HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Government vs. ransomware attacks By Julio Rivera

Posted By on April 25th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/government_vs_rannsomware_attacks.html

The past week gave us a glimpse into what an increasingly possible, widespread rash of ransomware attacks would look like in a worst-case scenario for America. An outbreak of similar penetrations wreaked havoc on Augusta, ME, Imperial County, CA, Stuart, FL, and Greenville, NC.

In Augusta, ME, the ransomware attacks affected municipal services ranging from the police dispatch system to the municipal financial systems, countywide billing services, automobile excise tax records, property tax assessor’s records, and even general assistance hotlines. Greenville, SC is said to be relying on paper forms currently, as its IT department sorts through the issue, while workers in Imperial County, CA, are using their personal email accounts along with Facebook to communicate with residents.

The specific variant of ransomware used is known as Ryuk ransomware, first identified on August 13th, 2018, and categorized as a hybrid between the Bitpaymer Ransomware and the Hermes Ransomware. The Bitpaymer ransomware strain uses an almost identical ransom note, but Ryuk’s encryption method is believed to be based on the Hermes ransomware variant.

POLITICS Comments turned off

NYC Mayor Joins Chorus of Crazed Democrats Trying to Lose the 2020 Election By Megan Fox

Posted By on April 25th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/nyc-mayor-joins-chorus-of-crazed-democrats-trying-to-lose-the-2020-election/

Democrats are determined to outdo one-another with one ridiculous proclamation after the next. Chief “Full of Bull” Warren promised to take money from those of us who paid for school to pay off student loans for millennial deadbeats. (I might agree to pay for 1/1024th of student loan debt if the students could name the three branches of government without using Google.) Bernie Sanders wants to let the Boston Marathon bomber vote from prison (because it’s highly likely that psychopaths are Democrat voters); Kamala Harris (descendant of actual slave owners) and the whitest “Hispanic” anyone’s ever seen and Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke say they will take money from people who never owned slaves and give it to people who have never been enslaved. A bunch of Democrats passed late-term abortion laws in a handful of states with more to come, disgusting the whole nation. Now, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is clearly positioning himself to join the ranks of the pandering Democrat presidential hopefuls, has issued the most absurd proclamation of all. He’s going to ban skyscrapers… in New York City.

“We are going to introduce legislation to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming. They have no place in our city or our Earth anymore,” he spat into a microphone while several people standing behind him looked visibly confused and dismayed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mayor de Blasio Sets Out To Accelerate New York City’s Decline Francis Menton

Posted By on April 25th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

When Bill de Blasio took office as the new Mayor of New York City back in 2014, many on the right looked at his policy prescriptions and predicted the rapid reversal of the City’s economic revival, potentially followed by rapid economic collapse. But not me! As I had originally written in this post of April 16, 2013, the consequence of bad — even disastrous — economic policy is not immediate economic collapse, but rather what I called “gradual relative decline.” That post looked particularly at Venezuela, then 15 years into the rule of Hugo Chavez, and far into the process of adopting over-the-top socialist policies that a Comsymp NYC Mayor could only dream about — everything from nationalization of most of the economy, to doubling the size of the state sector, to government deficit of 15% of GDP, and so forth. And yet, in its official (fraudulent) statistics, Venezuela was still showing economic growth, just not as fast as the growth in countries that allowed private enterprise to flourish.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Overseas investments in Israel expanded Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on April 25th, 2019

https://bit.ly/2L296wX

1. 368 multinational corporations (mostly from the USA) operate in Israel – mainly research & development centers – leveraging Israel’s brain power. Most of the multinationals initialed operations with the acquisition of Israeli startups. 105 employ more than 100 persons each. 128 are in the area of information technology and enterprise software; 64 – telecommunications; 48 – life sciences; 42 – Internet; 38 – semiconductors, etc.

