Cyber experts have warned that within the next two or three weeks, the U.S. and other countries may face an even more widespread and damaging infrastructure cyberattack.

Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a Pentagon briefing that there has been a "2,000 percent increase in Russian trolls in the last 24 hours," following the coordinated military strike against Syria, according to the Christian Emergency Network (christianemergencynetwork.org).

In May, 2017 Cyber Command Commander and Director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Mike Rogers, told Congress he was concerned about foreign nations using attacks against critical infrastructures that run the electric grid, financial systems, communications networks, the transportation systems and other key infrastructure systems.

Rogers warned of foreign nations attacking the U.S. using cyberattacks as "trial balloons" to determine vulnerabilities or to damage our critical infrastructure for a prolonged period of time.

Mary Marr of CEN said: "In a world, which has largely disavowed the sovereignty of God and dismissed the master 'first responder,' what can and should Christians do given a highly complex and broadly based threat such as this?"

In a media release, Marr says:

For those who place their trust in Christ alone we are not as those without Hope. We put on the armor of God Ephesians 6:10-29; trust in His protection Psalm 91; and employ the power of prayer! We don't sit idly by wringing our hands or feel helpless. Rather, we go on the offensive Acts 1:9, and communicate with those who will listen how to be ready 'for such a time as this'—sharing Jesus Christ in word and deed.

We have the good news of the Gospel, which brings Hope to the hopeless in any crisis. And, we have peace that passes all understanding despite what may be going on around us. Armed with the right Power, right Message and right Peace, who can stand against? It's time to be Aware, be Ready and be There—sharing Christ!

By Matt Agorist

The US is reeling from another tragedy this week after a deranged madman walked into a Tennessee Waffle House and began firing rounds from an AR-15 which he was not allowed to have. Gun control measures that were in place—and actually led to the confiscation of Travis Reinking’s guns—did not stop this killer from carrying out the sick thoughts in his head.

Gun control was in place and it failed. What’s more, less than 48 hours after Reinking murdered four people in a Waffle House, another mentally ill man with a seeming thirst for blood went on a killing rampage in Canada, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the world.

In Canada there is no legal right to possess guns. Canadian civilians aren’t allowed to possess automatic weapons, handguns with a barrel shorter than 10.5 cm or any modified handgun, rifle or shotgun. Most semi-automatic assault weapons are also banned. But that didn’t stop Alek Minassian, 25, from killing 10 people and injuring 15 others.

Minassian’s desire to take lives was so strong that he didn’t need a gun to murder. He simply rented a Ryder van and went to it. Consequently, Reinking, who had the notoriously loathed AR-15 rifle didn’t kill half as many people as Minassian who had no gun at all.

He did, however, attempt to pretend to have one as he begged a police officer to kill him.

Michel Boyer

✔@BoyerMichel

After multiple pedestrians plowed down on Toronto sidewalk, driver gets out holding what appears to be a gun. Police arrest him. No shots fired.

1:57 PM - Apr 23, 2018

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What these two incidents prove is that crazy people who want to kill will do so with or without a gun and with or without permission from the State to have said gun.

According to a 2015 study, even if all guns were removed from America, in a ten year period, 355 people still would’ve been murdered in mass killings.

From 2006 to 2015, 140 people were murdered by arsonists in mass fires, 104 were stabbed in mass stabbings, and 92 people were beaten to death in mass killings. To reiterate, these are deaths in which four or more people were killed.

People sufficiently enraged to commit such crimes may also be motivated to find other ways, criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University points out.

What’s more, every time there is a mass shooting in America, the anti-gun crowd is quick to take to the pulpits and begin spouting off incorrect information on how American gun ownership has made the United States deadlier than European countries. But this is simply not true.

After the tragic shooting in 2015 in which a gunman killed nine people in a Charleston, NC church, then-President Barack Obama took to the media to state that “we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

Just days later, Sen Harry Reid backed him up, claiming — falsely — that “the United States is the only advanced country where this kind of mass violence occurs.”

After the tragic shooting in Parkland, FL in February, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut echoed this sentiment when he said, “This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America.”

