News You Can Use

[mes5464]

BofA: Even The Bubbles Are Becoming More "Bubbly" Thanks To Central Banks | Zero Hedge

Back in June, Citi's credit strategist Hans Lorenzen pointed out that while QE had failed to spark inflation across the broader economy, it had achieved something else: "the principal transmission channel to the real economy has been... lifting asset prices." That however has required continuous CB balance sheet growth, and with the Fed, ECB and BOJ all poised to "renormalize" over the next year, the global monetary impulse is set to turn negative in the coming year. Meanwhile, as financial markets scramble to maximize every last ounce of what central bank impulse remains, we get such bubbles as London real estate, bitcoin and vintage cars, or as Citi puts it: "the wealth effect is stretching farther and farther afield."

[mes5464]

Facebook AI learns human reactions after watching hours of Skype | New Scientist

There’s something not quite right about humanoid robots. They are cute up to a point, but once they become a bit too realistic, they often start to creep us out – a foible called the uncanny valley. Now Facebook wants robots to climb their way out of it.

Researchers at Facebook’s AI lab have developed an expressive bot, an animation controlled by an artificially intelligent algorithm. The algorithm was trained on hundreds of videos of Skype conversations, so that it could learn and then mimic how humans adjust their expressions in response to each other. In tests, it successfully passed as human-like.

[mes5464]

Wary of robots taking jobs, Hawaii toys with guaranteed pay - CBS News

Hawaii state lawmakers have voted to explore the idea of a universal basic income in light of research suggesting that a majority of waiter, cook and building cleaning jobs — vital to Hawaii's tourism-dependent economy — will eventually be replaced by machines. The crucial question of who would pay for the program has yet to be determined. But support for the idea has taken root.

"Our economy is changing far more rapidly than anybody's expected," said state Rep. Chris Lee, who introduced legislation to consider a guaranteed universal income.

[mes5464]

Moody's: If the US defaults, it won't regain its top-notch debt rating

Moody's Investors Service said on Tuesday it would strip the United States of its top-notch rating if a default such as a missed debt payment were to happen and it would not regain the Aaa-status even if the default were resolved.

"An upgrade back to Aaa would be unlikely while the institution of the debt ceiling, and the political environment that gave rise to the missed payment, remained in place," the rating agency's analysts wrote in a report published on Tuesday.

[mes5464]

Virgin Islands Grabbing Guns Ahead Of Irma | The Daily Caller

U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Kenneth Mapp signed an emergency order allowing the seizure of private guns, ammunition, explosives and property the National Guard may need to respond to Hurricane Irma.

Mapp signed the order Monday in preparation for Hurricane Irma. The order allows the Adjutant General of the Virgin Islands to seize private property they believe necessary to protect the islands, subject to approval by the territory’s Justice Department.

Mapp issued an emergency declaration Tuesday and mobilized National Guard units to prepare for the massive storm.

[mes5464]

Men posing as teenage girls lured boys into pornographic videos, prosecutors say | Charlotte Observer

Feeding the sexual fantasies of adolescent boys, adult men posed as teenage girls to collect thousands of pornographic videos from online victims in the United States and other countries, a federal investigation says.

Now, three members of the ring appear headed to prison.

Dane William Anderson, Mark Christopher Klein and Samuel Heineman were part of a ring of sex predators who operated between 2007 and 2014, court documents say. All have pleaded guilty to pornography or child-exploitation charges. They are scheduled to be sentenced later this year in Asheville federal court.

[mes5464]

Kentucky Public Employee Retirements Surge As Fears Of Pension Collapse Mount | Zero Hedge

Slowly but surely it is becoming increasingly clear to public workers in states with massively underfunded pensions that they've been lied to for the past several decades as their states can't possibly afford to pay for the retirement they've all been promised.  As a local radio station in Bowling Green points out today, fears over potential pension changes in Kentucky have resulted in a surge of early retirements as workers move to lock in payouts before any potential cuts go into effect.

[mes5464]

Venezuelans Eating Dogs, Zoo Animals as Economy Collapses - Breitbart

Venezuela’s opposition published photos this weekend of men butchering a dead dog on the streets of Caracas, preparing the meat for cooking in a nation that has been forced to take increasingly extreme measures to avoid a famine.

The photos (warning: extremely graphic) show two men in Quinta Crespo, Caracas, standing on a street corner and butchering the body of a dog. A representative of Vente Venezuela, an opposition party that has taken a hard line against dialogue with the socialist regime, posted the photos online as proof of how rapid the decline of Venezuela’s society has been since Hugo Chávez dismantled the nation’s capitalist economy in the 2000s.

