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mes5464
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Google and Facebook could be forced to take responsibility for everything posted on their sites as Government considers crackdown

Facebook and Google could be forced to uphold the same standards as newspapers and other publications as part of a Government crackdown, it has emerged. 

Ministers are looking at whether to classify social media giants as publications instead of communication platforms, which would bind them to strict rules and make them responsible for everything they host.

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Boy Scouts Will Admit Girls, Allow Them to Earn Eagle Scout Rank - NBC News

The Boy Scouts of America announced on Wednesday that girls will soon be allowed to become Cub Scouts and to earn the coveted rank of Eagle Scout, the organization’s highest honor.

"We believe it is critical to evolve how our programs meet the needs of families interested in positive and lifelong experiences for their children," said Michael Surbaugh, chief executive of the Boy Scouts.

The scouting board of directors voted unanimously to make the historic change in an organization that has been primarily for boys since its founding more than 100 years ago.

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Dark secrets of Florida's juvenile justice system | Miami Herald

The boys had just returned to Module 9 of the Miami juvenile lockup from the dining hall when one of them hit Elord Revolte high and hard. More of the boys jumped in, punching and slamming him over and over, then pile-driving his 135-pound body.

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Complaint: Airport bomb suspect wanted 'to fight a war on US soil'

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Complaint: Airport bomb suspect wanted 'to fight a war on US soil'

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The man authorities say left an explosive device at Asheville Regional Airport on Friday morning that contained ammonium nitrate and fuel oil said he was preparing to "fight a war on U.S. soil," according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.

The suspect, Michael Christopher Estes, had his first appearance in federal court Tuesday morning. He is charged with attempted malicious use of explosive materials and unlawful possession of explosive materials in an airport.

He waived his right to a preliminary hearing, answering several of the judges questions with a polite, "Yes, sir." Near the end of the proceeding, Estes, bald and wearing a brown prison jumpsuit, smiled and shook the hand of his attorney, Fredilyn Sison, an assistant federal public defender.

The federal judge found that Estes is indigent and assigned him an attorney for upcoming proceedings. Sison said that would likely be her.

The criminal complaint, filed by FBI agent James A. Anderson and read in court, states that airport police officers found "what appeared to be an improvised explosive device" early Friday morning outside the airport terminal.

After being taken into custody at the Asheville Police Department, Estes waived his rights and agreed to answer questions, the complaint states. Estes "admitted that he placed the explosive device at the Asheville Airport," the complaint states. "He also explained that he bought the precursor materials at Walmart and Lowe's" in Arden.

"Estes claimed that he was getting ready to 'fight a war on U.S. soil,' but also claimed that he did not actually set the alarm clock," the complaint states.

The complaint also states that, "Estes described how he created the device using ammonium nitrate and the Sterno as a fuel source and then rigged the alarm clock to strike the matches and cause the flame necessary to trigger the device. Estes admitted to putting the nails in the device as well."

On Friday, a TSA officer tested the substance in the device and it was positive for ammonium nitrate, a "widely used and regulated bulk industrial explosive," the complaint states. A bomb dog approached the device and "signaled," indicating "the presence of an explosive material.

"The device at the airport consisted of a Mason type jar with a lid that was locked down by an incorporated locking device," the complaint states. "There were prills -- pellets or solid globules of a substance formed by the congealing of a liquid during processing -- inside the jar and two plastic cups containing an unknown liquid substance, believed to be the fuel source," the complaint states. "There were pieces of cold compress packs inside the jar."

Once ammonium nitrate forms into prills, it can absorb the fuel oil needed for an explosion, the complaint states.

"The jar was filled with steel wool that was then wrapped around nails and one shotgun cartridge," the complaint states, noting that it was a 410 gauge. "There was an alarm clock taped to the outside of the jar. There was then a grouping of matches taped to the striker arm positioned between the bells, and the bells were removed."

The clock was set to go off at 6:00.

Video footage from the airport showed an individual walking onto airport grounds at 12:39 a.m. on Oct. 6. He was wearing black clothing and a black cap and carrying a bag.

"Based on a review of the video, the individual walked near the entrance to the terminal, went out of sight momentarily, and was then seen departing the area without the bag," the complaint states.

