Wikileaks' 10th Anniversary Present to American Elections - One Million Secret Emails

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WikiLeaks' Assange signals release of documents before U.S. election

By Andrea Shalal,Reuters 

By Andrea Shalal

BERLIN (Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday the organization would publish around one million documents related to the U.S. election and three governments, but denied the release was aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton.

He said the documents would be released before the end of the year, starting with an initial batch in the coming week.

He criticized Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, for demonizing the group's work after a spate of releases related to the Democratic National Committee before the Democratic convention this summer.

Assange said her campaign had falsely suggested that accessing WikiLeaks data would make users vulnerable to malicious software.

But he denied the release of documents related to the U.S. election was specifically geared to damage Clinton, saying he had been misquoted.

Assange also signaled changes in the way WikiLeaks is organized and funded, saying the group would soon open itself to membership. He said the group was looking to expand its work beyond the 100 media outlets it works with.

Assange, 45, spoke via a video link at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the group's founding. He remains in the Eucador Embassy in London where he sought refuge in 2012 to avoid possible extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations that he committed rape in 2010.

Assange denies the allegations and says he fears extradition to the United States, where a criminal investigation into the activities of WikiLeaks is underway.

He told a packed news conference at a Berlin theater the group's work would continue, even if he had to resign in the future, and he appealed to supporters to fund the group's work, and said several new books were forthcoming.

Assange said Britain's vote to leave the European Union could complicate his case by limiting his ability to appeal to the European Court of Justice.

Asked how he felt after four years in the embassy, he said "pale" and joked he would be a good candidate for medical study since he was otherwise healthy but had not seen the sun in over four years.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Madeline Chambers and Janet Lawrence)

World

WikiLeaks vows to release 'significant' material on US election

AFP  

Berlin (AFP) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pledged Tuesday to publish "significant" new material on the US election before the November 8 vote, speaking on the 10th anniversary of the online leaking platform.

Assange said there were "enormous expectations in the United States" about the material and that "some of that expectation will be partly answered", with "a lot of fascinating angles" in the documents.

"Do they show interesting features of US power factions? Yes they do," he said, addressing an anniversary event in Berlin via videolink.

On why WikiLeaks was holding back for now, he added that "if we're going to make a major publication in relation to the United States at a particular hour, we don't do it at 3:00 am," referring to the time in the eastern United States.

He also said that "we hope to be publishing every week for the next 10 weeks," promising documents on the subjects of war, arms, oil, Google and mass surveillance.

Assange -- speaking from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for over four years to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face rape allegations -- hailed WikiLeaks for releasing 10 million documents over the past decade, exposing state and corporate secrets.

He pledged that WikiLeaks would seek to expand its activities with extra staff and new media partnerships, with plans to hire 100 more journalists over the next three years.

"We're going to need... an army to defend us from the pressure that is already starting to arrive," said Assange, wearing a black T-shirt with the word "truth" on it.

On the eve of the US Democratic Party convention in July, WikiLeaks published some 20,000 internal emails pointing at an apparent bias of its leaders for Clinton during the primary campaign.

Assange charged that WikiLeaks was now the target of a witch hunt orchestrated in particular by Clinton, likening it to the repression of American communists in the 1950s driven by then senator Joseph McCarthy.

Assange said WikiLeaks would scale up to "amplify our publications and to defend us against what is really a quite remarkable McCarthyist push in the United States at the moment, principally by Hillary Clinton and her allies because she happens to be the person being exposed at the moment".

Asked whether he felt affinity with Clinton's Republican rival Donald Trump, he said: "I feel personal affinity with all human beings. Through understanding someone, you can feel sorry for them.

"I certainly feel sorry for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. These are two people who are tormented by their ambitions."

World

Julian Assange moves speech to Berlin due to 'specific information'

steven_musil,CNET

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has moved a much-anticipated press conference on Tuesday from London to Berlin, citing unspecified "specific information."

