Blog

More than 50 new environmental chemicals detected in people

Researchers have detected more than 50 new environmental chemicals lurking in people’s bodies, the vast majority of which are little known or unknown compounds.

These chemicals — which have never been observed in people before — were discovered in a study of pregnant women and their newborns.

The findings are concerning given that very little is known about these chemicals and their potential health effects, researchers from the new study say. What’s more, pregnant women and their newborns are a particularly vulnerable population.

Keep reading

America’s Drinking Water Is Surprisingly Easy to Poison

On Feb. 16, less than two weeks after a mysterious attacker made headlines around the world by hacking a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, and nearly generating a mass poisoning, the city’s mayor declared victory.

“This is a success story,” Mayor Eric Seidel told the City Council in Oldsmar, a Tampa suburb of 15,000, after acknowledging “some deficiencies.” As he put it, “our protocols, monitoring protocols, worked. Our staff executed them to perfection. And as the city manager said, there were other backups. … We were breached, there’s no question. And we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again. But it’s a success story.” Two council members congratulated the mayor, noting his turn at the press conference where the hack was disclosed. “Even on TV, you were fantastic,” said one.

Get Our Top Investigations

Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.Email address:

“Success” is not the word that cybersecurity experts use to describe the Oldsmar episode. They view the breach as a case study in digital ineptitude, a frightening near-miss and an example of how the managers of water systems continue to downplay or ignore years of increasingly dire warnings.

The experts say the sorts of rudimentary vulnerabilities revealed in the breach — including the lack of an internet firewall and the use of shared passwords and outdated software — are common among America’s 151,000 public water systems.

“Frankly, they got very lucky,” said retired Adm. Mark Montgomery, executive director of the federal Cyberspace Solarium Commission, which Congress established in 2018 to upgrade the nation’s defenses against major cyberattacks. Montgomery likened the Oldsmar outcome to a pilot landing a plane after an engine caught fire during a flight. “They shouldn’t celebrate like Tom Brady winning the Super Bowl,” he said. “They didn’t win a game. They averted a disaster through a lot of good fortune.”

Keep reading

‘Shock and Awe’: Feds Admit They are Prosecuting Jan. 6 Capitol Protesters to Create Chilling Effect on 1st Amendment

Federal prosecutor Michael Sherwin appeared on CBS News’ 60 Minutes on Sunday where he admitted that he charged as many people as quickly as possible regardless of the evidence to put a chilling effect on the 1st Amendment rights of Trump supporters.

“After the 6th, we had an inauguration on the 20th. So I wanted to ensure, and our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe that we could charge as many people as possible before the 20th,” Sherwin told CBS News. 

He added: “And it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they’re like, “If we go there, we’re gonna get charged.”’

Sherwin made it clear that the feds went after people who had gone viral regardless of whether they perpetrated any violence or committed any actual crime.

“So the first people we went after, I’m gonna call the internet stars, right? The low-hanging fruit. The ‘zip-tie guy,’ the ‘rebel flag guy,’ the ‘Camp Auschwitz guy.’ We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did,” Sherwin said.

Keep reading

A Federal Judge Has Hidden 200 Hours Of Undercover Footage About Abortion Atrocities For 5 Years

Late one Friday in July 2015, District Judge William Orrick of San Francisco issued a restraining order blocking the release of undercover videos at the National Abortion Federation (NAF) convention showing Planned Parenthood employees negotiating the sale of aborted fetus body parts. After nearly six years, more than 200 hours of that footage are yet to be seen by the public, but that is now up for deliberation.

Since the first undercover footage was released, The Center for Medical Progress and its founder, David Daleiden, have been fighting legal battles with both NAF and Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA). Luckily for both NAF and PPFA, the federal judge presiding over their cases against Daleiden is more than friendly to their pro-abortion causes.

Orrick was nominated to his position by former President Barack Obama and was a major donor to and bundler for Obama’s presidential campaign. Both Orrick and his wife are longtime donors to San Francisco’s Good Samaritan Family Resource Center (GSFRC), where Orrick was a board member and helped fund and open a Planned Parenthood clinic on its site. That clinic sold fetal tissue to StemExpress, a for-profit wholesaler exposed by CMP’s videos and reporting.

Orrick’s wife is also an outspoken abortion advocate on social media, “liking” pro-abortion groups on Facebook and even “liking” posts calling CMP and Daleiden’s videos “domestic terrorism.” Suffice it to say, Orrick is not an impartial judge on abortion. Despite attempts by Daledien and CMP to have Orrick removed from their cases, Orrick has refused to step down or even disclose his relationship with the Planned Parenthood clinic.

Nearly six years later, Daleiden is still fighting both Planned Parenthood and NAF in court, and two cases in particular have put Orrick in an interesting, if not damning, position.

Keep reading

Boulder Shooter Threatened Fake Hate Crime Charges Against Classmates He Attacked

The gunman in Boulder who killed 10 people at a supermarket would routinely threaten his classmates with threats of filing fake hate crime charges after violently attacking them, eyewitnesses told the media.

As we highlighted yesterday, Ahmad Al-Issa would typically be described as an “anti-racist activist,” with his Facebook page having featured criticism of Donald Trump, advocacy for refugees and Muslim immigrants.

Despite the gunman’s family telling the Daily Beast that the reason for his rampage was as a result of him being the victim of “bullying” in high school, Al-Issa’s classmates say the opposite is true.

Fox 31 report reveals that Al-Issa once punched a classmate and continued to hit him as he lay on the ground.

Al-Issa tried to justify the attack by claiming the victim “had made fun of him and called him racial names weeks earlier,” although no other classmates could corroborate this.

The shooter’s wrestling team classmate Dayton Marvel also told the Denver Post that in Al Issa’s senior year, “during the wrestle-offs to see who makes varsity, he actually lost his match and quit the team and yelled out in the wrestling room that he was like going to kill everybody.”

“Nobody believed him. We were just all kind of freaked out by it, but nobody did anything about it,” said Marvel.

“He would talk about him being Muslim and how if anybody tried anything, he would file a hate crime and say they were making it up,” he added.

Given this history and the fact that Al-Issa was an avid reader of mainstream media, questions now must be asked about his real motivation given that all the gunman’s victims were white and whether he was radicalized by anti-white racism that has been institutionalized by the press.

Keep reading

Trans Activist Ridiculed For Burning Harry Potter Books

Harry Potter author JK Rowling routinely enrages transgender activists by asserting that biological women are being discriminated against, erased and put under threat as a result of trans people being treated as women.

“When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman … then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside,” Rowling wrote last year.

Such common sense has been branded as an “attack” on the transgender community.

Respondents to the book burning tweet pointed out the similarity to how religious fundamentalists wanted to burn Harry Potter books in the 2000s.

Keep reading