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North Korea
Jun 20 2017 US spy satellites detect activity at North Korean underground nuclear test site.Iit is not yet clear if the activity indicates a sixth nuclear test is imminent, but noted there is concern that North Korea could set off a test during tomorrow's visit to Washington by top Chinese diplomats and military officials. At the bilateral talks tomorrow, officials say the US is looking to use trade as a weapon with China to put more pressure on North Korea. (Source: CNN)
Persian Gulf
Jun 18, 2017 Iran's navy has conducted a joint exercise with a Chinese fleet near the strategic Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. The drill included an Iranian warship as well as two Chinese warships, a logistics ship and a Chinese helicopter that arrived in Iran's port of Bandar Abbas last week. The scheduled exercise came before the departure of the Chinese fleet for Muscat, Oman. The U.S. navy held a joint drill with Qatar in the Persian Gulf on June 17. Nearly a third of all oil traded by sea passes through the Strait of Hormuz. (Source: AP)
Syria
June 19, 2017 Moscow condemned the American military’s downing of a Syrian warplane and threatened to target aircraft flown by the United States and its allies west of the Euphrates. The Russians also said they had suspended their use of a hotline that the American and Russian militaries used to avoid collisions of their aircraft in Syrian airspace. The Russian threat to target American aircraft west of the Euphrates poses complications, particularly because Raqqa, which sits on the river in northern Syria, is well within range of Syrian and Russian air defenses. Weeks after President Putin of Russia ordered his country’s military forces to Syria in September 2015 to prop up the government of Mr. Assad, Russia and the United States signed a memorandum on preventing air clashes between the two countries. (Source: TheNewYorkTimes)
Jun 18, 2017 The U.S. military shot down near Tabqa by a U.S. F/A-18E Super Hornet a Syrian Air Force fighter jet SU-22 that bombed local forces known as the Syrian Democratic Forces aligned with the Americans in the fight against islamic state militants, an action that appeared to mark a new escalation of the conflict."The coalition's mission is to defeat isis in Iraq and Syria," the Pentagon said. "The coalition does not seek to fight Syrian regime, Russian or pro-regime forces partnered with them, but will not hesitate to defend coalition or partner forces from any threat. " 8Source: AP)
June 16, 2017 Russia announced it may have killed Baghdadi, the head of the islamic state group in an airstrike targeting a meeting of is leaders just outside the group’s self-declared capital in Syria. U.S. officials said there was no definitive proof of his death. Moscow claims that he may have been killed in the May 28 airstrike along with more than 300 militants. Drones were sent to monitor the area, followed by Su-34 bombers and Su-35 fighter jets to carry out the attack. But Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said: “I don’t have a 100 percent confirmation of the information.” Baghdadi, believed to be in his mid-40s, last released an audio message Nov. 3, urging his followers to keep up the fight for Mosul as they defended the Iraqi city against a major offensive that had begun weeks earlier. The group is fighting for survival in a few remaining neighborhoods in western Mosul and is now under attack in Raqqa, its self-styled capital. The battle for Raqqa was launched a few days after al-Baghdadi’s supposed killing, at a time when most of the group’s commanders have relocated to Mayadeen, a remote town in the heart of Syria’s IS-controlled, Euphrates River valley near the Iraqi border. The group’s current No. 2 is believed to be Obeidi, also known as Haifa, a former Iraqi army officer under Hussein. (Source: AP)
Puerto Rico
Jun 12, 2017 Puerto Rico's governor is vowing to make the U.S. territory the 51st state after statehood won in a non-binding referendum. (Source. AP)
United States Egyesült Államok
June 19, 2017 Federal authorities in San Diego have seized one of the largest loads ever in the U.S. of the potent synthetic opiate Fentanyl - over 44 kg of the drug, most of it from a house in San Diego. The drug is so powerful that the amount represents millions of lethal doses. Drug traffickers use it to strengthen heroin or make counterfeit painkiller pills. (Source: SFGate)
06/19/2017 At worse: public corruption. This is the similar type of pattern we received with the Clinton Foundation in which foreign governments and foreign interests were throwing a lot of money in the hopes of trying to buy influence. Arizona Republican Sen. McCain in 2012 turned over nearly $9 million in unspent funds from his failed 2008 presidential campaign to a new foundation bearing his name, the McCain Institute for International Leadership. The institute is intended to serve as a “legacy” for McCain and “is dedicated to advancing human rights, dignity, democracy and freedom.” It is a tax-exempt non-profit foundation with assets valued at $8.1 million and associated with Arizona State University. He is presently chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services. The institute’s donors and McCain’s personal leadership in the organization’s exclusive “Sedona Forum” bear an uncanny resemblance to the glitzy Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) that annually co-mingled special interests and powerful political players in alleged pay-to-play schemes. The institute has accepted contributions of as much as $100,000 from billionaire liberal activist-funder Soros and from Teneo, a for-profit company co-founded by Band, former President Clinton’s “bag man.” Teneo has long helped enrich Clinton through lucrative speaking and business deals. McCain and