Today's News: September 20, 2018

World News

Spokesman for Revolutionary Socialist Party in South Africa Says White “Existence Is a Crime”
Black First, Land First (BLF) is the name of a revolutionary socialist political party in South Africa that is indistinguishable from the Communist Party. Its spokesperson, Lindsay Maasdorp, says white “existence is a crime”. The party promotes the false belief that whites stole all of the land they came to occupy and, therefore, all of it now should be taken by the government. Maasdorp has come under fire in the past for his post on Facebook and Twitter stating, “I have aspirations to kill white people, and this must be achieved!” [For the record, we do not like reporting this story because of the possibility it will enrage white people against black people and, thereby, advance the goals of those who want race war as an excuse for martial law that never goes away. If we did not report it, however, we would be guilty of news censorship.]

Exposed: Document Proves That the US War in Afghanistan Was Based on A Lie
James Corbett – Justification for the US war in Afghanistan is no small matter. It is the moral basis for killing of over 100,000 Afghans plus the death of over 2,000 America soldiers. The basis for this war was an official document that was classified as secret but which was said to contain conclusive proof that the 911 attack on the US was directed from Afghanistan. Now, at long last, that document has been found and, to the great shame of those in high places, there was no proof whatsoever. We now know why the document was classified as secret – not because it contained information that would bastardize national security, but because it would have jeopardized those who told the lie. The war was planned in detail long before 911, and its purpose was, not to fight terrorism, but to control the flow of oil in the Middle East. James Corbett does an impeccable job of piecing together the grim details of this story.
Video: BOMBSHELL Documents Expose The Secret Lie That Started the Afghan War

$674 billion of tanks, fighter jets, subs and more to boost US military power in 2019
Fox – New destroyers, fighter jets, tanks, submarines, Black Hawk helicopters, supersonic weapons and more will make the U.S. military even more powerful next year.

US Can’t Pursue New Treaty With Iran After Violating Nuclear Deal – Tehran
Sputnik – ranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has once again lashed out at the United States over the latter’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal and plans to substitute Iran’s oil in the market.
“US calls JCPOA [the nuclear deal] a personal agreement between two governments, claiming it seeks a treaty. Wrong.” Zarif tweeted. “US has violated its treaty obligations too. … Apparently, US only mocks calls for peace,” the Iranian top diplomat stated.

Negotiators Struggle to Make Progress as PM May Sticks by Chequers Brexit Plan
Sputnik – The two-day Salzburg summit has ended with EU leaders failing to make progress in Brexit negotiations, and with both sides remaining as stubborn as ever, a no-deal Brexit is looking increasingly likely.

U.S. News, Politics & Government

House passes bill to create terrorist registry
WND – A bill that targets the problem of “radicalization” by creating a national terrorist registry passed the House of Representatives.
t would help the United States track dozens of convicted terrorists whose prison terms are nearing completion, points out Patrick Dunleavy, a former deputy inspector general for the New York State Department of Corrections.
The Terrorist Release Announcements to Counter Extremist Recidivism Act, or TRACER, would direct the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to inform state and local authorities of anticipated release dates and where the released terrorists will live.
Dunleavy, writing for the Investigative Project on Terrorism, notes that most of the hundreds of people convicted of terrorist-related offenses since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were “motivated by a radical Islamic ideology which calls for the destruction of the United States and Western democracies.”
More than 132,000 pounds of Cargill ground beef recalled over E. coli risk with 1 dead, 17 sickened
USA Today – For the second consecutive month, a Colorado-based meat producer that ships nationwide is recalling thousands of pounds of ground beef for a possible E. coli contamination.
According to a notice issued Wednesday by the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service, Cargill Meat Solutions is recalling approximately 132,000 pounds of ground beef products made from the chuck portion of the cow.
Officials said the ground beef was produced and packaged on June 21, 2018, and affects 12 different Cargill products. The full list of products can be found here.

Four Congressmen, Including Pelosi and Schumer, Confirm in Writing that there Is an Agreement among Intelligence Officials To Withhold Info From the President

Edward Griffin – On Monday, President Trump demanded that documents related to the Russia probe be declassified. In response, Democrat Congressmen, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner, who are on the Intelligence Oversight Committee, sent a letter to top intelligence leaders reminding them that they had agreed they “would not provide the White House or any of the President’s attorneys with access to sensitive information briefed to a small group of designated Members.” In other words, these intelligence officials who are part of the Executive Branch, which is subject to the authority of the President, agreed to withhold information from their boss. [If the President runs true to form, he will do nothing about this. He may not even mention it.]

4 get cancer from donated organ, 3 die
Four European patients developed breast cancer after receiving organs from the same donor, a case report explains.
The patients developed breast cancer years after their transplants, with three of them dying of the disease.
Dr. Frederike Bemelman, professor of nephrology at the University of Amsterdam and author of the report, stressed that this is an “extremely rare” case, the first she has encountered in 20 years in the field of transplantation immunology. “There is always a small risk” of something going wrong during a medical procedure, she said. “Even if you undergo a simple gallbladder procedure, you also have a small chance of something happening to you during the procedure.”

