Oil Prices Hit Highest Level Since 2022
The price of the oil benchmark Brent peaked at $89 per barrel on Tuesday, nearing levels last seen in June 2022, according to Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) data. Industry experts have attributed the surge to an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus and Tehran’s threat of retaliation.
Brent futures had risen by nearly 2% since Monday to trade at $89.060 per barrel as of 10:25 GMT, before retreating slightly, according to the ICE figures. The US benchmark West Texas Intermediate exceeded $85.
On Monday, Iran – a major oil producer – threatened a “harsh” response against Israel. The attack on the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus killed seven Iranian military advisers including three senior commanders.
Israel has repeatedly targeted Iranian installations in Syria, due to Tehran’s alleged support of the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza. Although Israel has not commented on the latest strike, the New York Times cited four unnamed Israeli officials as acknowledging that Israel was behind it.
Oil prices have rallied in recent months on fears that the Israel-Palestine conflict could spread to the broader Middle East. The region is a crucial supplier of energy and a key oil shipping route. In mid-March the price of Brent climbed to $85 per barrel as Yemen’s Houthi militants stepped up their rocket fire on merchant ships in the Red Sea, calling it retaliation for the actions of Israel and its supporters.
According to a projection by Bloomberg Economics, oil prices could reach $150 per barrel if Iran joins the conflict.
ICE data suggests that Brent last traded above the current level in June 2022 ($98.460 per barrel on June 28, 2022), during the early stages of the Western sanctions campaign against Russia, a major oil exporter, over the Ukraine conflict.
The advance in crude prices has also been underpinned by OPEC+ production cuts, strong economic data from China, and economists’ expectations of a global deficit this year.
Col. Douglas Macgregor Warns Attack on Iran Would Cause WWIII and Mass Migration
Being Pro-Life a Potential Stepping Stone to Terrorism, Says UK Government
Taking a stand for unborn human lives is a clear indicator that one is on the path towards becoming a terrorist, according to the government of the United Kingdom.
A UK counterterrorism program called “Prevent,” which aims to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism through education, includes mentions of “single-issue ideologies” that the government says could radicalize people into becoming terrorists, one of those issues being abortion.
Right to Life UK is warning the public that the UK government sees certain “extreme right-wing ideologies” as dangerous, one of them being pro-life advocates who oppose murdering babies in the womb through abortion.
“Narratives are likely to come from those who seek?to change a specific policy or practice, as opposed to replacing the whole economic, political or social system,” the Prevent training program states.
“Examples include, animal rights, anti-abortion or anti-fascism. Single-issue narratives can be politically agnostic, meaning they may be?neither right nor left aligned.”
In a statement of response to the Prevent program’s disturbing language against pro-lifers, Right to Life UK spokesperson Catherine Robinson said the UK government is making it undeniably clear that it opposes people who support life.
“The government are explicit that they believe that being pro-life is a potential ideology leading to terrorism,” Robinson said. “There has not been a single instance of anti-abortion terrorism in British history.”
“It is a grave insult and sign of deep intolerance that the government, via Prevent training, implies that being pro-life is potentially the beginning of the road towards terrorism.”
American government sees pro-lifers as dangerous, too
America’s federal government is not much different than the UK government – they are close allies after all. The Department of Justice (DOJ) infamous labeled pro-lifers as dangerous terrorists as well, paving the way for the eventual criminalization of pro-life thoughts and actions.
Remember when the FBI terrorized and arrested pro-life activist Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven, for his views? FBI agents in full tactical gear showed up armed in September 2022 at Houck’s home and dragged him away in front of his wife and children for supposedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a bill that punishes pro-lifers for trying to deter pregnant mothers before they murder their unborn children.
“[It was] an act of terror designed to humiliate, intimidate and instill fear in us,” Houck told Live Action president and founder Lila Rose about the experience.
“And they’ve effectively done that with our children to this day, but [to] instill fear in pro-life America, right? Because this is now becoming an overreach of government.”
In the end, Houck was acquitted of all charges, but he is just one of many pro-lifers who are being targeted right here in the United States for taking a stand for the lives of the unborn.
