Talk about timing. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is currently in the middle of a two-year pandemic training exercise with New York City and northern New Jersey.
Titled “2013-14 Pandemic Influenza Continuity Exercise Strategy,” the FEMA training simulates a global pandemic of influenza that spreads from person to person, including in the U.S.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, is under fire for its mishandling of the Ebola crisis, allowing infected people to enter the country and cause widespread panic and political turmoil as officials make claims and promises that turn out to be false.
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The alleged Islamic State terror plot to kidnap and behead an Australian was partly responsible for the decision to ramp up security at US government buildings, according to a high-ranking congressman.
Mike Rogers, the chairman of the US House Intelligence Committee, told FOX News that 14 Australian IS recruits were “ready to go to Syria” at the time and “further their radicalisation”.
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Prosecutors in Oklahoma have charged a 21-year-old man with first-degree murder in the killing of a man who was nearly decapitated.
Isaiah Marin of Stillwater was charged Thursday in the attack that killed 19-year-old Jacob Andrew Crockett a day earlier.
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A man with a history of psychiatric problems decapitated his mother, dragged her lifeless body into the street in front of their home and then killed himself by walking into the path of a nearby oncoming train, police said Wednesday.
Neighbours initially took the woman’s killing as a macabre Halloween prank.
Patricia Ward, a 66-year-old professor, was killed Tuesday night in her Farmingdale apartment just steps from a Long Island Rail Road station, Nassau County Police Detective Lieutenant John Azzata said.
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The latest wrong-headed proposal will be announced by the Bank of England on Friday: it is set to impose a much stricter leverage ratio on the industry than recommended by the Basel Committee, the international rule-setter. For a start, there ought to be no need for such a ratio at all – the much stricter rules on capital and liquidity that have already come into force, combined with the elimination of moral hazard triggered by the new resolution mechanisms, ought to be enough to reduce risk in the industry to a more rational level.
It gets worse, however. Banking sources expect the new UK leverage ratio to come in somewhere between 4pc and 5pc, above the minimum 3pc ratio recommended by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the global watchdog. So not only are the new rules inherently bad, they will actually be implemented in the worst possible way.
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A contractor operating a drill as part of the MTA’s East Side Access project mistakenly penetrated a Queens subway tunnel on Thursday, and the massive bit scraped the top and side of an occupied F train, transit officials said.
Some 800 passengers were aboard the Jamaica-bound train at the time, about 11:45 a.m. Nobody was hurt in the terrifying blunder, but it was far too close for comfort.
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Chinese Christians have accused police of using a crackdown on “evil cults” as a cover to intensify their persecution of the country’s underground church.
High-profile “anti-cult” campaigns have been rolled out across China since June when five cult members beat a woman to death in a McDonald’s restaurant after she rejected their attempts to recruit her.
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Ben-Gurion international airport and Haifa port would be closed on the first day of a third Lebanon war and Hezbollah officials would be viable targets for elimination, says a senior officer of the IDF General Staff, a conflict that the Israeli army envisions could well break out in the future.
The officer was speaking against the backdrop of a series of violent incidents targeting IDF troops on the Lebanese border over the past year, some of which have been claimed openly by Hezbollah in response to what it called IDF attacks on its positions or fighters in southern Lebanon.
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The first Moscow’s Buddhist temple, symbolizing Russia’s religious diversity and promoting friendly interconfessional and interethnic relations, will be built in Russia’s capital by 2017, Izvestia.ru reported Thursday.
“We need to be tolerant of people having various religious beliefs,” said Renat Laishev, member of the Moscow City Duma Commission.
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President Barack Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: Have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row.
In fact, Obama is likely to have the worst midterm numbers of any two-term president going back to Democrat Harry S. Truman.
Truman lost a total of 83 House seats during his two midterms (55 seats in 1946 and 28 seats in 1950), while Republican Dwight Eisenhower lost a combined 66 House seats in the 1954 and 1958 midterms.
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Topic: Longtime radio host and End Time watchman Steve Quayle and Rick discuss America’s obsession with Halloween, the culture of death, zombies and the walking dead, and how it will spiritually lead them to destruction through an Ebola pandemic and war.
