The BBCchanged the testimony of a rape victim after a debate over the pronouns of her transgender attacker, The Times has learnt.
The woman referred to her alleged rapist as “him” but insiders said that her words were changed to avoid “misgendering” the abuser in an article on the corporation’s website….
The victim’s quote was published last year in an online BBC News article about lesbians being coerced into sex with transgender women….
An anonymous participant told researchers: “I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so he was a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout, so I agreed to go home with him. He used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing his penis and raped me.”
The BBC article replaced every reference to “he” or “him” with “they” or “them”….
“They were originally all male references but the woke bros at the news website wanted to make them female because of misgendering,” said a person with knowledge of the matter. “It’s quite shocking. I can’t think of any other situation where we would change the words of an alleged rape victim.” …
The BBC article being discussed is here; the quote uses brackets to indicate that a change had indeed been made, though doesn’t describe what was in the original (e.g., whether the original used “he” or the name of the alleged rapist or something else).
Watch: Huge Rockslide Crashes Down On Drought-Stricken Lake Powell
Utahns were out on their motorboats scooting around drought-stricken Lake Powell on Memorial Day when a massive rockfall crashed into the waters, producing a tidal wave for nearby boaters.
Boater Mila Carter captured a video of the dramatic rockslide. She told CNN that she was en route to Antelope Point Marina with her husband when they noticed rocks and sand falling off a cliff near Warm Creek. They stopped to get a better view when suddenly, a huge piece of the cliff plunged into the water.
“We were not expecting anything like that,” Carter said.
Memorial a day boaters captured a massive slab of sandstone crashing into Lake Powell yesterday! 🪨🌊👏
As the cliff fell into the lake, a tide wave began to form, she said, adding, “I feel like the video didn’t capture the wave at the end … it was very impressive.”
The rockslide comes as Lake Powell’s water level is at a historic low amid an unprecedented megadrought beating down on the westernmost states of the US.
The water level at the second-largest reservoir in the country is so low that the federal government took emergency action to delay water releases earlier this month. The reservoir supplies water and power to millions of people in seven states. It stands at 3,531 feet, its lowest level since the reservoir was filled after the government dammed the Colorado River at Glen Canyon more than a half-century ago.
“Rising water levels can saturate rocks along the shoreline and weaken the cementing agents that bond the rock together, while declining water levels can destabilize the slopes by removing some of the rocks’ confining pressure,” CNN noted. Some of these cliffs are being dewatered for the first time in decades; it certainly suggests that more of these rockslides can occur.
The BBCchanged the testimony of a rape victim after a debate over the pronouns of her transgender attacker, The Times has learnt.
The woman referred to her alleged rapist as “him” but insiders said that her words were changed to avoid “misgendering” the abuser in an article on the corporation’s website….
The victim’s quote was published last year in an online BBC News article about lesbians being coerced into sex with transgender women….
An anonymous participant told researchers: “I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so he was a ‘woman’ even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout, so I agreed to go home with him. He used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing his penis and raped me.”
The BBC article replaced every reference to “he” or “him” with “they” or “them”….
“They were originally all male references but the woke bros at the news website wanted to make them female because of misgendering,” said a person with knowledge of the matter. “It’s quite shocking. I can’t think of any other situation where we would change the words of an alleged rape victim.” …
The BBC article being discussed is here; the quote uses brackets to indicate that a change had indeed been made, though doesn’t describe what was in the original (e.g., whether the original used “he” or the name of the alleged rapist or something else).
Researchers have discovered an approach to identify blood biomarkers that could predict the risk of suicide in patients with depression, bringing them one step closer to developing a potential blood test for use on future patients thanks to a study by researchers at the University of California–Irvine (UCI) and Pritzker Research Consortium.
A student crosses the University of California–Irvine campus in Irvine, Calif., on Sept. 25, 2020. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)
Suicides have increased to nearly 50,000 deaths yearly in the United States and around 800,000 total globally, according to the team’s research now published in Translational Psychiatry, a peer-reviewed medical journal launched in 2011. The 2022 study further shows clinical depression as the most common diagnosis among suicides.
Even more troubling is that in the United States alone, suicide rates have increased by more than 35 percent over the last 20 years, the study says, making it the tenth leading cause of death.
