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Shakespeare flagged as ‘far right’ literature in UK – media

Several of the UK’s most respected television shows, movies and works of literature have been included in a list of works that could potentially encourage far-right sympathies, compiled by the taxpayer-funded and government-led ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism programme, according to the Daily Mail.

Works by JRR Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and even William Shakespeare, as well as classic movies ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ and ‘The Great Escape’ were cited in a list published by the British paper on Saturday as being highlighted by the counter-terrorism watchdog, for their potential use by far-right agitators to promote troublesome viewpoints online.

“This is truly extraordinary,” historian and broadcaster Andrew Roberts said of the list to the tabloid. “This is the reading list of anyone who wants a civilized, liberal, cultural education.

“It includes some of the greatest works in the Western canon and in some cases – such as Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ – powerful critiques of terrorism. [Edmund] Burke, Orwell and Tolkien were all anti-totalitarian writers.”

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‘We Could Eat Malignant Chicken Tumors by the Bucket Load’ – Lab Grown Meat’s Impending CANCER Problem.

Lab-grown meat, touted as the “cruelty-free” food of the future by everyone from the World Economic Forum to Hollywood mega-celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio, may have a fatal problem, according to a new Bloomberg story.

The problem is that the materials used to make the product – “immortalized cell lines” – replicate forever, just like cancer. Which means, in effect, that they are cancer. Although these cell lines are widely used in scientific research, they’ve never been used to produce food before.

“Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous… [but d]on’t worry: Prominent cancer researchers tell Bloomberg Businessweek that because the cells aren’t human, it’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all.”

– Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Industry types are “confident” that eating such products poses no risk – although there isn’t any hard data – but it’s not difficult to see, even if the products are “proven” safe, how people might be put off by the thought they’re eating a glorified tumor.

All the evidence suggests that the most prominent producers of these new products – including the “Big Three” startups, Believer Meat, Eat Just and Upside Foods – are doing their best to avoid confronting the issue in public. But whether they’ll be able to keep do so after this latest blast of high-profile negative publicity, remains to be seen.

The story comes at a time of growing difficulty for new alternatives to traditional animal products, especially so-called “plant-based meats”.

At the beginning of the month, we reported on the ongoing problems faced by Impossible Foods, which is laying off 20 percent of its workforce, or nearly 140 staff.

Plant-based meats have gone from double-digit growth to double-digit decline in the last year, with sales of refrigerated meat alternatives falling by 10.5 percent for the year to September 4 2022.

In response to another cover story from Bloomberg Businessweek, which labelled plant-based meats “just another fad”, Impossible took the bold step of taking out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to counter the claims. Impossible’s new CEO, Peter McGuiness has put the company in a more confrontational stance, which includes denying the mounting evidence that his company, and others like it, are in serious trouble.

Beyond Meat, by contrast, has barely even been able to put on a brave face. Shares in the company plunged 75 percent in the first three quarters of the last year, and its flagship pilot collaboration with McDonald’s, the “McPlant Burger”, was discontinued by the fast-food giant.

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Mystery still swirls around three objects US shot out of the sky

Two weeks after the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon and one week after President Biden directed the military to shoot down three more unidentified objects, America is still gripped by questions over what the objects were and why they were flying at a height that posed a risk to air traffic.

President Biden on Thursday delivered his most extensive remarks to date on the situation, in which he all but ruled out that the three unidentified objects were part of the Chinese balloon program or that they were a foreign intelligence-gathering effort.

But with officials still unable to collect the debris from the latest downed objects, there is still much more to be learned about to whom, what their purpose was and how they ended up in a position to be shot down.

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On target? Democrats AND Republicans write to Biden demanding he send F-16 jets to Ukraine so its troops can dominate Russia ahead of Putin’s spring offensive

A bipartisan group of House members wrote to President Biden this week to urge him to send fighter jets to Ukraine in a move that would escalate U.S. involvement in the nation’s war with Ukraine. 

Five House members said modern jets like the F-16 ‘could prove decisive for control of Ukrainian airspace this year.’ Kyiv has long urged the U.S. to provide fighter jets, but President Biden weeks ago told reporters he would not.

The letter was led by Maine Democrat Rep. Jared Golden, with GOP Reps. Tony Gonzales, Texas, and Mike Gallagher, Wis., and Democratic Reps. Chrissy Houlahan, Pa., and Jason Crow, Colo., signing on. All five have military experience. 

The bipartisan group first praised Biden for his continued support for Ukraine, before asking him to send the F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft or similar fourth-generation aircraft ‘as soon as possible.’ 

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What We Know About The US Air Force’s Balloon Party So Far

You know, everyone’s always talking about how the US military is only ever used to kill foreigners for resource control and generate profits for the military-industrial complex, but that’s not entirely true. Turns out the US military is also used for shooting down party balloons.

In an article titled “Object downed by US missile may have been amateur hobbyists’ $12 balloon,” The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports the following:

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade says one of its hobby craft went “missing in action” over Alaska on 11 February, the same day a US F-22 jet downed an unidentified airborne entity not far away above Canada’s Yukon territory.

In a blogpost, the group did not link the two events. But the trajectory of the pico balloon before its last recorded electronic check-in at 12.48am that day suggests a connection – as well as a fiery demise at the hands of a sidewinder missile on the 124th day of its journey, three days before it was set to complete its seventh circumnavigation.

If that is what happened, it would mean the US military expended a missile costing $439,000 (£365,000) to fell an innocuous hobby balloon worth about $12 (£10).

“The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type,” writes Steve Trimble for Aviation Week, who first broke the Bottlecap Balloon Brigade story.

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The Biden Administration Is Helping Norfolk Southern Block Workers’ Lawsuits

Alooming Supreme Court decision could end up making it easier for the railroad giant whose train derailed in Ohio this month to block lawsuits, including from victims of the disaster.

