Today's News: November 12, 2018

Top Headlines

Gaza Mortars Slam Into Israeli Bus As 100 Missiles Unleashed; Major War Is Coming
ZeroHedge – There’s been a huge uptick in rocket fire out of Gaza on Monday following a dramatic Israeli special forces raid 3km into Gaza territory on Sunday to assassinate a top Hamas commander. And now an Israeli bus has been hit by Hamas fire out of the strip.
The escalation in violence began when earlier in the day Monday thousands of mourners in the Gaza Strip buried seven militants killed during the Israeli commando raid and accompanying aircraft cover fire that resulted in strikes on the strip, which further led to sporadic rocket fire from Hamas.
One Israeli soldier was reported killed during the high risk operation which reportedly involved the commandos entering Gaza by civilian car in order to take out a gathering of Hamas military leaders.
During the Gaza funeral the crowd chanted “revenge” amidst masked gunmen in camouflage.
A huge barrage of rocket and mortar fire was unleashed Monday after the burial of Hamas commanders killed by an Israeli special forces raid:

New Mexico: Another Democrat Wins Congressional Seat After 8,000 Votes Were Found in a Warehouse
G Edward Griffin – Republican Yvette Herrell campaigned for the 2nd Congressional District on a Trump-like platform, pro-border wall and speaking about illegal immigration, and appeared alongside Vice President Mike Pence and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. Harrell is refusing to concede, as she claims that an hour after some media outlets called the race and she gave her victory speech, the Secretary of State’s office called and said, “They had magically found 4,000 ballots that had not been counted.” She said about an hour and a half later, the office said there were an additional 4,000 ballots.

California Republicans Face More Potential Losses as Late Ballots Erase Leads
G Edward Griffin – Several California Republicans who appeared to have held onto their congressional seats on Election Day saw their leads narrowed — or reversed — as late ballots continued to be counted, almost uniformly helping Democrats.

Donald Trump: Honest Vote Count in Florida ‘No Longer Possible’
Breitbart – President Donald Trump expressed skepticism about a recount in the Florida election on Monday, claiming it was impossible to conduct a fair tally.
“An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected,” he wrote on Twitter. “Must go with Election Night!”
The recount of the midterm election vote has already started with the deadline for results on Thursday.

World News

Theresa May ‘has 48 hours to get Brexit deal’ as crisis talks drag on to 3am
Mirror – Theresa May has just 48 hours to get a Brexit deal, reports declare today amid a new warning she could be toppled.
Talks between top UK and EU officials ran to 2.45am this morning in Brussels – and the Prime Minister will summon her Cabinet tomorrow to discuss new plans.
May’s May’s official spokesman declared today: “There remain significant issues to resolve. We want to make progress as soon as possible.”
No Deal Brexit plans costing billions of pounds have to start being enacted within days, otherwise they won’t be ready by exit day on March 29.
Yet talks are still deadlocked over a “backstop” – backup plan – to extend EU customs rules across the UK if there’s no deal to keep the Irish border open.

Europe Should Become an “Empire” Says French Finance Minister
Infowars – France’s finance minister has called on Europe to become an “empire” so that it can better compete with the United States and China.
Asserting that “it takes courage to stand in the way of the government” of Donald Trump, Bruno Le Maire told Handelsblatt newspaper that, “Europe should no longer be afraid of using its power and [become] an empire of peace.”
“I’m talking about a peaceful empire which is a constitutional state,” he added.

