Abortion
Activists who filmed Planned Parenthood workers charged in California npr.org w!
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced the charges against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt on Tuesday, saying the state "will not tolerate the criminal recording of confidential conversations."
North Korea
South Korea speeds up creation of Kim Jong Un 'decapitation unit' cnn v
The country is speeding up plans to set up what some call a "decapitation unit," a brigade specifically tasked with targeting North Korea's "wartime command," including leader Kim Jong Un, according to a South Korea Defense Ministry official.
The brigade was initially supposed to be ready in 2019, but the Defense Ministry now says it'll be established "by this year."
Airlines
Customs outage causes chaos, backups at airports usatoday
People returning home from the New Year's holiday weekend were being processed at international terminals by hand at some airports, resulting in long lines and short tempers. Travelers reported issues in Chicago, Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Miami and Atlanta, among others.The outage lasted for four hours, the Customs agency cbp.gov said in a statement late Monday, before the system was up and running again.
"I've never seen anything like it," [Michelle Sencibaugh, a K-12 teacher in St. Louis] told USA TODAY. "No one was giving us direction. They didn't tell us what was going on. It was just a herd of people."
Abortion
Obama Bars States From Denying Federal Money to Planned Parenthood nytimes
Mindful of the clock ticking down to a Trump presidency, the Obama administration issued a final rule on Wednesday to bar states from withholding federal family-planning funds from Planned Parenthood affiliates and other health clinics that provide abortions. The measure takes effect two days before the Jan. 20 inauguration of Donald J. Trump.
According to the department, repealing the rule would require a new rule-making process, or a joint resolution of disapproval by the House and Senate, with concurrence by the new president.
Abortion
The Numbers That Show Planned Parenthood About Abortion, Not Women’s Health dailysignal v
Planned Parenthood’s own numbers prove that it’s an abortion corporation, focused on abortion, not on women’s health care. The fact is, Planned Parenthood doesn’t perform a single mammogram and performs less than 2 percent of all women’s cancer screenings in the United States. Yet, as America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood commits over 30 percent of America’s abortions—887 abortions a day, one abortion every 97 seconds, and over 320,000 abortions last year alone.
Research
Motherless babies possible as scientists create live offspring without need for female egg telegraph.co.uk
The landmark experiment by the University of Bath bath.ac.uk rewrites 200 years of biology teaching and could pave the way for a baby to be born from the DNA of two men.
A little sensationalized as it's more "maybe" than "possible", but a step in a scary direction.
Refugees
Calais migrants: Work to start on UK-funded wall bbc
Ms Rudd told the Home Affairs Committee the wall was "not a new initiative", but what mattered was making sure the French had the right amount of security to prevent "illegals" trying to get to the UK.
Also see Austria Threatens Hungary With Court Action Over Migrants abcnews.go
Depravity of Man
Am I a good person? You asked Google – here’s the answer theguardian w!
But before we even get to the question of what would make a good person, there is a basic difficulty with our inquiry: if we ask ourselves, the answer we get will probably be tainted with lies. Even when we know we have done wrong, our minds set at work to scrub the knowledge out. A rather elegant study recently published in PNAS showed that we have difficulties even forming memories of the times we have behaved unethically, and if they ever are formed, they disintegrate faster than other ones. And this is a truth that was known long before lab science, by anyone who studies human nature, from St Augustine to Jane Austen.
While clearly not holding to a biblical view point (and effectivly calling Jesus just another man and totally misunderstanding the point of Job), this is a good reminder that the problem with defining "good" is good by whose standard? God declared it's by His standard that we must be good, and said no one is good (Psalm 53:3, c.f. Romans 3:12). Jesus pointed to the Pharasees and said our righteousness must exceed those who were so about obeying laws that they even made up more laws to obey (Matt 5:20). No one is good, and certainly no one is perfect as God is and demands (Matt 5:48), but that's why Jesus had to live and die. To not only pay our fine in a legal sense through His death for our sin, but to also live righteously so that HIS righteousness could be credited to our account (2 Cor 5:21). There's only been one good man (Jesus - fully God, fully man), which is why there's only one way to be saved from the wrath of God! (John 3:36)
Big Data
Liberal, Moderate or Conservative? See How Facebook Labels You nytimes
You may think you are discreet about your political views. But Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, has come up with its own determination of your political leanings, based on your activity on the site.
Society
Compromise Reached in Bill to Criminalize Undercover Filming at Abortion Facilities christiannews.net
Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez (D-Echo Park) proposed the measure earlier this year in light of the undercover videos released by the Center for Medical Progress exposing Planned Parenthood’s provision of baby bodily organs to procurement companies.