Steve Quayle | Official Webiste
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The Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee told Fox News on Wednesday that a recent message from Islamic State leadership — urging recruits in Australia to launch attacks in their home country rather than travel to Syria and Iraq — was part of the threat stream that led to more security at U.S. federal buildings.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who gets regular briefings on the intelligence, said 14 Australian recruits were “ready to go to Syria” at the time and “further their radicalization.”
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NATO said Wednesday that it had intercepted a large number of Russian aircraft flying close to European airspace in the past two days, in an “unusual” series of incidents that brought Russian bombers as far afield as Portugal.
The aircraft — at least 19 in all — offered reminders of Russian air power at a time of the worst relations between the West and Russia since the Cold War. Russian military aircraft have significantly increased their activity in Europe since the conflict in Ukraine began earlier this year, with NATO scrambling to intercept aircraft more than 100 times in 2014. But a NATO official said the scale of the latest incidents was the most provocative this year.
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China is likely to purchase 5,000 R-73 and R-77 air-to-air missiles from Russia, writes Toshiyuki Roku, retired commander of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force’s Air Development and Test Command, in an article for the Tokyo-based Japan Military Review.
Since China’s domestic air-to-air missiles such as the PL-12, the SD-10A and the PL-9C were designed based on technology from Ukraine and are still unable to compete against US counterparts…
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Military personnel and civilians who work in the Pentagon could be targeted by the Islamic State group or other terrorists, the building’s internal security agency is warning employees in a new memo distributed late last week.
The Pentagon Force Protection Agency directed security managers to remind Pentagon employees about how they can avoid standing out to terrorists, said agency spokesman Christopher Layman.
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For the last year, the country’s largest police force has been increasingly concerned about a potential terror attack from the air by a drone armed with a deadly weapon.
Now, they are far along in planning a response to that possible security threat, reports CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues.
“We look at it as something that could be a terrorist’s tool,” New York Police Department Deputy Chief Salvatore DiPace said.
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Federal agents turned off Internet access to three luxury villas at a Las Vegas hotel then impersonated repair technicians to surreptitiously get inside and collect evidence in an investigation of online sports betting, according to defense lawyers challenging the practice.
The FBI employed the ruse against the recommendation of an assistant U.S. attorney, Kimberly Frayn, according to lawyers for four of eight men charged in the case. They filed a motion late Tuesday in federal court in Las Vegas to dismiss evidence in the case. According to a conversation recorded by an investigator for the hotel, the prosecutor told FBI agents “it was a consent issue,” the lawyers said.
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Daria Chernyshova – The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit in Fortaleza held in 2014 has become an important benchmark defining a new geopolitics, where Russia confronted the West and was supported by its partners in the BRICS, Georgy Toloraya, the Executive Director of the National Committee on BRICS Studies in Russia said Wednesday.
“The BRICS summit in Fortaleza has become a surprising turning point,” Toloraya said at a video conference held at Rossiya Segodnya’s press center.
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A man was found dead Wednesday morning in a upscale London neighborhood, impaled on a spiked fence surrounding the church and school frequented by the U.K. Prime Minister’s family.
The man, said to be in his late thirties, was pronounced dead in a scenic alleyway off Kensington Church Street — where properties fetch $3.6-million on average, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Police said the man, believed to be homeless, appears to have died while trying to climb the imposing black fence.
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It sounds like something straight out of “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Investment banker Sage Kelly — the global head of healthcare investment banking at Jefferies — is involved in a divorce and custody battle with his estranged wife Christina Di Mauro Kelly, and a recent affidavit she filed about their marriage alleges a lifestyle of rampant drug abuse and extramarital sex.
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Liberal American Catholics greet almost anything uttered by Pope Francis with glee, but his latest pronouncement has them scratching their heads. Headlines proclaiming “Pope says evolution, Big Bang are real” could have been written in 1950.
That’s when Pope Pius XII announced that Catholic doctrine and evolution could be compatible, an attitude endorsed–and even expanded upon–by Pope John Paul II, who said evolution is “more than a hypothesis” and “effectively proven fact.” Pope Francis is just following in those footsteps.
