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Health authorities have issued an advisory as cases of human leptospirosis have hit a record high

New York City health authorities have recorded a significant rise in cases of human leptospirosis, a disease caused by contact with the urine of animals, particularly rats. 

According to an advisory issued by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene on Friday, six people have been diagnosed with the disease so far this year, while 24 cases were reported in 2023, marking the highest number in a single year. The authorities attribute the rise to a soaring number of rats in the city.

If left untreated, leptospirosis can lead to kidney failure and liver damage. The ailment is caused by several species of bacteria transmitted through animal urine or feces, or contaminated water or soil if comes into contact with the eyes, mouth, nose or breaks in the skin. Among the most common symptoms of the disease are a fever, headaches and chills.   

New York City has one of the highest populations of brown rats in the US. Researchers from the city’s pest control company estimated that there were approximately three million rats in the city as of August 2023, finding that the number had increased by nearly 50% in the past decade. Rats are prodigious breeders, with one pair having the potential to produce as many as 15,000 offspring in a year. 

The rise in leptospirosis infections comes a year after Mayor Eric Adams appointed Kathleen Corradi as the Big Apple’s first ever director of rodent mitigation, or “rat czar.” The position was created as part of an effort to bring down the booming rat population in the city. 

As part of the effort to finally eradicate the longstanding problem, the City Council introduced a new bill earlier this week that would require the Health Department to use salty pellets that sterilize both male and female rats in two neighborhoods as part of a pilot program. 

The pellets would be deployed within so-called rat mitigation zones covering at least ten city blocks.

In their advisory the Health Department stressed that leptospira bacteria are fragile and can die within minutes in dry heat or freezing temperatures but that “excessive rain and unseasonably warm temperatures, factors associated with climate change, may support the persistence of leptospires in more temperate areas like NYC.”

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Penn Station was slammed by hundreds of illegal aliens arriving to New York City this week.

Iranian commandos hijacked an Israeli-affiliated container ship, reports indicate

While Israel on Friday braced for cruise missile and suicide drone attacks, there are new reports on Saturday morning that Iranian commandos hijacked an Israeli-affiliated container ship heading towards the Strait of Hormuz. 

AP News says the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations initially reported the hijacking of Portuguese-flagged MSC Aries, a container ship linked to London-based Zodiac Maritime. Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer controls the international ship management company that owns and charters large vessels. 

Video of the boarding has been circulating X for the past hour. However, “AP could not immediately verify the video, it corresponded to known details of the boarding, and the helicopter involved appeared to be one used by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which has carried out other ship raids in the past,” the media outlet said. 

According to Bloomberg data, MSC Aries was leaving a port from Dubai on Thursday and heading towards the Strait of Hormuz. The vessel’s last known position was recorded around 1256 local time on Friday off Dubai’s coast. AP noted that the ship’s transponder had been switched off. 

X user Megatron called the ship’s seizure by Iran a “big game changer”: 

This once again is confirming that the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar are helping Israel bypass the Houthi blockade by land route from the UAE port.

Iran is now cutting that route as well. 

If Hezbollah cut the Mediterranean route with its drones, Israel could fall into a complete trade blockade.

The incident in the Strait of Hormuz is very concerning since maritime chokepoints in the region are plagued with conflict. Off of Yemen, in the Bab-El Mandeb Strait, Iran-backed Houthis have unleashed multi-month drone and missile attacks against US, UK, and Israeli vessels. 

In a recent note to clients, the global corporate & investment banking capital markets strategy team at MUFG Bank warned the key theme for 2024 would be “Higher friction geopolitics.” 

Focusing on the Middle East, MUFG’s Tom Joyce showed how 25% of global trade flows through three chokepoints: Suez Canal, Bab-El Mandeb Strait, and Strait of Hormuz. The latest incident is very concerning for global trade and flow of goods, such as energy products, through the region. 

This all comes as Israel is bracing for drone and missile attacks by Iran or its proxies as warnings flashed on Friday about retaliation for the killing last week of senior Iranian military officials at the country’s embassy in Damascus. 

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Penn Station was slammed by hundreds of illegal aliens arriving to New York City this week.

Top Ivy League has decided to quietly shuffle SAT requirements back to where they were pre-Covid

Harvard is joining the ranks of other universities in recognizing the obvious: SATs are a great way to measure aptitude. And now that Harvard is busy grappling with other issues like plagiarism among its top ranks, it has decided to quietly shuffle SAT requirements back to where they were pre-Covid. 

Harvard will reintroduce standardized testing requirements for admissions starting with the Class of 2029, deviating from its prior commitment to remain test-optional through the Class of 2030.

