News You Can Use

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Violent Greektown Brawl Captured On Video « CBS Detroit

And then starts a video that shows about 25-40 men punching, kicking and brutally beating people on the streets of Greektown, one of Detroit’s most popular hotspots. In the video, one man is lying with his head over the curb appearing unconscious and very badly injured. He gets punched and kicked as the cell-phone filming crowd of young men shouts and laughs.

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Physicists create fluid with 'negative mass' - UPI.com

April 17 (UPI) -- A team of physicists at Washington State University have created a fluid that ignores Isaac Newton's Second Law of Motion. The fluid has "negative mass." When it's pushed it accelerates backwards.

Almost all matter in the universe obey's Newton's second law -- matter accelerates in the direction of the force applied to it. The new fluid does the opposite.

"With negative mass, if you push something, it accelerates toward you," Michael Forbes, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Washington State, said in a news release.

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Wells Fargo exec was fired for not scamming N.J. customers, lawsuit says | NJ.com

NEW BRUNSWICK -- A Somerset County woman is suing Wells Fargo Bank alleging she was fired for refusing to participate in an alleged scheme similar to the bank's widespread account scam that led to millions of dollars in federal fines. 

Melinda Bini, a former assistant vice president and regional private banker at the Highland Park bank's branch, says in a recent lawsuit that supervisors instructed her to manipulate accounts and sell banking products or investments that were not the customers' best interest or without their knowledge.  

The lawsuit, filed in Middlesex County Superior Court on April 5, names Wells Fargo and three local bank supervisors.

The Franklin Park woman accuses her former superiors in the suit of running or knowing about alleged banking and investment fraud scheme at the local branch.

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It's not elites vs. populists. It's cities vs. the countryside.

Across the West, from the U.K.'s Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S., societies are dividing along similar fault lines. But we can't quite agree on how to describe it: Neoliberal centrists vs. antiliberal extremists? Elites vs. populists? Globalists vs. nationalists? The establishment vs. the working class?

Each of those dichotomies captures something about our present moment, but none of them gets at the fundamentals — the sociological core of what we're all living through, which is a growing socio-cultural chasm pitting the city and the countryside against each other.

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Government will protect you!

'I will protect you!' Le Pen tells voters ahead of presidential election | Reuters

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen on Monday sought to mobilise her supporters six days ahead of France's most unpredictable presidential election in decades by pledging to suspend all immigration and shield voters from "savage globalisation."

Opinion polls have for months shown Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron qualifying next Sunday for the May 7 run-off, but the gap with conservative Francois Fillon and far-leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon has been tightening.

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Device that can literally read your mind invented by scientists | The Independent

A device that can read people’s minds by detecting their brainwaves has been developed in a breakthrough that could eventually enable people with “locked-in syndrome” to communicate.

The system was only partially effective with a 90 per cent success rate when trying to recognise numbers from zero to nine and a 61 per cent rate for single syllables in Japanese, the researchers said.

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Silicon Valley CEO Pleads ‘No Contest’ to Abusing His Wife—and Is Offered a Deal for Less Than 30 Days in Jail - The Daily Beast

At Apple, Neha Rastogi worked on everything from Siri to FaceTime to Maps, sometimes seated beside Steve Jobs himself.

She is clearly brilliant and dedicated as well as passionate about the happy interface between technology and the public. Nobody could have foreseen that she would someday be compelled to employ an iPhone to record harrowing moments of what she says was a pattern of domestic abuse during virtually her entire 10-year marriage to a man who is now CEO of a Silicon Valley startup.

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News from The Associated Press

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced plans Monday to expand the number of civilians involved in armed militias as tensions in the crisis-wracked South American nation continued to rise.

Maduro said he hopes to expand the number of civilians involved in the Bolivarian militias created by the late Hugo Chavez to 500,000, up from the current 100,000, and provide each member with a gun.

Speaking to thousands of militia members dressed in beige uniforms gathered in front of the presidential palace to mark the force's seventh anniversary, Maduro said it is time for Venezuelans to decide if they are "with the homeland" or against it.

"Now is not the time to hesitate," he said.

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UC Davis student leaders say American flag display should be optional at meetings | The Sacramento Bee

The UC Davis student senate has made it optional to display the American flag at its meetings, stirring up controversy on campus and conservative blogs.

Senate Bill 76 passed Thursday, said Michael Gofman, a student senator who opposed the change.

