Picture the scene. You're on holiday and intend to go for a swim in a nearby reservoir. You pull out your phone for a selfie to make sure everyone knows you're having a lovely time, but you fumble the handset and it falls into the water.

Irritating, embarrassing, and it might even cause you some serious logistical difficulties. But it's not the end of the world, is it? Most of us would be able to move on and enjoy our holiday one way or another.

Not so for Rajesh Vishwas, an Indian government food inspector, who accidentally dropped his phone into the reservoir created by Kherkatta Dam in the state of Chhattisgarh. His scenario essentially mirrors that outlined above except for one minor detail – he decided he would need to drain the reservoir to get his tech back.

Users should note that the removal of the extensions from the Chrome Web Store does not automatically deactivate or uninstall them from their browsers, so manual action is required to eliminate the risk.

Facebook-owned Instagram is preventing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is competing with President Joe Biden in the Democrat primary, from setting up an official campaign account, according to the candidate.

In a post on Twitter, RFK Jr. said that his campaign account is being automatically banned when they attempt to set up a campaign account.

Days after saying it remained on track for the first crewed Starliner flight next month, NASA and Boeing have scrapped their July launch plan to give them "time to address recent emerging issues." 

The grounding is due to tape Boeing used on Starliner to protect wires from chafing and its flammability risk, as well as trouble with the spacecraft's rather important parachute system, NASA and Boeing officials shared in a briefing yesterday. The tape wasn't tested for flammability until "late in the process," officials said, while linkage points where the parachutes connect to the spacecraft broke in recent tests, leaving engineers under confident in their strength.

How do I know if I'm affected?

Eclypsium has a list of 271 affected motherboards here [PDF].

What does Gigabyte have to say?

The Register asked Gigabyte for comment; we'll let you know if we hear anything back. Eclypsium says it's working with the manufacturer to resolve the vulnerability.

Should I take whoever thought it would be a good idea to allow UEFI firmware to automatically and silently install Windows services in the system32 folder off my Christmas card list?

Yes.

Should I panic?

No. 

The United States is ready for arms control dialogue with Russia and China without preliminary conditions, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Friday.

"We have stated our willingness to engage in bilateral arms control discussions with Russia and with China without preconditions," he said at an annual meeting of the Arms Control Association.

He noted however that "without preconditions does not mean without accountability, will still hold nuclear powers accountable. For reckless behavior, and we'll still hold our adversaries and competitors responsible for upholding nuclear agreements."

The Chinese Communist government is ramping up online censorship ahead of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, massacre of student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square – an event that is illegal to commemorate or discuss in China.

Beijing scrubs China’s heavily sealed, policed, and censored backwater of the Internet of Tiananmen content every year, but this time they, scrubbed a bridge right off the digital map. Users of China’s Baidu search engine – which, like Google and other search providers, has a mapping feature – suddenly found themselves unable to locate Sitong Bridge in Beijing. Early this week, Baidu began claiming “no related places found” when the bridge is searched for, although some intrepid users were able to get around the clumsy censorship by using different versions of the Chinese alphabet.

Sitong Bridge became a political topic last October when a man began hanging banners from the bridge criticizing dictator Xi Jinping and his heavy-handed coronavirus lockdown policies.

“No PCR tests, but food; no lockdowns, but freedom; no lies, but respect; no Cultural Revolution, but reform; no dictator, but vote; no [to being] slaves, but we the people,” one of the banners read.

Webmaster addition: Just like the US government did regarding Covid vaccines, election fraud, etc.

The FBI had previously refused to give Congress any access to the document. Bureau officials said the decision was necessary to protect confidential human sources.

Still, it's not clear whether Wray is complying with the subpoena, technically speaking.

On Wednesday, Comer said:

We have been clear that anything short of producing these documents to the House Oversight Committee is not in compliance with the subpoena. If the FBI fails to hand over the FD-1023 form as required by the subpoena, the House Oversight Committee will begin contempt of Congress proceedings.

A spokesman for the Republican lawmaker reaffirmed that sentiment on Thursday, suggesting the current plan may not spring Wray from contempt proceedings.

Many know Calvin Klein ads for featuring celebrities like young Mark Wahlberg and Kate Moss showcasing what one might call “fit” builds in their underwear.

While using attractive models seemed a tried and true method for selling a product, Calvin Klein is now completely changing its branding. Its ads now feature overweight and gender non-conforming models.

Dave Rubin doesn’t see the virtue in the new branding.

“Advertising is about aspiring to something, right? Which should you aspire to look like?” Rubin asks. “Relatively fit people, even if she was a little thin, or should we all look like obese people?”

The HR department held a training to lecture employees about their “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and the “‘unearned advantages’ of whiteness.” As part of their “personal journey,” white employees were encouraged to confront their pathological whiteness.

They learned mantras from twelve-step programs for overcoming their whiteness, including Racists Anonymous: “I have come to admit that I am powerless over my addiction to racism”; “We admit our collective history is rooted in white supremacy.”

