Riggleman, former Republican Virginia congressman and current senior staffer to Jan. 6 Committee, the group features prominent Democrats, including former Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, who co-chairs the council.

Haugen herself has strong ties to Democrats; Bill Burton, a former Obama administration official and founder of Democrat-linked consulting firm Bryson Gillette as well as political action committee Priorities USA Action, advised her on her public appearances after she leaked internal Facebook documents in 2021, The Washington Free Beacon first reported.

Haugen said the mission of the council was ''to build a healthier democracy in our digital age.''

''It requires all of us '-- doctors, pastors, CEOs, whistleblowers, tech experts, politicians, military leaders,'' she said.

Issue One and Haugen did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's requests for comment.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 12:52

Today, Issue One announced the launch of the Council for Responsible Social Media (CRSM), a crosspartisan and bipartisan group of national leaders united to hold social media platforms to higher standards and advocate for fundamental changes to the social media platforms. Members include religious and business leaders, children's health and national security experts, former members of Congress, and tech insiders.

The Council is co-chaired by former Congressman and Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO) and Kerry Healey, the former Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and President of the Milken Institute's Center for Advancing the American Dream. Other Council members include Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, best-selling author Jonathan Haidt, former Secretaries of Defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, Harvard University's Director of the Center for Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics Danielle Allen, former Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Press Senior Counsel and Director Nora Benevidez, and former Director of the National Security Agency Admiral Mike Rogers.

''Social media defines nearly every aspect of our social fabric and has changed the world as we know it. We can now see clearly that the companies operating these platforms have too often failed to be responsible stewards of our political, social and communications spaces,'' said Rep. Gephardt. ''They have placed profit above people and use turbo-charged business models that exploit our anxieties and aggravate our conflicts, all to the detriment of our social, physical, mental, and civic health. It's time we move beyond our traditional partisan divides and work together on agreed upon goals that will prevent these companies from harming our people and our democracy.''

The Council will advance reforms to bring transparency, oversight, and accountability to the decisions the social media companies are making with their increasingly powerful and pervasive platforms. These legislative and regulatory solutions will ensure that these platforms are operating with the health of our children, the wellbeing of our communities, and the protection of our national security in mind. Where appropriate, the Council will also apply pressure to the platforms to make internal changes themselves.

''Throughout Issue One's work to strengthen democracy, we've found ourselves up against the anti-democratic forces that social media amplifies '-- including disinformation, polarization, and foreign interference in our elections,'' said Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One. ''We also know that the health of our democracy is linked to the health of our fellow citizens, and social media companies are actively harming our civic, mental, and physical wellbeing. It doesn't have to be this way, and the platforms know it. The question is: Are they willing to take the steps necessary to make things truly better? Or will they continue pretending that they're just neutral pipelines of data and information?''

Today's announcement precedes an inaugural, in-person summit tomorrow in Washington, D.C., where members of the Council will gather to develop a comprehensive plan of action for the months and years ahead. The event will be livestreamed to the public '-- click here to register.

''Lasting change will require a radical shift in the way we think about social media and its impact not only with young people, but also on the stability of our government,'' said Frances Haugen. ''It requires all of us '-- doctors, pastors, CEOs, whistleblowers, tech experts, politicians, military leaders '-- to have a seat at the table and demand better from these platforms. And it requires the right and the left to work together to address the harms of social media and take back the power that American democracy ceded to these powerful corporations more than a decade ago. Only then will it be possible to build a healthier democracy in our digital age.''

The Council is a project of Issue One, the leading crosspartisan political reform group in Washington, D.C., that has been bringing Republicans, Democrats, and independents together for the last decade in the movement to build a democracy that works for everyone.

Learn more about the Council for Responsible Social Media.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 12:51

Social media promised to build a more interconnected, informed world. But now the harms the platforms are causing are exceeding the promise of greater improved conversation and global connectedness, and American democracy is at stake.

These harms are widespread: degraded mental health, especially for our children, growing political polarization, fragile democracies disrupted by propaganda, conspiracy theories going mainstream, and increased distrust of foundational institutions. How is this happening? The simple answer is that the Big Tech companies are operating with no serious accountability or oversight. and they are putting profits above the societal harms to our kids, for our communities, and to U.S. national security.

In the same way that tobacco companies designed purposefully addictive products, marketed those products aggressively to teens and adults, and suppressed research about their product, today's social media companies are obscuring the truth and preventing change.

We need to adopt significant bipartisan solutions, and that's exactly what the Council on Responsible Social Media is all about. The Council brings together a multi-sectoral group of leaders who are focused on finding solutions to the technological harms to our kids, communities, and national security. The Council brings together Republicans and Democrats, policymakers and members of the media, impacted communities and key stakeholders to elevate a bipartisan conversation and advance impactful, achievable solutions.

Strategies and ToolsAs a unique and unified voice, the Council will change the national conversation around social media reform so it is focused on meaningful, achievable and bipartisan solutions. Here's how we'll do it:

Advocate for key policies and legislation with the Biden Administration, on Capitol Hill, and in select state legislatures across the country.Publicly pressure social media platforms to make meaningful platform and internal governance changes.Hold bipartisan public hearings '-- both in-person and virtual '-- that are open to the press and highlight testimony from parents, pediatricians, child psychologists, national security leaders and tech experts who can shed light on the impact of decisions being made inside the platforms.Serve as a resource for the media, providing bipartisan insights, information, and quotes. The Council will point reporters and producers to academics, advocates, other stakeholders who also have bipartisan or nonpartisan credibility.Develop and strategically distribute powerful written and video content about the harms caused by social media.The Members

Co-chair Dick GephardtFmr. Congressman (D-MO) and Majority LeaderCo-chair Kerry HealeyFormer Lieutenant Governor (R) of Massachusetts Danielle AllenProfessor at Harvard University and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Nora BenavidezSenior Counsel and Director, Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Press Sophie BerenFound and CEO OF the Conversationalist Joel BervellTikTok disinformation specialist, member of White House Healthcare Leaders in Social Media Roundtable, 2021 TikTok ''Voice for Change'' Susan CoppedgeFmr. U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and Executive Director of the Georgia Legal Services Program Jiore CraigHead of Digital Integrity at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue Renee DiRestaTechnical Research Manager at Stanford Internet Observatory Linda DouglassFmr. Head of Communications for Bloomberg, Senior Vice President at Atlantic Media, and Communications Director in the White House's Office of Health Reform Laura EdelsonPostdoctoral Researcher with Cybersecurity for Democracy at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering Craig FormanFmr. CEO and President of McClatchy Mary Anne FranksProfessor at the University of Miami School of Law; President and Legislative and Technology Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative Dan GlickmanFmr. Secretary of Agriculture and Congressman (D-KS) Nancy GibbsFmr. Editor of TIME and Director of the Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy Josh GolinExecutive Director of Fairplay Porter GossFmr. Director of the CIA and Congressman (R-FL) Jonathan HaidtProfessor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, social psychologist, and best-selling author Chuck HagelFmr. Secretary of Defense & U.S. Senator (R-NE) Tristan HarrisPresident and Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology Frances HaugenFacebook whistleblower and tech expert Eileen HershenovSenior Vice President for Democracy Initiatives at the Anti-Defamation League Steve IsraelFmr. Congressman (D-NY), Director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University Chris KrebsFmr. Director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Herb LinSenior research scholar for cyber policy and security at Stanford University Claire McCaskillFmr. U.S. Senator (D-MO) Sean McGarveyPresident of North America's Building Trades Unions Manu MeelCEO of BridgeUSA Bill OwensFmr. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Navy Admiral Farah PandithFmr. Member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, State Department Representative to Muslim Communities, and Director for Middle East regional initiatives for the National Security Council Leon PanettaFmr. Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, White House Chief of Staff, and Congressman (D-CA) Bruce PattonCo-Founder and Distinguished Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project Anjana RajanFmr. Chief Technology Officer of Polaris Maria RessaRecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and CEO of Rappler Reid RibbleFmr. Congressman (R-WI) Denver RiggelmanFmr. Congressman (R-VA) and Senior Staffer to the U.S House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol Michael RogersFmr. Director of the NSA and U.S. Navy Admiral Vivian SchillerExecutive Director of Aspen Digital, fmr. President and CEO of NPR, Global Chair of News at Twitter, and General Manager of NYTimes.com Craig SpencerDirector of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center Jason ThackerChair of Research in Technology Ethics at the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission Tommy ThompsonFmr. Governor of Wisconsin (R), Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Interim President of the University of Wisconsin System Nicole TisdaleFmr. Director of Domestic Policy for the National Security Council, White House Tom WheelerFmr. Chair of the Federal Communications Commission Isabelle WrightFmr. Global Election Integrity Policy Lead at TikTok Layla ZaidanePresident and CEO of the Millennial Action ProjectWhy Issue One?For a decade, Issue One has been a leading voice in the effort to build a democracy that works for everyone. We have defended our elections against disinformation and disruption, advanced a modern and effective legislative branch, and built broad coalitions to strengthen democracy in the face of rising polarization. In each of these efforts, we have found ourselves pushing back against the destructive influence of social media on our democracy. We have approached this work from a crosspartisan discipline, uniting Republicans, Democrats, and independents in the movement to fix our broken political system '-- often through high-level bodies of leaders like the ReFormers Caucus, the National Council on Election Integrity, and the Faces of Democracy campaign. Now, Issue One is applying its experience and strengths to bring attention, energy, and bipartisan problem-solving to the challenges posed by social media.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 08:06