However, like Reid and Obama, Murphy is wrong.

While America is certainly up on the list of gun violence, it’s not even in the top ten. According to a study by the Crime Prevention and Research Center — which was attacked bySnopes, who failed to prove it wrong — from the years 2009 to 2015, the US failed to enter the top ten list for the most mass shootings.

So which country has the largest death rate from public mass shootings?

Norway does. With an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million, mostly due to the tragic shooting carried out by Anders Brevik in 2011, Norway is at the top of the list. No. 2 is Serbia, at just 0.381, followed by France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206. Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic all follow. Then comes the U.S., at No. 11, with a death rate of 0.089.

Also, according to the study, there were 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S.

“There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed,” the study said. “Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.”

But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.’s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.

The statistics debate and information war can go on forever — and it usually does — which is why actual conversation on what is really behind mass killings is suppressed or not even brought up.

The solution to preventing mass killings lies not in banning the tools used to carry them out. This is akin to putting a band aid on massive hemorrhage. Instead of focusing on the symptoms and tools used, there are a few people who are actually looking at the cause.

Stephen Paddock, Omar Mateen, Gavin Long, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, James Holmes, Nikolas Cruz, and more likely than not, Travis Reinking, all have one thing in common other than the mass murders they carried out. They were all reportedly taking prescription drugs which alter their state of mind and carry a host of negative side effects ranging from aggression and suicide to homicidal ideation.

THE OTHER BIG ONE

California’s next megaflood would be worse than eight Hurricane Katrinas

By Eric Holthaus on Apr 25, 2018

Worse than the 1906 earthquake. Worse than eight Hurricane Katrinas. Worse than every wildfire in California history, combined. The world’s first trillion-dollar natural disaster.

A wintertime megaflood in California could turn out to be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history by far, and we are making it much more likely, according toan alarming study published this week in Nature Climate Change.

The odds are good that such a flood will happen in the next 40 years, the study says. By the end of the century, it’s a near certainty. (And then another one hits, and another — three such storms are possible by 2100). By juicing the atmosphere, extreme West Coast rainstorms will happen at five times their historical rate, if humanity continues on roughly a business-as-usual path, the new research predicts.

The study’s lead author, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a lifelong Californian, says the best way to understand what we’re doing to California’s weather is to think of earthquakes.

“A major earthquake on the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area or on the San Andreas Fault east of Los Angeles is an inevitability in the long run, and either event would likely be devastating,” Swain says. “Yet the big difference with the risk of a major flood event is that human activities are greatly increasing the likelihood of the physical event itself through the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Three years ago, much of the Pacific Northwest sat in stunned silence after reading Kathryn Schulz’s Pulitzer-winning description of “the really big one” — an unimaginably huge earthquake, a full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone. Within months of that article, Congress held hearings and proposed new funding to prepare.

California’s looming megaflood would likely be much worse.

In terms of sheer destruction, displacement of human life, re-ordering of society, a California megaflood would be without parallel in modern U.S. history. The state’s levees aren’t designed to attempt to hold back such a flood. The blow to the world’s sixth largest economy would send shockwaves throughout the world.

On his blog, Swain wrote: “Climate scientists are sometimes accused of being ‘alarmist,’ but I would argue that alarm is a reasonable human response.”

In 2011, the USGS assessed the modern-day implications of a flood like the one that happened in the winter of 1862 — currently the worst flood in California history. An unceasing onslaught of atmospheric rivers brought Los Angeles three years worth of rain, more than 36 inches, in a month and a half. Floodwaters turned California’s Central Valley into an inland sea, from Bakersfield to Redding. When it was all finished, the storms had destroyed one-third of the taxable land in California, and bankrupted the state.

Swain’s research considered the consequences of these megafloods on the state’s water management system and found the signs of catastrophe:

[S]uch events would be unprecedented in California’s modern era of extensive water infrastructure. Few of the dams, levees and canals that currently protect millions living in California’s flood plains and facilitate the movement of water from Sierra Nevada watersheds to coastal cities have been tested by a deluge as severe as the extraordinary 1861–1862 storm sequence—a repeat of which would probably lead to considerable loss of life and economic damages approaching a trillion dollars.

