cryptogon.com

A recent Department of Justice gag order in an out-of-court settlement was designed to avoid responsibility and avert compensation to more victims and their families, said Alan Stein, who has represented numerous survivors who were once patients at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

Stein told CBC News that successive federal governments have demanded confidentiality agreements in at least five of the cases he has settled in the last few decades.

“We’ve never seen it like this,” said Tom Myers, executive director of Community Services Agency of Mountain View, where the city averages more than three complaints a day about RV communities. “We have to be prepared that this will be the new normal for us. It’s a crisis.”

Not his village neighbors in China’s far west, who haven’t seen him in months. Not his former classmates, who fear Chinese authorities beat him to death.

Not his mother, who lives in a two-story house at the far end of a country road, alone behind walls bleached by the desert sun. She opened the door one afternoon for an unexpected visit by Associated Press reporters, who showed her a picture of a handsome young man posing in a park, one arm in the wind.

“Yes, that’s him,” she said as tears began streaming down her face. “This is the first time I’ve heard anything of him in seven months. What happened?”

“Is he dead or alive?”

The student’s friends think he joined the thousands — possibly tens of thousands — of people, rights groups and academics estimate, who have been spirited without trial into secretive detention camps for alleged political crimes that range from having extremist thoughts to merely traveling or studying abroad. The mass disappearances, beginning the past year, are part of a sweeping effort by Chinese authorities to use detentions and data-driven surveillance to impose a digital police state in the region of Xinjiang and over its Uighurs, a 10-million strong, Turkic-speaking Muslim minority that China says has been influenced by Islamic extremism.

…

…

The Health Ranger podcast that was censored by YouTube discusses:

* The fact that the FBI confiscated cell phones and mobile devices from Mandalay Bay shooting witnesses, then scrubbed their devices before giving them back.

* The fact that the FBI also confiscated video footage from the Tropicana hotel that captured the mass shooting events.

* The fact that the FBI similarly confiscated all the video footage from all surveillance cameras that captured video of the Pentagon being struck during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To this day, none of that video footage has been released.

* How the FBI continues to obstruct any release of video surveillance footage from the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas shooting.

* Why federal agents routinely confiscate video footage so they can control the narrative and spread lies that won’t be contradicted by actual video footage taken by citizens.

* How the FBI routinely fakes “forensic” evidence using fake hair analysis science (and got caught committing scientific fraud).

“We recognize that there are a lot of people in the general public that have some concerns about their cellphones and whether using a cellphone is safe,” said Dr. Karen Smith of the California Department of Public Health.

The majority of the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, backed the historic shift which was supported by the Conservatives (Hoyre), Liberals (Venstre), the Labor Party (Ap) and the Socialist Left (SV).

They directed the national government to reform its policies on drugs.

Sveinung Stensland, deputy chairman of the Storting Health Committee, told Norwegian publication VG: “It is important to emphasise that we do not legalise cannabis and other drugs, but we decriminalise.

“The change will take some time, but that means a changed vision: those who have a substance abuse problem should be treated as ill, and not as criminals with classical sanctions such as fines and imprisonment.”

According to UNSW, the design, which can be manufactured using mostly standard industry processes and components, comprises a “novel architecture” that allows quantum calculations to be performed using existing semiconductor components, known as CMOS — complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor. CMOS is the basis for all modern chips.

“We often think of landing on the Moon as humanity’s greatest technological marvel, but creating a microprocessor chip with a billion operating devices integrated together to work like a symphony — that you can carry in your pocket — is an astounding technical achievement, and one that’s revolutionised modern life,” Andrew Dzurak, director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW, said.

“With quantum computing, we are on the verge of another technological leap that could be as deep and transformative. But a complete engineering design to realise this on a single chip has been elusive. I think what we have developed at UNSW now makes that possible. And most importantly, it can be made in a modern semiconductor manufacturing plant.”

The chip design, published in the journal Nature Communications, was devised by Dzurak alongside Dr Menno Veldhorst, who is the lead author of the paper and was a research fellow at UNSW when the conceptual work was performed.

“Remarkable as they are, today’s computer chips cannot harness the quantum effects needed to solve the really important problems that quantum computers will,” Veldhorst added.

Instead, a large number of working quantum bits (qubits) will need to work in tandem to achieve the processing power quantum computers are slated to deliver.

“Our design incorporates conventional silicon transistor switches to ‘turn on’ operations between qubits in a vast two-dimensional array, using a grid-based ‘word’ and ‘bit’ select protocol similar to that used to select bits in a conventional computer memory chip,” he added.

“By selecting electrodes above a qubit, we can control a qubit’s spin, which stores the quantum binary code of a 0 or 1. And by selecting electrodes between the qubits, two-qubit logic interactions, or calculations, can be performed between qubits.”

As a useful universal quantum computer will require a large number of qubits, the engineers at the university need to use error-correcting codes that employ multiple qubits to store a single piece of data.

Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.

For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.

On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.

…

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.

In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”

Police said they learned of the deaths after responding to a midday (1700 GMT) medical call at the Sherman’s home in an affluent section of northeast Toronto. Two bodies covered in blankets were removed from the home and loaded into an unmarked van on Friday evening.

“The circumstances of their death appear suspicious and we are treating it that way,” said Constable David Hopkinson. Homicide detectives later told reporters gathered outside the home that there were no signs of forced entry.

…

The San Francisco branch of the SPCA (the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) hired a K5 robot built by Knightscope to patrol the sidewalks outside its facilities. According to a report from the San Francisco Business Times, the robot was deployed as a “way to try dealing with the growing number of needles, car break-ins and crime that seemed to emanate from nearby tent encampments of homeless people.”

Jennifer Scarlett, president of the SF SPCA told the Business Times last week: “We weren’t able to use the sidewalks at all when there’s needles and tents and bikes, so from a walking standpoint I find the robot much easier to navigate than an encampment.”