China Hacking US Documents

More than 570 documents reported to be from a Chinese state-backed hacking group were posted online.


They mentioned targets in at least 20 countries and territories, The Washington Post reported.


Officials have issued repeated warnings about China's hacking operations.


A reported trove of leaked Chinese hacking documents may have given the world a glimpse of how widespread and effective China's hacking operations could be.


More than 570 files and documents were posted to the developer platform GitHub last week, The Washington Post reported. They appear to document hacking activity across multiple countries and come from iSoon, which the Post identified as a private security contractor with ties to China's Ministry of Public Security.  READ MORE...

Ancient Footprints

Footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. (National Park Service)



Dozens of awe-inspiring ancient footprints left on the shores of an ice age lake have reignited a long-running debate about when the first people arrived in the Americas.


Two years ago, a team of scientists came to the conclusion that human tracks sunk into the mud in White Sands National Park in New Mexico were more than 21,000 years old. The provocative finding threatened the dominant thinking on when and how people migrated into the Americas. 

Soon afterward, a technical debate erupted about the method used to estimate the age of the tracks, which relied on an analysis of plant seeds embedded with the footprints.


Now, a study published in the journal Science confirms the initial finding with two new lines of evidence: thousands of grains of pollen and an analysis of quartz crystals in the sediments.


“It’s more or less a master class in how you do this,” said Edward Jolie, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Arizona who has studied the White Sands footprints in the field but was not involved in the new study. “As Carl Sagan said, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ They have some extraordinary evidence.”


Lorena Becerra-Valdivia, a fellow at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, said that the results support her modeling work, which suggested that people first crossed into present-day North America before 29,000 years ago, possibly traveling via the ocean.


“If anything, early findings like the White Sands footprints should inspire further scientific investigation in what is a dynamic and changing field,” Becerra-Valdivia said.


Some critics who raised concerns about the initial study said that they were encouraged by the follow-up analyses but remained unconvinced.  READ MORE...

Biggest Hurdle for Electric Vehicles

The Biden administration just unveiled a proposal for some of the most aggressive auto climate rules in the world — the latest step for a White House that has gone all-in on electric vehicles. But America’s EV transition faces a threat few are talking about — not because of high car costs or a lack of automaker support, but the country’s broken and dysfunctional public charging system.


Most EV drivers charge their vehicles at home. But as Americans buy EVs — to the tune of 7 percent of all new vehicle registrations in January — more and more people are finding that the public charging system is unreliable, inconvenient and simply confusing.


“I’ve seen people wait because there are only four chargers and two of them are out of service,” said Bill Ferro, the founder of EVSession, a software firm that tracks charger reliability. “Everything that I’ve seen shows that it’s driving away current and potential EV owners.”


Drivers might show up at a DC-fast charging station — which can fill a vehicle’s battery by 80 percent in about 20 minutes — to find that most of the chargers are broken. Or one might work, but only if the driver installs a particular app on their phone, creates an account and loads money onto it.


Last year, in a study conducted by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the climate advocacy group Cool the Earth, researchers tested every single fast charging station in the San Francisco Bay Area.


They found that more than a quarter of the 657 charging points didn’t function during a two-minute charging test. Sometimes the charging cable couldn’t reach the vehicle’s charging port; other times the payment system wouldn’t work; sometimes the charger’s screen was broken or the network was down.  READ MORE...

China Putting Military Base in UAE

Abu Dhabi's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, left, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang attend a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Monday, July 22, 2019.  Andy Wong-Pool/Getty Images

• China has resumed the construction of a military base in the UAE, leaker papers show.
• Plans for a Chinese base had earlier been halted amid US concerns.
• China is riling the US by forming ties with its traditional allies in the region.

China resumed construction of a military base in the United Arab Emirates, a move likely to alarm US officials and increase concerns that another US ally in the Middle East is drawing closer to China.

According to leaked US intelligence documents obtained by The Washington Post, construction has resumed at a Chinese military base just outside Abu Dhabi.

Plans for a base were halted in 2021 after the US voiced its objections. But The Post's documents indicate that the plans now appear to be going ahead.

According to the report, US intelligence is monitoring Chinese activity at the base and at other locations in the oil-rich UAE amid concerns that it is drawing closer to Beijing. The presence of Chinese officials at several sensitive military sites have alarmed US intelligence, the report says.  READ MORE...

Ancient Methane Release

A group of scientists this week said they have discovered new evidence of how methane deposits stored deep in the seafloor can break free — and they are now trying to figure out what this could mean for our climate future.

The research published Monday suggests a major destabilization of seafloor methane off the coast of Africa around 125,000 years ago, after a global shift in currents warmed the middle depths of the ocean there by 6.8 degrees Celsius, or 12.2 degrees Fahrenheit — a massive rise.

Several scientists who reviewed the study said they weren’t ready to raise major alarms about the planet’s ample stores of subsea methane in the form of what are called hydrates. 

While most experts agree that this methane could cause tremendous warming if it somehow hits the atmosphere, many say that the gas would be unleashed only slowly as the planet warms, and that the ocean itself would protect us by absorbing most methane before it can escape to the air.

Still, the new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscore how little we still know about how the planet will respond to our uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions — and how unpredictable that response may be.

The new sample of sediment unearthed from the seafloor paints a picture of tumultuous events during a period of Earth’s history around 125,000 years ago, called the Eemian. 

The era has often stirred scientists’ fears about the future, for while the Earth was not much warmer than it is today, seas were 20 feet or more higher. Some suspect the West Antarctic ice sheet may have collapsed at that time — and a few have even postulated superstorms powerful enough to lift boulders atop cliffs in the Bahamas.  READ MORE...