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The US Federal Reserve has delivered on its promise to end its $US1.66 billion ($1.88 billion) asset purchase program but will keep rates at current levels, as the country’s economy gradually improves.
Despite saying for many months that it was going to end its $US15 billion in monthly purchases of treasuries and mortgaged backed securities, the move appeared to come as a surprise to investors, many of whom in recent weeks had began to doubt that the US economy was strong enough to warrant the end of the stimulus.
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The State Department has quietly made plans to bring Ebola-infected doctors and medical aides to the U.S. for treatment, according to an internal department document that argued the only way to get other countries to send medical teams to West Africa is to promise that the U.S. will be the world’s medical backstop.
Some countries “are implicitly or explicitly waiting for medevac assurances” before they will agree to send their own medical teams to join U.S. and U.N. aid workers on the ground, the State Department argues in the undated four-page memo, which was reviewed by The Washington Times.
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Australia became Monday the first Western nation to ban all travelers from the three Western countries currently being ravaged by the Ebola virus.
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison told parliament on Monday the government was not only canceling all non-permanent and temporary visas for people from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, but it was also requiring all permanent visa holders from the region to submit to a 21-day quarantine upon return to Australia.
Despite some scares, the country has not had a single reported positive test for Ebola.
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Hackers thought to be working for the Russian government breached the unclassified White House computer networks in recent weeks, sources said, resulting in temporary disruptions to some services while cybersecurity teams worked to contain the intrusion.
White House officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said that the intruders did not damage any of the systems and that, to date, there is no evidence the classified network was hacked.
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In a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations.
The number of requests, contained in a 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general, shows that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax.
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British intelligence services can access raw material collected in bulk by the NSA and other foreign spy agencies without a warrant, the government has confirmed for the first time.
GCHQ’s secret “arrangements” for accessing bulk material are revealed in documents submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the UK surveillance watchdog, in response to a joint legal challenge by Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International. The legal action was launched in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations published by the Guardian and other news organisations last year.
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Is Washington taking off the gloves when it comes to Israel? Amid the latest tensions in U.S.-Israel relations, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic on Tuesday quoted unnamed officials in Washington who launched a verbal tirade against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
“The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickens**t,” the senior Obama administration official told Goldberg, who referred to Netanyahu as “the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most.”
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A TEXAS nurse who was the second US healthcare worker infected with Ebola while caring for a Liberian patient left the hospital overnight after being declared cured of the virus.
“I’m so grateful to be well and first and foremost I want to thank God,” Amber Vinson, 29, said at a press conference at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia.
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A referendum that would force the Swiss central bank to hold a fifth of its assets in gold could rock foreign exchange markets, analysts have warned.
On the 30th November, voters in Switzerland will head to the polls to decide whether the Swiss National Bank (SNB) should boost its gold holdings and refrain from any further selling of Swiss gold.
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New British government threats that a Christian school, which previously was rated “good” and “excellent,” may be closed if it doesn’t promote “other faiths” are based on new regulations that need to be reviewed, according to school officials.
WND reported the U.K.’s official education inspector told an independent Christian school that it is out of step with “British values” prescribed by the government and must invite someone from another faith, such as a Muslim imam, to lead assemblies or it risks being closed.
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Another Christian university has won an injunction against the Obama administration’s birth control mandate and its ever-changing exemptions for it.
Ave Maria School of Law, a Catholic law school, first sued the Department of Health and Human Services in 2013 for its “religious accommodation” for religious non-profits who argue Obamacare’s wide mandate that employers must provide 20 kinds of birth control violates their religious beliefs.
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In its most recent assault on religion in the public sphere, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an atheist group, has issued a complaint against Russellville High School in Russellville, Ala., after the school’s head football coach allowed two students and an adult to be baptized on the team’s practice field one afternoon after football practice.
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Scientists have re-issued stark warnings ahead of what some have claimed is set to be the coldest winter for a century.
They said a lengthy spell of extreme and potentially devastating weather is just around the corner partly thanks to the unusually mild autumn.