[mes5464]

California officers accused of 'sadistic and terrorizing acts' against prisoners | US news | The Guardian

Four sheriff’s deputies accused of strangling prisoner and encouraging inmates to throw feces as activists say abuse remains widespread

[mes5464]

Man arrested for asking 'threatening' question at GOP senator's town hall | TheHill

“We’ve been here for a while. You probably haven’t seen the news. Can you confirm whether or not your daughter Bridget has been kidnapped?” Radecki asked the senator.

After several seconds, Radecki then said, “The reason I ask is because that’s the reality of families that suffer deportation…”
Tim Fallon, the CEO of PBS39, which aired last week’s town hall, described the exchange to the newspaper as “one of the scariest things that I have ever been a part of.” 

[mes5464]

"3 Nephi 3:7
Or in other words, yield yourselves up unto us, and unite with us and become acquainted with our secret works, and become our brethren that ye may be like unto us—not our slaves, but our brethren and partners of all our substance."

Silicon Valley exec on cash handouts: Eliminate poverty for Americans

It's de rigeur for the many of the richest of the rich to tout the benefits of giving cash handouts to all American citizens, in part as a way to end poverty. The idea, called universal basic income (UBI), is for every individual to be paid a regular sum of money irregardless of employment status.

One of the tech elite who has an interest in universal basic income is self-made multimillionaire and Y Combinator President Sam Altman. "Eliminating poverty is such a moral imperative and something that I believe in so strongly," Altman tells CNBC Make It.

"There's so much research about how bad poverty is. There's so much research about the emotional and physical toll that it takes on people.

"I think about the amount of human potential that is being wasted by people that are not doing what they want to do. I think about how great it would be to undo that. And that's really powerful to me," he says.

[mes5464]

A Funeral of 2 Friends: C.I.A. Deaths Rise in Secret Afghan War - The New York Times

Today there are at least 18 stars on that wall representing the number of C.I.A. personnel killed in Afghanistan — a tally that has not been previously reported, and one that rivals the number of C.I.A. operatives killed in the wars in Vietnam and Laos nearly a half century ago.

The deaths are a reflection of the heavy price the agency has paid in a secret, nearly 16-year-old war, where thousands of C.I.A. operatives have served since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The deaths of Mr. Hoke, 42, and Mr. Delemarre, 47, show how the C.I.A. continues to move from traditional espionage to the front lines, and underscore the pressure the agency faces now that President Trump has pledged to keep the United States in Afghanistan with no end in sight.

[mes5464]

University offers 30-week program to promote 'racial justice'

Grand Valley State University now offers a 30-week program for students looking to “advance the work of racial justice, advocacy, and inclusion” on campus.
Ambassadors will begin with a 9-week "student leadership development curriculum that focuses on advocating towards social change," after which they will facilitate workshops for classmates and conduct outreach on campus.

[mes5464]

Rise of robots taking jobs to be 'painful and enduring'  | Daily Mail Online

As automation and AI technologies improve, many worry about job futures  
But some say that when technology destroys jobs, people find other jobs
However, this will possibly happen after 'a long period of painful adjustment' 
Accountants, lawyers, truckers and even construction workers are about to find their work changing substantially, if not entirely taken over by computers

[mes5464]

ISIS Urges Supporters To Poison Food At US Grocery Stores | Zero Hedge

After urging its supporters in the west to turn cars into weapons, guidance that inspired terror attacks in the UK, Spain and France, ISIS is now calling for sympathizers to poison the food in US supermarkets with cyanide, according to SITE.  

[mes5464]

News from The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- The share of Americans who identify as white and Christian has dropped below 50 percent, a transformation fueled by immigration and by growing numbers of people who reject organized religion altogether, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

Christians overall remain a large majority in the U.S., at nearly 70 percent of Americans. However, white Christians, once predominant in the country's religious life, now comprise only 43 percent of the population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, a polling organization based in Washington. Four decades ago, about eight in 10 Americans were white Christians.

[mes5464]

Student who mocked Isis in Facebook post is investigated for Islamophobia | The Independent

A student who mocked Isis on Facebook is being investigated over claims his post put "minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear."

Robbie Travers, a 21-year-old third-year law student, is being probed by the University of Edinburgh over claims he committed a "hate crime," even though no criminal investigation by the police has taken place. 

The complaint came when he shared a comment after the US Air Force dropped a massive ordnance air blast (MOAB, or "mother of all bombs") on a network of Isis tunnels in Afghanistan in April.

