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Submission + - FBI Was Ordered to Destroy Evidence of China's 2020 Election Plot to Help Biden (justthenews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel handed Congress an intelligence report exposing a Chinese plot to interfere in the 2020 election. The report details how Chinese operatives mass-produced fake U.S. driver’s licenses to flood the system with fraudulent mail-in ballots, which helped Joe Biden in the process. However, the intel wasn’t investigated, corroborated, or acted on. In fact, it was quietly pulled from intelligence agencies even as then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress there were “no known plots” of foreign interference.

The report was sent out on Aug. 24, 2020, but was abruptly recalled by the FBI with a vague excuse about needing to “re-interview” the source. But it didn’t stop there. The bureau didn’t just recall the report; it ordered its destruction.

According to the recall notice, intelligence agencies weren’t just asked to disregard the report — they were ordered to “destroy all copies” and “remove the original report from all computer holdings.” This wasn’t routine bureaucratic cleanup. It was a deliberate effort to wipe damning evidence from existence. The FBI didn’t just bury credible intelligence about Chinese election interference; it tried to scrub it from history.

According to the report, the Chinese government had secretly produced and exported a large batch of fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses in late August 2020. The goal? To enable tens of thousands of ineligible Chinese nationals — particularly students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party — to vote for Biden using mail-in ballots.

Submission + - How one meeting in 2020 and a GOP senator helped create RFK Jr.'s vaccine wreck (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In more than 20 years of covering policy, I have witnessed some crazy stuff. But one episode towers above the rest in sheer lunacy: the November 2020 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Sounds boring? Usually, maybe.

But that meeting was when the committee’s eminent experts, having considered a range of vaccine rollout strategies, selected the plan that was projected to kill the most people and had the least public support.

In a survey conducted in August 2020, most Americans said that as soon as health-care workers were inoculated with the coronavirus vaccine, we should have started vaccinating the highest-risk groups in order of their vulnerability: seniors first, then immunocompromised people, then other essential workers. Instead of adopting this sensible plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee decided to inoculate non-medical essential workers ahead of seniors, even though its own modeling suggested this would increase deaths by up to 7 percent.

Why did they do this? Social justice. The word "equity" came up over and over in the discussion — essential workers, you see, were more likely than seniors to come from “marginalized communities.” Only after a backlash did sanity prevail.

Submission + - Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself.

As far as scientists can tell from its genome—the only evidence of its existence so far—it’s a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum’s mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli.

The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum’s bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, “challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses,” says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. “This organism might be a fascinating living fossil—an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on.”

Adamala adds that if Sukunaarchaeum really does represent a microbe on its way to becoming a virus, it could teach scientists about how viruses evolved in the first place. “Most of the greatest transitions in evolution didn’t leave a fossil record, making it very difficult to figure out what were the exact steps,” she says. “We can poke at existing biochemistry to try to reconstitute the ancestral forms—or sometimes we get a gift from nature, in the form of a surviving evolutionary intermediate.”

What’s already clear: Sukunaarchaeum is not alone. When team leader Takuro Nakayama, an evolutionary microbiologist at Tsukuba, and his colleagues sifted through publicly available DNA sequences extracted from seawater all over the world, they found many sequences similar to those of Sukunaarchaeum. “That’s when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage,” Nakayama says.

Submission + - Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter program HR director, blocked raises for merit (x.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After the whistleblower protested that bonuses should be based solely on performance, human resources director La Wanda Moorer demanded that he "get there" and swap out higher-performing whites for lower-performing POC.

On the F-35.

DEI is deadly. The Chinese are laughing at us.

Submission + - Israel Launches Multiple Strikes in Iran (axios.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. previously told Israel it would not be directly participating in any strikes against Iran's nuclear program. However, the U.S. privately warned allies to prepare for a scenario where talks between the U.S. and Iran might collapse, and where Israel would strike Iran. Reports seem to confirm that this scenario has come to pass.

Submission + - Alarms blaring on multiple iPhones looted from the Apple store in downtown LA (x.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Alarms blaring on multiple iPhones that were taken from the Apple store in downtown LA

Displays on the devices read
“Please return to Apple Tower Theatre
This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted.”

Submission + - Pavel Durov exposes U.S. law that forces engineers to install back doors (x.com) 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Pavel Durov blows Tucker Carlson’s mind by exposing U.S. law that forces engineers to install back doors—and bans them from telling their own company

This is why Telegram didn’t set up shop in America.

“You know what’s interesting, in the U.S., you have a process that allows the government to actually force any engineer in any tech company to implement a back door and not tell anyone about it.”

“Using this process called the gag-order, you know there are certain legal procedures.”

Carlson, stunned, asked: “Not tell his own employer about it?”

Durov confirmed: “Yes, exactly. If you tell your own boss, you can end up in jail. Like, gag order.”

Carlson: “Actually?!”

Durov: “Yeah.”

Carlson: “So your employees have a legal obligation to act as fifth column spies? Saboteurs against you, your employees?”

Durov didn’t hesitate: “That’s one of the reasons I didn’t move to the U.S. with my team.”

Submission + - Why science is about to become AI's killer app (substack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Laboratory science is largely the methodical, relentless pursuit of evidence in controlled conditions. That is a difficult task, not because of a single, insurmountable obstacle, but due to a thousand tiny, complex ones. Humans are good at this but now a new generation of AI-enabled systems are beginning to automate this process. In one recent advance, researchers at the University of Oxford and elsewhere created a set of knowledge agents that work together to carry out the complex task of preparing, calibrating and measuring superconducting qubits in a quantum computing laboratory based on natural language prompts. As this approach is applied more widely, it raises the prospect of a new kind of discovery, analogous to the emerging technique of “vibe coding” enabled by platforms like Replit and Cursor. "Vibe science” would allow researchers to immediately test ideas and hypotheses developed in brainstorming sessions, by intuition or guess work. The prospects for science look good. For scientists? Not so much.

Submission + - Microsoft pulls Seattle tech conference over crime, drug use and homelessness (thepostmillennial.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “According to an internal email obtained by journalist Jonathan Choe of the Discovery Institute, Visit Seattle—the city’s official tourism and marketing organization—was informed that Microsoft will cancel its 2026 event and release all future holds for the conference in Seattle. The email, titled “DEFINITE BOOKING CANCELLATION NOTICE,” said the decision was heavily influenced by the experience of company leadership and attendees walking the downtown core between the Hyatt Regency and the Arch Building on 8th Street.”

That’s some choice real estate — or at least it used to be.

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