University of Florida has created a radical DEI bureaucracy that promotes racial preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a 12-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains segregated scholarships that violate civil rights law.

Officially, the university has reported that it hosts 31 DEI initiatives at a cost of $5 million per year. But I have obtained internal documents via Sunshine Law requests revealing the stunning scope, scale, and radicalism of UF’s DEI bureaucracy, which is embedded everywhere.

The daily issue of Lisa DePasquale’s “Bright” political newsletter never disappoints. Her May 31 edition was quite an eye opener. To wit, via the New York Post, DePasquale highlights the findings of a study titled, “Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment”:

The study published in Current Psychology suggests that left-wing extremism is associated with toxic, psychopathic tendencies and narcissism [and] found a link between higher levels of left-wing authoritarianism and higher levels of narcissism. The authors coined the term ‘dark-ego-vehicle principle’ to describe the phenomenon where individuals with dark personality traits are attracted to political and social activism as a means to satisfy their ego-focused needs rather than working towards social justice and equality. The study also noted that some activists use social justice as a guise for unhinged behavior and prioritize self-presentation, moral superiority, and social status over genuine social causes.

This makes sense. After all, one need only think of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other left-wing monsters to see the “dark-ego-vehicle-principle” at work in the capture of organizations and movements, and their subsequent implementation of purges and democides. Yet, even on a smaller scale, one can see numerous instances of organizations of all political and apolitical stripes being captured to varying degrees by their most narcissistic and aggressive left-wing members, leading to the group’s increasing left-wing authoritarianism and, in some instances, embrace of violence, at the expense and/or eclipse of its original goals. 

Nathan Hitchen and Robert Patterson have kicked up some dust in conservative circles by revealing that things are even worse than you thought:  “The Post-Industrial Economy Has Failed.”  The authors also offer potential New Right notions for digging out of the ditch. 

Hitchen, an Alexander Hamilton Society fellow, and Patterson, a former Trump Administration official and vice president of the U.S. Business and Industry Council, start strong with a word play channeling Uncle Sam’s World War II manufacturing juggernaut to underscore China’s rise to an “industrial superpower:” the “21st-century Arsenal of Autocracy.” 

The pair then backs up that description by crushing the longtime conceit that while the Middle Kingdom may dominate production, America will always maintain the competitive edge in “knowledge fields.” 

As if. The authors cite several Chinese “Sputnik moments” in space and defense, then drop the hammer: the “stunning leads” of China (the country Joe Biden described as “not competition” for the United States) in 37 out of 44 “critical and emerging science and technology fields.” These are fields like synthetic biology, photonic sensors, advanced batteries, telecommunications, and nanoscale materials and manufacturing. 

Yikes. 

Coronaviruses can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed in a way never seen before,” wrote 18 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers in a shocking 2015 document titled “The Unnatural Origins of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons.”

The next time someone tries to condescend to you about how and why it is scientifically impossible not only for COVID-19 to have come from a lab, but for it to have been a bioweapon, just repeat those damning words from China’s top military scientists. If that doesn’t change your interlocutor’s mind on the matter, then that person is likely a bad faith actor in this ongoing discussion.

After having initially discounted the “lab leak theory,” the U.S. intelligence community reopened its investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in 2021.

Not since John Hinckley shot President Reagan to impress actress Jodi Foster has a lovesick suitor caused as much political havoc as the FBI’s Peter Strzok did in pursuit of FBI attorney Lisa Page. Or so, at least, it would appear.

The House Judiciary Committee this month will have a chance to probe this and other lines of inquiry with former special counsel John Durham as it regards his investigation of the apocryphal Trump-Russia connection. Although a useful guide, the Durham report never got beyond the shallow end of the deep state. Congress needs to go deeper. 

Both Page and Strzok were in a position to shape outcomes. In 2016, while their courting was still more or less covert, the 35-year-old Page served as an advisor to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The 45-year-old Strzok, despite his adulterous affair, was promoted later that year to be deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. 

On March 3, 2016, Page texted Strzok, “God trump is a loathsome human.” In this series of texts, as in most, it is Page who initiates the Trump bashing and Strzok who plays along to curry her favor. Page, in particular, has little use for any Republican. “Would he be a worse president than cruz?” she asks. Responds Strzok, “Trump? Yes, I think so.”

At the end of April, my daughter Victoria and I departed New York City’s JFK airport, ultimately bound for the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, the first destination of what would be a 26-day, 12-city tour of Russia.

While the official purpose of the visit was business (I was promoting my book, Disarmament Race, which has been published in the Russian language by the Komsomolskaya Pravda publishing house), the unofficial – and for me, most important – purpose of the visit was an opportunity to better understand today's Russia. To do this, I was going to dig deeper into Russian history, get a better grasp of the culture, and, in the process, try to understand the “Russian soul” in as precise a manner as possible.