Assange, who has been living in asylum in Ecuador's embassy in London for four years, had been scheduled to deliver a speech from his balcony during which it was expected he would release information that could be damaging to US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Assange had said in August he planned to release "significant" information about the Democratic nominee before the November 8 election.

The change in venue, which WikiLeaks announced in a tweet Monday, came just hours after the document-leaking site tweeted a report that quoted Clinton as appearing to suggest use of a drone strike against Assange. According to True Pundit, Clinton asked during a 2010 State Department meeting about WikiLeaks and Assange, "Can't we just drone this guy?"

The quote, allegedly made while Clinton was serving as Secretary of State, was included in a massive trove of classified State Department documents that Wikileaks began releasing later that month.

Representatives for WikiLeaks and Clinton's campaign didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The WikiLeaks founder sought asylum from Ecuador in 2012 after Swedish investigators issued a European arrest warrant for Assange that required British police to detain and extradite him. He is trying to avoid extradition to Sweden out of fear he would then be extradited to the US to face questioning over classified material published on WikiLeaks. 

The California Shake and Bake - More than a Quake - Too Much to Take - the Trump and Clinton Wake

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The official news media report on the California earthquake warning seems to have upset some people but as with all things in the news, what is the hidden meaning?  In this case, what is the hidden cause and meaning?

Could this have anything to do with the political presidential campaign underway?  Let us face it, this is a campaign for the ages that has finished off the political process, the institutions of America, the news media of America, so why not California and the world?

The Book of Revelations may have the Four Horsemen but we have got Hillary, the Donald, throw in a Wild Billy for good measure, with the Fourth being none other than Barack Obama whose legacy rests in the hands and mouths of the other three.

This is a campaign for the ages so it might as well be heralding the End Times because what will be left when this finally ends, probably nothing of consequence.

 
So we can hardly fault California for being the starting point for the End of Time and it would only make sense a giant earthquake would swallow up the state being it is the last outpost for liberal purity.

Most fair minded Americans realize there is something dreadfully wrong with this presidential election.  It is bad enough we have to pick the lesser of two evils, but add in the baggage of past presidents and the load is too great to absorb.

So get this for 2016 logic.  We have a Republican president who was defeated by a Democratic governor of Arkansas because of an Independent - and we all know Independents have no status in America.  Then we have the same Republican president who got whipped by the Democratic Arkansas governor now endorsing the wife and former First Lady of the Arkansas governor who whipped him because the Republican now running for president whipped the former Republican president's kid.

Bring on the End Times, it has to make more sense than the present.  Did I mention the former First Lady of the Arkansas governor who whipped the former Republican president that now supports her got whipped by the present Democratic president who has now joined forces with the former Republican president to back the former First Lady who nearly beat him and whose husband whipped the former Republican president.

Please note all members of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Hillary, Donald, Billy, and Barack are all products of the venerable Ivy League that has controlled the presidency for 28 straight years and I am certain this information has something to do with the End Times.
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Is California about to be shaken to the bone? Something bigger than an election is afoot!

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California's chances of having a magnitude-7 or greater earthquake in the next couple days just skyrocketed

1:18 p.m. ET

A cluster of more than 200 small earthquakes beneath the Salton Sea in Southern California earlier this week has scientists waiting to see if the slumbering San Andreas fault nearby could be the next to move. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that following the quake swarm at the Salton Sea on Monday and Tuesday, the likelihood of a magnitude-7 or greater earthquake being triggered is as high as 1 in 100 over the next seven days, though the odds will lower as time goes on.

But for now, local seismologists might feel their hearts racing. "When there's significant seismicity in this area of the fault, we kind of wonder if [the San Andreas] is somehow going to go active," Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson told the Los Angeles Times. "So maybe one of those small earthquakes that's happening in the neighborhood of the fault is going to trigger it, and set off the big event."

