So take me down slow an' easy,
Make love to me slow an' easy
I know that hard luck an' trouble
Is coming my way,
So rock me 'til I'm burned to the bone,
Rock me 'til I'm burned to the bone
Whitesnake - Slow & Easy
Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands.
Tens of millions of people use smart speakers and their voice software to play games, find music or trawl for trivia. Millions more are reluctant to invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out of concern that someone might be listening.
Sometimes, someone is.
Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio
Communist Chinese government announces bounty rewards for informants who identify Christians to be “disappeared” by the regime
Too many Americans forget this, but in Communist China where most of our consumer products are manufactured these days, it’s illegal to be a Christian. And the Communist Chinese government is now offering cash rewards to anyone who snitches on Chinese Christians who lead so-called “house churches,” which operate under the radar of the oppressive Communist Chinese regime.
According to reports, the Guangzhou Department of Ethnic and Religious Affairs has announced that it will pay the yen equivalent of $1,500 U.S. – an amount that’s roughly equal to an average two-month income in China – to anyone who successfully leads authorities to Christian house churches, which the Chinese government sees as a constant threat.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who’s repeatedly met with President Donald Trump to discuss issues related mostly to trade, is said to be going after both Christian and Muslims “with great zeal,” as he sees the views of these two religions as conflicting with the goals of China’s communist government.
President Jinping apparently sees the spread of both Christianity and Islam in his country as an “infiltration” that threatens to undermine his own power – which indeed it does, seeing as how Big Government functions as a religion in and of itself.
https://newstarget.com/2019-04-13-communist-chinese-government-announces-bounty-rewards-for-informants-who-identify-christians.html
The grey wall of China: inside the world's concrete superpower
Beijing’s new airport is just the latest megaproject that has seen China pour more concrete every two years than the US did in the entire 20th century
Find the rest of our Guardian concrete week pieces here
Cities is supported by
About this content
Amy Hawkins in Beijing
@XLHawkins
Thu 28 Feb 2019 01.00 EST
Beijing Daxing international airport.
Beijing Daxing international airport contains 1.6m cubic metres of concrete. Photograph: Sipa Asia/Rex/Shutterstock
In the suburbs south of Beijing, what could one day be the world’s busiest airport is rapidly taking shape. Nicknamed “the starfish” due to the striking design by Zaha Hadid Architects, the Beijing Daxing international airport is set to open in October, and could eventually handle more than 100 million passengers a year.
While the 52,000-tonne steel exoskeleton covering the airport’s six concourses immediately catches the eye, what lies beneath is familiar to many Chinese mega-projects: concrete – 1.6m cubic metres of it.
Construction of the new airport hub started in 2014, and is one of the largest infrastructure projects initiated by the country’s president, Xi Jinping, in an effort to jumpstart China’s slowing economy and place Beijing firmly on the international stage.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/28/the-grey-wall-of-china-inside-the-worlds-concrete-superpower
Parallel geometry kek
At least 4 people shot, 1 killed, outside Melbourne nightclub
A man has died in hospital after a gunman opened fire on revelers from a passing car outside a night club in Melbourne, Australia. Three other people have been treated for injuries, one remains in critical condition.
Police reported on Sunday morning that they launched an investigation into a shooting in Prahran, an inner suburb of Melbourne, that resulted in multiple injuries among visitors of a local nightclub. The incident took place at about 3.20 am Sunday at a nightclub near Little Chapel Street and Malvern Road. Among the four people who were initially hospitalized, two were in a critical condition. Two other patients, a 50-year-old man and a 29-year-old man, suffered non-life threatening injuries.
In an update on Sunday, police said that a 37-year-old man from Narre Warren South succumbed to his injuries in hospital.
Police said they had found an abandoned Porsche, which is believed to have been used by the attackers. The vehicle was found burnt in Wollert, a Melbourne suburb some 30km from Prahran.
The shooter, who is believed to be on the run, apparently fired from a car as it was passing by the Love Machine nightclub, which was hosting a night for "old school groovers." The Age reported that the victims include a security guard, who was short in the face, and a patron of the club.
https://www.rt.com/news/456448-australia-nighclub-shooting-attack/
New Jersey Gov Signs Bill Making It 7th State to Legalize Assisted Suicide, Will Force Taxpayers to Fund Suicides
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed into law today a bill targeting elderly and disabled people that legalizes assisted suicide statewide.
Six states (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont) and Washington D.C. permit the dangerous practice of allowing physicians to write lethal prescriptions to certain groups of persons to kill themselves.
New Jersey works on a system where a bill must achieve 41 votes in the Assembly to pass and 21 votes in the Senate to pass, regardless of how many votes are cast against it. Advocates of the assisted suicide measure received the bare minimum in each chamber to pass it.
New Jersey pro-life advocates fought legalization valiantly for six years but euthanasia supporters finally obtained enough votes for the bill.
Patients Rights Action Fund’s Executive Director, Matt Valliere told LifeNews he was disappointed by the news.
