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The Trump administration is asking Congress to give the federal government sweeping powers to track, hack and destroy any type of drone over domestic soil with a new exception to laws governing surveillance, computer privacy and aircraft protection, according to a document obtained by The New York Times. The draft bill’s language would authorize the government to summarily track, seize control of and use force to destroy any unmanned aircraft it determines may pose a security threat to an area designated for special protection. The government would have to respect “privacy, civil rights and civil liberties” when exercising that power,...

It is in the personal realm that Garrow’s account is particularly revealing. He shares for the first time the story of a woman Obama lived with and loved in Chicago, in the years before he met Michelle, and whom he asked to marry him. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a professor at Oberlin College, is a recurring presence in “Rising Star,” and her pained, drawn-out relationship with Obama informs both his will to rise in politics and the trade-offs he deems necessary... Garrow, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr., concludes this massive new work...

Chinese drone maker DJI is offering up to one million yuan (£112,000) for information about drones that disrupted scores of flights at a Chinese airport. On four days this month - 14, 17, 18 and 21 - drones were blamed for stranding thousands of passengers at Chengdu Shuangliu International. Chinese reports said they caused 60 flight interruptions on 21 April alone. The bounty was a sign that the firm was taking the potential impact on its reputation seriously, suggested Prof David Dunn at the University of Birmingham. "Clearly they're concerned about their brand image, given how much they dominate the...

The outdoor jail that was Mr. Arpaio’s marquee undertaking was a travesty. Ostensibly established to save money and deter criminals, who presumably would want to avoid sweltering in desert heat, it failed on both counts. In fact, closing the encampment will save taxpayers some $4.5 million annually. And in a recent study, the inmates there said they preferred the facility, the heat notwithstanding, to the cramped cells in conventional jails. In announcing that the encampment would be closed, after 24 years, Mr. Arpaio’s successor, Paul Penzone, a Democrat, said, “Starting today, the circus ends, and the tents come down.” Mr....

On Thursday evening, precisely 49 days, five hours and 11 minutes after Barack Obama was no longer the president of the United States, the conspiracy-enthusiastic site Gateway Pundit posted a new story: "Breaking: Malik Obama Tweets Alleged Barack Obama Birth Certificate In Kenya" Gateway Pundit never met an anti-Obama or anti-Hillary-Clinton story that it didn’t like. On any number of occasions, the site’s articles have been demonstrably false, as collated by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters. Despite that — or perhaps because of its ferocious defenses of then-candidate Donald Trump over the course of 2016 — an employee of...

On Monday night’s edition of Fox News’s “Special Report,” host Bret Baier reported that former Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio was “off the job tonight,”...Fox News has maintained a complete blackout of the investigation, launched in August 2011. As with the Associated Press and other mainstream outlets, Baier did not provide any information from the final presser on December 15 revealing that two document examiners from two different disciplines arrived at the same conclusion: that the anomalies found in the Obama birth certificate image which exactly replicate nine items from a long-form birth certificate belonging to a woman born in...

When his eldest child, Maureen, got into West Point, Mr. Bannon was thrilled and joked about switching his allegiance to Army from Navy. He never missed her volleyball games, and he was at Fort Campbell, Ky., in 2011 when she returned from a deployment to Iraq. “That was one of the greatest feelings I’ve had, seeing my dad when I walked off the plane,” she said. But through his daughter’s service, he saw an inequity that fueled his anger at the privileged Americans among whom he had long worked. At West Point, “he saw a complete, utter lack of people...

WND has learned that a news conference has been scheduled for Dec. 15 to make public the final conclusions of the investigation by the Cold Case Posse in Arizona’s Maricopa County under Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was defeated Nov. 8 in his bid for a seventh term. On Wednesday, the PPSIMMONS blog, affiliated with author, pastor and radio host Carl Gallups, reported Arpaio had been planning to announce the news conference on a Phoenix television station, but the interview was postponed. Gallups confirmed, however, that a press conference regarding the birth certificate has been scheduled for Dec. 15 at 4...

