Mystery of Sonic Weapon Attacks at U.S. Embassy in Cuba Deepens
September 15th, 2017Via: AP:
The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he’d walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room.
Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 US victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top US diplomat has called them “health attacks”.
New details learned by the Associated Press indicate at least some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with laser-like specificity, baffling US officials who say the facts and the physics don’t add up.
“None of this has a reasonable explanation,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA official who served in Havana long before America re-opened an embassy there. “It’s just mystery after mystery after mystery.”
Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the state department and US intelligence agencies involved in the investigation.
Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the US government initially realized. The United States first acknowledged the attacks in August – nine months after symptoms were first reported.
Childhood Vaccines May Go Into One Jab
September 14th, 2017Via: BBC:
A technology that could eventually see every childhood vaccine delivered in a single injection has been developed by US researchers.
Their one-shot solution stores the vaccine in microscopic capsules that release the initial dose and then boosters at specific times.
The approach has been shown to work in mouse studies, described in the journal Science.
The researchers say the technology could help patients around the world.
Childhood immunisations come with tears and screams. And there are a lot of them.
Diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, Hib and hepatitis B at eight, 12 and 16 weeks.
Pneumococcal jab at eight weeks, 16 weeks and one year
Men B vaccine at eight weeks, 16 weeks and one year
Hib/Men C vaccine at one year
Measles, mumps and rubella at one year and three years and four months
A team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed a new type of micro-particle that could combine everything into a single jab.
The particles look like miniature coffee cups that are filled with vaccine and then sealed with a lid.
Crucially, the design of the cups can be altered so they break down and spill their contents at just the right time.
One set of tests showed the contents could be released at exactly nine, 20 and 41 days after they were injected into mice.
Other particles that last for hundreds of days have also been developed, the researchers say.
The approach has not yet been tested on patients.
Research Credit: Jb
Grant Cameron on Tom Delonge
September 14th, 2017Via: YouTube:
Book: Managing Magic: The Government’s UFO Disclosure Plan by Grant R. Cameron
New Zealand: National MP Trained by Chinese Spies
September 14th, 2017Via: Newsroom:
A National Party MP who studied at an elite Chinese spy school before moving to New Zealand has attracted the interest of our Security Intelligence Service.
The list MP Jian Yang did not mention in his work or political CVs a decade he spent in the People’s Liberation Army-Air Force Engineering College or the Luoyang language institute run by China’s equivalent of the United States National Security Agency.
That agency, the Third Department, conducts spying activities for China.
Newsroom has been told that to have taught at the Air Force Engineering College, Yang would have almost certainly been an officer in Chinese military intelligence and a member of the Communist Party, as other students and staff have been.
Yang studied and then taught there before moving to Australia where he attended the Australian National University in Canberra. He migrated to this country to teach international relations in the politics department at the University of Auckland.
He was hand-picked by National Party president Peter Goodfellow to become an MP on its list in 2011, wooed directly by the former Prime Minister John Key and has been a key fundraiser for National among the Chinese community in Auckland.
As an MP he variously served on Parliament’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (from 2014 until last year), Commerce, Transport and Industrial Relations and Health and Science select committees and is prominent in New Zealand’s interactions with the Chinese community and diplomatic and consular missions in Wellington and Auckland. He remains a Parliamentary Private Secretary for ethnic affairs.
Related:
Not a Typo: Chinese Company Pays NZ$526 for 146 Million Litres of Water a Year… In a Drought Zone
Research Credit: tochigi
Forget Equifax, Facebook and Google Have the Data That Should Worry You
September 12th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Just for a minute, imagine that hackers have gained access to a database containing sensitive information about hundreds of millions of people. In this totally hypothetical scenario, the theft would be comprehensive—including enough details to do real damage to those whose data had been exposed—and would involve a company that wasn’t widely recognized as a security risk. This large company would’ve exposed you, and everyone you know, to possible financial ruin.
No, I’m not talking about Equifax, the Atlanta-based credit reporting agency that disclosed a massive hack late last week. Think of a comparable breach at Google, Facebook, or Amazon.com.
Those companies, plus Slack, Tinder, and a half-dozen others, possess more than enough financial and personal data for hackers to steal our identities and, possibly, rack up fraudulent charges. They also have private messages, photographs, and most of our secrets. A large-scale attack on any one of these companies could make the Equifax hack, the theft of some 143 million Social Security numbers, look like petty larceny.