From my perspective, both objectives were accomplished. I’m inclined to believe that Komsomolskaya Pravda was pleased with the results of a tour that drew positive media coverage, resulted in well-attended town hall-style events involving vigorous question-and-answer sessions, and reportedly resulted in the initial print run of 10,000 books to be sold out in a manner of days. Through the considerable interaction I had with Russians of all walks of life, I came away with deeper insight into the complexity of what comprises the modern Russian nation circa 2023. However, divining an articulable definition of the Russian soul – if indeed possible at all – requires deeper introspection into the plethora of data and experiences captured during this journey than the passage of several days affords and is beyond the scope of this article.

I left on this adventure fully cognizant of the existence of an informational pandemic in America known as Russophobia, and I always believed that I was realistic as to the challenges that I would have to face in trying to convert my Russian experience into a fact-based vaccine to counter this disease of the American mind. However, the scale of the obstacles that I imagined overcoming paled in comparison to the reality that hit home literally as I stepped off the aircraft on our way back home, when Victoria and I were both pulled out of the passport checkpoint for an hours-long interrogation by investigators from Customs and Border Protection who specialize in travelers from designated nations such as Russia.

Webmaster addition: This is a "must read!"

Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) says documents he acquired from the January 6 Congressional Committee expose a Hollywood production behind the Committee hearings. Rep. Loudermilk says every Committee member had a Hollywood-style, written script to read off of and an employee from a major network was paid to help the “production” of the hearings.

As reported earlier by Cassandra Fairbanks new election fraud whistleblowers came forward on Tuesday, including one who witnessed the shipping of an estimated 144,000-288,000 completed ballots across three state lines on October 21.

The new information was made public at a press conference by the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, a national constitutional litigation organization.

The Amistad Project said that they have sworn declarations that state over 300,000 ballots are at issue in Arizona, 548,000 in Michigan, 204,000 in Georgia, and over 121,000 in Pennsylvania. They claim that their evidence reveals multi-state illegal efforts by USPS workers to influence the election in at least three of six swing states.

The whistleblower statements include potentially hundreds of thousands of completed absentee ballots being transported across three state lines, and a trailer filled with ballots disappearing in Pennsylvania.

Video evidence has surfaced, showing multiple election machines being broken into after they were ‘logic and accuracy’ tested in Maricopa County, Arizona.

According to Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake‘s War Room, “[o]n October 14th, 17th & 18th, Maricopa County performed secret testing on the tabulators” after being tested.

There were 446 tabulators in Maricopa County, 260 of which failed. More than 59 percent of tabulators failed, yet used on election day.

Over a three day period, October 14th, 17th and 18th, they went in, broke the seals, removed the memory cards, and tinkered with the machines. The failing machines are believed to have been placed in Republican areas.

“Maricopa County did NOT Follow The Law. Instead, they ensured mass failure and chaos on Election Day,” argues Lake.

The Democrat-led House Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6 doctored a key piece of its evidence, adding audio to silent U.S. Capitol Police security footage used to create a dramatic video montage for the opening of its primetime hearings last summer, according to a Just the News review of the original raw footage and interviews.

In at least two instances identified by Just the News, the panel's sizzle reel that aired live and on C-SPAN last June failed to identify that it had overdubbed audio from another, unidentified source onto the silent footage. Multiple current and former Capitol Police officials as well as key lawmakers and congressional aides confirmed that the closed-circuit cameras that captured the video do not record sound and that it was added afterwards.

A former spokesman for the Jan. 6 committee told Just the News that the panel was supposed to clearly mark any video that was dubbed with another audio source, and it did so on some occasions in the sizzle reel. 

Fusion GPS, a contractor that worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, reportedly withheld over 1,500 documents from Special Counsel John Durham. These documents were sought during Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe. Fusion GPS cited attorney-client privilege in their refusal to hand over the documents, a claim that has been contested by many legal experts​.

According to the initial report, Durham did not take legal action to acquire the documents.

On Friday, Paul Sperry, a senior reporter for Real Clear Investigations, broke the news on Twitter, stating, “BREAKING: Hillary Clinton campaign contractor Fusion GPS held back more than 1,500 DOCUMENTS sought by Special Counsel Durham, claiming attorney-client privilege, and Durham didn’t sue for the evidence.”

House Republicans on Wednesday passed two new bills in observance of National Police Week, including one aimed at illegal immigrants.

According to The Epoch Times, HR 2494 requires that illegal immigrants who assault police officers are automatically deportable, while HR 3091 authorizes retired federal law enforcement officials to buy surplus weapons being sold by the federal government.

Not surprisingly, Democrats opposed both measures, the outlet noted.

The individual behind the information that then-Vice President Joe Biden was involved in a criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national is a "highly credible" FBI confidential human source who has been used by the bureau in multiple investigative matters dating back to the Obama administration, Fox News Digital has learned.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley were approached by a whistleblower last month alleging that the FBI was in possession of a document—an FD-1023 form, dated June 30, 2020—which explicitly detailed information provided by a confidential human source alleging Biden, while serving as vice president, was involved in a $5 million criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national in exchange for influence over policy decisions.