855: Burkini Meanie

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:41

Dr. Drew Pinsky:

"Earlier tonight, I mistakenly raised an anonymously sourced report about Hillary Clinton's health. By doing so, I violated HLN and CNN's editorial standards and I was wrong to have mentioned the unsubstantiated report. I regret the error and will make sure, in the future, to apply the rigorous editorial standards we have in place here. I apologize to our viewers and Secretary Clinton for falling short tonight."

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Thu, 25 Aug 2016 23:26

Days after CNN's Ashleigh Banfield announced on air she's moving to HLN in the fall, HLN quietly confirmed Dr. Drew Pinsky's program will end next month, though he will remain a contributor for CNN Worldwide.

''Dr. Drew and his team have delivered more than five years of creative shows, and I want to thank them for their hard work and distinctive programming,'' CNN EVP Ken Jautz said in a statement confirming Pinsky's last telecast will be September 22.

In its latest reboot, HLN is going for more straight news fare, add shows hosted by CNN's Erica Hill, Michaela Pereira and Banfield. Drew's departure is a no-brainer, given the show's ratings; far bigger was HLN star Nancy Grace's announcement in June that she was calling it a wrap when her contract expires in October.

Last week, Banfield ended a broadcast of CNN's Legal View telling viewers she is ending her run as host of the noon ET program, and would host a primetime show on HLN that will be a ''unique brand of social and legal issues.''

''It is really tough to tell you I am going to be leaving,'' said Banfield, who has been with CNN since 2011. But she cast the move as ''joining my friends'' who have been shifted over to HLN as that network undergoes yet another re-branding.

Dr. Drew had survived the previous re-branding, little more than two years ago, when HLN announced it would become ''the first TV network for the social media generation,'' and ''redefine TV news and information, driven by what's trending, being shared and going viral across all screens.''

Pinsky made headlines last week when he announced on his radio show he is ''gravely concerned'' about Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's health and the health care she is receiving. It played nicely into Donald Trump's position that Clinton is not healthy enough to serve as POTUS.

HLN came to TCA last month, with the three dayside stars of its latest branding scheme: Robin Meade, 6-10 AM; former CNN New Day host Pereira, who last month debuted her eponymous 10 AM-1 PM show; and Hill, who will rejoin the network she'd previously joined during one of its earlier re-brands, hosting 1-3 PM in the fall.

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Sat, 27 Aug 2016 13:05

Longtime celebrity and radio show host, Dr. Drew Pinsky, was fired by HLN after recent comments were made concerning Hillary Clinton's healthcare. HLN said last Thursday that ''Dr. Drew on Call'' will air its final episode on September 22nd of this year.

Dr. Drew's critique of the type of medications that Hillary Clinton takes has apparently struck a nerve at HLN, a division of the CNN network. In a recent show, Pinsky proposes serious problems and grave health risks associated with the specific medications being prescribed to the Democratic nominee.

However, the information given by Dr. Drew has only verified the recent rumors concerning the odd behavior of Clinton and raises another concern. Why is Hillary taking medicine that is no longer used and known to cause other life-threatening illnesses?

Based on the medical records that were released by Clinton, Dr. Drew and his colleague, Dr. Robert Huizenga, agree that there is a grave concern in not only her health, but also with her healthcare. Dr. Drew begins by stating,

''Both of us concluded that if we were providing the care that she was receiving, we would be ashamed to show up in the doctor's lounge. We would be laughed out.'' Dr. Drew states, ''She is receiving 1950s care by our evaluation.''

He then tries to explain Clinton's medical history and the convoluted terms surrounding her conditions. ''She is being treated for hyperthyroidism with something called Armour Thyroid.'' Dr. Drew points out, ''Which is very unconventional and something we used to use back in the sixties.''

Dr. Drew goes on to describe several medical conditions and drug side effects that could explain the odd behaviors and mishaps that the public has been seeing as of late. His diagnosis seems to fit the bill, but the fact that Hillary Clinton has been prescribed more than one out-dated drug has him perplexed.

''So she goes on Coumadin '... that's weird because Coumadin really isn't used anymore.'' Drew exclaims, ''Certainly somebody who is a presidential candidate would get one of the newer anti-coagulants!''

Here is where we must stop and wonder this same question proposed by Dr. Drew. Why is Hillary Clinton being prescribed drugs that are no longer used and purported to have serious side effects if newer, safer drugs are available?

According to Science Daily, a patient's request for specific drugs greatly affects the prescribing practices of medical professionals. Given the ability for a patient to choose their own medications, it is easy to believe that Clinton specifically requested these ancient drugs rather than believe that her doctor would prescribe them, especially since recent email leaks show Clinton's interest in several medicines and treatments.

Last June, Larry Klayman at WND wrote that Hillary Clinton was responsible for the nomination of Margaret Hamburg as the FDA commissioner. This indicates that Clinton could have had insider knowledge into specific drugs and information about those drugs that was never released to the public. The emphasis added below is mine.

There appears to be substantial evidence that Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state, was responsible for the nomination of a woman, who had given substantial contributions to the political campaigns of Hillary Clinton, as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner. Her name is Margaret Hamburg, and her husband, Peter Brown, also had his company, Renaissance Technologies, contribute to the Clinton Foundation and other so-called charities. Thus, it is likely that Hillary got Hamburg, who hails from New York City, her job.

Buttressing this ''unlikely coincidence'' is the fact that in a lawsuit I filed for victims of Hamburg's subsequent actions at the FDA, which alleged criminal racketeering violations through Hamburg's and J&J's suppression of material information about the highly dangerous effects of the antibiotic Levaquin, Hamburg is being represented by a criminal defense lawyer named Beth Wilkinson. Wilkinson is the same lawyer who has been defending Hillary confidants and accomplices, such as Cheryl Mills, Bryan Pagliano and many others in the ongoing FBI investigation of the illegal use of Hillary's so-called private email server. Wilkinson has counseled these accomplices to assert Fifth Amendment privileges and improperly instructed witnesses not to answer relevant questions, in the recent depositions taken by Judicial Watch over the secreting of State Department records on Hillary's private email server in response to various FOIA requests. In short, the link between Hamburg and Hillary Clinton is substantial for this and many other indicia too long to list in this column.

'' via WND

While there isn't any concrete evidence that Hillary had insider knowledge leading to the choice of a different drug than what is commonly used today, we can easily imagine this to be the true reason for prescribing a drug known by the medical community to be dangerous. This surmised knowledge only reinforces my own belief that modern medications are bad for you given the limited and biased testing as shown in recent scandals. I will continue in my abstinence of any and all pills.

H/T [Breitbart]

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:41

Drew Pinsky's six-year-old HLN show, ''Dr. Drew On Call,'' has been canceled by CNN, effective Sept. 22.

In a statement, CNN executive vice president Ken Jautz said he and Pinsky ''have mutually agreed to air the final episode of his show on September 22'" but gave no specific reason for the cancellation.

CNN Money, in its reporting of the announcement, connected it to a broader shakeup at HLN, including the end of Nancy Grace's flamboyant show devoted to criminal court cases.

But the decision came eight days after Pinsky's comments on a radio show on Aug. 17 questioning the health and medical care of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president. After looking at bits and pieces of Clinton's health-care records she made public in 2015, he said he was ''gravely concerned not just about her health, but her health care.''

His comments came as the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, along with its surrogates and supporters, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Fox News host Sean Hannity, have attempted to portray Clinton as lacking ''the mental and physical stamina'' demanded by the job, as Trump has put it.

Twice this week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump went after Democrat Hillary Clinton for her physical health. Here's how that claim checks out. (Sarah Parnass,Julio Negron,Osman Malik/The Washington Post)

Pinsky's views, which he said were shared by another physician with whom he had consulted, aired on KABC's ''McIntyre in the Morning.''

The episode has been removed from the station's website, but a transcript was published by the conservative Washington Free Beacon:

Based on the information that she has provided and her doctors have provided, we were gravely concerned not just about her health, but her health care '....

What is going on with her health care? It's bizarre. I got to tell you. Maybe they have reasons, but at a distance, it looks bizarre. There ought to be some sort of standard for people that are going to lead the country or are going to making these important decisions. Again, Hillary may be fine with all of this. I mean, it's dangerous and it's concerning, but you can see'--and by the way, there were two other things that gravely concerned us. When she hit her head, she had to wear these prism glasses when she came out.

'.... That is brain damage, and it's affecting her balance. Now clearly, it hasn't affected her cognition, but tell us a little more about that. That's profound. And then number two, when they screened her for heart disease, again, they did an old-fashioned screen. It just seems like she's getting care from somebody that she met in Arkansas when she was a kid, and you've got to wonder. You've got to wonder. It's not so much that her health is a grave concern. It's that the care she's getting could make it a concern.

He based his comments on a July 2015 letter from Lisa Bardack, an internist in Mount Kisco, N.Y., who has served as Clinton's doctor for 15 years. The eight-paragraph letter described Clinton as ''a healthy 67-year-old female whose current medical conditions include hypothyroidism and seasonal pollen allergies.''

Twice this week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump went after Democrat Hillary Clinton for her physical health. Here's how that claim checks out. (Sarah Parnass,Julio Negron,Osman Malik/The Washington Post)

As The Post's Fact Checker noted, the letter disclosed that Clinton suffered from deep vein thrombosis in 1998 and in 2009, an elbow fracture in 2009 and, most notably, a concussion in 2012. (The elbow injury and concussion, when she was secretary of state, were extensively reported at the time.) The letter says her concussion symptoms, including double vision, were resolved within two months. The letter concluded that Clinton ''is in excellent physical condition and fit to serve as president of the United States.''

It was Pinksy's second foray into the subject of Hillary Clinton's health, and the first one ended badly, as well. In January, he made reference on-air to Clinton's late return to the stage in a debate and cited a Breitbart News story, attributed to a ''strong source,'' suggesting that it was due to ''a flare-up of problems from'' a ''brain injury.'' In fact, she had only visited the restroom.

He apologized after the broadcast. ''Earlier tonight, I mistakenly raised an anonymously sourced report about Hillary Clinton's health. By doing so, I violated HLN and CNN's editorial standards and I was wrong to have mentioned the unsubstantiated report. I regret the error and will make sure, in the future, to apply the rigorous editorial standards we have in place here. I apologize to our viewers and Secretary Clinton for falling short tonight.''

''Dr. Drew and his team have delivered more than five years of creative shows and I want to thank them for their hard work and distinctive programming,'' Jautz said in a statement Thursday. ''Their audience-driven shows, in particular, were innovative and memorable TV. And Dr. Drew has been an authoritative voice on addiction and on many other topical issues facing America today.''

Drew's website describes him as ''America's most trusted physician'' who ''explores the behavior behind the headlines and addresses the fundamental issue, 'why we do what we do.' '' Until earlier this year, Pinsky also hosted a nationally syndicated radio show called Loveline.

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Sat, 27 Aug 2016 13:40

For a change, we come not to bury a college president but to praise him. His name is Robert Zimmer, and nearby the University of Chicago president defends the educational and societal virtues of free speech on college campuses. Let's hope he wears body armor to the next faculty meeting.

Mr. Zimmer's public coming out is all the more notable because it appears to be part of a university-wide message. The school's dean of students, Jay Ellison, has written a letter to incoming freshmen noting that the desire for ''safe...

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 15:05

Public DomainMany universities are caving to fragile students' demands for emotional protection from offensive speech. The University of Chicago isn't one of them.

In a welcome letter to the incoming Class of 2020, Dean of Students John Ellison gives students the truth: there will be no quarter from controversial ideas on campus. U of C has made an ironclad commitment to the First Amendment, and will not abide safe spaces, trigger warnings, and other kinds of limitations on what is considered acceptable discourse:

"Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called 'trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."

Ellison pulls no punches. "Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn, without fear of censorship," he writes. "At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort."

A university administrator forewarning students that they might actually be uncomfortable is so unheard of these days that I worried Ellison's letter was actually a fake'--even though The Chicago Maroonretweeted it. So I emailed Ellison's office to confirm it.

"I can confirm that the letter is authentic," a U of C spokesperson told Reason.

Bravo, Chicago. Bravo.

Read the full letter here.

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:09

zondag 28 augustus 2016, 13:59 (C) REUTERSDe gesprekken tussen de Europese Unie en de Verenigde Staten over het vrijhandelsverdrag TTIP zijn mislukt. Dat heeft de Duitse vicekanselier Sigmar Gabriel zondag gezegd in een interview met de ZDF.

Volgens Gabriel zit er weinig schot in de gesprekken. ,,Als je het mij vraagt zijn de onderhandelingen met de VS feitelijk mislukt, ook al wil niemand dat echt toegeven'', zei de vicekanselier. In maar liefst veertien gespreksrondes die de afgelopen jaren zijn gehouden, is er volgens hem over geen van de beoogde 27 hoofdstukken van het verdrag overeenstemming bereikt.

Gabriel was een stuk positiever over CETA, een verdrag waarover de EU met Canada in gesprek is. Wel toonde hij zich gefrustreerd dat TTIP en CETA vaak op een hoop worden gegooid. ,,Het debat is erg lastig geweest, omdat de overeenkomst met de VS en die met Canada over een kam worden geschoren. Dat is verkeerd.''

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Sat, 27 Aug 2016 15:58

As Bill Clinton entered the final year of his presidency, his aides put together a legacy-building trip to South Asia'--the first visit to the region by a U.S. president since Jimmy Carter's in 1978. Early drafts of the itinerary featured a notable exclusion: The president would visit India, an emerging ally, but had no plans to stop in neighboring Pakistan.

There were good reasons for this. Pervez Musharraf had seized power there in a military coup six months earlier. His regime was regarded as tolerant of Islamic radicals, perhaps even complicit in their attacks, and unhelpful on nuclear talks with India. Whatever the potential benefits to regional stability, a visit would be seen as legitimizing a troublemaker. Clinton had the support of many in the foreign policy establishment and his decision was popular among liberals in his party. In an editorial published February 18, 2000, the New York Times noted, "Pakistan has been lobbying hard in Washington"; the paper urged Clinton to stand firm, absent a return to civilian rule in the country and "concrete progress" on nukes and terror.

Four days later, Hillary Clinton weighed in. At a gathering in a private home on Staten Island, Clinton said she hoped her husband would be able to find time to visit Pakistan on his trip. That she spoke up on a matter of public controversy was interesting; where she did it was noteworthy.

Clinton was the guest of honor at a $1,000-per-plate fundraiser hosted by a group of prominent Pakistani doctors in New York, who acknowledged holding the dinner as part of that lobbying effort. The immediate beneficiary? Hillary Clinton, candidate for U.S. Senate. Organizers were told they'd need to raise at least $50,000 for her to show up. They did. The secondary beneficiary? Pakistan. Two weeks after Clinton told her hosts that she hoped her husband would do what they wanted him to do, the White House announced that Bill Clinton would, indeed, include Pakistan on his trip to South Asia.