Health | Health Panel Recommends Anxiety Screening for All Adults Under 65 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/health/anxiety-screening-recommendation.htmlThe guidance comes as Americans are coping with illness, isolation and loss from the pandemic, as well as other stressors like inflation and rising crime.

Send any friend a story

As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation is intended to help identify warning signs during routine examinations. Credit... iStock/Getty Sept. 20, 2022

A panel of medical experts on Tuesday recommended for the first time that doctors screen all adult patients under 65 for anxiety, guidance that highlights the extraordinary stress levels that have plagued the United States since the start of the pandemic.

The advisory group, called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, said the guidance was intended to help prevent mental health disorders from going undetected and untreated for years or even decades. It made a similar recommendation for children and teenagers earlier this year.

The panel, appointed by an arm of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, has been preparing the guidance since before the pandemic. The recommendations come at a time of ''critical need,'' said Lori Pbert, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, who serves on the task force. Americans have been reporting outsize anxiety levels in response to a confluence of stressors, including inflation and crime rates, fear of illness and loss of loved ones from Covid-19.

''It's a crisis in this country,'' Dr. Pbert said. ''Our only hope is that our recommendations throw a spotlight on the need to create greater access to mental health care '-- and urgently.''

From August 2020 to February 2021, the percentage of adults with recent symptoms of an anxiety or a depressive disorder increased to 41.5 percent from 36.4 percent, according to one study cited by the task force.

The guidance was issued in draft form. The panel will finalize it in the coming months after reviewing public comments. While the panel's recommendations are not compulsory, they heavily influence the standard of care among primary care physicians across the country.

In response to the recommendations, mental health care providers emphasized that screening programs are useful only if they lead patients to effective solutions. At a time when the country is ''short on mental health resources on all levels '-- psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists '-- that's a real concern,'' said Dr. Jeffrey Staab, a psychiatrist and chair of the department of psychiatry and psychology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

''We can screen lots of people, but if that's all that happens, it's a waste of time,'' said Dr. Staab, who is not on the task force.

Psychiatrists, while pleased with the attention on mental health, also underscored that a standardized screening is only the first step toward a diagnosis, and that providers will need to guard against assuming that a positive screening result indicates a clinical disorder.

For many Americans, the screening could simply reveal a temporary period of distress and a need for extra support.

''When providers say, 'You must have a disorder, here, take this,' we could face an overprescribing problem,'' Dr. Staab said. ''But the opposite scenario is that we have lots of people suffering who shouldn't be. Both outcomes are possible.''

Rising mental health issues are not unique to the United States. Anxiety and depression increased by 25 percent globally during the first year of the pandemic, according to the World Health Organization, and has only partially improved since.

About a quarter of men and about 40 percent of women in the United States face an anxiety disorder in their lifetimes, according to the task force, though much of the data is outdated. Women have nearly double the risk of depression compared with men, studies show, and the recommendation paid special attention to screenings for pregnant and postpartum patients.

Physicians typically use questionnaires and scales to survey for mental health disorders. According to the recommendations, positive screening results would lead to additional assessments at the provider's discretion, depending on underlying health conditions and other life events.

Some primary care physicians expressed concern that adding an additional responsibility to their wide-ranging checklist for brief patient appointments is implausible.

Dr. Pbert of the task force said that those providers should ''do what they already do on a daily basis: Juggle and prioritize.''

She also said the task force's rigorous review of available studies revealed that people of color are often underrepresented in mental health research, which, if not addressed, could contribute to a cycle of inequity.

Mental health disparities are rampant in the United States, where Black patients are less likely to be treated for mental health conditions than are white patients, and Black and Hispanic patients are both more frequently misdiagnosed. From 2014 to 2019, the suicide rate among Black Americans increased by 30 percent, data shows.

Standardizing screening for all patients could help combat the effects of racism, implicit bias and other systemic issues in the medical field, Dr. Pbert said.

The task force panel did not extend its screening recommendations to patients 65 and older. It said there was no clear evidence regarding the effectiveness of screening tools in older adults because anxiety symptoms are similar to normal signs of aging, such as fatigue and generalized pain. The panel also said it lacked evidence on whether depression screening among adults who do not show clear signs of the disorder would ultimately prevent suicides.

The task force will accept public comments on the draft recommendation through Oct. 17.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 07:45

The founder of the Oath Keepers and other leaders of the self-styled militia organization were in contact with Secret Service officials multiple times in late 2020 and leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to an agency official and court testimony in Stewart Rhodes's ongoing seditious conspiracy trial.

A former member of the Oath Keepers testified last week that the group's founder Stewart Rhodes claimed to be in touch with someone in the Secret Service in the months before the riot. A Secret Service official confirmed that members of the agency's protective intelligence division reached out to the Oath Keepers in advance of protests in D.C. in November and December as well as the Jan. 6 ''Stop the Steal'' rally.

Agents regularly engage in such advance contact with protest groups expected to attend public presidential events, the official said. The goal is to explain what items are prohibited and learn more about the protesters' numbers and plans to assess the risk to protected officials.

Rhodes and four associates are now in the midst of a trial expected to last at least a month, in which they face the most serious charges of the criminal investigation into the Capitol riot. Jurors have heard evidence that prosecutors say shows the Oath Keepers wanted to keep Donald Trump in power by force, trial testimony that comes just as the House committee investigating Jan. 6 prepared for what is expected to be its final public hearing Thursday.

The House committee is expected to highlight Secret Service records indicating Trump received multiple warnings on Jan. 6 about rising danger at the Capitol yet continued to insist on traveling there himself, according to people briefed on the records, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal records.

The full extent of what intelligence the Secret Service received from the Oath Keepers is unclear.

John Zimmerman, a former Oath Keeper from North Carolina, testified that he believed Rhodes talked to a Secret Service agent in September 2020 about what weapons they could be carrying while ''working'' a Trump rally in Fayetteville, N.C. In response to that testimony, a Secret Service spokesman said that ''it is not uncommon for various organizations to contact the agency concerning security restrictions and activities that are permissible in proximity to our protected sites.''

Veteran D.C. protesters say they rarely deal with the Secret Service compared with other agencies.

''Out of all of the demonstrations I ever planned in D.C. over the past 15 years, the one agency I've had the least amount of interaction with is the Secret Service,'' said Robby Diesu, who has organized protests for various progressive causes.

But most D.C. protests don't involve organized armed groups known for advocating violent resistance to government authority.

A D.C. police lieutenant was put on leave for his contacts with longtime Proud Boys chairman Henry ''Enrique'' Tarrio, who is set to go on trial in December on charges similar to those faced by the Oath Keepers. The same lieutenant also reached out to a man he believed led a white-supremacist group. Experts said it makes sense for law enforcement personnel to seek information from extremist groups but that interactions must be handled with care to avoid misinterpretation.

