Important Takeaways:
- California Democrats are “crazy” for passing a progressive legislature that would give illegal immigrants up to $150,000 in first-time homeownership, officials said.
- The bill, AB 1840, would require the California Housing Finance Authority’s home purchase assistance program, or California Dream for All Program, to include illegal immigrants’ applications.
- The bill cleared the state Senate on Tuesday.
- In a statement to Fox News Digital, California Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher of Yuba City argued that the legislation would exacerbate the border crisis, the housing crisis and the high cost of living in the Golden State.
- “I didn’t know it was possible to make the border crisis and the housing crisis worse with just one vote, but Democrats found a way,” Gallagher said. “Giving taxpayer-funded housing subsidies to illegal immigrants will drive costs even higher and encourage more chaos at the border.”
- “This is crazy, and it needs to stop,” he said.
- The California Dream for All program passed despite funds running out just 11 days after being instituted in June, which was awarded to 1,700 first-time homebuyers at the time.
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom has not said whether he will sign the bill into law if it clears the legislature before the Aug. 31 deadline.
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Important Takeaways:
- Japan urges 4 million to evacuate as lumbering Typhoon Shanshan threatens south with up to a meter (40 inches) of rain
- Japanese authorities on Thursday warned that a “life-threatening situation” was imminent for towns in Kyushu’s Oita prefecture and urged 57,000 people to take “live-saving actions” as it issued its highest typhoon alert. A Level 4 evacuation advisory, the second-highest alert, is in place for all of Kyushu, affecting 3.7 million residents.
- In central Aichi prefecture, a family of five were buried in a landslide when it destroyed their house late Tuesday, according to Gamagori City’s Crisis Management Division. Three people, a couple in their 70s and a 30-year-old man, died in the incident. Two women in their 40s were pulled out of the debris and survived, one with severe injuries.
- Slower storms can be more destructive, with strong gusts or rainstorms that pound the same areas for hours or days.
- Already, rainfall has reached over 0.5 meters (20 inches) in many areas and forecasters say totals could reach as high as 1 meter (40 inches) across some isolated and hilly regions.
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Important Takeaways:
Important Takeaways:
- Texas has removed 1.1 million people from voter rolls since 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office announced Monday, highlighting efforts to clean up election data and ensure legal registration.
- That includes 6,500 potential noncitizens and 457,000 deceased people, according to data the governor’s office provided.
- The review comes after Abbott signed Senate Bill 1 in 2021, which increased the penalty for lying while registering to vote to a state jail felony and requires the Secretary of State to audit random county election offices every two years.
- “What we want is our voters to say, ‘these are fair, these are transparent, my vote counts.’ As a state, we need to be the gold standard for the country, and the country, the gold standard for the world,” State Rep. Mano DeAyala, R-Houston, said.
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Important Takeaways:
- Three weeks ago, Ukraine’s military launched a stunning operation to take the war in Ukraine back onto the territory of the country that launched it. Three weeks later, the Ukrainians still occupy hundreds of miles of territory in Russia’s western Kursk region.
- The incursion had a number of goals: to force Russia to divert its forces from Ukraine to defend its own towns and cities; to seize territory that might later be used for bargaining leverage in peace negotiations; and to send a political message to the Russian people and their leaders that they are not safe from the consequences of the war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin nearly two-and-a-half years ago.
- But there was also a less obvious objective: Leaders in Kyiv likely hoped to send a message to their friends in the United States and Europe that their approach to the war has been overly cautious — that fears about “escalation,” “red lines,” and Russian nuclear use — a threat that Putin himself has voiced repeatedly — have been overblown.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged this explicitly in a speech on August 19, saying, “We are now witnessing a significant ideological shift, namely, the whole naive, illusory concept of so-called ‘red lines’ refs somewhere near Sudzha” — a town near the border now under the control of Ukrainian forces.
- The Russian government has certainly done everything in its power to add nuclear uncertainty to Western leaders’ calculations. From the very first day of the invasion, Putin has made repeated references to his country’s nuclear arsenal — the largest in the world — and warned countries that get in Russia’s way of “consequences that you have never faced in your history.”
- Over the course of the war, Putin and other Russian officials have made repeated references to “red lines” that should not be crossed if Western governments don’t want to face a catastrophic response. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been particularly active in threatening foreign powers with “nuclear apocalypse” via his social media accounts.
- It’s not all rhetoric: The Russian government has taken steps such as moving some of its nuclear weapons to Belarus and conducting realistic drills for using tactical nuclear weapons — seemingly in an effort to remind Ukraine’s allies of Russia’s capabilities.
- Pavel Podvig, senior researcher on Russia’s nuclear arsenal at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva [thinks] Putin would be unlikely to consider any sort of nuclear use unless the very existence of the Russian state were threatened. “Even the loss of a region like Kursk technically would not qualify,”
- As the Council on Foreign Relations’s Fix put it, Western “red lines” on aid to Ukraine have clearly shifted. The problem is “we don’t know how the red lines are shifting in Putin’s mind.”
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Important Takeaways:
- A ransomware gang claims it hacked the U.S. Marshals Service and is threatening to release data that includes “Top Secret” documents.
- In a recent post to its site on the dark web, the cybercrime group known as Hunters International added the law enforcement agency to its list of alleged victims, alongside a countdown timer set for roughly two days.
- The posting, as viewed by the Daily Dot, claims that 386 GB of data, made up of 327,268 files, were obtained in the breach. Screenshots of the purported data suggest the leak includes dossiers on gang members and their mugshots, files marked “Confidential” and “Top Secret,” as well as files from the FBI.
- One such top-secret document appears to be a report from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Group. A document under the FBI label is listed as a white paper on Instagram from the National Domestic Communications Assistance Center, a hub containing collective technical knowledge and resources of law enforcement.