Win, win, and win.

The White House naturally insisted that Hillary Clinton's views had no bearing on her husband's decision to change his itinerary. And a subsequent New York Times article about the curious sequence of events found "no evidence" she had prevailed upon the president to alter his plans. But that same article, published under the headline "Donating to the First Lady, Hoping the President Notices," noted the "unique aspect" of Hillary Clinton's candidacy: "While her husband still occupies the White House, people may seek to influence his policies by making donations to her Senate campaign."

In fact, people did. The hosts of the event moved it up so that it might take place before a final decision had been made on the South Asian schedule. Suhail Muzaffar, one of two primary organizers of the fundraiser, told the paper: "'We thought it went very well, in terms of the message and the timeliness of it, especially in terms of the president's going to the region." His co­host, Dr. Asim Malik, added: "I cannot deny that the fact that she's the president's wife makes a difference."

A similar dynamic is at play in the growing controversy over Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation: People sought to influence her decisions as secretary of state by making donations to his foundation. And while we cannot yet offer definitive conclusions about the extent to which those efforts were successful, disclosures over the past several weeks make clear that Clinton and her top aides eagerly provided special access to Clinton Foundation donors'--and, in some cases, provided that special access because they were Clinton Foundation donors.

Such conflicts of interest'--perceived and real'--should come as no surprise. They were the focus of Clinton's cabinet nomination. "The main issue related to Senator Clinton's nomination that has occupied the committee has been the review of how her service as secretary of state can be reconciled with the sweeping global activities of President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation," said Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, moments after her nomination hearing was gaveled to order on January 13, 2009. "The core of the problem is that foreign governments and entities may perceive the Clinton Foundation as a means to gain favor with the secretary of state, although neither Senator Clinton nor President Clinton has a personal financial stake in the foundation." The keys, Lugar said, will be transparency and preventing overlap between the work of the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. Large chunks of the hearing were devoted to an extended discussion about whether a Memorandum of Understanding drafted to make clear the lines between State and the foundation went far enough. Republicans wanted more assurances and a more detailed statement of the rules. Democrats, for the most part, were happy to leave things vague. Democrats won.

The recent revelations leave in tatters Clinton's unequivocal claim from July: "There is absolutely no connection between anything that I did as secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation."

There are, in fact, many connections.

In June 2009, Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the crown prince of Bahrain, sought a meeting with Secretary Clinton. He initially made requests through normal diplomatic channels but they went unfulfilled. Khalifa, a Clinton Foundation donor, got creative. Doug Band, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who helped create the Clinton Foundation, emailed Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary Clinton. Band noted that Khalifa, "a good friend of ours," would be visiting Washington and was seeking a meeting with Secretary Clinton. Abedin responded, noting that she was aware of Khalifa's requests made "through normal channels." She told Band that her boss didn't want to commit to a meeting.

Two days later, the situation had changed. Abedin emailed Band to inform him that Khalifa was on the schedule and would be seeing Secretary Clinton in Washington. "If u see him, let him know," she emailed. "We have reached out thru official channels."

Another email, this one from Dennis Cheng, a fundraiser at the Clinton Foundation, to Abedin at the State Department, reveals that Clinton invited Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a high-dollar Clinton Foundation donor, to a reception at her home in 2012. When Clinton's team was asked about her involvement with Pinchuk in 2014, her spokesman, Nick Merrill, told the New York Times that Clinton had never met Pinchuk and the Ukrainian "was never on her schedule" during her tenure at the State Department. (Cheng had been a colleague of Abedin at the State Department before moving to the Clinton Foundation.)

That same month, in June 2012, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, traveled to New York City to interview two candidates to lead the Clinton Foundation. Mills, Clinton's top aide, appears to have had significant involvement with those at the highest levels of the Clinton Foundation. Laura Graham, chief operating officer of the Clinton Foundation, left 148 telephone messages for Mills between 2010 and 2012, according to State Department records obtained by Citizens United via Freedom of Information Act requests and first reported by James Rosen of Fox News. The tally covers only half of Clinton's tenure at the State Department and does not include calls in which Graham and Mills connected. Still, the 148 messages from Graham were exponentially more than any other individual left for Clinton's top aide.

Many of these recent revelations have come despite efforts by Clinton defenders to keep them from the public. The FBI last week turned over to the State Department nearly 15,000 emails it recovered during its investigation of Clinton's private server. Many of them'--"thousands," according to FBI director James Comey'--were "work-related" emails that Clinton claimed she had turned over to the State Department. On August 8, 2015, Clinton signed a declaration submitted to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., swearing "under penalty of perjury" that she'd directed all emails that "were or potentially were" work-related turned over to the State Department.

That plainly didn't happen. Why not? Comey offered several explanations in his July 5 press conference announcing he wouldn't be charging anyone in connection with the scandal. Perhaps they were lost in routine system purges of the kind that any email user might perform. Or maybe her lawyers mistook these thousands of "work-related" emails as "personal" because their search techniques weren't as sophisticated as those used by the FBI.

While the FBI recovered thousands of work-related emails that Clinton failed to turn over, Comey reported that many others had been deleted. The FBI director acknowledged that while the FBI did not have "complete visibility" as to the contents of these emails or a thorough understanding of how they were permanently erased, he nonetheless offered his assurances that "there was no intentional misconduct" in the sorting of the emails.

If Comey's explanations seemed generous when he made them, they seem even more charitable today. In his telling, Clinton's failure to turn over thousands of work-related emails'--at least some of which include evidence of coordination between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department that Clinton World was eager to keep secret'--was merely the result of incompetence or bad luck. And the efforts her lawyers undertook to delete the others were unremarkable, benign. "We found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them," Comey said at his press conference. Yet moments later, Comey acknowledged: "They deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery."

There may be a simple reason the FBI didn't find evidence of intent: They didn't ask. That's the explanation Representative Trey Gowdy offered in an interview with Fox News on August 24. "I didn't see any questions on the issue of intent," Gowdy said, referring to the FBI's notes from its interview with Secretary Clinton.

And the evidence the FBI collected, particularly with respect to how some of Clinton's "personal" emails were deleted, indicates that questions about intent ought to have been among the first ones asked. FBI interviews with the techs responsible for erasing Clinton's emails suggest that her team went to great lengths to ensure the messages would never be seen again. The Clinton team used a technology called "BleachBit" to permanently delete those emails. BleachBit, according to its website, allows users to "shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery" and "overwrite free disk space to hide previously deleted files." The techs used additional tools to ensure those emails would be unrecoverable.

So Clinton, who took virtually no precautions to safeguard her emails'--"personal" or "work-related"'--while they sat on her server, went to great lengths to ensure that the emails she withheld from the State Department could never again be seen by anyone. She did this nearly two years following her departure from the State Department and only after she understood that the government was interested in seeing her emails. Seems like a lot to do to protect yoga schedules and emails about the grandkids.

The challenge for Clinton is simple: survive until November 8. So she's avoiding the media'--265 days and counting since her last press conference'--and trying to offer reassurances about the Clinton Foundation.

There's little reason to believe her. This is the same woman, after all, who promised during her nomination hearing seven years ago that she would take extraordinary measures to separate the foundation from her work at the State Department and do her best to "avoid even the appearance of a conflict."

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 03:43

Our Revolution - About

Campaigns end. Revolutions endure.

Our Revolution will reclaim democracy for the working people of our country by harnessing the transformative energy of the ''political revolution.'' Through supporting a new generation of progressive leaders, empowering millions to fight for progressive change and elevating the political consciousness, Our Revolution will transform American politics to make our political and economic systems once again responsive to the needs of working families.

Our Revolution has three intertwined goals: to revitalize American democracy, empower progressive leaders and elevate the political consciousness.

Revitalize American Democracy

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Our Revolution will revitalize American democracy by unifying the millions of people who got involved over the course of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign in support of progressive causes. Our Revolution will give the people a major voice in the political system by activating supporters and engaging millions more Americans in the political process.

Paid for by Our Revolution. Our Revolution is a 501(c)(4) organization. Contributions to Our Revolution are not deductible as charitable contributions for Federal income tax purposes.

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 03:53

Michael Eric Dyson (born October 23, 1958) is an American academic, author, and radio host. He is a professor of Sociology at Georgetown University.[2] Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a PrincetonPh.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two",[3] Dyson has authored or edited 18 books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marvin Gaye, Nas's debut album Illmatic, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Hurricane Katrina.

Personal life[edit]Dyson was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Addie Mae Leonard, who was from Alabama. He was adopted by his stepfather, Everett Dyson.[4] He attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on an academic scholarship but left and completed his education at Northwestern High School.[3] He became an ordainedBaptistminister at 19 years of age.[5] Having worked in factories in Detroit to support his family, he entered Knoxville College as a freshman at age 21.[6] Dyson received his bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from Carson''Newman College in 1985.[3] He obtained his master's and Ph.D in religion, from Princeton University. Dyson serves on the board of directors of the Common Ground Foundation, a project dedicated to empowering urban youth in the United States.[7] Dyson and his third wife, writer and ordained minister Marcia L. Dyson,[3] are regular guests and speakers at the Aspen Institute Conferences and Ideas Festival.[8][9] Together, they lecture on many American college campuses.

Dyson has taught at Chicago Theological Seminary, Brown University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, DePaul University, and the University of Pennsylvania.[3] Since 2007, he has been a Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. His 1994 book Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X became a New York Times notable book of the year.[10] In his 2006 book Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, Dyson analyzes the political and social events in the wake of the catastrophe against the backdrop of an overall "failure in race and class relations".[11][12][13] In 2010, Dyson edited Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, with contributions based on the album's tracks by, among others, Kevin Coval, Kyra D. Gaunt ("Professor G"), dream hampton, Marc Lamont Hill, Adam Mansbach, and Mark Anthony Neal.[14] Dyson's own essay in this anthology, "'One Love,' Two Brothers, Three Verses", argues that the current US penal system disfavors young black males more than any other segment of the population.[15][16] Dyson hosted a radio show, which aired on Radio One, from January 2006 to February 2007. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio and CNN, and is a regular guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. Beginning July 2011 Michael Eric Dyson became a political analyst for MSNBC.

The Michael Eric Dyson Show[edit]The Michael Eric Dyson Show radio program debuted on April 6, 2009, and is broadcast from Morgan State University. The show's first guest was Oprah Winfrey,[17] to whom Dyson dedicated his book Can You Hear Me Now?: The Inspiration, Wisdom, and Insight of Michael Eric Dyson. The most recent episode of the show was in December 2011.

Awards and nominations[edit]YearAwardWorkResult2004NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work '' Non-FictionWhy I Love Black WomenWinner[18]2006NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work '' Non-FictionIs Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?Winner[18]2007NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work '' Non-FictionCome Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of DisasterNominee[19]2007American Book AwardCome Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of DisasterWinner[20]Bibliography[edit]Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. | ISBN 0-8166-2143-8Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. | ISBN 0-19-510285-1Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley, 1996. | ISBN 0-201-91186-8Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture, Oxford University Press, USA, 1997. | ISBN 0-19-511569-4I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr., New York: Free Press, 2000. | ISBN 0-684-86776-1Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002 | ISBN 0-465-01756-8Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002. | ISBN 0-465-01765-7Why I Love Black Women, New York: Perseus Books Group, 2002. | ISBN 0-465-01763-0The Michael Eric Dyson Reader, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004. | ISBN 0-465-01771-1Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005. | ISBN 0-465-01770-3Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black middle class Lost Its Mind?,[21] New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005. | ISBN 0-465-01719-3Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. | ISBN 0-19-516092-4Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, New York: Perseus Books Group, 2006. | ISBN 0-465-01761-4Debating Race, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007. |ISBN 0-465-00206-4Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip Hop. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007. ISBN 978-0-465-01716-4.April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King's Death and How it Changed America, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008. | ISBN 978-0465012862Can You Hear Me Now?: The Inspiration, Wisdom, and Insight of Michael Eric Dyson, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009. | ISBN 0-465-01883-1Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2010 (editor, with Sohail Daulatzai). | ISBN 978-0-465-00211-5The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2016. | ISBN 978-0544387669References[edit]^Armstrong, Elizabeth (March 15, 2001). "The Pure Heart of Gangsta Rap". Chicago Reader. ^Michael E Dyson, Department of Sociology, Georgetown University^ abcdeMichael A. Fletcher (Spring 2000). "Michael Eric Dyson: A Scholar and a Hip-Hop Preacher.", The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.^http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/4223/Dyson-Michael-Eric-1958.html^Marie Arana (August 24, 2003). "Michael Eric Dyson. Telling It Any Way He Can.", The Washington Post.^Michael Eric Dyson (April 2, 2011). "Manning Marable: A Brother, a Mentor, a Great Mind.", The Root.^Staff (2007). "Biography: Dr. Michael Eric Dyson", Common Ground Foundation, board members.^Staff (2011) "2011 Speakers. Marcia Dyson", Aspen Ideas Festival. The Aspen Institute.^Staff (2011). "2011 Speakers. Michael Eric Dyson", Aspen Ideas Festival. The Aspen Institute.^Calvin Reid (February 21, 2000). "Interview. Michael Eric Dyson: Of Her s and Hip-hop. The real challenge of King's heroism is to make it a useful heroism", Publishers Weekly.^Austin Considine (February 5, 2006). "Disparities revealed in Katrina's wake / Race, class central to analysis of how nation failed victims.", San Francisco Chronicle.^Staff (April 2006). "The center of the storm", Ebony.^Staff (January 16, 2006). "Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster", Publishers Weekly.^Michael Eric Dyson; Sohail Daulatzai (December 28, 2009). Born To Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic. Basic Civitas Books. pp. v''vi. ISBN 978-0-465-00211-5. Retrieved August 21, 2011. ^Dyson; Daulatzai (2009). Born To Use Mics:. p. 131. Retrieved August 21, 2011. ^Alessandro Porco (May 2009). ""Time is Illmatic": A Critical Retrospective on Nas's Groundbreaking Debut", Postmodern Culture '' Volume 19, Number 3.^Richard Prince (April 1, 2009). "Oprah to Inaugurate Michael Eric Dyson Radio Show", Maynard Institute. Richard Prince's Journal-isms'.^ abStaff. "NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work '' Nonfiction.", Harris County Public Library.^Kam Williams (2007). "38th NAACP Image Awards (2007)". AALBC. Retrieved June 20, 2015. ^American Booksellers Association (2013). "The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation [1980''2012]". BookWeb. Archived from the original on March 13, 2013. Retrieved September 25, 2013. 2007 [...] Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Basic Books) ^Lartigue, Casey, Jr. (December 25, 2005). "Black youth must think bigger". Black America Today. External links[edit]

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Sat, 27 Aug 2016 13:01

While the world reels at the sight of a five-year old pulled from a bombed building in Aleppo, Fiona Clark looks at why Russia won't give up on backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Five-year-old Omran's dust-covered and stunned face captures all that is wrong with the war in Syria - the senseless destruction of innocent lives - but unfortunately it's not enough to stop the various factions fighting there from tearing the country apart. One player in particular, Russia, will not give up its support for Syria's current regime easily.