Rhodes and other Oath Keepers have argued that they were regularly in touch with law enforcement and left their firearms outside D.C. because they had no intention of breaking the law on Jan. 6. In multiple encrypted chat conversations before the riot, Rhodes expresses hope that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, which he argued would ''nullify'' D.C. gun laws and all other restrictions on violent behavior.

''I have to try to get Trump the message on the necessity of him waging war on the enemy NOW while still President and Commander in Chief,'' he wrote to one group of Oath Keepers on Dec. 14, 2020. He said he had stayed in D.C. to press the president, had ''passed that message on through one contact'' and was ''working on others.''

Rhodes was in contact with Roger Stone, a close confidant of the former president who was guarded by Oath Keepers on the morning of Jan. 6. Stone denies any involvement in the riot; he is also expected to be a focus of Thursday's House committee hearing.

Trump never called on private militias to act as his defense force, and prosecutors argue that the law would not have allowed it. They note that Rhodes repeatedly said that the group would fight Joe Biden with or without Trump's approval.

''He needs to know that if he doesn't do it, we will,'' Rhodes said of Trump in a Dec. 29, 2020, message read in court. ''And if we have to do it ourselves, without him as Commander in Chief, it will be exponentially harder, and many more of us will die.''

When members of the Oath Keepers went into a VIP section at Trump's speech on Jan. 6, the Secret Service required them to leave tactical gear outside and go through metal detectors, another former member of the group testified Wednesday.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the House committee earlier this year that Trump wanted the metal detectors removed despite being told members of the crowd were armed.

''They're not here to hurt me,'' Hutchinson recalled him saying.

Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman and Ellie Silverman contributed to this report.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 13:41

The story was shocking: As PJM's Rick Moran stated Saturday, ''The financial services company PayPal announced a controversial policy to deduct up to $2,500 from the accounts of users who spread 'misinformation.''' But as the news of this astonishing plan circulated far and wide, PayPal experienced a swift backlash in the form of a blizzard of account cancellations, and quickly backed down, claiming that the announcement went out ''in error'' and adding: ''PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy.'' That's terrific, or would be if it weren't for the fact that PayPal's current Acceptable Use Policy still threatens $2,500 fines per infraction for promoting ''hate'' and ''intolerance'' '-- language the Left regularly uses to characterize (and demonize) speech that is critical of its insane policies.

Eugene Volokh pointed out Sunday that PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy, which was last updated on Sept. 20, 2021, warns the unfortunate PayPal user that ''you must adhere to the terms of this Acceptable Use Policy,'' or else: ''Violation of this Acceptable Use Policy constitutes a violation of the PayPal User Agreement and may subject you to damages, including liquidated damages of $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation, which may be debited directly from your PayPal account(s) as outlined in the User Agreement (see 'Restricted Activities and Holds' section of the PayPal User Agreement).''

Click on that ''Restricted Activities and Holds'' section, and you'll find a long list of ''you must nots,'' including the expected prohibitions of fraud, selling counterfeit goods, and the like. But included on the list of things you must not do is ''Provide false, inaccurate or misleading information.'' False, inaccurate, or misleading in the eyes of whom? Why, of PayPal's Leftist hall monitors, of course, and no one else, including the person PayPal accuses: ''If we believe that you've engaged in any of these activities, we may take a number of actions to protect PayPal, its customers and others at any time in our sole discretion.'' No one else's. You'll have no appeal, no recourse, no opportunity to present your side of the story.

And among the ''Prohibited Activities'' listed on the Acceptable Use Policy page, you'll find forbidden ''the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime.'' No problem, eh? You have never engaged in or ever plan to engage in any promotion of hatred, violence, or intolerance, so you're in the clear, right? Wrong. Leftists routinely accuse patriots of promoting hate: Wanting a secure southern border is promoting hate. Not wanting to see our schools become platforms for genuinely hateful and false race grievance propaganda is promoting hate. Disagreeing with the Leftist dogma that Islam is a religion of peace is promoting hate. Not believing that Jan. 6 was an insurrection or that Donald Trump is a traitorous Russian puppet is promoting hate.

Related: [UPDATED] Could PayPal Policy Allow Them to Deduct Up to $2,500 From Your Account for Spreading 'Misinformation'?

And so what PayPal's still-in-force Acceptable Use Policy is saying is that at PayPal's sole discretion, it can decide to start fining wrongthinkers and taking thousands of dollars from your account for the sole reason that you don't toe the Left's political line. PayPal backed down on fining you for spreading ''misinformation,'' but few people seem to have noticed at all that it still threatens to fine you for ''hate'' and ''intolerance.'' Don't like drag queens sexualizing primary school children? If a PayPal wonk decides that's ''intolerance,'' you could be out $2,500, and remember, that's just for one infraction alone. If you dare to express your dissent more than once, you could be in to PayPal for tens of thousands of dollars.

Can they do this? Will they do this? That depends on who wins the game of judicial roulette. Will a case challenging this get heard by a judge appointed by Obama or Biden, or by one whom Trump appointed? PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy is one indication of why Leftists are so avid to pack the Supreme Court and so incandescently enraged with Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. Give the Left a Supreme Court majority, and the ruling will come that PayPal is a private company that need not be bound by First Amendment considerations, and is free to put political pressure on its users however it may wish to do so.

It's certainly time to ditch PayPal. But make no mistake: PayPal is not alone in this. They're just out front on it. Before too long, every one of the social media giants and financial services will have similar policies, unless there comes to be such a change in the American customer base that these massive corporations see that woke fascism simply isn't profitable for them, as tens of thousands of people, or more, stop using their services. That part is up to us.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 12:12

Authored by Noi Mahoney via FreightWaves.com,

Members of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division (BMWED) rejected a labor contract with the freight railroads on Monday, sending the two sides back to the bargaining table and resetting the countdown to a potential work stoppage.

More than 56% of BMWED membership voted against ratification of the tentative national agreement reached with the Class I freight railroads on Sept. 11.

The Biden-sponsored deal included a 24% wage increase, $5,000 bonuses and an additional paid day off.

BMWED represents about 26,000 workers who build and maintain the tracks, bridges, buildings and other structures on railroads across the country, according to its website.

''The result of the vote indicates there is a lot of work to do to establish goodwill and improve the morale that has been broken by the railroads' executives and Wall Street hedge fund managers,'' BMWED President Tony D. Cardwell said in a statement.

''I trust that railroad management understands that sentiment as well. Railroaders are discouraged and upset with working conditions and compensation and hold their employer in low regard.''

BMWED will go back to the bargaining table for additional negotiations with the railroads. If a deal cannot be negotiated, BMWED could go on strike after Nov. 14.

A new labor deal for union members has been in the works since January 2020, but negotiations with the railroads failed to progress. A federal mediation board took up the negotiations but released the parties from those efforts earlier this summer.

Two of the largest labor unions '-- those representing locomotive engineers and train conductors '-- were the last to reach a tentative agreement with the railroads. Their agreement averted a rail strike that could have begun as early as Sept. 16.

So far, only four of the 12 unions have ratified the national agreement with the railroads: the American Train Dispatchers Association, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Transportation Communications Union and the the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 13:54

The National Academy of Sciences said the violation occurred before Jane Lubchenco joined President Joe Biden's administration as deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Photo courtesy Jane Lubchenco/website

Aug. 17 (UPI) -- The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has sanctioned White House official Jane Lubchenco, and barred her from working on publications or programs for the academy for five years, for violating its ethical code of conduct.

The NAS took the punitive action because it said Lubchenco violated the code when she edited a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal that included her brother-in-law as an author.

The academy said Lunchenco violated a rule that says members "shall avoid those detrimental research practices that are clear violations of the fundamental tenets of research."

The ban extends to Lubchenco's work with the National Research Council.

The NAS said the violation occurred before Lubchenco joined President Joe Biden's administration as deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

"I accept these sanctions for my error in judgment in editing a paper authored by some of my research collaborators -- an error for which I have publicly stated my regret," Lubchenco said according to Science.org.