This change, prompted by criticism as peers like Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown resumed mandatory testing, will affect applicants for fall and winter 2024, who must submit SAT or ACT scores unless exceptions apply. In specific cases where students can’t access these tests, Harvard will accept scores from Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams instead, according to the Harvard Crimson.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi E. Hoekstra said:  “…standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond. More information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range. With this change, we hope to strengthen our ability to identify these promising students.”

Uh, yeah. That’s why it was a requirement to begin with. But we digress…

The Crimson wrote that despite a majority of undergraduates submitting standardized test scores over the past four years, the exact figure has not been disclosed.

Recently, Harvard officials, including Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons, were non-committal about reinstating testing requirements, noting ongoing policy reviews. However, a study from the Harvard-affiliated Opportunity Insights indicated that SAT scores are a better predictor of college success than high school GPA. Experts also suggest that requiring standardized tests could enhance racial and socioeconomic diversity at universities like Harvard.

Harvard economist David J. Deming commented that test scores provide the “fairest admissions policy for disadvantaged applicants.”

“Not everyone can hire an expensive college coach to help them craft a personal essay. But everyone has the chance to ace the SAT or the ACT,” he continued.

Recall, we wrote just days ago that $500 tutors were back en vogue now that SATs were being reinstated. It was earlier this year when we noted that SATs were once again being reconsidered by colleges who had reduced or eliminated their requirement due to (pick one: diversity, racism, climate change, equity, gender affirmation). 

As a result of the comeback, Bloomberg noted that tutors, sometimes costing $500 per hour, are all of a sudden back in vogue. They wrote that demand for SAT tutoring and prep centers is surgingas several top colleges reintroduce mandatory SATs, and students adapt to the SAT’s new digital format.

Kaplan reported a significant enrollment increase, attributed to digital testing and the reinstatement of testing requirements by institutions and three Ivy League schools—Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown—have reinstated mandatory SATs, alongside MIT and the University of Texas at Austin. This shift has left many students scrambling for preparation before early application deadlines.

Companies like The Princeton Review have also seen a spike in interest for prep services.

We noted earlier this year in a piece from American Greatness, that according to Axios, multiple colleges used the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to weaken the importance of SAT and ACT test scores in most student applications. But in recent weeks, several schools have reversed course; Yale is considering repealing its prior policy of making SAT/ACT requirements optional, with Dartmouth already reinstating the requirements earlier this month. MIT reversed a similar policy back in 2022.

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Penn Station was slammed by hundreds of illegal aliens arriving to New York City this week.

There’s far more plastic below the surface of the seas and oceans than on it

A shocking new study from researchers in Australia and Canada suggests that there could be 11 million tonnes of plastic on the ocean floor, up to 100 times the amount visible on the surface.

This study is the first ever estimate of exactly how much plastic there is at the bottom of the ocean. Generally, research has focused on floating plastic, accumulating on the surface in great agglomerations like the famous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” which is twice the size of Texas, or washing up on beaches.

It’s now clear that ongoing efforts to rid the seas and oceans of plastic waste will be an even more complicated, and more costly endeavor than previously thought.

“We know that millions of tonnes of plastic waste enter our oceans every year but what we didn’t know is how much of this pollution ends up on our ocean floor,” noted one of the study’s principal researchers in a press statement.

“We discovered that the ocean floor has become a resting place, or reservoir, for most plastic pollution, with between 3 to 11 million tonnes of plastic estimated to be sinking to the ocean floor.

“While there has been a previous estimate of microplastics on the seafloor, this research looks at larger items, from nets and cups to plastic bags and everything in between.”

Researchers used two complicated predictive models to estimate the amounts of large items of plastic that reach the seafloor. One model used data taken from remote-operated vehicles, while the other used data taken from trawls of the ocean floor.

The results from the remote-operated vehicles showed that significant amounts of plastic cluster on the ocean floor near continents. Just under half (46%) of the plastic mass predicted using the models resides above 200 m depth. Deeper areas of the ocean, ranging between 200 and 11,000 meters, contain the remaining 54% of the predicted plastic mass.

The researchers believe the new research, by allowing us to see exactly where plastic accumulates, will help future attempts to reduce plastic pollution in the oceans.

There has been growing alarm in recent years about levels of plastic pollution, and in particular the effects of microplastic pollution.

More than nine billion tons of plastic are estimated to have been produced between 1950 and 2017, with over half of that total having been produced since 2004. The vast majority of plastic ends up in the environment, where it breaks down, through weathering, exposure to UV light and organisms of all kinds, into smaller and smaller pieces—microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics.