Soros reportedly became friends after the senator was exposed as a member of the “Keating Five” during the savings and loan (S&L) industry scandal during former President Bush’s administration. As the S&L bank chairman, Keating paid $1.3 million to bribe five members of Congress to interfere with government regulators on behalf of the savings bank. Bloomberg reported in 2016 on a $1 million Saudi Arabian donation to the institute. The institute has taken at least $100,000 from a Moroccan state-run company tied to repeated charges of worker abuse and exploitation. It accepted more than $100,000 from OCP, S.A., a Moroccan state-owned phosphate company operating in the Western Sahara, territory which Morocco seized in 1975. The North African country has since occupied the region by force in defiance of U.N. resolutions and legal declarations by other international bodies. Morocco has come under criticism from human rights groups that the government violates basic human rights and that its state-owned companies subject its workforce to gruesome conditions while exploiting the disputed territory’s natural resources. The Western Sahara holds half of the world’s phosphate reserves. Used to make fertilizer, phosphate is called Morocco’s “white gold.” The King of Morocco was a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. Mrs Clinton personally accepted $12 million from the King in return for holding a CGI regional meeting in the country. McCain has lavished effusive praise on the King of Morocco, saying in 2011, that the country was a “positive example to governments across the Middle East and North Africa.” The McCain group has also accepted at least $100,000 from the Pivotal Foundation, which was created by Najafi who owns the Pivotal Group, a private equity and real estate firm. The Pivotal Foundation has in the last three years given $205,000 to the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), which has been a vocal advocate for the Iranian nuclear deal the Obama administration negotiated. The NIAC is Iran’s lobbyists in Washington. The NIAC does not file as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, nor does it register as a lobbyist with Congress. McCain recently claimed no involvement with the institute, saying “I’m proud that the institute is named after me, but I have nothing to do with it.” (Source: DailyCaller): http://tinyurl.com/y8ssfdcn
June 18, 2017 An extended shutdown of the nation's only scientific laboratory for producing and testing the plutonium cores for its nuclear weapons has taken a toll on America's arsenal, with key work postponed and delays looming in the production of components for new nuclear warheads, according to government documents and officials.The unique research and production facility is located at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, the birthplace of the U.S. atomic arsenal. The lab's director ordered the shutdown in 2013 after the Washington, D.C., official in charge of America's warhead production expressed worries that the facility was ill-equipped to prevent an accident that would kill its workers and potentially others nearby. Parts of the facility began renewed operations last year, but with only partial success. And workers there last year were still violating safety rules for handling plutonium, the unstable man-made metal that serves as the sparkplug of the thermonuclear explosions that American bombs are designed to create. Los Alamos' persistent shortcomings in plutonium safety have been cited in more than 40 reports by government oversight agencies, teams of nuclear safety experts and the lab's own employees over the past 11 years. Los Alamos needs 27 fully qualified safety engineers specialized in keeping the plutonium for fissioning out of control. The lab has 10. In April 2015, workers discovered tubes of liquids containing plutonium in seldom-used rooms at PF-4, with labels that made it hard to know how much plutonium the tubes held or where they'd come from, the safety board said. In May, workers packed a drum of nuclear waste with too much plutonium, posing a criticality risk. In June 2016, after technicians working in a glovebox spilled about 7 tablespoons of a liquid containing plutonium, workers violated safety rules by sopping up the spill with organic cheesecloth and throwing it in waste bins with other nuclear materials, posing the risk of a chemical reaction and fire, according to an internal Los Alamos report. (Source: ReadingEagle)
June 18, 2017 More courts allowing 3 parents of 1 child. New techniques designed to avoid some rare diseases now allow for a child to be born with a small amount of DNA from a third person. (Source: TheWallStreetJournal)
2017. VI. 17. Trump amerikai elnök Miami-ban tartott beszédében hangsúlyozta: tiszteletben tartja Kuba szuverenitását, ugyanakkor felszólította a kommunista szigetországot a szabad választások megszervezésére. (Forrás: Mandiner)
06 16 2017 Mind blowing list of attacks against aonservatives. A wave of liberal rage has marked the last 11 months since the rise and subsequent election of President Trump. Antifa protestors clad in black masks shut down college campuses, destroy property and indiscriminately attack those they disagree with, whether women or the elderly. Meanwhile, CNN fires Griffin for taking photos with a bloody replica of the president’s decapitated head. The Huffington Post publishes an article calling for the execution of Trump and “everyone assisting his agenda.” Shots ring out as a man gorged on media hysteria attempts to slaughter Republican congressmen while they practice for a charity baseball game. A close but non-exhaustive list of violent acts against conservatives in months following the Republican National Convention, including those that resulted in the cancelling of events - some instances of violence between rival