As rumors swirl that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing a case against Russians who are alleged to have hacked Democrats during the 2016 election – a conclusion based solely on the analysis of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, a Friday op-ed in the Washington Times by retired U.S. Navy admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. asks a simple, yet monumentally significant question: Why […]
Water is an often overlooked and under appreciated natural resource. We need to consume it to sustain human life, we require it to bathe, we depend on it to grow our food, and so much more. And while water may serve as a luxury for many of our lifestyle needs, when it comes to the basics, it’s essential.
Drinking water is often a no-brainer for many. We grab a cup and fill up whenever thirst hits, never thinking twice about what a luxury it is to do so. But what if you were told that the water you consume could be doing the opposite of helping you to thrive?
According to an Environmental Working Group’s review of government water analysis, 75% of America’s drinking water is ridden with cancer-causing hexavalent chromium, or chromium-6. And 200 million Americans are currently being exposed to it.
Chromium-6 is a heavy metal categorized as a Group 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization, or WHO. The same heavy metal Erin Brockovich brought to attention, it’s aby-product of industrial manufacturing and is known to cause cancer even in minute concentrations. Indeed, California scientists labelled it dangerous when it surpasses a mere0.02 parts per billion — the equivalent of one drop of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Research has exposed that no level is safe in your water, however. A two-year study conducted by the National Toxicology Program (2008) concluded that drinking water with traces of chromium-6 resulted in cancer among the test subjects.
The scary news is that, while the numbers and results are right in front of us, California remains the one state to have a public health record on the heavy metal’s effects, and is the only state that has mandated a legal limit on it. Unfortunately, even that is not enough for residents of the state, since they permitted levels of chromium-6 500 times higher than what’s known to be safe. The EWG reported:
The California scientists based their public health goal of 0.02 parts per billion solely on protecting people from cancer and other diseases. Public health goals are not legally enforceable, but legal limits are supposed to be set as close as possible to health goals “while considering cost and technical feasibility.”[8] But the California Department of Public Health relied on a flawed analysis that exaggerated the cost of treatment and undervalued the benefits of stricter regulation,[9] and adopted a legally enforceable limit of 10 parts per billion.
And even if you wanted to be mindful of it yourself, chromium-6 has neither taste nor smell, and leaves no sign of its presence. In order to ensure you are not ingesting it, you would have to take your water to a specialized lab for testing.
As for why more is not being done to protect America’s drinking water, it seems to be an issue of the cost and work needed to properly filter out the harmful contaminants. Way too many gallons are needed in the process, and at a cost too high to resolve a nation-wide concern.
There are plenty of people trying to support it, oddly enough, as well. In fact, some unethical superfood and raw food companies say that eating heavy metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium is good for you because they are “naturally occurring.” But if that’s the case, then chromium-6, which is also naturally occurring, and causes cancer, must be beneficial as well.
The EPA website said: “Chromium-6 occurs naturally in the environment from the erosion of natural chromium deposits. It can also be produced by industrial processes. There are demonstrated instances of chromium being released to the environment by leakage, poor storage, or inadequate industrial waste disposal practices.”
So how can you take action? Buy and use a water filter like the Clearly Filtered Water Pitcher, which has been tested to remove chromium-6 by up to 96 percent, the lab-verified Big Berkey gravity filter, or the AquaTru countertop filter, which removes chromium-6 along with hundreds of other toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Note that brands like Brita will not protect you against this form of contamination.
A Lebanese newspaper wrote that it has gained access to an email from the British embassy in the US which reveals Washington’s 5-paragraph plan to disintegrate Syria.
The Arabic-language al-Akhbar newspaper wrote on Saturday that the US officials along with
(Natural News) British consumers got quite the shock when they discovered that antibiotic levels in the meat products they’re planning to buy from the U.S. have gone through the barn roof. American farm animals are dosed with several times the antibiotics given to locally-raised livestock, reported The Guardian. According to newly-acquired research data from the Alliance...
Majority of drivers make less than minimum wage and many end up losing money, according to study published by MIT
Uber and Lyft drivers in the US make a median profit of $3.37 per hour before taxes, according to a new report that suggests a majority of ride-share workers make below minimum wage and that many actually lose money.