Trump Admin Announces Billion Dollars in Grants to Fight Opioid Crisis
Washington Free Beacon – Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar announced one billion dollars in grants Wednesday to help combat the opioid epidemic across the country, adding to major federal actions on opioids throughout the past week.
Disbursed through state-level programs, $900 million will be used to support medication-assisted treatment with methadone, buprenorphine, and vivitrol, all drugs which curb opioid cravings. The funds will also be used to provide prevention, treatment, and recovery activities aimed at opioid use disorder.

James O’Keefe Strikes Again: Open Communists in GAO Admits to Slow-Walking President’s Agenda
The Gateway Pundit – TODAY’S NEW REPORT features a Government Accountability Office (GAO) employee and self-proclaimed Communist actively engaged in potentially illegal political activity. Natarajan Subramanian is a government auditor for the GAO and a member of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America.
In one exchange, Subramanian describes his political philosophies and those of his comrades in DSA:
“We have a bunch of just communists, like no prefix, and that’s basically me. We [also] have some folks who are Trotskyists or Leninists.”
“Sometimes as a government employee, you have to keep it under wraps a little bit so you don’t get into trouble and that’s kind of what I try to do.”
Subramanian says that federal employees in executive branch agencies can deliberately work less efficiently in order to slow down the implementation of the President’s agenda:
“If you’re in [an] executive branch agency you can slow ball things to a degree, that it’s like ineffective, and maybe you get in trouble, or maybe you get fired or resign or whatever, but you slowed [Trump’s agenda] down for a certain period of time.”
In today’s release Project Veritas includes several experts who discuss how Subramanian and other communists are openly violating US law with their activities.

Economy & Business

Time Is Running Out for NAFTA 2.0 to Include Canada
The New American – As talks begin again today in Washington between top people from the United States and Canada over revisions to the inaccurately-named North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the pressure is all on Canada. Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House majority whip, has about had it with Canada’s stalling. Negotiations have been taking place for nearly 14 months and essentially have been going nowhere. Said Scalise,
There is a growing frustration with many in Congress regarding Canada’s negotiating tactics. While we would all like to see Canada remain part of this three-country coalition, there is not an unlimited amount of time for it to be part of this new agreement.
Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland was adamant: “Any negotiator who goes into a negotiation believing that he or she must get a deal at any price — that is a negotiator who will be forced to pay the maximum price for that deal. No deal is better than a bad deal.”

Trump Gives US Treasury Powers to Impose Anti-Russia Sanctions – White House
Sputnik – In early August, the United States announced a new round of sanctions against Russia over its alleged involvement in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in UK’s Salisbury in March.
US President Donald Trump has given the Department of Treasury the authority, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), to impose sanctions on Russia, the White House said in a press release.

Trump demands OPEC lower oil prices, claims US ‘protects’ Middle East countries
RT – US President Donald Trump has accused OPEC’s Middle East producers of “pushing for higher and higher oil prices.” Trump, who is a proponent of cheap crude, has told OPEC countries they would not be safe for long without the US.

Pot stocks now bigger than Chipotle, Macy’s
CNBC -Wall Street’s obsession with marijuana stocks has propelled industry leaders to lofty market valuations that now rival those of household names such as Twitter, Hershey and CBS.
Canadian cannabis company Tilray, which soared more than 50 percent Wednesday in trading on the Nasdaq, has seen its market capitalization rocket to over $21 billion as of 12:25 p.m. ET. Its share price is up more than 400 percent over the past month.
Its U.S. market value is now larger than half the stocks that comprise the S&P 500.

Amazon hit by E.U. antitrust probe
CNBC – The EU regulators behind a $5 billion fine against Google are turning their attentions to Amazon.
European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has begun questioning merchants on Amazon’s use of their data, Vestager said Wednesday. The issue, she said, is whether Amazon is using data from the merchants it hosts on its site to secure an advantage in selling products against those same retailers.
“These are very early days and we haven’t formally opened a case. We are trying to make sure that we get the full picture,” Vestager said during a news conference Wednesday. The probe comes as the world’s largest online retailer faces growing calls for regulation. Investors and insiders have long cited Amazon’s size and reach as reason to break the company up. President Donald Trump has hinted at antitrust action against Amazon as part of continued attacks against CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was set to meet this month with state officials to discuss antitrust concerns in Silicon Valley, though much of the regulation on Big Tech thus far has come out of Brussels.

Energy & Environment

‘There is still more of hurricane season to go’: Expert warns another tropical threat may make US landfall
Accuweather – Even though the tropical Atlantic is void of organized storms at this time, conditions may again get busy over the next couple of weeks with a few areas of potential development.
Sept. 10 marked the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season from a climatology standpoint. However, hurricane season does not officially end until Nov. 30. The coming weeks into mid-October often bring several additional tropical storms and hurricanes. This year may not be any exception.
AccuWeather long-range tropical meteorologists, led by Hurricane Expert Dan Kottlowski, are projecting two to four more tropical storms, of which one or two may become hurricanes, following Tropical Storm Joyce.
There have been 10 tropical storms, of which five became hurricanes. Three named systems, Alberto, Florence and Gordon, made landfall in the United States.
Thus far, Florence has been the only major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) in the basin.

