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Telegram gains 3 million new users in 24 hours during Facebook outage


RT
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 14:42 UTC
Telegram
© Reuters/Dado Ruvic
Cloud-based, privacy-focused messenger system Telegram added a whopping 3 million new users to its estimated 200 million user base in a single day after Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all went down.

Telegram's founder and CEO Pavel Durov announced the massive uptick in registered users on his personal channel on Thursday, boasting about the merits of his popular alternative messenger app.
I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours. Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.

Comment: See also: Censorship hitting Left, Right, and Non-Aligned media: Now Zero Hedge gets the ban-hammer from Facebook - UPDATES: Facebook backs off, 'it was a mistake'

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Rose

Opium poppy growth to become legal in Russia to counter possible Western sanctions


RT
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 11:41 UTC
Opium poppy
© SputnikAn opium poppy flower.
The Russian parliament has furthered a bill, which seeks to legalize growth of plants that can be used to produce opioids. The measure is meant to ensure that Russia has a steady supply of raw materials for producing painkillers.

At the moment growth of opium poppies is completely illegal in Russia, which means that Russian medicine producers have to import materials to produce opioid painkillers. The bill, which passed its first reading in the Russian parliament on Thursday, wants to cover this potential vulnerability by making poppy growth a state monopoly.
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Chart Bar

'Killer inflation' & the soaring cost of services

Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 09:47 UTC
economics
The soaring cost of services is driven by a number of factors.

What will the future bring: fire (inflation) or ice (deflation)? The short answer: both, but in very different doses. Goods that are tradeable and exposed to technologically driven commodification will decline in price (deflation) while untradeable services that are difficult to commoditize will increase in price (inflation), generating a self-reinforcing feedback loop of wage-price inflation.

Gordon Long and I discuss these trends in our latest program The Supply-Demand Services Problem (YouTube).
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NPC

Activists occupy Sarah Lawrence College, demand it punish conservative professor for expressing his views

Robby Soave
Reason
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 09:47 UTC
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College
A group of activist students at Sarah Lawrence College calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition have released a long list of demands after occupying the campus's main administrative building for 24 hours.

One of these demands concerns Samuel Abrams, a tenured professor of politics. Abrams is conservative-leaning, and has complained about the ideological bias of leftist administrators in a New York Times op-ed. Last November, his office door was vandalized by unknown persons who wanted him to apologize to marginalized students and quit the college.

Now the Diaspora Coalition is demanding that Sarah Lawrence review Abrams' tenure. The review should be conducted by a panel consisting of members of-you guessed it-the Diaspora Coalition, as well as faculty members of color.
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Clipboard

Study shows migrants use close to twice the welfare benefits as native-born Americans

John Binder
Breitbart
Tue, 12 Mar 2019 08:15 UTC
us immigrants
© Spencer Platt/Getty
Households headed by foreign noncitizens living in the United States, including legal and illegal aliens, use nearly twice as much welfare as native-born Americans, research finds.

In recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of noncitizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.

Likewise, roughly 50 percent of naturalized citizens - those who legally immigrated to the country and became citizens - use taxpayer-funded welfare, as well as about 55 percent of all households headed by legal immigrants, those who are naturalized citizens and those who are not yet citizens.

welfare use
© Center for Immigration Studies

Comment: See also: US Wars Fund The Welfare State Which Finances The Liberal March Towards Totalitarianism

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Pistol

Brazil school shooting: eight people killed, including five students

Dom Phillip
The Guardian
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 19:31 UTC
Raul Brasil school
© Mauricio Sumiya/APPolice officers guard the entrance of the Raul Brasil school. About 1,000 children attend the school, police said.
Eight people, including five schoolchildren, have been killed by gunmen who opened fire in a high school near São Paulo, before turning their guns on themselves when police arrived.

The two gunmen, ages 25 and 17, walked into the state school in Suzano, near São Paulo, around 9.30am on Wednesday, and opened fire while students were on a break.

The local police chief, Colonel Marcelo Salles, told reporters that the attackers were armed with a .38 revolver, a crossbow, a bow and arrows and also carried fake explosives. "In 34 years of service, I have never seen [an attack] with a crossbow. It is totally unthinkable," he said.