Enormous solar storm caused hidden US bombs to detonate during the the Vietnam War
Fox News – The Vietnam War may have been one of the most unpopular wars in U.S. history, but the massive solar event that took place in August 1972, towards the end of the war may have caused a greater impact than the government let on.
According to a new study published in the journal Space Weather, the enormous solar storm may have actually caused old sea mines to detonate unintentionally.
“These effects, long buried in the Vietnam War archives, add credence to the severity of the storm: a nearly instantaneous, unintended detonation of dozens of sea mines south of Hai Phong, North Vietnam on 4 August 1972,” the plain language summary of the study reads. “This event occurred near the end of the Vietnam War. The U.S. Navy attributed the dramatic event to magnetic perturbations of solar storms.”
It continues: “In researching these events we determined that the widespread electric‐ and communication‐grid disturbances that plagued North America and the disturbances in southeast Asia late on 4 August likely resulted from propagation of major eruptive activity from the Sun to the Earth.”
News of the study was first reported by LiveScience.
The solar flares caused significant disruptions to Earth’s communications equipment, with X-ray emissions remaining high for more than 16 hours, the researchers wrote.
They also noted that a defense communications satellite “suffered a mission-ending on orbit power failure;” and Air Force sensors turned on, giving a false reading that a nuclear weapon had detonated on Earth.
NASA describes the 1972 event as “legendary” because it happened between two Apollo missions: “the crew of Apollo 16 had returned to Earth in April and the crew of Apollo 17 was preparing for a moon landing in December,” NASA writes on its website. Former radiation health officer Francis Cucinotta estimates that had astronauts been in space, they could have absorbed 400 rem from the solar flare. Perhaps not enough to cause death, although they would have needed “a quick trip back to Earth for medical care” to save their lives.
According to LiveScience, pilots flying near that part of Vietnam noticed approximately two dozen explosions in just a 30-second period. Eventually, the U.S. Navy investigated the situation and determined the solar storm caused the magnetic sensors in the mines to trip as if ships were passing them, causing them to detonate.

U.S. News, Politics & Government

Congress braces for high-drama lame duck
The Hill – Congress is returning to Washington this week for an end-of-the-year session that’s expected to be filled with high-stakes legislative fights and plenty of drama.
Lawmakers will be forced to juggle several crucial deadlines on must-pass pieces of legislation and unravel thorny policy fights, while also navigating political battles over leadership and a potential Cabinet shakeup.
Both chambers are set to be in session for approximately four weeks once they reconvene on Tuesday, giving lawmakers little room for error as they race to wrap up their work for this session of Congress.
Here are five issues to watch:

Leadership fights
Government funding
Nominations
Criminal justice reform
Farm bill

Democratic hit list: At least 85 Trump investigation targets
Axios – Now that they’re set to assume control of the House, there are at least 85 topics that Democrats have said they’d target — or are expected to target — in the forthcoming torrent of investigations and subpoenas to be directed at the Trump White House, according to Axios’ reporting and analysis of members’ public comments.

Report: Comey was using private email, too While he was investigating Hillary Clinton for that action
WND – Remember back when then-FBI Director James Comey investigated Hillary Clinton’s transmission of classified information through a private email server and concluded no reasonable prosecutor would file charges against her?
It seems that Comey knew exactly what he was talking about, since he, too, was using his personal email for government work.
Investigate reporter Sara Carter notes the New York Post found that at least seven email messages on Comey’s private Gmail account were so sensitive that the Department of Justice declined to release them.
The refusal came in a Freedom of Information case brought by government watchdog Cause of Action Institute.
The Post got 156 pages of messages from the Gmail account in which Comey and his chief of staff, James Rybicki, were conducting government business.
There apparently are about 1,200 pages of messages being sought.
But the DOJ refused the release the seven sensitive emails, arguing they “disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions.”
Another 363 pages were withheld because they contained “privileged FBI communications” or “personal privacy” issues.
“The messages – which span from 2013 to 2017, with many highly redacted – were obtained by the Post after conservative watchdog, Cause of Action Institute, filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking Comey’s work-related emails from his private account,” the report said.
The Post said they reveal Comey “used his personal email throughout the Clinton email investigation.”