And, deep breaths, this isn’t the worst-case scenario. It is “plausible, perhaps inevitable”, according to the USGS, that a flood even worse than the 1862 disaster will occur again. The USGS called their scenario the “ARkStorm” — a thousand-year megastorm — and made a stark warning: “The hazards associated with such extreme winter storms have not tested modern infrastructure nor the preparedness of the emergency management community.”

For California, it looks like the worst of climate change is just getting started.

(GRIST)

Dangerous outbreak of E. coli illness from romaine lettuce expands, with 19 states affected

An additional 31 people have fallen ill from E. coli-contaminated romaine lettuce, bringing the tally to 84 cases across 19 states from an outbreak whose source is still under investigation.

Of those sickened, 42 have been hospitalized, a higher rate than usually seen in E. coli cases, and nine of those patients have developed kidney failure, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventionannounced Wednesday. No deaths have been reported.

The search for the source of the outbreak is ongoing. The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration say the Yuma, Ariz., growing region is the source, but no farm has been identified. The Yuma area grows most of the lettuce harvested in the United States during the winter months, but officials say that lettuce now in stores or at restaurants is probably from California's Central Valley or Salinas Valley and has not been implicated in the outbreak.

The CDC urges consumers not to eat any romaine lettuce unless they know it is not from the Yuma area. That includes all kinds of lettuce, whether chopped, whole-head or in a salad mix. The CDC advises consumers to throw away any romaine that might be from the Yuma region even if some of it has been eaten already with no sign of illness.

The three additional states affected by the outbreak are Colorado, Georgia and South Dakota. Pennsylvania has led the nation in reported cases, with 18, followed by California with 13 and Idaho with 10. The most recent case involved a person becoming sick April 12, but the CDC notes that sicknesses since April 5 may not have been reported yet to authorities.

E. coli is a bacterium that can be present in animal or human feces. This particular strain of E. coli produces a Shiga toxin that causes severe symptoms, such as vomiting and diarrhea, and can also lead to kidney failure.

Izabella Radovich of Wilton, Calif., was among those who got sick from eating contaminated salad. The 16-year-old from rural Sacramento had been eating salad every day the week before she got sick.

“She’s a teenager. She was trying to cut out junk food and be healthier,” her mother, Tiffany Halley, told The Washington Post. But Radovich started getting chills, fever and stomach cramps April 6. Within two days, she was doubled over in pain and having bloody stools and diarrhea.

Over the course of several days, Halley took her daughter to see a pediatrician twice, and twice rushed her to the emergency room because she was in so much pain. By April 10, the CDC had issued its first announcement about the E. coli illness outbreak. The next day, Halley went to the pediatrician’s office and remembers being told that this dangerous E. coli strain could affect her daughter’s kidneys.

The doctor said that Radovich was young and had healthy kidneys, Halley said.

“She told us, ‘her kidneys are perfect,’ ” Halley recalled. Two days later, on April 13, Radovich’s skin had turned pale and yellow, and she was no longer urinating, signs that she was suffering from a potentially life-threatening type of kidney failure known as Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, or HUS.

They went back to the emergency room, where the hospital said Radovich was having kidney failure and sent her by ambulance to a nearby children’s hospital in Roseville. The teenager stayed in the ICU for eight days. She has had to receive all her nutrition intravenously, and has had four blood transfusions to treat severe anemia.

“They’re waiting for the toxins to leave her body completely,” Halley said. On Monday, test results from her stool samples confirmed her illness is part of the outbreak. The teenager was still in the hospital on Wednesday, and doctors said it could take three months for her blood count to rise to a normal level, Halley said.

Even after her daughter became sick, some friends and acquaintances didn’t realize how serious the illness was until they saw Radovich in the hospital.

“This has been an absolute nightmare,” said Halley, 36. “The only way I can describe it, just watching your child get sick like that, it's the most gut-wrenching feeling on Earth.”

(The Washington Post)