The punishment stems from a paper that was retracted last fall, which the academy said was not based on the most recent data available and included a personal relationship between Lunchenco and the author.

Congressional Republicans on the House science committee expressed concern earlier this year about Lubchenco's editing of the PNAS paper.

"Dr. Lubchenco demonstrated a clear disregard for rules meant to prevent conflicts of interest in publishing peer-reviewed studies," they wrote in a letter to Biden in February.

"Now, Dr. Lubchenco is playing a leading role in developing and overseeing this administration's best practices for scientific integrity."

Lubchenco has been a professor at Oregon State University and was administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during President Barack Obama's administration.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 13:30

The first car woke Jennifer King at 2 a.m. with a loud, high'‘pitched hum. ''It sounded like a hovercraft,'' she says, and that wasn't the weird part. King lives on a dead-end street at the edge of the Presidio, a 1,500-acre park in San Francisco where through traffic isn't a thing. Outside she saw a white Jaguar SUV backing out of her driveway. It had what looked like a giant fan on its roof '-- a laser sensor '-- and bore the logo of Google's driverless car division, Waymo.

She was observing what looked like a glitch in the self-driving software: The car seemed to be using her property to execute a three-point turn. This would've been no biggie, she says, if it had happened once. But dozens of Google cars began doing the exact thing, many times, every single day.

King complained to Google that the cars were driving her nuts, but the K-turns kept coming. Sometimes a few of the SUVs would show up at the same time and form a little line, like an army of zombie driver's-ed students. The whole thing went on for weeks until last October, when King called the local CBS affiliate and a news crew broadcast the scene. ''It is kind of funny when you watch it,'' the report began. ''And the neighbors are certainly noticing.'' Soon after, King's driveway was hers again.

Waymo disputes that its tech failed and said in a statement that its vehicles had been ''obeying the same road rules that any car is required to follow.'' The company, like its peers in Silicon Valley and Detroit, has characterized incidents like this as isolated, potholes on the road to a steering-wheel-free future. Over the course of more than a decade, flashy demos from companies including Google, GM, Ford, Tesla, and Zoox have promised cars capable of piloting themselves through chaotic urban landscapes, on highways, and in extreme weather without any human input or oversight. The companies have suggested they're on the verge of eliminating road fatalities, rush-hour traffic, and parking lots, and of upending the $2 trillion global automotive industry.

It all sounds great until you encounter an actual robo-taxi in the wild. Which is rare: Six years after companies started offering rides in what they've called autonomous cars and almost 20 years after the first self-driving demos, there are vanishingly few such vehicles on the road. And they tend to be confined to a handful of places in the Sun Belt, because they still can't handle weather patterns trickier than Partly Cloudy. State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls ''unprotected left turns,'' which most of us would call ''left turns.''

The industry says its Derek Zoolander problem applies only to lefts that require navigating oncoming traffic. (Great.) It's devoted enormous resources to figuring out left turns, but the work continues. Earlier this year, Cruise LLC '-- majority-owned by General Motors Corp. '-- recalled all of its self-driving vehicles after one car's inability to turn left contributed to a crash in San Francisco that injured two people. Aaron McLear, a Cruise spokesman, says the recall ''does not impact or change our current on-road operations.'' Cruise is planning to expand to Austin and Phoenix this year. ''We've moved the timeline to the left for what might be the first time in AV history,'' McLear says.

Cruise didn't release the video of that accident, but there's an entire social media genre featuring self-driving cars that become hopelessly confused. When the results are less serious, they can be funny as hell. In one example, a Waymo car gets so flummoxed by a traffic cone that it drives away from the technician sent out to rescue it. In another, an entire fleet of modified Chevrolet Bolts show up at an intersection and simply stop, blocking traffic with a whiff of Maximum Overdrive. In a third, a Tesla drives, at very slow speed, straight into the tail of a private jet.

This, it seems, is the best the field can do after investors have bet something like $100 billion, according to a McKinsey & Co. report. While the industry's biggest names continue to project optimism, the emerging consensus is that the world of robo-taxis isn't just around the next unprotected left '-- that we might have to wait decades longer, or an eternity.

''It's a scam,'' says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.'s Autopilot. ''These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.'' In 2018 analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC, then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175 billion. Its most recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of $30 billion, roughly the same as Cruise. Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google's former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year and is now worth less than $3 billion. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora's cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company. Many of the industry's most promising efforts have met the same fate in recent years, including Drive.ai, Voyage, Zoox, and Uber's self-driving division. ''Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy,'' says Mike Ramsey, an analyst at market researcher Gartner Inc. ''But we're going to be old.''

Our driverless future is starting to look so distant that even some of its most fervent believers have turned apostate. Chief among them is Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who more or less created the model for self-driving research and was, for more than a decade, the field's biggest star. Now he's running a startup that's developing autonomous trucks for industrial sites, and he says that for the foreseeable future, that's about as much complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle. ''You'd be hard-pressed to find another industry that's invested so many dollars in R&D and that has delivered so little,'' Levandowski says in an interview. ''Forget about profits'--what's the combined revenue of all the robo-taxi, robo-truck, robo-whatever companies? Is it a million dollars? Maybe. I think it's more like zero.''

In some ways, Levandowski is about as biased a party as anyone could be. His ride on top of the driverless wave ended in ignominy, after he moved from Google to Uber Technologies Inc. and his old bosses sued the crap out of his new ones for, they said, taking proprietary research along with him. The multibillion-dollar lawsuit and federal criminal case got Levandowski fired, forced him into bankruptcy, and ended with his conviction for stealing trade secrets. He only avoided prison thanks to a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.

On the other hand, Levandowski is also acknowledged, even by his detractors, as a pioneer in the industry and the person most responsible for turning driverless cars from a science project into something approaching a business. Eighteen years ago he wowed the Pentagon with a kinda-sorta-driverless motorcycle. That project turned into Google's driverless Prius, which pushed dozens of others to start self-driving car programs. In 2017, Levandowski founded a religion called the Way of the Future, centered on the idea that AI was becoming downright godlike.

What shattered his faith? He says that in the years after his defenestration from Uber, he began to compare the industry's wild claims to what seemed like an obvious lack of progress with no obvious path forward. ''It wasn't a business, it was a hobby,'' he says. Levandowski maintains that somebody, eventually, will figure out how to reliably get robots to turn left, and all the rest of it. ''We're going to get there at some point. But we have such a long way to go.''

For the companies that invested billions in the driverless future that was supposed to be around the next corner, ''We'll get there when we get there'' isn't an acceptable answer. The industry that grew up around Levandowski's ideas can't just reverse course like all those Google cars outside Jennifer King's bedroom. And the companies that bet it all on those ideas might very well be stuck in a dead end.

All self-driving car demos are more or less the same. You ride in the back seat and watch the steering wheel move on its own while a screen shows you what the computer is ''seeing.'' On the display, little red or green boxes hover perfectly over every car, bike, jaywalker, stoplight, etc. you pass. All this input feels subliminal when you're driving your own car, but on a readout that looks like a mix between the POVs of the Terminator and the Predator, it's overwhelming. It makes driving feel a lot more dangerous, like something that might well be better left to machines. The car companies know this, which is why they do it. Amping up the baseline tension of a drive makes their software's screw-ups seem like less of an outlier, and the successes all the more remarkable.

One of the industry's favorite maxims is that humans are terrible drivers. This may seem intuitive to anyone who's taken the Cross Bronx Expressway home during rush hour, but it's not even close to true. Throw a top-of-the-line robot at any difficult driving task, and you'll be lucky if the robot lasts a few seconds before crapping out.

''Humans are really, really good drivers '-- absurdly good,'' Hotz says. Traffic deaths are rare, amounting to one person for every 100 million miles or so driven in the US, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even that number makes people seem less capable than they actually are. Fatal accidents are largely caused by reckless behavior '-- speeding, drunks, texters, and people who fall asleep at the wheel. As a group, school bus drivers are involved in one fatal crash roughly every 500 million miles. Although most of the accidents reported by self-driving cars have been minor, the data suggest that autonomous cars have been involved in accidents more frequently than human-driven ones, with rear-end collisions being especially common. ''The problem is that there isn't any test to know if a driverless car is safe to operate,'' says Ramsey, the Gartner analyst. ''It's mostly just anecdotal.''