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Dr Boyd Bushman made the extraordinary claims in his last ever interview and showed pictures of what he alleged were extra terrestrials.
He said people at the secretive US air base are studying UFOs 24 hours a day and that he helped develop flying saucer technology for a major defense firm.
The scientist’s claims were made in a video recorded days before his death in August and posted recently to YouTube.
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The news out of New York, contrary to what President Obama and other top government officials have said, is that the Ebola crisis appears to be getting worse in the U.S. Judicial Watch is striving to pry loose the truth from reticent federal agencies that have a responsibility for public safety and our national security.
We have filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In light of the potential danger from this deadly disease, the administration’s long history of delaying and obstructing information requests could have severe consequences for members of the public who have been told that they are safe.
We are prepared to go to court to force the release of critical pieces of information. Our Ebola FOIA requests ask for an immediate clarification of the DOD’s plans for the evacuation of U.S. personnel from Africa if an Ebola outbreak occurs. We are also looking for information from OSHA regarding any plans the agency has for responding to the current Ebola outbreak and any expressions of concern by OHSA personnel.
Another key player here is a cryptic carrier known as Phoenix Air. We know this air carrier has been responsible for transporting Ebola victims, but that’s all the American people are being told. How safe is Phoenix Air, and what kind of relationship does it have with the U.S. government? This much seems clear: Phoenix Air is more than just a medical transport unit. It appears to have significant DOD contracts.
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Warsaw has decided to relocate troops from the west of the country towards its eastern border due to “the biggest security crisis since the Cold War.” It is a major realignment of the military structure, Poland’s defense minister told the AP.
“The geopolitical situation has changed, we have the biggest crisis of security since the Cold War and we must draw conclusions from that,” Poland’s Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak told The Associated Press on Monday.
He explained that the number of troops stationed at three military bases in the east will triple in two years. Siemoniak added that the quantity of military hardware stationed at the bases will also be increased.
The Polish minister explained that it was not a radical measure but for protection due to the threat posed by the neighboring Ukrainian conflict.
“…we would like those units in the east of Poland to be more efficient,” he said.
Most of Poland’s army has been concentrated in the western part of the country as the country has not realigned its military structure since it was part of the Soviet bloc.
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The largest sunspot observed on the sun in more than 20 years has been firing off powerful solar flares for the past week, and it’s still producing strong solar storms.
Today, the huge sunspot erupted with a large solar flare, peaking at around 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT). The flare caused a strong radio blackout on Earth, according to the National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center. This solar flare is the fourth X-flare (the most powerful kind of solar storms) in as many days.
On Sunday (Oct. 26), the giant sunspot unleashed a solar flare, which peaked at about 6:56 a.m. EDT (1056 GMT). The sunspot, called Active Region 12192 (also known as AR 2192), also shot out another powerful flare on Saturday. Today and Sunday’s flares measured in at X2, while Saturday’s is classified as an X1 flare.
Sunday’s X2-class flare was “the third X-class flare in 48 hours…
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Fujifilm Holdings’ stock jumped on 27 October after the Japanese firm said it will buy 49% of US-based Kalon Biotherapeutics, a maker of vaccines used against pandemic influenza, Ebola and other public health threats.
Fujifilm’s stock finished 2.89% higher in Tokyo on the news, while the benchmark Nikkei 225 share average closed 0.63% higher.
Fujifilm, in a statement, also said that its US unit, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, may increase the stake to 100% after the initial purchase based on the achievement of certain milestones.
The purchase amount was not revealed.
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Egypt is warning terrorist groups are poised to seize control of Libya’s oilfields, as the country’s foreign minister appealed for an expansion of the Western-led campaign against jihadists fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham (ISIS) to tackle extremism threatening North Africa.
Sameh Shukri, the Egyptian foreign minister, used a visit to London Monday to push for a new approach from Britain and the West to Islamist violence in Egypt and its neighbours, modelled on the campaign targeting the Islamic extremists.