One student, Rosni Grotliwed, 15, told the G1 news site that students were eating their morning snack when they heard popping sounds and started running.

"The guys came after us and started to kill lots of people," he said. "They were shouting but I didn't understand what it was."

Caterer Silmara de Moraes, 54, said she helped hide 50 students in a kitchen. "It was really desperate because there were a lot of shots, really a lot of shots, and panic," she told G1.

Comment: RT reports at least 10 dead in school shooting in Brazil's Sao Paulo:
At least 10 people were killed in a school shooting in Brazil's Sao Paulo state, law enforcement has confirmed. The suspects are believed to be two teenagers, who shot themselves after the rampage.

The deadly incident occurred on in the city of Suzano located in the southeastern Brazilian state of Sao Paulo on Wednesday.

The Military Police confirmed on Twitter that 10 people were dead and 10 others injured after the shooting. It did not elaborate on how many children died during the incident or whether the attackers were included in the figure. The tweet, however, has later been deleted.

The attack was carried out by two "armed and hooded" teenagers, according to police. Local media reported that they turned their weapons on themselves after killing several students and at least one adult. 23 other people were injured.

A .38 revolver, a crossbow with arrows, as well as several Molotov cocktails and a "wired suitcase" were found by police at the scene. One of the attackers was armed with a firearm, while another wielded a knife, local media reported, citing eyewitnesses.


The assailants reportedly were former students of the school, yet the motive of the attack remains unclear.

Governor of Sao Paulo, Joao Doria, condemned the "cruel murder" of the children.The official arrived at the shooting scene shortly after the incident.


Another shooting occurred shortly before the massacre in the vicinity of the school, when a person was injured during an apparent robbery attempt. It was not immediately clear whether the two incidents were linked.

Despite strict weapon laws, gun crime is rampant in Brazil, yet school shootings are a rare occurrence. The last major incident of this type occurred back in 2011, when 12 schoolchildren were shot dead in Rio de Janeiro by a former student.
See also: High school shooting in Brazil: Two young men kill students and employees

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Attention

While you were sleeping: Courts are systematically abolishing all immigration enforcement

Daniel Horowitz
Conservative Review
Mon, 11 Mar 2019 06:55 UTC
ninth circuit court
© David Paul Morris/Bloomberg | Getty Images
Congress could never get away with creating constitutional rights for illegal aliens to remain here, yet a single lower court just did so on Thursday. And where Congress would face deep reprisal in the next election, faceless judges will never feel the heat.

Conservatives fear that extreme Democrats might actually abolish ICE and all immigration enforcement, but the lower courts are already systematically abolishing ICE's authority, nullifying immigration enforcement statutes, violating separation of powers, and constantly increasing the wave of bogus asylum-seekers that they originally spawned with other radical rulings. The latest ruling from the Ninth Circuit demonstrates that unless Republicans and the president begin pushing back against these radical judges and delegitimizing their rulings, Democrats will get everything they want without ever facing electoral backlash or even the need to win elections.

It's truly hard to overstate the outrageously harmful effects of Thursday's Ninth Circuit ruling. For the first time in our history, the courts have fabricated a constitutional right for those denied asylum to appeal to federal courts for any reason.

Here's the background.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants are flooding our border, claiming the formula of "credible fear" of persecution. They get to stay indefinitely while they ignore their court dates in immigration court. Because of an amalgamation of several prior activist court rulings, mainly by this very circuit, roughly 90 percent of credible fear claims are approved by asylum officers and the claimants shielded from deportation, even though asylum status is ultimately rejected almost every time by an immigration judge. Unfortunately, by that point it's too late for the American people, who are stuck with the vast majority of these claimants remaining indefinitely in the country. Yet rather than ending this sham incentive, the Ninth Circuit drove a truck through immigration law by asserting that there is now a constitutional right for even the few who are denied initial credible fear status and are placed in deportation proceedings to appeal their denials, not just to an administrative immigration judge but to a federal Article III judge for any reason.

Comment: See also:

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Dollar Gold

Hypocrisy, privilege and bribes: Celebrities involved in college admissions deception


RT
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 01:00 UTC
felicity huffman
Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman
Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among some 50 people charged in the massive scam to cheat on admission to elite US universities that involved bribes, fraudulent test scores and even fake photographs.