Waymo, the market leader, said last year that it had driven more than 20 million miles over about a decade. That means its cars would have to drive an additional 25 times their total before we'd be able to say, with even a vague sense of certainty, that they cause fewer deaths than bus drivers. The comparison is likely skewed further because the company has done much of its testing in sunny California and Arizona.

For now, here's what we know: Computers can run calculations a lot faster than we can, but they still have no idea how to process many common roadway variables. People driving down a city street with a few pigeons pecking away near the median know (a) that the pigeons will fly away as the car approaches and (b) that drivers behind them also know the pigeons will scatter. Drivers know, without having to think about it, that slamming the brakes wouldn't just be unnecessary '-- it would be dangerous. So they maintain their speed.

What the smartest self-driving car ''sees,'' on the other hand, is a small obstacle. It doesn't know where the obstacle came from or where it may go, only that the car is supposed to safely avoid obstacles, so it might respond by hitting the brakes. The best-case scenario is a small traffic jam, but braking suddenly could cause the next car coming down the road to rear-end it. Computers deal with their shortcomings through repetition, meaning that if you showed the same pigeon scenario to a self-driving car enough times, it might figure out how to handle it reliably. But it would likely have no idea how to deal with slightly different pigeons flying a slightly different way.

The industry uses the phrase ''deep learning'' to describe this process, but that makes it sound more sophisticated than it is. ''What deep learning is doing is something similar to memorization,'' says Gary Marcus, a New York University psychology professor who studies artificial intelligence and the limits of self-driving vehicles. ''It only works if the situations are sufficiently akin.''

And the range of these ''edge cases,'' as AI experts call them, is virtually infinite. Think: cars cutting across three lanes of traffic without signaling, or bicyclists doing the same, or a deer ambling alongside the shoulder, or a low-flying plane, or an eagle, or a drone. Even relatively easy driving problems turn out to contain an untold number of variations depending on weather, road conditions, and human behavior. ''You think roads are pretty similar from one place to the next,'' Marcus says. ''But the world is a complicated place. Every unprotected left is a little different.''

Self-driving companies have fallen back on shortcuts. In lieu of putting more cars on the road for longer, they run simulations inside giant data centers, add those ''drives'' to their total mile counts, and use them to make claims about safety. Simulations might help with some well-defined scenarios such as left turns, but they can't manufacture edge cases. In the meantime the companies are relying on pesky humans for help navigating higher-order problems. All use remote operators to help vehicles that run into trouble, as well as safety drivers '-- ''autonomous specialists,'' Waymo calls them '-- who ride inside some cars to take over if there's a problem.

To Levandowski, who rigged up his first self-driving vehicle in 2004, the most advanced driverless-car companies are all still running what amount to very sophisticated demos. And demos, as he well knows, are misleading by design. ''It's an illusion,'' he says: For every successful demo, there might be dozens of failed ones. And whereas you only need to see a person behind the wheel for a few minutes to judge if they can drive or not, computers don't work that way. If a self-driving car successfully navigates a route, there's no guarantee it can do so the 20th time, or even the second.

In 2008, Levandowski kludged together his first self-driving Prius, which conducted what the industry widely recognizes as the first successful test of an autonomous vehicle on public streets. (The event was recorded for posterity on a Discovery Channel show called Prototype This!) Levandowski was aware of how controlled the environment was: The car was given an extremely wide berth as it made its way from downtown San Francisco across the Bay Bridge and onto Treasure Island, because there was a 16-vehicle motorcade protecting it from other cars and vice versa. The car did scrape a wall on its way off the bridge, yet he says he couldn't help but feel amazed that it had all basically worked. ''You saw that, and you were like, 'OK, it's a demo and there are a lot of things to work on,''Š'' he recalls. ''But, like, we were almost there. We just needed to make it a little better.''

For most of the years since he built his first ''Pribot,'' Levandowski says, it's felt as though he and his competitors were 90% of the way to full-blown robot cars. Executives he later worked with at Google and Uber were all too happy to insist that the science was already there, that his prototypes could already handle any challenge, that all that was left was ''going commercial.'' They threw around wild claims that investors, including the Tesla bull Cathie Wood, built into models to calculate that the industry would be worth trillions.

Once again, this was a bit of self-hypnosis, Levandowski says. The demos with the sci-fi computer vision led him and his colleagues to believe they and their computers were thinking more similarly than they really were. ''You see these amazing representations of the 3D world, and you think the computer can see everything and can understand what's going to happen next,'' he says. ''But computers are still really dumb.''

In the view of Levandowski and many of the brightest minds in AI, the underlying technology isn't just a few years' worth of refinements away from a resolution. Autonomous driving, they say, needs a fundamental breakthrough that allows computers to quickly use humanlike intuition rather than learning solely by rote. That is to say, Google engineers might spend the rest of their lives puttering around San Francisco and Phoenix without showing that their technology is safer than driving the old-fashioned way.

In some ways the self-driving future seemed closest and most assured in 2017, after Levandowski went to Uber and Google sued them. Google accused Levandowski of taking a work laptop home, downloading its contents, and using that information to jump-start his work at Uber. (Although he doesn't deny the laptop part, he's long disputed that its contents found their way into anything Uber built.) The lawsuit was destabilizing but also validating in a way. Google's $1.8 billion claim for damages suggested it had done the math based on just how imminent the fortunes to be made from driverless technology were. ''People were playing for this trillion-dollar prize of automating all transportation,'' Levandowski says. ''And if you think it's really just a year away, you take the gloves off.''

Uber had promised to defend Levandowski if he was sued, but it fired him in May 2017, and he faced an arbitration claim in which Google sought to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars. During the 2018 trial, with Google struggling to prove Uber had used its trade secrets, the company settled with Uber. It got about $250 million in Uber stock, a fraction of what it had initially sought, plus a promise that the ride-hailing company wouldn't use Google's driverless technology.

The fallout continued for Levandowski in 2019, when federal prosecutors announced that a grand jury had indicted him on 33 counts of trade secrets theft. Soon after, the deal his new company, Pronto.ai, had been negotiating with a truck manufacturer '-- to try out Pronto's more modest driver-assist feature for trucks '-- fell apart. ''It turns out a federal indictment does cramp your style,'' he says. An arbitration panel also ordered him to pay Google $179 million. He stepped down as Pronto's chief executive officer, turned the company over to its chief safety officer, Robbie Miller, and declared bankruptcy. As part of a deal with prosecutors, in exchange for the dismissal of the other 32 counts, Levandowski pleaded guilty to one and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in August 2020. Because of the pandemic, the sentence was delayed long enough that he never served a day before his pardon, which came on the last day of the Trump presidency.

According to a White House press release at the time, the pardon's advocates included Trump megadonor Peter Thiel and a half-dozen Thiel allies, including Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Levandowski says that he and Thiel have some mutual friends who spoke up for him but that they never talked until after the pardon was announced. He says he doesn't know why Thiel took up his cause, but Thiel's antipathy for Google is legendary, and pardoning Levandowski would've been an opportunity to stick a thumb in the company's eye. Earlier this year, Levandowski reached a settlement with Uber and Google over the $179 million judgment that will allow him to emerge from bankruptcy.

The idea that the secret to self-driving was hidden on Levandowski's laptop has come to seem less credible over time. A year after Uber fired him, one of its self-driving cars killed a pedestrian in Phoenix. (The safety driver was charged with negligent homicide and has pleaded not guilty; Uber suspended testing its cars on public roads and added additional safety measures before resuming testing. The company was never charged.) Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora, the now-struggling upstart, in 2020, when times were better. In September, Waymo claimed, based on the results of a simulation, that its vehicles are safer in some circumstances than humans. Back in the real world, the safety figures are much less conclusive, and Waymo is basically where it was five years ago. (Waymo disputes this.)

