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Scotland is getting sicker under the SNP as HALF of population now suffers from long term health problems

Scotland is getting sicker under the SNP as HALF of population now suffers from long term health problems

The Scottish Health Survey found a staggering 50 per cent of people reported a long-term condition last year, the highest since comparable studies began in 2003, when it was 41 per cent.

The prevalence of doctor-diagnosed diabetes also doubled over the same period.

Around 1 in 13 Scots now have the life-limiting condition.

A fifth of adults have ‘harmful’ alcohol intakes, and almost as many (18 per cent) have been diagnosed with asthma, up from 13 per cent in 2003 and another unwelcome record.

The Scottish Tories said the worsening picture threatened to ‘overwhelm’ an already over-stretched NHS.

Conservative health spokesman Dr Sandesh Gulhane said: ‘Scotland is getting sicker under the SNP.

‘Their failure to support our NHS and invest in preventative health means that Scots are the unhealthiest they’ve been since 2008.

‘On their watch, mental health issues are on the rise, harmful alcohol consumption remains dangerously high and the number of children at risk of obesity is at record levels.

‘This rising tide of poor health threatens to overwhelm our already overstretched NHS and cost taxpayers’ a fortune in the process.

‘SNP ministers need to act now to tackle this crisis by boosting GP numbers, focus on improving mental wellbeing, prioritising preventative health and cutting waste to ensure that Scots can access the healthcare they need.’

Published by the Scottish Government, the annual survey defines a long-term condition as ‘a physical or mental health condition or illness lasting or expected to last 12 months or more’.

Around four in five (81 per cent) of those living with a long-term condition say it limits their activities, with most citing problems with mobility (32 per cent), stamina, breathing and fatigue (28) and mental health (26).

The percentage of Scots with diagnosed diabetes has risen from 4 to 8 per cent since 2003, with most people affected by Type 2 diabetes, often associated with an unhealthy lifestyle.

The disease, caused by the body not making enough insulin to regulate blood sugar, can damage the heart, kidneys, eyes and feet if untreated and shorten life expectancy.

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From Anti-Semitic Conspiracy to Custody: Man Arrested for Threats Based on Lies About Kirk Assassination

On October 12, Seth Dillon, owner and CEO of The Babylon Bee, received a death threat from an anonymous X user.

The threat read:

You’re in on it too b***h don’t think we forgot. Conspired with foreign govt about killing Charlie we f***ing know you did b***h. We’re gonna get you I promise maybe not today or tomorrow but you’re living on borrowed time and you know it.

Yesterday, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier identified that user as Nicholas Ray of Spring, TX. Ray, 28, is now being extradited to Florida.

“Ray is now in custody and will be extradited to Florida to face charges of extortion, written threats to kill, and unlawful use of a two-way communication device,” Uthmeier wrote on X.

Dillon wasn’t the only person Ray allegedly threatened. He also posted threats against Laura Loomer and Josh Hammer.

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White House posts massive list of criminal illegal immigrants who were on Medicaid

The White House on Monday released a list of criminal illegal immigrants who reportedly received Medicaid benefits while living in the United States. The post, shared on the administration’s official account, included mugshots of offenders and noted the crimes for which they were arrested, along with the label “Received Medicaid.”

The new release follows weeks of partisan conflict over government funding. Earlier this month, on October 1, a government shutdown began after lawmakers failed to agree on a budget. The main point of contention was over healthcare funding and whether illegal immigrants should have access to taxpayer-funded programs.

Vice President JD Vance previously said Democrats were misrepresenting their position on the issue. “A Democrat talking point, they say ‘we’re not actually trying to give healthcare benefits to illegal aliens,’ and here’s why it’s not true,” Vance said in an interview with Fox News earlier this month.

Vance said the Trump administration cut two Biden-era programs that had allowed federal money to be used for healthcare provided to illegal immigrants, including hospital services and benefits granted to mass-paroled migrants. “Democrats want to turn it back on,” he said. “The first thing they put out to reopen the government actually turned that money for health care benefits for illegal aliens back on.”

In a separate interview earlier this month, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) was questioned by LindellTV reporter Alison Steinberg about whether Democrats were prioritizing healthcare for illegal immigrants. Waters said Democrats “want healthcare for everybody” and denied that they were putting non-citizens before Americans.

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NY lawmakers claim Hochul is targeting them for ongoing probe into alleged $11B Medicaid program scandal

State lawmakers are accusing Gov. Kathy Hochul of retaliating against them for continuing a probe into mounting claims her administration rigged the contract for a massive $11 billion Medicaid homecare program.

State Sens. Jim Skoufis (D-Orange) and Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx) plan to send a letter Tuesday demanding Hochul’s administration turn over evidence surrounding bid rigging and other allegations centering on her overhaul of the $11 billion per year Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program.

While the lawmakers were finalizing plans to move the investigation forward last week, Hochul took the unusual step of vetoing several of Skoufis’ bills, including one that would reimburse pharmacies for consulting patients on abortion procedures.

