Free Thought Project – by Jay Syrmopoulos

Washington, D.C. – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg looked uneasy as he gave testimony for five hours on Tuesday before 44 U.S. Senators. Wednesday, he appeared before before 55 members of the House of Representative regarding the role of Facebook and to how the company can address consumer data-privacy concerns in the wake of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal.  Continue reading “9 Questions Mark Zuckerberg Strangely Couldn’t Answer During His Senate Hearing”

Zero Hedge – by Tyler Durden

Update: The Russian warships leaving port has been reported as a drill, as InterFax reports:

Russian Navy ships, starting from April 11, will conduct exercises near the coast of Syria, follow from the international notification for aviation personnel (NOTAM) and navigational warning for seafarers.
Continue reading “11 Russian Warships Leave Syrian Port To Conduct Exercises”

Bloomberg – by Jennifer Kaplan

The U.S. marijuana industry has a new spokesman: John Boehner.

The Republican former Speaker of the House has joined the advisory board of Acreage Holdings, a company that cultivates, processes and dispenses cannabis in 11 U.S. states. Boehner’s endorsement, after saying nine years ago he was “unalterably opposed” to legalization, could be considered a watershed event: Marijuana has gone mainstream.  Continue reading “Ex-Speaker John Boehner Joins Marijuana Firm’s Advisory Board”

New York Daily News – by Leonard Greene

They were part of the city’s Bravest and Finest, but prosecutors say two ex-cops and a former firefighter are now among the Sleaziest.

Three former NYPD officers — including one who also used to be a firefighter — were arrested Wednesday for separate schemes that netted them more than $1 million in bogus disability benefits, authorities said.  Continue reading “Ex-NYPD cops cuffed for swiping $1M in disability grifts”

The Hill – by Ellen Mitchell

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Wednesday accepted federal funding to add National Guard troops to his state while blasting President Trump over his immigration policies.

Brown wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen that the California National Guard would accept federal funding to add “approximately 400 Guard members statewide to supplement the staffing of its ongoing program to combat transnational crime.”  Continue reading “California gov accepts funding to add National Guard troops, blasts Trump over immigration”

AOL

NEW YORK, April 11 (Reuters) – Gun control advocates are planning to send birthday packages to newly turned 18-year-olds in 10 states where they believe pro-gun lawmakers are vulnerable. Inside each: a voter registration form.

The effort is part of a teen voter sign-up campaign aimed at electing a gun control-friendly Congress in November by seizing the momentum of a movement driven by young people shaken by gun violence, organizers told Reuters.   Continue reading “Teen birthday vote drive targets pro-gun US lawmakers”

Business Insider – by Haley Peterson

Sears is closing several stores and selling 16 others in an online auction.

The closing stores include Sears locations in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Youngstown, Ohio, as well as Kmart stores in Brandon, Florida, and Saugus, Massachusetts. Sears will also likely close its store at Tacoma Park Mall in Tacoma, Washington. The owner of the mall, Simon Property Group, recently revealed plans to demolish the Sears store and replace it with several buildings, including a movie theater.  Continue reading “Sears is closing more stores and selling others in an online auction”

Collective Evolution – by Dulce Ruby

If you’re like me, you have questions about the food you’re consuming – or as a general rule of thumb, you aim to be conscious & cautious of what goes into your body on the day-to-day.

What should we really consider is purchasing organic, so that we can breathe a little easier knowing our toxin intake is bare minimum but how do we really determine this?  Continue reading “The Results Are In! These Fruits & Veggies Have The Most Pesticides In 2018”

Kansas City Star

An 80-year-old man has been charged with murder in the shooting death last fall of Kansas City attorney Tom Pickert.

Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker announced the charges Wednesday at a news conference at the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office in Kansas City.  Continue reading “Suspect in Brookside killing accidentally taped his talk about murder, police say”

GreenMedInfo – by Sayer Ji

The aviation industry hangs its hat on air travel being “the safest way to travel.” The truth, however, is that it has harbored a dark secret since its inception: it’s poisoning its passengers and crew due to deeply flawed aircraft design, de-prioritizing safety in favor of profit. 