Veteran News

The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them
The Liberty Beacon – The US [is] celebrating Veterans Day [ ], and many a striped flag shall be waved. The social currency of esteem will be used to elevate those who have served in the US military, thereby ensuring future generations of recruits to be thrown into the gears of the globe-spanning war machine.
Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won’t be any of them left. Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.
I just said something you’re not supposed to say. People have dedicated many years of their lives to the service of the US military; they’ve given their limbs to it, they’ve suffered horrific brain damage for it, they’ve given their very lives to it. Families have been ripped apart by the violence that has been inflicted upon members of the US Armed Forces; you’re not supposed to let them hear you say that their loved one was destroyed because some sociopathic nerds somewhere in Washington decided that it would give America an advantage over potential economic rivals to control a particular stretch of Middle Eastern dirt. But it is true, and if we don’t start acknowledging that truth lives are going to keep getting thrown into the gears of the machine for the power and profit of a few depraved oligarchs. So I’m going to keep saying it.

As the US Spent $1.5 Million a Day to “Fight” Afghan Heroin Production, Heroin Output Quadrupled
Free Thought Project – On November 5 yet another US soldier was killed by a member of Afghanistan’s military forces, as the country continues to be wracked by violence in its seventeenth year of war.
Donald Rumsfeld was US Secretary for Defence from 2001 to 2006 under President George W Bush. They, along with other psychotic figures such as Vice-President Dick Cheney, were responsible for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and their legacy is apparent in many spheres, one of which is the drug production bonanza in Afghanistan.
In August 2004 NBC News reported Secretary Rumsfeld as declaring “The danger a large drug trade poses in Afghanistan is too serious to ignore. The inevitable result is to corrupt the government and way of life, and that would be most unfortunate.” He issued the warning that “It is increasingly clear to the international community that to address the drug problem here is important for the people of Afghanistan.”
Rumsfeld, for once during his catastrophic years as chief war-maker, was absolutely right, and his pronouncement about likely danger and impending corruption was spot on. The US invasion and subsequent operations led to Afghanistan becoming the fourth most dangerous and fourth most corrupt country in the world.
The “drug problem” to which he referred has expanded rapidly over the years. It is destroying Afghanistan. It is a main reason for the place being ungovernable.
Mr John Sopko, the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), has just produced his latest quarterly report for the US Congress in which he observes that “From 2002 through September 2018, the United States has committed an average of more than $1.5 million a day to help the Afghan government combat narcotics. Despite this, 2017 poppy cultivation is more than four times that reported by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2002, the first full year of US intervention in Afghanistan,” so there is small wonder that the country is “the largest source of street heroin in Europe and Canada.”
Mr Sopko observed that efforts to combat drugs “have cost US taxpayers more than $8 billion since 2002, yet Afghanistan’s opium crisis is worse than ever,” and the increase in the area and quantity of poppy cultivation has been impressive and depressing.
Washington is well aware of the shattering effects of Afghan drug production, but the SIGAR writes that “counternarcotics seems to have fallen completely off the US agenda. The State Department’s new ‘Integrated Country Strategy’ for Afghanistan no longer includes counternarcotics as a priority, but instead subsumes the issue into general operations. Meanwhile, the US military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan, and USAID says it will not plan, design, or implement new programs to address opium-poppy cultivation.”
It is amazing that “The US military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan.”

Army Evaluates DARPA’s Futuristic Soft Exosuit
Defence-aerospace.com – The US Army is testing, on behalf of DARPA, a soft, lightweight undersuit to help reduce injuries and fatigue while improving the physical performance of infantry soldiers.

Economy & Business

OPEC: Do “Whatever it Takes” to Balance Oil Market
The New American – Following the emergency meeting attended over the weekend by members of the OPEC cartel and its non-members in Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said “We need to do whatever it takes to balance the oil market.” That goal is indicative of OPEC’s increasing nervousness that it is running out of options to counter increasing U.S. oil production. Last month, the EIA (Energy Information Administration) announced that the United States now leads the world in crude oil production, ahead of both Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Dow Plunges 400 as Tech Stocks Lead Broad Sell-Off as Oil Rebounds
Newsmax – A broad sell-off in technology companies pulled U.S. stocks sharply lower Monday, knocking more than 460 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Apple, Amazon and other big names fell.
Banks and consumer-focused companies and media and communications stocks also took heavy losses. Crude oil prices veered lower, erasing an early gain.