Researchers did an analysis of vehicle cost data and a survey of over 1,100 drivers for the ride-hailing companies for the paper published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. The report – which factored in insurance, maintenance, repairs, fuel and other costs – found that 30% of drivers are losing money on the job and that 74% earn less than the minimum wage in their states.
Former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has accused the Obama DOJ of swapping out her hard drive while it was in their possession in a Thursday tweet.
"What would you think if I told you the hard drive of one of my personal computers was secretly switched out w/another while in custody of the Justice Dept. Inspector General-- before they gave it back to me?" Attkisson tweeted, adding "Tick-tock" at the end, suggesting there's more to the story.
Re: My govt. computer intrusions...What would you think if I told you the hard drive of one of my personal computers was secretly switched out w/another while in custody of the Justice Dept. Inspector General-- before they gave it back to me? (Tick-tock.) #GettingCloserToAnswers
Attkisson says that Inspector General Michael Horowitz was the Inspector General which she gave her computer(s) to, and who she she claims has her hard drive.
Attkisson's computer was famously hacked in 2012 while she was reporting on the Benghazi scandal for CBS - which the journalist captured on video given to Politicoin 2014. A cybersecurity firm hired by the network "determined through forensic analysis" that "Attkisson's computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions in late 2012."
Attkisson alleges that government agencies were behind the attack, and also claims that her TVs and phone were tampered with. Someone she knows finds a “stray cable” attached to her FiOS box, which can be used to download data. -Politico
"Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson's accounts," said CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair at the time. "While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data. This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion."
Attkisson wrote in her memoir that a source linked to a government agency implicated a "sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that's proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency" in the hack.
Attkisson wrote last August on her blog:
The IG investigators found and described to me significant suspicious anomalies in that system much like the CBS laptop, unearthing similar efforts by someone to erase data and evidence. However, when the IG computer experts finished their review, the findings went to higher ups and the resulting report was inexplicably withheld from me in its entirety.
I was shut out.
Many months later, under pressure from Congress, the IG eventually released a very different-sounding summary of its forensics report to the press. It recast or excluded much of what the investigators had told me they’d found. I attempted to obtain the full report and original notes, some of which I reviewed while the investigation was underway, describing the suspicious activity found on my personal computer. However, the IG has stonewalled my Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for these documents for several years. If the Department of Justice won’t comply with FOI law, then what recourse does a citizen have?
Vault 7
Last June, WikiLeaks released a trove of over 8,000 documents as part of their "Vault 7" series of leaks on the CIA, which detail sophisticated tools the government can use to infiltrate, control, and manipulate computer systems - even making it look like another country did it with digital "fingerprints."
From our reporting on last year's release:
The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware. This includes multiple local and remote weaponized "zero days", air gap jumping viruses such as "Hammer Drill" which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs, infectors for removable media such as USBs, systems to hide data in images or in covert disk areas ( "Brutal Kangaroo") and to keep its malware infestations going.
It is unclear whether any of these tools were used on Attkisson, whose video shows that she was running an Apple operating system at the time of her hack. The vault 7 release also describes ultra-stealthy techniques used to spy on Apple products through the computer's EFI firmware.
“The EFI is what orchestrates the entire boot sequence. If you change something before that, you’re controlling everything,” says Karsten Nohl, the founder of Security Research Labs and a well-known firmware hacker. “It becomes part of your computer. There’s no way of knowing that it’s there, and also hardly any way to get rid of it.”
One manual explains how to modify the firmware of a standard Apple Thunderbolt-to-ethernet adapter, turning it into an spyware-planting tool the CIA calls "Sonic Screwdriver." When plugged in, the altered adapter can trick a Mac into thinking it's booting its operating system from a spoofed network source that the adapter impersonates, allowing tweaks to its firmware even in the rare cases when the user has set a password for any changes to that deep-seated code. -Wired
CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE
DOJIG has already refused my FOIs, will not comply with FOI law. This is all to be part of my federal computer intrusion lawsuit. https://t.co/bEp3T0mcp6
