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Robot dogs seeking new homes in U.S. military and security agencies
Robot dogs are finding new homes in Washington’s security establishment, as a Philadelphia-based firm is building new military companions with the goal of keeping service members and other personnel away from danger.
Ghost Robotics showed off its four-legged creatures at a military expo in D.C. this week. The firm recently hired lobbyists and has been spotted conducting demonstrations in Northern Virginia.
The robotic dogs’ ability to bite, bark, and smell goes beyond what people expect from man’s best friend — these dogs can carry weapons, communicate via a speaker, and detect biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiation threats.
“The robot is a tool, right? It’s really a tool for force multiplication; for keeping humans out of harm’s way,” Ghost Robotics CEO Gavin Kenneally said in an interview.
Mr. Kenneally’s team maneuvered its “quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle” using a Samsung tablet at the sprawling Modern Day Marine exhibition in Washington, D.C., where government and security customers shop and test the latest equipment offered by a few hundred vendors.
The robot dogs can climb, crawl, walk, and run, moving at a maximum speed of about ten feet per second. Mr. Keneally said the robots are also capable of going underwater, and Ghost Robotics can craft software teaching it how to doggy paddle through water.
Assembling and disassembling the robots for repair takes approximately 15 minutes, according to Mr. Keneally, who said the robot’s endurance and low level of noise create advantages over other drones and robots.
“What we’re trying to do is have all humans further from harm’s way and have the robot be the thing that goes up ahead and provides [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] or inspection or security, or whatever needs to happen,” he said.
AL JAZEERA ACCUSES ISRAEL OF “BLATANT MURDER” AFTER ITS STAR REPORTER SHOT DEAD IN WEST BANK RAID
The media outlet Al Jazeera accused Israeli forces of “deliberately targeting and killing our colleague” on Wednesday after Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the face while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
In a statement, the Al Jazeera Media Network said that Abu Akleh—who worked as the publication’s Palestine correspondent—was wearing a press jacket that clearly identified her as a journalist when Israeli forces shot her “with live fire.”
Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar, called the attack “a blatant murder,” saying Abu Akleh, 51, was “assassinated in cold blood.”
The statement continued:
Al Jazeera Media Network condemns this heinous crime, which intends to only prevent the media from conducting their duty. Al Jazeera holds the Israeli government and the occupation forces responsible for the killing of Shireen. It also calls on the international community to condemn and hold the Israeli occupation forces accountable for their intentional targeting and killing of Shireen.
The Israeli authorities are also responsible for the targeting of Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samudi, who was also shot in the back while covering the same event, and he is currently undergoing treatment.
Al Jazeera extends its sincere condolences to the family of Shireen in Palestine, and to her extended family around the world, and we pledge to prosecute the perpetrators legally, no matter how hard they try to cover up their crime, and bring them to justice.
Video of Oath Keepers Rescuing 16 Police Officers Deflates Jan. 6 Sedition Narrative, Attorneys Say
A video widely circulated in 2021 that shows a Capitol Police lieutenant asking members of the Oath Keepers for rescue help at the U.S. Capitol blows a hole in the seditious conspiracy charges brought against the group by federal prosecutors, two defense attorneys say.
In the video, Lt. Tarik Khalid Johnson asks a group of men to help him get more than a dozen trapped Capitol Police officers out of the Capitol and through a tightly packed crowd of protesters on the building’s east steps.
It was widely reported in January 2021 that Johnson wore a red Make America Great Again cap on Jan. 6 as a ruse to “trick” supporters of President Donald Trump into helping him rescue fellow officers from the Capitol. He was later suspended for wearing the MAGA cap. Johnson is a registered Democrat, according to online records.
The men who answered the call to help were members of the Oath Keepers, a nationwide group of current and former military, law enforcement, and first responders who have been targeted by federal prosecutors for allegedly conspiring to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The video is at least the second example showing the Oath Keepers coming to the aid of Capitol Police inside the building that day.
Would a group of men seditiously plotting an attack on the Capitol, allegedly to prevent certification of Electoral College votes, rush into the building to extract police trapped inside—all while being followed by a filmmaker?
Journo: Is It Coincidence That Some CIA Torture Techniques are so Popular With Ukrainian Neo-Nazis?
While the US rushed to vilify Russia’s latest UN Security Council Arria-Formula summit on Kiev’s human rights violations, one might wonder as to why Ukrainian neo-Nazi torture sites have so much in common with CIA secret prisons, says Dutch journalist Sonja van den Ende.
“I participated in the UN Security Council Arria-Formula meeting on 6 May 2022″, says Sonja van den Ende, an independent journalist from Rotterdam, Netherlands. “The goal of this meeting was to present to the United Nations (UN) members evidence about war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Army in cooperation with the Azov Battalion which was provided by us, journalists on the ground, in Donbass. The evidence was presented in the form of videos and oral testimonies, from residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, especially Mariupol, Volnovakha and Melitiopol”.