The Hudson Valley lawmaker, who shocked many with his full-throated attacks on Hochul during this year’s budget votes, accused the Democratic governor of vetoing his bills as payback for pushing the probe.

“The Governor wanted me to suppress critical information related to the CDPAP investigation, plain and simple. Kathy Hochul is barking up the wrong tree if she’s looking for a hack to shamelessly cover for her administration,” Skoufis said.

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CISA Orders Federal Agencies to Patch F5 Devices After Nation-State Hack

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an emergency directive compelling federal agencies to address major security flaws in software management devices made by F5, a technology company. The order follows a security breach where nation-state-affiliated hackers reportedly accessed F5’s internal systems, stealing source code and customer data.

In the directive released on October 15, CISA warned that a foreign government-affiliated group compromised F5’s networks and exfiltrated sensitive files. This stolen data included parts of the source code for BIG-IP, F5’s flagship product, along with information about known vulnerabilities.

CISA stated that this access gives the hackers a significant advantage, allowing them to analyze the code for undiscovered flaws, or “zero-day vulnerabilities,” and develop targeted attacks against F5 devices and software.

Imminent Threat to Federal Networks

According to the directive, this cyber threat actor poses an “imminent threat” to all federal networks that use F5 products. If hackers successfully exploit the vulnerabilities, they could gain access to embedded login details and API keys, which would allow them to move undetected within a network, steal data, and establish long-term access. CISA warns this could lead to a “full compromise” of an organization’s information systems.

Due to what it calls an “unacceptable risk,” CISA has mandated immediate action for agencies using a range of F5 products.

Affected F5 Products:

The directive applies to the following hardware and software:

  • Hardware: BIG-IP iSeries, rSeries, and any other F5 devices that are no longer supported by the company.
  • Software: All devices running BIG-IP (F5OS and TMOS), Virtual Edition (VE), BIG-IP Next, BIG-IQ, and BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes (BNK)/Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNF).

The directive’s requirements are designed to address the immediate risk and help agencies defend against anticipated attacks targeting these systems.

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House Judiciary Chair Refers Ex-CIA Director John Brennan for Criminal Prosecution

Republicans who lead the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday referred former CIA Director John Brennan to Attorney General Pam Bondi for criminal prosecution in connection with an investigation in 2016 into alleged Russian–Trump collusion.

The chairman of the panel, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), wrote in a letter that Brennan allegedly “knowingly made false statements during his transcribed interview” in May 2023 with the House Judiciary Committee, and that he provided “numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact” during his testimony.

As an example, the letter said that Brennan, who had served as CIA director under President Barack Obama, had denied that the intelligence agency used the “Steele dossier” in coming up with a post-election assessment following Donald Trump’s first presidential win in 2016. The reference is to a collection of documents and claims that were put together by former UK intelligence official Christopher Steele.

Used as Democratic-funded opposition research against Trump in 2016, the dossier has long been discredited as false by Republicans as well as by former special counsel John Durham. In a report released in 2023, Durham said that FBI investigators did not corroborate a “single substantive allegation” in the dossier, even though it was continually cited in warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil former Trump aide Carter Page.

According to Jordan’s Oct. 21 letter to Bondi, Brennan told lawmakers that he wasn’t involved in analyzing the Steele dossier and that he only saw it after the 2016 election. Jordan said that Brennan’s statement to Congress about the CIA not being involved was false.

“I said the first time I actually saw it, it was after the election. And the CIA was not involved at all with the dossier. You can direct that to the FBI and to others,” Brennan had testified before the lawmakers, according to the letter.

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To Media, Gaza Ceasefire Holds Despite Repeated Israeli Strikes

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel violates ceasefire”—or maybe “So much for ‘peace’ in Gaza.”

No such headlines turned up in the Western corporate media—not that there weren’t some pretty spectacular violations to choose from. On October 17, for example, eleven members of the Abu Shaaban family, including seven children and three women, were blasted to bits in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood while attempting to reach their home. According to the Israelis, the family’s vehicle had trespassed over the so-called “yellow line,” the invisible boundary arbitrarily demarcating the more than 50 percent of Gazan territory still occupied by the genocidal army. 

Then on October 19, Israel bombed the living daylights out of central and southern Gaza and killed dozens after alleging a ceasefire violation by Hamas—an allegation that not even Trump found convincing, but that enabled such impressively passive headlines as “Strikes Hit Gaza After Truce Violations Alleged” (Guardian, 10/19/25). Once the carnage was complete, the BBC (10/19/25) assured readers that “Israel Says It Will Return to Ceasefire After Gaza Strikes.” For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed the Knesset that the Israeli military had dropped 153 tons of bombs on Gaza during this particular, um, pause in the ceasefire.

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Ohio Lawmakers Advance Bill To Scale Back Voter-Approved Marijuana Law And Impose Hemp Regulations

Ohio House lawmakers on Tuesday approved an amended Senate-passed bill that would make significant changes to the state’s voter-approved marijuana legalization law while incorporating a series of regulations for hemp that are meant to align the two sectors of the cannabis industry.