Huffman (of 'Desperate Housewives' fame) and Loughlin (Aunt Becky from 'Full House') were among the 33 parents indicted on Tuesday by the Department of Justice in what was dubbed 'Operation Varsity Blues.' It is the largest college cheating scheme ever prosecuted by the DOJ.

The ringleader of the scheme was named as William Singer, owner of Key Worldwide Foundation and a company called Edge College & Career Network. Singer and several other employees of his outfits accepted some $25 million dollars in bribes from parents between 2011 and 2018 "to guarantee their children's admission to elite schools," said US Attorney Andrew Lelling. Nine coaches, two ACT and SAT exam administrators, one proctor, and a college administrator were also charged.

"This case is about the widening corruption of elite college admissions through the steady application of wealth combined with fraud," Lelling said Tuesday.

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Stock Down

Best of the Web: Boeing is screwed: EU and India follow China's lead in banning 737 Max planes from their airspace - UPDATE: Trump grounds all US 737 Max aircraft


BBC
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 14:56 UTC
boeing 737 Max
© Getty'Nothing to see here!' American and Southwest airlines continue to fly their 737 Max 8s in the US
The European Union and India have banned the Boeing 737 Max from flying over their airspace to ensure passenger safety.


Comment: It's one thing to mandate the grounding of all such planes, but you know they know something is seriously wrong when they won't even let the planes traverse their airspace.


They join a long list of countries in suspending the plane, including the UK.

It comes after an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed on Sunday, killing 157 people on board. It was the second fatal accident involving the 737 Max 8 model in less than five months.

US officials say the aircraft are still safe to fly.

However, the US Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union is now calling for the Federal Aviation Administration "to temporarily ground the 737 Max fleet in the US out of an abundance of caution".

Comment: They apparently needed to install an 'anti-stall system' because the plane was prone to stalling upon take-off. American pilots reported the plane making "recurrent sudden downward pitches" upon take-off last year.

We don't claim to know exactly what the technical issue is, but it's fairly clear that US allies like the EU and UK would not be taking such precautionary measures if they did not have specific information about a fatal design flaw.

Keep in mind that Boeing is a mega-corporation and major branch of the US military-industrial complex, effectively making it the US government itself, so most of what you'll read about this in the media is damage control on its behalf.

UPDATES 21:30 CET

Canada has banned the 737 Max from flying in its airspace, citing "new data from validated satellite tracking," despite earlier this week saying that grounding them would be "premature."

An hour later, Trump announced that the US, among the last countries to do so, would also ground all 737s. He apparently went above the FAA, which has been batting for Boeing all week, and has yet to make a follow-up announcement.

Boeing stocks have, pardon the pun, taken a nose-dive.

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Jet1

US pilots reported major problem with Boeing 737 MAX late last year: Sudden downward pitching


Digital Journal
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 17:14 UTC
B737 in Maimi
© JOE RAEDLE, GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFPAn American Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 arrives in Miami, Florida from Washington Ronald Reagan National Airport on March 12, 2019 in Miami, Florida.
As US authorities continued to resist pressure Wednesday to ground the Boeing 737 MAX following the latest deadly crash, reports from American pilots surfaced who reported issues with the plane late last year.

At least four pilots made reports following the October crash of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia shortly after takeoff, all complaining that the aircraft suddenly pitched downward, according to documents reviewed by AFP on a flight safety database.

The incidents seem to involve the flight stabilization system designed to prevent the aircraft from stalling, the "MCAS," which was implicated in the fatal accident in the Lion Air crash that killed 189 people shortly after takeoff.

After the latest accident Sunday of another 737 MAX 8 from Ethiopian Airlines, shortly after takeoff, killing 157, numerous airlines and governments around the world grounded the aircraft or banned it from their skies, including Canada which just took the step on Wednesday.

However, the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday said there was no reason as yet to ground the planes, even though it has mandated Boeing update its flight software and training on the aircraft.

The cause of the tragedy in Ethiopia has not been determined, although the black boxes with critical data and recordings of the pilot were retrieved Monday.
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