Science & Technology

Child Protective Services to Use AI, Big Data To Predict Child Abuse
Technocracy.news – Pre-crime is taken to a new extreme to smoke out child abuse situations but to get there, millions of citizens will suffer privacy abuse.Many false positives will also be wrongfully abused. It this trading one kind of abuse for another? Indeed, Technocrats have created an ethical firestorm.
The Guardian obtained details of all predictive indicators considered for inclusion in Thurrock council’s child safeguarding system. They include history of domestic abuse, youth offending and truancy.
More surprising indicators such as rent arrears and health data were initially considered but excluded from the final model. In the case of both Thurrock, a council in Essex, and the London borough of Hackney, families can be flagged to social workers as potential candidates for the Troubled Families programme. Through this scheme councils receive grants from central government for helping households with long-term difficulties such as unemployment.
Such systems inevitably raise privacy concerns. Wajid Shafiq, the chief executive of Xantura, the company providing predictive analytics work to both Thurrock and Hackney, insists that there is a balance to be struck between privacy rights and the use of technology to deliver a public good.

China’s Technocracy Introduces Scorecards For Continuous Control Of Citizens
Technocracy.news – Data mining and data fusion of disparate databases plus advanced identification technology like DNA and facial recognition, is all laser-focused on putting every citizen under the microscope for signs of dissent. Dissenters are punished and branded as enemies of the state. This same system of oppression is in its early states in America.
China’s chilling dictatorship is moving quickly to introduce social scorecards by which all citizens will be monitored 24/7 and ranked on their behaviour.
The Communist Party’s plan is for every one of its 1.4 billion citizens to be at the whim of a dystopian social credit system, and it’s on track to be fully operational by the year 2020.
An active pilot program has already seen millions of people each assigned a score out of 800 and either reap its benefits or suffer its consequences — depending on which end of the scale they sit.
Under the social credit scheme, points are lost and gained based on readings from a sophisticated network of 200 million surveillance cameras — a figure set to triple in 18 months.
The program has been enabled by rapid advances in facial recognition, body scanning and geo-tracking.

New research shows the skin “remembers” injuries, which helps it heal faster the next time
NaturalNews – A study from The Rockefeller University reveals that wounds or other harmful experiences caused by inflammation impart long-lasting memories to the stem cells residing in the skin, teaching them to heal subsequent injuries faster.
In the study, the researchers discovered that the stem cells deep within the inner layers of our skin, which are responsible for replenishing the outer layers, take their cue from inflammation, the body’s response to injury or infection.
When the skin experiences irritation such as a sunburn, or infection by microbes, or injuries such as a paper cut, it becomes inflamed – red, swollen, and painful – as its way to initiate repair to the damaged tissue. The stem cells were found to remain in place after the skin has recovered from inflammation, and will recognize a recurring inflammation coming on after being sensitized to it the first time, and will respond to it more rapidly.
In experiments with mice, the research team found that wounds closed more than twice as fast in the area of the skin that had already experienced inflammation than in the area that had never been damaged. This holds true even if the initial inflammation happened as far back as six months earlier, the equivalent of about 15 years for a human. The team determined that the healing sped up due to the stem cells’ faster reaction to repair the recurring damage.

Health

Research finds exercise increases brain size, memory function as you age
NaturalNews – Here’s one more reason to start working out — a study has shown that regular exercise can benefit our brain in the long run.
The study, a collaborative effort between researchers from Australia’s National Institute of Complementary Medicine at Western Sydney University and the Division of Psychology and Mental Health at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, indicates that aerobic exercises directly affect the brain’s hippocampus — the region that governs memory, including the creation of long-term memory from short-term memory. (Related: Regular exercise increases brain volume, protects against age-related dementia.)
Brain health deteriorates as a person ages. The average brain starts shrinking at a rate of five percent per decade after reaching the age of 40.
Aerobic exercises, commonly known as “cardio”, make the heart pump fresh blood to working muscles. Common examples of these include running, hiking, swimming, and dancing. Previous studies, as well as some animal tests, have indicated that this kind of exercise increases the size of the hippocampus. However, evidence of this benefit applying to humans has been inconsistent at best.

Young children exposed to indoor air pollution or cigarette smoke found to have increased risk of respiratory sickness
NaturalNews – There are two things in the air that people know to be harmful: air pollution and tobacco smoke. While the particular dangers that each bring are well-documented, the same can’t be said on how both affect expectant mothers and their newborn. These risks were the focus of a study made by the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University in South Africa and the University of Queensland in Australia. The study, which appeared on The Lancet Planetary Health, revealed that newborn infants exposed to indoor air pollution and tobacco smoke were more likely to develop lower respiratory tract infections and wheezing.
The longitudinal birth cohort study, conducted on mothers and infants in Paarl, South Africa, also revealed that newborns who were exposed to smoke before they were born – either from their mothers or a family member – also had an increased risk of wheezing.