Today's News: June 19, 2018

World News

EU leaders consider camps outside bloc to process refugees
Politico – European Council President Donald Tusk has proposed that EU leaders create “regional disembarkation platforms” outside the European Union, where officials could quickly differentiate between refugees in need of protection and economic migrants who would potentially face return to their countries of origin.
The proposal is an effort to break the acute political crisis over migration and asylum that has bedeviled EU leaders since 2015 — and even threatened in recent days to topple the German government — even as the numbers of arrivals have plummeted since the peak of the crisis.

Julian Assange health fears: UK forcing Wikileaks chief to ‘make impossible choice’
Express.co – As they prepared to hold a vigil they called for the UN to intervene on his sixth anniversary as an asylum-seeker.
Mr Assange’s team of lawyers claimed doctors have confirmed his protracted confinement in the Ecuador’s London embassy is having a severe impact on the journalist’s physical and mental health.
Calling for the intervention of the UN’s Human Rights Council, they argued the UK is forcing Mr Assange, 46, to make an “impossible” choice.

USA tops Germany as country with most new asylum requests
Politico – Germany is no longer the largest recipient of new asylum applications worldwide, according to the United Nations: the U.S. is.
A report released Tuesday by the U.N. Refugee Agency showed that the number of new, individual asylum applicants plummeted drastically by 73 percent in Germany between 2016 and 2017, from 722,400 down to 198,300.

Man convicted over Nazi salute in Austria
AP – A Croatian man has been handed a 15-month suspended sentence for giving a Nazi salute at an annual commemoration in Austria of a 1945 massacre of pro-Nazi Croats.
The Austria Press Agency reported Tuesday that the state court in the southern city of Klagenfurt convicted the 51-year-old under a law banning the glorification of Nazi ideology.

US Plans to Withdraw From UN Human Rights Council Today
Bloomberg – The Trump administration plans to announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, making good on a pledge to leave a body it has long accused of hypocrisy and criticized as biased against Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

U.S. News, Politics & Government

Video: Bitter Hillary Calls Trump ‘Unchristian Liar’ Over Child Immigration Policy (Despite the fact she wanted to ‘send them back’ in 2014)
Infowars – Crooked Hillary Clinton scuttled out of the shadows once again Monday night to take yet more swipes at the President, this time over immigration, despite the fact that she herself advocated the same policy, which was introduced under Obama.
Referring to the arrest of all who cross the border illegally, and the subsequent separation of them from their children, Hillary claimed “This is not happening because of the ‘Democrats’ law’” as the White House has claimed.”
“Separating families is not mandated by law at all. That is an outright lie. And it is incumbent on all of us, journalists and citizens alike, to call it just that.” Clinton declared.

TRUMP DOUBLES DOWN: Dems want illegals to ‘infest our country’…
The Hill – President Trump on Tuesday restated his support for his administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the U.S. border, calling Democrats “the problem.”
“We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally. Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions,” he wrote on Twitter.
“Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!” he continued in another tweet.

Trump: I’ll Authorize Cancellation of Aid To Nations Sending Illegals
Infowars -Countries that allow immigrants to infiltrate America will no longer be eligible for US aid, President Trump claimed Tuesday.
Speaking at the National Federation of Independent Businesses 75th Anniversary Celebration, the president touched on a few of his upcoming plans to put pressure on nations sending illegal immigrants.
“Think of all that aid we give to some of these countries. Hundreds of millions of dollars we give to these countries, and they send them up,” the President said.

Fact-Checker Snopes’ Owners Accused of Corporate Subterfuge
Courthouse News (May 10th) – A lawsuit filed in California last week claims the fact-check news site Snopes.com has been caught up in its own concealment scheme, in an ownership spat that has left the site’s personnel matters in limbo.

Judge strikes down Kansas voter ID law, orders Kobach take legal classes
The Hill – A federal judge on Monday permanently struck down Kansas’s proof-of-citizenship voter registration law, handing down a blistering ruling against Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, one of the country’s most vocal advocates of voter-ID laws.
In the 118-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson wrote that the state’s requirement that voters show proof of citizenship during registration violated both the Constitution and the National Voter Registration Act.

Northam orders Virginia National Guard helicopter crew to return from border amid family separation controversy
Richmond.com – Gov. Ralph Northam has ordered a Virginia National Guard helicopter and crew assisting with immigration enforcement at the southern border to return home until President Donald Trump ends his family separation policy.
Several other governors, both Republicans and Democrats, have refused to commit state military resources in protest of Trump’s immigration policies. Unlike other state leaders who said they would refuse to send troops if asked, Northam is pulling back resources already carrying out an assigned mission, an extraordinary response to the rapidly developing controversy at the border.

IG Horowitz Confirms He is Investigating Whether Strzok’s Anti-Trump Bias Impacted Launch of Russia Probe
Gateway Pundit – Inspector General Michael Horowitz revealed on Tuesday in a joint hearing with the House Oversight and House Judiciary Committees he is investigating whether Peter Strzok’s anti-Trump bias impacted the launch of the Russia Probe.