Members of the House Judiciary Committee agreed to changes to the measure from Sen. Stephen Huffman (R) before advancing it to other panels and an expected floor vote on Wednesday. But while certain controversial provisions of the bill as passed by the Senate were scaled back, it would still make major changes to the marijuana law voters approved in 2023.

The measure will now go to the Rules Committee before being re-referred to the Finance Committee, after which point it’s expected to receive floor action.

“We’ve had years of testimony. We’ve heard from marijuana advocates, hemp advocates, public health advocates and everyone in between,” Rep. Brian Stewart (R) said. “We are generally going to take the feedback from the hemp industry, which said, ‘Treat us like marijuana,” he said. “They will have the same potency limitations, the same advertising restrictions, the same restrictions on quantities, serving size and how they operate.”

Rep. Jamie Callender (R), who has led the charge on marijuana policy in the House, said ahead of the vote that the revised bill would be “very thoughtful and targeted.” But at the hearing, he added that the legislation is “not perfect” or what he would have drafted.

“It’s a bill that can get passed that will help us implement some of the elements of Issue 2 that have been held up and give clarity to the rulemakers on some of the points that are outstanding,” he said, referring to the voter-approved legalization measure. “It also clarifies and cements a few of the gains that were gained over the years: Sharing, home grow, no new prosecutions [and] the taxes going to the local governments.”

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The Brain’s Hidden Radar: How Theta Waves Sweep the Mind to Spot the Unexpected

New research from MIT suggests that brainwaves sweep across the cerebral cortex much like radar scans the sky, helping the brain detect unexpected visual anomalies.

Neuroscientists at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, led by Hio-Been Han in Professor Earl K. Miller’s lab, made the discovery while studying how the brain stores and processes visual information in the short term—a process known as visual working memory.

The Cortex

The cerebral cortex maps what the brain perceives in space. When we focus on our surroundings, theta-frequency waves sweep across them, searching for visual anomalies that might demand attention. Using animal subjects, the researchers sought to understand why performance in visual working memory tasks varies and why memory capacity appears limited.

Their work builds on previous studies identifying theta waves as being strongly correlated with attention—particularly during tasks requiring the brain to track multiple points at once. Miller’s earlier research supported the theory that different brainwave frequencies act as carriers for distinct forms of neural computation. The new study takes this a step further, revealing how those traveling waves may actively drive such computations.

“It shows that waves impact performance as they sweep across the surface of the cortex,” said Professor Miller, also of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “This raises the possibility that traveling waves are organizing, or even performing, neural computation.”

Brainwaves and Video Games

For their experiments, the team trained animals to play a simple video game: an array of colored squares appeared briefly on-screen, followed by a second array in which one square had changed color. The animals’ task was to look at the altered square as quickly as possible. Researchers tracked their eye movements and reaction times while recording brainwave activity in the frontal eye fields—a region of the cortex responsible for mapping visual information from the retina.

After analyzing hundreds of trials, the researchers found that both theta brainwave activity and the vertical location of the changed square were strongly correlated with how accurately and quickly the animals detected changes. Certain horizontal bands of the cortex appeared tuned to specific theta frequencies, meaning that a subject’s performance depended on whether the brain’s internal rhythm aligned with the position of the visual change.

“The optimal theta phase for behavior varied by retinotopic target location, progressing from the top to the bottom of the visual field,” the researchers wrote in Neuron. “This could be explained by a traveling wave of activity across the cortical surface during the memory delay.”

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From Humanoid Encounters to Ultra-Secret Units: Mind-Bending UFO and Alien Accounts from the Netherlands!

When people think of the Netherlands, they might likely conjure up images of rides along the canals, tulips fields and windmills, or even the coffee houses that can be found in most towns and cities throughout the country. The fact is, though, the Netherlands can boast of some of the most thought-provoking and intriguing UFO and alien encounters on record, ranging from encounters with strange, humanoid figures, to sightings over air bases, and bizarre close encounters that span decades and involve some kind of strange secret security services. Moreover, these incidents continue to be reported today.

While we will explore several encounters from this side of the start of the Modern UFO Era, UFO sightings and encounters with strange humanoid entities in the Netherlands stretch back decades, at the very least.

Perhaps one of the earliest comes from the research files of Albert Rosales, and occurred in Heiden at around 10 pm on July 2nd, 1905, when a man named Soufian woke in the middle of the night to find he was looking down on himself lying in bed. As if that wasn’t strange enough, next to him was the female humanoid figure, who wore long robes and had pale grey skin. Then, the figure somehow moved directly over the top of him and was reaching towards his chest. The next thing he knew, he could feel an intense pain in his chest, almost as if this strange figure was parting his ribcage. Even though he was viewing this from above, when he tried to move he was unable to do so, suspecting he was somehow paralyzed.

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