March 29, 2024

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Today's News: May 28, 2019

World News
Secretive Bilderberg meeting to address Russia, cyber threats and Brexit as 130 of world’s elite including Henry Kissinger, Mark Carney and the Dutch King prepare for Swiss summit
Daily Mail – More than a hundred of the world’s elite including Henry Kissinger, Mark Carney and the Dutch King will meet at the secretive Bilderberg summit this week.
Bankers, Prime Ministers, CEOs and defence experts will meet in Montreux, Switzerland, to discuss a wide range of topics including Russia, cyber threats and Brexit.
From Thursday to Sunday 130 influential men and women from 23 countries will meet under strict secrecy rules and the precise location of their venue has not been revealed.
Notable attendees include former US Secretary of State Kissinger, Governor of the Bank of England Carney, former CIA director David Petraeus and White House Adviser Jared Kushner, Donald Trump‘s son-in-law.
From Colombia, Venezuelan defectors arm themselves to ‘liberate’ their homeland
Reuters – Wearing camouflage shirts and combat boots, a Venezuelan militia group stands in formation in the Colombian city of Cucuta as their commander, a former Venezuelan army sergeant, outlines plans to seize towns across the border before heading to Caracas to help oust President Nicolas Maduro.
Eight men, who said they were defectors from Venezuelan police, army and intelligence services, had gathered near the two nations’ tense frontier, from where they said they will lead an attack aimed at overthrowing Maduro and handing the reins of power to opposition leader Juan Guaido.
Dubbing their planned offensive “Operation Venezuela,” the ex-army sergeant, Eddier Rodriguez, said there were around 150 men ready to take part with his group. Reuters was unable to independently confirm the status of the eight men or the size of the militia.
“Our goal is to liberate the country,” said Rodriguez, 37, who said he is currently working as a security guard in Bogota. “We’re troops willing to give our lives if necessary, all 150 of us.”
Kushner in Mideast to drum up support for peace plan
AP – President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner is in the Middle East to drum up support for his as-yet unveiled Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.
A White House official says Kushner, along with Trump’s special envoy for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt and special Iran envoy Brian Hook, are in Morocco and will visit Jordan and Israel later this week.
The trip comes as the U.S. prepares to roll out the economic portion of the plan at a conference in Bahrain in late June. The Palestinians have already rejected the peace plan and have urged Arab nations to avoid the conference. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have already indicated they will participate.
Merkel Decides Her Chosen Successor Isn’t Up to the Job
Bloomberg – Angela Merkel has given up hope on her heir apparent and is hunkering down in office in the face of growing turmoil in Germany’s ruling party.
Since taking over as leader of the Christian Democratic Union in December, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer slid in opinion polls, roiled the party with a failed effort to accelerate Merkel’s exit, and on Sunday oversaw the CDU’s worst ever result in a national election.
All that has persuaded Merkel that Kramp-Karrenbauer may not be up to the job, according to two officials with knowledge of her thinking. As a result, the chancellor is more determined than ever to stay in power until her term ends in 2021, the officials said.
Kramp-Karrenbauer’s failure to grasp the baton leaves Germany’s governing party flailing as the leadership prepares to meet June 2 and 3 to pore over the losses in the European Union election.
It’s likely to be an awkward encounter between the chancellor and her one-time protegee: AKK, as Kramp-Karrenbauer is known, convened the session without warning Merkel and the officials say it was designed to put pressure on the chancellor to move aside. AKK has also alienated the chancellor by reaching out to her conservative enemies within the CDU.
No More Help
Merkel has resolved to spend no more political capital helping AKK, the officials said. But her ability to change the party’s direction is limited now that she has handed over control of the machinery. The chancellor is expecting to come under more pressure to step aside as AKK’s political problems mount, they added.
The direction of the party is completely open again, one official said, and what happens after 2021 is entirely uncertain.
Israeli election rerun looms as Netanyahu talks falter
AFP – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urgently worked to break a deadlock in coalition negotiations Tuesday as the once far-fetched possibility of fresh general elections only months after April polls loomed ever larger.
Netanyahu has until Wednesday night to reach a coalition deal, but he has been unable to convince ex-defence minister Avigdor Lieberman to abandon a key demand and allow a government to be formed.
Confirmed: Secretive Bilderberg Meeting to be held in Switzerland from May 30th
The Local –
The 2019 edition of the exclusive Bilderberg Meeting will take place at the Hotel Montreux Palace in the Swiss town of Montreux from Thursday to Sunday.                    It will feature Swiss Finance Minister Ueli Maurer, French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire, the head of Germany’s Christian Democrats, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, and Crédit-Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam among others.
According to Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will also be among the attendees, although he is not on the official guest list on the Bildberg website.
The Swiss paper reports that Pompeo is set to sit down with Ueli Maurer. The two are tipped to discuss the situation in Iran where Switzerland represents US interests.
However, the Swiss Finance Ministry told The Local on Tuesday that no meeting was envisaged between Pompeo and Maurer.