Archeology
King Solomon-era Palace Found in Biblical Gezer haaretz
The monumental building dates to the 10th century BCE, the era associated with King Solomon, who is famed for bringing wealth and stability to the newly-united kingdom of Israel and Judah. The American archaeological team also found a layer featuring Philistine pottery, lending credence to the biblical account of them living in the city until being vanquished by King David.
Space
SpaceX Signs First Customer for Launch of Refurbished Rocket wsj
Scheduled to occur before the end of the year, the mission announced on Tuesday will be the first one to use the lower stage and nine main engines of a Falcon 9 rocket that experienced the rigors of a blastoff and acceleration through the atmosphere on a previous launch. No other commercial space company or military contractor has achieved such a landmark by recovering and reusing the entire lower stage intact, after an initial orbital flight.
Egypt
Egypt blames EU-Turkey deal for refugee spike euobserver
"You see what has happened as a result of the deal with Turkey. The closing of the Balkan route and the deal in north Africa, the pressure has increased on Egypt," [foreign minister ambassador Hisham Badr] told MEPs in the European parliament's foreign affairs committee.
Robots
Researchers discover machines can learn by simply observing, without being told what to look for sheffield.ac.uk
The discovery, published in the journal Swarm Intelligence springer, takes inspiration from the work of pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed a test, which a machine could pass if it behaved indistinguishably from a human. In this test, an interrogator exchanges messages with two players in a different room: one human, the other a machine.
AI
Kawasaki Developing Artificial Intelligence For Motorcycles motorcycle
The AI wouldn’t just allow a motorcycle to talk to a rider; Kawasaki kawasaki says the AI will use a technology called an “Emotion Engine” to interpret a rider’s emotions and perhaps even develop its own personality. Cue the “Knight Rider” theme now.
DNA
How DNA could store all the world’s data nature
“We sat down in the bar with napkins and biros,” says Goldman, and started scribbling ideas: “What would you have to do to make that work?” The researchers' biggest worry was that DNA synthesis and sequencing made mistakes as often as 1 in every 100 nucleotides. This would render large-scale data storage hopelessly unreliable — unless they could find a workable error-correction scheme. Could they encode bits into base pairs in a way that would allow them to detect and undo the mistakes? “Within the course of an evening,” says Goldman, “we knew that you could.”
Variation in 'junk' DNA leads to trouble medicalxpress
Although variants are scattered throughout the genome, scientists have largely ignored the stretches of repetitive genetic code once dismissively known as "junk" DNA in their search for differences that influence human health and disease.
A new study shows that variation in these overlooked repetitive regions may also affect human health. These regions can affect the stability of the genome and the proper function of the chromosomes that package genetic material, leading to an increased risk of cancer, birth defects and infertility. The results appear online in the journal Genome Research. genome.cshlp.org
Medical
Contacts May One Day Be Used to Deliver Glaucoma Medication drugs
The new study showed that the drug-dispensing lenses were able to effectively lower the eye pressure in monkeys with glaucoma at least as much as the standard eye drops used to treat the disease.
Reconstructing the 6th century plague from a victim scienmag
Before the infamous Black Death, the first great plague epidemic was the Justinian plague, which, over the course of two centuries, wiped out up to an estimated 50 million (15 percent) of the world's population throughout the Byzantine Empire—-and may have helped speed the decline of the eastern Roman Empire.
No one knows why it disappeared.
Other...
View smart nanotechnology glass is in 250 commercial buildings nextbigfuture v
Interesting, though this is mostly a commercial for the product...
Syria
REBELS, CIVILIANS LEAVE TOWN AFTER FOUR-YEAR SIEGE hosted.ap.org
Following the deal struck late Thursday, Daraya's rebels began evacuating in government buses on Friday, a process expected to take several days. Around 700 gunmen are to be allowed safe passage to the opposition-held northern province of Idlib, while some 4,000 civilians will be taken to temporary shelter in government-controlled Kisweh, south of Daraya.
Also see Daraya Evacuation Deal Hands Syria's Assad a Strategic Win nbcnews
Society
Barack Obama's transgender bathroom guidelines challenged by more than a dozen states independent.co.uk
The states will appear before a federal judge in Fort Worth on Friday to argue that the Obama administration’s directive presents “unlawful changes” in US law.
Also see 13 states to ask court to stop White House transgender bathroom policy washingtonexaminer
That lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nebraska, includes Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming.
Israel
Israel should stop settlements, denying Palestinian development: Quartet report reuters
The report by the Quartet entities sponsoring the stalled peace process - the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - said the Israeli policy "is steadily eroding the viability of the two-state solution."