Levandowski says his skepticism of the industry started around 2018. It was a little more than a year after Elon Musk unveiled a demo of a Tesla driving itself to the tune of Paint It Black. Levandowski checked the official road-test data that Tesla submitted to California regulators. The figures showed that, in that time, the number of autonomous miles Tesla had driven on public roads in the state totaled'--wait for it'--zero. (Tesla hasn't reported any autonomous miles traveled in California since 2019. The company didn't respond to a request for comment.) Although Levandowski says he admires Tesla, is impressed by its driver-assistance technology, and believes it may one day produce a truly self-driving car, he says the lack of progress by Musk and his peers forced him to question the point of his own years in the field. ''Why are we driving around, testing technology and creating additional risks, without actually delivering anything of value?'' he asks.

While Tesla has argued that its current system represents a working prototype, Musk has continued to blur the lines between demos and reality. On Sept. 30 he unveiled what looked like a barely functional robot, promising it would unleash ''a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it.'' Six years after it began selling ''full self-driving'' capabilities, Tesla has yet to deliver a driverless car. Levandowski, for his part, has been spending time in gravel pits.

For more than 100 years, mining companies have been blasting rocks out of the hills near Santa Rosa, Calif., and crushing them into gravel bound for driveways, roads, and drains. Levandowski sometimes refers to Mark West Quarry, where Pronto has been operating its driverless trucks since last December, as a ''sandbox,'' and it's easy to see why. The dusty mine features life-size versions of the Tonka toys you'd find in a child's playroom. Yellow excavators knock enormous boulders down from a terraced cliffside into the mining pit, where front-end loaders pick up the stones and place them in 50-ton dump trucks to be carried to the crusher. ''An 8-year-old boy's dream,'' Levandowski says as the boulders rattle through the crusher, which spits the smaller pieces out onto piles.

The mine work started as a sort of backup plan '-- a way to bring in revenue while Pronto got trucking companies comfortable with using its driver-assistance technology in their long-haul semis. Now, Levandowski says, construction sites are Plan A. Pronto took the same basic system it had used on the semis and built it into a self-driving dump truck, adding cameras, radar, and an onboard computer. Because connectivity is spotty at mine sites, the company created its own networking technology, which it spun off as a separate company, Pollen Mobile LLC. ''With mining we're doing driverless, but controlling the environment,'' says Pronto Chief Technology Officer Cat Culkin. BoDean Co., the company that owns Mark West Quarry, is one of a half-dozen clients that pay installation fees to retrofit dump trucks with sensors, plus hourly fees for use. Neither Levandowski nor BoDean will say how much Pronto charges or how much it's taking in.

Here's his new vision of the self-driving future: For nine-ish hours each day, two modified Bell articulated end-dumps take turns driving the 200 yards from the pit to the crusher. The road is rutted, steep, narrow, requiring the trucks to nearly scrape the cliff wall as they rattle down the roller-coaster-like grade. But it's the same exact trip every time, with no edge cases '-- no rush hour, no school crossings, no daredevil scooter drivers '-- and instead of executing an awkward multipoint turn before dumping their loads, the robot trucks back up the hill in reverse, speeding each truck's reloading. Anthony Boyle, BoDean's director of production, says the Pronto trucks save four to five hours of labor a day, freeing up drivers to take over loaders and excavators. Otherwise, he says, nothing has changed. ''It's just yellow equipment doing its thing, and you stay out of its way.''

Levandowski recognizes that making rock quarries a little more efficient is a bit of a comedown from his dreams of giant fleets of robotic cars. His company plans to start selling its software for long-haul trucks in 2023. And hopefully, in a few decades, all his old boasts will come true: driverless cities with cushy commutes, zero road fatalities, and totally safe road naps. But for now: ''I want to do something that's real, even if that means scaling back the grandiose visions.''

Related video:

Link to Article

Archived Version

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 13:24

F or decades, gastroenterologists put colonoscopies on a pedestal. If everyone would get the screening just once a decade, clinicians believed it could practically make colorectal cancer ''extinct,'' said Michael Bretthauer, a gastroenterologist and researcher in Norway. But new results from a clinical trial that he led throw confidence in colonoscopy's dominance into doubt.

The trial's primary analysis found that colonoscopy only cut colon cancer risk by roughly a fifth, far below past estimates of the test's efficacy, and didn't provide any significant reduction in colon cancer mortality. Gastroenterologists, including Bretthauer, reacted to the trial's results with a mixture of shock, disappointment, and even some mild disbelief.

''This is a landmark study. It's the first randomized trial showing outcomes of exposing people to colonoscopy screening versus no colonoscopy. And I think we were all expecting colonoscopy to do better,'' said Samir Gupta, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Diego and the VA who didn't work on the trial. And, he said, it raises an uncomfortable question for doctors. ''Maybe colonoscopy isn't as good as we always thought it is.''

advertisement

He stressed that the study does not invalidate colonoscopies as a useful screening tool. Colonoscopies are still a good test, Gupta said, but it may be time to reevaluate their standing as the gold standard of colon cancer screens. ''This study provides clear data,'' he said, ''that it's not as simple as saying, 'Colonoscopy is the most sensitive test, and therefore it is the best.' It still prevented cancers.''

Colonoscopies search for pre-cancerous polyps, known as adenomas, by inserting a camera up the rectum. If the endoscopist discovers a suspicious polyp, then it's promptly removed, thus nipping the cancer before it spreads. Past research always showed that colonoscopy could put a huge dent, on the order of 70%, in the incidence and mortality from colon cancer.

advertisement

But none of those studies were large randomized trials, the ultimate experiment in clinical research. So Bretthauer, of the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, and several colleagues started one a decade ago, recruiting more than 80,000 people aged 55 to 64 in Poland, Norway, and Sweden to test if colonoscopy was truly as good as they all believed. Roughly 28,000 of the participants were randomly selected to receive an invitation to get a colonoscopy, and the rest went about their usual care, which did not include regular colonoscopy screening.

The researchers then kept track of colonoscopies, colon cancer diagnoses, colon cancer deaths, and deaths from any cause. After 10 years, the researchers found that the participants who were invited to colonoscopy had an 18% reduction in colon cancer risk but were no less likely to die from colon cancer than those who were never invited to screening. Of the participants who were invited to colonoscopy, only 42% actually did one. The team published their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sunday.

The results are incongruent with some past investigations in other colon cancer screens. ''We know from other screening tests that we can reduce cancer mortality by more than this,'' said Jason Dominitz, the executive director of the national gastroenterology and hepatology program at the VA who wrote an accompanying editorial in NEJM and didn't work on the trial. Sigmoidoscopy, which only examines a smaller portion of the colon, has been shown to reduce colon cancer mortality in randomized studies, Dominitz pointed out. ''Colonoscopy is sigmoidoscopy and more, so you'd think it can't be less effective than sigmoidoscopy,'' he said.

But nuances abound in interpreting the data, Dominitz said. For one, a minority of participants who were invited to colonoscopy actually showed up for one. That may have diluted the observed benefits of colonoscopy in the study. Cancer treatment has also progressed over the last couple of decades, too, and the study only had 10 years of follow-up thus far, both of which would make it harder to see a mortality benefit from the screen. ''They're doing a 15-year follow, and I would expect to see a significant reduction in cancer mortality in the long term,'' Dominitz said. ''Time will tell.''

Even if cancer therapy has progressed to the point where a 15-year follow-up fails to eke out a mortality reduction, UCSD's Gupta pointed out that preventing cancer nonetheless can have a great benefit. The study still showed that colonoscopies reduced cancer incidence, which also means a reduction in surgeries, chemotherapies, immunotherapies, and other bad times. ''The process of being treated is awful,'' Gupta said. ''If you ask patients if you'd rather be treated or prevented, a lot would say prevented.''

A secondary analysis also offers another silver lining, Gupta said. When the investigators compared just the 42% of participants in the invited group who actually showed up for a colonoscopy to the control group, they saw about a 30% reduction in colon cancer risk and a 50% reduction in colon cancer death. ''That adds to a bunch of observational study data that suggests exposing people to colonoscopy can reduce risk of developing and dying of colon cancer,'' Gupta said.