Economy & Business

CVS Health will now deliver prescriptions to your home
Daily Journal – CVS Health will make prescription deliveries nationwide to accommodate the heightened expectations of convenience from consumers.
The nation’s second-largest drugstore chain says it also will make home deliveries of other items, like allergy medicines, vitamins or household products. The service will cost $4.99 for deliveries made in one or two days.
The drugstore chain said Tuesday that it’s expanding same-day deliveries, for a higher fee, to Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, DC. It began those deliveries in New York late last year.

Florida Officials Approve Plan to Build Largest Mall
WSJ – Residents, other mall owners raise concerns about traffic, environmental impact and possible subsidies
At a time when store closures are accelerating and struggling malls pockmark the country, county commissioners in Florida have approved a plan to build what would be the largest mall in the U.S.

Science & Technology

Disney & Studios Can’t Dodge Claims Over Stolen Technology
Courthouse News – Disney and other major film studios cannot dodge lawsuits claiming they used stolen technology to create lifelike animated characters in top-grossing films like “Beauty and the Beast,” a federal judge ruled Monday.

Private sector warms to U.S. Cyber Command carrying out ‘hack backs’…
Cyberscoop.com – The U.S. government should decide how to retaliate against the worst attacks on the country’s private sector, and when appropriate, the military’s hacking unit should hit back, three experts said Monday.
The controversial idea entails taking the fight to nefarious actors by attacking their computer network in-kind, probing for exfiltrated data and employing measures to retrieve or destroy stolen information.

Health

Marriage is (literally) good for the heart: study
AFP – Even if marriage is sometimes more a bed of nails than roses, living into old age with a partner may help ward off heart disease and stroke, researchers said Tuesday.
A sweeping survey of research conducted over the last two decades covering more than two million people aged 42 to 77 found that being hitched significantly reduced the risk of both maladies, they reported in the medical journal Heart.
The study examined ethnically varied populations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia, adding weight to the results.
Compared to people living in spousal union, the divorced, widowed or never married were 42 percent more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and 16 percent more likely to have coronary heart disease, the study found.
The risk of dying was likewise elevated for the non-married, by 42 percent from coronary heart disease and by 55 percent from stroke.
The results were nearly the same for men and women, except for stroke, to which men were more susceptible.

Dermatologists now treating eczema by spraying the skin with live bacteria
NaturalNews – For years, people diagnosed with the skin problem, eczema, had no other choice but to consistently put topical creams to alleviate their symptoms. Despite their best efforts, the itchy rash typically persists, causing the skin to dry out and sometimes even lead to infections.
An ongoing clinical trial led by researchers from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has potentially good news for all those who suffer from the disease. It appears that the solution lies in the application of live bacteria to the skin. According to the study, positive strains of a bacterium called Roseomonas mucosa or R. mucosa, which naturally lives in the skin, brings relief to eczema’s symptoms.

DSM files an FDA petition suggesting that brands use simpler vitamin names instead of their chemical ones THIS MAY BE A GOOD STORY TO BRING UP DURING TODAY’S INTERVIEW WITH JASON DERKEVICS
NaturalNews – Purchasing vitamins and supplements can be hard, especially for people who do not have a background in medicine. This is due to the complicated and unfamiliar names of vitamins and nutrients printed on packaging.
According to DSM Nutritional Products, the long, hard-to-pronounce names are scaring consumers away, specifically because they don’t know exactly what they might be getting. Because of this, the Dutch multinational company filed a citizen petition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The document forwarded to the food authority agency suggested making an amendment allowing companies to put the simpler and more common name of vitamins instead of the chemical ones. DSM said this is an initiative to “appease consumers looking for recognizable ingredients.”

Microplastics in House Dust Rain Down on Your Food
Tree Hugger – We each may be ingesting up to 68,415 microplastic particles every year simply from eating at home.
Now it turns out that not only is our house dust simply toxic, it’s loaded with microplastics that drift down on our food, according to another study recently published in the journal Environmental Pollution. It’s not enough that we are ingesting itty bits of plastic from our seafood and sea salt and even bottled water?
The study was conducted by researchers from Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University, who found that every meal you eat could contain, on average, more than 100 microplastic particles.
Interestingly, the team set out to look at the plastic levels in mussels and wanted to compare those levels to how much might be found in a household meal. They did this by using petri dishes outfitted with sticky dust traps placed next to plates of food at mealtimes. At the end of a 20-minute meal, they checked the traps – on average, they found up to 114 plastic fibers on the dust traps. How did the mussels fare? There were fewer than two plastic fibers in each mussel.
That they found more plastic in the air in our homes than in seafood coming from habitat known to be flooded with microplastics is pretty disconcerting.
“These results may be surprising to some people who may expect the plastic fibers in seafood to be higher than those in household dust,” says Ted Henry, senior author of the study and professor of environmental toxicology at Heriot-Watt University.

Pet News

Federal Bill Looks to Improve Animal Welfare by Banning Big Cat Possession
Care 2 – A federal bill has been reintroduced to the United States Senate in an effort to better animal welfare nationwide by banning the possession of big cats, including tigers and lions.