“Identifying those at the highest risk is a pressing challenge,” researchers note in the literature, adding that “suicide prevention strategies and current medications, although helpful, have not stemmed the increase in self-inflicted deaths.”
As such, researchers launched an investigation to see if a blood biomarker signature for depression could be identified in post-mortem patients who took their own lives, studying both brain and blood cells. Their efforts were successful.
In their research, scientists found that non-preserved blood can be used to discover a gene that, when expressed or activated, makes people at a higher risk of suicide.
Not only can this discovery help providers pinpoint suicidal individuals, the results can also help researchers understand molecular changes in suicide victims, which may be of great use in treating the illness moving forward.
“That is so cool, I didn’t even know you could test for something like that … in someone’s blood,” a source diagnosed with depression, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Epoch Times.
“I wish that test was already available when I was in high school.”
The study uses a novel gene expression approach—a way to look for clusters of genes encoded in our DNA that make people at higher risk for certain conditions—in this case the genetic code specific to putting people at risk of suicidal tendencies.
Research further shows that many individuals do not disclose suicidal intentions despite frequent contact with health care professionals and that an estimated 30 percent of suicides visit a healthcare provider within a month of taking their lives.
As such, once developed this blood test can be administered during such medical visits, potentially helping to identify high-risk individuals before it’s too late.
“These blood biomarkers are an important step toward developing blood tests to identify patients with imminent risk of ending their lives,” said corresponding author Dr. Adolfo Sequeira, associate researcher in the Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior at the UCI School of Medicine in a statement.
Dominion Voting Machines In 16 States Vulnerable To Hacks: Cyber Agency
Dominion Voting Systems machines used in at least 16 states have software weaknesses that make them vulnerable to hacking, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) has warned election officials.
According to AP, which obtained the CISA advisory ahead of an anticipated Friday release, the agency said it has no evidence these vulnerabilities have actually been exploited, but is urging states to implement measures to prevent and detect hacking.
“One of the most serious vulnerabilities could allow malicious code to be spread from the election management system to machines throughout a jurisdiction…The vulnerability could be exploited by someone with physical access or by someone who is able to remotely infect other systems that are connected to the internet if election workers then use USB sticks to bring data from an infected system into the election management system,” AP reports.
The 16 states weren’t identified. According to the company’s website, Dominion products are used in 28 states and nine of the 20 largest counties in the country.
The CISA advisory was prompted by a 25,000-word report by J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer scientist. He prepared the report as an expert witness in a federal lawsuit filed by voting integrity activists who want Georgia’s machines replaced with paper ballots. The suit was filed in 2017 and is unrelated to any allegation of a specific hack.
Election-hackers could exploit other weaknesses to forge cards technicians use to access—and change—the machines’ software. “Attackers could then mark ballots inconsistently with voters’ intent, alter recorded votes or even identify voters’ secret ballots,” Halderman told AP.
State and federal election officials maintain they have no evidence that Dominion equipment was tampered with to change 2020 election tallies. Dominion is suing Fox News, Rudy Giuliani and others for defamation, over their suggestions the company’s voting machines enabled fraud in that election.
CISA is recommending that, in jurisdictions where the Dominion voting machines are used, officials should implement safeguards such as testing of machines before and after elections, post-election audits, and asking voters to confirm the readable portion of machine-generated paper ballots.
However, even according to the CISA advisory, voter confirmation of the human-readable, computer-generated paper ballot can be skirted by hackers. Automated counting of ballots is done by reading a QR code printed on them, and CISA warned that some of the software vulnerabilities could allow hackers to generate a code that’s “inconsistent with the human-readable portion of the paper ballot.”
Halderman’s report is being kept under seal; U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg says she’s wary the report, if made public, would serve as a user’s manual for bad actors. Halderman’s report has been designated “attorneys’ eyes only,” which means even the parties to the suit aren’t allowed to read it.
Dominion is at the center of the CISA advisory because the Georgia lawsuit that prompted Halderman’s report centers on Dominion machines, which are used for nearly all in-person voting in the state.
“I think it’s more likely than not that serious problems would be found in equipment from other vendors if they were subjected to the same kind of testing,” said Halderman.
