The Battle to Keep Peasants from Walking on Beach in Front of John Kerry’s Family Home in France
December 30th, 2018Via: AFP:
Hikers demanding right of way along a pristine stretch of coastal France are locked in a legal war with villa owners in a posh Brittany resort town, not least the family of US statesman and former presidential candidate John Kerry.
Unless the latest round of lawsuits seeking to curtail free access to the Emerald Coast path near Saint-Briac-sur-Mer succeeds, officials say it will be open to all starting next year.
Der Spiegel Journalist ‘Faked Stories’ for Years
December 30th, 2018“CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014”
Via: RTE:
Germany’s respected news weekly Der Spiegel has stunned the media world by revealing that one of its award-winning reporters had for years falsified stories.
Claas Relotius “made up stories and invented protagonists” in at least 14 out of 60 articles that appeared in the magazine’s print and online editions, Spiegel wrote, warning that other outlets could also be affected.
Mr Relotius, 33, resigned after admitting to the scam.
He had written for the magazine for seven years and won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014.
Earlier this month, he was named German Reporter of the Year for a story about a young Syrian boy.
The cheating came to light after a colleague who worked with him on a story along the US-Mexican border raised suspicions about some of the details in Relotius’s reporting.
The colleague eventually tracked down two alleged sources quoted extensively by Relotius in the article, which was published in November. Both said they had never met Relotius.
Relotius had also lied about seeing a hand-painted sign that read “Mexicans Keep Out”, a subsequent investigation found.
Other fraudulent stories included one about a Yemeni prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, and one about NFL star Colin Kaepernick.
In a lengthy article, Spiegel said it was “shocked” by the discovery and apologised to its readers as well as to anyone who may have been the subject of “fraudulent quotes, made up personal details or invented scenes at fictitious places”.
Related: 2014: German Journalist Udo Ulfkotte Admits Spreading CIA and BND Propaganda for Decades
Malware Attack Disrupts Delivery of L.A. Times and Tribune Papers Across the U.S.
December 30th, 2018Via: Los Angeles Times:
What first arose as a server outage was identified Saturday as a malware attack, which appears to have originated from outside the United States and hobbled computer systems and delayed weekend deliveries of the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers across the country.
Technology teams worked feverishly to quarantine the computer virus, but it spread through Tribune Publishing’s network and reinfected systems crucial to the news production and printing process. Multiple newspapers around the country were affected because they share a production platform.
911 Emergency Services Go Down Across the U.S. After CenturyLink Outage
December 28th, 2018Via: TechCrunch:
911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center.
The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused the outage beyond an issue with a “network element,” but said in its latest update — around 11am ET on Friday — that the company said that it was “seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete.”
In a tweet, the telecoms giant said it was “working tirelessly” to get its affected systems back up and running.
CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Data center or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.
In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.
Chinese Schools Make Pupils Wear Micro-Chipped Uniforms to Thwart Truancy
December 27th, 2018Via: Telegraph:
Schools in southern China are forcing children to wear uniforms embedded with computer chips that track their movement and trigger an alarm if they skip class.
More that more than 10 schools in Guizhou province and the neighboring autonomous region of Guangxi are now requiring students to wear “intelligent uniforms”, according to the state-run newspaper The Global Times.
Two chips, sown into the shoulders of school jackets, can sustain around 500 wash cycles and temperatures of 150 degrees Celsius, according to the Guizhou Guanyu Technology Company, their manufacturer.
Dr Tenpenny: Infanrix Hexa Vaccine
December 27th, 2018Via: Dr. Tenpenny:
The first vaccine they thoroughly tested was Infanrix Hexa – a six-in-one vaccine manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) that is *supposed* to contain the following antigens: tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis toxoids; inactivated poliomyelitis viral strains 1-2-3; and hepatitis B surface antigen. Shockingly, Corvelva found NONE of these antigens in the vaccine, meaning, that NO antibodies to the intended antigens will be created.
And it gets worse. In addition to no vaccine antigens, they found the following:
traces of 65 chemical cross-contaminants from other manufacturing lines;
chemical toxins;
unrecognizable macromolecules;
various free bacterial peptides that are potential allergens and are capable of inducing autoimmune reactions.
These Portraits Were Made by AI: None of These People Exist
December 26th, 2018Via: PetaPixel:
Check out these rather ordinary looking portraits. They’re all fake. Not in the sense that they were Photoshopped, but rather they were completely generated by artificial intelligence. That’s right: none of these people actually exist.
NVIDIA researchers have published a new paper on easily customizing the style of realistic faces created by a generative adversarial network (GAN).
Christmas: Skid Row vs. Beverly Hills
December 25th, 2018In case you’re not familiar with Los Angeles, these two areas are about 12 miles apart.
Top Trump Official Calls Bankers, Will Convene ‘Plunge Protection Team’
December 24th, 2018Via: Reuters:
U.S. President Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary called top U.S. bankers on Sunday amid an ongoing rout on Wall Street and made plans to convene a group of officials known as the “Plunge Protection Team.”
U.S. stocks have fallen sharply in recent weeks on concerns over slowing economic growth, with the S&P 500 index .SPX on pace for its biggest percentage decline in December since the Great Depression.
“Today I convened individual calls with the CEOs of the nation’s six largest banks,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Twitter shortly before financial markets were due to open in Asia.
…
The Treasury said in a statement that Mnuchin talked with the chief executives of Bank of America (BAC.N), Citi (C.N), Goldman Sachs (GS.N), JP Morgan Chase (JPM.N), Morgan Stanley (MS.N) and Wells Fargo (WFC.N).
“The CEOs confirmed that they have ample liquidity available for lending,” the Treasury said.
Mnuchin “also confirmed that they have not experienced any clearance or margin issues and that the markets continue to function properly,” the Treasury said.
Industrial Hemp Legalized
December 23rd, 2018Via: Boston Globe:
President Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalizes industrial hemp after decades of the crop being caught up in broader cannabis prohibition, into law on Thursday.
The signing ceremony represents the culmination of a months-long debate over various provisions of the wide-ranging agriculture legislation. But after the House and Senate Agriculture Committees reconciled their respective versions, the final Farm Bill easily passed in full floor votes last week.
Hemp legalization, a provision of the bill championed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, received bipartisan support, with members on both sides of the aisle celebrating its inclusion in the now signed law.
While the move has been widely characterized as outright legalization, it’s important to note that strict regulations still apply. Although hemp will no longer be in the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice, prospective growers will have to submit cultivation plans to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), either through the state government or the USDA itself.