And by big event, they mean big:

A San Andreas earthquake starting at the Salton Sea has long been a major concern for scientists. In 2008, USGS researchers simulated what would happen if a magnitude-7.8 earthquake started at the Salton Sea and then barreled up the San Andreas fault, sending shaking waves out in all directions.

By the time the San Andreas fault becomes unhinged in San Bernardino County's Cajon Pass, Interstate 15 and rail lines could be severed. Historic downtowns in the Inland Empire could be awash in fallen brick, crushing people under the weight of collapsed buildings that had never been retrofitted.

Los Angeles could feel shaking for a minute — a lifetime compared with the seven seconds felt during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Shaking waves reach as far as Bakersfield, Oxnard, and Santa Barbara. About 1,600 fires spread across Southern California. And powerful aftershocks larger than magnitude-7 pulverize the region, sending shaking into San Diego County and into the San Gabriel Valley. [Los Angeles Times]

Scientists say major earthquakes happen in Southern California about once every 150 or 200 years; the last big quake at the Salton Sea-tip of the San Andreas fault was 330 years ago. Read the full chilling report at the Los Angeles Times. Jeva Lange

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Trump Sign 58,000 square feet appears in Michigan - An Alien Conspiracy?

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Another Adorable Deplorable

No debate over his support: Michigan homeowner mows  58,000 square-foot TRUMP sign into his lawn

• Wally Maslowsky is a General Motors retiree who lives in rural Almont
• He decided to cut 'TRUMP' into his grass in 176-feet-high letters
• It took four to five hours over the weekend to complete  

By Dailymail.com Reporter

Published: 09:38 EST, 27 September 2016 | Updated: 12:37 EST, 27 September 2016

A retired Michigan man decided it wasn't enough to put a Donald Trump campaign sign in his front yard to show his support for the controversial Republican candidate.

Instead, Almont resident Wally Maslowsky, decided to mow 'TRUMP' in huge letters into the grass of his 8-acre lawn in Lapeer County.

Drone footage taken from the air shows how expansive the sign spreads across the land.

Measured from the front of the 'T' to the back of the 'P', is 330 feet, while the letters are 176-feet high, making the entire creation over 58,000 square feet, Maslowsky told CBS Detroit.  

Maslowsky worked at General Motors before retiring, and came up with the idea during his spare time gardening.  

'I was cutting out there one day and I said, well, it would be pretty neat to put a sign in here,' he told CBS.

'Being that I've got a design background I just kind of came in the house and laid it out and plotted some points kinda like you're doing a survey when you're laying out a basement for a house.' 

Maslowsky says the project took about four or five hours over the weekend to complete.

Maslowsky told the station that there is a lot of support for Donald Trump in the area around Almont. 

Hillary Clinton still leads Trump 38%-35% in Michigan, according to the latest polls.

'I decided, well, I could do this; so just for the heck of it I did it,' Maslowsky said. 

'I mean, that's what retired people do to keep busy, right? …Either that or sit in front of the TV and get old.'

Maslowsky said he didn't think the sign would become a big deal, until his daughter-in-law posted pictures of what he had done to Twitter.

'And I said, well, you know, I didn't do this for the news or anything, I'm not looking for any kind of publicity, and she says, ''Well, why'd you do it?''

'I said, just for fun, just to do it! Let the planes see it when they fly over.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3809905/No-debate-support-Michigan-homeowner-mows-58-000-square-foot-TRUMP-sign-lawn.html#ixzz4La45dIW9

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Scientists Are Freaking Out Over This 25-Year-Old's Solution to Superbugs

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Health Sep. 26, 2016 03:21PM EST

Kristin Falzon

After three years of research, a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne may have discovered a way to kill superbugs without the use of antibiotics.

Shu Lam believes that she has found the key to averting a health crisis so severe that the United Nations recently declared it a "fundamental threat" to global health.