DOJ could probe Comcast as pressure mounts over alleged antitrust violations
Fox Business – Pressure is mounting on the Department of Justice to investigate alleged antitrust violations committed by Comcast.
The American Cable Association (ACA), a lobbying group for midsize cable operators, sent a letter on Nov. 6, demanding an investigation citing the “substantial competitive harm” it has already provided consumers.
The letter was addressed to Makan Delrahim, assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, and a hawk on antitrust issues.
Under Delrahim, the DOJ is appealing the AT&T-Time Warner deal over concerns the merger will inhibit competition. Both AT&T-Time Warner and Comcast-NBCU are vertical mergers, meaning the deals marry a content producer with a content distributor.

Energy & Environment

California wildfires kill 31 people, with more devastation to come
CNN – The most destructive wildfire in California history is nowhere near done with its catastrophic rampage.
Northern California’s Camp Fire has already torched more than 6,400 homes and killed 29 people. If the death toll gets any worse, it will be the deadliest wildfire in California history.
“I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life,” said Paradise resident Susan Miller, who drove through flame-lined streets to escape with her daughter.
>> Related: The Latest: 2 new wildfires break out in S. California

A bubbling pool of mud is on the move, and no one knows why
National Geographic – Traveling at about 20 feet a year, the muddy mystery has no obvious driver—and so far, it can’t be stopped.
Refusing to stay in place, a roiling mass of carbon dioxide and slurry-like soil is migrating across the state at a pace of 20 feet a year. So far, it’s carved a 24,000-square-foot basin out of the earth, and it’s set to continue its crusade until whatever’s driving it dies out. Scientists currently have no real idea why it’s moving or if it can be stopped.
This curiosity appeared in the Salton Trough, an area of California that’s being stretched apart by a tectonic battle between the forces of the San Andreas Fault and the East Pacific Rise, a mid-ocean ridge. This unique environment is where the Colorado River dumps plenty of its sediment, which gets packed up so that the lower layers a few miles down get heated up and squashed a little.
This low-grade metamorphic action transforms the sediment into new rock types, and in the process, CO2 gets emitted. Escaping up to the soggy surface through pre-existing cracks and faults, this gas fuels features known as mud pots or—if they’re protruding from the ground—mud volcanoes.
Mud pots and volcanoes are common but normally stationary objects. That’s why scientists sat up and took notice when this mud pot began to move sometime between 2015 and 2016.
Currently located just north of Niland, the mud pot is moving toward Union Pacific Railroad tracks and giving engineers there a headache. A well dug to depressurize the source of the gas had no effect. Steel walls driven 80 feet into the ground were also nonchalantly circumvented; the mud pot simply ducked under them and continued its freakishly linear path of destruction.
“No one has seen a moving mud pot before,” says David Lynch, a consulting physicist who has long studied the area’s geothermal features. Mud pots and mud volcanoes also generally don’t emit much water, but this one is extremely vigorous, producing somewhere around 40,000 gallons of water a day. Lynch and other experts have taken to calling it a “mud spring.”

Science & Technology

Professor: Businesses to Microchip Employees ‘to Monitor’ Staff
Sputnik – British companies are planning to implant staff with microchips to improve security. Sputnik spoke about it to Katina Michael, professor of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences at the University of Wollongong.
Sputnik: Could companies sell employees’ personal data to third parties?
Katina Michael: The first thing to know is that before an employer considers selling implant-discreet data to a third party, they would likely use it to monitor staff. For example, physical access control, the way staff congregate, how often they use the restroom, how fast they may be finishing and completing some processes. If not to say that that would occur, but quite possibly it would be used as a timestamp kind of device, seen that today we have things like facial recognition or fingerprint our handprints to allow employees to log their time at work.
But a company now will use this technology to introspectively look at what employees are doing. I mean, we can consider employers today gathering data on their employees by using smartphones: I know a lot of companies sign off an agreement when they do offer their employees a smartphone, identifying that they may will log their locations and time based on the company smartphone. Otherwise, I don’t believe that a corporation would sell that information.

