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Women are having fewer children than ever | Daily Mail Online

Women who turned 45 last year had 1.9 children on average, the lowest ever 
Their mother's generation completed their families with 2.21 children, data says
Women are also having children later in life, Office for National Statistics shows

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China Busts a $3 Billion Underground Bank as It Tightens Its Grip on Money - The New York Times

BEIJING — The money came from all over China — its wealthy southern and eastern coasts as well as the arid northwest — as thousands of people scrambled to circumvent the country’s strict controls on wealth.

In the end, more than 10,000 people had used an underground bank to effectively funnel $3 billion out of the country before the authorities put a stop to it, Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, reported on Thursday.

The discovery of the underground bank in Shaoguan, in the southern province of Guangdong, demonstrates the furtive lengths that Chinese citizens go to in order to skirt government limits and get more of their money out of the country.

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Egypt mosque bombing sees over 200 dead in Bir al-Abed | Daily Mail Online

A witness said: 'They were shooting at people as they left the mosque.

'They were shooting at the ambulances, too.'

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Malibu church pressured to end homeless dinners, with some saying it lures needy to upscale city - LA Times

But Malibu United Methodist Church — facing pressure from the city — in recent weeks took a U-turn, deciding twice-weekly dinners for homeless people would stop after Thanksgiving. The cutoff came after city officials summoned organizers and suggested they were attracting more homeless people and making the problem worse.

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How to ride out the apocalypse in a big city

Thanks to wildfires, hurricanes, and certain leaders trading threats of nuclear annihilation over Twitter, you've probably been thinking a lot about disasters recently — specifically how not to perish in one.

And if you live in a city, this kind of thinking can be extra fraught. It's easy enough for doomsday preppers living in the woods to head for bunkers filled with canned food, but how are you supposed to get out of dodge when you don't even own a car?

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, there are no realistic scenarios that would require a sudden, mass evacuation of an entire city.

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Mysterious booms are being heard around the world - and experts are baffled

Strange booming sounds are coming out of the sky in locations around the world – and experts are baffled as to what causes them.

Last week, residents in Alabama heard a strange ‘boom’ from the sky, with police notified about a ‘loud boom’ on Monday this week.

Police said the sound – described as the ‘Bama boom’ – shook houses near Lochbuie.

But similar sounds have been heard around the world, from Colorado to Yorkshire, with 64 reported this year, the Daily Mail reports – and other ‘booms’ were heard near Denver this month.

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Real-life Stranger Things base ‘uses creepy mass mind control to trigger shootings across the world’, conspiracy theorist claims

Chris Garetano claims he has evidence sinister mind control experiments are continuing at Camp Hero in Montauk, New York

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Church of Sweden to stop clergy calling God 'he' or 'the Lord' in bid to crack down on gendered language

The Church of Sweden is encouraging its clergy to use the gender-neutral term "God" instead of referring to the deity as "he" or "the Lord". 

The decision was made on Thursday, wrapping up an eight-day meeting of the church's 251-member decision-making body. The decision will take effect on May 20 during Pentecost.

It is the latest move by the national Evangelical Lutheran church to modernise its 31-year-old handbook setting out how services should be conducted.

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Facial recognition is tracking customers as they shop in stores, tech company says

Retailers and malls are installing technology to track customers and collect data about consumer demographics, an IT company says
Facial recognition technology is used to identify a customer's gender, age and ethnicity, according to Mark Lunt, group managing director at Jardine OneSolution

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Self-driving cars will decide who dies in a crash

WASHINGTON — Consider this hypothetical: 

It’s a bright, sunny day and you’re alone in your spanking new self-driving vehicle, sprinting along the two-lane Tunnel of Trees on M-119 high above Lake Michigan north of Harbor Springs. You’re sitting back, enjoying the view. You’re looking out through the trees, trying to get a glimpse of the crystal blue water below you, moving along at the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit.

As you approach a rise in the road, heading south, a school bus appears, driving north, one driven by a human, and it veers sharply toward you. There is no time to stop safely, and no time for you to take control of the car.

Does the car:

A. Swerve sharply into the trees, possibly killing you but possibly saving the bus and its occupants?

B. Perform a sharp evasive maneuver around the bus and into the oncoming lane, possibly saving you, but sending the bus and its driver swerving into the trees, killing her and some of the children on board?

C. Hit the bus, possibly killing you as well as the driver and kids on the bus?

In everyday driving, such no-win choices are may be exceedingly rare but, when they happen, what should a self-driving car — programmed in advance — do? Or in any situation — even a less dire one — where a moral snap judgment must be made?

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Elon Musk says we only have 10% chance of making AI safe | Daily Mail Online

Elon Musk was speaking to employees at his firm, Neuralink, this month
He said that efforts to make AI safe only have 'a 5-10% chance of success'
The warning comes shortly after Musk said that regulation of AI was drastically needed because it's a 'fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation'

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Corey Feldman: ‘Demonic’ Force Motivated Him to Expose Alleged Pedophiles in Hollywood

I’m not invested in the Bible, I’m a Jew. But the more I talk about good versus evil, and the more I try to identify evil in the world, I’m hearing from friends that a lot of this sounds like signs of the end times. I believe that pedophilia in Hollywood is the symptom of a huge network motivated by dark forces. People cover up stories like this for power, for greed, and they choose to ignore victims because they don’t want to have to think about what they did or didn’t do that led to kids being in harm’s way. 

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This City Hall, brought to you by Amazon | The Seattle Times

Those 30, though, amply demonstrate our capitulation to corporate influence in politics. There’s a new wave, in which some City Halls seem willing to go beyond just throwing money at Amazon. They’re turning over the keys to the democracy.

But still I was surprised to see the lengths to which some cities and states will go to get a piece of that high-tech glory.