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs kill about 170,000 people a year and, according to a British study, are estimated to kill up to 10 million people a year by 2050 and cost the world economy $100 trillion.

"If we fail to address this problem quickly and comprehensively, antimicrobial resistance will make providing high-quality universal healthcare coverage more difficult if not impossible," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told The Guardian. "It will undermine sustainable food production. And it will put the sustainable development goals in jeopardy."

EcoWatch @EcoWatch

The Superbug Doctors Have Been Dreading Is Now in the U.S.http://ow.ly/XsDC300OvUC  @greenpeaceusa @Sierra_Magazine

5:45 PM - 2 Jun 2016

The Superbug Doctors Have Been Dreading Is Now in the U.S.

A team of scientists at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and Army Institute of Research in Washington, DC has discovered the first instance of a person living in the U.S. infected...

ecowatch.com

In what is being hailed by scientists in the field as "a breakthrough that could change the face of modern medicine," Lam and her team developed a star-shaped peptide polymer that targets the resistant superbugs, rips apart their cell walls and kills them.

"These star polymers screw up the way bacteria survives," Lam told VICE. "Bacteria need to divide and grow but when our star is attached to the membrane it interferes with these processes. This puts a lot of stress on the bacteria and it initiates a process to kill itself from stress."

A bacterium cell before (left) and after being treated by the star-shaped polymers.University of Melbourne

Lam told The Telegraph the polymers have been effective in treating mice infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and are relatively non-toxic to the healthy cells in the body. The reduction in toxicity is because of the larger size of the polymers which make them too big to enter healthy cells.

Lam's findings were recently published in the Nature Microbiology journal and while the results are promising in the lab and on mice, she said there is still a long way to go.

"We still need to do a lot of studies and a lot of tests—for example, to see whether these polymers have any side effects on our bodies," she explained to Vice. "We need a lot of detailed assessments like that, [but] they could hopefully be implemented in the near future."

Professor Greg Qiao, her Ph.D. supervisor, told The Telegraph they will need at least five more years to fully develop her project unless millions of dollars are invested into speeding up the process.

However, "The really good news about this is that, at the moment, if you have a superbug and you run out of antibiotics, there's not much you can do. At least you can do something now," he said.

So what would the star polymer treatment look like in the future? As Lam explained in an interview with VICE:

"The quickest way to make this available to the public is through topical application, simply because you go through less procedures as opposed to ingesting these molecules into the body. So when you have a wound or a bacterial infection on the wound then you [generally] apply some sort of antibacterial cream.

"The star polymers could potentially become one of the anti-bacterial ingredients in this cream. Ultimately, we hope that what we're discovering here could replace antibiotics. In other words, we also hope that we will be able to inject this into the body to treat serious infections, or even to disperse it in the form of a pill which patients can take, just like somebody would take an antibiotic."

Does this 25 year-old hold the key to winning the war against superbugs?

• Nicola Smith

25 September 2016 • 7:04am

Not many 25-year-olds can claim to get up at 4am and work weekends to save the world from an impending Armageddon that could cost tens of millions of lives.

But for the past three years, Shu Lam, a Malaysian PhD student at the University of Melbourne, has confined herself to a scientific laboratory to figure out how to kill superbugs that can no longer be treated with antibiotics.

She believes that she has found the key to averting a health crisis so severe that last week the United Nations convened its first ever general assembly meeting on drug-resistant bacteria.

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The overuse and incorrect use of antibiotics has rendered some strains of bacteria untreatable, allowing so-called “superbugs” to mutate. Last Wednesday, the problem was described by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a “fundamental threat” to global health and safety. 

Superbugs kill an estimated 700,000 people a year, among them 230,000 newborns. But, according to a recent British study, this number will rise to a staggering 10 million a year by 2050 – as many as cancer – if no action is taken. It could cost the world economy $100 trillion.