China deploys Confucius in bid to boost religion controls
AP – China has begun five-day Confucian culture immersion courses for religious leaders in the sage’s hometown as part of a campaign to extend government control over faith communities through a process of sinicization.
The ruling Communist Party’s United Work Front Department said in a news release issued Monday that the activity was designed to ensure the primacy of traditional Chinese values above all.
“To hold activities here … is a collective tribute to excellent traditional Chinese culture and a conscious identification and integration with Chinese culture,” said the release, posted on the department’s website.
U.S. News, Politics & Government
US boycotts arms control conference in protest at Venezuela
RT – The United States walked out of a UN disarmament forum in protest after Venezuela took up the conference’s rotating chairmanship, insisting it would not participate in a conference led by a “rogue state.”
“Whatever is discussed in there, whatever is decided, has absolutely no legitimacy because it is an illegitimate regime presiding over that body,” US ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament (CD) Robert Wood told reporters Tuesday after he stormed out of the meeting.
Wood ditched the forum as soon as his Venezuelan counterpart Jorge Valero was granted the conference’s presidency – which rotates on a monthly basis – calling Valero’s acceptance speech a “diatribe of propaganda.”
The US and its allies in the Lima Group – comprised of more than a dozen Latin American allies including Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Chile – will boycott the CD for the next four weeks, until the new chair takes over, Wood said in a statement after the meeting.
Supreme Court leaves intact block on Indiana abortion restriction, but allows fetal burial to go into effect
CNN – The Supreme Court said Tuesday that a provision of an Indiana law which said the state may prohibit abortions motivated solely by race, sex or disability should remain blocked.
The court, however, did say it would allow part of the law that requires clinics to bury or cremate fetal remains to take effect.
The fact that the court decided not to take up the more controversial provision of the Indiana law suggests that there is not a current appetite on the court to move aggressively to question the court’s core abortion precedents of Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Still, supporters of abortion rights will be disappointed and worried that the justices allowed the fetal tissue provision to go into effect.
High radiation levels found in giant clams of Marshall Islands near U.S. nuclear dump
LA Times – Researchers have found high levels of radiation in giant clams near the Central Pacific site where the United States entombed waste from nuclear testing almost four decades ago, raising concerns the contamination is spreading from the dump site’s tainted groundwater into the ocean and the food chain.
The findings from the Marshall Islands suggest that radiation is either leaking from the waste site — which U.S. officials reject — or that authorities did not adequately clean up radiation left behind from past weapons testing, as some in the Marshall Islands claim.
The radioactive shellfish were found near Runit Dome — a concrete-capped waste site known by locals as “The Tomb” — according to a presentation made by a U.S. Department of Energy scientist this month in Majuro, the island nation’s capital. The clams are a popular delicacy in the Marshall Islands and in other nations, including China, which has aggressively harvested them from vast swaths of the Pacific.
According to Terry Hamilton, a veteran nuclear physicist at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Runit Dome is vulnerable to leakage by storm surge and sea level rise, and its groundwater, which is leaking into the lagoon and ocean, is severely contaminated.
For battles with Congress, Trump reshapes legal defense team
Reuters – President Donald Trump is restructuring his legal team with lawyers more at home in a courtroom than a television studio as he shifts from dealing with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to battling Democratic-led investigations in the U.S. Congress.
The long-time leaders of Trump’s team – Jay Sekulow and Rudy Giuliani – remain in place. But other attorneys, known for their litigation skills, are taking on larger roles on the team: William Consovoy, Patrick Strawbridge, Marc Mukasey and Stefan Passantino.
The first legal offensive from Consovoy and Strawbridge has encountered early setbacks. Their law firm, Consovoy McCarthy, filed two lawsuits in April on behalf of Trump intended to block congressional subpoenas seeking the Republican president’s personal financial records, but both were rejected last week by federal judges. Trump is appealing those decisions, and House Democrats agreed not to enforce the subpoenas during that process.
Some lawyers scoffed at Consovoy’s handling of the litigation, particularly a courtroom moment when he sought to cast doubt on the authority of Congress to investigate presidential corruption because it is not a “law enforcement” agency.
Supremes go silent, let school put boys in girls’ showers
WND – The justices on the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday abruptly went silent, and decided to allow a Pennsylvania school district to continue its secretly implemented program allowing boys into the girls’ shower rooms.
The fight erupted several years ago when officials in the Boyertown Area School District in Pennsylvania told a boy who says he’s a girl he could use the rest rooms and showers for girls – based on his own perception of a “gender identity.”
However, the district officials refused to let other students or their parents know that their privacy rights were being destroyed in pursuit of a politically correct agenda, and students who found themselves confronted by members of the opposite sex protested, then eventually sued.
School officials at the time had told those protesting the change just to get used to it and not make a big deal.
Officials with the Alliance Defending Freedom, who had worked on the students’ challenge to district actions, confirmed on Tuesday the court declined to take up the case.