“The natural resources in Libya represents a very large pool of wealth and funding that will fund terrorist activity not only there but in other parts of the world,” he said. “You see
Egypt has supported the Libyan government against Islamist militias that now control most of the country’s big cities and large swaths of territory, though not yet the oilfields capable of producing 2.7 million barrels a day.
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Japan will today begin exercises with the U.S. Army on its northernmost island of Hokkaido, a day after it started naval maneuvers with Russia 800 kilometres away off the coast of Vladivostok.
The drills illustrate the balance Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe must strike between his attempts to mend relations with Russia and the need to bolster his country’s alliance with the U.S. as a backstop to a more assertive China in the region.
While Russia supplies about 10 percent of Japan’s natural gas needs, and potentially more, Japan backed Group of Seven sanctions over Russia’s infiltration of Ukraine. That sparked recriminations from Russia and raised military tensions, with Japanese jets dispatched hundreds of times to head off approaches by Russian aircraft in the three months through June.
“What’s difficult for Japan is that the alliance with the U.S. is the centerpiece of its security policy,” said Taisuke Abiru, a research fellow specializing in Russia at research group The Tokyo Foundation. “How can they maintain this alongside relations with Russia? This is an extremely important problem for Prime Minister Abe now.”
Abe had sought to strengthen ties with Russia until that country’s annexation of Crimea in March. He may use his first summit with President Vladimir Putin in nine months at an international forum in Beijing in November to restart his diplomatic push.
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It didn’t take long for some progressives to exploit the tragic shooting at a Washington State high school last Friday, as they used it in an attempt to gain support for a ballot initiative requiring expanded background checks on all gun transfers in the state.
Within hours of the Oct. 24 shooting that claimed the lives of two students at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, one of the billionaire backers of the Nov. 4 ballot initiative posted a link to the story on his Facebook page with the caption, “We need more school shootings!!! Vote yes on Initiative 591.”
The posting by Nick Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist from a Democrat family, was excused as “sarcasm,” according to gun-rights advocates in Washington. I-591 would prohibit background checks and has the support of the National Rifle Association. Hanauer is one of the top financial donors to the organization pushing I-594, a competing ballot measure that would require background checks on almost all gun transfers, even short-term loans between friends and family members.
The Facebook posting by Hanauer was removed sometime late Friday. Meanwhile, the news came Monday morning that a third Marysville student, 14-year-old Gia Soriano, had died overnight of her wounds at a hospital in Everett.
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An advanced surface-to-air missile believed to have been supplied to Syrian rebels by Qatar against American wishes has been filmed in the hands of Isil jihadists, raising the threat to allied operations in Iraq.
A militant was shown firing a Chinese-made FN6 shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile, with a later image suggesting it had brought down an Iraqi army helicopter.
The attack was said to have happened during the battle for Baiji, a town that is host to Iraq’s biggest oil refinery, north of Baghdad.
The biggest worry is the greater power of the FN6, a modern weapon that is still being manufactured, compared with the older Russian-made missiles previously seen in the hands of moderate rebels and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The helicopter the militants claimed to have brought down, an Mi-35M, was of a type provided to Iraq by Russia in the last year and is supposed to be fitted with defence systems.
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The Internal Revenue Service has been seizing bank accounts belonging to small businesses and individuals who regularly made deposits of less than $10,000, but broke no laws. And the government is refusing to return all the money taken.
The practice ‒ called civil asset forfeiture ‒ allows IRS agents to seize property they suspect of being tied to a crime, even if no charges are filed, and their agency is allowed to keep a share of whatever is forfeited, the New York Times reported. It’s designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking cash deposits under $10,000, which is the threshold for when banks are federally required to report activity to the IRS under the Bank Secrecy Act.
It is not illegal to deposit less than $10,000 in cash, unless it is specifically done to avoid triggering the federal reporting requirement, known as structuring. Thus, banks are required to report any suspicious transactions to authorities, including patterns of deposits below that threshold.
“Of course, these patterns are also exhibited by small businesses like bodegas and family restaurants whose cash-on-hand is only insured up to $10,000, and whose owners are wary of what would be lost in the case of a robbery or a fire,” the Examiner noted.
