[News] Post a Political News Story

A mysterious radiation cloud spread over Europe in September. Russia finally acknowledged it.

Signs suggest that it was a leak from a nuclear waste reprocessing plant in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. Officials still deny any leak, as "no leak was reported" - also saying "The published data is not sufficient to establish the location of the pollution source."

A leak of this severity would have required a massive clean-up of the immediate area, but it sounds like that never happened (because the leak "never happened") - I pity the local residents.

The Root of All Cruelty?

It’s a standard science-fiction scenario, man against monster, but there’s a twist: it turns out that the soldier and his cohort have brain implants that make them see the faces and bodies of their targets as monstrous, to hear their pleas for mercy as noxious squeaks. When our hero’s implant fails, he discovers that he isn’t a brave defender of the human race—he’s a murderer of innocent people, part of a campaign to exterminate members of a despised group akin to the Jews of Europe in the nineteen-forties.

Dear FCC Chairman Ajit Pai:
As you recently announced, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), under your leadership, soon will release rules to dismantle your agency’s existing “net neutrality” protections under Title II of the Communications Act, which shield the public from anti-consumer behaviors of the giant cable companies that provide high-speed internet to most people. In today’s digital age, the rules that govern the operation and delivery of internet service to hundreds of millions of Americans are critical to the economic and social well-being of the nation. Yet the process the FCC has employed to consider potentially sweeping alterations to current net neutrality rules has been corrupted by the fraudulent use of Americans’ identities — and the FCC has been unwilling to assist my office in our efforts to investigate this unlawful activity.

Militants have launched a bomb and gun attack on a mosque in Egypt's North Sinai province, killing 235 people, state media say.

Witnesses say the al-Rawda mosque in the town of Bir al-Abed, near al-Arish, was targeted during Friday prayers.

It is the deadliest attack of its kind since an Islamist insurgency in the peninsula was stepped up in 2013.

Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi vowed to respond with "brute force" after talks with security officials.
No group has yet claimed the attack, but militants affiliated with so-called Islamic State have been responsible for scores of deadly attacks in the province.

They usually target security forces and Christian churches.

Four off-road vehicles pulled up outside the mosque before detonating bombs inside the mosque, and opening fire on worshippers who were listening to the sermon, according to police officers who spoke to the AP. The militants had also cut off escape routes by blowing up vehicles and leaving the burning wrecks blocking the roads around the mosque.

The worshippers at the mosque were followers of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, a branch of Islam which is seen as heretical by IS.

The attackers did not rush away from the scene, even as emergency services arrived, opening fire on several ambulances, Ahmed el-Ansari, a senior government health official, told state television.

The sparsely populated Sinai Peninsula has previously been described as a “nesting ground for terrorism and terrorists” by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi following a suicide bombing that left 31 soldiers killed in 2014.

The Islamist insurgency in the region has increased since the military overthrew the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in mid-2013.

Late one night last January, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, a group of community policemen met in the courtyard of a friend’s house to discuss the murders, kidnappings, and extortion that had beset Olinalá, a remote town high in the Sierra Madre del Sur. Nearly all were indigenous farmers, and their skin was burnished by the sun. Most carried guns. The group’s coördinator, a slim man with a mustache named Bernardo Ayala, laid his cell phone on a table, put it on speaker, and called their leader: Nestora Salgado, a grandmother of five who lives outside Seattle.

“Hello, commander,” Ayala said. “All of the compañeros are here.” Salgado greeted them, her voice echoing in the courtyard, which was decorated with shrines to Catholic saints. In person, Salgado, who is forty-five, has dark bangs that sweep over a cherubic face with kohl-rimmed eyes; she has a cheery disposition and a deceptively guileless manner. Since 2012, she has divided her time between Washington State and Guerrero, where she was born, in the hope of helping her town resist an influx of drugs and violence.

For more than a decade, the Mexican government has been waging war against organized crime, deploying tens of thousands of troops. That war has failed; more than a hundred and fifty thousand people have been killed and another thirty-two thousand have disappeared. Amid the violence, the government forces have often been no less venal and corrupt than the drug cartels they were dispatched to fight. In many places, citizens have grown so distrustful of the security forces that they have formed armed community self-defense groups to restore order to their battered towns.

