EXPLAINER: Why National Guard's role was limited during riot - 0 views
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questions are being raised about why the District of Columbia National Guard played such a limited role as civilian law enforcement officers were outnumbered and overrun.
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The questions also highlight concern about the potential for violence to erupt again next week when President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated at the Capitol, and whether the Guard should play a bigger or different role.
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When rioters ransacked the Capitol on Wednesday, it wasn’t easy to quickly pivot to having a larger, more muscular force capable of backing up the embattled Capitol Police.
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MyPillow CEO hints at scrapped plan to replace CIA director with Trump loyalist - CNNPo... - 0 views
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A Trump ally's notes visible as he visited the West Wing on Friday revealed a suggestion to replace the current CIA director with the current acting chief of staff at the Pentagon
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Patel, who has held a number of senior jobs in the administration, was named chief of staff to Miller a few days after the general election and is widely viewed as a Trump loyalist.
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Trump has been on the verge of firing CIA Director Gina Haspel several times only to be pulled back from the brink,
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US still out front in tech race, China experts say in response to Pentagon claim | Sout... - 0 views
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these technologies had not only military applications but were also critical for long-term economic prosperity, making them important to the future of US-China
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China exhibited hypersonic missiles and drones at last month’s National Day parade, and has just launched a commercial 5G – fifth generation mobile network – service on Friday, which is the biggest in the world.
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Despite breakthroughs in certain fields like 5G, there was more generally a clear gap between China’s digital information and electronics technologies and the world’s technological leaders, according to Beijing-based naval expert Li Jie.
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Aliens definitely exist and they could be living among us on Earth, says astronaut Hele... - 0 views
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Aliens definitely exist, Britain's first astronaut has said -- and it's possible they're living among us on Earth but have gone undetected so far.
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Then, in a tantalizing theory that should probably make you very suspicious of your colleagues, Sharman added: "It's possible they're here right now and we simply can't see them."
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A former Pentagon official who led a secret government program to research potential UFOs, revealed in 2017, told CNN at the time that he believes there is evidence of alien life reaching Earth.
BBC News - Pentagon ends ban on women in front-line combat - 0 views
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US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has lifted the military's ban on women serving in combat roles, potentially opening hundreds of thousands of frontline positions to women.
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the president was "very pleased" with the new policy. He noted the proposal had emerged from military commanders
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This decision could open more than 230,000 combat roles to women,
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Pressure Rises for Higher Taxes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley wants to raise capital gains taxes. His rival Bernie Sanders seeks to tax stock trades and increase personal income tax rates.
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But they also reflect a broader shift in tax politics that is rippling through the Republican world, too. Pressure to raise taxes, at least on the wealthy, is rising.
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The Tea Party push to slash spending has lost steam and generated a backlash. Defense hawks want more money for the Pentagon, while other Republicans seek additional cash for highway projects. The largest potential targets for further cuts, Social Security and Medicare for the elderly, are hardly politically inviting.
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Psychologists Approve Ban on Role in National Security Interrogations - The New York Times - 0 views
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The American Psychological Association on Friday overwhelmingly approved a new ban on any involvement by psychologists in national security interrogations conducted by the United States government, even noncoercive interrogations now conducted by the Obama administration.
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The ban was approved by the association’s council by a vote of 156 to 1. Seven council members abstained, while one was recused.
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The ban passed on Friday says that “psychologists shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation.” The measure’s backers added language on Friday that stated that psychologists may consult with the government on broad interrogation policy, but may not get involved in any specific interrogation or consult on the specific detention conditions for detainees.
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A Christian Nation? Since When? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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For all our talk about separation of church and state, religious language has been written into our political culture in countless ways. It is inscribed in our pledge of patriotism, marked on our money, carved into the walls of our courts and our Capitol. Perhaps because it is everywhere, we assume it has been from the beginning.
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the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.
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Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion.
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The Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords and the Future of Work - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone.