Carole Hinders, a victim of civil asset forfeiture, owns a cash-only Mexican restaurant in Iowa. Last year, the IRS seized her checking account ‒ and the nearly $33,000 in it. She told the Times she did not know of the federal reporting requirement for suspicious transactions, and that she thought she was doing everyone a favor by reducing their paperwork.
“My mom had told me if you keep your deposits under $10,000, the bank avoids paperwork,” she said.“I didn’t actually think it had anything to do with the I.R.S.”
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A Catholic university located in Chicago has given its blessing to a student organization for “pagans,” according to The Campus Fix.
Loyola University of Chicago, a Jesuit school, pushed back a little bit and asked the group to change its name from the Loyola Student Pagan Alliance to the “Indigenous Faith Tradition Alliance.” It seems administrators of the school were uncomfortable with the word “pagan.” Even with the name change, however, the group’s mission remains the same.
Founder Jill Kreider wrote on Facebook that her group wants to “to unify Pagan, the spiritual but not religious, those seeking faith or religion, minority faith students (including but not limited to: Buddhists, Taoists, Shinto practitioners, Santeras, etc…) pluralists and those students interested in New Age religions on Loyola’s campus. If you don’t have a faith group on campus, we’re here to fill that gap!”
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The 2010 BP oil spill left an oily “bathtub ring” on the sea floor roughly the size of Rhode Island, according to a new study.
The rig blew on April 20, 2010, and spewed 172 million gallons of oil into the Gulf through the summer. Scientists are still trying to figure where all the oil went and what effects it’s had.
Study author David Valentine, a geochemistry professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, estimated that the spill from the Macondo well left about 2 million barrels (84 million gallons) of oil coagulated on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico around the damaged Deepwater Horizons oil rig.
In the study, using data from the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the scientists analyzed more than 3,000 samples collected at 534 locations, and identified a 1,250-square-mile patch of the deep sea floor where 2 to 16 percent of the discharged oil was deposited.
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A Methodist pastor who was disciplined after he officiated at the wedding of his gay son will be allowed to remain an ordained minister.
The Judicial Council of the second-largest U.S. Protestant denomination ruled Monday that a Pennsylvania church jury was wrong to defrock Frank Schaefer last year after he would not promise never to perform another same-sex wedding.
The council ruled on technical grounds and did not express support for gay marriage in general. Its decision is final.
Reached by phone after the decision, Schaefer called it “amazing.”
He said he was pleased, “not just for myself, but for everyone in the LGBTQ community and the church. This is a positive decision that keeps the dialogue going. They didn’t bar a person who is an outspoken activist and who has said that, if asked, he would perform another gay marriage.”
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Officials say molten lava from a Hawaii volcano has been flowing steadily in an area where residents have been warned they might have to evacuate their homes.
Dozens of residents in the flow path have been told to complete all necessary preparations by Tuesday for a possible evacuation. The timeline could change, based on the flow rate.
The Red Cross said it was opening a shelter to aide any evacuees.
Authorities on Sunday said lava flow on the Big Island of Hawaii had advanced hundreds of yards since Saturday morning and was moving at the rate of about 10 to 15 yards an hour, consistent with its advancement in recent days.
Kilauea volcano has been erupting continuously since 1983. Most lava from this eruption has flowed south. But the lava has flowed to the northeast over the past two years.
The current flow that has been threatening Pahoa began in June. It’s been moving toward town in fits and starts for weeks, speeding up and then slowing down.
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Elon Musk, a chief advocate of cars smart enough to park and drive themselves, continues to escalate his spooky speech when it comes to the next level of computation — the malicious potential of artificial intelligence continues to freak him out.
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” Musk said last week at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department’s 2014 Centennial Symposium. “You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like… yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out.”
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Security experts have long predicted that airlines in the future will rely on biometrics — fingerprints or retina scans — to verify the identity of air travelers.
That has not happened yet, but Seattle-based Alaska Airlines began in August to use fingerprint scans to screen fliers at the airline’s four airport lounges, including one at Los Angeles International Airport.
After further testing, Alaska officials say they may expand the fingerprint screening to the ticket gate to identify passengers before they board planes.
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