Today's News: November 16, 2018

Top Headlines

Julian Assange ‘Has Been Charged,’ According to Justice Department Filing
The Daily Beast – A paperwork slip-up reveals that the U.S. is hiding a federal criminal complaint against the WikiLeaks founder for fear of jeopardizing his extradition.
>> Related: Seriously: Why is the DOJ indicting Julian Assange but not Hillary Clinton?

Top Cheney Aide in Mueller’s Sights as Probe Expands
The Daily Beast – Mueller’s investigators have examined an array of operatives with ties to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE—including John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser.

Texas schools to keep Moses in social studies lessons
Fox – Texas education officials tentatively approved keeping the biblical figure Moses in the state’s social studies curriculum Wednesday while voting to change the language that potentially links Islamic fundamentalism with terrorism.
The board’s actions comes despite recommendations from one of its working groups to remove the biblical prophet and a day after it voted to keep Hillary Clinton and disability advocate Helen Keller in history lessons taught to Texas students, the Austin American-Statesmen reported.
A final vote on the changes is expected Friday.

Judge rules Acosta should get back press pass
WND – A federal judge, responding to CNN’s request to act quickly, ordered the White House to reinstate reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass.
The credential was suspended last week by the White House after Acosta belligerently challenged the president during a news conference and refused to relinquish a microphone.
CNBC reported Acosta thanks Judge Tim Kelly after the ruling.
“I want to thank the judge for the decision he made today,” Acosta said.
While most of the legacy media outlets supported CNN’s demand that Acosta’s pass be restored, One America News Network sided with the White House.

Amid progress against California blaze, number of missing soars
Reuters – Family members and survivors on Friday sought news of the 630 people considered missing after the deadliest wildfire in California history reduced much of the town of Paradise to ash and charred rubble, and killed 63.

House Republican to subpoena ex-FBI director Comey, former AG Lynch
Reuters – The outgoing chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee is planning to issue subpoenas compelling former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch to be deposed about their decision-making ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a U.S. House Democratic aide told Reuters on Friday.

World News

POROSHENKO PREPARES TO FLEE UKRAINE, LIQUIDATES ASSETS
FRN – According to the generally reliable Russian website, iarex.ru, Poroshenko seems quite aware that he is unlikely to win the upcoming election in Ukraine. Polls presently project that a transfer of power will take place, favoring elements of the ‘old guard’ of Ukrainian oligarchs, led by Yulia Tymoshenko who presently leads in various polls.
According to iarex.ru, Poroshenko has already started an urgent sale of his assets, so that after the elections he will immediately leave the penniless and decaying country.
Petro Poroshenko is ostensibly negotiating the sale of its own assets in Ukraine. The goal is to close the deal before March 1, 2019.
Two independent auditors from among the Big Five handed over reports to two potential buyers. The first candidate is a consortium of ostracized oligarchs from the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Lithuania. The second candidate is a group led by Dmitry Firtash and two high-ranking members of the US Democratic Party, with the support of Joe Biden and Michael Pence.

Woman refuses to hold escalator handrail, case to be heard in Supreme Court of Canada
Fox – The Supreme Court of Canada On Thursday agreed to hear the case of a woman who was arrested and ticketed back in 2009 for refusing to hold an escalator handrail at a subway station.
Bela Kosoian was “taken by force” by a police officer who told her to respect a pictogram with instruction, “hold the handrail,” at the station in Laval, a Montreal suburb, The Canadian Press reported. She said she did not consider the image to be an obligation, the report said.
Merkel says ‘No negotiation!’ on Brexit
Express – ANGELA Merkel has slammed the door on any hope of further concessions on the Brexit deal from the EU, warning Brexiteers there is “no question” of renegotiating the terms.
European Union leaders have been broadly united in their support for the draft deal the Prime Minister has struck with Brussels amid mounting concern Britain could tumble out of the bloc without an agreement when it officially leaves on March 29, 2019. But the German Chancellor, seen as one of the most prominent voices among EU leaders, has been particularly vocal over Britain’s Brexit negotiations this week. She warned a no-deal Brexit could be the “worst and most chaotic” scenario but was clear in her reluctance to concede more ground to London if any further Brexit negotiations are required.