protestors were not included as it was difficult to ascertain who initiated the event -: July 2016: a Ms Clinton supporter lights a flag on fire and attacks a Trump supporter in Pittsburgh; protesters jumped on cars, stole hats, fought with and threw eggs at Trump supporters outside a Trump rally in downtown San Jose. Trump supporters sued San Jose over the violence. August: anti-Trump protesters attacked pushed, spit on and verbally harassed attendees forced to walk a “gauntlet” as they left a Trump fundraiser in Minneapolis, Minn., and beat an elderly man. Protesters also attacked Trump’s motorcade; a Tennessee man was assaulted at a garage sale for being a Trump supporter; Trump supporter in New Jersey was attacked with a crowbar on the street. September 2016: protesters in El Cajon, Calif., chased and beat up a Trump supporter. June 2017: Hodgkinson opened fire on a congressional GOP baseball practice, injuring five, including House Majority Whip Scalise; republican Rep. Tenney received an email threat that read, “One down, 216 to go,” shortly after the shooting at the Republican congressional baseball practice; a man driving a white Malibu reportedly fired several shots at a man driving a truck displaying a “Make America Great Again” flag in Indiana. (Source: DailyCaller): https://tinyurl.com/yaa57o25
June 15, 2017 The most dangerous gang in the nation, MS-13 honchos in El Salvador have implemented the ‘New York Program,’ which mandates an increase of violence and bloodshed in New York. Dozens of reputed MS-13 gang members were arrested as part of a 41-person indictment. Multiple incidents alleged in indictment involve handguns and machetes, the latter of which is MS-13’s weapon of choice. MS-13 has terrorized communities, killed innocent people, and stolen the childhoods of the vulnerable young people they recruit to join their ranks. (Source: TheNewYorkPost)
June 14, 2017 When blood flow to the heart is interrupted by a clot or the narrowing of vessels, the effect can be deadly, either now or later. Physicians have long sought to avert that lingering damage by restoring the flow of oxygenated blood to the heart muscle as quickly as possible. Several years ago, researchers in Woo’s Stanford lab started by grinding spinach, and then kale, with mortar and pestle. When they introduced the green slurry to living tissue in Petri dishes and set them in the sun, nothing happened. But when they tried a more primitive practitioner of photosynthesis - pond scum - the oxygenation effect was clear to see. The scientists used cyanobacteria, the blue-green algae that often blooms on the surface of still waters, to supply life-giving oxygen to the stricken hearts of rats. After clamping off the largest of three arteries feeding blood to the heart - the left anterior descending coronary artery - the researchers injected those hearts with tens of millions of the single-celled organisms. For two full hours - one hour while the clamp remained in place and a second hour after it was removed - the animals’ incisions remained open. During that time, the hearts of the treated rats were exposed to strong light, which jump-started the photosynthetic process. Just as they would on the surface of a pond, the cyanobacteria used the pigment chlorophyll to combine water, carbon dioxide and light to produce glucose. The incidental byproduct of that process - oxygen - kept cells deprived of oxygenated blood from dying off in droves.
(Source: LosAngelesTimes)
June 14, 2017 The Pentagon is building robotic wingmen to fly alongside fighter planes. Kratos Defense and Security Solutions, a San Diego company rolls out a set of new drones - the UTAP-22 Mako - it says could accompany human-piloted fighters into combat. Separately, the company showed off a larger, 30-foot-long drone backed by the Air Force called the XQ-222 Valkyrie, with a range of more than 4,000 nautical miles. The drones could fly in tandem with an F-16 or F-35 fighter. In tests, a pilot in an accompanying airplane is preparing to monitor the drones from a small Android tablet. For most of the flight, the drone will attempt to maneuver without the help of a human, relying on artificial intelligence technology and sensors to mimic the nearby plane’s movements. The Mako represents a step forward from the unmanned Predator and Reaper drones now largely used for aerial surveillance and for targeted attacks in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Kratos’ $12.6 million contract with DIUx to explore the autonomous use of high-speed drones is tiny compared with larger military hardware development contracts, which can reach into the billions of dollars. (Source: TheWashingtonPost)
June 14, 2017 Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, a supporter of former Democratic presidential candidate Sanders fired at Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, seriously injuring House Majority Whip Scalise and four others before U.S. Capitol Police took down the assailant. Without the Capitol Police officers assigned to Scalise, “it would have been a massacre. Noting the suspect was a big Sanders supporter, according to his Facebook page, Savage accused Sanders of inciting violence by stirring up “venom and hate against millionaires and billionaires.” “This blood is on Bernie’s hands, and he should be put in jail for this. He incited violence,” Savage declared. Savage writes in his 2014 book, “Stop the Coming Civil War.” on page 252 of the book: “Not since the run-up to the Civil War has the nation been more divided. The battle lines have been drawn: The haves against the have-nots. The illegal aliens against hard working middle-class families. Liberals who hate the second amendment versus lawful gun owners. Climate activists whose policies cause forest fires and exacerbate drought against those who understand that the effect on human activity is negligible. Anti-Christian Communist educators against God fearing families. Republicrats against Patriots.” (Source: WND)
