Amazon Drone Deliveries: The Greatest Threat To Privacy Americans Have Ever Seen

Americans have not seen a greater threat to our privacy than the move towards drone deliveries. This includes Amazon Ring doorbells surveilling families and neighborhoods under the guise of public safety a few years ago.

According to an article in the LA Times, the FAA cannot wait for Amazon to use drones to deliver packages to households across the country.

“This certification is an important step forward for Prime Air and indicates the FAA’s confidence in Amazon’s operating and safety procedures for an autonomous drone delivery service that will one day deliver packages to our customers around the world,” David Carbon, an Amazon vice president who oversees Prime Air, said in a statement.

Amazon joins a growing list of companies using drones to deliver packages to Americans.

"Wing, with partners Walgreens and FedEx Corp., has been conducting limited drone deliveries under a similar FAA approval in Virginia since last year. UPS flies medical supplies within a hospital campus in Raleigh, N.C. Other smaller companies and start-ups are also seeking expanded FAA approvals."

It has become commonplace for the mass media to pander to Big Tech. In fact the LA Times went out of its way to praise drone deliveries.

"Amazon and other companies hoping to revolutionize the retail world with drones have made significant strides in recent years. They’ve invented new devices and shown, at least on a limited scale, that they’re capable of flying relatively long distances and carrying the payloads necessary for packages."

One thing became clear after reading approximately 10 news articles about the FAA approving Amazon's drone delivery fleet. Not a single news article would address the giant elephant in the room: Privacy.

Amazon Air wants to hire drone pilots

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/77928/amazon-drone-deliveries-the-greatest-threat-to-privacy-americans-have-ever.html

Amazon Keeps Hiring, Plans To Increase Workforce With 10,000 More Jobs

Amazon (AMZN) on Friday announced that it will be adding another 10,000 jobs in Bellevue, Washington, over the next few years.

The new hires add to the 15,000 jobs it previously announced it was creating in Bellevue. The jobs will be centralized at a new development in the downtown area.

The office space will encompass 2 million square feet at 555 Tower and West Main and will be leased from Vulcan. The location will house public parks and retail space in a walkable distance from Bellevue Downtown Station, which is scheduled to open in 2023 as part of an extension of the Sound Transit’s East Link.

The new office space will add to the Bellevue 600 project - a 27-story office tower created in the city for Amazon that is expected to be completed by 2025.

John Schoettler, vice president of Global Real Estate and Facilities at Amazon, said in a statement that it looks "forward to bringing more jobs to Bellevue—contributing to a regional growth strategy that can create opportunities for people across the Puget Sound."

Currently, more than 2,000 employees work in Bellevue, the same city where Amazon started in 1994. The e-commerce giant said in August that it had a total of 876,000 employees globally.

To further its commitment to Bellevue, Amazon is also giving a $1 million grant to the City of Bellevue’s Human Services Fund to help local families that have been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. As many as 40 entities will receive the funding across the Eastside of the city.

"Amazon’s continued investment in Bellevue, including today’s announcement of adding 10,000 well-paying jobs as well as a $1 million grant to the Humans Services Fund, is a major win for our community and region," Bellevue Mayor Lynne Robinson said in a statement.

Amid a market selloff, shares of Amazon were trading at $3,246.27 as of 11:41 a.m. EDT, down $121.73, or 3.61%.

https://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-keeps-hiring-plans-increase-workforce-10000-more-jobs-3040442

Monopoly takeover

Pelosi, Mnuchin Cut a Deal on Funding Bill

The government will technically run out of money on September 30 and for members of Congress, this presented a nightmare scenario. Republicans would dearly love to pass some kind of pandemic relief bill before they break until after the election. But with negotiations still stalled, the prospect of being tied up with a coronavirus relief bill and having to deal with a bill to fund the government past September 30 at the same time would have been problematic.

To forestall that eventuality, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have agreed to treat the two issues separately. This means that any government funding bill will be “clean” — no pandemic relief measures included.

Politico:

“House Democrats are for a clean continuing resolution,” Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff for Pelosi, said in a statement.

There is no consensus for how long the stopgap would extend government funding past Sept. 30, Hill aides said. House and Senate Democratic leaders haven’t formally discussed the issue yet, although a mid-December deadline would be the traditional practice during an election year.

As for pandemic relief, the “skinny” GOP bill introduced this week is getting fatter every day.

The new Senate Republican proposal — costing as much as $1 trillion — is expected to include $300 in weekly federal unemployment benefits through the end of December, another round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses, $105 billion for education, and liability protections for companies, schools and health care providers amid the pandemic, according to a draft proposal. The bill would also provide billions to the U.S. Postal Service by converting an existing loan into a grant. The House has passed legislation calling for $25 billion in new funding for the Postal Service, but the White House has supported only $10 billion.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer derisively referred to the GOP bill, saying, “Republicans may call their proposal ‘skinny,’ but it would be more appropriate to call it ‘emaciated.'”