17 Saudis suspected in Khashoggi death sanctioned
Washington Times – Saudi Arabian prosecutors on Thursday indicted 11 men and said they would seek the death penalty for five who they say carried out the gruesome killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but the move did not dispel skepticism in Washington and across the region that the kingdom is failing to come clean about the death last month of the U.S.-based writer in Turkey.
The official statement in Riyadh implicated some members of de-facto Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s inner circle but was released while the Saudi foreign minister was telling reporters that the crown prince had no role in the operation that killed Mr. Khashoggi and reportedly dismembered his body.
“Sometimes mistakes happen …,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told a briefing in Riyadh after the charges were announced. “Sometimes people exceed their authority.”
Under pressure to show its displeasure with a critical ally in the region, the Trump administration took its most aggressive action against the kingdom to date, putting new sanctions on 17 Saudis it says assisted in the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, who frequently criticized the crown prince while living in self-imposed exile in Virginia.
Among those sanctioned was Saudi deputy intelligence chief Ahmed al-Asiri, whom Riyadh has blamed for authorizing the operation, allegedly without the crown prince’s knowledge or approval. Saudi officials say all of the figures named in the U.S. sanctions are already in custody as part of their internal investigation.

U.S. News, Politics & Government

DEA: Heroin, Fentanyl Are Biggest Drug Threat to US
Newsmax – The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says opioid overdose deaths hit the highest level ever recorded in the United States last year.
A DEA report obtained by The Associated Press shows heroin, fentanyl and other opioids continue to be the highest drug threat in the nation. The National Drug Threat Assessment will be released publicly Friday.

Pentagon Fails Its First-Ever Official Audit
Antiwar – After generations of being a black hole down which money goes, never to return, a team of 1,200 auditors tried to give the Pentagon its first ever comprehensive audit, just to see where all that money went. Unsurprisingly, it went poorly, and was declared a failure.
How bad the failure was is something of a mystery at this point, with officials refusing to disclose the exact results, or even ballpark how much money is unaccounted for. The only clue to the sheer scope of the matter is that they believe it will take “years” to sort out.
And if there was one thing more dependable than the Pentagon failing an audit and missing an undisclosed, but vast, amount of money, it’s officials downplaying the matter. Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told reporters that the Pentagon “never expected to pass it” in the first place.
Indeed, Shanahan insisted that even though the Pentagon failed the audit, the fact that they even bothered to do an audit at all “is substantial,” and shows effort toward compliance. That said, he said the issue of audits is “irritating to me.”

US Navy Alleges SEAL Was ‘Out of Control’ in Mosul Iraq
NBC – Witness accounts and graphic photos of a Navy SEAL out of control while deployed to Iraq, U.S. Navy prosecutors said in military court at Naval Base San Diego.
Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher arrived at court Wednesday in his uniform and handcuffs.
U.S. Navy prosecutors accuse Gallagher of premeditated murder for the stabbing death of an injured ISIS fighter who they estimate was about 15 years old.
The stabbing happened in Mosul, Iraq in May 2017.
Gallagher is also charged with aggravated assault for shooting Iraqi civilians. Prosecutors want those charges increased to attempted murder.
On Wednesday, the Navy outlined its evidence including cell phone photos that show Gallagher holding the severed head of the fighter during a reenlistment ceremony.

Navy SEALs, Marines Charged With Green Beret Logan Melgar’s Murder
The Daily Beast – The victim allegedly discovered SEALs in Mali were stealing money from an informant fund and soliciting prostitutes.
The military has formally charged two Navy SEALs and two special-operations Marines in one of the most grisly murder cases in recent U.S. history, The Daily Beast has learned.
Two members of elite SEAL Team Six, Petty Officer Anthony E. DeDolph and Chief Petty Officer Adam C. Matthews, along with two Marine Raiders face charges that include felony murder, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, burglary, hazing, and involuntary manslaughter in the strangulation death of a Green Beret, Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar. All four were charged with felony murder and with lying to investigators.

Economy & Business

Trump says U.S. may not impose more tariffs on China
Reuters – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that he may not impose more tariffs on Chinese goods after Beijing sent the United States a list of measures it was willing to take to resolve trade tensions, although he added it was unacceptable that some major items were omitted from the list.

Science & Technology

China’s brightest children are being recruited to develop AI ‘killer bots’
China Morning Post – Beijing Institute of Technology recruits 31 ‘patriotic’ youngsters for new AI weapons development programme.
Expert in international science policy describes course as ‘extremely powerful and troubling’.