There have been a number of theories that have been put forward explaining the reasons why Putin is fighting a war in a foreign country and they include:

- Supporting an ally,

- A battle for supremacy in the Middle East and Russia's desire not to let the US call the shots,

- Putin's desire to be seen as strong at home and abroad,

- Diverting attention away from his activities in Ukraine and Crimea,

- Fighting and possibly basking in the glory of defeating "Islamic State," (IS) and

- A dislike of popular uprisings and the belief that Syria could become fast become another Libya or Tunisia.

There may be elements of truth in all of these, but there is one overriding interests that seems to have been forgotten recently and that's gas.

So while the bombs rain down on Aleppo let's take a brief look back at what lead to Russia's intervention. Back in 2000, Qatar unveiled an ambitious plan to build a 1,500-kilometer long multi-billion dollar gas pipeline from its shores, across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.

The US liked the idea as a way of getting cheaper gas to Europe and weakening the EU's reliance on Russian gas. But in 2009 Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, said no to the project, turning his attention a year later to signing a deal with Iran to build a pipeline that would transport its gas across Iraq, Syria and under the Mediterranean Sea to Europe instead.

Some say he was pressured by Putin to turn down the deal as 80 percent of Russia's gas went to Europe and competition from that supply route would see his market share and corresponding revenue drop. The gas supplied from Iran's pipeline would also see competition increase, but Russia's cooperation in building the pipeline would have delivered other benefits that would offset the loss of market share.

Pipeline war

In any case the decision was a slap in the face to Saudi and the Gulf states, and to the US and UK who have supported Saudi Arabia since the 1940's, despite its horrific human rights violations and allegedly continuous backdoor funding of extremist groups like al Nursa, al-Qaeda and IS.

For Putin, a pro-Russian outcome in the Syrian conflict is paramount to maintaining its influence in the region

Saudi denies it funds IS as it claims they're enemies - after all God can't bless two caliphates simultaneously. But outside of Saudi, in places like Yemen and Syria, IS serves a Saudi aim by fighting against members of the Shia sect of Islam. In 2014 a former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, recounted a conversation he'd had just prior to 9/11 with a Saudi prince and then ambassador to Washington who prophesized the destruction of Shai followers. Prince Bandar bin Sultan told him: "The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally 'God help the Shia.' More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them."

High stakes

For Russia the stakes are high. At a time when oil prices are low and its economy is struggling as a result it has little choice but to push as hard as it can for a pro-Russian outcome. Failure would see a US/Saudi puppet installed, its gas sales and pipeline interests threatened, and its influence in the region radically diminished. A victory, however, would be a godsend - weakening US influence in the region and improving Russia's ability to control oil and gas supplies and ultimately prices.

Strategic partners in crime

So, it's not going to give that easily. It will continue to bomb anything and everything that is a threat to its interests to keep its preferred leader in power and the US/UK and Saudi's will continue to fund and train the very people Russia is bombing.

Estimates of the number who have died in Syria since the fighting started in 2012 vary from 155,000 to more than 400,000 while almost 11.5 million people have been displaced - 6.6 million internally and 4.8 million to neighboring countries and beyond, putting pressure on an increasingly fragile European Union.

For Russia there no other option than keeping Assad (or his appointed successor) in power. Compromise will be very hard to achieve without considerable compensation and assurances that its interests are not going to be curtailed.

Until that time comes small children will continue to be pulled from the rubble of bombed buildings and treated by the 35 doctors that remain in Aleppo - and all because of a pipeline.

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Sat, 27 Aug 2016 13:54

A Type 1 diabetes patient holds up bottles of insulin.Reuters

At this point, it's getting hard to keep track of all the stories of drug companies jacking up the prices of prescription medications to nauseating heights for little identifiable reason other than the fact that, unlike in other developed countries, the U.S. government lets them. At the moment, Congress is getting exercised over EpiPens, the fast-acting epinephrine injectors made by Mylan that are used to stop potentially deadly allergy attacks. (I carry one myself, because bees.) Mylan has upped EpiPen prices by 400 percent since it bought the decades-old device from Merck in 2007. The company says the moves are justified by ''product improvements,'' a line that presumably even they couldn't possibly believe. Sen. Chuck Grassley has some questions.

Jordan Weissmann is Slate's senior business and economics correspondent.

On Wednesday I noticed yet another disturbing story about drug prices'--one that, despite some coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere, hasn't become a national scandal quite on the order of the EpiPen or the adventures of Martin Shkreli. It turns out that the cost of insulin, which diabetics rely on to stabilize their blood sugar, has been going through the roof. A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in April found that between 2002 and 2013, insulin's cost had leapt by more than 200 percent, from $231 to $736 per patient annually.

''Insulin is a life-saving medication,'' William Herman, one of the study's authors and a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told Stat at the time. ''There are people with type 1 diabetes who will die without insulin. And while there have been incremental benefits in insulin products, prices have been rising. So there are people who can't afford them. It's a real problem.''

Drugmakers have a few go-to excuses when reporters query them about price hikes. The drugs are typically covered by insurance, so patients don't really feel the pain. They offer big discounts, so list prices don't necessarily reflect what people and companies are paying on the market, etc.

What makes the insulin story so disturbing is that it specifically affects patients who are likely to have trouble affording meds. Diabetics tend to be older'--the JAMA study found the average user was 60'--and many rely on Medicare Part D's prescription drug benefit to cover their prescriptions. Unfortunately, Part D has a coverage gap, sometimes called the ''doughnut hole,'' that can force seniors with high drug expenses to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket.

Faced with high costs, many patients seem to be skipping or rationing shots of a hormone they are required to take multiple times a day in order to stay alive, keep from going blind, or lose a foot to amputation. At least, that's what seems to be happening if you believe the front-line reports from doctors in clinical practice. Take these stories from a recent article in the Missoulian (it got a write-up at Consumerist, which is how I came across it):

Hirsch and many of his colleagues are not subtle when they describe what ''price gouging of a medication required for survival'' is doing to their patients.

''I had a patient tell me her insulin bill is suddenly costing her as much as her mortgage,'' Hirsch said.

Dr. Claresa Levetan, chief of endocrinology at Chestnut Hill Hospital, said ''just about 100 percent of them are having problems affording the higher cost of insulin.

''I see people every day in the hospital because they can't get their required doses of insulin. Many are in the ICU with what is called diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition. This lack of insulin brings the patients to a critical juncture, where they will become extraordinarily sick, go into a coma and could ultimately die.

''I have patients who tell me that they have to make a decision between food and insulin, and their rent and insulin.''I mean, seriously, food, rent or insulin,'' she said.

Why is the price of insulin, a hormone we've known about since the 1920s, spiking? There seem to be a few major reasons, all of which speak to the fundamental dysfunctions in the pharmaceutical market. Rather than compete against one another, the three major drug companies that produce insulin in the U.S.'--Sanofi, Eli Lilly, and Novo Nordisk'--seem to have raised their prices in tandem. As Bloomberg explains, this follow-the-leader approach is called ''shadow pricing,'' and it's fairly common in pharma. At the same time, there is no generic insulin on the U.S. market, in part because the branded makers have found ways to extend their patents by making small improvements to the product. There may be more competition on the horizon, as Eli Lilly is expected to start selling a biosimilar version of Sanofi's Lantus. But experts only expect that to shave 20 or 30 percent off the cost. Pharmacy benefit managers, which handle prescriptions and negotiate with drugmakers on behalf of insurers, are another likely culprit. These companies often receive commissionlike ''rebates'' from drug producers that may be encouraging them to buy more expensive products for their clients, as Kasia Lipska noted in the New York Times in February.

As always, though, the overriding issue is that unlike most developed nations, the U.S. government doesn't cap what drugmakers can charge. Instead, we have a semifree market that lets essentially monopolistic drugmakers set prices for essential drugs, with the frequently misplaced assumption that generic competition will lower costs somewhere down the line. In the case of insulin, we're starting to see the human casualties the system leaves behind.

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Sat, 27 Aug 2016 14:16

Theresa May will not hold a parliamentary vote on Brexit before opening negotiations to formally trigger Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, The Telegraph has learned.

Opponents of Brexit claim that because the EU referendum result is advisory it must be approved by a vote in the Commons before Article 50 - the formal mechanism to leave the EU - is triggered.

However, in a move which will cheer Eurosceptics, The Telegraph has learned that Mrs May will invoke Article 50 without a vote in Parliament

It had been suggested - by Tony Blair, the former Labour Prime Minister, and Owen Smith, the Labour leadership candidate, among others - that Remain-supporting MPs could use a Parliamentary vote to stop Brexit.

But sources say that because Mrs May believes that ''Brexit means Brexit'' she will not offer opponents the opportunity to stall Britain's withdrawal from the EU.

A Downing Street source said: ''The Prime Minister has been absolutely clear that the British public have voted and now she will get on with delivering Brexit.''

Mrs May has consulted Government lawyers who have told the Prime Minister she has the executive power to invoke Article 50 and begin the formal process of exiting the European Union without a vote in Parliament.

Her decision will come as a blow to Remain campaigners, who had been hoping to use Parliament to delay or halt Brexit entirely.

The majority of MPs in the Commons, a total of around 480, campaigned for Britain to stay in the European Union at the last election.

The House of Lords is also overwhelmingly in favour of Britain staying in the EU, meaning that obtaining formal parliamentary approval for Brexit could take years.

Mr Smith last week set out plans to block Article 50 in Parliament. He said: ''Under my leadership, Labour won't give the Tories a blank cheque.

''We will vote in Parliament to block any attempt to invoke Article 50 until Theresa May commits to a second referendum or a general election on whatever the EU exit deal emerges at the end of the process. I hope Jeremy will support me in such a move."

Mr Blair made a similar suggestion earlier this year as he suggested that Britain should be open to the idea of holding a second referendum.

He said: ''If, as we start to see the details emerge of what this new world we are going into looks like, what are the practical effects, then parliament has got a role. The country should carry on being engaged in this debate, it should carry on expressing its view.''

A group of lawyers has mounted a legal challenge in a bid to force Mrs May to hold a parliamentary vote.

The case, which will be heard in the High Court in October, argues that Article 50 cannot be invoked until the European Communities Act of 1972 is repealed.

However Government lawyers are confident that they will win, paving the way for Article 50 to be triggered at the beginning of next year, which could see Britain leave the European Union in 2019.

Bill Cash, a eurosceptic Conservative MP and leading Brexit campaigner, said: ''It sounds emphatic and that's what we want to hear.

''There were people who are threatening to try and stop Brexit. The bottom line is that here is nothing that could possibly be allowed to stand in its way. Everyone in Europe is expecting it, the decision has been taken by the British people and that's it. Let's get on with it.''

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Work and Pensions Secretary, has said that the Government needs to ''get on'' with triggering Article 50 amid signs of increasing splits among Conservative MPs.

He said: "I have spoken to them and I am definitely certain that these characters - David Davis, Liam Fox, and Boris Johnson, and the Prime Minister by the way - are very clear that they need to get on with triggering Article 50 as soon as possible early in the new year.

"When they do that, we will be bound on a course that means Britain will leave and I believe they are all very positive about the outcome that will entail. We will be out and we will do incredibly well."

However Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, has suggested that Mrs May could be ''tempted'' to hold an early election to increase the Conservative's majority and capitalise on Labour's turmoil. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has said that he will respect he result of the EU referndum.

If we see no notification by late spring then we will have a very big problemTomas Prouza

It came as a senior Czech official warned Britain that unless it triggers Article 50 soon "the goodwill that still exists will start to disappear."

Tomas Prouza, the Czech secretary of state for EU affairs, issued the warning following a meeting of leaders from the Visegrad Four'--Poland, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics'--and Angela Merkel in Warsaw on Friday.

''People are willing now to negotiate in good faith, but part of that good faith is based upon the UK notifying us of its intention to leave reasonably quickly, and if it comes up with a proposal reasonably quickly'' he told The Telegraph, following the meeting at which when the UK would trigger Article 50 was discussed.

''If we see no notification by late spring then we will have a very big problem and then the mood and the priority will shift to the 27 trying to come to special arrangements without the UK,'' he added.

Follow Telegraph News

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:51

Adel Daoud's belief that fantastical lizards, Freemasons, and assorted shadowy figures were out to kill him indicated he was not fit for trial, a judge has ruled.

CHICAGO '-- A suburban Chicago terrorism suspect charged with attempting to bomb a downtown bar sincerely believes that fantastical lizards, Freemasons, and assorted other shadowy figures are out to get him, so he is mentally unfit to stand trial, a judge concluded Thursday in a rare federal ruling.

Among the plots that 22-year-old Adel Daoud has broached in court was that the judge was herself ''a reptilian overlord'' and that his own attorneys were in cahoots with the Illuminati, Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman said in explaining her decision at a hearing in US District Court in Chicago.

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Coleman said Daoud's mental state has deteriorated since previous exams found him competent, saying ''his belief in the Illuminati, Freemasons, and lizard people is sincere and escalating.'' She pointed to Daoud witnessing a cellmate's suicide this year and his four years behind bars '-- often in isolation '-- as possible explanations.

Out of almost 500 terrorism-related cases tracked by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in New York, director Karen Greenberg said this was among just a few where judges declared a terrorism suspect mentally unfit. Terrorism-case lawyers elsewhere are likely to cite it as they seek similar rulings, she said.

Agents arrested Daoud, then 18-years-old, as part of a 2012 FBI sting after he allegedly placed what he believed to be an explosive device by a downtown Chicago bar. While in jail, he was charged with soliciting the murder of an undercover agent and attacking an inmate who allegedly taunted him with a Prophet Muhammad drawing.

Daoud, of Hillside, Ill., will be placed in a psychiatric facility for at least three months, although his trial set for Feb. 7 could still proceed if his mental state improves, Coleman said. The legal standard isn't whether he suffers mental illness, she said, but whether he is rational enough to understand proceedings and work with his legal team.

If Daoud's mental health does not improve, he could potentially be committed to an institution for years or even decades as he is treated. If convicted at trial, he would face a maximum life sentence on the terrorism charges alone.