“With the signing of this bill to legalize assisted suicide, many vulnerable New Jerseyans are now at risk of deadly harm through mistakes, coercion, and abuse. People with disabilities, the economically disadvantaged, and terminally ill patients are at greatest risk – dangerous public policies often ignore the voices of the vulnerable,” he said. “They are already at a disadvantage when they try to gain equal access to healthcare, and this law will only increase the challenges they face.”
https://www.lifenews.com/2019/04/12/new-jersey-gov-signs-bill-making-it-7th-state-to-legalize-assisted-suicide-will-force-taxpayers-to-fund-suicides/
Closer Everyday
Backlash Grows As Cashless Stores Increase
The economic system of Technocracy demands that no person can be left out. Thus, the global initiative to remove cash from society is not surprising, but it is facing stiff citizen resistance wherever it is being pushed. ⁃ TN Editor
Hembert Figueroa just wanted a taco.
So he was surprised to learn the dollar bills in his pocket were no good at Dos Toros Taqueria in Manhattan, one of a small but growing number of establishments across the U.S. where customers can only pay by card or smartphone.
Cash-free stores are generating a backlash among some activists and liberal-leaning policymakers who say the practice discriminates against people like Figueroa, who either lack bank accounts or rely on cash for many transactions.
Figueroa, an ironworker, had to stand to the side, holding his taco, until a sympathetic cashier helped him find another customer willing to pay for his meal with a card in exchange for cash.
“I had money and I couldn’t pay,” he said.
The issue got some high-profile attention this week when retail giant Amazon bowed to pressure from activists and agreed to accept cash at more than 30 cashless stores, including its Amazon Go convenience stores, which have no cashiers, and its book shops. Amazon declined to say when the change would happen.
There is no federal law that requires stores to accept cash, so lawmakers are working on the issue at the state and city level.
Earlier this year, Philadelphia became the first city to ban cashless stores, despite efforts by Amazon to dissuade it. New Jersey passed a statewide ban soon after, and a similar ban is working its way through the New York City Council. Before this year there was only one jurisdiction that required businesses to accept cash: Massachusetts, which passed a law nearly 40 years ago.
https://www.technocracy.news/backlash-grows-as-cashless-stores-increase/
Research Study on Ongoing Crime Spree by Wall Street Mega Banks Gets News Blackout: Here’s Why
One day before Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee held an historic grilling of the CEOs of the mega banks on Wall Street, the nonprofit watchdog, Better Markets, released an in-depth research report on “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” The report detailed facts, figures and this inescapable conclusion:
“[Six Wall Street mega banks] have engaged in—and continue to engage in—a crime spree that spans the violation of almost every law and rule imaginable. Taking the breadth and depth of their illegal conduct as a whole, the six biggest banks in the country look like criminal enterprises with RAP sheets that would make most career criminals green with envy. That was the case not just before the 2008 crash, but also during and after the crash and their lifesaving bailouts…In fact, the number of cases against the banks has actually increased relative to the pre-crash era.”
The six mega banks profiled in the report are: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.
A reliable source tells us that all major business media received the report on Tuesday, April 9. We know that Politico had the report by 8:00 a.m. because its “Morning Money” column provided a small news nugget at that time announcing that the report was out. Politico did not follow up, however, with any detailed coverage of the shocking revelations in the report.
Wall Street On Parade, after carefully reading and digesting the report, published an article on its contents the next morning, April 10. Then we began to hear from our outraged readers, who wanted to know why they weren’t reading about this report at major business media outlets. We checked the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters, CNBC, and CNN. We could find no mention of the Better Markets report. (We checked again this morning. There is still a news blackout.)
https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/72141/research-study-on-ongoing-crime-spree-by-wall-street-mega-banks-gets-news-blackout-heres.html
Photos Surface Revealing 2017 'Closed-Door' Meeting Between Rep. Ilhan Omar and Turkish President Erdogan
Conservative Review reporter Jordan Schachtel recently came upon an interesting tidbit in the Tusmo Times, a publication that covers the Somali community in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, area. He found a story there by the Somali-language paper’s founder and editor, Abdirahman Mukhtar, about a “closed-door meeting” that took place in New York City in September 2017 between visiting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a then-relatively unknown Minnesota state representative named Ilhan Omar.
Omar, a Muslim immigrant from Somalia who won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2018, reportedly led a delegation of Somalis from Minnesota to meet with Erdogan in New York. Erdogan was in town for the annual UN General Assembly meeting and Omar flew in to meet him at a local hotel in downtown New York City.
She even tweeted about the meeting in Somali:
What is most interesting about this meeting, however, aside from the fact that the President of Turkey agreed to meet with a local Minnesota state legislator, is that it took place in the very same hotel room where Erdogan, either just before or just after his meeting with Omar, met with the assembled top leadership of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood.
This is obvious from the room’s carpeting and table and chairs arrangement: here is Erdogan posing with Ilhan Omar.
In this second photo with Erdogan are Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR); Osama Abu Irshaid, the national director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); Mazen Mokhtar, the national executive director of the Muslim American Society (MAS); and Oussama Jammal, the secretary general of the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the umbrella political organization of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Whether Omar herself met with these leading Brotherhood figures in that room is not known, but it seems unlikely that she would not have.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/photos-surface-revealing-2017-closed-door-meeting-between-rep.-ilhan-omar-a