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Ten years from now, the Deloitte consultant Erica Volini projects, 70 to 90 percent of workers will be in so-called hybrid jobs or superjobs—that is, positions combining tasks once performed by people in two or more traditional roles.
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If you ask Laszlo Bock, Google’s former culture chief and now the head of the HR start-up Humu, what he looks for in a new hire, he’ll tell you “mental agility.
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My Mom Believes In QAnon. I've Been Trying To Get Her Out. - 0 views
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An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.
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“The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”
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By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.
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US dials back Iran rhetoric and seeks 'peaceful resolution' over Saudi attack | US news... - 0 views
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The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has said Washington and its allies were seeking a “peaceful resolution” with Iran in the wake of the attack on Saudi oil facilities, making clear that Washington would limit its initial response to further sanctions.
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“I was here in an act of diplomacy. While the foreign minister of Iran is threatening all-out war and to fight to the last American, we’re here to build out a coalition aimed at achieving peace and a peaceful resolution to this,”
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“US inaction will be perceived as weakness,” said Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of the foreign policy programme at the Brookings Institution. “Let me be clear: I’m not advocating war. The point is that [Trump] engaged in a stupid, unnecessary, incredibly dangerous bluff and the Iranians have called him on it.”
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Why Donald Trump can't grasp this moment (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views
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In his mind, he seems to think it's the riots of the 1960s all over again, and his reaction appears both terrified and angry. "LAW & ORDER!" was the response he voiced via Twitter on Sunday and again in a public address on Monday.
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a hellscape governed by a man frozen in his childhood and out of step with the times. The world is spiraling out of control and its most powerful man is abjectly unprepared and unqualified.
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he convulsive 1960s was America's most trying period of unrest in modern times.
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The Middle East Isn't Worth It Anymore - WSJ - 0 views
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If Iran’s retaliation for the Trump administration’s targeted killing of Tehran’s top commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, had resulted in the deaths of more Americans, Washington was, as Mr. Trump tweeted, “locked and loaded” for all-out confrontation.
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Why does the Middle East always seem to suck the U.S. back in? What is it about this troubled region that leaves Washington perpetually caught between the desire to end U.S. military involvement there and the impulse to embark on yet another Middle East war?
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Previously, presidents of both parties shared a broad understanding of U.S. interests in the region, including a consensus that those interests were vital to the country—worth putting American lives and resources on the line to forge peace and, when necessary, wage war.
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Why pilots are seeing UFOs | CNN - 0 views
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For centuries, people have witnessed unexplained lights in the sky and thought that perhaps they might be ghosts or angels. However, it was in the summer of 1947 when a different explanation became popular. Following a widely reported incident over Mt. Rainier in Washington state, people began to believe that these unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are actually alien spacecraft prowling the Earth.
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Over the past 70 years, more than ten thousand similar reports have been made.
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The problem is that many people jump directly from the “unidentified” in “UFO” to “flying saucer.” And that’s just too large a jump to be reasonable. There is simply no credible evidence that the Earth is being visited by aliens. There are no artifacts, no clear photographs, no captured aliens, no alien bodies – nothing.
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Opinion | Elon Musk, Geoff Hinton, and the War Over A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Beneath almost all of the testimony, the manifestoes, the blog posts and the public declarations issued about A.I. are battles among deeply divided factions
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Some are concerned about far-future risks that sound like science fiction.
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Some are genuinely alarmed by the practical problems that chatbots and deepfake video generators are creating right now.
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Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues - Washington Post - 0 views
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Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.
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The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
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Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
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Two recent surveys show AI will do more harm than good - The Washington Post - 0 views
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A Monmouth University poll released last week found that only 9 percent of Americans believed that computers with artificial intelligence would do more good than harm to society.
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When the same question was asked in a 1987 poll, a higher share of respondents – about one in five – said AI would do more good than harm,
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In other words, people have less unqualified confidence in AI now than they did 35 years ago, when the technology was more science fiction than reality.
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It's Not Just the Discord Leak. Group Chats Are the Internet's New Chaos Machine. - The... - 0 views
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Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011.
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As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”
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unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.
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