But the secondary analysis isn't as robust as the primary or intention-to-treat analysis. ''The intention-to-treat analysis is the premium methodology, the analysis you put all your trust in,'' Oslo's Bretthauer said. That's led him to consider that he and everyone else in the colon cancer field may have been wrong about how useful colonoscopy truly is.

''It's not the magic bullet we thought it was,'' he said. ''I think we may have oversold colonoscopy. If you look at what the gastroenterology societies say, and I'm one myself so these are my people, we talked about 70, 80, or even 90% reduction in colon cancer if everyone went for colonoscopy. That's not what these data show.''

Rather, he said, colonoscopy screening's true benefit may lie somewhere in between the primary and secondary analyses in his study. ''You may reduce your risk of getting colorectal cancer by 20 to 30% if you get a colonoscopy,'' Bretthauer said. That brings it more in line with the other main colorectal cancer tests, which analyze feces for signs of cancer, either abnormal DNA or blood, and can be taken at home.

That raises an important point for policymakers, Bretthauer added. Colonoscopy is more expensive, more time-intensive, and more unpleasant in preparation for patients. Many European countries balked at putting public health dollars towards a large, expensive program, he said, when the fecal testing was cheaper, easier, and had greater uptake in certain studies. ''Now, the European approach makes much more sense. It's not only cheaper, but maybe equally effective,'' Bretthauer said.

That, too, is being put to the test. Gupta, Dominitz, and others are working on large randomized trials that pit colonoscopy against fecal screens.

This study may not change the calculus very much for any individual patient, though, Gupta said. In the end, which colon cancer screening you decide to go with is a matter of personal preference. ''The first message is that screening saves lives and prevents cancer. If we could have a chance to start everyone at age 45, I'd like that. Second is you have many options,'' he said. ''Someone who says, 'I'm way too busy, can't take 2 days off of work for a colonoscopy.' OK, we have stool-based options.''

But for someone who just wants to be screened once every 10 years rather than every 1 or 2 and wants the most sensitive test, Gupta said, then colonoscopy is still king.

Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT's free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.

Angus ChenCancer Reporter

Angus is a cancer reporter at STAT.

Create a display name to commentThis name will appear with your comment

Link to Article

Archived Version

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 13:01

Meta's push to develop virtual and augmented reality technology has had a bumpy year.

Send any friend a story

As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, introducing the Oculus Quest virtual-reality headset in 2019. Credit... Amy Osborne/Agence France-Presse '-- Getty Images Oct. 9, 2022

Last October, when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, announced that the company would change its name to Meta and become a ''metaverse company,'' he sketched a vision of a utopian future many years off in which billions of people would inhabit immersive digital environments for hours on end, working, socializing and playing games inside virtual and augmented worlds.

In the year since, Meta has spent billions of dollars and assigned thousands of employees to make Mr. Zuckerberg's dream feasible. But Meta's metaverse efforts have had a rocky start.

The company's flagship virtual-reality game, Horizon Worlds, remains buggy and unpopular, leading Meta to put in place a ''quality lockdown'' for the rest of the year while it retools the app.

Some Meta employees have complained about frequent strategy shifts that seem tied to Mr. Zuckerberg's whims rather than a cohesive plan.

And Meta executives have butted heads over the company's metaverse strategy, with one senior leader complaining that the amount of money the company had spent on unproven projects made him ''sick to my stomach.''

The company's struggle to reshape the business was described in interviews with more than a dozen current and former Meta employees and internal communications obtained by The New York Times. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal matters.

Image A still from Mr. Zuckerberg's announcement in 2021 that Facebook was changing its name to Meta and would become a ''metaverse company.'' Credit... Meta/EPA, via Shutterstock On Tuesday, Meta is expected to unveil a new V.R. headset at a developer conference, along with other new metaverse features. The stakes are high for the company, which is racing to transform itself to make up for declines in other parts of its business. TikTok is siphoning younger users away from Facebook and Instagram, Meta's two big moneymakers, and Apple made privacy changes to its mobile operating system that have cost Meta billions of dollars in advertising revenue.

The company's stock price has tumbled nearly 60 percent in the past year '-- a reflection not just of broader market turbulence, but of some investors' skepticism that the metaverse will be highly lucrative anytime soon. In late September, the company announced that it would freeze most hiring, and Mr. Zuckerberg has warned employees that layoffs may be coming.

''The pressures Meta's business is facing in 2022 are acute, significant and not metaverse-related,'' said Matthew Ball, an investor and metaverse expert whose advice Mr. Zuckerberg has sought. ''And there is a risk that almost everything Mark has outlined about the metaverse is right, except the timing is farther out than he imagined.''

What Is the Metaverse, and Why Does It Matter?

Card 1 of 5The origins. The word ''metaverse'' describes a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the one in which we live. It was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel ''Snow Crash,'' and the concept was further explored by Ernest Cline in his novel ''Ready Player One.''

The future. Many people in tech believe the metaverse will herald an era in which our virtual lives will play as important a role as our physical realities. Some experts warn that it could still turn out to be a fad or even dangerous.

In a statement, Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, said the company believed it was still on the right path.

''Being a cynic about new and innovative technology is easy,'' Mr. Stone said. ''Actually building it is a lot harder '-- but that's what we're doing because we believe the metaverse is the future of computing.''

Mr. Zuckerberg successfully overhauled his company a decade ago, getting it to focus on how its products worked on smartphones instead of desktops. He signaled a similar shift last year, saying that investing in the metaverse would allow Meta to make the leap from one technological era to the next.

There are some signs that Meta's bet has put it ahead of competitors. The company's consumer V.R. headset, the Quest 2, is the most popular V.R. headset on the market with more than 15 million sold, according to outside estimates. Its Oculus V.R. app '-- which has since been rebranded Meta Quest '-- has been installed over 21 million times on iOS and Android devices, according to an estimate by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm.

But Meta's future success depends on the company's ability to bring virtual and augmented reality tools to far more people.

Meta said in February that its Horizon Worlds game had grown to roughly 300,000 monthly active users '-- an increase from a few months earlier, but minuscule in comparison with Facebook's more than 2.9 billion monthly active users. The company declined to provide more up-to-date figures for Horizon Worlds.

Adding to Meta's woes is that U.S. regulators appear determined to prevent the company from acquiring its way to success, as it did by buying Instagram and WhatsApp. In July, the Federal Trade Commission sued Meta to block it from acquiring Within, the maker of a popular V.R. fitness app. Meta is fighting the agency's lawsuit, which it has called ''wrong on the facts and the law.''

Image Mr. Zuckerberg, right, fencing with an Olympic gold medal fencer in the metaverse. He has made himself the face of the company's metaverse push. Credit... Facebook, via Reuters Mr. Zuckerberg, determined to recast his public image after years in the limelight for unpopular decisions about political speech on Facebook, has surprised some employees by making himself the innovator face of the company's metaverse push. Demonstrations and mock-ups of Meta's latest metaverse technologies feature footage of Mr. Zuckerberg performing V.R. versions of his hobbies, including fencing and a surfing-like watersport called hydrofoiling. The chief executive recently went on Joe Rogan's podcast, where he told the popular comedian that building an immersive metaverse was his ''holy grail.''

What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What's their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.

His involvement has backfired at times. In August, Mr. Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of his Horizon Worlds avatar on his Facebook page, along with an announcement that the app was expanding into France and Spain. But the avatar's flat, cartoonish look was roundly mocked. (One commenter compared it to ''a 2002 Nintendo GameCube release.'')

After that response, Mr. Zuckerberg and other executives directed employees to give priority to improving the appearance of avatars, according to two employees. Mr. Stone, the Facebook spokesman, characterized Mr. Zuckerberg's reaction to the avatar backlash as ''frustrated,'' but did not provide additional details.

A new version of Mr. Zuckerberg's digital appearance was fast-tracked, the two employees said, along with updates to other Horizon Worlds avatars that had been in the works.

Four days after Mr. Zuckerberg's original post, he shared that upgraded digital version of himself, conceding that his first avatar was ''pretty basic'' while the ''graphics in Horizon are capable of much more.'' One Meta graphic artist claimed in a LinkedIn post, which has since been deleted, that he and his team had designed roughly 40 versions of Mr. Zuckerberg's face over a four-week period before a final version was approved.