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Daoud has appeared jovial, never angry, as he has spoken at hearings about assorted plots, including that Judge Coleman planned to hire Freemasons as jurors to hear his case. He has also asserted that the end-goal for federal authorities was to kill him, saying: ''They're going to take me downstairs and they're going to cut my head off.''

His legal team pushed for the finding that he is mentally unfit, though Daoud himself had told the judge he felt he was mentally fit. Daoud has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

At a two-day competency hearing last week, one doctor who examined Daoud supported prosecutors' contention that he was neither delusional nor paranoid, telling the court his off-beat behavior may be at least partly calculated.

Defense lawyer Thomas Durkin had told Coleman that it would be impossible for him to defend a client at trial who believes his attorneys are in league with the Illuminati, which conspiracy theorists contend is a secret society bent on controlling the world. Durkin has argued for years that federal stings tend to snare psychologically vulnerable youth, not committed would-be terrorists.

''Unquestionably, this supports that contention,'' he said about Coleman's finding Thursday.

A spokesman for the US attorney's office in Chicago declined any comment on the ruling.

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Sat, 27 Aug 2016 13:12

"Welcome to You.'' So says the genetic test kit that 23andMe will send to your home. Pay $199, spit in a tube, and several weeks later you'll get a peek into your DNA. Have you got the gene for blond hair? Which of 36 disease risks could you pass to a child?

See the Rest of the PackageRun by entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki, the ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, and until last year housed alongside the Googleplex, the company created a test that has been attacked by regulators and embraced by a curious public. It remains, nine years after its introduction, the only one of its kind sold directly to consumers. 23andMe has managed to amass a collection of DNA information about 1.2 million people, which last year began to prove its value when the company revealed it had sold access to the data to more than 13 drug companies. One, Genentech, anted up $10 million for a look at the genes of people with Parkinson's disease.

HOW IT WORKSPeople who sign up for 23andMe submit a spit sample. The DNA in stray cheek skin cells is analyzed for some 650,000 genetic markers. These markers reveal which common version of each human gene a person has, about 20,000 genes in all. Such "genotypes" may explain many physical traits and disease risks, although not all.WHAT YOU WILL LEARNInherited Disease RiskThirty-six genes that put your children at risk for inherited disease, including:-Niemann-Pick disease-Cystic fibrosis-Tay Sachs disease-Usher syndromeSickle-cell anemia-Bloom syndromeTraitsTwenty-two genes that explain your appearance or characteristics, including:-Cheek dimples-Cleft chin-Unibrow-Earlobe type-Widow's peak-Asparagus-odor detection-Bald spot-Bitter-taste perceptionWellnessSix genes that reveal differences related to food, exercise, and sleep, including:-Sensitivity to alcohol-Preference for caffeine-Lactose intolerance-Muscle compositionAncestryThe overall composition of your genes reveals a person's ancestry, including:-Countries of origin-Relatives who share DNA-Percentage of Neanderthal genesBanned in U.S.The U.S. still bars certain genetic findings from being provided directly to consumers, including:-BRCA breast cancer gene-Blood-thinner sensitivity-Risk of Alzheimer's disease-Risk of Parkinson's disease-Response to hepatitis C treatmentThat means 23andMe is monetizing DNA rather the way Facebook makes money from our ''likes.'' What's more, it gets its customers to pay for the privilege. That idea so appeals to investors that they have valued the still-unprofitable company at over $1 billion. ''Money follows data,'' says Barbara Evans, a legal scholar at the University of Houston, who studies personal genetics. ''It takes a lot of labor and capital to get that information in a form that is useful.''

The company almost didn't survive to build its database. In 2013, the U.S. government forced 23andMe's flagship health test off the market when it charged, in one of the angriest letters the Food and Drug Administration has ever sent to a private company, that the company's gene predictions were inaccurate and dangerous for those who might not fully understand the results.

Wojcicki apologized and continued offering more limited ancestry tests. But she never really changed her idea. By last fall, the government agreed to allow some health information back on the market'--for example, letting customers know whether they're carriers of risk genes like the one that causes cystic fibrosis. Wojcicki has vowed she ''will not sleep'' until the full results (which once included estimates of a person's risk for diabetes, macular degeneration, and breast cancer) are available again.

To some, 23andMe's strategy is controversial for the way it treats personal data as a commodity. But ''prescient'' may be a better word. Even the U.S. government is catching up. President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative will begin inviting citizens to join its own one--million-strong database this year. And just like 23andMe, it must find ways to entice the public to join.

For now, though, 23andMe's biobank is the world's largest repository of DNA samples that also contains extensive health information, willingly provided by customers who answer survey questions like ''Do you like cilantro?'' and ''Have you ever had cancer?'' 23andMe says its customers supply it with as many as two million new facts each week. These surveys are proving valuable to drug investigators. This year the company found genetic variations strongly linked to whether customers consider themselves early risers, offering a clue about how to develop drugs that modulate alertness.

When it receives a spit sample, 23andMe examines about 650,000 locations in its customer's genomes. That's not as detailed (or expensive) as generating a complete, letter-by-letter genome map. Yet the technology captures the big picture of which genes a person has. It allows 23andMe to tell you, for instance, that your eyes are probably blue rather than brown.

To gain the volume of information necessary to study specific diseases, 23andMe has recruited patients by giving the test away for free. One person who joined the database is Amy Caron, who was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disorder, at age 22. Caron agreed to submit her DNA as part of a study of lupus financed by Pfizer. Very little is known about the disease, and filling out surveys ''is a safe, low-risk way to get involved and contribute,'' she says.

This spring 23andMe also opened a drug lab, where it will begin testing some of its own treatment ideas. It's the first time the company has done work at a lab bench rather than a computer screen, says Joyce Tung, the company's vice president of research. To some observers, finding drugs is the only way 23andMe can justify the value investors have given it, since the company has never turned a profit from its tests.

Another reason 23andMe can't stand still is that genetic technology keeps advancing, and it keeps getting cheaper. That means lots of companies are offering low-priced gene tests. One even promises to fully decode a person's genome for $1,000. Yet unlike 23andMe's test, these must be ordered by a doctor, in order to avoid regulations covering direct-to-consumer medicine.

Wojcicki still believes the public is able to deal with the sort of complex information that can be gleaned from DNA ''without a middleman in a white coat delivering it,'' as she recently told the Wall Street Journal. Instead, it's 23andMe that's in the middle.

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Archived Version

Sun, 28 Aug 2016 15:08

Your browser does not support the video tag. Since January, police have been testing an aerial surveillance system adapted from the surge in Iraq. And they neglected to tell the public.

By Monte Reel | August 23, 2016

Photographs by Philip Montgomery

From

The sky over the Circuit Court for Baltimore City on June 23 was the color of a dull nickel, and a broad deck of lowering clouds threatened rain. A couple dozen people with signs'--''Justice 4 Freddie Gray'' and ''The whole damn system is guilty as hell'''--lingered by the corner of the courthouse, watching the network TV crews rehearse their standups. Sheriff's officers in bulletproof vests clustered around the building's doors, gripping clubs with both hands.

Inside, a judge was delivering the verdict in the case of Caesar Goodson, the only Baltimore police officer facing a murder charge for the death of Freddie Gray. In April 2015, Gray's neck was broken in the back of a police van, and prosecutors had argued that Goodson purposefully drove the vehicle recklessly, careening through the city, to toss Gray around.

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Aug. 29-Sept. 4, 2016. Subscribe now.Photograph by Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

The verdict trickled out of the courthouse in text messages: not guilty, all counts. Ralph Pritchett Sr., who's spent each of his 52 years in Baltimore, stood on the sidewalk among the protesters. He chewed on a toothpick and shook his head slowly. In a city with more than 700 street-level police cameras, he wondered, shouldn't the authorities have had video of Gray's ride?

''This whole city is under a siege of cameras,'' said Pritchett, a house painter who helps run a youth center in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood called Johnston Square. ''In fact, they observed Freddie Gray himself the morning of his arrest on those cameras, before they picked him up. They could have watched that van, too, but no'--they missed that one. I thought the cameras were supposed to protect us. But I'm thinking they're there to just contradict anything that might be used against the City of Baltimore. Do they use them for justice? Evidently not.''

Pritchett had no idea that as he spoke, a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane's wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.

Since the beginning of the year, the Baltimore Police Department had been using the plane to investigate all sorts of crimes, from property thefts to shootings. The Cessna sometimes flew above the city for as many as 10 hours a day, and the public had no idea it was there.

A company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, based in Dayton, Ohio, provided the service to the police, and the funding came from a private donor. No public disclosure of the program had ever been made.

Outside the courthouse, several of the protesters began marching around the building, chanting for justice. The plane continued to circle overhead, unseen.

McNutt at Persistent Surveillance's office in Baltimore.Photographer: Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

A half block from the city's central police station, in a spare office suite above a parking garage, Ross McNutt, the founder of Persistent Surveillance Systems, monitored the city's reaction to the Goodson verdict by staring at a bank of computer monitors. ''It's pretty quiet out there,'' he said. The riots that convulsed the city after Gray was killed wouldn't be repeated. ''A few protesters on the corner, and not much else. The police want us to keep flying, but the clouds are getting in the way.''

McNutt said something about not being able to control the weather, pretending to shrug it off, but he was frustrated. He wanted to please the cops. Since this discreet arrangement began in January, it had felt like a make-or-break opportunity for McNutt. His company had been trying for years to snag a long-term contract with an American metropolitan police department. Baltimore seemed like his best shot to date, one that could lead to more work. He's told police departments that his system might help them reduce crime by as much as 20 percent in their cities, and he was hoping this Baltimore job would allow him to back up the claim. ''I don't have good statistical data yet, but that's part of the reason we're here,'' he said. McNutt believes the technology would be most effective if used in a transparent, publicly acknowledged manner; part of the system's effectiveness, he said, rests in its potential to deter criminal activity.

McNutt is an Air Force Academy graduate, physicist, and MIT-trained astronautical engineer who in 2004 founded the Air Force's Center for Rapid Product Development. The Pentagon asked him if he could develop something to figure out who was planting the roadside bombs that were killing and maiming American soldiers in Iraq. In 2006 he gave the military Angel Fire, a wide-area, live-feed surveillance system that could cast an unblinking eye on an entire city.

The system was built around an assembly of four to six commercially available industrial imaging cameras, synchronized and positioned at different angles, then attached to the bottom of a plane. As the plane flew, computers stabilized the images from the cameras, stitched them together and transmitted them to the ground at a rate of one per second. This produced a searchable, constantly updating photographic map that was stored on hard drives. His elevator pitch was irresistible: ''Imagine Google Earth with TiVo capability.''

Persistent Surveillance's Cessna.Photographer: Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

The images weren't perfect. Analysts on the ground could see individual cars moving through the streets, but they couldn't tell what make or model they might be. Pedestrians were just pixelated dots; you couldn't distinguish a man from a woman, or an Iraqi civilian from an American soldier. Individual recognition, however, wasn't the point; any dot could be followed backward or forward in time, which opened up all sorts of investigative possibilities.

If a roadside bomb exploded while the camera was in the air, analysts could zoom in to the exact location of the explosion and rewind to the moment of detonation. Keeping their eyes on that spot, they could further rewind the footage to see a vehicle, for example, that had stopped at that location to plant the bomb. Then they could backtrack to see where the vehicle had come from, marking all of the addresses it had visited. They also could fast-forward to see where the driver went after planting the bomb'--perhaps a residence, or a rebel hideout, or a stash house of explosives. More than merely identifying an enemy, the technology could identify an enemy network.

McNutt demonstrated the prototype to a group of Marines at a California base in 2006. ''They called up their general,'' McNutt recalls, ''and when he saw it, he said, 'I need this, and I need it right now'--in Fallujah.''‰''

Eventually another military unit took control of the project and completed the development of Angel Fire at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In 2007 the technology was deployed to Iraq. Angel Fire was eventually upgraded with all-weather and nighttime capabilities and then used as the basis for another system, called Blue Devil, which coupled wide-area cameras with narrow-focus zoom lenses in the same package.

McNutt retired from the military in 2007 and modified the technology for commercial development, increasing the number of cameras in the assembly to 12 and making the apparatus lighter and cheaper. He began attending security trade shows to fish for clients. His first real customer approached him at a security expo in Miami. His name was Jos(C) Reyes Ferriz, and he was the mayor of Ciudad Jurez, in northern Mexico. In 2009 a war between the Sinaloa and Jurez drug cartels had turned his border town into the most deadly city on earth.

Reyes Ferriz offered enough money for a couple months' worth of surveillance, and McNutt, who's married with four children, left Ohio to temporarily set up shop at the border. Within the first hour of operations, his cameras witnessed two murders. ''A 9-millimeter casing was all the evidence they'd had,'' McNutt says. By tracking the assailants' vehicles, McNutt's small team of analysts helped police identify the headquarters of a cartel kill squad and pinpoint a separate cartel building where the murderers got paid for the hit.

The technology led to dozens of arrests and confessions, McNutt says, but within a few months the city ran out of money to continue paying for the service. Reyes Ferriz left office to mount an unsuccessful campaign for state governor.

For the next couple of years, Persistent Surveillance survived by providing services such as traffic-flow analysis for municipal planners, wildlife monitoring and border surveillance for federal agencies, and security monitoring for single events ranging from the Brickyard 400 Nascar race to Ohio State University football games. The company also did short-term projects in six countries, including in Central America and Africa, but the nature of that work is confidential, protected by nondisclosure agreements. The combination of those projects earned Persistent Surveillance about $3 million to $4 million a year in revenue, according to McNutt.

A single, long-term contract with an American police department would be worth about $2 million a year, he says. By 2012, McNutt was approaching the police departments of the 20 most crime-ridden jurisdictions in the country, marketing his services. He floated several of them an offer: Let us fly over your city to show you what we can do, and then you can decide if you want to hire us.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department quietly took him up on the offer, allowing him to conduct a nine-day trial run over Compton, a largely minority city south of L.A., in 2012. According to Patrick Bearse, operations lieutenant for the Aero Bureau of the sheriff's department, the county recognized the potential of Persistent Surveillance's service, but it didn't sign a contract with the company because the technology, particularly the quality of the images, didn't meet the department's expectations. The city's residents didn't find out about the flights until a year later. Angry protesters demanded a new ''citizen privacy protection policy'' from local leaders, but even those leaders'--from the mayor on down'--hadn't been told about the test program. ''There is nothing worse than believing you are being observed by a third party unnecessarily,'' Compton Mayor Aja Brown told the Los Angeles Times.

