Today's News: April 09, 2018

World News

Israeli missile strike ‘indirect response’ to Syrian Army’s success in E. Ghouta – Damascus
RT – Sunday’s missile strike in Homs was Israel’s “indirect response” to the Syrian Army’s liberation of Eastern Ghouta, Damascus has said. Syria also called on the UN Security Council to condemn the act of “Israeli aggression.”

Iran threat: We’ll restart nuke enrichment in days
Freebeacon – Iranian leaders are threatening to restart the country’s contested nuclear enrichment program in just a matter of days as the Trump administration and European allies scramble to address a range of flaws in the landmark nuclear accord ahead of a May deadline that could see the United States walk away from the accord, according to regional reports and administration insiders.

Reports: Israel warned U.S. of Syria strike
WND – Israel gave the United States advance warning of its early Monday morning strike on a military base in Syria, according to initial reports, while the Kremlin charged that it failed to inform Russia.
There have been some media reports, however, that Israel did warn Russia, and as a result, Moscow pulled its personnel from the base. There were no Russian casualties from the attack.
Israel has not made any statement on the strike. The US, France and Great Britain have also said they were not involved in the operation.

‘Nothing off the table’ in Syria: Trump promises decision on US military action within 24-48 hours
RT – US President Donald Trump has said that he will decide on potential actions against Syria within 24-48 hours in response to reports of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, East Ghouta.
Trump promised a swift response to the “heinous attack,” saying that “this is about humanity and it can’t be allowed to happen.”

London Mayor Sadiq Khan enacts ‘knife control’ policies to crack down on stabbing epidemic
The Blaze – Last week, TheBlaze reported the number of murders in London, a traditionally safe city, surpassed the number of murders in New York City in February and March for the first time in modern history. The murders were mostly carried out in stabbing attacks with knives.
Now, London Mayor Sadiq Khan is taking action — by implementing knife control.
In response to the spike in crime, Khan deployed over 300 additional London police officers to the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods to stop and search anyone they suspect is carrying a knife. In the U.S., such policies are very controversial and possibly violate the Fourth Amendment, but in England, police are able to stop and search anyone they suspect is carrying a knife.
The “tough, immediate” measures also ban home deliveries of knives and acid, two of the most common weapons in London today.

Hungarian PM could target Soros organisations right after election win
Reuters – Prime Minister Viktor Orban could use his sweeping new political mandate to extend Hungary’s crackdown on civil organisations that have been critical of his anti-immigration policies.
On Monday, a spokesman for Fidesz said one of the first laws to be passed by the new parliament could be legislation that would empower the government to ban NGOs that support migration and pose a “national security risk”.
The proposed legislation, dubbed “Stop Soros” by the government before the vote, is part of Orban’s strident anti-immigration campaign targeting Hungarian born U.S. financier George Soros, whose philanthropy aims to bolster liberal and open-border values.

Indian school bus plunges into gorge, ‘killing 27 children’
BBC – At least 30 people, most of them children, have died after a school bus fell into a gorge in a mountainous region of India, officials say.

U.S. News, Politics & Government

MSNBC’s Joy Reid: What If Trump Refuses To Be Arrested By Federal Marshals?
Real Clear Politics – unday on her weekend morning program, MSNBC’s Joy Reid seriously discussed a situation where President Trump refused a subpoena and would have to be arrested and put in jail until he testified before a grand jury. Reid envisioned a scenario of a White House besieged by federal marshals who would wait for Trump to give the Secret Service a stand down order so he could be taken into custody.

Tom Steyer wants Trump impeached, and he’s mad that many Democrats don’t
San Francisco Chronicle – Billionaire activist Tom Steyer is bringing a nationwide town hall tour promoting President Trump’s impeachment to Oakland, but he’s got more in mind than leading a pep rally for Bay Area liberals. He intends to shame Democrats who aren’t cheering along with him.
Many Democrats aren’t calling to impeach Trump, Steyer said, “because of political posturing before the midterms.”
Some Democrats fear losing the moral and political high ground by backing impeachment before Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into any Trump campaign ties to Russian election meddling is complete.
It will be impossible to win Republican support for impeachment in the GOP-controlled Congress unless Mueller finds evidence of criminal conduct by Trump himself, Democratic leaders say. Impeachment requires a majority vote in the House, and conviction and removal from office takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
“I don’t think it’s helpful for anyone to be pushing impeachment before the investigation is finished,” Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast earlier this year. While there is a legal standard for impeachment, he said, there “also a political standard. Can you make the case for impeachment in districts around the country?
“That case will be more difficult to make if it looks like this is where we wanted to go all along,” Schiff said.