Halderman and his students have successfully hacked voting machines in their own tests. In 2017 testimony for the Senate intelligence committee, Halderman, speaking about voting machines in general, said:
“We’ve created attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes.We studied touch screens and optical scan systems. And in every single case, we found ways for attackers to sabotage machines and to steal votes.”
Halderman recommended universal adoption of optical scan ballots, where voters manually fill in paper ballots that are scanned and counted by a computer—along with the inspection of a sufficient quantity of paper ballots to verify that optical scanners are compiling an accurate tally.
“Paper provides a resilient physical record of the vote that simply can’t be compromised by a cyberattack,” he said.
China has been elected to the World Health Organisation’s Executive Board with zero objections from any democratic countries, despite its voluminous attempts to cover up the Coronavirus outbreak and its subsequent brutal lockdowns.
Hillel Neuer of the watchdog group UN Watch noted “this is the regime that crushed” warnings from whistleblowers in late 2019 and early 2020.
He also noted that “not a single democracy spoke out to object.”
Spectator columnist Ross Clark commented that the WHO is “stuffed with small countries, many with lousy human rights records, which will not dare to challenge China or which will not have the political clout to do so.”
Lets remember that the head of the World Health Organization’s origin investigation into COVID-19 has admitted that China basically ordered his team on what to write in their report and allowed them to mention the lab leak theory, but only on the condition that they didn’t recommend following it up.
In addition, China has refused to cooperate with the renewed WHO probe, declaring that any attempt to look into the lab leak theory goes “against science” and claiming, contrary to U.S. intelligence and the WHO’s own conclusions, that workers in the lab were hospitalised with COVID in the autumn of 2020.
Metzl also pointed out that the World Health Organisation “doesn’t have the mandate to have its own surveillance capabilities,” and was therefore easily batted away by China in the early days of the outbreak when it requested to send responders.
The WHO, which facilitated China’s draconian response to COVID by insisting the western world impose similar lockdowns, is also now urging that gay pride events go ahead despite the clear risk of them being monkeypox super-spreader events, given that the virus is transmitted through close physical contact.
Awarding China a seat on the WHO Executive Board is like if North Korea was put in charge of the UN Conference on Disarmament…oh wait, they really did that too.
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‘Minor’ $1.9 Million Failed Bond Interest Payment Triggers Russian “Failure-To-Pay” Event
In what seems a major action over what many outside observers may see as but a relatively minor technical issue, Russia’s failure to include less than $2 million interest on a late bond payment made at the start of last month has triggered a “failure-to-pay” event, the EMEA Credit Derivatives Determinations Committee has ruled. It has brought the country a significant step closer to a dreaded possible first major external debt default in over a century.
Russia failed to add the precisely $1.9 million in additional interest accrued on credit-default swaps. The ruling came after inquiry from overseas holders of the Russian sovereign bond in question, allowing them to seek payout on the default insurance on as much as $3.2 billion of debt (an amount likely determined later at auction).
But Reuters, which was the first to report the ruling by the panel of investors notes that “At the same time, the size of the accrued interest and the fact that the principal payment has already been paid means the ruling won’t spark a broader default on Russia’s bonds.”
The committee indicated it plans to take up the matter further when it meets Monday, June 6. It could have huge future implications for the some $40 billion of the country’s still outstanding international bonds – nearly $2 billion of which is due through the end of the year.
Russia last month rushed to send dollars through investors after the Credit Derivatives Determinations Committee logged its first “potential failure-to-pay” event when Moscow first tried to transfer rubles on the note.
Meanwhile, the Reuters report reviews: “There are currently $2.54 billion of net notional credit default swaps outstanding in relation to Russia, including $1.68 billion on the country itself and the remainder on the CDX Emerging Markets Index, according to JPMorgan calculations.”
Just prior to the Feb.24 Ukraine invasion Russia possessed nearly $650 billion of available gold and currency reserves, and currently takes in billions of dollars a week selling oil and gas – which Europe is currently seeking to blunt amid its mulled oil embargo – against the backdrop of of its $40BN sovereign debt estimate.
The left’s push for more gun control omit the many cases that go against their narrative, such as instances where guns were used to neutralize shooters, according to Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owners of America (GOA), a gun rights advocacy organization that represents more than 2 million Americans.
