U.S. Waives FBI Checks on Caregivers at New Migrant Facilities, Alarming Child Welfare Experts
June 1st, 2021Something is very wrong here.
Via: AP:
The Biden administration is not requiring FBI fingerprint background checks of caregivers at its rapidly expanding network of emergency sites to hold thousands of immigrant teenagers, alarming child welfare experts who say the waiver compromises safety.
…
These emergency sites don’t have to be licensed by state authorities or provide the same services as permanent HHS facilities. They also cost far more, an estimated $775 per child per day.
And to staff the sites quickly, the Biden administration has waived vetting procedures intended to protect minors from potential harm.
Related:
Gov. Abbott Orders Texas Child-Care Regulators to Pull Licenses of Facilities Housing Immigrant Kids
ALL JBS BEEF PLANTS IN U.S. SHUT AFTER CYBERATTACK, UNION SAYS
June 1st, 2021Update: “JBS Moves to Reopen ‘Vast Majority’ of Plants After Cyberattack”
Two hours after Bloomberg reported that all JBS plants in the U.S. were shut, they are now saying that operations will resume Wednesay.
Via: Bloomberg:
JBS SA, the largest meat producer globally, has made “significant progress” to resolve the cyberattack that impacted its global operations and will have the “vast majority” of its plants operational on Wednesday.
—
Via: ZeroHedge:
Bloomberg News reports an official at the United Food & Commercial Workers has indicated all JBS’ US meat plants have been shuttered due to a ransomware attack over the weekend.
Amazon Rolls Out Portable Panic Booth For Warehouse Employees To Collect Themselves
June 1st, 2021Via: ZeroHedge:
Known simply as the “ZenBooth,” the new apparatus, according to a video released by the company on Wednesday, is an “interactive kiosk where you can navigate through a library of mental health and mindful practices to recharge that internal battery.”
World’s Biggest Meat Supplier Under Cyber Attack
June 1st, 2021Via: Bloomberg:
The world’s biggest meat supplier has become the latest casualty of a cybersecurity attack, posing a fresh threat to global food security already rattled by the Covid-19 pandemic.
JBS SA shut its North American and Australian computer networks after an organized assault on Sunday on some of its servers, the company said by email. Without commenting on operations at its plants, JBS said the incident may delay certain transactions with customers and suppliers.
The attack sidelined two shifts and halted processing at one of Canada’s largest meatpacking plants, while the company canceled all beef and lamb kills across Australia, industry website Beef Central said. Some kill and fabrication shifts have also been canceled in the U.S., according to a union Facebook post.
China Announces Three-Child Limit
June 1st, 2021Via: Guardian:
China has announced that couples will be permitted to have up to three children in a major policy shift from the existing two-child limit, after recent data showed a dramatic decline in births in the world’s most populous country.
“To actively respond to the ageing of the population … a couple can have three children,” state media Xinhua reported on Monday, citing a meeting of China’s elite politburo leadership committee hosted by President Xi Jinping.
China’s fertility rate stands at 1.3 – below the level needed to maintain a stable population. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, there were officially 12 million babies born in 2020, 2.65 million fewer than were born in 2019, an 18% fall. Preliminary data released earlier this year, based on registered births, had indicated a year-on-year drop of 15%.
Earlier this month, China reported the slowest population growth since the early 1960s, despite scrapping its one-child policy in 2015 to encourage more births and stave off a looming demographic crisis.
In Mexico, Cartels Are Hunting Down Police at Their Homes
May 30th, 2021Via: AP:
The notoriously violent Jalisco cartel has responded to Mexico’s “hugs, not bullets” policy with a policy of its own: The cartel kidnapped several members of an elite police force in the state of Guanajuato, tortured them to obtain names and addresses of fellow officers and is now hunting down and killing police at their homes, on their days off, in front of their families.
Killer Drones Operate in Autonomous Mode for First Time
May 30th, 2021Via: New York Post:
After a United Nations commission to block killer robots was shut down in 2018, a new report from the international body now says the Terminator-like drones are now here.
Last year “an autonomous weaponized drone hunted down a human target last year” and attacked them without being specifically ordered to, according to a report from the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya, published in March 2021 that was published in the New Scientist magazine and the Star.
The March 2020 attack was in Libya and perpetrated by a Kargu-2 quadcopter drone produced by Turkish military tech company STM “during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction led by Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army,” the Star reports, adding: “The Kargu-2 is fitted with an explosive charge and the drone can be directed at a target in a kamikaze attack, detonating on impact.”
The drones were operating in a “highly effective” autonomous mode that required no human controller and the report notes:
“The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability” – suggesting the drones attacked on their own.
Study: COVID-19 ‘Has No Credible Natural Ancestor’ and Was Created by Chinese Scientists Who Then Tried to Cover Their Tracks
May 29th, 2021Via: Daily Mail:
An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
The paper’s authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had ‘prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year – but were ignored by academics and major journals.
Related: Sen. Paul Shreds Fauci Over ‘Gain-Of-Function’ Funding
FragAttacks Let Hackers Inject Malicious Code or Commands Into Encrypted Wi-Fi Traffic
May 29th, 2021Via: ArsTechnica:
One of the things that makes Wi-Fi work is its ability to break big chunks of data into smaller chunks and combine smaller chunks into bigger chunks, depending on the needs of the network at any given moment. These mundane network plumbing features, it turns out, have been harboring vulnerabilities that can be exploited to send users to malicious websites or exploit or tamper with network-connected devices, newly published research shows.
In all, researcher Mathy Vanhoef found a dozen vulnerabilities, either in the Wi-Fi specification or in the way the specification has been implemented in huge numbers of devices. Vanhoef has dubbed the vulnerabilities FragAttacks, short for fragmentation and aggregation attacks, because they all involve frame fragmentation or frame aggregation. Broadly speaking, they allow people within radio range to inject frames of their choice into networks protected by WPA-based encryption.
Fauci Once Argued for Risky Viral Experiments – Even if They Can Lead to Pandemic
May 29th, 2021Via: NY Post:
Dr. Anthony Fauci once argued that conducting experiments on contagious viruses to increase their potency was worth the risk, even if the work could accidentally lead to a pandemic, it was revealed Friday.
The nation’s chief medical advisor wrote in the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012 of the public health benefit to gain-of-function viral experiments — which center on manipulating viruses and making them stronger — as long as there is significant oversight.
In the article, first reported by The Australian, Fauci also noted that a pause on such studies should continue until researchers can figure out how to do them more transparently.
Gain-of-function experiments are the sort of work that was being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when the COVID-19 pandemic first started in China in late 2019 and some experts fear a lab accident is what led to the global outbreak that killed 3.4 million.
In the 2012 paper, Fauci acknowledged the risky research could lead to serious lab accidents but the chance is rare and the work is “important” because it helps the scientific community prepare for naturally occurring pandemics.