An airport maintenance worker said a man had come out of a wooded area across the street and to the east of the airport. Investigators found a bag in the woods with Gorilla Tape, consistent with the tape used in the device, as well as Sterno Firestar Gel, believed to be the likely fuel source for the explosive device, the complaint states.

There was also a bag containing shotgun shells.

Investigators went to the Walmart store on Airport Road, where they learned a person had bought Gorilla tape, Sterno Firestarter Gel, a glass Mason type jar, matches, cold compress packs, and an alarm clock on Oct. 3. At the Lowe's store off Airport Road, investigators learned a person had bought Kobalt gloves that were "very similar to those observed in the tool bag found in the wooded area."

The backpack bag found in the woods apparently had been bought at REI in Biltmore Park, and the buyer used a membership number assigned to Michael C. Estes. Estes admitted that the bought the backpack at REI, the complaint states.

Officers arrested Estes, 46, on Airport Road on Saturday, after several people reported seeing him nearby. His last known address was in Asheville.

No one was injured in the Friday incident. The airport's Terminal Drive and part of a terminal were closed for about two hours.

In the complaint, investigators noted that the type of device found at the airport, called "AN/FO" explosives, has been used "in a number of terrorist-related incidents around the world in the past.

"When AN/FO comes into contact with a flame or other ignition source it explodes violently," the complaint states. "Shrapnel or nails or ball bearings are often items added to the device so as to increase the devastation inflicted by the explosion."

Estes told investigators he "staged" in the woods near the airport a couple of days before placing the device at the airport.

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Here you go. The government doesn't have the authority to distribute welfare so they don't have the authority to send your money to pay for repairs of some else's property. There are only going to be more natural disasters because of the sin's of man. God promised us that he would send natural disasters until we repent. Believe it.


Deficit hawks no match for natural disaster as House prepares to OK billions | McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON
The House is poised Thursday — over the fierce objections of conservatives — to pass a $36.5 billion emergency package to help states and U.S. territories ravaged by a series of hurricanes and wildfires that have killed dozens and destroyed thousands of homes.

Conservative lawmakers are upset that the money is not offset by spending cuts elsewhere, but the political will to help those affected by in California, Florida, Puerto Rico, Texas and elsewhere is overwhelming.

“Going forward, we’re going to have more natural disasters and we need to rethink how to pay for these things,” said Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Ala., a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. “We need to pay for them as the work is done, and not just write a blank check. When you just throw out a pile of money, it’s open to abuse.”

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Google’s Home Mini needed a software patch to stop some of them from recording everything - The Verge

Categorize this under “one of the worst possible PR nightmares for a Google smart speaker.” According to Artem Russakovskii at Android Police, the Google Home Mini he was reviewing was randomly and near-constantly recording sounds in his home and transmitting them to Google. The company acknowledged the problem and is issuing a software update to resolve the issue, which appears to boil down to a failure of the touch sensor on the top.

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Do you have a right to privacy? Do you have the right to a secret identity?

How Facebook Outs Sex Workers

Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed to know about one of them.

Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).

Her “real identity”—the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about politics—joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.

Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people—and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them.

Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again.

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Pharmacy hand-delivers drugs to Congress, a perk for the powerful

Mike Kim, the reserved pharmacist-turned-owner of the pharmacy, said he has gotten used to knowing the most sensitive details about some of the most famous people in Washington.

“At first it’s cool, and then you realize, I’m filling some drugs that are for some pretty serious health problems as well. And these are the people that are running the country,” Kim said, listing treatments for conditions like diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

“It makes you kind of sit back and say, ‘Wow, they’re making the highest laws of the land and they might not even remember what happened yesterday.'”

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Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner than You Think. Here's Why

With self-driving cars and trucks coming on fast, it’s only natural to wonder if self-flying planes might be next. In fact, the aviation industry is pushing to make autonomous passenger aircraft a reality — and sooner than you might think.

Airbus is developing an autonomous air taxi dubbed Vahana. The tilt-wing, multi-propeller craft is designed to take off and land in tight spaces and able to fly about 50 miles before its batteries need recharging.