Also Quartet report cites violence, settlements and Gaza as barriers to Middle East peace – UN envoy from the UN and The Quartet Report pdf
Google to ban payday loan advertisements washingtonpost
The decision is the first time Google has announced a global ban on ads for a broad category of financial products. To this point, the search giant has prohibited ads for largely illicit activities such as selling guns, explosives and drugs, and limited those that are sexually explicit or graphic in nature, for example. Critics of payday lenders say they hope the move by Google and other tech companies might undercut the business which finds huge numbers of willing customers on the internet.
Ok - I can't say I have much good to say about PayDay lenders, BUT what I find interesting is Google has a) decided to discrimintate against a broad group by not allowing advertising from them, and b) done so from pressure from 'civil rights' groups.
AI
When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime nytimes
In March when Alphago, the Go-playing software program designed by Google’s DeepMind subsidiary defeated Lee Se-dol, the human Go champion, some in Silicon Valley proclaimed the event as a precursor of the imminent arrival of genuine thinking machines.
What has not been shown, however, is scientific evidence for such an event. Indeed, the idea has been treated more skeptically by neuroscientists and a vast majority of artificial intelligence researchers.
The Next Rembrandt nextrembrandt
Short film of a computer painting a new "Rembrandt" based on his original works
Society
U.S. Executives Urge Repeal of Mississippi Law fortune
Executives of several major U.S. corporations urged Mississippi on Wednesday to repeal a new state law that allows businesses to deny wedding services to same-sex couples on religious grounds.
Still, nearly two-thirds of Mississippi voters supported the law, according to a poll highlighted on Tuesday by the Christian-based Family Research Council.
Lawsuit against state of Indiana calls abortion law 'unconstitutional' theguardian
The state of Indiana is being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, over an abortion law recently signed by Governor Mike Pence.
One thing that bothers them about this law is that they would need to treat unborn babies as dead humans, and not discarded medical waste:
The law also requires fetuses to be buried or cremated, which the lawsuit called a costly requirement that does not exist for the disposal of medical waste for other types of operations.
Nature of Man
Can children be natural born killers? bbc
It seems to rip the notion of childhood - a supposed age of innocence - to shreds. We are accustomed to regarding children as in transformation - young people who will eventually shape into a good, bad or indifferent citizen. We do not generally consider them capable of adult crimes such as premeditated murder.
When proved wrong, shockwaves ripple through the fabric of society.
Paul reminds us that God has said all of us are sinners (Romans 3:23) and that by nature we are in rebellion of God and children of wrath (Eph 2:3). It is true that our sins tend to blossom and get more severe as we get older, but there is no such thing as the morally innocent child. From birth we are capable of murder (evil by nature), and it's only God's restraining grace that keeps most from fully realizing their potential even as adults. This article reminds us that what seems unexpected (children who murder) is only because we misunderstand just how wicked we are.
DNA Tech
UW team stores digital images in DNA — and retrieves them perfectly washington.edu
The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies.
Brain Tech
IBM Wants to Implant Fake Brains in Real Brains to Prevent Seizures wired
In Melbourne, Australia, Stefan Harrer is running an artificial software brain atop an artificial hardware brain in an effort to analyze a brain that isn’t artificial at all. Ultimately, he and his colleagues envision merging these three brains together so that the artificial can augment the real.
Military Tech
Submarine-hunting drone ship Sea Hunter unveiled by the US watoday.au
The 40-metre-long unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface for two or three months at a time - without a crew or anyone controlling it remotely.
Industrial Tech
Scientists invent robotic 'artist' that spray paints giant murals phys.org
The researchers wanted to create a way to help non-artists create accurate reproductions of photographs as large-scale murals using spray painting. So, they developed a computer-aided system that uses an ordinary paint spray can, tracks the can's position relative to the wall or canvas and recognizes what image it "wants" to paint. As the person waves the pre-programmed spray can around the canvas, the system automatically operates the spray on/off button to reproduce the specific image as a spray painting.
Apostasy
Pope speaks to Methodists, calls for unity christiantoday
Dialogue between Methodists and the Catholics isn't the only ecumenical discussion happening at the moment. The Pope has held discussions with Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican and Pentecostal leaders. However, there is no immediate prospect of formal unity between them as theologians grapple with the doctrinal differences between the Churches.
Government
Spies in the Skies buzzfeed
Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with “augmented reality” software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes....Most of the aircraft are small, flying a mile or so above ground, and many use exhaust mufflers to mute their engines — making them hard to detect by the people they’re spying on.
Other...
See what a tattoo will look like on your skin before you get inked techspot
InkHunter uses augmented reality to overlay a tattoo onto a body’s surface area. You can select from a series of designs by different artists that are included in the app, or you can upload your own sketches to see how they’ll look on your skin.