If tradition holds, the continuing resolution to keep funding the government will be of short duration — perhaps to the middle of December. Some Democrats want a CR that would keep the government running until March, hoping to flip the Senate, which would allow the left to cram billions of dollars in spending into the bill.

The Hill:

The duration of the CR is not clear at this point, but the most likely option is that the government will be funded until December, when Congress would need to return for a lame-duck session to pass another short-term bill to fund the government into 2021.

The sources familiar with the talks said it’s possible any coronavirus relief deal reached this month could still hitch a ride on the CR but emphasized the items would run on separate tracks.

In this atmosphere of hate and distrust, anything is possible. Democrats would welcome a shutdown if they could be assured blame would fall on Trump and the Republicans. Some Republicans may wish to make a statement about the $3.5 trillion budget deficit the government has already run up and vote against a short-term CR.

But in the end, it’s likely that more practical heads will prevail and the CR will be passed.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/09/04/pelosi-mnuchin-cut-a-deal-on-funding-bill-n889468

5.6 Magnitude Quake Hits Panama-Costa Rica Border Region, USGS Says

Panama and Costa Rica lie in a seismologically active region known as the Ring of Fire and regularly suffer from earthquakes of various magnitudes.

A 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck Panama on 4 September near the border with Costa Rica, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.

According to the USGS’ data, the tremor was recorded at 17:45 UTC and took place 12.9 km (8 miles) east-north-east of Finca Blanco, Chiriqui, Panama at a depth of 8.7 km (5.4 miles). The quake was given a green alert level, which means economic losses, but unlikely casualties or damages.

There are no immediate reports of victims or damages in either country.

On 25 August, seismologists in Costa Rica recorded a 6.2 magnitude tremor off the country's Pacific coast, 12 km (7.5 miles) south of the province of Puntarenas.

On 16 July, the USGS registered a 5.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of central Panama at a depth of 5.7 km (3.5 miles).

https://sputniknews.com/latam/202009041080369204-5-6-magnitude-quake-hits-panama-costa-rica-border-region/

Tesla Director Nets $5 Million After Cashing In Stock Options This Week

It turns out that Ballie Gifford isn't the only one unloading shares of Tesla near all-time highs. And if you keep asking yourself why Tesla's Board of Directors doesn't seem to weigh in much on Elon's (or the company's) behavior, we might have your answer.

It was disclosed late Wednesday night that Tesla Board member Kathleen Wilson-Thompson exercised an option to buy 12,500 shares at $44.95 and then turned around and sold them immediately at more than 10x that price.

After selling at an average weighted price of about $451.48, according to MarketWatch, the sale likely netted Thompson slightly over a cool $5 million.

Wilson-Thompson hasn't even been with the company for 2 years yet; she has only been on the board since December 2018. In 2019, her total compensation from Tesla was $7.36 million.

Recall, on the same day that Wilson-Thompson sold, we noted that Ballie Gifford, the company's largest outside shareholder, had trimmed its stake in the company citing portfolio weighting restrictions.

For now, both sellers seemed to have great timing. Tesla is well off its $502 all time high ($2510 pre-split) and is slated to open trading on Friday around $380 per share (about $1900 pre-split).

Tesla has shed more than $100 billion in market cap after Wilson-Thompson and Gifford's selling.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/tesla-director-nets-5-million-after-cashing-stock-options-week

Mark Zuckerberg Warns There is Risk of Civil Unrest During and After US Presidential Election

Google, Facebook, and other social media companies, like Twitter, have come under pressure from Democrats, who have claimed that the tech giants' platforms were used to influence the result of the last election and could be used to tip the scales in the upcoming vote.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has warned of the risk of civil unrest in the United States during and after the presidential election. Speaking to Axios, Zuckerberg said it is necessary to do everything to reduce the chances of violence in the wake of the 3 November vote.

"There is, unfortunately, I think, a heightened risk of civil unrest in the period between voting and a result being called. We're trying to make sure that we do our part to make sure that none of this is organized on Facebook. I think we need to be doing everything that we can to reduce the chances of violence or civil unrest in the wake of this election", Zuckerberg told Axios.

80 million people are expected to vote by mail in the upcoming election in the United States due to the severe coronavirus situation in the country. President Donald Trump has strongly opposed the measure, saying this could result in election fraud. Trump has also claimed that the results might not be known "for months or for years" because the ballots could be lost or fail to arrive in time.

Commenting on a potential delay in counting the votes, Zuckerberg said Facebook and news organisations should start "preparing the American people that there's nothing illegitimate about this election", even if it takes "additional days or even weeks to make sure that all of the votes are counted".

"So we're going to do a bunch of different messaging around that just to make sure that people know that that's normal", he told Axios.