Following a UK-led drive to raise awareness of the potential impact of antimicrobial resistance, UN members pledged to deliver an update on the superbug war by 2018, but in her small laboratory on the other side of the world, Lam is already several steps ahead.

She believes her method of killing bacteria using tiny star-shaped molecules, built with chains of protein units called peptide polymers, is a ground-breaking alternative to failing antibiotics.

On current trends, a common disease like gonorrhoea may become untreatable.

“We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways,” says Lam, who leads a half-a-dozen-strong research team. “One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself.”

Her research, published this month in the prestigious journal, Nature Microbiology, has already been hailed by scientists as a breakthrough that could change the face of modern medicine.

Lam builds the star-shaped molecules at Melbourne’s prestigious school of engineering. Each star has 16 or 32 “arms” made from peptide polymers, a process she likens to putting together small blocks of Lego. 

When unleashed, the polymers attack the superbugs directly, unlike antibiotics, which create a toxic swamp that also destroys nearby healthy cells. 

Lam successfully tested the polymer treatment on six different superbugs in the laboratory, and against one strain of bacteria in mice. Even after multiple generations of mutations, the superbugs have proven incapable of fighting back.

“We found the polymers to be really good at wiping out bacterial infections,” she says. “They are actually effective in treating mice infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. At the same time, they are quite non-toxic to the healthy cells in the body.”

The reduction in toxicity is because the larger size of the peptide polymers, about 10 nanometres in diameter, means they cannot enter healthy cells.

Her scientific breakthrough has left Lam little time for socialising. Due to the sensitivities of her biological experiments, even her weekends cannot be regarded as her own. “For a time, I had to come in at 4am in the morning to look after my mice and my cells,” she says.

But for the ambitious doctor’s daughter, the sacrifice has been worth it. “I wanted to be involved in some kind of research that would help solve problems,” she says.

“This research is significant because everyone is worried about superbugs. Suddenly, a lot of people have been telling me that either they themselves or their relatives have been infected, that they have been in intensive care because of a superbug, and that people they know have actually died,” added Lam.

“I really hope that the polymers we are trying to develop here could eventually be a solution.”

The growing superbug crisis has been described by scientists as a “slow-motion tsunami”.

The world is slowly waking up to the nightmare threat of a post-antibiotic era that could end modern medicine and create a situation where mundane problems such as a sore throat or a grazed knee could prove fatal.

But it was Alexander Fleming, the Scot who in 1928 discovered penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, who first sounded a warning about the consequences of its misuse. “There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and, by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug, make them resistant,” he cautioned while accepting his Nobel Prize in 1945.

A mere 71 years after Fleming’s discovery revolutionised global healthcare, Margaret Chan, the director of the World Health Organisation, has warned that the gains antibiotics have brought to modern medicine may soon be reversed.

“On current trends, a common disease like gonorrhoea may become untreatable,” Chan said last week. “Doctors facing patients will have to say: ‘I’m sorry – there’s nothing I can do for you.’”

An outbreak of a tough strain of typhoid in Africa and a form of tuberculosis found in 105 countries have already proven impervious to antibiotics. Gram-negative bacteria, which cause diseases like pneumonia and meningitis, and wound- or surgical-site infections, is also proving resistant.

Meanwhile, only two new classes of antibiotics have entered the market in the last half-century.

For pharmaceutical companies, antibiotics have proven to be a poor investment, because development costs are high, the resulting drugs rid the patient of the target disease after a short period of time. By contrast, chronic illness such as high blood pressure require treatments to be taken daily for the rest of a patient’s life.

“Incentives must be found to recreate the prolific era of antibiotic discovery that took place from 1940 to 1960,” said Chan.

Lam hopes her “innovative” research will encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest. “I hope it will attract some interest, because what we have discovered is quite different from antibiotics,” she says.

“Some people have been telling me ‘Please work harder, so that we can have a solution and put it out on the market.’ But with research, you need to have a lot of patience because we still have quite a long way to go.”

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