The bill amends bylaws that required the United States flag to be on display at every senate meeting of the Associated Students, University of California, Davis. The revised bylaws give senate members the option to petition for the display of the flag 24 hours before each meeting. The ASUCD senate pro tem ultimately has authority to decide whether the U.S. flag will be displayed, according to the revision.

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Despite Record Collections, 52,062,499 Filers Paid No Income Taxes in 2014

(CNSNews.com) - In tax year 2014, according to a report published by the Internal Revenue Service, the federal government hauled in a then-record $1,377,797,136,000 in individual income taxes.

Nonetheless, of the 148,606,578 individual income tax return filers that year, 52,062,499 filed what the IRS calls “nontaxable returns,” which means they paid no net individual income taxes.

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Russian bombers fly near Alaska; Air Force scrambles jets | Fox News

A pair of Russian nuclear-capable bombers flew near Alaska Monday night, two U.S. officials told Fox News, coming as close as 100 miles from Kodiak Island -- the first time since President Trump took office that Moscow has sent bombers so close to the U.S.

The two Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers flew roughly 280 miles southwest of Elmendorf Air Force Base, within the Air Defense Identification Zone of the United States.

The U.S. Air Force scrambled two F-22 stealth fighter jets and an E-3 airborne early warning plane to intercept the Russian bombers.

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Mark Zuckerberg confirms Facebook's 'brain interface' | Daily Mail Online

Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled Facebook's augmented reality system - and confirmed rumours the firm is developing a 'mind control' brain interface. 

The social network's founder took to the stage at the firm's annual F8 developer conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center to introduce what he called the 'second act' in Facebook's camera strategy - a new platform to allow developers to build AR apps that intensifies its battle with Snapchat.

He also hinted at the firm's more distant future, confirming rumours it is developing a radical mind reading computer interface - and promised more details on the project 'soon'. 

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Why Are Republicans Making Tax Reform So Hard? - The New York Times

In the aftermath of the health care blowup, President Trump and the Republicans need a legislative victory. Tax reform probably should have gone first, but now is the time to move it forward with urgency.

Unfortunately, the White House seems all over the map on the subject. One day there is a trial balloon for a value-added tax. The next, the idea of a carbon tax or a reciprocal tax. And now we are hearing the curve ball of a payroll tax cut. Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, has thrown cold water on the idea of any tax bill meeting the August deadline.

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U.S. intelligence agencies fear rogue insiders as much as spies these days | McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON
Forget about spies. It’s rogue insiders that cause heartburn at U.S. intelligence agencies these days.

Few spy cases have broken in the past decade and a half. In contrast, a proliferation of U.S. intelligence and military insiders have gone rogue and spilled secrets to journalists or WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group.

The leaks are as damaging as any major spy case, perhaps more so. And they have underscored the ease of stealing secrets in the modern age, sometimes with a single stroke of a keyboard.

[Joel]

https://www.facebook.com/JasonChaffetz1 ... 3022140234

[Joel]

he should team up with Alex Jones, that would be a fun pair :))

[Joel]

North Korea Is a Large Opium Producer Just Like Afghanistan — But That’s None of Your Business

Prior to the U.S. invasion and occupation that sent production and cultivation skyrocketing 35-fold in just the first 13 years, the Taliban had successfully decimated the opium poppy crop in Afghanistan.

Nearly 16 years later, Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trafficking business is still roaring along unhindered, and — with U.S. troops literally guarding the occupied nation’s 90-percent share of the world’s opium supply — potential competitors rightly seemed scarce.

That is, until North Korea just said ‘no’ to the Drug War.

“In its early stage, the Kim Jong-un regime declared a war against drugs, getting rid of poppy fields,” Kang Cheol-hwan, president of the defector organization, North Korea Strategy Center, told Yonhap News Agency last month. “But now they are cultivating them again.”

North Korea’s opium poppies remained at least somewhat secreted from its citizens under the rule of Kim Jong-il.

In an August 2011 interview with NPR, Ma Young Ae — a defector and former North Korean spy who lives in Virginia — explained she “worked for Kim Jong Il’s internal police force. Her job was was to track down drug smugglers. That sounds like pretty normal law enforcement, except for one difference. She was supposed to stop small-time Korean drug dealers in order to protect the biggest drug dealer in the country: the North Korean government.

“Ma told us the North Korean government produced opium on a large scale. But it hid its poppy fields from most of the population. Ma only saw the fields because she was an insider.

“After harvesting the fields, the government would put its empty factories to use. The government would turn on its production lines at night and process opium, Ma says. Then they would pack the product in plastic cubes the size of dictionaries and smuggle it out of the country through China.”

