U.S. National Debt Hits $20 Trillion
September 11th, 2017Via: CBS:
The U.S. national debt reached $20 trillion for the first time ever last Friday after President Trump signed a bipartisan bill temporarily raising the nation’s debt limit for three months.
While at Camp David, Mr. Trump, with the stroke of his presidential pen, increased the statutory debt last Friday by approximately $318 billion, according to the Treasury Department. Before the bill’s completion, the U.S. debt was sitting around $19.84 trillion.
The legislation allowed the Treasury Department to start borrowing again immediately after several months of using “extraordinary measures” to avoid a financial default. The bill passed last Thursday 80-17 in the Senate and in the House 316-90 on Friday. Around $15 billion in emergency funding for Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts was attached to the borrowing measure.
The $318 billion increase raised the U.S. national debt to $20.16 trillion by Friday. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the debt has increased about $215 billion from around $19.94 trillion.
California Bans Drones from Delivering Marijuana
September 11th, 2017Via: The Verge:
Drones delivering hamburgers, beer, and Amazon products might be right around the corner, but don’t get your hopes up if you want your weed sent to you via robot. That’s because California’s Bureau of Cannabis Control has recently unveiled new regulatory rules that will ban drones from delivering marijuana, as spotted by Ars Technica. The Bureau is currently developing regulation surrounding weed use and sales under the Medicinal and Adult-Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act (MAUCRSA) after recreational marijuana was legalized in California.
Eat, Pray, Live: The Lagos Megachurches Building Their Very Own Cities
September 11th, 2017Be sitting down for this one!
Via: Guardian:
Redemption Camp has 5,000 houses, roads, rubbish collection, police, supermarkets, banks, a fun fair, a post office – even a 25 megawatt power plant. In Nigeria, the line between church and city is rapidly vanishing.
Irma: Over 5 Million Homes and Businesses Without Electricity in Florida
September 10th, 2017Via: Reuters:
Hurricane Irma knocked out power to about 5.8 million homes and businesses in Florida, even as the storm’s power waned as it crept up the state’s west coast, according to state officials and local electric utilities.
Monitoring Hurricane Irma
September 8th, 2017Equifax Says Cyberattack May Have Hit 143 Million Customers
September 8th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Equifax Inc. said its systems were struck by a cyberattack that may have affected about 143 million U.S. customers of the credit reporting agency, shedding light on one of the largest and most intrusive breaches in history.
Intruders accessed names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers, Equifax said in a statement. Credit card numbers for about 209,000 consumers were also accessed, the company said. Equifax shares dropped more than 8 percent in after-hours trading.
Hackers Send Silent Commands to Speech Recognition Systems with Ultrasound
September 8th, 2017Via: Tech Crunch:
Security researchers in China have invented a clever way of activating voice recognition systems without speaking a word. By using high frequencies inaudible to humans but which register on electronic microphones, they were able to issue commands to every major “intelligent assistant” that were silent to every listener but the target device.
SpaceX Launches U.S. Air Force X-37B
September 7th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
SpaceX successfully launched a classified Air Force drone from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as Hurricane Irma barrels toward the state.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launched the Air Force space plane around 10 a.m. local time Thursday, despite warnings earlier in the morning the weather was only 50 percent favorable for the mission. Irma was forecast to be about 900 miles southeast of the launch site during Thursday’s take-off, with a separate storm system causing the earlier lift-off uncertainty, according to the nearby Patrick Air Force Base.
The launch was the fifth mission for the 11,000-pound autonomous spacecraft, but the first involving SpaceX.
New Zealand: Polluted Paradise
September 7th, 2017Update: Part 2: Government Backing Policies Destroying Water Resources
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Via: Al Jazeera:
I also discovered that the country is harbouring a disturbing secret, little known to the rest of the world: its freshwater is in severe crisis. Two-thirds of New Zealand’s rivers are too polluted to swim in and half its lakes are irreversibly damaged.
This pollution, say many independent environmentalists, scientists and economists, is primarily a by-product of the laissez faire growth of the country’s dairy industry. The government, dairy industry, and irrigation lobby disagree. They say it’s a legacy of over 100 years of farming.
I set out to investigate why New Zealand, a country which markets itself as a clean, green paradise, has in fact got disturbing water pollution problems which only appear to be getting worse.
Research Credit: KB
U.S. House Unanimously Approves Sweeping Self-Driving Car Measure
September 6th, 2017Via: Reuters:
The U.S. House on Wednesday unanimously approved a sweeping proposal to speed the deployment of self-driving cars without human controls by putting federal regulators in the driver’s seat and barring states from blocking autonomous vehicles.
The House measure, the first significant federal legislation aimed at speeding self-driving cars to market, would allow automakers to obtain exemptions to deploy up to 25,000 vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards in the first year. The cap would rise over three years to 100,000 vehicles annually.