The next city to try McNutt's technology was his home base of Dayton. After the L.A. County trial, he improved the system by more than doubling the resolution, to 192 megapixels, increased the archive's storage capacity, and sped up the image processing to allow analysts to conduct multiple investigations simultaneously. The Dayton police department and the city council were sold on it, and they aired the idea for a contract at a series of public hearings. Joel Pruce, who teaches human rights studies at the University of Dayton, helped organize the opposition. To the objecting residents, it seemed as if it hadn't occurred to city leaders that the surveillance program might be interpreted as a violation of some vital, unspoken trust. ''At the hearings, nobody spoke in favor of it except for the people working for the city,'' Pruce recalls. ''The black community, in particular, said, 'We've seen this type of thing before. This will target us, and you didn't even come to us beforehand to see how we'd feel about it.''‰'' Dayton's city leaders dropped their attempts to hire the company after those hearings.

Last year the public radio program Radiolab featured Persistent Surveillance in a segment about the tricky balance between security and privacy. Shortly after that, McNutt got an e-mail on behalf of Texas-based philanthropists Laura and John Arnold. John is a former Enron trader whose hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, made billions before he retired in 2012. Since then, the Arnolds have funded a variety of hot-button causes, including advocating for public pension rollbacks and charter schools. The Arnolds told McNutt that if he could find a city that would allow the company to fly for several months, they would donate the money to keep the plane in the air. McNutt had met the lieutenant in charge of Baltimore's ground-based camera system on the trade-show circuit, and they'd become friendly. ''We settled in on Baltimore because it was ready, it was willing, and it was just post-Freddie Gray,'' McNutt says. The Arnolds donated the money to the Baltimore Community Foundation, a nonprofit that administers donations to a wide range of local civic causes.

In January, McNutt opened the office above the parking garage. The only sign greeting visitors is a piece of copy paper taped to the door that reads ''Community Support Program.''

Almost everything about the surveillance program feels hush-hush; the city hasn't yet acknowledged its existence, and the police department declined requests for interviews about the program. On Aug. 10 the U.S. Department of Justice released a 163-page report that detailed systemic abuses within the Baltimore Police Department, including unlawful stops and the use of excessive force, that disproportionately targeted poor and minority communities and led to ''unnecessary, adversarial interactions with community members.'' Within a week, civil rights groups filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission claiming that the department's warrantless use of cell phone tower simulators known by the trade name StingRay'--an activity the police acknowledged last year in court'--violated federal law and targeted minorities. ''The problem of radicalized surveillance is particularly pronounced in Baltimore,'' the complaint stated. The city was already on the defensive, even as the aerial surveillance program was shielded from the public eye.

Analysts in the Baltimore office.Photographer: Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

Around 11 o'clock each morning, a printout is delivered to the Persistent Surveillance office listing all the crimes logged the previous day by Baltimore's computer-aided dispatch'--or CAD'--system. The company has hired a former Baltimore cop to act as a liaison between the company and the police force, and he scans the list for cases Persistent Surveillance's analysts might help solve, highlighting them with an orange marker.

On a Friday in late June, not long after the Goodson decision, six analysts sat at separate workstations inside the office suite. The analysts ranged from their early 20s to their late 50s. McNutt brought four full-timers with him from Dayton, and he's hired several more from a local temp agency, paying $10 to $15 per hour for entry-level trainees.

Terrence Rice, a 25-year-old from Baltimore County, was one of the local hires. It was his third day on the job, and he was still getting the hang of the software. For practice, he worked on a weeks-old case involving the illegal dumping of wood. He stared at an aerial image on the twin large-screen monitors on his desk. He struggled to track a pickup as it proceeded north, squinting to differentiate between the target vehicle and others it passed on a busy roadway. He kept his cursor over the truck as it advanced frame-by-frame. ''It reminds me of playing a video game,'' he said, his eyes rarely leaving the screen, his back bent as he leaned in close. ''And that's what they told me over the phone. They said that if I was into video games, I might like this work.''

The highlights of the previous day's CAD list included 13 burglaries and 11 hit-and-runs, and all of the analysts were reviewing archived images instead of tracking the live feed. They were prepared to instantly drop their individual investigations and collaborate, however, if the police called with a report of a high-profile crime, like a homicide or violent assault.

Aerial view of Baltimore from Persistent Surveillance's Cessna.Photographer: Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

One afternoon in February, every analyst in the office had pitched in when the police responded to the shooting of a 90-year-old woman and her 82-year-old brother, who'd been hit while walking in front of a bus stop on Clifton Avenue in the Western District. In a city where gun violence had lost much of its power to shock, the crime struck a local nerve. TV crews descended on the scene, sensing a big story.

McNutt's analysts called up the aerial images and began tracking vehicles leaving a busy shopping center across the street from the bus stop, where witnesses had placed the shooter. For about two hours, they mapped the routes of several cars leaving the parking lot, until a detective informed McNutt that the shooter probably had left the area on foot. Rewinding to the moment of the shooting, they quickly pinpointed a person who appeared to scramble away from the scene just after the gunshots.

He was little more than a faint, grainy dot with no identifying characteristics. After he crossed the parking lot, he walked past a Subway sandwich shop and proceeded down a hill behind the shopping center. He cut a corner to cross a vacant lot and ducked between two houses on a quiet residential street. Then he approached what seemed to be a stationary object sitting in the backyard of one of the houses. The analysts toggled their screens to pull up Google Earth's Street View, and the image'--taken months earlier'--revealed that the object in the backyard was a car, abandoned on the grass. The suspect stopped briefly at the car before walking a few doors down and into a house.

While he was inside, a vehicle pulled up to the front of the house; a person exited the house, got in the car, and traveled about three miles to Bons Secours Hospital. The analysts tracked him into the emergency room entrance.

Because the analysts had lost so much time while tracking the cars leaving the parking lot, all of the movements they were watching were a few hours old. When the police went to the emergency room, the hospital wouldn't release any patient information. With no identifying information at hand, the trail seemed cold.

It wasn't. The police later that day determined that the house the suspect may have entered before he went to the hospital belonged to the girlfriend of Carl Anthony Cooper, a man with a long criminal record. Additionally, they discovered that when the suspect walked away from the shopping center, he'd passed in front of a ground-based security camera. Accessing that footage and reviewing Cooper's mug shots on file, they found a possible match. The police couldn't immediately figure out why he went to the hospital; some speculated that his gun might have accidentally gone off when he tucked it into his pants and the bullet grazed his leg.

Two days after the shooting, the Baltimore Police Department posted an archived picture of Cooper on its Facebook page, labeling him the city's ''Public Enemy #1.'' It also posted the footage captured by the ground-based security camera, which showed him calmly carrying what appeared to be a bag of food in one hand and his cell phone in the other.

The footage baffled Facebook users, who couldn't figure out how it implicated Cooper. In the comments section, one wrote that if the man on camera really was the shooter, he surely would have dropped his food and run. Another commenter typed: ''Not saying this isn't the suspect but what is being seen that we, the public, isn't seeing???'' Finally someone posted, ''Can a detective chime in and let us know what additional information leads you to believe that he is the suspect?''

No one from the department responded. But Cooper was eventually apprehended by federal marshals in North Carolina and sent to Baltimore, where he remains in custody. The police held a press conference to announce Cooper's capture, saying he'd face charges for the shootings, including attempted murder and assault. Nothing was said about the surveillance plane.

Detail from an analyst's screen.Photographer: Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

Even six months after the flights began, some Baltimore police officers still didn't know exactly how the surveillance program worked. But word was spreading.

One morning in June, three plainclothes officers showed up to see McNutt. They were members of a special unit charged with investigating dirt bike crews'--groups of primarily young men who recklessly drive illegal off-road motorcycles through the city. In Baltimore the crews are infamous for aggressively disrupting traffic, ignoring stoplights, and occasionally injuring and killing bystanders. Should a car accidentally collide with group members, other riders have been known to assault the driver before speeding away. City policy prevents police from chasing the bikers, because high-speed pursuits are deemed too risky.

The officers wanted to learn more about the surveillance system, and McNutt led them to a conference room to give them a demonstration. Using two large projection screens, he delivered the sales pitch he'd honed for trade shows. He called up old images from a murder in Jurez and walked the detectives through the tracking process that had led him to a cartel safe house. The spiel lasted about 20 minutes. When it was over, the sergeant in charge of the unit sat in silence for a moment, his arms crossed on his chest.

''I'm sorry,'' he said. ''But oh my God'--this is just overwhelming right here. This is amazing.''

One of the other officers slapped the tabletop. ''Let's go get some dirt bikes, Sarge!''

The sergeant said he expected the dirt bikes to be out in force that Sunday, and some might be entering the city from out of town on Saturday. When one of the officers asked if the plane might be flying that weekend over the west side of the city, where police suspected several of the bikes would be stored, McNutt said he would make sure of it.

That Saturday morning, the Cessna rolled out of a hangar at the Martin State Airport, about 10 miles east of downtown Baltimore. The plane was scheduled to make two flights of about five hours each, with a break to refuel. The pilot for the first flight was a man who declined to identify himself but said he was a local firefighter who'd flown for the U.S. Army. David Trexler, Persistent Surveillance's director for operations, rode along in the back of the plane in case there were glitches with the cameras' data link to the analysts. Trexler met McNutt when both were in the Air Force, and he'd worked on Angel Fire in Iraq.

Trexler aboard the plane.Photographer: Philip Montgomery for Bloomberg Businessweek

The plane took off, and as it rose over the buildings of East Baltimore, the cockpit was noisy. The camera array was bolted onto the floor rails where seats normally would be, and it hung out of a broad opening in the fuselage, where the wind rushed through.

The Cessna leveled out at 8,500 feet, an altitudinal sweet spot between the planes approaching for landing at BWI Airport and those flying higher en route to the Washington airports. Occasionally, the Cessna has had to share airspace with an FBI airplane. Last year, two days after the Freddie Gray riots began, the FBI flew over Baltimore for five days'--actions that were discovered when local aviation enthusiasts noticed a plane's strange flight orbits on a public website that tracks radar data. According to information and footage released this summer by the FBI, its plane wasn't doing the sort of wide-area motion imaging that Persistent Surveillance does but instead was zooming in on specific targets. McNutt says the FBI doesn't coordinate its flights with him, and he doesn't know what the agency is investigating; however, when his plane is in the air at the same time as the FBI's, air traffic controllers insist that McNutt's plane remain at a lower altitude than the federal craft.

From 8,500 feet, some of the landmarks below were easy to pick out. Pimlico Race Course to the north. The bold diagonal line of Pennsylvania Avenue. Paddleboats dotting the Inner Harbor close to the shore and sailboats scattered farther out. The just-detectable baseball players taking the field at Camden Yards. The Orioles were playing a doubleheader against the Tampa Bay Rays that afternoon; Trexler commented that the police were concerned Black Lives Matter demonstrators might try to disrupt the games. (Those concerns proved to be unfounded.)

Trexler was able to look at the cameras' integrated aerial image on the computer on the plane, and he could chat with the analysts on the ground via instant message. About two hours into the flight, while he and the pilot were trading war stories about their respective tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, a message popped up. ''Here we go,'' Trexler said. The police had called in a shooting on the west side. ''They're probably following a bad guy through the city right now,'' he guessed.

The analysts were, in fact, tracking a black SUV that had left the crime scene, and they saw that it had passed in front of three different ground-based police cameras. Those images gave them a clear picture of the suspect's vehicle. Eventually, however, the vehicle drove beyond the range of the plane's cameras, out of the city. They lost its trail.

Minutes later, Trexler announced, ''Looks like we've got a new priority!'' An off-duty Baltimore police detective had collided with a dirt bike rider in West Baltimore. When the detective got out of her unmarked car, other riders assaulted her. The crew probably had no idea that the officer was Dawnyell Taylor, the lead homicide detective in the case of Gray.

It was exactly the sort of crime McNutt and the analysts on the ground had been primed to follow. They tracked the motorcycle involved in the accident and followed it for an hour and a half. It passed several ground-based cameras, and the police got good images of the rider and the passenger sitting behind him. Police eventually found the motorcycle, confiscated it, and arrested the man they found sitting on it.

McNutt prides himself on being a student of efficiencies. In the airport residence hotel where he's been living since January, he keeps a closet of cargo pants and identical black polos'--a uniform that saves him the trouble of choosing what to wear each day. His goatee is a recent experiment to see if he can cut grooming time by limiting the surface area he shaves (results are pending; tending to the edge work, he's discovered, takes time). And in 2014, when he was strategizing how he might best silence the sort of criticism he'd attracted in Compton and Dayton, McNutt attempted to save time and trouble by directly approaching the ACLU, the organization he figured would be most likely to challenge his system on privacy grounds.

He visited the ACLU's headquarters in Washington, and in the office of Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst and privacy expert, McNutt explained why his cameras weren't a threat. The aerial images couldn't identify specific people, because the target resolution would be limited to one pixel per person. The analysts zoomed in on specific areas only in response to specific crimes reported to the police. To further ensure that his employees weren't spying on random people or addresses, everything they did was logged and saved'--every keystroke and every address they zoomed in to for a closer look. Vehicles would be tracked only over public roads in areas where people have no expectation of privacy.

McNutt cited a couple of U.S. Supreme Court cases to show Persistent Surveillance wasn't in the business of wanton intrusion. In 1986 a case from California hinged on whether police had the right to fly over a man's property to see inside a fence in his backyard and then bust him for growing marijuana. The court backed the police, saying that ''any member of the public flying in this airspace who glanced down could have seen everything that these officers observed.'' Three years later, the court similarly upheld the arrest of a man busted for growing marijuana in a greenhouse after police in a helicopter spotted the plants through the roof, which was missing two panels.

Stanley heard McNutt out and thanked him for taking the initiative to seek the ACLU's feedback. But McNutt's presentation shocked him to the core. As he listened to his visitor describe the type of surveillance the company was capable of doing, Stanley felt as if he were witnessing America's privacy-vs.-security debate move into uncharted territory.

''My reaction was 'OK, this is it,''‰'' Stanley recalls. ''I said to myself, 'This is where the rubber hits the road. The technology has finally arrived, and Big Brother, which everyone has always talked about, is finally here.''‰''

The meeting took place before McNutt's work with Baltimore was arranged, and Stanley knew other companies were beginning to work in the same general field. For example, the creators of Constant Hawk, a system that had competed for military adoption with McNutt's Angel Fire, started a company called Logos Technologies, which provides wide-area motion cameras to organizations that can mount them to aircraft and analyze the images. (''We sell the diamond, and someone else has to mount it in the ring,'' company spokesman Erik Schechter says.) This year, Logos landed its first nonmilitary contract, partnering with a Brazilian company called Altave to provide aerial monitoring of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, via blimplike aerostats floating above the city. As the sector continues to mature, Stanley predicts that more companies will enter the marketplace, and each will try to one-up the other to please law enforcement agencies, creating more flexible'--and more intrusive'--camera and tracking systems. The Supreme Court decisions that McNutt cited, he says, might not apply. The previous court rulings didn't take into consideration the constancy of these systems: It's true that anyone might be able to see into someone's fenced-in backyard from a passing plane, but was it reasonable to argue that anyone could follow a person's movements across a city for hours at a time? To Stanley, these are open questions.