Intel has the largest presence – 12,800 employees in four research & development centers (Haifa, Jerusalem, Petah Tikvah and Yakum) and two manufacturing facilities (Jerusalem and Kiryat Gat, which is one of Intel’s most advanced facilities in the world), exporting $3.6BN annually. Intel’s 7th and 8th generation Intel-Core processors were developed mainly in Israel. Intel Capital’s investment portfolio includes 28 Israeli startups in the areas of cybersecurity, Internet, enterprise software, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles and 5G (the next phase in global telecommunications). In 2018, Intel Capital invested $120MN in 14 Israeli startups, out of a total of $400MN invested in 95 startups globally.
Additional multinational corporations operating in Israel: Microsoft, IBM, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Marvell, Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Google, Cisco, 3M, AOL, Yahoo, E-bay, Amazon, Pfizer, Oracle, Sony, SanDisk, Philips, Siemens, Deutsche Telecom, Alibaba, Huawei, etc.

2. A record of 211 overseas venture capital funds (mostly USA) operate in Israel – up from 149 in 2013 – primarily investing in software startups (source: Israel VC Research Center).

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton is Whistling Past the Graveyard with Impeachment Talk By Debra Heine

Posted By on April 25th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/hillary-clinton-is-whistling-past-the-graveyard-with-impeachment-talk/

“The woman basically voted to send 20 percent of out plutonium to Russia,” Giuliani pointed out, adding, “her crooked foundation got $150 million” from the Russians. “Her husband got a $2.5 million speaking fee …I don’t know it kinda looks like bribery, it smells like bribery, it sounds like bribery … I’m not saying it is — but it comes awful close,” he said.

That Hillary Clinton certainly has chutzpah.

In a blistering op-ed published in The Washington Post Wednesday, she argued that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “documents a serious crime against the American people” and that President Trump probably broke the law.

The former first lady, who famously had her subpoenaed emails destroyed with bleachbit and her blackberry phones smashed with a hammer. suggested that Congress should should hold “substantive hearings” to investigate Trump’s alleged attempts to obstruct Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

During an interview with Time Magazine on Tuesday, Clinton ominously called the Mueller report a “roadmap” to impeachment and said the probe was just the “beginning.”

Said Clinton: “I think there is enough there that any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted, but because of the rule in the Justice Department that you can’t indict a sitting President, the whole matter of obstruction was very directly sent to the Congress.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Denmark’s Blaspheming Mother written by Andy Ngo

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/04/22/denmarks-blaspheming-mother/

“This is a nightmare. We’re in shock,” Jaleh Tavakoli says. Last month, the 36-year-old Iranian-Danish critic of Islam received notification from Danish social services that she is no longer fit to care for the 8-year-old child she’s fostered since birth. Why? Tavakoli, a columnist and author, says it is because of her politically incorrect views on Islam. Social services maintains it is looking out for the best interest of a potentially vulnerable child. Tavakoli lives under security precautions, has been threatened on the streets of Copenhagen, and even survived a jihadist attack in 2015. As she prepares for the most difficult challenge of her life, Danish society must contend with the unprecedented challenge of where to draw the line when radical Islam intersects with free speech and children’s rights.

Denmark, a kingdom of just 5.7 million people, consistently ranks among the top countries in the world in quality-of-life indexes. The small Nordic state is envied for its strong universal healthcare system, high levels of trust and extremely generous welfare benefits. In 2018, it ranked third in the world for having the happiest citizens according to the UN World Happiness Report (it has topped the list three times since the report began in 2012).

Denmark has also settled hundreds of thousands of immigrants, primarily from the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Today, around 10 percent of its population are immigrants—a rapid demographic change that only started in the last decades. And yet, beneath the façade of happiness surveys and the welfare state, Denmark has been unable to escape the social and political tensions now afflicting the body politic of nearly every country on the continent. Immigration, Islamism and integration are salient issues even in the happiest place on earth.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

FDA approves 1st generic nasal spray to treat opioid overdose (From Israel)

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

U.S. regulators have approved the first generic nasal spray version of Narcan, a drug that reverses opioid overdoses. The Food and Drug Administration gave the green light Friday for naloxone spray from Israel’s Teva Pharmaceuticals.