Kim Jong-il’s son and successor instead chose to fight the war on drugs — until the Chinese Commerce Ministry suspended imports of coal from February through the end of the year, in response to one of Pyongyang’s contentious ballistic missiles tests.

Faced with the rapid loss of hard currency and an uphill battle to fund the regime’s activities — coal comprised an estimated 40 percent of North Korea’s exports to China — Kim Jong-un appears to have cozied to the wallet-stuffing possibilities the prized poppy provides.

Noting the war on drugs had already failed, Kang added, “The North is cultivating poppy fields again for drug smuggling as a way to secure funds to manage its regime.”

Funding an entire government’s operations from the cultivation and production of opium should be a piece of cake — should illegal markets fail, America has an insidious obsession with opioids.

Tens of thousands each year die of overdoses from heroin, opioids, and/or their synthetics in the United States, alone — in large part, courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry’s reckless devotion to painkillers.

Vox reported March 29 the opioid “epidemic has by and large been caused by the rise in opioid overdose deaths. First, opioid painkiller overdoses began to rise, as doctors began to fill out a record number of prescriptions for the drugs in an attempt to treat patients’ pain conditions. Then, people hooked on painkillers began to move over to heroin as they or their sources of drugs lost their prescriptions. And recently, more people have begun moving to fentanyl, an opioid that’s even more potent and cheaper than heroin. The result is a deadly epidemic that so far shows no signs of slowing down.”

And how could it slow down?

Opioids doled out like candy by doctors and hospitals to those suffering but unaware of the addiction pitfalls inherent in rising tolerance, short-term prescriptions, and — in particular — the availability of potent substances like heroin and fentanyl on the black market.

This isn’t by far purely an issue to be blamed on illegal trade in drugs. Media Roots’ Abby Martin elaborated on the perniciousness of the opioid crisis in 2014, stating,

“In today’s globalized world of rule-for-profit, one can’t discount the role that multinational corporations play in US foreign policy decisions either. Not only have oil companies and private military contractors made a killing off the occupation, big pharmaceutical companies, which collectively lobby over 250 million dollars annually to Congress, need opium latex to manufacture drugs for this pill happy nation. As far as the political elite funneling the tainted funds, the recent HSBC bank scandal exposed how trillions of dollars in black market sales are brazenly being laundered offshore.”

For the welcome relief opioid painkillers offer those who suffer severe discomfort, the medications’ highly-addictive nature leaves doctors reluctant to write strong prescriptions. However, if tolerance builds, and medical personnel refuse to increase dosage accordingly, those still facing unbearable pain often shop black markets — where the purity and safety of substances cannot be verified — to supplement their supplies.

It must be duly noted, America’s opioid epidemic mushroomed only after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan.

“Within six months of the U.S. invasion,” wrote Matthieu Aikins for the December 4, 2014, Rolling Stone, “the warlords we backed were running the opium trade, and the spring of 2002 saw a bumper harvest of 3,400 tons.”

Just prior to boots and bombs hitting the ground, opium production in Afghanistan fell to an impressive low of 185 pounds — all-too ironically, thanks to Taliban efforts to eradicate the entire supply of opium poppies.

Mint Press News’ Mnar Muhawesh wrote last year, “The War in Afghanistan saw the country’s practically dead opium industry expanded dramatically. By 2014, Afghanistan was producing twice as much opium as it did in 2000. By 2015, Afghanistan was the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium poppy.”

Claiming terrorism as the impetus for invading Afghanistan would be at least as absurd as the Drug Enforcement Agency claiming the global War on Drugs has been a success. Taliban forces have returned in strength to the nation whose opium poppies are guarded by U.S. troops — who are putatively present to fight in the ongoing War on Terror.

After a moment deeply pondering the last point, it’s imperative to address current events — specifically, U.S. military vessels already present in the South and East China Seas, amid dangerously high tensions with North Korea.

North Korea — who announced weeks ago its debilitated economy would seek relief from, yes, the cultivation and production of opium poppies.

Perpetually bellicose Pyongyang is no stranger to hyperbole in military prowess — so much so, threats of direct nuclear strikes by North Korea against the United States are typically downplayed by Washington, if not dismissed with a snide grin.

Pyongyang’s testing of ballistic and other missiles has been deemed a threat to the national security of South Korea, where a U.S. missile defense system pointed North has further heightened hostilities on the peninsula and in the region.

