Tag Archives: National

Gun poll: 7 in 10 feel safer in an armed neighborhood

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An overwhelming seven in 10 Americans say they would feel safer living in a neighborhood where individuals could own a gun for self defense, the latest indication that support for comprehensive gun control is fading.

Rasmussen Reports found that 68 percent of voters polled would feel safer in an armed neighborhood. Just 23 percent said they’d feel safer in “a neighborhood where nobody was allowed to own a gun.”

The poll is the latest to show shrinking support for the type of gun control President Obama and Senate Democrats sought after the December 2012 slayings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The president has put gun control on his 2014 agenda, but few in Washington expect action.

Read more at The Washington Examiner

Confirmed: Snapchat Hack Not A Hoax, 4.6M Usernames And Numbers Published

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snapchat_uhohA site called SnapchatDB.info has saved usernames and phone numbers for 4.6 million accounts and made the information available for download. In a statement to us, SnapchatDB says that it got the information through a recently identified and patched Snapchat exploit and that it is making the data available in an effort to convince the messaging app to beef up its security. We’ve also reached out to Snapchat.
SnapchatDB said:

Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does.

We used a modified version of gibsonsec’s exploit/method. Snapchat
could have easily avoided that disclosure by replying to Gibsonsec’s private communications, yet they didn’t. Even long after that disclosure, Snapchat was reluctant to taking the necessary steps to secure user data. Once we started scraping on a large scale, they decided to implement very minor obstacles, which were still far from enough. Even now the exploit persists. It is still possible to scrape this data on a large scale. Their latest changes are still not too hard to circumvent.

We wanted to minimize spam and abuse that may arise from this release. Our main goal is to raise public awareness on how reckless many internet companies are with user information. It is a secondary goal for them, and that should not be the case. You wouldn’t want to eat at a restaurant that spends millions on decoration, but barely anything on cleanliness.

Earlier we speculated that SnapchatDB might be a hoax meant to call attention to the app’s security issues but, as it turns out, it’s real–at least one member of our editorial team has been affected. A reader also told us he found his own number, that of several friends and Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel in the list. On Hacker News, several people have had trouble downloading the data files (I just got an error message for both of them, but that may be because of high traffic), but a Jailbreak subreddit user who saw the list said that only numbers in some parts of the U.S. have been published so far. If you have not been able to download the list, you can use this site created by developer Robbie Trencheny to see if your username was included.

Read more at Tech Crunch

Christians targeted in Iraq on Christmas Day

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iraq_christmas_bombThe persecution of Christians in Muslim countries is one of the most under-reported stories out there. It’s widespread and constant, carried out by terrorist undergrounds when it’s not condoned or indulged by the local government. When Islam gains power, it often develops serious “co-existence” problems. The global media really hates to discuss it for ideological reasons, but sometimes it’s impossible to ignore. From the Associated Press:

Militants in Iraq targeted Christians in three separate Christmas Day bombings in Baghdad, killing at least 37 people, officials said Wednesday.

In one attack, a car bomb went off near a church in the capital’s southern Dora neighborhood, killing at least 26 people and wounding 38, a police officer said.

Earlier, two bombs ripped through a nearby outdoor market simultaneously in the Christian section of Athorien, killing 11 people and wounding 21, the officer said.

The Iraq-based leader of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Louis Sako, said the parked car bomb exploded after Christmas Mass and that none of the worshippers were hurt. Sako said he didn’t believe the church was the target.

There were well over a million Christians in Iraq 20 years ago; it’s down to less than half that number today, and maybe closer to a third, depending on which estimates of the current population are most reliable. The usual factional violence and government-toppling insurgent agenda was also in play:

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad condemned the attacks in a statement.

“The Christian community in Iraq has suffered deliberate and senseless targeting by terrorists for many years, as have many other innocent Iraqis,” the statement read. “The United States abhors all such attacks and is committed to its partnership with the government of Iraq to combat the scourge of terrorism.”

Along with Christians, other targets include civilians in restaurants, cafes or crowded public areas, as well as Shiites and members of the Iraqi security forces, attacked in an attempt to undermine confidence in the Shiite-led government and stir up Iraq’s already simmering sectarian tensions.

Read more at Human Events

Fast and Furious gun turns up after Mexican resort shootout

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Washington (CNN) — A dramatic shootout between authorities and suspected cartel gunmen at a Mexican seaside resort this month has ties to a botched U.S. gun operation.

A U.S. official said Tuesday that investigators have traced at least one firearm recovered at a December 18 gunfight in Puerto Peñasco, across from the Arizona border, to Operation Fast and Furious.

That’s the disastrous operation run by agents in the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Agents allowed suspected gun smugglers to buy about 2,000 firearms with the goal of trying to find and prosecute high-level traffickers. They couldn’t track the firearms and most are believed to have ended up with cartels and gangsters in Mexico.

Many have turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States, including at a shooting that killed a U.S. border agent in 2010.

The shootout in Puerto Peñasco, also called Rocky Point by Arizona tourists, two weeks ago left at least five suspected cartel gunmen dead, including possibly a high level Sinaloa cartel chief, according to Mexican authorities.