His statements come two months before Americans choose their next president in what is expected to be a contentious election between incumbent Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden. Google, Facebook, and other social media companies like Twitter and YouTube have been under pressure from Democrats, who have claimed that the tech giants' platforms were used to influence the results of the last election and could be used to tip the scales in the upcoming vote. However, big tech companies have also been criticised by the Trump administration for being biased against the president and conservatives.

On Thursday, Facebook announced a new policy under which, among other things, all political ads will be banned within a week of Election Day. Zuckerberg said the company will also attach an information label to content aimed at delegitimising "the outcome of the election or discuss the legitimacy of voting methods, for example, by claiming that lawful methods of voting will lead to fraud".

In addition, the company will flag posts made by candidates who try to declare victory before the final results have arrived. "We’ll add a label to their posts directing people to the official results from Reuters and the National Election Pool", the company said.

https://sputniknews.com/us/202009041080368984-mark-zuckerberg-warns-there-is-risk-of-civil-unrest-during-and-after-us-presidential-election/

The Atlantic’s Goldberg Defends Trump Piece — ‘Extensively Sourced and Entirely Accurate’

Editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, JeffreyGoldberg, defended his article claiming President Donald Trump said Americans who died in war were “losers” and “suckers” Friday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”

President Donald Trump denied the story saying, “It’s a fake story, and it’s a disgrace they’re allowed to do it.”

Goldberg said, “It is not fake, it is real. This story is extensively sourced and entirely accurate. That’s all I can say. This is not the first time, of course — certainly not the first time today that the president has cast aspersions on journalism that doesn’t reflect well on him. So his reaction is completely predictable.”

He added, “You’re right, it’s very vigorous, and I think that these vigorous denials are motivated by a realization —I think you were talking about this earlier in your show— a realization that these kinds of comments that he’s made really don’t reflect well on him among a certain kind of voter he actually needs very much in a couple of months. So I think that’s a little bit of the energy there, is from that realization.”

Mitchell said, “I want to give you a chance to respond also to John Bolton, who has said now that he was in the meeting in France, in the morning meeting discussing going to the American cemetery and had not heard any of the disparaging comments that you have reported.”

Goldberg said, “Right. I have very, very good sources. There were more than one meeting and many discussions during that period. I am completely confident that Donald Trump said those exact words.”

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/09/04/the-atlantics-goldberg-defends-trump-piece-extensively-sourced-and-entirely-accurate/

Sen. Rand Paul: Instead of Condemning Leftist Rioters, Joe Biden Blames Trump and Kamala Harris Offers Bail Money

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News exclusively on Thursday that the leftist mob that surrounded him on his way out of the White House after President Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention (RNC) speech last week, along with other leftist violence in Democrat-controlled cities, could be a game-changer in this election.

Asked to reflect on what happened to him and his wife Kelley Paul last Thursday, video of which Breitbart News captured on scene, Paul said that rioters and people who break the law will continue to do so until they face consequences for their actions.

“People who act this way and people who misbehave and break the law have to be punished,” Paul said. “What’s happening is they’re either being arrested or not arrested and then they don’t do anything. One of the people who was trying to get to us, who tried to knock the policeman down, had an altercation with the policeman just after they got us to our hotel, and punched the policeman. The policeman had a cut around his eye that required stitches. The person wasn’t even held. They were let go without bail. So if we do this, if we don’t punish people who misbehave, there will continue to be misbehavior. If you let people roam the streets and throw molotov cocktails, and you don’t arrest these people, you’ll get more of it. I think the mayors of these cities have let us down. To a person, these mayors are Democrats. Democrats have run all of these cities, not for a short period of time, but really for 50 years Democrats have been running these cities.”

This past week, as his poll numbers have tanked nationally and in battleground states, Democrat presidential nominee former Vice President Joe Biden appeared in Pittsburgh purportedly to condemn violence and rioting and looting. Instead, he just blamed President Trump for it. Asked about this, and whether he thinks Biden or his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) are genuine on this, Paul ripped into both Biden and Harris. Paul specifically pointed to Harris pushing to fundraise for the Minnesota Freedom Fund earlier this summer, an organization that spent raised funds bailing rioters in Minnesota out of jail.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/04/exclusive-sen-rand-paul-instead-condemning-leftist-rioters-joe-biden-blames-trump-kamala-harris-offers-bail-money/

Selling Human Organs- China's True Diabolical Face

Please watch this video from China Uncensored." China is killing millions of dissenters and ethnic minorities for their organs. It's a billion-dollar business. The hypocrisy of American corporations and athletes in suppressing this information and collaborating with China is breathtaking. It is mindboggling that this could be taking place in our day.