“Secondary” microplastics they start off big and end up small, but there’s a whole class of “primary” microplastics which are small by design, like so-called “microbeads” used in cosmetics.

Within our homes, microplastics are mainly produced when synthetic fibres from clothes, furnishings and carpets are shed. They accumulate in large quantities in dust and float around in the air, which we then inhale.

Microplastics have been found, variously, in mist, rainfall and snow. They are known to circulate on the wind. They have also been found in every human and animal tissue, from gut and lung tissue to the eyes, liver, brain, womb and placenta.

Studies are linking exposure to microplastics to virtually every one of the prevailing chronic diseases of modernity, from autism and alzheimer’s to Crohn’s disease and cancer.

If you want to protect yourself and your family against exposure to microplastics, read our primer, “The Microplastic Menace” now.

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Breaking! New Revelations In FBI/CIA Plan To Destroy Alex Jones Released

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Mexican territory is the major thoroughfare for migrants of the world to traipse through and invade the United States

Mexico is in the midst of a presidential election. Voting is scheduled for June 2, with the winner taking office October 1.

The three candidates are frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum, second-place challenger Xochitl Galvez, and male candidate Jorge Alvarez Maynez, in a distant third in single digits.

On April 7, the first general election debate was held.

The candidates made all sorts of promises which would require plenty of government spending, with almost no mention of wealth creation. They pledged allegiance to the LGBTQXYZ agenda, which is strong in Mexico.

And, the candidates discussed immigration.

That’s of interest to us, Mexican territory being the major thoroughfare for the migrants of the world to traipse through and invade the United States.

A moderator asked this question of candidate Xochitl Galvez (all translations mine):

“Many migrants literally risk their lives on the way through Mexico… What will be the focus of your government to protect these migrants who are in transit through our country? In case you win, what migratory policies would your government have?”

Xochitl’s response:

“As a senator, I presented two bills so that once they are in Mexico these migrants would not be bothered nor attacked, that they would have conditions of full respect to their human rights, and what happened in that migratory station [which burned, killing dozens of migrants] would not happen. We have to have a secure southern border. I think that the migrants can be an opportunity for economic growth for Mexico, not a problem.”

Galvez said she visited shelters in Tijuana on the border and bemoaned that “the migrants live in really lamentable conditions.”

She concluded with this confusing statement:

“…I am going to work so that they have a quality during the time they are in Mexico.”

Huh? A quality what? Quality time?

Anyway, her entire statement is a mishmash, just like Mexico’s migratory policy.

Is she going to keep anybody out of Mexico?

The other two candidates were asked what they would do.

Claudia Sheinbaum jumped on the “root causes” argument, which her benefactor, current Presidente AMLO, promoted in his recent 60 Minutes interview.

Sheinbaum’s declaration:

“Now, the most important thing is that migration is not going to decrease if the causes are not attended to, and the causes of migration are essentially the poverty, particularly in Central America and in other countries where the migration originates. And this is the essential proposal we are making and this is the debate, justly, with the United States. They [Americans] should dedicate a percentage of what they dedicate today to armaments to help the countries and decrease migration. That is the most humane thing that can be done.”

Did you catch that, Mr. and Mrs. U.S. Taxpayer? The solution is for you to pump billions more dollars into Latin America.

Jorge Alvarez Maynez, the male candidate, began his answer as follows:

“To have moral authority in the migratory issue, in our defense of Mexicans who live in the United States, I am a Zacatecan [from state of Zacatecas] and we have as many Zacatecans in the U.S. as in Mexico.”

Then he launched into an anti-Trump rant:

“We are a binational society, but defend ourselves from the misogynist, discriminatory, racist and xenophobic speeches of Donald Trump which we are going to see in the [U.S.] campaign and which we have to have the courage to confront, to defend the migrant persons in the United States, we have to have the moral authority and what we have done in the southern border is inhumane. The militarization has not made our border more secure, but it has made it more cruel. That’s why we need to change the model to a model of human rights which accompanies at every stage the migrant persons. To migrate is not a crime, to migrate is a decision that human beings make.”

Jorge’s solution is for Mexico to “accompany” these invaders in every step of their trek to the United States.

None of these candidates have a coherent migration policy.

When did Mexican citizens ask for their country to become a flophouse for the hordes invading the United States?

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Penn Station was slammed by hundreds of illegal aliens arriving to New York City this week.

The United States said on Friday that it was sending reinforcements to the Middle East as fears grow that Iran could attck Israel in retaliation for an alleged Israeli strike on Tehran’s consulate in Syria. […]

The post US Is Sending Reinforcements To ‘Defend Israel’ appeared first on The People’s Voice.