However, the Western UN members, especially representatives from the US, the UK, Norway, Albania, and France, paid little if any attention to the Donbass people’s stories, according to the Dutch journalist. Furthermore, they behaved in an arrogant way, she adds.
You’ve Been Flagged as a Threat: Predictive AI Technology Puts a Target on Your Back
“The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem and very often makes the problem worse.”—Milton Friedman
You’ve been flagged as a threat.
Before long, every household in America will be similarly flagged and assigned a threat score.
Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.
If you’re not unnerved over the ramifications of how such a program could be used and abused, keep reading.
It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
Exorcism gone wrong… 3-year-old girl dies in San Jose, CA…
Faith leaders at a tiny church in San Jose where a three-year-old girl perished last fall have confirmed that they performed a ceremony on the child to “liberate her of her evil spirits” but say what happened was “the will of God,” not the consequence of an exorcism.
“If you read the Bible, you’ll see that Jesus casts away demons and made sick people healthy again,” said Rene Huezo, pastor of Iglesia Apostoles y Profetas and grandfather of the victim. “It’s not when I want to do it, it’s when God, in his will, wants to heal the person. The preacher is like an instrument of God; what we do is what God says.”
Arely Naomi Proctor’s death by asphyxiation has been ruled a homicide by the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner’s office.
Her mother, Claudia Hernandez, who authorities say withheld food from the girl and squeezed her neck during the exorcism, has been arrested and charged with assault on a child resulting in death.
But neither Huezo nor the victim’s uncle, both of whom allegedly held the girl down as the ceremony continued, have been charged in the incident at the church on the 1000 block of South Second Street in San Jose.
US is having trouble finding Asian countries willing to shoot missiles at China
A satirical impression of a headline in the ‘Foreign Policy’ magazine, authored by one Raymond L. Bloodthirst Jr., began circulating around the internet recently. It read as follows: ‘We’re Having Trouble Finding Asian Countries Willing to Shoot Missiles at China.’ The subheading then lambasted China’s neighbors for not being “democratic enough” to potentially sacrifice thousands of lives in this endeavor.
It’s very clearly fake, although some people who shared it didn’t examine it too closely and believed it was real – and one journalist on the “disinformation” beat, who apparently works for Voice of America, made a Twitter thread about the post. Well, it may be hard to really blame users who circulated the satirical headline since it is, at least in part, based in reality.
As it turns out, a recent article by the decidedly non-satirical RAND Corporation, a highly influential American nonprofit global policy think tank, had the exact same take as the satirical headline. RAND wrote on Twitter about its report: “A U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific that relies on an ally agreeing to permanently host ground-based intermediate-range missiles risks failing because of an inability to find a willing partner.”
Washington Post Opinion Piece Says George Washington University’s Name Is Racist
Apparently The Washington Post doesn’t have enough writers on staff because it turned to a university student to write an opinion piece.
“George Washington University needs a new name,” reads the headline of the piece, written by Caleb Francois, a senior at the university in Washington, D.C.
“Racism has always been a problem at GW. At the university’s founding in 1821, enrollment was restricted to White men. In 1954, then-university president Marvin employed numerous efforts to preserve segregation, arguing for a ‘homogenous’ group of White students,” Francois wrote, adding that “systemic racism and inequality [are] still present on campus.”
“In 1987, Black students organized to demand more visibility in a predominantly Black city where Black students were outnumbered by huge majorities. Today, with Black enrollment at about 10 percent, Black students on campus continue to struggle for community. Despite alleged efforts by administration to enhance diversity, the admissions office continues to fail to ensure a student body with adequate minority representation.”
Francois notes that the university has never had a black president and says “European studies and White perspectives are favored over Black perspectives.”
“These problems are rooted in systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy. There are at least four ways the university could achieve progress: Decolonized university curriculum, increased Black enrollment, the renaming of the university and the selection of an African American President,” Francois wrote.
The writer finally gets around to George Washington, the first president of the United States. “Just blocks from the main campus is the Mount Vernon Campus, named for George Washington’s former slave plantation. Every day, hundreds of Black students walk on a campus named after an enslaver of men and study at a site named after dark parts of history. Such sites, among other locations and buildings, are touted as glorified mementos here at GW.”
Francois then takes aim at Winston Churchill, prime minister of Britain during World War II.
“The controversial Winston Churchill Library must go. The university’s contentious colonial moniker must go. Even the university’s name, mascot and motto — ‘Hail Thee George Washington’ — must be replaced. The hypocrisy of GW in not addressing these issues is an example of how Black voices and Black grievances go ignored and highlights the importance of strong Black leadership.”
But Francois never targets the paper in which his opinion piece appeared — The Washington Post.
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