In June, 2019, I reported on the China Tribunal in London, which found evidence of "forced organ harvesting" from Chinese prisoners, including Falun Gong and Uighur Muslims. The Tribunal's final judgment concluded that this "forced organ harvesting has been committed for years… on a significant scale."

China has said that the practice has been outlawed, replaced with a system of voluntary donations. But a new report, published on November 14 in the BMC Medical Ethics journal, has refuted this, alleging that those claims of reform are being supported by the "systematic falsification and manipulation of official organ transplant datasets in China."

The China Tribunal used first-hand testimony from former detainees and implausible transplant availability and short waiting times to shape its findings. The witness reports were horrificincluding organ extractions on live victims, subsequently killed by the procedures. A 2015 documentary claimed China's illegal organ transplant industry is worth $1 billion each yearbut China insists that forced extractions have stopped, that its efforts to reform date back to 2010, with a system of voluntary donations replacing forced organ harvesting from prisoners.

Not so, says the BMC article, claiming that China is "artificially manufacturing organ transplant donation data." The report says its findings mean that any trust in China's organ harvesting system "has been violated," that the reforms were "a mask for the continued use of non-voluntary donors or donors who are coerced into giving organs." In short, the allegation is that the new system of voluntary donations operates alongside and not instead of forced extractions. The giveaway, according to the report, patterns in the state's data which are too neat to be genuine–they must be falsified.

Sources behind the forensic data analysis deployed by the report's authors included the China Organ Transplant Response System (COTRS) and the Red Cross Society of China. Data that found mathematical patterns that defy expected statistical anomalies. In other words, the official China reports emanate from a PR spreadsheet and not from any kind of genuine on the ground analysis and genuine data.

Susie Hughes from the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), initiated the China Tribunal, welcomed the findings, warning that the report "exposes the lies and deception that mark China's so-called transplant 'reforms.' The falsification of the China Organ Transplant Response System (COTRS) data appears to be part of an elaborate coverup that disguises the state-run mass murder of innocent people for their organs in China."

Earlier this year, David Spiegelhalter, a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, reviewed the core analysis, commenting that "the anomalies in the data examined follow a systematic and surprising pattern–the close agreement of the numbers of donors and transplants with a quadratic function is remarkable and is in sharp contrast to other countries who have increased their activity over this period. I cannot think of any good reason for such a quadratic trend arising naturally."

Responding to the Tribunal's findings in June, the Chinese Embassy in London said its "government always follows World Health Organisation's guiding principles on a human organ transplant and has strengthened its management on organ transplant in recent years. On 21 March 2007, the Chinese state council enacted the regulation on human organ transplants, providing that human organ donation must be done voluntarily and gratis." The embassy has been approached for any comments on the claims made in this latest report. The China Red Cross and China Medical Board have also been approached for any comments on the study and its findings.

As tensions continue between the U.S. and China over alleged human rights abuses, with sanctions including restrictions placed on leading Chinese companies, this report will be seriously unhelpful to Beijing and its claims that the U.S. is painting a misleading picture of the country. This is especially true of Xinjiang and the region's Uighur Muslim minority, which has prompted sanctions on a number of China's surveillance technology giants and which also finds itself central to claims of forced organ harvesting. By contrast, the case being made by the U.S. will be strengthene

https://www.henrymakow.com/2020/09/selling-human-organs-china-diabolical.html

Joe Biden’s Staff Give First Question to Atlantic Reporter, Who Asks About Trump’s ‘Soul’

Joe Biden’s campaign kicked off a round of questions with the candidate Friday by selecting an Atlantic reporter who asked him to comment on President Donald Trump’s “soul and the life he leads.”

Biden, who rarely answers questions from the press, opened the floor to questions immediately after his remarks on the August jobs report, which showed the U.S. economy added 1.4 million jobs in August.

He deferred to his staff to choose the reporters who would be allowed to ask questions. The first reporter was Edward-Isaac Dovere of The Atlantic.

Dovere strode to the microphone and asked about an article in The Atlantic, published the night before, that claimed the president had referred to American soldiers who died in the First World War as “losers” and “suckers.”

(The claims, based on anonymous sources, have been vigorously disputed by all those who were there — including former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who opposes Trump’s re-election.)

Dovere asked: “When you hear these remarks — ‘suckers,’ ‘losers,’ recoiling from amputees — what does it tell you about president Trump’s soul, and the life he leads?

Thanks for watching. https://t.co/ecVkqViixz

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) September 4, 2020

Biden, who had opened his press conference referring to The Atlantic piece, resumed his attack based on the article, “if it’s true.”

He cited Trump’s criticism of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2015 as reason to believe that Trump had disparaged soldiers who had died defending their country.

The reporter followed up with a question about QAnon conspiracy theories, and invited Biden to address Trump supporters who might believe them.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/09/04/watch-joe-biden-staff-give-first-question-to-atlantic-reporter-who-asks-about-trumps-soul/