At about 2 min. into the video Hillary's left eye begins to jump around eratically and you can tell that she is becoming distressed by it. She is becoming concerned that her usual head-bob is not concealing it. The eye is going every which way completely out of control. It goes on for several minutes and ends only when Bernies announces it is time for her to spead. I haven't seen this picked up elsewhere. FReepers please feel free to provide links if it has! It could be isolated and blown up for medical professionals to analyze.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a mysterious and maddening condition, with no cure or known cause. But researchers, using a variety of techniques to identify and assess targeted metabolites in blood plasma, have identified a characteristic chemical signature for the debilitating ailment and an unexpected underlying biology: It is similar to the state of dauer, and other hypometabolic syndromes like caloric restriction, diapause and hibernation. Dauer is the German word for persistence or long-lived. It is a type of stasis in the development in some invertebrates that is prompted by harsh environmental conditions. The findings are published online in the...

If your doctor diagnoses you with chronic fatigue syndrome, you’ll probably get two pieces of advice: Go to a psychotherapist and get some exercise. Your doctor might tell you that either of those treatments will give you a 60 percent chance of getting better and a 20 percent chance of recovering outright. After all, that’s what researchers concluded in a 2011 study published in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet, along with later analyses. Problem is, the study was bad science. And we’re now finding out exactly how bad. Under court order, the study’s authors for the first time released...

REIMER: Obama did release his birth certificate, though, so what more does Donald Trump need to see, you think? STONE: Well there are many people who are far more knowledgeable than I am about the internet and about the computerized graphics who have a belief that the document that was produced is not real. I don’t know. I’m not an expert on this. I also don’t really care in the sense that Obama’s presidency is essentially over. We’re not running against Barack Obama, at least not directly. Trump is running against four more years of Obama perhaps but Hillary Clinton...

“Our work demonstrates that the gut bacterial microbiome in chronic fatigue syndrome patients isn’t normal, perhaps leading to gastrointestinal and inflammatory symptoms in victims of the disease,” said Maureen Hanson, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell. “Furthermore, our detection of a biological abnormality provides further evidence against the ridiculous concept that the disease is psychological in origin.” In a study published this month in the journal Microbiome, Cornell University researchers looked at stool and blood samples of 48 people diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (or more formally, myalgic encephalomyelitis) and at 39 healthy volunteers. They found two...

On Thursday night, Donald Trump finally acknowledged an obvious, proven fact: President Obama was born in the United States. Or, rather, Trump's campaign said that he acknowledged it, in a statement that was itself riddled with falsehoods. "Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President," the statement begins. That's untrue — and it's been fact-checked any number of times. In 2011, Politico outlined the origins; in May, our fact checkers dubbed it ridiculous. "This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As...

Videos of Trump and surrogates from CNN and other networks at link compiled by CNN updated through this AM...

Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's campaign manager, sat for an interview with CNN Friday morning in which she became the latest prominent surrogate for the Republican presidential candidate to attempt a walk away from his long support of the disproved notion that President Obama was not born in the United States. "So, he believes President Obama was born here," Conway said of Trump, quickly pivoting to an argument about Obama's performance in office. That's a smart pivot by Conway! There are many more people open to an argument about the allegedly poor job Obama has done as president than to one...

A darling of the far right and a longtime adversary of civil-rights groups and immigration activists, “America’s toughest sheriff” will soon face Justice Department lawyers in Washington in a years-long legal saga over whether he intentionally defied federal orders to stop racially profiling Latinos. A special section of the Justice Department — dedicated to investigating corruption in publicly elected offices — will decide whether Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio should face criminal contempt-of-court charges, according to a ruling filed in U.S. District Court on Friday. The decision followed several other blows for the Arizona sheriff in the protracted case. In...

In response to requests by U.S. patient organizations and advocates, the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has issued an Addendum to its 2014 ME/CFS evidence review. This Addendum downgrades the conclusions on the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET), and this has tremendous implications for medical education and treatment recommendations. GET is Ineffective for ME Patients. CBT Is Barely Effective.

In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination. The more Mr. Trump questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Obama’s presidency, the better he performed in the early polls of the 2012 Republican field, springing from fifth place to a virtual tie for first. That frenzied period culminated...

Excerpt via print piece at Politico: Oh, and he expended millions in county resources to fruitlessly pursue Barack Obama’s “fake” birth certificate (a crusade he insists isn’t over by a long shot). That’s what got him his first give-‘em-hell letter from part-time birther Trump. “That's not dead as far as I'm concerned,” he told me.