- Other screenshots reference electronic surveillance, ongoing cases, and documents related to “Operation Turnbuckle,” the name of a law enforcement effort that saw the takedown of alleged drug traffickers in 2022.
- The posting does not indicate that the criminal organization encrypted any files belonging to the U.S. Marshals Service, but instead, based on the countdown timer, is seeking a ransom from the government entity in order to not leak or sell the data.
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Important Takeaways:
- Jack Hergenrother, IBM’s VP of global enterprise systems development, confirmed the R&D shutdown in China to IBM employees in a meeting on Monday, citing Chinese competition, The Wall Street Journal reports. Plus, IBM’s infrastructure business has not been doing as well in recent years, the executive reportedly said. IBM saw its revenue from China fall nearly 20% last year amid ongoing tech industry tensions between the US and China.
- IBM is planning to hire R&D staff in other locations, like India, according to employees familiar with the plans. Over 1,000 IBM employees in China are expected to lose their jobs, impacting staff in cities like Shanghai and Beijing. At time of writing, IBM’s research division only shows a handful of jobs available based in either Japan, the US, or Singapore. IBM has not yet responded to PCMag’s request for comment.
- IBM’s research primarily focuses on artificial intelligence development, semiconductor research, quantum computing, and cloud computing technology, according to the company’s website. In recent months, IBM launched an AI development platform for engineers called InstructLab and open-sourced some of its Granite AI models.
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Important Takeaways:
- George Barna, director of research at Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center, released new data earlier this month that “reveals the limitations of Christian evangelicalism in American society.” The events from recent years have caused “millions of Americans to realize just how depraved American society has become,” the report stated. “Corrupt politicians, dishonest journalists and media outlets, broken social institutions, immoral religious leaders, unconstitutional government programs and policies, and more, have generated non-stop headlines highlighting the decadence of American society and the demise of the United States.”
- It went on to contend that “The depth of the depravity is shocking” and that it’s “indisputable” that the “decline is a direct result of the spiritual collapse of Christianity in the nation” — particularly the way in which the evangelical community has changed over time. The idea of a denomination or even individual churches being “evangelical” has lost much of its definition and certainty in the past quarter-century.
- Among adults who regularly attend evangelical churches, close to two-thirds (62%) are not born-again…
- Half believe that people can earn eternal salvation through their good works.
- About half (45%) also contend that there is no absolute moral truth.
- Four of 10 are unable to identify a God-given purpose for their life, or believe that human beings are born into sin and need Jesus Christ to save them from the consequences.
- Unexpectedly large minorities of adults at evangelical churches reject the biblical nature and character of God (24%), worship spirits other than the God of the Bible (26%), and admit they are afraid to die (27%).
- A stunning number—15%—revealed that they occasionally cast spells on other people.
- Given these insights, it is not surprising to find that only one-eighth of the adults who regularly attend evangelical churches (13%) have a biblical worldview.
- And contrary to the media’s depiction of the politics represented by people in evangelical churches, just one-third are very likely to vote in the 2024 general election, only half are consistently conservative in their socio-political views, and one out of every five prefers socialism to capitalism. Those outcomes are substantially different from the results among people who theological positions qualify them as evangelicals, regardless of the type of church they attend.
- [There’s a lot more in George Barna’s research that I couldn’t fit here so feel free to follow the link]
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Important Takeaways:
- The Israeli military conducted a massive military operation in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, killing at least nine people in a string of fierce gunbattles across Jenin and other major cities as tensions heightened in the war that already has laid to waste most of Gaza.
- Katz accused Iran of trying to establish an eastern terrorist front against Israel in the West Bank “according to the Gaza and Lebanon model,” by financing terrorists and smuggling weapons from Jordan.
- Israel said the Wednesday’s military operation followed a sharp rise in militant activity there in recent months.
- “We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and whatever steps are required,” Katz said. “This is a war for everything and we must win it.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Scientists studying the new mpox strain that has spread out of Democratic Republic of Congo say the virus is changing faster than expected, and often in areas where experts lack the funding and equipment to properly track it.
- That means there are numerous unknowns about the virus itself, its severity and how it is transmitting, complicating the response, half a dozen scientists in Africa, Europe and the United States told Reuters.
- A new strain of the virus, known as clade Ib, has the world’s attention again after the WHO declared a new health emergency.
- The strain is a mutated version of clade I, a form of mpox spread by contact with infected animals that has been endemic in Congo for decades. Mpox typically causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions and can kill.
- Congo has had more than 18,000 suspected clade I and clade Ib mpox cases and 615 deaths this year, according to the WHO. There have also been 222 confirmed clade Ib cases in four African countries in the last month, plus a case each in Sweden and Thailand in people with a travel history in Africa.
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Important Takeaways:
- An American has died from eastern equine encephalitis, a rare and deadly disease spread by mosquitoes.
- The disease has been ripping through parts of the Northeast, placing 10 counties in Massachusetts on high alert before spreading and killing a person in New Hampshire.
- Last week, it was reported that an 80-year-old man in Massachusetts tested positive for the rare virus, sparking public health concerns.
- Officials then discovered the disease in mosquitoes across the state and warned residents to limit their time outdoors.
- The virus then started appearing in neighboring states, with cases popping up in Vermont and New Hampshire, where an unidentified victim was pronounced dead.
- The resident, who was only identified as an adult by the New Hampshire state health department, had initially been hospitalized with severe central nervous system problems caused by the virus.
- While EEE infections are rare, one-third of those infected die from the virus, according to statistics gathered by the CDC.
- After the death was confirmed Tuesday, officials made a chilling warning that cases could be on the rise.
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