“The left is all about pushing gun control. It’s absolutely disgusting what they’re doing. They’re pushing gun control, they’re fundraising off of this within hours of the shooting,” Pratt told NTD’s Capitol Report, referring to the May 24 shooting that killed 21 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
“And really, it’s despicable because it becomes clear they only care about certain deaths,” he said.
Politicians and activists pushing for gun control neglect to talk about cities that already have the policies they want to implement for the entire nation, he said.
“For example, more than 40 people have been shot and killed in Chicago this month. In the last 30 days, in Baltimore, there had been 20 people shot and killed. But the left is not talking about that. They’re not fundraising off of Chicago or Baltimore because they already have very strict gun control,” Pratt noted.
“Those cities don’t serve their cause—[they] have red-flag, gun confiscation orders, they have universal background registration checks, they have so-called assault weapons bans, they have everything that the left is trying to push on us, and yet they have murders out the wazoo in those two cities that they can’t control it.
“And what that tells us, obviously, is that gun control is not the answer,” he said.
Pratt noted examples of past deadly attacks that did not involve guns, and said that blaming a certain instrument for mass attacks is “short-sighted because no law that bans a certain object is going to stop an evil-determined heart from killing.”
“What’s amazing, and this is one of the things that the anti-gun left does, is they only talk about certain uses of a firearm, which fit their narrative when they’re used in a bad way. But then they won’t talk about firearms when they’re actually used to stop mass shootings,” Pratt said.
Pratt noted how, on May 25, the day after the mass shooting in Uvalde, a woman with a concealed carry permit in West Virginia shot and killed a man who had started firing an AR-style rifle into a crowd of people at a birthday-graduation party.
He accused the left-wing media of generating opposition to people’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms “by only selectively talking about certain stories,” and neglecting stories that show how guns may be used to avert more deaths.
“A lot of times where there has been a lot of killing … they are brought to an end by a good guy with a gun,” he said.
Pratt shared the story of Stephen Willeford, who is currently GOA’s spokesperson. As an armed citizen, Willeford in November 2017 stopped a shooter at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, from potentially killing more people.
“Sadly, everyone at that church in Sutherland Springs did not have a gun on that day except for the bad guy,” Pratt said. “But when Steven Willeford, who lived down the street heard the shooting, he ran out of his house barefoot with his AR-15 [and] called the guy out of the church. That guy came out and Steven mortally wounded him.”
“I mean, the guy got in his car, drove off but eventually took his own life because he was wounded so bad,” he continued. “The FBI cited that case and many other cases as examples where armed citizens use guns to stop attempted mass murders.”
Pratt argued against the concept of gun-free zones, saying they only serve to be places where shooters seek to go. The Uvalde shooting was an example of that, he noted.
“It’s really important to point out that in most cases, these killers will try to seek out a location where it’s a gun-free zone. You know, 81 percent of police agree that teachers and staff should be armed, and with good reason because no school has ever had a mass shooting where there were armed teachers and staff,” he said.
“But tragically, that wasn’t the case at the Texas School. Police were reportedly not quick to rush in. And this Texas school didn’t take part in the program that allows teachers to be armed, so it was a gun-free zone.
“And again, that’s what killers often choose to target. And why would 94 percent of mass shooters target gun-free zones? Because they don’t want bullets being fired back at them.
“That’s why they don’t target police stations or gun shows because killers love gun control. And sadly, that’s what enabled this killer in Texas.”
DOJ Charges Ex-OpenSea Exec With NFT Insider Trading
The US Department of Justice has charged a former OpenSea staffer with insider trading in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) “by using confidential information about what NFTs were going to be featured on OpenSea’s homepage for his personal financial gain.”
Nate Chastain, 31, was arrested Wednesday morning on two charges of wire fraud and money laundering, after prosecutors allege he flipped “dozens of NFTs” he chose to feature on the website.
Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
According to the indictment, Chastain sold the NFTs for between 2x and 5x what he initially paid – and sought to cover his tracks by making the purchases via anonymous digital currency wallets and OpenSea user accounts.
“NFTs might be new, but this type of criminal scheme is not,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. “As alleged, Nathaniel Chastain betrayed OpenSea by using its confidential business information to make money for himself. Today’s charges demonstrate the commitment of this office to stamping out insider trading – whether it occurs on the stock market or the blockchain.”
An OpenSea spokesperson told CoinDesk that they took action to quickly investigate Chastain once his actions were known, and then asked him to resign.