Volkswagen Spends Billions More on Electric Cars in Search for Mass Market
September 12th, 2017Via: Reuters:
Volkswagen is stepping up its shift to electric cars and plans to invest more than 20 billion euros ($24 billion) in zero-emission vehicles by 2030 to challenge pioneer Tesla in creating a mass market.
The world’s largest automaker by sales said on Monday it would roll out 80 new electric cars across its multi-brand group by 2025, up from a previous goal of 30, and wanted to offer an electric version of each of its 300 group models by 2030.
The German company had previously said it would spend more than 10 billion euros by 2025 on a move to electric vehicles.
Until it admitted two years ago to cheating on U.S. diesel emissions tests, Volkswagen (VW) had been slow to embrace electric cars and self-driving technology.
But the “dieselgate” scandal has prompted a strategic shift, while major advances in batteries and a global fight against pollution in the wake of VW’s scandal have raised pressure on carmakers to speed up development of zero-emission alternatives.
Irma Devastation, Image Galleries
September 12th, 2017After 15 Die in Hepatitis Outbreak, San Diego Begins Sanitary Street Washing
September 12th, 2017Via: Los Angeles Times:
Sanitary street washing will commence in downtown San Diego and will continue every other week to combat the city’s deadly hepatitis A outbreak, Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s office said Friday.
The city responded to a letter sent by San Diego County Thursday, asking the city to move forward with a list of specific sanitation actions designed to help control the spread of the disease, which has killed 15 people and hospitalized nearly 300, many of them homeless and living on streets without adequate access to restrooms or showers.
The county gave the city five business days to respond with a plan for remedying what it called a “fecally contaminated environment” downtown. The county will soon expand its efforts to other cities in the region, where the outbreak has now produced nearly 400 confirmed cases.
The county moved forward last weekend with its own contractor, who installed 40 hand-washing stations in areas where the homeless often gather. There are plans, according to the city’s letter, to add more stations next week.
In addition to regularly pressure-washing dirty city right-of-ways with chlorinated water, the county also asked the city to “immediately expand access to public restrooms and wash stations within the city limits that are adjacent to at-risk populations.”
Japan Trials Driverless Cars with Rural Elderly
September 12th, 2017Via: Reuters:
As the annual rice harvest begins this month in the Japanese town of Nishikata, the combines that usually putter along the sleepy roads lining its rice fields are giving way to a vehicle residents have never before seen, a driverless shuttle bus.
Japan is starting to experiment with self-driving buses in rural communities such as Nishikata, 115 km (71 miles) north of the capital, Tokyo, where elderly residents struggle with fewer bus and taxi services as the population ages and shrinks.
The swift advance of autonomous driving technology is prompting cities such as Paris and Singapore to experiment with such services, which could prove crucial in Japan, where populations are not only greying, but declining, in rural areas.Japan could launch self-driving services for remote communities by 2020, if the trials begun this month prove successful.
The government plans to turn highway rest stops into hubs from which to ferry the elderly to medical, retail and banking services.
Cruise Automation/GM: “How We Built the First Real Self-Driving Car (Really)”
September 12th, 2017Via: Medium:
The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation self-driving car, but it’s the first that meets the redundancy and safety requirements we believe are necessary to operate without a driver. There’s no other car like this in existence. In a few weeks, these cars will be a part of the fleet that carries Cruise employees anywhere in San Francisco using our app. For now, there will still be a human behind the wheel.
In the near future you’ll see these cars on the road, and they’ll look like regular cars, but they’re actually some of the most technically advanced robots on the planet. They don’t need drivers, and there might not be anyone inside at all. They’ve been designed to emulate human driving behavior but with the human mistakes omitted. They don’t drink and drive, they don’t text while driving, and they don’t get tired. It has taken the collective effort of over two thousand people to create this product, and we believe that together we’ve managed to create something that will one day drive significantly better than any individual.
…
All of these new systems are important, because a driverless vehicle can’t rely on a human as a backup system. If something on a vehicle fails while there is an attentive human in the driver’s seat, they can yank the wheel or stomp on the brake pedal to avoid an incident. This isn’t the case for a car with no driver, so we built backup systems. And in some cases we built backups for the backups?—?and backups for those systems, too. Safety and validation teams have carefully considered plausible failure modes for all critical systems and fed changes back into the design. Our newest self-driving car might look like a regular car on the outside, but the vehicle’s core system architecture more closely resembles that of a commercial airplane or spacecraft.