Future of Flight: AI in Cockpit..
Wall Street Journal – The U.S. military is investing billions of dollars each year in developing autonomous technologies that could enable planes, helicopters and drones to fly into some of the world’s most dangerous places, without a human pilot.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work said the Pentagon is working on autonomous fighter jets that could substantially reduce costs and perform better in combat than human pilots.
But U.S. military officials are concerned, he said, about how adversarial countries like China and Russia might acquire and make use of autonomous planes and drones equipped with autonomous weapons.
“In a democracy, we’re going to set legal ethical and moral boundaries on AI that an authoritarian regime might not,” Mr. Work said.

Gardening, Farming & Homesteading

How to Use Super Glue for First Aid
The Organic Prepper – uper glue is one of the greatest inventions. It will bond almost anything. Army Medics and Navy Corpsman were the first to ever use it in the field, during the Vietnam War. They glued more patients back together than they sewed. Placing a standard interrupted suture for every stitch you make two new wounds – two new avenues of infection. Super glues eliminated that route of infection
You can use super glue when you have a cut. Deep or shallow, it doesn’t matter – you need to protect it from infection. Sealing the wound is your best bet. Why should you worry about a tiny cut? In the SHTF world, more people will die of infection than major trauma. Why? Because no matter how much people like me preach about diet and washing hands, its human nature to find 5000 more important things to do when you’re trying to survive.
How to use super glue on a cut
Using super glue is pretty easy. Just follow a few simple directions. Included are some screen captures from a first aid video I made on how I used medical glue to close a wound in a piece of pork. Meet our victim:
First, make sure the wound is not bleeding and is dry and CLEAN. Notice how clean is in bold type. If you seal a wound and it is not clean you are making an incubator. Warm, wet, dark and chock full of goodness for bacteria to eat. Blood poisoning or as we say in the biz, Septicemia, is fatal. Even with 21st-century medication and care. You do not want someone to experience that type of death.
Once the wound is clean and dry, you’ll start to apply the super glue. Whoa! Hold up there cowboy! Don’t just dump it in there! A very close and dear friend of mine closed a deep wound on his arm once it healed there was almost no scar. He had cut it on a piece of metal roofing. Deep and long. He cleaned it perfectly got it dry. And closed it. But he closed both the muscle and the skin and discovered a new meaning to the word. ITCH. When you apply super glue below the skin level, the body thinks it’s being invaded and attacks it. My friend had a knot under his skin and a deep itch for months.
Then you’ll close the wound while applying the super glue. To close, start at either edge. Pinch the wound closed, and apply a drop or 2 along the first 1/4 inch.
Hold until it’s completely dry. Move up and repeat this process until the wound is completely closed.
Then dress with a band-aid. What? A band-aid? Yep, it will give your repair an extra layer of protection. Here’s what the wound looks like when it’s closed and you’re ready for duty.

Health

Too Much Caffeine May Stress the Heart
New York Times – In moderate doses caffeine has mainly positive effects for most people. But it increases production of cortisol, which can lead to health problems including anxiety, weight gain and heart disease.

WHO maps dangerous misuse of antibiotics
France 24 – The World Health Organization warned Monday that antibiotics consumption is dangerously high in some countries while a shortage in others is spurring risky misuse, driving the emergence of deadly superbug infections.
In a first, the United Nations health agency said it had collated data on antibiotic use across large parts of the world and had found huge differences in consumption.
The report, based on 2015 data from 65 countries and regions, showed a significant difference in consumption rates from as low as around four so-called defined daily doses (DDD) per 1,000 inhabitants per day in Burundi to more than 64 in Mongolia.
“The large difference in antibiotic use worldwide indicates that some countries are probably overusing antibiotics while other countries may not have sufficient access to these life-saving medicines,” WHO warned in a statement.