One afternoon in June, McNutt watched his analysts dig through archived images of traffic accidents. ''I'm tired of these little hit-and-runs,'' he said. ''Let's have some shootings!'' If it sounded crass, it wasn't intentional; he meant the statement as a declaration of confidence in his system's ability to solve the worst crimes, the ones that most gravely endanger public safety. He's convinced his system can be used to examine police behavior, too, in an objective, dispassionate, and nondiscriminatory way.

McNutt often says that when he stares into the computer monitors, the dots moving along the sidewalks and streets are mere pixels to him. Nothing more. If anyone else wants to project identifying features onto them'--sex, race, whatever'--that's their doing, not his. Even as the technology advances and the camera lenses continue to get more powerful, he says, his company will choose to widen its viewing area beyond the current 30 square miles rather than sharpen the image resolution. He's exasperated when his system is criticized not for what it does, but for its potential. Yet for critics like Stanley, the two can't be separated. When told that Persistent Surveillance Systems had been operating over a major city for months, Stanley predicts, ''I would expect fierce controversy over this.''

McNutt says he's sure his system can withstand a public unveiling and that the more people know about what his cameras can'--and can't'--do, the fewer worries they'll have. But the police ultimately decide who and what should be tracked. In a city that's struggled to convince residents that its police can be trusted, the arguments are now Baltimore's to make.

(Corrects the year McNutt met with Stanley in the 54th paragraph.)

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Sat, 27 Aug 2016 16:06

$2.5 Million Commitment Will Increase HIV/AIDS Testing and Treatment Capacity in Ukraine.

The Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) announced a new partnership with the Olena Franchuck ANTIAIDS Foundation and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. The two Foundations have committed a total of $2.5 million dollars to support CHAI's HIV/AIDS work in Ukraine over the five-year period of 2006 through 2010.

''I'm happy to be working with the the Olena Franchuck ANTIAIDS Foundation and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation on expanding access to HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment services in Ukraine,'' said President Clinton. ''Through their generous support, we will be able to greatly increase the number of people with access to these services, and I am grateful for the partnership.''

UNAIDS estimates that 410,000 Ukrainians are living with HIV/AIDS, giving Ukraine one of the highest prevalence rates in the region. Of particular concern in Ukraine are injection drug users, who account for the majority of the estimated 17,000 people in need of immediate antiretroviral treatment (ART). As of 2005, only 2,700 people in Ukraine were receiving this life-saving intervention.

''The work of the Clinton Foundation made a tremendous difference in treatment and care of people living with HIV/AIDS in many countries,'' said Elena Franchuk. ''For the ANTIAIDS foundation, this partnership means an expansion of our activities, which have been centered for the last three years on media campaigns. Now, to change the AIDS situation in Ukraine, the country needs the best international experience and know-how in combating the epidemics.''

Thanks to the contributions of the Olena Franchuck ANTIAIDS Foundation and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, CHAI will immediately begin to increase access to rapid testing, to improve laboratory capacity, to train and mentor health care workers, to introduce HIV treatment and to improve drug procurement processes in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Over the next several years, CHAI will collaborate with the government of Ukraine to expand HIV testing legislation, to develop rapid HIV test guidelines, to increase the number of people receiving ART treatment, to establish new rapid test sites, to train healthcare workers, to register and improve access to methadone-based substitution therapy for injection drug users, and to ensure a constant and reliable ARV drug supply.

CHAI and the government of Ukraine have been working together since 2004. In November 2005, Ukraine joined CHAI's group of partner countries, in which CHAI works alongside governments to develop and implement strategic, sustainable HIV/AIDS care and treatment programs. Since then, CHAI has rapidly scaled up its program in Ukraine, specifically helping Ukraine with its Round 6 Global Fund proposal, reviewing existing guidelines and protocols, and helping integrate high risk populations into effective HIV/AIDS care, treatment, and prevention programs.

Elena Franchuk ''ANTIAIDS'' Foundation

Elena Franchuk has been involved in business and charitable activities in Ukraine for many years. Her foundation, established in 2003, is the first and sole foundation in Ukraine committed to fighting HIV/AIDS. The Foundation's activities are aimed at: drawing attention of opinion makers, government authorities and business leaders to the HIV/AIDS problem; implementing large-scale informational and educational campaigns; providing direct support to people living with HIV/AIDS; attracting resources for supporting relevant projects on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment; and diminishing the stigma and discrimination of people living with HIV/AIDS.

Victor Pinchuk Foundation

Victor Pinchuk is the founder of Interpipe Corporation, one of the largest Ukrainian industrial groups. Interpipe is the only Eastern European member of the Global Business Coalition against HIV/AIDS. The Victor Pinchuk Foundation develops and supports projects that contribute to the development of Ukraine. The six fields of activity and the projects of the Foundation have been selected because of their strategic importance for the future of the country: Health (Neonatal Centers), Education (Stipends Programs, School of Economics, cooperation with the Aspen Institute), Culture (Contemporary Art Centre, Film on the Holocaust with Steven Spielberg), Rule of Law (with the Soros Foundation), International Development (promotion of Ukraine in the EU) and support for local communities in Ukraine.

# # #

Learn more about our work at http://www.clintonfoundation.org/about, on Facebook at Facebook.com/ClintonFoundation and on Twitter @ClintonFdn.

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The Elena Pinchuk ANTIAIDS Foundation is the first and only charity foundation in Ukraine, that is functioning thank to private funds.[1][2] The main aim of the Foundation is to control the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ukraine.[3]

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The foundation was established in September 2003[3][4] by Elena Franchuk, the daughter of Leonid Kuchma, the 2nd Ukrainian President. In 2010 the Foundation changed its name to the Elena Pinchuk Foundation, as Elena Franchuk divorced her first husband, Igor Franchuk, and married Viktor Pinchuk (in 1997).[5] In 2010 Elena Pinchuk entered UNAIDS High Level Commission on HIV Prevention[6][7] In 2011 the Foundation launched a competition to develop social media and mobile phone projects for HIV prevention.[8]

Programs and projectsEditAwareness media campaigns intended to attract attitude of Ukrainians towards HIV/AIDS problem. The first campaign started in November 2003,[9] up to 30 PSA were made and shown on the national TV channels.[10]Direct help to people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH)Wide scale campaigns to attract international leaders and stars attention to HIV problem in Ukraine. Among others, visit to Kiev of the 42nd President of the USA, Bill Clinton,[11][12] charity concerts of Elton John,[13][14] and Queen+Paul Rodgers[15] were organized.Partnership with international and Ukrainian organizations. Elena Pinchuk Foundation has been in partnership with Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative since 2004,[16] with Elton John AIDS Foundation since 2007.[17]On October 18, 2010 Victor and Elena Pinchuk received An Enduring Vision>> award by Elton John AIDS Foundation for their contribution to the fight against HIV/AIDS[18][19][20]

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Victor Pinchuk (Ukrainian: Ð'Ñ–ÐºÑ‚Ð¾Ñ Ð'ихйÐ>>ович Пінч½Ðº, Viktor Mykhailovych Pinchuk; born 14 December 1960) is a Ukrainian businessman and philanthropist. As of January 2016, Forbes ranked him as 1250th on the list of wealthiest people in the world, with a fortune of $1.44 billion.[2]

Pinchuk is the founder and main owner of EastOne Group LLC, an international investing, project funding and financial advisory company based in London, and of Interpipe Group, one of Ukraine's leading pipe, wheel and steel producers. Pinchuk is the owner of four TV channels and a popular tabloid, Fakty i Kommentarii. He has been a member of the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, for two consecutive terms from 1998 to 2006. He is married to Olena Pinchuk, the daughter of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.

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Early life and careerEditPinchuk was born in 1960 in Kyiv to Jewish parents[3][4] who moved to the industrial city of Dnipropetrovsk. He graduated from Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute in 1983. Seven years later he founded the Interpipe Company on the basis of his patented innovations, which were successfully adopted by leading metallurgical factories in the USSR.

Interpipe, whose customers include Gazprom and Rosneft, is a major producer of seamless pipes and railway wheels. In 2004, Interpipe became the first Ukrainian company member of the World Economic Forum. Interpipe is very active in the fight against HIV/AIDS at the workplace and in 2004 became the first Eastern European company member of the Global Business Coalition against HIV/AIDS. In 2004 Pinchuk and Rinat Akhmetov, two of Ukraine's richest men, acquired the Kryvorizhstal steel factory for about $800 million.[5] Later, the first Tymoshenko Government reversed this sale, and held a nationally-televised repeat auction that netted $4.8 billion.[5] In 2006, Pinchuk founded an investment advisory company, EastOne. Its portfolio includes industrial assets such as production of pipes and tubes, railcar wheels, specialty steels and alloys, machinery, as well as media.

Pinchuk was a member of the Ukrainian Parliament between 1998 and 2006 for Labour Ukraine.[6] He left politics after he came to the conclusion that Ukraine had reached a level of development when business and politics should be separated.

Pinchuk is a member of the Board of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, of the International Advisory Council of Brookings Institution and of the Corporate Advisory Board of the Global Business Coalition against HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria. Pinchuk holds a share of VS Energy International Ukraine together with Mikhail Spektor and Igor Kolomoisky.[7]

On 18 November 2014 in Kyiv, Pinchuk was presented with the 2014 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Award for his work in fostering Ukrainian-Jewish relations and advancing his homeland's European aspirations.[8]

Pinchuk has supported philanthropic projects in Ukraine. In 2006, he consolidated these activities under the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, which is now considered the largest private Ukrainian philanthropic foundation.

Its projects include the creation of a network of modern neonatal centres throughout Ukraine, cooperation programs with the Clinton Global Initiative, the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the ANTIAIDS Foundation of his wife Olena Pinchuk, the creation of the Kyiv School of Economics, a cooperation with the Aspen Institute, the opening of the first large scale contemporary art centre in Ukraine PinchukArtCentre, the creation and development of the only Ukrainian private chamber orchestra, the production and promotion of a film with Steven Spielberg on the Holocaust in Ukraine, human rights projects with George Soros and support of local Jewish communities.

In June 2009, Pinchuk organized the Paul McCartney free concert on Independence Square in Kyiv in front of 500,000 people. As an initiative of the Pinchuk Art Center,[9] in December 2009 Pinchuk announced a new $100,000 prize for artists under the age of 35. The Future Generation Art Prize is awarded every two years and is open to any young artist who applies online. The jury includes Elton John, Eli Broad, Richard Armstrong, Glenn D. Lowry and/or Miuccia Prada. Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky and Jeff Koons, artists whose work Pinchuk collects, serve as mentors who support to the finalists and the winner.[9] In December 2010, the main prize was awarded to Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle.

In February 2013, Pinchuk committed to giving half or more of his fortune during his lifetime and beyond to philanthropic causes, joining the Giving Pledge, a philanthropic initiative founded in 2010 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Yalta European StrategyEditIn 2004, Pinchuk created Yalta European Strategy (YES) - an international independent organization that is promoting Ukraine joining the European Union. Its annual summer meeting in Yalta has become the main high-level Ukraine-EU forum for debate and policy recommendations development. At the recent annual meetings among others, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, Stefan Fule, Paul Krugman, Alexei Kudrin, Shimon Peres, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Larry Summers and other political and business leaders were present to discuss Ukraine's European perspectives and global challenges. Pinchuk has long promoted closer ties between Ukraine and the EU.[10]

Victor Pinchuk is married to Olena Pinchuk, the daughter of the second president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma. Olena Pinchuk runs the ANTIAIDS Foundation, which focuses on prevention and retroviral distribution and AIDS care in Ukraine. She and Pinchuk are friends of singer Elton John and former US President Bill Clinton, whose 60th birthday Pinchuk attended in New York.[11] Victor Pinchuk has three daughters and a son.

Pinchuk spent more than $6 million on his 50th birthday party in the French ski resort of Courchevel, flying in Cirque du Soleil and chef Alain Ducasse.[12]

Forbes ranked him No. 560 on the list of the wealthiest people in the world in 2014, with a fortune of $3.1 billion.[1] Pinchuk was listed as one of the "2010 Time 100 - The World's Most Influential People" in Time Magazine. He was ranked No. 1 on the ranking of promoters of Ukraine abroad by the Institute of World Policy and No. 38 on ArtReview magazine's 2013 Power 100 ranking of people in contemporary art.

^ abVictor Pinchuk - Forbes, Forbes.com.^"Forbes The World's Billionaires". ^Arielle Th(C)drel (2009-10-27). "Victor Pinchuk, oligarque philanthrope". Le Figaro (in French). Retrieved 26 September 2014. ^Cnaan Liphshiz (February 6, 2013). "Jews occupy top 3 places on Ukrainian list of philanthropists". JTA. Retrieved 14 October 2013. ^ abMonopolies thrive as toothless state bows to moguls, Kyiv Post (March 18, 2010)^Ukraine Political Parties, GlobalSecurity.org^"Ð'ихаиÐ>> ÐÐектоÑ: ÐдеÐ>>аем уÐÐ¾Ñ Ð½Ð° энеÑÐ"етику, Ð"остиничный бизнес и недвижимость, все остаÐ>>ьное '' ÐÑодадим". ^Ukrainian Jews seek to rehabilitate Holocaust era priest^ abCarol Vogel, New Prize to Honor Artists Under 35, The New York Times (December 7, 2009)^[1]^#6 Richest: Viktor Pinchuk, 50, Kyiv Post (December 17, 2010)^Henry Samuel (17 December 2010). "Ukrainian oligarch spending £4 million on birthday bash in Courchevel". Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 26 September 2014.

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:07

August 27, 2016

If James Wesley Howell were a genuine terrorist, you'd think there'd

be one news item about his case in the two-and-a-half-months

since he was arrested June 12.

There is a virtual news blackout and law enforcement refuses to answer

inquiries. The mass media are too afraid to ask about Howell. Why?

James Wesley Howell was a CIA-sponsored "terrorist"

who realized he was being double-crossed. He backed out and surrendered

to local police before he could be murdered. Of course the MSM spun it that he was arrested.

by Henry Makow Ph.D.