Read more at CNN

Global Warming Alarmists Stuck In Antarctic Sea Ice

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das-boot

The alarmists set sail for Antarctica with a plan to show the world how badly alleged man-made “global warming” was wreaking havoc across the region. Instead, their Russian-flagged ship was frozen in place after sea-ice coverage hit record-high levels this year. The dozens of global warmists onboard are still stuck as multiple ice-breaking rescue vessels were unable to reach the frozen ship. Climate realists and the alternative press, meanwhile, were quick to ridicule and poke fun at the stranded and beleaguered alarmists. However, the increasingly discredited establishment media has largely failed to notice or report the irony.

The doomed Antarctic “climate research” expedition that ended up being trapped in ice was led by Chris Turney, a professor of “climate change” at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He claims emissions of essential-to-life carbon dioxide — exhaled by all humans — must be drastically curtailed by government to stop “global warming,” which has been non-existent in recent years. The controversial alarmist, who boasts of setting up a “green” business known as “Carbonscape” to profit from increasingly discredited theories underpinning climate hysteria, was on a self-proclaimed mission to “discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south.”

Presumably, being frozen in summer ice was not what Turney and his fellow alarmists had in mind. However, it should not have been entirely surprising. Despite hysterical fear-mongering by the United Nations and self-styled “climate experts,” sea-ice cover in the Southern Hemisphere hit a new record in September of 2013 for the second year in a row, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The latest data show Antarctic sea ice is more than two standard deviations above normal, climate researchers reported.

Read more at The New American

12-year-old drug smuggler reignites immigration debate

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122_2013_cruz-iowa-20168201_s160x107The U.S. Border Patrol earlier this month arrested a 12-year-old illegal immigrant smuggling 80 pounds of marijuana from Mexico into Texas, reigniting a debate over controversial comments made by a Republican congressman earlier this year about children’s involvement in the cross-border drug trade.

Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has called for a crackdown on illegal immigration, had said there were more young illegal immigrants smuggling drugs than there were ones who were valedictorians of their classes in U.S. high schools.

In the Texas incident earlier this month, Border Patrol agents arrested six Mexicans — two adults, two 17-year-olds, a 16-year-old and the 12-year-old — smuggling more than 300 pounds of marijuana.

“They were carrying the marijuana on their backs and when arrested it was discovered that the 12-year-old boy had the heaviest load at 80 pounds,” the Border Patrol said in a statement describing the arrest.

Read more at The Washington Times

Marine Corps delays pull-up requirement for women

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marines_femalesThe Marine Corps has delayed the requirement for female Marines to do three pullups because most women have so far been unable to pass the test.

For 40 years, male recruits were required to perform three pullups to prove their upper body strength for combat, where they would need to carry heavy equipment and potentially lift themselves out of mud walls. Starting Jan. 1, female recruits would have been required to do the same.

Read more at FOX News.

It Looks Like A Crazy Guy Just Walking Around In The Snow. Then You Zoom Out And.. Whoa.

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snow-art3It’s possible you’ve never heard of Simon Beck, but after today, you won’t be able to forget him or his wintry works of art. Simon is an artist and is most well-known for making incredibly delicate and detailed art in the snow, just by walking over a fresh snowfall. He literally walks miles in the snow to create these pieces. And the part that blows our minds? He could spend hours upon hours creating one design, just to have it be covered by snowfall or blown away by the next day. But he still makes them.

snow-art5

Read more at Viral Nova

It Actually Is Better (and Healthier) to Give Than to Receive, Study Finds

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130204184300Feb. 4, 2013 — A five-year study by researchers at three universities has established that providing tangible assistance to others protects our health and lengthens our lives.

This, after more than two decades of research failed to establish that the same benefits accrue to the recipients of such help.

Principal investigator Michael J. Poulin, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, says, “This study offers a significant contribution to the research literature on the relationship between social environment and health, and specifically to our understanding of how giving assistance to others may offer health benefits to the giver by buffering the negative effects of stress.”

Poulin, along with colleagues at Stony Brook University and Grand Valley State University, produced the study, “Giving to Others and the Association Between Stress and Mortality,” which was posted online Jan. 17 by the American Journal of Public Health, which will publish the study in an upcoming print issue.

The authors point out that although it is established that social isolation and stress are significant predictors of mortality and morbidity, 20 years of studies and meta-analytical review have failed to establish that receiving social support from others buffers recipients against mortality after exposure to psychosocial stress.

Read more at Science Daily

Professor admits faking AIDS vaccine to get $19M in grants

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aids_vaccineAn Iowa State University professor resigned after admitting he falsely claimed rabbit blood could be turned into a vaccine for the AIDS virus.

Dr. Dong-Pyou Han spiked a clinical test sample with healthy human blood to make it appear that the rabbit serum produced disease-fighting antibodies, officials said.

The bogus findings helped Han’s team obtain $19 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, said James Bradac, who oversees the institutes’ AIDS research.

Read more at the New York Post