Northern Ireland: Dr. Anne McCloskey on COVID Fraud
March 17th, 2021Via: Freedom Alliance Island of Ireland:
U.S. Army Prepping Robotic Combat Vehicles for Big Test with Soldiers in 2022
March 17th, 2021Via: Defense News:
The U.S. Army has taken receipt of its light and medium Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) prototypes from industry teams and is putting them through the paces this year ahead of a major company-level soldier assessment in 2022.
More: Textron Systems Readies All-Electric Ripsaw M5 UGV
Philadelphia: Kensington Ave at Night
March 17th, 2021I noticed a store there called, “Dollar Heaven.”
Via: HoodTime:
Lobbyist in $60 Million Ohio Bribery Probe Found Dead in Florida
March 17th, 2021Update: USA Today: Unlimited Dark Money Available
Clark, who founded Columbus lobbying firm Grant Street Consultants, was accused last year of playing a key role in a $61 million scheme to elect Larry Householder to the House Speaker post and pass a bailout for two Ohio nuclear plants. Clark pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
The FBI recorded conversations between Clark and Householder as part of their investigation into the bribery scheme. In those conversations, Clark described himself as Householder’s “proxy” and the dark money available to them as “unlimited.”
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Via: Tampa Bay Times / AP:
A longtime Ohio lobbyist who had pleaded not guilty in a sweeping federal bribery investigation has been found dead.
In response to a request about information concerning Neil Clark’s death, the sheriff’s office in Collier County, Florida, where Clark had been living, provided a report describing a man’s body being found near a pond Monday morning by a bicyclist. The county medical examiner confirmed to AP it was Clark’s body and that a medical investigation and autopsy are underway.
When officials reached out to the man’s wife, she said the couple was having financial issues and that she had not heard from her husband for a couple of hours, according to the report.
Clark, 67, had pleaded not guilty in August over an alleged role in a $60 million scheme in which federal prosecutors say FirstEnergy companies funneled money through a network of dark money entities to then-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder in exchange for the passage of a $1 billion nuclear bailout bill.
Company Offering Realtime Tracking Information For “Specific Cars In Nearly Any Country On Earth”
March 17th, 2021Mobile phone tracking: Check
License plate tracking: Check
Vehicle telematics tracking: Check
Via: Vice:
A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard.
“Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis,” the document, written by contractor The Ulysses Group, reads. “Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month,” the document adds.
Although the company told Motherboard it has not sold the product to the U.S. government at this time, the news highlights the scale and reach of car-tracking technology, and the fact that car location data is of interest not just to insurance companies and the finance sector, but to government contractors who explicitly say they want to source the data for intelligence and surveillance purposes.
Ulysses previously had a contract with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), though for a different piece of technology.
“Scientists Create Living Entities In The Lab That Closely Resemble Human Embryos”
March 17th, 2021“Growing these sort-of humans…”
Via: NPR:
For decades, science has been trying to unlock the mysteries of how a single cell becomes a fully formed human being and what goes wrong to cause genetic diseases, miscarriages and infertility.
Now, scientists have created living entities in their labs that resemble human embryos; the results of two new experiments are the most complete such “model embryos” developed to date.
In Other News: Scientists Grow Mice Embryos in a Mechanical Womb
A Defensive Computing Checklist
March 17th, 2021For those who didn’t get enough from Who Controls Your Computer? (And How to make sure it’s you).
This is more hilarious than anything else: defensivecomputingchecklist.com
U.S. “COVID Relief” Was Enough To Give Every Taxpayer $41,870
March 17th, 2021Via: Foundation for Economic Education:
The sheer immensity of this spending is hard to grasp. For context, $6 trillion is more than one-fourth of what the US economy produces in an entire year, according to Fox Business. The COVID spending blowout is at least eight times bigger than the (inflation-adjusted) price tag of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”
Moreover, the COVID spending bills have all lost huge sums of money to unrelated carve-outs, politician pet projects, corporate bailouts, fraud, waste, and worse.
…
The numbers here really are quite damning.
For the same $6 trillion in expenditure, the government could have given every federal taxpayer a $41,870 check. Or, to think about it a bit differently, it could have written every American roughly an $18,181 check.
Britain Increasing Size of Nuclear Arsenal
March 17th, 2021Via: Barrons:
Britain unveiled plans Tuesday to pivot its strategic focus towards Asia, counter Russian threats and bolster its nuclear stockpile, in one of the biggest overhauls of security, defence and foreign policy since the Cold War era.
The conclusions of the government’s so-called Integrated Review, crafted over the past year as London recalibrates its post-Brexit foreign policy, include labelling China a “systemic competitor”.
The document — entitled “Global Britain in a Competitive Age” — identifies Russia as the “most acute direct threat to the UK” which poses “the full spectrum” of dangers.
It also notably announces an increase to Britain’s nuclear arsenal, reversing a previous commitment to reduce the stockpile to 180 warheads by pledging to increase it to 260 by the end of the decade, “in recognition of the evolving security environment”.
VW Orders $14 Billion Worth of Battery Cells from Northvolt’s Gigafactory
March 16th, 2021Via: Electrek:
Volkswagen Group confirmed that it placed a new order for $14 billion worth of battery cells from Northvolt’s Swedish gigafactory, and it is taking a bigger stake in the battery manufacturer.
Northvolt is a battery startup founded by two former Tesla executives who worked on Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 in Nevada with Panasonic.