5 Compelling Reasons Why The Youtube Shooting Has Disappeared From Headlines
Freedom Outpost – Breaking news alerts announcing reports of a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters quickly faded from the spotlight and out of the news cycle—and there are a number of imperative reasons why the rampage initiated by a woman who injured three people and then killed herself, has not been used to push the mainstream’s media obsession with gun control.
Here are 5 compelling reasons why the YouTube shooting has disappeared from headlines:

As a woman, a peaceful vegan, and a PETA advocate, the suspected shooter is the opposite of the typical “mass shooter” profile promoted by the mainstream media.
The shooter reportedly used a handgun, which also deviates from the mainstream narrative that all mass shooters use high-powered rifles.
The shooting happened in California—a state that has already enacted some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation.
The police were warned about the shooting by the suspect’s father in advance, and they did nothing—something the media tends to cover up.
The shooter blamed YouTube for censoring and demonetizing her videos—a problem alternative content creators experience on a daily basis that mainstream media tries to pretend doesn’t exist.

This Bobcat’s Suspenseful Fight With a Rattlesnake Has Gone Viral
Time – A bobcat’s vicious takedown of a rattlesnake has gone viral after a realtor shared a video of the pair facing off on an Arizona sidewalk.
In footage captured by real estate agent Laura Lucky while she was showing a home in north Scottsdale, the bobcat can be seen repeatedly attempting to control the snake as the reptile lashes out at it.
“The rattlesnake had come up and bit the bobcat on the lip,” Lucky told KSAZ of the moments before she began filming. “The cat flew. It was very surreal.”
The clip shows the two predators sparring for nearly 40 seconds before the bobcat manages to get its mouth around the rattlesnake’s neck and carries it into the desert. However, bobcats are not immune to rattlesnake venom as some old wives’ tales suggest, meaning the feline may have also fallen victim in the ensuing hours.

Economy & Business

CBO Projections Will Show Trillion Dollar Deficits as Far as the Eye Can See
PJ Media – The Congressional Budget Office will release deficit projections for the next 10 years and, in case anyone is interested (and no one seems to be), it will show budget deficits in excess of 1 trillion dollars every year.
There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth from some Republicans and Donald Trump will pretend he didn’t sign a federal budget with hundreds of billions of dollars in increased spending. But we’re about to enter an era where trillion dollar deficits are the new normal.

Rockefellers join Rothschilds & Soros in cryptocurrency investing
RT – Despite the dramatic collapse of the crypto market this year, well-known investors have opted to buy into digital currencies, triggering a brief surge in the prices of top tokens.
Reports have emerged that George Soros is preparing to invest in digital assets, despite his earlier criticism of them. Adam Fisher, who controls macro investing at Soros Fund Management, has reportedly secured internal approval to trade the currencies.
The Rockefellers have also reportedly joined the crypto party. Venrock, the official venture-capital arm of the family, reportedly signed a partnership with Coinfund, a cryptocurrency investment fund, to back virtual tokens and blockchain business innovations.

US and China both omit key products from tariff threats
AP – Americans spent nearly $96 billion last year on cellphones and computers imported from China, far more than on any other items. But you won’t find them on the list of Chinese-made products the Trump administration is threatening with tariffs.
And China spends about $1 billion a year importing animal hides from the U.S. to make shoes, car interiors and furniture upholstery. But China didn’t include those on its own list of threatened tariffs.

Energy & Environment

Tesla’s giant battery system gets praised by energy market operator: ‘rapid, accurate, and valuable’
Electrek – Since the success of its giant Powerpack system in Australia, Tesla has been rolling out several other massive energy storage projects in the country despite some high-profile critics at the federal level and now within the new South Australian government who think the initiative is overvalued.
Nonetheless, the Australian Energy Market Operator praised the performance of the system in a new report this month.
Tesla’s 100MW/129MWh Powerpack project in South Australia, the largest in the world for now, has been demonstrating its capacity since going into operation in December.

Science & Technology

‘Unsafe to the community’: Facebook takes on pro-Trump Diamond and Silk
The American Mirror – The hilarious duo of Diamond and Silk is a danger to society.
That’s according to Facebook.
The pro-Trump pair posted on the embattled social media platform on Friday night, saying after months of correspondence, they were deemed to be “unsafe to the community.”
“Diamond And Silk have been corresponding since September 7, 2017, with Facebook (owned by Mark Zuckerberg), about their bias censorship and discrimination against D&S brand page,” they wrote.
“Finally after several emails, chats, phone calls, appeals, beating around the bush, lies, and giving us the run around, Facebook gave us another bogus reason why Millions of people who have liked and/or followed our page no longer receives notification and why our page, post and video reach was reduced by a very large percentage,” echoing the complaints of many conservative and pro-Trump pages.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says he’s left Facebook over data collection
USA Today – Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told USA TODAY he’s leaving Facebook out of growing concern for the carelessness with which Facebook and other Internet companies treat the private information of users.