Ancient Panda in Europe

An illustration of Agriarctos nikolovi, an ancient relative of the modern panda. (Velizar Simeonovski/Chicago)

Six million years ago, a relative of today’s giant panda roamed ancient forests — but in Bulgaria, not China, scientists say.


Researchers used a set of fossilized teeth discovered in the 1970s to uncover a new species of panda. The teeth were first discovered by paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, and the species bears his name — Agriarctos nikolovi.


The find is described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.


The teeth are shiny and black because they fossilized in coal deposits in Bulgaria. Researchers believe they date from the Messinian age — 7.2 million to 5.3 million years ago — and that the animal lived in humid forests and swamps. It was probably comparable in size to modern pandas, which can weigh up to 250 pounds.

The fossilized teeth are less robust than those of modern-day pandas, which chomp on woody bamboo, and researchers think the ancient bears relied on softer plants instead.  READ MORE...

Our Government Spending

In 2021, the government spent $6.82 trillion.

Like households, the federal government must live within the confines of a budget. However, those confines are much, much larger than the spending limits of the average household — or any household, for that matter.

How large? The federal government is projected to spend $5.7 trillion in 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If you’re wondering where that money comes from and where it goes, here’s what you need to know about the federal budget and how it impacts you.
NOTE: Our government spent $1.1 Trillion than expected...

How the Federal Budget Process Works
If you think staying on top of your household budget is tedious, consider the process the federal government must go through each year. Actually, the process takes more than a year. The U.S. government doesn’t budget for the calendar year starting on Jan. 1 but rather a fiscal year starting on Oct. 1 and going through Sept. 30 of the following year. The process for creating the budget begins a year and a half before the fiscal year begins.

Step 1: Government agencies start compiling their spending proposals in the spring (1 1/2 years before the fiscal year begins) to submit to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Step 2: Using the agencies’ request, the OMB and president create a budget request that typically is submitted to Congress by the first Monday in February.

Step 3: The House of Representatives and Senate budget committees draft budget resolutions. Then a House-Senate conference committee resolves the differences between the two resolutions to create one budget resolution that both the House and Senate are supposed to approve by April 15.   READ MORE...

In 2021, the federal government collected $4.05 trillion in revenue.
In 2021, the federal government spent $6.82 trillion.

Deficit: ($2.77) trillion

SOURCE:  Datalab

COVID PANDEMIC
The U.S. government spent at least $5.2 trillion to combat the covid-19 crisis. It stands as one of the most expensive, ambitious experiments in U.S. history. And it succeeded.

A final phase of that assistance could begin this week, when the Treasury Department starts a $110 billion program of child tax credit payments for millions of Americans. Those benefits are set to run through the end of the year.

But even that program will run out, assuming it is not renewed. And policymakers will be undertaking an equally uncertain experiment by letting most other covid-19 relief aid run its course. Businesses and households that were able to navigate the coronavirus pandemic with large levels of government aid will soon test their ability to forge ahead on their own.

Previous attempts to let pandemic-related benefits expire were met with last-minute extensions, as economic updates remained dismal and hardship remained prominent. But the White House appears ready to let the training wheels come off this year as positive indicators pile up.  READ MORE...

Power Grid

COPENHAGEN, N.Y. — On a good day, a fair wind blows off Lake Ontario, the long-distance transmission lines of New York state are not clogged up and yet another heat wave hasn’t pushed the urban utilities to their limits. On such a day, power from the two big wind turbines in Vaughn Moser’s hayfield in this little village join the great flow of electricity from upstate as it courses through the bottleneck west of Albany and then heads south, where some portion of it feeds what is currently the country’s largest electric vehicle charging station, on the edge of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

There, at an installation opened earlier this year by a car-sharing company called Revel, on the site of the old Pfizer pharmaceutical headquarters, this carbon-free power can help juice up a whole fleet of sleek vehicles that aim to leave the internal combustion engine behind.

But that’s on a good day. Even now — before this state and the country’s grand ambitions for an electric future are fully in motion — there are too many bad ones.

Seventy-four times last year, the wind across Upstate New York dropped so low that for stretches of eight hours or more barely any electricity was produced. Nearly half the year, the main transmission line feeding the metropolitan area was at full capacity, so that no more power could be fed into it. Congestion struck other, smaller lines, too, and when that happened some of the wind turbine blades upstate fell still.

And in New York City this summer, the utility Con Edison appealed to customers to cut back on their electricity usage during the strain of five separate heat waves, while Tropical Storms Elsa, Henri and Ida cut power to thousands.

Converting the nation’s fleet of automobiles and trucks to electric power is a critical piece of the battle against climate change. The Biden administration wants to see them account for half of all sales by 2030, and New York state has enacted a ban on the sale of internal combustion cars and trucks starting in 2035.  READ MORE...

CNN Host is Puzzled

 

In a Post piece headlined, "The puzzle of Joe Biden’s unpopularity," Zakaria claimed Biden's low approval rating wasn't actually his fault, but that he was instead "paying the price" for being president during "complicated times."

"I find President Biden’s unpopularity puzzling. He is rounding out his first year in the White House with the lowest end of first-year approval ratings of any elected president in modern times with the exception of Donald Trump. Why?" Zakaria wrote.

He described Biden as "a genial, likable person," and noted that some of his policies were popular amongst Americans with even some Republican support, but also claimed that the country was doing "reasonably well" economically, despite record inflation, nationwide supply chain challenges and a labor shortage.  IF YOU WANT TO READ MORE THEN CLICK ON...READ MORE...

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-host-admits-puzzled-biden-unpopularity