The DOJ continues to target pro-life groups for their “extremely dangerous behavior,” which includes non-violent actions such as sitting in front of or within close vicinity of an abortion facility.
Under the FACE Act, the DOJ has brought 20 criminal prosecutions and one civil case against a total of 46 defendants, reports indicate. All but one of the cases involved charges for disrupting abortion clinics in some way.
Right now, several pro-lifers across America face a potential of 11 years in prison for obstructing the entrance to an abortion clinic. Pro-abortionists who deface crisis pregnancy centers, meanwhile, are free to continue committing their crimes without punishment.
The pro-death lobby considers it terrorism to protect the unborn. Find out more at Abortions.news.
EXCLUSIVE: Col. Douglas Macgregor Warns Attack On Iran Would Cause WWIII And Mass Migration
The American Journal: Iran Vows Revenge After Israel Kills Top General
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Staff at Taxpayer-Funded Colorado Virus Lab Bitten by Covid-Infected Hamsters And Bats… And They Refused to Alert The Public
Another high-level bioweapons laboratory is under the gun after it was revealed that there have been at least 50 serious safety incidents since 2020.
The lab, located at Colorado State University (CSU), handles some of the world’s deadliest viruses, including coronaviruses that reportedly transferred from test animals to lab scientists via bites by hamsters.
Other incidents at the CSU lab include one in which workers were splashed in the face with blood from tuberculosis-positive mice, and another in which they were scratched by rabies-infected cats.
None of these 50-plus incidents were ever reported publicly, even though the public has a right to know if deadly diseases are circulating among the general population through infected lab workers going about their everyday lives following exposure.
Experts say there is a “disturbing lack of transparency” at the CSU lab, the disturbing news of which will only further erode the general public’s trust in America’s public health institutions.
In late 2022, there was another incident in which a bat infected with MERS-CoV, a type of coronavirus, bit a researcher while it was being put back inside its cage. This incident harkens back to what is believed to possibly have happened prior to the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “pandemic.”
(Related: It was just revealed that Colorado’s star forensic scientist, Yvonne “Missy” Woods, has been committing data fraud for many years – how many of the people she helped convict are actually innocent?)
CSU handles bat coronaviruses
One of the world’s premier infectious disease and veterinary medicine institutions, CSU has been studying bats since the 1980s, believe it or not. Scientists at the lab have apparently been tampering with coronaviruses during this time, much like their counterparts in Wuhan were doing.
The White Coat Waste Project learned all this disturbing information about CSU after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which uncovered details including meeting minutes, emails and internal reports about the lab’s operations.
What these FOIA-obtained documents clearly show is a pattern of accidents between May 2022 and July 2023 involving disease-ridden animals such as cats, bats and rodents attacking workers and possibly infecting them with serious illnesses.
This increase in accidents is now being blamed on the heightened stress of the “pandemic,” which reportedly caused employees at the lab to “rush” their work.
On at least two separate occasions in 2020 at the height of the COVID “pandemic,” researchers at the CSU lab working with SARS-CoV-2-infected hamsters were bitten by the rodents. Some of the employees also contracted Zika virus from experiments involving infected mosquitoes.
According to Dr. Bryce Nickels, cofounder of the nonprofit group Biosafety Now and a genetics professor at Rutgers University, none of this disturbing information would be known were it not for the FOIA requests made by the White Coat Waste Project.
“This is ridiculous, and once again underscores a disturbing lack of transparency. Irrespective of their funding sources, researchers have an ethical obligation to report any lab accidents that could pose risks to the public,” Nickels said.
“Public reporting of lab accidents should be standard practice, not an issue up for debate.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Ia.) also commented on the matter by stating that these types of incidents, including “lab leaks,” are “inevitable,” adding that “we don’t want the next outbreak to happen in our own backyard or near our military bases.”
The CSU lab in question is located in Fort Collins, population 168,500, which is north of Denver close to the border of Colorado and Wyoming. CSU is reportedly planning to construct another bat lab later this year using $6.7 million in taxpayer funding.
The latest news about the mad science taking place at state-funded laboratories across the United States can be found at Bioterrorism.news.