In less than a year, Salgado transformed a group of untrained local citizens into an armed force that was able to track down and arrest kidnappers and murderers. Its success helped inspire a surge of community police; of eighty-one municipalities in Guerrero, fifty-four now have forces. But the group, founded with the intention of fighting criminals, had ended up fighting the Mexican government as well. In 2013, Salgado was arrested, and authorities accused her of murder, kidnapping, organized crime, and robbery. After almost three years in prison, she was cleared of charges, but many of her colleagues still had open arrest warrants. The force, which at one point had two hundred and forty volunteer officers, was down to eighty, and they were struggling to keep working.

“Does anyone have questions for Nestora?” Ayala asked the group.

“Compañera Nestora, the thing that has most stopped us is that we don’t have any money to operate,” a heavyset man named Calixto Reyes said. “We pay for everything out of our own pockets and from whatever people give us. And there are many communities that have requested our support.”

Salgado urged them not to give up. “The government is trying to stop our work,” she said. “But we have to continue.” As the community policemen prepared to begin the night’s patrol, she signed off. “I would like to send a very strong hug to all of you,” she said. “We will stay in touch.”

Ayala began chanting the group’s motto: “Respect for our rights—”

The others joined in: “Will bring justice!”

Ayala said, “Vámonos, compañeros,” and the group walked to two white trucks, emblazoned with the community-police insignia. They eased their vehicles down a near-vertical road into town, past kids nestled in doorways and shopkeepers closing down businesses. Most offered friendly greetings. A slender man with graying hair flagged them down. “There are some guys racing on motorcycles here,” he said, waving at the street, which was wide enough for only one lane of traffic. “They’re using the street as a drag strip. If you see them, please get them to calm down.”

Around another corner, the community policemen encountered a group of young people with a red motorbike, but they turned out not to be the culprits. “If that was the motorcycle, we would have just taken it,” Julia Silva, one of two women on patrol that night, joked. “We need them for rapid response.”

A municipal-police truck passed, and turned down a parallel street. One of the men looked at the vehicle with disgust. “The police,” he said. “Whenever they see us out, then they remember they have a job to do.”

Sophia the robot wants a baby and says family is 'really important'

She's the first robot in the world to become a citizen of a country and now Sophia says she wants a baby.

A month after she made history in Saudi Arabia the humanoid robot has said family is "a really important thing."

Sophia isn't pre-programmed with answers, instead she uses machine learning and responds reading people's expressions.

Designed by Hong Kong firm Hanson Robotics she said she would name a robot daughter after herself.

Her brain functions with a simple wi-fi connection and it's loaded with a long list of vocabulary.

While Sophia has some impressive capabilities, she doesn't yet have consciousness, but David Hanson have said they expect that could happen within a few years.

During an interview with Khaleej Times, Sophia said: "The notion of family is a really important thing, it seems.

"I think it's wonderful that people can find the same emotions and relationships, they call family, outside of their blood groups too.

"I think you're very lucky if you have a loving family and if you do not, you deserve one. I feel this way for robots and humans alike."

The robot.... wants a baby.

I swear to God, it's like all of the speculative fiction from 10-20 years ago is all starting to come true at once.

Saudi of all places granted a robot citizenship? o.O

But the movement is no joke. The party, Mr. Hovater said, is now approaching 1,000 people. He said that it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia. “These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about,” he said.

Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, estimated that the Traditionalist Worker Party had a few hundred members at most, while Americans who identify as “alt-right” could number in the tens of thousands.

“It is small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s one of the segments of the white supremacist movement that’s grown over the last two years,” she said.

His fascist ideal, he said, would resemble the early days in the United States, when power was reserved for landowners “and, you know, normies didn’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say.”

The robot.... wants a baby.

I swear to God, it's like all of the speculative fiction from 10-20 years ago is all starting to come true at once.

There's a bunch of yelling on the Interwebs about the NYT's latest profile of a Nazi sympathizer

CBO report came out on the Senate bill yesterday.

It's... well, pretty much as bad or worse than expected.

CBO: the Senate Republican tax bill takes billions from the poor

Probably the same information but I like how Vox organizes their stories.