In the case against Norfolk Southern, the Biden administration is siding with the railroad in its conflict with a cancer-stricken former railworker. A high court ruling for Norfolk Southern could create a national precedent limiting where workers and consumers can bring cases against corporations.

The lawsuit in question, filed initially in a Pennsylvania county court in 2017, deals with a state law that permits plaintiffs to file suit against any corporation registered to do business there, even if the actions that gave rise to the case occurred elsewhere.

In its fight against the lawsuit, Norfolk Southern is asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling, overturn Pennsylvania’s law, and restrict where corporations can be sued, upending centuries of precedent.

Oral arguments in the case were held last fall, and a ruling is expected from the Supreme Court in the coming months.

If the court rules in favor of Norfolk Southern, it could overturn plaintiff-friendly laws on the books in states including Pennsylvania, New York, and Georgia that give workers and consumers more leeway to choose where they take corporations to court — an advantage national corporations already enjoy, as they often require customers and employees to agree to file litigation in specific locales whose laws make it harder to hold companies accountable.

Limiting lawsuits is exactly what the Association of American Railroads (AAR), the industry’s primary lobbying group, wants. The organization filed a brief on the side of Norfolk Southern in the case, arguing that a ruling in favor of the plaintiff would open up railroads to more litigation.

It is also apparently what the Biden administration wants — the Justice Department filed its own brief in favor of Norfolk Southern.

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Science needs to stop using terms like male, female, mother and father, researchers say

Alternatives to terms like “male” and “female” and “mother” and “father” should be sought in science because they assume that sex is binary and heterosexuality is the norm, a group of researchers from the US and Canada suggests.

Male and female should instead be referred to as “sperm-producing” and “egg-producing,” the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Language Project said, according to the Times of London.

Meanwhile, father and mother should be labeled “parent,” “egg donor” and “sperm donor” in the scientific field.

The group has called on the scientific field to use words that are more “inclusive and precise,” according to a press release from the University of British Columbia, which has three researchers in the initiative.

“Much of Western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture,” some project members wrote in the Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal.

UBC assistant professor Dr. Kaitlyn Gaynor said the undertaking began from a Twitter conversation among a few people about terminology that is potentially harmful.

“We reached out to different networks in ecology and evolution that were focused on increasing inclusion and equity in the field to rally support for one very specific action —revising terminology that might be harmful to certain people, particularly those from groups historically and currently excluded from science,” she said, according to the press release.

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What happened to the story of the two murdered NJ councilmen?

We are being told it is a coincidence, and that there don’t appear to be any political motivations behind the murders. Perhaps that is true. I have no reason one way or another to believe otherwise.

But it sure is odd that not one, but two Republican councilmen in New Jersey were murdered in a week, and both had been elected since 2020.

The first murder was of Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour of Sayreville; the second of Milford Borough Councilman Russell Heller. The second murder may have been work-related, as his killer shared the same employer. However, nobody is saying “boo” about what happened and it isn’t even clear that the killer and the councilman knew each other.

On a whim, I searched the Googles and found a distinct dearth of stories about the killings, neither of which has an apparent motive. The police indicated that each was a targeted killing, but the reasons behind the murders are unknown.

It has been two weeks since the first murder and a week since the second. Both briefly made national news, and then the story was memory-holed. A brief update was covered locally when the 911 call for the first was released. But the initial flurry of stories died out almost immediately.

Everybody has chalked it up to coincidence and…that’s it.

Maybe. But it sure seems weird that we haven’t been given much of an explanation about what happened in either case, and the coincidence is rather striking.

One thing is certain: if these were two Democrats we would be enduring endless lectures about insurrections, political violence, violent rhetoric, and gun control.

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Who Corrupted a Top FBI Spyhunter?

IN THE FINAL days of the Cold War, a young diplomat arrived at the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Agents in the FBI’s San Francisco field office kept a close eye on the personnel coming and going from the consulate. The six-story building in one of the city’s toniest neighborhoods long served as a hub of espionage activity. The newly-arrived Soviet diplomat in his twenties, Evgeny Fokin, soon raised suspicions that he was a KGB officer operating under diplomatic cover on his first overseas posting. “I do remember he was an intelligence officer. He was KGB at the time,” says Rick Smith, a retired veteran of the FBI’s counterintelligence squad in San Francisco.

Three decades later, that young diplomat is now at the center of another spy story. This one involves Charles McGonigal, a former senior FBI counterintelligence officer who was indicted last month for taking money illegally from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services. Fokin was the mysterious “Agent-1” described in court papers, an executive working for Deripaska who slowly corrupted the veteran FBI agent over a three-year period, according to sources and documents reviewed by Rolling Stone.

Arrested last month, McGonigal faces federal charges in New York of violating federal sanctions laws that prohibited him from taking money from Deripaska and laundering those ill-gotten gains. He is also accused in a separate case filed in Washington, D.C., of accepting nearly a quarter of a million dollars in secret payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer, including $80,000 that was handed over gangland-style in a car parked outside a New York City restaurant. “His arrest is a sorry day for the FBI,” a retired senior FBI official tells Rolling Stone. “The bureau has taken a beating the last few years with Trump and others attacking it. His arrest is all we need.” 

The damage to the bureau may go deeper than previously understood. In 2020, McGonigal took part in an Atlantic Council panel discussion titled “How Did Russia’s Security Services Capture the Kremlin?” A better question might be: Did Russia’s security services compromise a top FBI counterintelligence agent, here in America? How was one of the FBI’s top spyhunters so easily ensnared? “And how exposed is the FBI, given that it was Fokin, a suspected Russian spy, who snared him?”

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