In flight, every crew member and passenger relies on an air supply. The assumption, of course, is that this air is filtered if not fresh. Perhaps you have sensed (and promptly dismissed) that there may be quality control issues around cabin air. The problem goes further than that, however, and astoundingly, this is not by accident but by design.    Continue reading ““Asbestos of the Sky” – The Aviation Industry’s Darkest Coverup”

CNS News – by David North

The New York Times, in a recent article about the prospect that H-4 aliens will not be allowed to continue to work, wrote sympathetically about the plight of a two-guestworker family that may become a one-guestworker family under the proposal: “She began fretting about how they would afford their $4,800 monthly mortgage.”

The situation is that the family, including an H-1B alien worker and his H-4 alien worker wife, both currently working in the U.S. economy, were worried that the latter would lose her job should the administration roll back an Obama-era scheme in which some of the H-4 dependents of H-1B workers are allowed work permits.  Continue reading “New York Times Urges Sympathy for Plight of H-1B Workers in Million-Dollar Homes”

AccuWeather

An outbreak of severe thunderstorms, including the potential for a few tornadoes, is anticipated from portions of the central and southern Plains to the Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee valleys spanning Friday and Saturday.

The eruption of thunderstorms will be inspired by a strong temperature contrast, fueled by daytime heating and a surge of Gulf of Mexico moisture and enhanced by strong winds and dry air aloft.  Continue reading “Multi-day severe outbreak, isolated tornadoes loom across central, southern US”

Anti-Media – by Jake Anderson

With all the attention paid to Facebook in recent weeks over ‘data breaches’ and privacy violations (even though what happened with Cambridge Analytica is part of their standard business model), it’s easy to forget that there are four other Big Tech corporations collecting just as much — if not more — of our personal info. Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are all central players in “surveillance capitalism” and prey on our data. New reports suggest that Google may actually harvest ten times as much as Facebook.  Continue reading “Google’s File on You Is 10 Times Bigger Than Facebook’s — Here’s How to View It”

KCRA 3 News

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that aims to add and strengthen work requirements for public assistance and other welfare programs.

The order, signed in private, promotes “common-sense reforms” that policy adviser Andrew Bremberg said would reduce dependence on government programs.  Continue reading “Trump signs executive order pushing work for welfare”

CNN

Bank of America plans to stop lending to manufacturers of “military-style firearms” used by civilians, an executive told Bloomberg.

“We want to continue in any way we can to reduce these mass shootings,” Anne Finucane, vice chairman of Bank of America (BAC), said in an interview. “It is our intention not to finance these military-style firearms for civilian use.”  Continue reading “Bank of America to stop lending to makers of ‘military-style firearms’”

Tech Dirt – by Tim Cushing

If everything keeps falling apart in Massachusetts, there won’t be a drug conviction left in the state. The eventual fallout from the 2012 conviction of drug lab technician Annie Dookhan was the reversal of nearly 21,000 drug convictions. Dookhan was an efficient drug lab worker — so efficient she often never performed the tests she was required to. The state moved much slower, dragging its feet notifying those possibly affected by Dookhan’s lab misconduct until a judge told it to stop screwing around. There still could be more reversed convictions on the way as the state continues to make its way through a 40,000-case backlog.  Continue reading “More Drug Lab Misconduct Results In Massachusetts Court Tossing Nearly 12,000 Convictions”

Huffington Post – by Nick Wing

Last week, on April 4, exactly 50 years after her father’s assassination, Rev. Bernice King, the youngest child of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, picked up a gun for the first time in her life.

The white-handled revolver wasn’t as big as the rifle used to kill her father in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. But in the half-century since his death, handguns were responsible for the vast share of the more than 1.5 million gun deaths in the U.S. Continue reading “This Group Is Turning Guns Into Shovels And Using Them To Plant Trees”