Genetically engineered virus spins gold into beads
UC Riverside – The race is on to find manufacturing techniques capable of arranging molecular and nanoscale objects with precision.
Engineers at the University of California, Riverside, have altered a virus to arrange gold atoms into spheroids measuring a few nanometers in diameter. The finding could make production of some electronic components cheaper, easier, and faster.
“Nature has been assembling complex, highly organized nanostructures for millennia with precision and specificity far superior to the most advanced technological approaches,” said Elaine Haberer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering and senior author of the paper describing the breakthrough. “By understanding and harnessing these capabilities, this extraordinary nanoscale precision can be used to tailor and build highly advanced materials with previously unattainable performance.”
Viruses exist in a multitude of shapes and contain a wide range of receptors that bind to molecules. Genetically modifying the receptors to bind to ions of metals used in electronics causes these ions to “stick” to the virus, creating an object of the same size and shape. This procedure has been used to produce nanostructures used in battery electrodes, supercapacitors, sensors, biomedical tools, photocatalytic materials, and photovoltaics.
The virus’ natural shape has limited the range of possible metal shapes. Most viruses can change volume under different scenarios, but resist the dramatic alterations to their basic architecture that would permit other forms.
The M13 bacteriophage, however, is more flexible. Bacteriophages are a type of virus that infects bacteria, in this case, gram-negative bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, which is ubiquitous in the digestive tracts of humans and animals. M13 bacteriophages genetically modified to bind with gold are usually used to form long, golden nanowires.
Studies of the infection process of the M13 bacteriophage have shown the virus can be converted to a spheroid upon interaction with water and chloroform. Yet, until now, the M13 spheroid has been completely unexplored as a nanomaterial template.
Haberer’s group added a gold ion solution to M13 spheroids, creating gold nanobeads that are spiky and hollow.

Scientists say goodbye to physical definition of the kilogram
The Verge-In between coffee breaks and presentations on quantum physics, scientists today voted to redefine the kilogram, the unit that underpins the world’s system of weights. Instead of basing the kilogram’s value on a physical artifact, as has been the case for more than 100 years, it will now be defined using a constant of nature.
Its weight, handily, will not change.
The vote has been centuries in the making, with scientists describing it as the biggest revolution in measurement since the French Revolution. Now, they say, the metric system will fulfill the guiding ideology of metrology established in that period: to create units of measurement “Pour les temps, pour les peuples” — for all time and for all people.
The kilogram is now based on natural constants, not a lump of metal
The use of physical artifacts has been a stumbling block in achieving this goal. For 129 years, the kilogram has been defined as the weight of the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK), a lump of platinum-iridium that’s stored in a vault in Paris. Slight changes to the IPK’s weight (caused by contamination, some speculate) have been a blemish on the metric system’s reputation and a threat to scientific experiments that depend on precise measurement.
With today’s vote, those problems are in the past. The kilogram is now defined using a calculation based on Planck’s constant, or h, which can be thought of as the smallest amount of energy possible. Along with the kilogram, three other units were also redefined: the ampere, Kelvin, and mole, all of which are now officially linked to constants of nature.

Facebook could soon suggest people standing near you as friends
Infowars – Facebook has patented a creepy new feature that uses sensors on your phone to see you in nearby – and suggest them as a friend.
The firm’s patent says the feature could be used when the ‘first user and the second user forgot to obtain each other’s full names and contact information.’
It even reveals that phone sensors could spot people with similar movement patterns’.
‘In one embodiment, the broadcast trigger can occur when data from at least one of a gyroscope, an accelerometer, or a motion processor of the computing system indicates that the computing system is moving in a movement pattern similar to that of a source of the second wireless communication,’ the patent says.
It would use a range of sensors, including Bluetooth and NFC, and also analyze signal strength to find out who is nearby.
The patent goes on to explain how sensors in the phone could monitor nearby people using the same ‘connection suggestion module’.
It could even use GPS, and analyze ‘a stationary pattern, a walking pattern, a running pattern, or a vehicle-riding pattern’ to find users.

Health

Massive ground turkey recall for salmonella contamination includes Oregon, Washington
Oregon Live- On Thursday, Jennie-O recalled 91,388 pounds of raw ground turkey products that may be linked to salmonella outbreaks in multiple state, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.
The raw ground turkey products were produced on Sept. 11, and shipped to stores nationwide, including Oregon and Washington. The products had a “Use by” date of either Oct. 1 or 2. While it’s long past those dates for consumption, officials are concerned about consumers who may have frozen the products after purchase.
These are the recalled products (click here to see the package labels)