“When we learned of Nate’s behavior, we initiated an investigation and ultimately asked him to leave the company,” they said, adding “His behavior was in violation of our employee policies and in direct conflict with our core values and principles.”
Opensea head of product knew what NFTs were to be featured on the homepage, bought them beforehand- charged with insider trading
1) what took so long? this has been going on in crypto forever
2) do NFT’s have to be a security for it to be insider trading?https://t.co/G9gpsh1P7J
As CoinDesk notes, this may be just the beginning when it comes to prosecutions related to NFTs.
“We know that there is a lot of insider trading in the industry, in NFTs” and in decentralized finance (DeFi)” according to New York City-based attorney Max Dilendorf, who specializes in cryptocurrencies and NFTs, adding that Chastain’s arrest sends a “very, very loud message to the industry.”
“A lot of projects and a lot of market participants are walking down the edge of a knife,” he added. “They get pulled in for an audit, or get subpoenaed by any of the federal regulators. I mean, it’s so easy for regulators to build a money-laundering case, and it’s so hard to defend against one.”
While a coming regulatory crackdown could spook the industry, Moish Peltz, a Los Angeles-based NFT lawyer, told CoinDesk that consumer confidence in NFT marketplaces could improve with stricter regulation.
“If consumers are going to have confidence in the NFT marketplace, it is important for them to know they are not being taken advantage of by insiders using confidential information to their disadvantage,” Peltz said in an email to CoinDesk.
“It may be difficult for consumers to have that confidence given the pseudonymous nature of blockchain transactions. The U.S. government has proven again that they are extremely sophisticated in terms of building legal cases surrounding blockchain transactions,” Peltz added. -CoinDesk
According to Peltz, ” the legal guardrails applicable to the NFT marketplace are still emerging, and [the Chastain case] appears to be an important test case where the government is sending a message to insiders who may seek to misuse confidential information. It is now clear that the U.S. government is not ignoring NFT marketplaces. Insiders should act accordingly.“
Author of the popular book “Deep State” and award-winning journalist Alex Newman says Deep State globalists are afraid the world is waking up to the tyranny they are trying to impose on every country on earth including America.
Things are not going as smoothly into their so-called reset as they had envisioned.
Newman explains, “The Deep State is in a ‘do or die’ moment right now…”
“They, the elites or predator class, recognize that they are now locked into this. If they try to retreat, there is no retreat. People are waking up at such a rapid rate that they are in a moment where they are going to have to go for broke and try to impose the whole agenda and damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead or they are going to be in big trouble. They are going to be prosecuted. Right this moment, there are conversations in state attorney generals’ offices all across the country, and this is a problem. People are demanding prosecution..
Right now, the elites, or predator class, realize if they don’t move forward very quickly, they are going to lose everything. They could possibly end up facing true accountability. I think we are in a very dangerous situation now. When people get into a position like that, they don’t have a whole lot of options. Either they cancel the election or they cheat like crazy or they just collapse everything. The way things are going right now with inflation out of control, the food crisis and famine just around the corner, of course, that they engineered, and the monkey pox and bird flu, they have all there crises lined up…
You realize they have a lot of options still to play. I suspect there will be some very interesting developments between now and the mid-term elections. If we had honest elections, they would be totally creamed. They would be toast, and they know that.”
Newman thinks the next move by the Deep State may be a combination of crises that could include the collapse of the buying power of the U.S. dollar and a food crisis that is already a lock in the not-so-distant future. Newman warns,
“What’s going on in Russia and Ukraine, we cannot count out. There is a very real prospect of that expanding…
Desperate people do desperate things. This is just like with an animal that has been backed into a corner. When you get an animal in that situation, they are really left with few options other than attack and do something dangerous, and I think that is where we are at. They recognize that they need crises to advance their agenda. They need to terrify the population…
…and it has to be done in a way that their finger prints are not on this, and instead of people turning on each other, they will start looking for them.”
Newman says,
“The country can be turned around and it needs to be turned around, but it’s going to take work . . . and maybe intervention by the Good Lord.”
Newman closes by saying, “There is no silver bullet.”
There is much more in the 49 min. video interview.
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with hard hitting journalist Alex Newman, founder of LibertySentinel.org and author of the recent book “Deep State.”