Science & Technology
Popular DNA Testing Company Admits to Sharing Genetic Data With the FBI
The Mind Unleashed – f you’re like millions of others across the United States, you may have considered buying a DNA genetic analysis test. The offer is tempting: for under $100, you can potentially unearth new details about your ancestry, distant relatives, and diverse ethnic background from the comfort of your own home. According to some advertisements, lives have been changed and families reunited thanks to the services being sold by 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and other consumer genetic testing companies.
Yet while the temptation of trading a simple saliva sample for personalized genetic and health info may seem to be worth the cost, a recent report from BuzzFeed News has raised new concerns for civil liberties advocates.
As it turns out, Houston, Texas-based FamilyTreeDNA – one of the most prominent private DNA testing companies – has given the FBI free license to search its genealogy database, granting feds virtually unlimited access to a treasure trove of genetic data for the purpose of solving violent crimes.
Last Thursday, the company confirmed in a statement to BuzzFeed that it had granted the law enforcement agency virtually unfettered access to the nearly 2 million genetic profiles it hosts on the grounds that the new relationship “would help law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes faster than ever.”
Exploding stars led to humans walking on two legs, radical study suggests
The Guardian – t was the evolutionary leap that defined the species: while other apes ambled around on all fours, the ancestors of humans rose up on two legs and, from that lofty position, went on to conquer the world.
The benefits of standing tall in the African savannah are broadly nailed down, but what prompted our distant forebears to walk upright is far from clear. Now, in a radical proposal, US scientists point to a cosmic intervention: protohumans had a helping hand from a flurry of exploding stars, they say.
According to the researchers, a series of stars in our corner of the Milky Way exploded in a cosmic riot that began about 7m years ago and continued for millions of years more. The supernovae blasted powerful cosmic rays in all directions. On Earth, the radiation arriving from the cataclysmic explosions peaked about 2.6m years ago.
Energy & Environment
Malaysia to ship back tonnes of plastic waste to foreign nations
Al Jazeera – Malaysia will send back almost 3,000 metric tonnes of non-recyclable plastic waste to countries including the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom in a move to avoid becoming a “dumping ground” for rich nations.
Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin said on Tuesday that 60 containers stacked with contaminated waste were smuggled in en route to illegal processing facilities in Malaysia and will be sent back to their countries of origin.
Yeo said Malaysia, and many developing countries, have become new targets after China banned the import of plastic waste last year.
“This is probably just the tip of the iceberg [due] to the banning of plastic waste by China,” Yeo told a news conference.
“Malaysia will not be a dumping ground to the world … we will fig
Health
5-HTP Is Helpful for Mitochondrial Biogenesis
Mercola – Researchers in Mumbai, India, found that the neurotransmitter serotonin, aka 5-HT, is a significant player in producing new mitochondria in neurons, a process called mitochondrial biogenesis.
Mitochondria are the “powerhouses” that generate energy, optimize cellular function and regulate the survival of neurons, especially under stress.
Mitochondrial biogenesis enhances mitochondrial function in a number of ways that protect the neurons of your brain, including the involvement of serotonin-2A, also known as 5-HT2A.
5-HTP, the hydroxylated form of tryptophan, is made from the seeds of the African plant Griffonia simplicifolia and isn’t derived from foods.
Studies show that while the jury is still out on 5-HTP’s efficacy for anxiety and depression, it has been found very effective for weight loss, sleep disorders, pain from fibromyalgia and migraines, and more
Chronic renal failure can be alleviated using Chinese chives
NaturalNews- Chronic kidney failure, also known as chronic kidney disease, is a progressive and potentially life-threatening condition in which the kidneys are damaged and can’t filter blood properly. A study published in the journal Food Science and Human Wellness found a natural solution to this debilitating disease that can also improve kidney function: Chinese chives.
Chinese chives (Allium tuberosum), also known as garlic chives, are a well-known green vegetable in China used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat impotence and nocturnal emissions. Other allium plants have been shown to have kidney-protective effects. Therefore, researchers from Hefei University of Technology in China looked at the protective effects of Chinese chive extracts against chronic kidney failure in mice. (Related: Try this instead of oysters: Garlic chives are a natural way to increase libido and treat erectile dysfunction.)
In the study, the researchers administered adenine to mice to induce chronic kidney failure. They then treated the animals for five weeks with water or ethanol extracts obtained from Chinese chives. The administration of adenine caused damage to the kidneys of mice and increased the levels of creatinine and urea nitrogen in their blood. High levels of serum creatinine and blood urea nitrogen indicate impaired kidney function.
However, these damages caused by adenine were reduced upon treatment with Chinese chive water extracts. The Chinese chive water extract significantly reduced renal pathological damages, serum creatinine, and blood urea nitrogen levels. At the same time, it significantly inhibited oxidative stress and inflammation in the kidneys of mice with chronic kidney failure. These results indicated that Chinese chive water extracts can improve kidney function in mice with chronic kidney failure by increasing the antioxidative activity and inhibiting inflammation in the kidneys. With these findings, the researchers concluded that Chinese chive water extracts may be used to develop a functional food supplement that can treat chronic kidney failure.

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