Facebook’s data-mining woes deepen as company suspends another analytics firm
RT – Cambridge Analytica was not an isolated incident: Facebook has suspended another data analytics firm for collecting user data for marketers in the name of academic research, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces the wrath of Congress.
CubeYou gathered user information through quizzes, which were billed as being “for non-profit academic research,” and then shared this information with third-party marketers. Facebook took action to suspend the company from its platform over the weekend, following an investigation by CNBC.

Chinese facial recognition company becomes world’s most valuable AI start-up
Telegraph – The Chinese government’s plans for mass surveillance using facial recognition have received a boost from one of the country’s tech powerhouses, after Alibaba led a $600m investment in SenseTime, which develops technology for tracking individuals.
The company is working on facial and object recognition technology that accurately can spot people using cameras, recently demonstrated on CCTV in Beijing.

Feds’ tech effort seeks to write info to brain
WND – A government program is describing as “attainable” the goal of developing technology that can read information from the human brain, or write information there, without any invasive hardware, reports Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
The agency is launching the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology programs to move past the limited-scope, noninvasive neurotechnologies that already exist, such as the electroencephalogram and transcranial direct current stimulation
“DARPA created N3 to pursue a path to a safe, portable neural interface system capable of reading from and writing to multiple points in the brain at once. High-resolution, nonsurgical neurotechnology has been elusive, but thanks to recent advances in biomedical engineering, neuroscience, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology, we now believe the goal is attainable,” he said.
The biggest anticipated problem is having signals scattered as they pass through skin, skull and brain tissue, the agency explained.
“We’re asking multidisciplinary teams of researchers to construct approaches that enable precise interaction with very small areas of the brain, without sacrificing signal resolution or introducing unacceptable latency into the N3 system,” Emondi said.

Health

FDA worried drug was risky; now reports of deaths spark concern
CNN – Nuplazid’s review was being expedited because it had been designated a “breakthrough therapy” — meaning that it demonstrated “substantial improvement” in patients with serious or life-threatening diseases compared to treatments already on the market. Congress created this designation in 2012 in an effort to speed up the FDA’s approval process, which has long been criticized for being too slow. Around 200 drugs have been granted this designation since its creation.
Still, to recommend approval, the advisory committee would have to find that the drug’s potential benefits outweighed its risks for its intended patients.
Some FDA officials concluded that Nuplazid’s public health benefit was enough to merit approval of the drug. Their argument echoed the pleas of family members and caregivers like Tyne: It could possibly help patients with no other alternative. Several of the people who spoke said their loved ones had been transformed during the clinical trials, though some said there was no way for them to know whether they were on Nuplazid or a placebo.
But the physician who led the FDA’s medical review, Dr. Paul Andreason, warned that patients taking the drug during the company’s clinical trials experienced serious outcomes, including death, at more than double the rate of those taking the placebo. The company’s limited testing, he said, had not convinced him that the benefits outweighed the risks.

Top 10 Spring Superfoods
Care 2 – Spring is finally here and along with it starts the cascade of vibrant superfoods. Obviously, some take a little longer than others to hit the grocery store, but here are my picks for the top 10 spring superfoods and lots of reason to start enjoying them as part of your regular diet.

Artichokes
Asparagus
Chives
Collards
Kale
Rhubarb
Spinach
Spring greens
Strawberries
Watercress

Benefits Of Hibiscus Tea
MBG – Hibiscus tea is an herbal tea with many health benefits. The hibiscus flower contains the calyx, which protects and supports the hibiscus plant and is responsible for those health benefits. Hibiscus tea consists of dried calyces, which are steeped to make both hot and cold beverages.
he Journal of Nutrition published a recent study that used a randomized controlled trial to assess whether drinking hibiscus tea could reduce blood pressure in mildly hypertensive or pre-hypertensive adults. In this study, fewer than 100 participants were instructed to continue with their normal diet for six weeks. In addition, the participants were divided into two randomized groups. One group was instructed to drink three servings of calyces of the Hibiscus sabdariffa flower, and the other was to consume the placebo.
After just six weeks, the researchers found that there was a substantial reduction in systolic blood pressure in the patient group that was drinking the hibiscus tea. The blood-pressure-lowering effects of hibiscus tea could be a result of its flavonoid or its phytochemical content, although that’s not entirely conclusive. The results of this study suggest that if consumed over time, hibiscus tea can reduce the risk of stroke and heart attack, which is another huge benefit of hibiscus tea.