EXCLUSIVE: Col. Douglas Macgregor Warns Attack On Iran Would Cause WWIII And Mass Migration
Tech Startup Working on Building a Robot That Uses AI-Powered ‘Brain’
Artificial intelligence and robotics startup Physical Intelligence is working on bringing AI to the physical world through a robot with a brain.
Over the past 15 years or so, AI systems that work entirely in software have grown far more sophisticated than their moving counterparts. Non-AI-powered robots, meanwhile, can easily manufacture anything in factories and clean up after people at home but only carry out a relatively small range of tasks compared to the increasingly general nature of AI-powered chatbots.
In a move to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence and the physical world, Physical Intelligence has emerged with $70 million in seed funding. The company, founded by a team of renowned robotics and AI experts, aims to develop foundation models and learning algorithmsthat can power a wide range of robots and physically-actuated devices.
The massive investment – from big names including OpenAI and Sequoia Capital – reflects the immense potential the financial world see in Physical Intelligence’s vision to create a universal robot model that can bring AI to the physical world and enable other kinds of robots to perform tasks across various applications.
(Related: Tech firms developing and deploying AI that can deceptively MIMIC HUMAN BEHAVIOR.)
Formed this year by a team of robotics and AI experts, the company plans to create software that can add high-level intelligence to a wide variety of robots and machines. Or, as co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Karol Hausman puts it in Physical Intelligence’s first public interview since founding the company: “We aim to bring AI to the physical world with a universal model that can power any robot or any physical device basically for any application.”
Physical Intelligence’s thesis is that the time is right for a new approach to building robotics AI models. The company looks to merge the techniques used to build language models with its own techniques for controlling and instructing machines. The end goal would be to create an AI that works as a type of general-purpose robotics system.
Physical Intelligence among a growing number of startups working on general robotics
Hausman spent the last few years as a scientist working on robotics at Google. His fellow co-founders include Sergey Levine, who has done pioneering robotics work as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Chelsea Finn, a professor at Stanford University; Brian Ichter, a former Google research scientist; and Lachy Groom, a former executive at the payments company Stripe and prominent tech investor.
Physical Intelligence wants to develop software that can be applied across many types of robotics. To do this, it has set to work creating its own AI model designed to bring basic human abilities to machines.
“I think it’s really cool what people are building with humanoids,” Groom said. “But what fundamentally makes humans interesting is the brain, not our hardware. We are the ultimate generalists.”
Efforts to improve the software that powers robots have been going on for decades. Notably, a company called Willow Garage, formed in 2006, spent several years trying to build a type of general-purpose software that could be shared across robots and give them a unified set of basic functions. While its software was picked up by several companies and robotics developers, Willow Garage’s work did not lead to a huge leap forward in robotic intelligence, and the company wound down its operations in 2014.
Other companies like Rethink Robotics tried to build systems that could learn to do jobs by copying movements shown to them by humans. Some startups have recently implemented AI that uses repetition to teach robotic arms to pick up objects and perform tasks similar to those done by humans in warehouses.
Other companies have begun building androids designed to mimic human movements. One of these startups, Figure AI, was able to raise $675 million to help it build robots to work in logistics and manufacturing facilities. Notable investors include Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia.
Physical Intelligence faces stiff competition from some of these companies, especially Figure AI and electric vehicle giant Tesla. They are also either researching or manufacturing androids and working on general-purpose robotics software.
“Realistically, I think we are going to need a long and very serious research effort to make this happen,” says Levine. “But there are enough signs that the biggest obstacles to use robots in the real world are now solvable.”
EXCLUSIVE: Col. Douglas Macgregor Warns Attack On Iran Would Cause WWIII And Mass Migration
WAR ON MEN: Pearl Davis Says Attack on Fathers is Causing The Breakdown of Society
Guest Hosts of the Alex Jones Show, Anthony Rubin and Carlos Arellano, interviewed Pearl Davis regarding the ongoing cultural war against males during the Monday broadcast.
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EXCLUSIVE: Col. Douglas Macgregor Warns Attack On Iran Would Cause WWIII And Mass Migration