Of one such missile launch Sunday, Defense Secretary James Mattis admonished,

“The leader of North Korea again recklessly tried to provoke something by launching a missile.”

Kim In Ryong, North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations, warned on Monday the U.S. has “created a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any minute” — adding, Pyongyang “is ready to react to any mode of war desired by the U.S.”

Whether that war includes plans for the U.S. usurpation of North Korea’s literal cash crop of opium poppies will undoubtedly be determined soon.

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Congress considering new 'tax' on troops for GI Bill - The San Diego Union-Tribune

A proposal in Congress would impose a new $2,400 fee on troops who want to sign up to get the GI Bill after discharge.

The idea is being considered by the House Veterans Affairs Committee next Wednesday at a hearing.

The nation’s veterans groups appear to be steaming about the proposed change.

“We are still a nation at war. We have troops actively engaged in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and now in Syria,” said leader of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Brian Duffy, in an issued statement.

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Technology will turn future workers into cyborgs | Daily Mail Online

Robots have taken over dangerous and repetitive tasks, improving factory safety
The next phase of labor innovation will do the same thing for cognitive work
It will remove mentally stressful and repetitive tasks from people's daily routines
Researchers claim robots and people will work more closely together than ever
This will involve tech-augmented human workers, both in factories and in offices
One type of enhancement would let workers wear robotic exoskeletons, letting them handle heavy objects without losing the flexibility of human movement

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For Its 'Workshop on Privilege,' Kennesaw State University Separates Students by Race | Heat Street

When Kennesaw State University held an event last week on privilege and interracial relations, it asked “those who identify as white” to go to one room and “those who identify as people of color” to go to another.

“The goal of the workshop, which was led by an outside expert, was to foster learning and create an environment of understanding and support for one another,” said Kennesaw State University spokeswoman Tammy DeMel. “Attendees were asked to work together and then were invited to join the group with which they identify.”

The April 13 event “is being mischaracterized” as segregation, DeMel added.

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Steinmetz accuses George Soros Of ""Puppeteering" In BSGR Lawsuit

When an investment asset has potential to deliver returns for 100 years, the competition to be the sole owner can be intense. Such is the case with mining rights to the Simandou iron ore deposit in the West African nation of Guinea, where George Soros is involved in one of several lawsuits over the past few years. The dispute is aggressive, with Soros being called out as anti-Israeli in the suit, which dredges up well-worn charges the former hedge fund managers engages in a global conspiracy to manipulate numerous governments. The feud with Israeli mining magnate Beny Steinmetz dates back to 1998 and involves charges of manipulation and bribery.

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SGA passes resolution supporting reparations for black students | News | bgdailynews.com

Western Kentucky University’s Student Government Association passed a resolution Tuesday supporting reparations for African-American students.

The resolution calls on WKU to create a task force to “assess the feasibility of test-optional admissions and geographically-weighted admissions,” citing research showing that using standardized test scores in the college admissions process “restricts the college opportunities for needy students, helping higher education perpetuate inequality.”

[Joel]

Twerking woman causes major accident

A twerking woman’s saucy roadside dancing display caused mayhem when a biker smashed into car.

The video shows a brunette busting her best moves for the camera as the whine of a motorcycle can be heard in the background.

As the biker appears in view, the dancer starts cheering to get his attention, causing him to take his eyes off the road.

He turns his head toward the gyrating woman and in doing so, fails to notice an oncoming BMW.

As a result, the motorcycle smashes straight into the car, catapulting the rider into the air.

Immediately after the crash, the woman and person filming dash toward the collision, clearly panicked by what has just happened.

The clip goes on to show the biker’s limp body lying in the road.

Astonishingly, he managed to survive the crash, but did sustain a broken pelvis and leg.

More than 170,000 people have watched the video, filmed in Ukraine, since it was uploaded Sunday.

Shocked commenters on YouTube have asked, “Why would you dance on the motorway?”

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Russia flexes muscle from Alaska to Japan - CNNPolitics.com

Washington (CNN)US defense officials are calling recent sightings of Russian bombers off the Alaskan coast "nothing out of the ordinary" -- itself an indication that both nations are toeing the line between routine military posturing and escalating provocation.

On Monday, US F-22 fighter jets intercepted two Russian bombers in international airspace 100 miles from Kodiak Island, Alaska. A US military official called the interaction "safe and professional."

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Elon Musk Lays Out Plans to Meld Brains and Computers - WSJ

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday confirmed plans for his newest company, called Neuralink Corp., revealing he will be the chief executive of a startup that aims to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in “consensual telepathy.”