[mes5464]

U.S. House unanimously approves sweeping self-driving car measure

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House on Wednesday unanimously approved a sweeping proposal to speed the deployment of self-driving cars without human controls and bar states from blocking autonomous vehicles.

The bill now goes to the Senate and would allow automakers to obtain exemptions to deploy up to 25,000 vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards in the first year, a cap that would rise to 100,000 vehicles annually over three years.

Automakers and technology companies, including General Motors Co and Alphabet Inc‘s self-driving unit Waymo, have been pushing for new federal rules making it easier to deploy self-driving technology.

[mes5464]

Washington National Cathedral to remove windows honoring Confederate generals - Washington Times

The Washington National Cathedral on Wednesday said it will remove stained glass windows honoring Confederate generals, saying they act as “a barrier to our important work on racial justice and racial reconciliation.”

[mes5464]

The next challenge for facial recognition is identifying people whose faces are covered - The Verge

The paper itself needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, though. Its results were far less accurate than industry-level standards (when someone was wearing a cap, sunglasses, and a scarf, for example, the system could only identify them 55 percent of the time); it used a small dataset; and experts in the field have criticized its methodology.

“It doesn’t strike me as a particularly convincing paper,” Patrik Huber, a researcher at the University of Surrey who specializes in face tracking and analysis, told The Verge. He pointed out that the system doesn’t actually match disguised faces to mugshots or portraits, but instead used something called “facial keypoints” (the distances between facial features like eyes, noses, lips, etc) as a proxy for someone’s identity.

[mes5464]

Hurricane Irma: Florida sheriff threatens to arrest fugitives at shelters - Orlando Sentinel

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd is threatening to jail wanted people seeking shelter due to Hurricane Irma.

The sheriff, who is known for his outspoken comments, made the threat in a series of posts to Twitter.

“If you go to a shelter for #Irma and you have a warrant, we'll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail,” Judd tweeted to his nearly 66,000 followers on Twitter.

Judd also posted that officers would be at every shelter checking IDs and that sex offenders and sex predators would not be allowed inside.

[mes5464]

This is in essence praying to Satan, against Trump.

Tens of thousands of witches around the world join forces every month to cast a ‘binding’ spell on Donald Trump and ‘protect’ the world from his actions

TENS of thousands of witches around the world join forces every month to cast a “binding” spell on Donald Trump, Hollywood witch Vicky Adams has revealed.

Vicky, who runs a renowned occult store in tinseltown, says the spell aims to stop the US President from reaping “harm and destruction” across the globe.

[mes5464]

Violent Political Confrontations Rising In California « CBS Los Angeles

COSTA MESA (CBSLA.com) — A new study finds that protests in California are getting more violent.

Professor Brian Levin says that their research shows that along with a rise in hate crimes in California that is double what is being seen in the rest of country, that violent political confrontations are also increasing.

The director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino told the joint session of the state legislature last week that violent political confrontations are rising in California by nearly double.

“We are seeing more of these mega rallies of white nationalists in the last two years than in the previous ten to twenty nationally,” Levin says.

There were about 13 hostile gatherings in all of 2016. So far this year we’ve had 15. Many centered in Orange County.

[mes5464]

Protesters Block Part of Lake Shore Drive After Police Remove Homeless People's Tents - NBC Chicago

Protesters blocked part of southbound Lake Shore Drive near Montrose Avenue Thursday morning after homeless people were being removed from their shelters in the area. 
Police said the demonstrators were protesting homelessness, and that many did not want to move from their tents. 
As of just after 9 a.m., one lane was shut down on Lake Shore Drive but two were moving, authorities said. 
The protests came after police started removing tents in an area known for so-called "tent cities" underneath bridges in Uptown. 
Photos from the scene showed people holding signs with messages like "Give us a home or leave us alone." 
Some chanted "We want housing, like everybody else."

[mes5464]

Police: Taco Bell Employees Fatally Shoot Armed Robber « CBS Pittsburgh

CLEVELAND (AP) – Police say three employees of a Cleveland Taco Bell opened fire on two armed robbers, killing one.

Police have said two masked robbers entered the restaurant early Wednesday and ordered three employees to lie on the floor. Police say three other employees pulled out handguns and opened fire, shooting one of the suspects six times. The other suspect ran off.

The Cuyahoga (ky-uh-HOH’-guh) County Medical Examiner’s Office on Thursday said the man killed was 24-year-old De’Carlo Jackson.

Investigators say Jackson was found with a loaded gun in his hand. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

No one has been arrested. The employees who opened fire are said to be two 19-year-old men and a 23-year-old man.

A Taco Bell spokeswoman told Cleveland.com the company is “shocked” by the shooting and is offering counseling to employees.