June, 2019

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is similar to mad cow disease (formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE). It infects deer, elk, and moose and it's spread by a protein — called a prion — which has the unusual ability to spread between animals causing a deadly wasting disease...

"I will tell you, something that attacks your brain, I will never take that chance to eat an animal that can be contaminated, or maybe contaminated. I will never try that."

Health Canada recommends that people avoid eating meat from animals known to be infected with the prion protein. There are precautions for hunters, too. They're encouraged, when handling carcasses, to have those animals tested before eating the meat...

"I think the Canadian consumer should be very worried," Cashman said.

The Oregon Capitol will be closed Saturday due to a “possible militia threat” from right-wing protesters as a walkout by Republican lawmakers over landmark climate change legislation drags on. Republican state senators fled the Legislature — and some, the state — earlier this week to deny the majority Democrats enough votes to take up the climate bill, which would dramatically reduce fossil fuel emissions by 2050... Gov. Kate Brown then dispatched the state police to round up the rogue lawmakers, but none appeared in the Capitol on Friday... Right-wing groups posted their support for the GOP lawmakers Friday on social media — in one instance offering to provide escorts to them should the state police come for them. A group of local Republicans were set to protest inside the Capitol on Saturday when lawmakers were present, and anti-government groups threatened to join, prompting the statehouse shutdown.

US Cyber Command on Thursday launched an operation against an Iranian spy group, despite President Donald Trump's last-minute scrapping of a direct military strike, former intelligence officials said in a Yahoo News report. The Iranian group is believed to have supported the limpet mine attacks against two tanker ships earlier last week, which resulted in the US increasing its military posture against the country. The group reportedly tracked and targeted both military and civilian vessels sailing through the Strait of Hormuz.

While the pope has emerged as a leading champion for refugees and migrants around the world, anti-immigration politicians with a populist appeal have found increasing support among once-powerful conservative Catholic figures who have been sidelined within the church by Francis.

Cardinal Burke and his fellow ultraconservative prelates are working to extend ecclesiastical cover to nationalist politicians by hailing them as champions for Western Christianity and traditional values in the face of what they suggest is a Muslim migrant invasion...

The five blacklisted organizations placed on the so-called Entity List includes supercomputer maker Sugon, which is heavily dependent on U.S. suppliers including chipmakers Intel, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. The other four are the Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology and three Sugon affiliates. The Commerce Department called their activities “contrary to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”

Sugon and the Wuxi Jiangnan Institute, which the U.S. said is owned by a Chinese army research institute, are involved in China’s push to develop next-generation “exascale” high performance computing to assist with military modernization. The technology involved supports such military-related tasks as running nuclear simulations, calculating missile trajectories and hypersonic algorithms, said Paul Triolo, technology analyst with the global risk-assessing Eurasia Group.

Since Trump’s inauguration, he has reduced the levels at which Syrian refugees are arriving in the U.S. Between January 20, 2017, and June 2019, only about 2,419 Syrian refugees have entered the country — nearly 97 percent of which are Muslim and 1.4 percent of which are Christians and Catholics.

Compare this level to Obama’s surge of Syrian refugees between January 20, 2014, and June 2016 when about 6,368 Syrian nationals were granted entry to the country. Almost 99 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted by the Obama administration during this period were Muslim and less than 0.8 percent were Christians and Catholics.

"People are eating away at their brain with a really bad fast-food diet and little-to-no exercise," Cherbuin said in a university newsletter.

"We've found strong evidence that people's unhealthy eating habits and lack of exercise for sustained periods of time puts them at serious risk of developing type 2 diabetes and significant declines in brain function, such as dementia and brain shrinkage."

The invocation was the first given by the Satanic Temple since the borough changed its invocation policy in November. The new policy allows for anyone in the borough to offer an invocation, no matter their religion. The change in policy came after the Alaska Superior Court found the former policy unconstitutional and in violation of the state’s constitution’s establishment clause.

In her invocation, Iris Fontana — a member of the Satanic Temple and the prevailing plaintiff in the lawsuit against the borough — called the room to be present, and for attendees to clear their minds. She asked listeners to embrace the impulse to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Cook County State Attorney Kim Foxx's handling of the controversial Jussie Smollett alleged hate crime case -- including the contentious decision to suddenly drop all charges against him -- will be examined by a special prosecutor, an Illinois judge ruled Friday afternoon. The decision by Cook County Judge Michael Toomin comes after a deluge of criticism and second-guessing regarding Foxx's management of the case, in which Smollett claimed he was attacked in the early morning hours of Jan. 29 while walking home to his Chicago apartment. Toomin, according to the Chicago Tribune, said the special prosecutor could re-charge Smollett.