“In the wake of the opioid crisis, a number of efforts are underway to make this emergency overdose reversal treatment more readily available and more accessible. In addition to this approval of the first generic naloxone nasal spray, moving forward we will prioritize our review of generic drug applications for naloxone,” Douglas Throckmorton, M.D., deputy center director for regulatory programs in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

Naloxone has been sold as a nasal spray in the U.S. since 2016 under the brand name Narcan. Pharmacists can dispense it without a prescription. It is also sold as a generic or brand-name drug in automatic injectors, prefilled syringes and vials.

A pack of two Narcan nasal sprays cost about $130 to $150 without insurance. Teva didn’t immediately provide the product’s price or when it will be available.

More than 47,600 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2017, a toll that has been rising for two decades.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Who to believe, Jake or Waleed? Roger Franklin

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/

For want, as yet, of Waleed Aly laying out with his customary attention to nuance how Australians, at least those of the ABC-watching and Age-reading demographic, must regard the recent “irritations” in Sri Lanka, readers might care to consult the writings of another and somewhat less prominent Muslim thinker, young Jake Bilardi.

The Melbourne teenager, as some might recall, departed from Iraq for an imagined Paradise after failing to take any enemies of Allah with him when he detonated himself and an explosive-laden truck. That was in 2015 and, as is Facebook’s custom, his posts were taken down straight away.

Quadrant Online managed to grab and copy those disturbing screeds before they vanished forever,all of them preserved here. To read them again today, with 300-plus funerals underway in Colombo and other of the island’s Christian parishes, is to gain an insight into why, whenever and whatever Waleed Aly might eventually have to contribute, the problem is and always will be Islam, most particularly its salafist stream.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

How to Get Fired at Duke Publishing fake history is fine, but don’t make students feel uncomfortable. By James Freeman

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get-fired-at-duke-11556133633

Zion Williamson isn’t the only star leaving Duke University after this academic year. But at least the basketball phenom is allowed to leave voluntarily to pursue an NBA career. A popular professor is being driven off campus for reasons that are not entirely clear.

After teaching for nearly two decades at Duke, Evan Charney was told last year by the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy that his contract would not be renewed after this academic year. He reports that he had not been warned about any problems with his teaching and was not told why he was being dismissed.

This week, as he prepares to depart, he describes what happened after he filed a complaint with Duke’s Faculty Hearing Committee. Unlike his Sanford colleagues, this outfit at least gave him some vague sense of why he was getting sacked:

Professor Charney’s tendency to provoke negative reactions, and perhaps harm, among some students in the classroom due to his confrontational teaching style—a style that had a tendency to be polarizing among students, particularly in a required Sanford course in which not all students could choose to have Professor Charney as an instructor.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Mark Horowitz Reviews Two Books on Ben Hecht

Posted By on April 24th, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/books/review/adina-hoffman-julien-gorbach-ben-hecht-biography.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

BEN HECHT
Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
By Adina Hoffman

THE NOTORIOUS BEN HECHT
Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist
By Julien Gorbach

For understandable reasons, biographies about Ben Hecht have focused
almost exclusively on his screenwriting career in Hollywood. And why
wouldn’t they? Consider a few of his credits: “Underworld,” directed
by Josef von Sternberg, for which Hecht won the first Academy Award.
(Not his first Academy Award, the first Academy Award ever given for
best story. The year was 1927.) “Scarface,” “The Front Page,”
“Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Wuthering Heights,” “His
Girl Friday,” “Spellbound,” “Notorious.” And that’s just films with
his name on them. Uncredited, he script-doctored countless others,
including “Stagecoach,” “Gone With the Wind,” “A Star Is Born” (1937)
and “Roman Holiday.”

Across four decades, Hecht worked on about 200 movies. He helped
establish the ground rules for entire genres, including the gangster
film, the newspaper picture, the screwball comedy and postwar film
noir. Jean-Luc Godard said “he invented 80 percent of what is used in
Hollywood movies today.”