James Wesley Howell is the smoking gun that proves terror events worldwide are sponsored by intelligence agencies. He asked Santa Monica police for protection June 12, the morning of the Orlando "massacre." He told them he was supposed to bomb the gay pride parade but had backed out when he learned Omar Mateen had been killed in Orlando. He said he had trained with Mateen at a CIA camp in Virginia.Police found the following in his possession, items no freelance or ISIS terrorist would be able to assemble: "He had twenty-five (25) pounds of Shoc-Shot, an explosive used for blowing up targets by high velocity bullets most likely to cause a crowd widespread panic, and a possible escape by assailants in smoke and mass confusion. The two components needed to make the Shoc-Shot explosive had been mixed. Howell had an Anderson Manufacturing AM-115 .223- high velocity round caliber rifle. The rifle had a round in its chamber and additional rounds in a 30-round magazine attached to it. Another 30-round magazine was taped to the rifle. He had a .30-06 bolt-action rifle with a round in its chamber, and a high velocity .22-caliber Ruger semi-automatic pistol. He had a mass murdering commando assassin's arsenal.[4]"The FBI swept in and took charge of Howell. Since then, there has not been a word about his case in the media, proof that he was telling the truth. Most disturbing is that both the mass media and alternative media won't touch this story. It proves that the American people are complicit in the charade that is the "war on terror." They are accomplices at best; victims of Stockholm syndrome at worst.

My email or phone inquiries to the following were not answered. I asked the status of the case and who his lawyer was.

Law enforcement:

Sean Carney Assn't District Attorney LA County Phone 213-257-2226 Email: SCarney@da.lacounty.gov

FBI Spokesperson Laura Eimiller (310) 420-6441

Santa Monica detective Dereck Leone (310) 458-8949

Mainstream Media:

It is mind boggling that NO ONE in the mainstream media has followed up on this case. It is heart sickening and mind boggling that no one in the alternative media has followed up, not even letsgetoffthebs and G. Edward Griffin who first broke the story. I have written 4-5 alternative media types and also didn't get a reply.Where is Gordon Duffy, Jeff Rense, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson and the hundreds of other websites that pretend to present the truth? Have all these people been warned? (Where are Russia Today and Iran's Press TV?)

This is a sign that the country may be paralyzed by fear. It remains for ordinary citizens to demand information from the authorities. I'm asking you to help find out what has happened to James Wesley Howell and let me know.

Our fate is bound up in his. JWH is our best chance to prove that the government is waging a terror war against its own citizens. If he is allowed to "commit suicide" or slip down the memory hole, that war will continue.

Have we forgotten that more than 3000 innocent people died on 9-11? Their murderers have not been brought to justice. They are holding James Wesley Howell prisoner today. His life is in danger. How many more people will die before the real CIA terrorists are stopped?

---

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:08

June 18, 2016

(Left, James Wesley Howell and his munitions-laden car)

Anonymous Santa Monica police officers say James Howell was part of a coordinated CIA plan to attack homosexual events in LA and Orlando but turned himself in Sunday when he realized that, like his partner Mateen, he would be killed. Howell described details of his recruitment and training by the CIA. As Griffin says, this could be the smoking gun for all federal government false flag terror operations.

According to two department sources, Howell called the Santa Monica police on Sunday morning claiming that he needed protection from the CIA. Howell further elaborated to the dispatcher stating that he "had been set up by the CIA - they are going to kill me." (see below)

by Edward Griffin

(henrymakow.com)

Santa Monica-- Two police officers who wish to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation say that James Wesley Howell, an Indiana man who was found with a car full of explosives and weapons on Sunday morning, told police he was part of a team that planned shooting attacks on gay communities in Florida and California.

Howell told police he was turning himself in because he wanted protection. His story was that he had been assured by his recruiters that he would not be harmed in the shooting but, when he heard on the news that Omar Mateen, the lead gunman in the Orlando group, had been killed by sniper fire, he realized he was being set up as a patsy and would be killed.

Soon after that, the FBI took over the investigation, and information to the public was filtered to remove any facts that might show the Orlando shooting as a planned event involving others. GetOffTheBS 2016 Jun 15 (See Below) It is important to remember that the police officers who are the source of this story choose to remain anonymous, so it cannot be independently verified at this time, but circumstantial evidence supports it. For example:

(1) After the FBI took charge of the investigation, Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks changed her original report that Howell was part of a group of five people who intended to do harm at the gay-pride event in West Hollywood. Her altered report made no mention of anyone other than Howell.

(2) The web site that reported this story (see below) is still carrying the article without triggering legal action against it. That is significant because, if the story is false, immediate legal action would be expected. If it is true, Howell will be killed or 'disappeared' to prevent him from talking, but the last thing the perpetrators would want is a public trial where witnesses can be called to testify. This news story could be one of the most important reports ever published in the annals of journalism.

That's quite a statement but, when you consider the nature of its content, it is no exaggeration to say that it has the potential to fundamentally change the relationship between the United States government and the American people, and that could lead to a profound change, not only in America, but the entire world.

The story still is still unfolding, and it is likely that officialdom either will pull it off the Internet or do everything possible to discredit it but, unlike most false-flag scenarios, there are many people on the outside of the plot who can verify the accuracy of this one. In fact, there may even be an entire police department to do that. If so, the sheer number of witnesses could outweigh the threats against job security or physical safety. We shall see.

---

Here is the pertinent information from the source -

by Brenda Corpion

(excerpt by henrymakow.com)

"The real truth of the story was releasedto a former Los Angeles County prosecutor who works forGet Off the BSby two Santa Monica police officers that have been issued gag orders under threat of Federal prosecution for talking further talking about the incident.

According to two department sources, Howell called the Santa Monica police on Sunday morning claiming that he needed protection from the CIA. Howell further elaborated to the dispatcher stating that he "had been set up by the CIA - they are going to kill me."

According to Howell, he was in LA to meet with another person in a collaborated attack on the gay communities in both Florida and Los Angeles.

Howell additionally stated that, "everything has gone south. Dan was gone when I got here. They killed the leader of the Florida attack this morning. They are going to kill me. I need protection."

According to sources within the police department's investigation Howell indicated to officers who first made contact with him that Howell claimed he was one of five people involved in a planned Sunday attack on both the east and west coasts.

Howell stated that he was suppose to "hook up" late Saturday night with his contact in LA who was suppose to have more weapons and chemicals to mix with the Tannerite he was in possession of.

"When I got here, Dan was gone. I went to his apartment and he had cleared out....I tried calling him but he never answered me," said Howell.

When questioned about the other four people involved in the plot, Howell was only familiar with the first names of three of the alleged suspects, naming his contact in LA - Dan and two of the three contacts in Florida, Omar and Brandy

Speaking of the suspect killed in the Pulse Bar massacre in Florida, Howell stated, "Omar was not suppose to be killed. They lied to us - Omar and Brandy were suppose to get away."

When Howell was questioned about how he and his conspirators knew each other, he said that, "We were all familiar with each other through an online fundamental Islamic knowledge seminary course[1] - we were recruited through the course and trained together at a camp in Virginia - we were taught how to shoot and make bombs - everyone knew their part - something went wrong...."

Before the officers could further question Howell, agents working for the Los Angeles office of the FBI quickly swept in and took over the case. Santa Monica detectives were never allowed to talk with Howell.

In summary, it appears that Howell was on his way to "hook up" with another conspirator (Dan) to set off explosives and shoot people at the gay pride parade in Hollywood California on Sunday.

Finding his contact missing when he got to LA and having heard that Omar Matteen had been killed by a FBI SWAT teem in Orlando, Howell determined he had been double crossed by the CIA and feared for his own life.

Howell was taken in to custody by the FBI before Santa Monica police officers could further question him about the motives behind killing gay people on both coasts of the US on Sunday.

However, in absence of further information and or anyone who will officially go on the record, there is no doubt that the America public is not being told the truth about the Orlando Florida shooting and the arrest of Howell on Sunday.

It is a shame that the Fed's got to the Santa Monica police chief on Sunday before she was silenced, however we are very thankful that at least two officers have risked their jobs and freedom to reveal what she would of most likely Tweeted had the Fed's not got to her.

----

---------------------------

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:29

Mosquitoes hover around South Korea's bronze medalist Ki Bo Bae during the medal ceremony for archery, held on Aug. 11 at the Rio Games. Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Imageshide caption

toggle captionJewel Samad/AFP/Getty ImagesMosquitoes hover around South Korea's bronze medalist Ki Bo Bae during the medal ceremony for archery, held on Aug. 11 at the Rio Games.

Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty ImagesNot 1,000. Not 50. Not even 10.

Zero.

"There have so far been no laboratory confirmed cases of Zika virus in spectators, athletes or anyone associated with the Olympics," the World Health Organization said Thursday on its website.

Now, no cases doesn't mean no one caught Zika at the Summer Games. About 80 percent of people who get infected don't know it. They don't have any symptoms. And those who do get sick often have only mild symptoms. So the vast majority of cases go unreported.

But so far, it's looking like predictions from computer models were pretty much spot on: Zika wasn't a big threat in Rio de Janeiro during the Olympics.

Back in the spring, several computer scientists built models for how Zika is spreading in Latin America. They predicted there would be '-- at most '-- 16 cases at the games. And the chance a fan or athlete would bring Zika home with them after the games was very low.

But other researchers still thought the risk was too high to keep the games in Rio. In May, more than 200 scientists, many bioethicists, signed a letter to WHO, calling for the games to be moved.

One of the lead authors on that letter was Amir Attaran, a professor in the School of Public Health and the School of Law at the University of Ottawa.

He says it's way too early to draw any conclusions about Zika and the Olympics.

"The Olympics aren't even over!" Attaran said in an email to NPR. "WHO has forgotten the Paralympic Games next month," which start Sept. 7 in Rio.

And there's also the issue with sexual transmission, says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University.

Zika can stay in a man's semen for months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, even if the man didn't show any Zika symptoms. Women can also pass the virus to men through sex, a recent study found.

"We don't know who is spreading Zika via sex that they acquired at the Olympics," Caplan says. "We will need to monitor [the situation] for impact for many many months '-- not who got bitten over two weeks!"

WHO says it's doing just that.

"The situation is being closely monitored; a few cases may still occur," the agency said, "especially given the approximately one-week incubation period of the virus."

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 15:04

There are many national security challenges facing the United States, but too often our focus is exclusively on threats from terrorism, geopolitics and cyberattacks. As the country confronts the arrival of the Zika virus and contemplates travel bans to Miami, it's time to have an adult conversation about the threats posed by biology.

It's not hard to understand why our lives are increasingly wrapped up in the latest twists and turns of the cyberworld. That supercomputer you are carrying in your pocket (when its tiny colorful screen isn't parked six inches in front of your eyes) is a synthesizer of all the world's knowledge, photography, art, music, and data. It is also a kind of X-ray machine that can provide insights into the deepest recesses of our personal lives: our preferences, choices, intimate moments, health, purchases, and indeed our character.

Yet the impact of all that information and data pales in comparison to what is heading our way in the world of biology. Biological, not cybernetic, developments will determine the course of the 21st century. Ebola, Zika, and the emergence of antibiotic-impervious superbugs are just previews of the coming challenges.

By the turn of the next century, most scientists believe biological technologies will introduce the most wrenching changes '-- both practical and ethical '-- in our daily lives. These technologies will include human and animal life extension, crop and livestock genetic manipulation, and human performance enhancement, which together will begin changing the very nature of what it means to be human. As futurist and visionary Ray Kurzweil has famously opined, ''The singularity is near,'' meaning the merger of information, big data, artificial intelligence, and biology. Stand by for heavy rolls, as we say in the Navy.

A main element of the biological revolution will be its impact on security in the broadest sense of the term, as well as on the more specific realm of military activity. Both of these are part of the work being done by various laboratories around the globe, including here in the United States at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, where I serve as a senior fellow.

Some of the most promising advances made at JHU APL and elsewhere involve man-machine interfaces, with particular emphasis on brain-machine connections that would allow the use of disconnected limbs; more rapid disease identification in response to both natural and man-made epidemics; artificial intelligence, which offers the greatest near-term potential for both positive benefit and military application (i.e., autonomous attack drones); human performance enhancement, including significant reduction in sleep needs, increases in mental acuity, and improvements in exoskeleton and skin ''armor''; and efficient genome editing using CRISPR-Cas, a technology that has become widely available to ever smaller laboratory settings, including individuals working out of their homes.

The most important question is how to appropriately pursue such research while remaining within the legal, ethical, moral, and policy boundaries that our society might one day like to set, though are still largely unformed. Scientists are like soldiers on patrol in unmarked terrain, one that is occasionally illuminated by a flash of lightning, revealing steeper and more dangerous ground ahead. The United States needs to continue its research efforts, but, equally important, it needs to develop a coherent and cohesive biological strategy to guide those efforts.

But national biological research efforts will also have international implications, so over time there will need to be international diplomacy to set norms of behavior for the use of these technologies. The diplomacy that went into developing the Law of the Sea, and is under consideration in the cyberworld, could serve as a useful model.

A major challenge for such diplomacy is that individual nations, transnational organizations, or even individuals will soon have access '-- if they don't already '-- to biological tools that permit manipulation of living organisms. The rise of low-cost synthetic biology technologies, the falling cost of DNA sequencing, and the diffusion of knowledge through the internet create the conditions for a breakout biological event not dissimilar to the Spanish influenza of roughly a century ago. In that plague, by some estimates, nearly 40 percent of the world's population was infected, with a 10 to 20 percent mortality rate. Extrapolated to our current global population, that would equate to more than 400 million dead.

Most alarming would be that either rogue nations or violent transnational groups would gain access to these technologies and use them to create biological weapons of mass destruction. As Josh Wolfe, a leading researcher at Johns Hopkins, has said, ''Natural biological weapons are limited by the characteristics of agents that are not ideal for weaponization; synthetic biological weapons can be designed without these limitations.''

His work focuses on being able to quickly detect such synthetic biological threats, analyze them, and, perhaps most importantly, attribute them '-- that is to say, identify which lab or nation is the source of the bug. Wolfe's research could provide governments with enough information about biological attacks to allow them to develop coherent responses '-- and thus provide the foundation for an international deterrent regime, which would hopefully prove effective against other countries. (Deterring terror organizations from using such bioweapons if they were able to construct or obtain them would be a far more daunting task.)

There are three key components to preparing for the biological revolution. First, we need an international approach that seeks to limit the proliferation of highly dangerous technologies (much as we try to accomplish with nuclear weapons) and fosters cooperation in the case of contagion or a transnational biological threat.

Here we already encounter a big problem. Nuclear proliferation is fairly straightforward to regulate, at least from a policy standpoint, because there are certain things that nobody needs unless they're trying to make a nuclear weapon. Synthetic biology offers no such list. Even if we were omniscient in regard to every single gene being ordered or sequenced worldwide, it would still be nearly impossible, in the absence of other information, to tell which people or organizations were pursuing peaceful research and which ones were up to no good. It would be the Wild West, with no black hats or handlebar mustaches to tip us off.