Globalization
16 June 2017 ‘I can’t walk anywhere without looking back’: a moderator describes psychological damage after his personal details were leaked to suspected terrorists he removed from the platform. Facebook put the safety of its content moderators at risk after inadvertently exposing their personal details to suspected terrorist users of the social network. The security lapse affected more than 1,000 workers across 22 departments at Facebook who used the company’s moderation software to review and remove inappropriate content from the platform, including sexual material, hate speech and terrorist propaganda. A bug in the software, discovered late last year, resulted in the personal profiles of content moderators automatically appearing as notifications in the activity log of the Facebook groups, whose administrators were removed from the platform for breaching the terms of service. Of the 1,000 affected workers, around 40 worked in a counter-terrorism unit based at Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. The leak was identified in November 2016. Facebook then discovered that the personal Facebook profiles of its moderators had been automatically appearing in the activity logs of the groups they were shutting down. The bug in the software was not fixed for another two weeks. The glitch had been active for a month. The bug was also retroactively exposing the personal profiles of moderators who had censored accounts as far back as August 2016. Six of those were assessed to be “high priority” victims of the mistake after Facebook concluded their personal profiles were likely viewed by potential terrorists. The high-risk six had spent weeks in a state of panic and emergency. An Iraqi-born Irish citizen, who is in his early twenties and was contracted by global outsourcing company Cpl Recruitmen fled Ireland and went into hiding after discovering that seven individuals associated with a suspected terrorist group he banned from Facebook - an Egypt-based group that backed Hamas and had members who were islamic state sympathizers - had viewed his personal profile. The moderator, who first came to Ireland as an asylum seeker when he was a child, quit his job and moved to eastern Europe for five months. The five months he felt like “exile”. He returned to Ireland last month after running out of money, although he still lives in fear. Others within the high-risk six had their personal profiles viewed by accounts with ties to isis, Hezbollah and the Kurdistan Workers Party. “The punishment from isis for working in counter-terrorism is beheading. All they’d need to do is tell someone who is radical here.' - he said. He was paid just €13 per hour for a role that required him to develop specialist knowledge of global terror networks and scour through often highly-disturbing material. “You come in every morning and just look at beheadings, people getting butchered, stoned, executed,” he said. Facebook’s policies allow users to post extremely violent images provided they don’t promote or celebrate terrorism. When he started he was required to use his personal Facebook account to log into the social media giant’s moderation system. “They should have let us use fake profiles,” he said. Details of Facebook’s security blunder will once again put a spotlight on the grueling and controversial work carried out by an army of thousands of low-paid staff, including in countries like the Philippines and India. (Source: TheGuardian)
June 15, 2017 Epidemiological studies suggest that 12 percent of Americans and six percent of Europeans already suffer from the condition; the disease, formally known as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which is caused by a buildup of fat in the liver. NASH can lead to scarring of the liver, which in turn leads to cirrhosis. In humans, the inflammation slowly eats away at the liver's cells, causing scar tissue to form known as fibrosis. This can result in either liver cancer or what is known as non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. US giant Allergan acquired Californian biotech firm Tobira for $1.7 billion last year, and recently hooked up with Switzerland's Novartis to carry out clinical trials. Danish diabetes giant Novo Nordisk is also interested - among many others. Three companies are leading the pack, with candidate drugs already in the final third phase of development: Gilead, US firm Intercept and French biotech firm Genfit. The preliminary results of the phase-three trials are expected in mid-2019 for Genfit's drug Elafibranor, which is designed to reduce if not halt inflammation and degeneration of liver cells. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 30 percent of the world's population was overweight in 2015. (Source: Yahoo)
Space
Jun 11, 2017 NASA has announced that it has discovered 10 new “potentially hazardous” space rocks close to Earth that could put life on this planet at risk. The discovery was made by NASA’s asteroid detecting mission – Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or NEOWISE. Nasa says that they have identified 97 other space rocks and seen an unexplained spike in comet activity. There are currently over 600,000 known asteroids in our solar system. Most asteroids are found orbiting in the Asteroid Belt, a series of rings located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The findings come shortly after a group of Czech scientists warned fragments of asteroids which could wipe out entire countries are hidden in the Taurids meteor shower. According to the group of researchers, one of the fragments could hit Earth in 2022, 2025, 2032 or 2039 during the annual meteor shower. (Source: Express)
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