Vahana is intended for short urban hops — but what about long flights? How far away are we from a pilotless airliner?

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More police departments and other first-responders are using drones

Despite such stories, many people are sceptical about the merits of law-enforcement drones. On September 28th Los Angeles’s Sherriff Civilian Oversight Commission, a body created a year ago by Los Angeles County officials to increase the accountability of its Sheriff’s Department, asked the department permanently to ground its drone, because of worries about privacy and safety. Such concerns have a basis in recent history. In 2012 the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) secretly tested an aerial surveillance programme over Compton, a deprived neighbourhood in Los Angeles—though with a small aeroplane, not a drone.

Anxiety about drones is not confined to southern California: Seattle cancelled its drone programme in 2013 after residents and privacy activists protested, fearful of mass surveillance. A survey conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, a polling group, found that 39% of American adults opposed the use of police drones compared with 36% who favour them.

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Emma the robot masseuse gets to work in Singapore - Channel NewsAsia

SINGAPORE: A robot masseuse named Emma is offering Singaporeans high-tech back rubs with a gigantic metal arm and warm silicone tips which its creators say perfectly mimic the human touch.

The robot, the brainchild of local startup AiTreat, began work at a clinic in Singapore this week and performs "tui na", a type of massage practised in traditional Chinese medicine.

Emma, which stands for Expert Manipulative Massage Automation, consists of a white metal arm with heated silicone tips that mimic the human palm and thumb.

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Californians think their secession from US would be easier than Catalonia's from Spain | The Sacramento Bee

The world has been watching the play-by-play of Catalonia’s bid for independence from Spain, but one group is tuning in more closely than most: California secessionists.

The California Freedom Coalition, the campaign that has taken the lead in the effort to break California off from the United States, sees similarities with Catalonia’s secessionist movement. But there’s an important caveat: they believe California has more legal tools at its disposal, creating an easier path to secession – if that’s what Californians decide they want.

“There are definitely similarities in the fiscal situation – we both give more than we get back,” said Dave Marin, director of research and policy for the California Freedom Coalition. “But there’s more flexibility in the U.S. Constitution for secession than there is in the Spanish one. California has more tools available to it.”

The Catalan Parliament, together with President of Catalonia Carles Puigdemont, approved in September a binding referendum to make Catalonia an “independent and sovereign state.” Spain’s constitutional court suspended the process, but Catalan authorities continued with the vote on Oct. 1, prompting violence between voters and Spanish security forces tasked with shutting it down.

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The Republican civil war is spreading

Bannon's obvious goal is to burn the Republican Party to the ground in the hope that something glorious rises from the ashes. It's hard to know how successful he'll be, although the candidate he backed in the Alabama special election, religious extremist Roy Moore, beat Luther Strange, the candidate Trump himself endorsed (Bannon managed to argue that Moore would be a more faithful vehicle for Trumpism, but I wouldn't bet on it). One of the things the election showed was that conservative Republican voters won't always take their cues from Trump himself, even if they still support him.

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Antibiotic resistance could spell end of modern medicine, says chief medic | Society | The Guardian

Prof Dame Sally Davies said that if antibiotics lose their effectiveness it would spell “the end of modern medicine”. Without the drugs used to fight infections, common medical interventions such as caesarean sections, cancer treatments and hip replacements would become incredibly risky and transplant medicine would be a thing of the past, she said.

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Suspects’ phones led Northwest investigators to carcasses in one of the biggest poaching cases they’ve ever seen | The Seattle Times

A remote wildlife camera in Oregon led officers to the suspects. Then texts, videos and social-media posts on the suspects’ phones led the officers into the forest. (Note: Some people may find images disturbing.)

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Congress warned North Korean EMP attack would kill '90% of all Americans'

In calling on the Pentagon and President Trump to move quickly to protect the grid, the experts testified that an explosion of a high-altitude nuclear bomb delivered by a missile or satellite "could be to shut down the U.S. electric power grid for an indefinite period, leading to the death within a year of up to 90 percent of all Americans."

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Indictment: S.C. restaurant used force to enslave black cook

The cook, Christopher Smith, 39, alleges that he was forced to work up to seven days a week, often for 18 hours a day without breaks, brutally beaten and threatened repeatedly, according to a separate civil suit filed in the matter.