Second, the American government's interagency process must become more adept at addressing both the scientific advances and the security challenges emanating from the world of biological research. At present, federal policy pertaining to such work is organized in silos that prevent it from responding quickly or efficiently. Some of the work is done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some by the Department of Homeland Security, and other responsibilities and capabilities are assigned to the Department of Health and Human Services. Alongside all that, the Department of Defense has developed its own fairly elaborate capability. Until this changes, the country will be at significant risk.

Finally, all this will require a powerful level of private-public cooperation. So much of the technological advances will come in the business ventures of the Route 128 biotech belt around Boston and other advanced centers in the private sector. Bringing them in concert with government and academic centers like Johns Hopkins will be significant, although this must be done in a way that does not stifle innovation unduly. How to link private and public in this sector is largely unclear, but there may be models in the world of cybersecurity, where some nascent attempts (and failures, frankly) are evolving.

Additionally, there is an imperative to open a broader conversation about the coming impact of the biological world. As citizens, both in the United States and globally, we spend far too much time focused on information and cyber-technologies. The weaponization of biology is coming, and coming quickly. And our ability to control that process '-- or not '' will determine our destiny.

Photo credit: John Moore/Getty Images

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:48

Updated Aug. 25, 2016 10:02 p.m. ET Security researchers say a little-known Israeli startup exploited previously unknown bugs in Apple Inc.AAPL-0.59%'s smartphone software to help foreign governments spy on their citizens.

The researchers say the surveillance software was the work of NSO Group Technologies Ltd., which sells primarily to government agencies. The researchers, at Citizen Lab, a group that investigates surveillance technology, and at mobile-security firm Lookout Inc., say they discovered the software in a link sent earlier this month to the phone of Ahmed Mansoor, a human-rights activist in the United Arab Emirates.

Their report sheds new light on the capabilities of private security companies to produce sophisticated software for state-sponsored spying. It also suggests that the iOS operating system behind Apple's iPhones isn't as impregnable as it appeared earlier this year, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation struggled for weeks and ultimately paid $1 million to unlock a phone tied to the San Bernardino terror attack.

NSO Group's software takes advantage of three previously unknown flaws in iOS to install itself on an iPhone, where it then transforms the phone into a surveillance device, tracking its movements, logging messages and downloading personal data.

In a statement Thursday, Apple said it had been ''made aware of this vulnerability and immediately fixed it.'' The company advised iPhone users to download the new version of iOS, dubbed 9.3.5.

Mike Murray, Lookout's vice president of security research, said the NSO software, called Pegasus, is ''the most professional piece of spyware that I've ever seen.'' He said the software operates stealthily, ensuring that it doesn't quickly drain the battery and speeding up its data transfer when it is on Wi-Fi networks so that it doesn't get noticed.

An NSO spokesman said the company had no knowledge of Mr. Mansoor's case. In a statement, the spokesman said, ''NSO's mission is to help make the world a safer place, by providing authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime. The company sells only to authorized governmental agencies, and fully complies with strict export control laws and regulations.''

The spokesman said NSO doesn't operate its systems, and requires customers to use them lawfully and only ''for the prevention and investigation of crimes.''

NSO has billed itself as a leader in the field of cyberwarfare, offering tools for governments to keep tabs on criminals and terrorists who use encrypted communications. The company has been thought to be capable of installing unauthorized software on Android, BlackBerryBBRY-0.13% and iPhone devices, but Thursday's report provides the first in-depth look at its capabilities.

''We're a complete ghost,'' NSO co-founder Omri Lavie told Defense News in a 2013 interview. ''We're totally transparent to the target, and we leave no traces.''

The Wall Street Journal in 2014 reported that the company had been acquired by private-equity firm Francisco Partners for $110 million. Francisco Partners had no immediate comment.

Researchers highlighted the unusual way that Pegasus is installed on a phone, taking advantage of the three flaws in iOS to silently ''jailbreak'' the phone and circumvent the requirement that only Apple-approved software runs on the device. This type of one-click iPhone attack previously has been described by researchers but never been seen in a real-world attack, Lookout's Mr. Murray said.

Mr. Mansoor said he received a text message Aug. 10 from a phone number he didn't recognize that said, ''New secrets about torture of Emiratis in state prisons.'' He said his suspicions immediately were aroused. ''I could tell that there was something wrong and I contacted the Citizen Lab team immediately.''

At Citizen Lab, researchers found that the link in Mr. Mansoor's text message led to a website that they previously had connected to NSO Group. That website launched the Apple attack and installed the Pegasus spyware.

Although these products typically are marketed as legitimate tools sold only to law enforcement, some governments use them to spy on activists and journalists, said Bill Marczak, a senior researcher with Citizen Lab.

After the attack on Mr. Mansoor, Citizen Lab linked NSO to 2015 attacks on a Mexican journalist who received text messages that were similar to Mr. Mansoor's.

Mr. Mansoor believes that he was the target of U.A.E. officials looking to keep tabs on his online activity.

A U.A.E. official declined to comment.

Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications: Mike Murray is Lookout's vice president of security research. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated his first name as Mark.

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 14:51

Roger Stone has been a longtime opponent of the Clinton family, and he has repeatedly pushed views and attacks against them that range from hard-right to fringe-right. On Sunday, the Donald Trump hatchet man gave a speech where he outlined a theory of his about how Bill Clinton's daughter isn't really his daughter.

Stone was talking about an anecdote from his book, The Clintons' War on Women, wherein he explains how he's convinced that Chelsea Clinton was born from an affair between Hillary Clinton and former Associate Attorney General, Webb Hubbell. From there, Stone went on to say that Chelsea Clinton looks nothing like her father despite ''four plastic surgeries'' to make herself more resemblant to her mother's husband.

''She looks just like her daddy, despite four plastic surgeries, the youngest one when she's only 18. What 18-year-old gets plastic surgery unless you're trying to, I don't know, thin out the lips and make you look less like your daddy.''

Stone proceeded to rip into the Clinton daughter as a ''grifter'' who oversees the Clinton Foundation's supposed money-laundering operation.

Watch above, via Media Matters.

[Image via screengrab]

'-- '--

>> Follow Ken Meyer (@KenMeyer91) on Twitter

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 05:32

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 04:30

[See NewsBusters for more.] Tom Coburn wasn't having any of Chuck Todd's bias. The former Republican Senator appeared on MSNBC, Thursday, to discuss Hillary Clinton's speech on the so-called alt-right movement. After Todd repeatedly pushed Todd on Republican connections to the extremist group, Coburn called out the network's liberal spin: ''That's just like saying if somebody hires you, Chuck, and NBC's viewpoint politically is far left anyway, so, therefore, it's bad because you work for [NBC].'' A flustered Todd sputtered, ''Let me stop you there. Senator, wait a minute. That is not true. I don't know where you are coming up with an ideological attack on that.''

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 03:46

Disturbing news broke Thursday that for the third time in a week US Navy ships in or near the Persian Gulf were harassed by vessels maned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But the situation escaladed Thursday when the vessels ignored warnings and got close enough to for the USS Squall to draw warning shots. As provocative as the actions of the Iranian vessels were, they did not seem important enough for the ''Big Three'' network news outlet who didn't report about the engagement at all, Thursday evening.

''Tensions in the Persian Gulf on the rise tonight,'' reported Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Special Report, ''New confrontations between the U.S. Navy and vessels from Iran, adding to a growing list of Iran's provocative actions against the US, but this time shots were fired.''

In his report, correspondent Kevin Corke noted that the Iranian vessels managed to get roughly 200 yards away from the US patrol ship. ''The USS Squall firing three warning shots at an Iranian vessel that engaged the US patrol,'' Corke mentioned.

Corke continued:

Now, as you pointed out this is not the first time we've heard about this, not even this week, if you can believe it. There was another engagement that happened on Wednesday when four Iranian boats came within 300 yards of the USS Nitze. US officials say the Iranians were acting in an unprofessional and unsafe manner in that instance as well.

CBS was the only network to report Wednesday's incident during the morning broadcasts the following day. Norah O'Donnell discussed Iran's harassment in a 40 second news brief on CBS This Morning.

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 03:26

[See NewsBusters for more.] Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange doesn't think that MSNBC or the New York Times would have been interested in the Democratic National Committee e-mails that his website released, messages that showed party collusion with Hillary Clinton. Talking to Fox News's Megyn Kelly, he explained, ''I would like to believe that no organization, no organization, no media organization in the United States would not have published the DNC e-mails.'' Assange added, ''But I don't think that's true actually. I think MSNBC wouldn't have published them. I think the New York Times wouldn't have published most of them. And that's sad.'' Assange concluded, ''It's an incredible politicization in this election of the media.''

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Sun, 28 Aug 2016 03:08

[More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.]

The 26 August 2016 edition of ABC's World News Tonight led with a preview of a special 20/20 report that detailed how the parents of ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller tried to free her before she was killed in captivity. Carl and Marsha Mueller disclosed that President Obama "made a promise to help the foundation they set up in her name, and then broke it." Mueller's parents also revealed their "belief that the government failed their daughter."

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Archived Version

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 15:53

Fox guests blow up after one calls Hillary Clinton a 'bigot': 'You should be ashamed of yourself!'

Internet destroys Trump for using shooting death of NBA star's cousin to tell blacks 'VOTE TRUMP!'

Trump campaign CEO didn't want children 'going to school with Jews': court document

The American dream of home ownership is now a costly nightmare

7 things to know about new Trump adviser jettisoned by Christie after Bridgegate

WATCH: Fox host floored as Trump fan claims Hispanics are lining up to board the 'Trump train'

'I lost. The ni**er won': Alabama GOP mayor gets racist on Facebook after losing to black candidate

Alabama GOP mayor denies calling her black opponent the N-word: 'I think I've been hacked'

How racist white people are pissing away what little political power the working class has left

Social media gleefully roasts #TrumpsDoctor: 'Mad scientist who pumps racism in his veins'

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Archived Version

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 15:40

Steven CrowderThursday July 16 2015

In today's installment of ''Social Justice Warrior'' dictionary, the word is ''Microaggression.'' Taught as a legitimate theory at Universities and tumblrs across the country, you'd think that everyone in mainstream America would know the meaning of ''Microaggression''. Only when we asked people on the street'...

As a matter of fact, the only person who knew what Microaggression meant was'... a women's studies feminist. So again, watch the video above. We've created a beginner's guide to understanding the ins and outs of the complex landscape that is modern ''Microaggression theory''! You can thank us later.

COLUMBIA DEFINITION: ''microaggression'' is a term referring to ''commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward minority classes.''

REAL MEANING: everyone is super racist, sexist and prejudice even though they think they aren't and you have no proof that says otherwise. As a matter of fact, no proof is even better than proof'... because it's already like proof anyhow. So shut up and don't express a different opinion than mine.

Microaggression.

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Archived Version

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 12:50

Drive west from Calgary on the Trans-Canada Highway toward the Rocky Mountains, and you'll pass a distinct billboard that isn't promoting a hotel, restaurant or other attraction.

Its message is vague, with images of airplane vapour trails crisscrossing the sky and the words "Look up!!! There's a new cloud in town..." as well as an accompanying website address, pointing people to LookUpBanff.com.

While this might confuse most people, the motive for the sign is all too clear to world-renowned climate researcher David Keith.

'I think it's stunning and a frightening thing because it is complete lunacy.''-- David Keith, Harvard scientist

The Harvard scientist was amazed and, admittedly, a little frightened when he saw the billboard, which stands on the north side of the highway between Calgary and the mountain town of Canmore.

The billboard promotes a conspiracy theory about governments secretly spraying chemicals from the sky to sterilize people. While it sounds outlandish, Keith has received aggressive threats from some who believe the theory because his research revolves around finding ways to alter the atmosphere to limit the effects of climate change.

"I get emails once every few days," he said. "I get occasional mails that are really wild hate mail. I've had packages that I'm a little worried to open."

He also receives disturbing phone calls, and twice the threats were serious enough that the police were called.

"I suppose if you really believe it, then it's rational to want to kill me because if you really believe it, then you believe I'm some mass murderer orchestrating the death of the human race," he said in an interview with CBC News.

Keith lives part time in nearby Canmore, Alta., and says it feels like the billboard is in his backyard.

Contrails, not chemtrailsThe slender clouds left behind by aircraft are condensation trails, known as contrails for short. They are created when moisture from a plane's engines enters the cold atmosphere, similarly to how exhaled breath in winter leaves a visible trail.

The chemtrails conspiracy theory is based on the belief that those trails really are chemicals or other harmful materials that governments are deliberately spraying.

"People believe that 9/11 was staged, some people believe there are aliens on air force bases in Texas or Nevada or wherever," said Keith.

"The fact of the matter is, in our society, a lot of people just believe things that normal science doesn't believe at all. People believe vaccines are somehow hugely destructive, when the evidence is the other way."

Keith is a prime target because part of his research focuses on solar geoengineering, which is an attempt to limit the impacts of climate change through methods such as seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles.

While there is significant debate about geoengineering, the mainstream environmental community supports such research. Environmental groups have also strongly rejected the notion of chemtrails.

David Keith: Why am I pretty confident chemtrails don't exist 2:27

Research distraction"I'm a scientist, so I look at credible science '-- and there is none for the existence of chemtrails," wrote scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki in a blog co-authored by Ian Hanington with the David Suzuki Foundation.

"The science is clear: human-caused climate change is the most pressing threat to humanity, and we must work to resolve it. We don't have time for debunked conspiracy theories."

For Keith, the notion of chemtrails is completely fabricated, as his research team lays out clearly on its website. But he is concerned the belief in chemtrails will alter the public debate about geoengineering.

'A lot of people just believe things that normal science doesn't believe at all.''-- David Keith

"Intellectually, I know it's part of my job now to think and know about this. There's a lot of people who take this seriously," said Keith.

"We've done some large-scale public opinion polling in Canada and the U.S., and if you ask a very open-ended question, 'Do you think the government is involved in some kind of secretive program to do spraying?' you get 10 or, depending how you ask the question, maybe as many as 20 per cent of the people will answer yes to some version of that."

"I think it's stunning and a frightening thing because it is complete lunacy."

Billboards similar to the one in Alberta have appeared in Oregon and Nevada. The Banff businessman believed to have put up the billboard and created the associated website did not respond to requests for comment from CBC News.

Receiving so many threats from chemtrail believers has made Keith cautious.

"There are some very angry people out there. I don't wake up worrying about it, but I do think there is some risk of actual violence."

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Archived Version

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 20:57

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