Image In a post on his Facebook account, Mr. Zuckerberg said that the graphics on the Horizon World app are ''capable of much more,'' after criticism of an earlier avatar of himself. Credit... Meta Mr. Zuckerberg's zeal for the metaverse has been met with skepticism by some Meta employees. This year, he urged teams to hold meetings inside Meta's Horizon Workrooms app, which allows users to gather in virtual conference rooms. But many employees didn't own V.R. headsets or hadn't set them up yet, and had to scramble to buy and register devices before managers caught on, according to one person with knowledge of the events.

In a May poll of 1,000 Meta employees conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional social network, only 58 percent said they understood the company's metaverse strategy. Employees have also grumbled about the high turnover and frequent shuffling of employees as Mr. Zuckerberg's priorities change. Inside Meta, two employees said, some workers now jokingly refer to key metaverse projects as M.M.H., an acronym for ''make Mark happy.''

In September, Vishal Shah, the vice president in charge of Meta's metaverse division, wrote on an internal message board that he was disappointed in how few Meta employees were using Horizon Worlds, according to a post obtained by The Times.

In his post, which was first reported by The Verge, Mr. Shah said that managers would begin tracking workers' use of Horizon Worlds, and said that testing their own technology was essential.

''Why don't we love the product we've built so much that we use it all the time?'' Mr. Shah asked. ''The simple truth is, if we don't love it, how can we expect our users to love it?''

Mr. Shah, who declined to comment to The Times, also said in his post that Horizon would undergo a ''quality lockdown'' for the rest of the year to ''raise the overall craft and delight of our product.''

Image Horizon Worlds has seem some recent user growth, but Facebook still dwarfs the game in monthly active users. Credit... Rafael Henrique/Sipa, via Associated Press As Meta has struggled to grow its metaverse, some at the company have suggested unconventional ideas for bringing in new users. This summer, three Meta employees proposed marketing V.R. headsets to Americans who received student debt relief from the Biden administration, believing it could boost sales of headsets by 20 percent, according to an internal post viewed by The Times.

''This is an opportunity for Meta Quest growth, as there is evidence that past Federal Stimulus spurred growth,'' the analysis read. It does not appear that the company acted on the advice.

One prominent insider who has objected to Mr. Zuckerberg's approach to the metaverse is John Carmack, a well-known game developer and former chief technology officer of Oculus, the V.R. company Facebook acquired for roughly $2 billion in 2014. He continues to work part time at Meta as an adviser.

In a podcast interview in August, Mr. Carmack said the scale of Meta's metaverse bet '-- last year, it reported a $10 billion loss in the division housing its A.R. and V.R. units '-- made him ''sick to my stomach thinking about that much money being spent.'' He added that Meta's development of the metaverse has been hampered by big-company bureaucracy and concerns about issues like diversity and privacy.

Image A customer trying out the Meta Quest 2 headset at a Meta retail store in California. Credit... Nathan Frandino/Reuters Mr. Carmack has also spoken out on Workplace, Meta's internal message board. In posts obtained by The Times, Mr. Carmack, who is speaking at the developer conference on Tuesday, criticized features of the company's V.R. headsets, calling the need to run software updates before using them ''extremely bad for user enjoyment.''

Mr. Carmack did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Carmack's criticism has put him at odds with executives like Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, who oversaw the company's V.R. efforts for years and is a close ally of Mr. Zuckerberg's. Mr. Carmack, according to four employees who have worked with him, has urged the company to think about the metaverse primarily from the immediate user experience, while Mr. Bosworth has approached it from a longer-term point of view with a focus on business opportunities.

As the pressure grows, Mr. Zuckerberg has sent a clear message to Meta employees: Get on board or get out. In a June meeting first reported by Reuters, the 38-year-old billionaire noted that ''there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here'' and that he'd be ''turning up the heat'' on expectations and goals, according to copies of his comments that were shared with The Times. Since then, the company has frozen most hiring, reduced budgets and Mr. Zuckerberg asked managers to start identifying low-performing employees.

Faced with possible layoffs, some Meta employees have started to convey more enthusiasm for the metaverse. More teams have been conducting meetings inside Horizon Workrooms in recent months, several employees said.

But the transition has been rocky. Earlier this year, Mr. Bosworth tried to lead a staff meeting inside Horizon Workrooms, according to an employee who was present.

The meeting was thwarted by technical glitches and the team ended up using Zoom, the employee said.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:40

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:36

Walker : ''To lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account with the Fed.''GENIUS! GIVE THIS'... https://t.co/ULhj9qITXo

Mon Oct 10 22:59:13 +0000 2022

BoMiCle : @WalkerAmerica @ethanbpeck Printing money to loan to productive people and corporations is good. This is how the ec'... https://t.co/XL3JF4jpvz

Thu Oct 13 08:47:07 +0000 2022

BoMiCle : @WalkerAmerica @ethanbpeck I'm sorry but this is nothing new. What am I missing here? Banks print money to loan to'... https://t.co/zWgTlxtZdJ

Thu Oct 13 08:43:40 +0000 2022

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:30

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:28

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slammed ''MAGA Republicans,'' claiming they applaud racism and anti-Semitism.

During Tuesday's briefing, Jean-Pierre was asked about Nury Martinez, the former president of the Los Angeles City Council. Martinez resigned as president on Monday after the recording of a 2021 meeting in which she said a fellow council member's son acts ''like a monkey.'' She also slammed the city's district attorney, saying, ''Fuck that guy'... He's with the Blacks.''

Martinez said she is taking a ''leave of absence'' and currently remains on the council.

Two other council members were at the meeting when Martinez made the remarks. In addition, a union leader who was also present resigned from his position. He was not heard making inappropriate remarks, but faced criticism for not speaking up.

A White House reporter asked Jean-Pierre if President Joe Biden has been following the situation. She replied in the affirmative.

''The president is glad to see that one of the participants in that conversation has resigned,'' she stated. ''But they all should. He believes that they all should resign. The language that was used and tolerated during that conversation was unacceptable and it was appalling.''

Jean-Pierre then pivoted to take a shot at the Republican Party '' specifically ''MAGA Republicans.''

''And here's the difference between Democrats and MAGA Republicans,'' she said. ''When a Democrat says something racist or anti-Semitic, we hold Democrats accountable. When a MAGA Republican says something racist or anti-Semitic, they're embraced by cheering crowds and become celebrated and sought after endorsements.''

Jean-Pierre pointed to recent comments by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) at a rally over the weekend with former President Donald Trump. About reparations for the descendants of slaves, he said, ''They want reparation 'cause they think people that do the crime are owed. Bullshit! They're not owed that!''

The crowd cheered in response.

Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:24

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:21

Activate Push Notifications

Confirm to receive notifications when channels you've subscribed to upload new videos.

You can activate this any time from the settings page.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 15:58

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 15:44

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 14:59

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:33

Enjoyed this video? Join my Locals community for exclusive content at

thevigilantfox.locals.com!

Bancel: "We are now in a super exciting program where we inject mRNA in people's heart after a heart attack to grow back new blood vessels and re-vascularize the heart"

Reporter: "The irony of COVID is that is really has in some ways allowed you to go and develop these other areas because of the revenues that came through the door."

Bancel: "You're 100% right"

Credit: https://rumble.com/v1nd8dg-moderna-ceo-stphane-bancel-announces-new-mrna-shot-to-treat-heart-muscle-af.html

Support my work with a free or paid Substack subscription: https://vigilantfox.substack.com

Read my articles: https://redvoicemedia.com/vigilantfox

Follow my other socials at https://vigilantfox.id

Or use that same code to buy ''The best coffee you'll ever try'' at https://mystore.com/vfox

Save 5% Off Dr. Zelenko's Z-DTOX With Coupon Code FOX: https://zstacklife.com/?ref=wmpgvtrNa6bk

Support my work, RVM, and gain access to exclusive content at https://redvoicemedia.com/subscribe/ref/8/

Protect your wealth from Bidenflation: https://www.gcjdjhs3e.com/3N116J/PS824/?uid=19