Did a Military Experimental Vaccine in 1918 Kill 50-100 Million People Blamed as “Spanish Flu”?
Health Impact News – The “Spanish Flu” killed an estimated 50-100 million people during a pandemic 1918-19. What if the story we have been told about this pandemic isn’t true?
What if, instead, the killer infection was neither the flu nor Spanish in origin?
Newly analyzed documents reveal that the “Spanish Flu” may have been a military vaccine experiment gone awry.
In looking back on the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, we need to delve deeper to solve this mystery.
Summary

The reason modern technology has not been able to pinpoint the killer influenza strain from this pandemic is because influenza was not the killer.
More soldiers died during WWI from disease than from bullets.
The pandemic was not flu. An estimated 95% (or higher) of the deaths were caused by bacterial pneumonia, not influenza/a virus.
The pandemic was not Spanish. The first cases of bacterial pneumonia in 1918 trace back to a military base in Fort Riley, Kansas.
From January 21 – June 4, 1918, an experimental bacterial meningitis vaccine cultured in horses by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York was injected into soldiers at Fort Riley.
During the remainder of 1918 as those soldiers – often living and traveling under poor sanitary conditions – were sent to Europe to fight, they spread bacteria at every stop between Kansas and the frontline trenches in France.
One study describes soldiers “with active infections (who) were aerosolizing the bacteria that colonized their noses and throats, while others—often, in the same “breathing spaces”—were profoundly susceptible to invasion of and rapid spread through their lungs by their own or others’ colonizing bacteria.” (1)
The “Spanish Flu” attacked healthy people in their prime. Bacterial pneumonia attacks people in their prime. Flu attacks the young, old and immunocompromised.
When WW1 ended on November 11, 1918, soldiers returned to their home countries and colonial outposts, spreading the killer bacterial pneumonia worldwide.
During WW1, the Rockefeller Institute also sent the antimeningococcic serum to England, France, Belgium, Italy and other countries, helping spread the epidemic worldwide.

During the pandemic of 1918-19, the so-called “Spanish Flu” killed 50-100 million people, including many soldiers.
Many people do not realize that disease killed far more soldiers on all sides than machine guns or mustard gas or anything else typically associated with WWI.

Groundbreaking study reveals that heart disease is an early indicator of vitamin C deficiency
NaturalNews – Heart disease is usually linked to issues with cholesterol, but researchers are increasingly finding that vitamin C plays an outsized role in heart health. This antioxidant nutrient, which the body uses to make connective tissue, has already gotten some buzz for its utility in cancer treatment, but its effects on the heart may be even greater.
Researchers at the Dr. Rath Research Institute of California found that a vitamin C deficiency can cause coronary heart disease. In their study, they used transgenic mice that mimic the human metabolism in two key ways: They don’t produce vitamin C internally, and they generate lipoprotein to make up for this. After feeding the mice a diet that was lacking in vitamin C, their bodies acted as expected and created their own lipoprotein to fix the vascular walls. This caused them to develop heart issues and atherosclerosis.
Crucially, they discovered that the degree and level of heart disease the mice developed was directly linked to their vitamin C intake and blood levels. Those mice who had consumed the highest amounts of vitamin C naturally produced the least lipoprotein to repair their arteries, and by extension, had the strongest hearts and fewest atherosclerotic lesions.
Therefore, the researchers believe that proper vitamin C intake could be the secret to preventing heart disease and other cardiovascular problems. That doesn’t mean that cholesterol isn’t important; maintaining healthy HDL and LDL cholesterol levels is still a powerful component of overall health, but it may not play as big of a role as once believed

Diabetes spike in Mexican town where Coca-Cola used as drinking water, currency & religious offering
RT – A Mexican town, next to a Coca-Cola plant, is running so low on water that locals have turned to the sugary drink as an alternative. It’s drunk, used in religious ceremonies and even as a currency. While diabetes and obesity soar.
Cristobal de las Casas, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, has for years been caught between an inept local government and a multinational corporation which is draining its local water supply in a case of crony capitalism at its worst.
Coca-Cola is produced locally at the Femsa plant, which bottles and sells the drink across Mexico. Under a long-standing agreement with the Mexican government, the factory owns the rights to draw out more than 300,000 gallons (around 1,135,623 liters) of water per day.
Desperate locals average more than two liters of soda per day, as it’s often more accessible than bottled water and is almost as cheap, with a 1.5-liter Coca-Cola bottle costing roughly 18 Mexican pesos ($0.88), compared with water, which costs 10 Mexican pesos ($0.48) per bottle.
The Chiapas state has seen a 30-percent increase in the mortality rate from diabetes between 2013 and 2016.