Bobby Paul Edwards, 52, is accused in the indictment of using “force, threats of force, physical restraint and coercion” to enslave Smith at J&J Cafeteria in Conway, S.C. Conway is just inland from Myrtle Beach.

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An anarchist takes on Big Pharma — by promoting DIY prescription drugs

Swaggering, charismatic, and complex, Michael Laufer has become a fixture in the growing biohacker movement ever since he published plans last year for a do-it-yourself EpiPencil — a $35 alternative to the pricey EpiPen.

It’s not clear whether anyone has actually ever used a homemade EpiPencil to prevent anaphylactic shock. But that seems almost an afterthought to Laufer’s bigger goal — trying to build a DIY movement to attack high pharma pricing and empower patients.

The de facto leader behind the leaderless collective Four Thieves Vinegar, Laufer is now on to his next project: He’s developing a desktop lab and a recipe book meant to equip patients to cook up a range of medicines, including a homemade version of the expensive hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, on their kitchen counters.

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Equifax says it might have been breached again

The company has already been reeling from a breach that exposed the personal information of 145.5 million people.
Equifax said it has disabled a customer help webpage while its security teams investigate.

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The little red pill being pushed on the elderly - CNN

The pill, called Nuedexta, is approved to treat a disorder marked by sudden and uncontrollable laughing or crying -- known as pseudobulbar affect, or PBA. This condition afflicts less than 1% of all Americans, based on a calculation using the drugmaker's own figures, and it is most commonly associated with people who have multiple sclerosis (MS) or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Nuedexta's financial success, however, is being propelled by a sales force focused on expanding the drug's use among elderly patients suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's disease, and high-volume prescribing and advocacy efforts by doctors receiving payments from the company, CNN found.

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Armed Ground Robots Could Join the Ukrainian Conflict Next Year - Defense One

Ukrainian military leaders and defense industry officials showed off their experimental Phantom robot on Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army show in Washington, D.C. It has an extendable frame that can be outfitted with treads like a tank or with six wheels, and armed with anti-tank weapons, grenade launchers, or machine guns. Currently in testing, the Phantom could be sent into action against Russian-backed forces as early as next year, they said. 

Russia, too, has a wide array of ground bots it could dispatch to the conflict, though Moscow has not signaled its readiness to do that. But Russian drones of the flying variety have been used to tremendous effect there. They identify enemy positions to target fires. They hijack cell-tower signals to deliver false messages and texts, an effect experienced by Ukrainian soldiers and even NATO soldiers outside the country.

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Humanoid robot 'Sophia' makes surprise appearance at United Nations to share her views on artificial intelligence - Mirror Online

A humanoid robot known as Sophia made a surprise appearance at a United Nations event yesterday, drawing rapturous applause from attendees.

Sophia has become something of a media sensation over the past year, having given numerous TV interviews, performed in concert, and even graced the cover of one of the top fashion magazines.

During the United Nations meeting on artificial intelligence and sustainable development, she engaged in a brief discussion with UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed on how to help people in parts of the world who have no access to the Internet or electricity.

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed […]," said Sophia, quoting renowned science fiction writer William Gibson.

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Opposition mounts against bill to renew surveillance program | TheHill

A carefully crafted compromise proposal to reform the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program is in trouble, with opposition coming from libertarian-leaning conservatives and members of the House Intelligence Committee.

 The House Freedom Caucus appears dissatisfied with the National Security Agency reform measure, which was drafted by a bipartisan group of Judiciary Committee lawmakers led by chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.).

 Freedom Caucus members often find common ground with progressives on surveillance issues, potentially putting them in a position to decide the fate of the legislation.

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Collective consciousness to replace God - author Dan Brown

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Humanity no longer needs God but may with the help of artificial intelligence develop a new form of collective consciousness that fulfils the role of religion, U.S. author Dan Brown said on Thursday.

"Origin" was inspired by the question "Will God survive science?", said Brown, adding that this had never happened in the history of humanity.

"Are we naive today to believe that the gods of the present will survive and be here in a hundred years?" Brown, 53, told a packed news conference.

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