I found exceedingly rich, white men with enormous cultural influence are funding the transgender lobby and various transgender organizations. These include but are not limited to Jennifer Pritzker (a male who identifies as transgender); George Soros; Martine Rothblatt (a male who identifies as transgender and transhumanist); Tim Gill (a gay man); Drummond Pike; Warren and Peter Buffett; Jon Stryker (a gay man); Mark Bonham (a gay man); and Ric Weiland (a deceased gay man whose philanthropy is still LGBT-oriented). Most of these billionaires fund the transgender lobby and organizations through their own organizations, including corporations...

These funders often go through anonymous funding organizations such as Tides Foundation, founded and operated by Pike. Large corporations, philanthropists, and organizations can send enormous sums of money to the Tides Foundation, specify the direction the funds are to go, and have the funds get to their destination anonymously. Tides Foundation creates a legal firewall and tax shelter for foundations and funds political campaigns, often using legally dubious tactics...

In the lawsuit, Huawei said that it shipped telecommunications equipment from China, including a computer server and Ethernet switch, to a testing laboratory in California. After the testing was done, the equipment was shipped back to China. No application for a license was made because none was needed, the lawsuit claims. But the equipment was seized in Alaska by the U.S. government, and no decision has been made about whether a license is required to ship it, the filing said.

Nine people died in a plane crash in Hawaii on Friday, the Hawaii Department of Transportation said. The twin-engine King Air plane went down near Dillingham Airfield. There appeared to be no survivors, it said in a statement. The cause of the crash was not immediately clear.

NASA has released a photo taken by its Curiosity rover that shows a mysterious, unexplained white light on Mars.

The tenth international meeting on security has just concluded in the Russian the city of Ufa. The forum has been under-reported, but it represents one of the few global examples of multilateral meetings between high-level representatives of countries that are in conflict...
The most important news of the day coming from Ufa was revealed by Tass:

“A high-ranking official from the US National Security Council will take part in an international meeting of high security representatives at Ufa on June 18-20, Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council Alexander Venediktov said in an interview with the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily on Sunday.”

This disclosure is particularly relevant as the US has not sent any representatives to attend the international security meeting in the last four years...

A war against Iran is a red line for virtually all forum participants. The fact that the US is represented at the forum at a time of elevated tensions with Iran, especially after having not attended for the previous four years, is a good signal from the Trump administration that it is willing to open dialogue with Iran despite the risk of continued provocations or intentional accidents between the two countries...

The news comes three days after the abrupt resignation of acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan, whose hopes of getting the job collapsed amid ethics questions, complaints about his leadership style and media scrutiny of his troubled family history...

The White House also said Friday that Trump will nominate Pentagon comptroller David Norquist — the brother of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist — to be deputy Defense secretary, and Army Undersecretary Ryan McCarthy to be Army secretary.

Richard Barry, a former Toys “R” Us executive who is now CEO of new entity Tru Kids Inc., has been pitching his vision to reincarnate the chain to toymakers, including at an industry conference this week, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public. The stores are slated to be about 10,000-square feet, roughly a third of the size of the brand’s big-box outlets that closed last year, the people said. The locations will also have more experiences, like play areas.,,

FBI agents searched the Georgetown home of D.C. Councilman Jack Evans on Friday, one day after he put out a letter saying he would step down from the board that oversees the Metro transit agency. D.C. police secured the area while agents, operating under a court-approved federal warrant, searched the home on P Street NW for about three and a half hours, starting at 6 a.m. Federal prosecutors would not say what they were looking for.

The “family op,” as it is referred to at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, is slated to target up to 2,000 families facing deportation orders in as many as 10 U.S. cities, including Houston, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and other major immigration destinations, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the law enforcement operation.

President Trump sat down Friday for an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," marking the first time he will appear on the program during his presidency. Moderator Chuck Todd tweeted that he had spent the morning interviewing the president at the White House. The conversation will air on Sunday...

Here's a preview:

EXCLUSIVE: In an exclusive interview with Chuck Todd, President Donald Trump says he hadn’t given final approval to Iran strikes, no planes were in the air. pic.twitter.com/qHtTx7Zql5

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 21, 2019