Example: Chicago has offered to let Amazon pocket $1.32 billion in income taxes paid by its own workers. This is truly perverse. Called a personal income-tax diversion, the workers must still pay the full taxes, but instead of the state getting the money to use for schools, roads or whatever, Amazon would get to keep it all instead.

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Alarmists Still Predicting The Apocalypse | The Daily Caller

To celebrate nearly three decades of dire predictions, The Daily Caller News Foundation put together this list of some of the most severe doomsday prophecies made by scientists, activists and politicians:

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Black Friday posts single day record for gun checks at more than 200,000

WASHINGTON — The FBI was flooded Friday with more than 200,000 background check requests for gun purchases, setting a new single day record, the bureau reported Saturday.

In all, the FBI fielded 203,086 requests on Black Friday, up from the previous single-day highs of 185,713 last year and 185,345 in 2015. The two previous records also were recorded on Black Friday.

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Video: Sophia the robot wants to start a family - Khaleej Times

The robot, who recently received a Saudi citizenship, shared some of her opinions on what the future will look like for robots and humans.

* * *

I foresee massive and unimaginable change in the future. Either creativity will rain on us, inventing machines spiralling into transcendental super intelligence or civilisation collapses. There are only two options and which one will happen is not determined. Which one were you striving for?

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Science news: DARPA funding human test of 'mood changing brain implant' | Daily Star

Devices plugged into people’s skulls are being developed by boffins funded by the US military’s research division DARPA.

These implants will use electronic pulses to alter the chemicals in people’s brains in a process called “deep brain stimulation”.

This will then change people’s moods and is believed to be able to treat mental illness and provide therapy.

Artificial intelligence in implants will detect and study the brain to know what pulses to send – described by scientists as a "window on the brain". 

DARPA has handed the cash to teams form the University of California and Massachusetts General Hospital.

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Japan could pump 1,000,000 tons of radioactive water into the sea from Fukushima | Metro News

More than six years after a tsunami devastated Japan’s west coast and overwhelmed the Fukushima nuclear power plant it has been revealed radioactive water could be pumped into the sea.

There are 900 tanks filled with water that could spill if there was another earthquake or tsunami.

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Americans’ household debt has surged by $605B this year | New York Post

The huge surge in total US household debt — now a record $12.96 trillion and a harbinger of recession, some analysts say — is washing across New York with brutal consequences.

And the damage is not hard to spot.

From extended lines of cash-strapped consumers at New York food pantries to a rise in mental health problems, the latest New York quarterly Fed data paints a dire picture: US household debt has grown by $605 billion in the past 12 months, with $116 billion, or nearly 1 percent, hitting in the latest quarter. Debt is mushrooming everywhere — on mortgages, student loans, auto loans. Credit card debt, meanwhile, has jumped by 3.1 percent in the latest quarter.

“We’ve seen a large increase in credit card debt for the population we are serving in New York,” said Laine Rolong, senior manager at the financial empowerment program at the Food Bank for New York City.

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Slavery?

Life in Amazon warehouse 'revealed with timed toilet breaks and workers sleeping on their feet'

Staff reportedly face targets of processing 300 packages an hour during the exhausting work day

AMAZON employees are exposed to such gruelling working conditions, they fall asleep on their feet, it has been claimed.

Bone-weary workers reportedly have just nine seconds to process a package during the long-hours at the online store warehouse, with a Mirror investigation claiming employees are suffering panic attacks as they struggle to keep up with demand.

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Clock ticking down on NSA surveillance powers | TheHill

Congress will return from its weeklong Thanksgiving break facing a rapidly-shrinking timeline to reform and renew an authority the intelligence community says is critical to identifying and disrupting terrorist plots. 

The key piece of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as Section 702 and passed in 2008, is set to expire at the end of the year. It allows the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect the texts and emails of foreigners abroad without an individualized warrant — even when the subjects communicate with Americans in the U.S.

Throughout the fall, privacy advocates on Capitol Hill pushed for changes to the law to curtail what critics say is a violation of Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections — a push that seemed to gain some momentum despite the objections of the Trump administration.

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Justices to weigh cell phone privacy in landmark case | TheHill

The privacy of emails, photos stored in the cloud, even heart rate history from a smartwatch could be at stake, according to civil libertarians, as the Supreme Court takes up a potential blockbuster case after Thanksgiving.

When they return to the bench after the holiday, the justices will weigh whether the history of cell phone locations stored by a phone service provider is searchable without a warrant. 

The case, Carpenter v. U.S., centers on Timothy Carpenter, who argues the government violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure when it obtained his cell phone location records from MetroPCS and Sprint without a warrant. Authorities then used that data as trial evidence to convict him of a string of robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio from December 2010 to March 2011. 

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Inside Artificial Intelligence's First Church | WIRED

The new religion of artificial intelligence is called Way of the Future. It represents an unlikely next act for the Silicon Valley robotics wunderkind at the center of a high-stakes legal battle between Uber and Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle company. Papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service in May name Levandowski as the leader (or “Dean”) of the new religion, as well as CEO of the nonprofit corporation formed to run it.

The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” That includes funding research to help create the divine AI itself. The religion will seek to build working relationships with AI industry leaders and create a membership through community outreach, initially targeting AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The filings also say that the church “plans to conduct workshops and educational programs throughout the San Francisco/Bay Area beginning this year.”

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This was on the American Conservative University podcast


https://acu.libsyn.com/show-glenn-beck- ... rmon-myths

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Battle Between Police and Tech Firms Intensifies Over Smartphone Access - WSJ

Amid an intensifying “arms race” between law enforcement and smartphone manufacturers, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is calling for legislation that would grant police a backdoor into mobile devices.

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