Saturday, January 25, 2020

please pass this on Queen Elizabeth Gives Prince William a New Royal Title amid Prince Harry & Meghan Markle's Exit



Queen Elizabeth Gives Prince William a New Royal Title amid Prince Harry & Meghan Markle's Exit

Helen Murphy
Prince William has a new title.
On Saturday, Queen Elizabeth appointed her grandson as the new Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In the position, William will become the British monarch’s personal representative to the Church of Scotland, carrying out various official visits and ceremonial duties.
William, 37, takes over the role from Richard Scott, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry. Before Scott, Princess Anne held the position.
The appointment comes as William’s brother Prince Harry and Harry’s wife Meghan Markle step back as senior members of the royal family.
Last week, Queen Elizabeth and her family — including William, Harry and Prince Charles — cemented an agreement for the terms of Harry and Meghan’s royal exit. After a period of transition that ends this spring, Meghan, 38, and Harry, 35, will lose their “Royal Highness” titles, repay renovation costs to their Frogmore Cottage home and split their time between North America and the U.K.
Queen Elizabeth; Prince William | ALASTAIR GRANT/AFP via Getty Images; Pool/Samir Hussein/WireImage
Queen Elizabeth; Prince William | ALASTAIR GRANT/AFP via Getty Images; Pool/Samir Hussein/WireImage
RELATED: Kate Middleton and Prince William Host Buckingham Palace Reception Amid Meghan and Harry’s Exit
Amid the royal drama, William and wife Kate Middleton have been continuing their royal duties, recently hosting a reception at Buckingham Palace on behalf of the Queen. The reception marked the U.K.-Africa Investment Summit taking place in London. (Harry also attended the summit, taking part in meetings with leaders from three countries.)
In his speech, William offered some personal words about the couple’s personal connection to the region.
Prince William and Kate Middleton | Yui Mok/PA Images
Prince William and Kate Middleton | Yui Mok/PA Images
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“The African continent holds a very special place in my heart,” the royal dad said. “It is the place my father took my brother and me shortly after our mother died. And when deciding where best to propose to Catherine, I could think of no more fitting place than Kenya to get down on one knee.”
Kate, 38, and William are also set to attend the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards — the British equivalent of the Oscars — on Feb. 2.

Friday, January 24, 2020

This App Is a Dangerous Invasion of Your Privacy—and the FBI Uses It




This App Is a Dangerous Invasion of Your Privacy—and the FBI Uses It

Courtney Linder
Photo credit: Fanatic Studio / Gary Waters - Getty ImagesPhoto credit: Fanatic Studio / Gary Waters - Getty Images
From Popular Mechanics
  • Clearview AI, a small startup that was mostly unknown until a story from The New York Times called it the app to "end privacy as we know it," lets strangers figure out your identity through the quick snap of a single photo.
  • Hundreds of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, are already using this facial recognition technology, despite bans on the tech in cities like San Francisco.
  • The app uses over three billion images to find a match. These photos were sourced from social media sites and even apps like Venmo.
Let's say a random stranger approaches you on the street, snaps a quick photo of you in a public place (which is perfectly legal), uploads the photo to an app, and soon finds your social media profiles. And your Venmo account. And your full name. And your address.

That's a privacy disaster any way you slice it—but it's also at the heart of an app called Clearview AI, which The New York Times recently called "The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It."

It's not just extremely dangerous because stalkers could instantly find people through the app and hound them over social media or even show up at their house, but because hundreds of law enforcement agencies, plus the FBI, are currently using this facial recognition technology, despite the pushback the tech has seen in legislative spaces.

In San Francisco, for instance, it's not even legal for law enforcement to use facial recognition. What's more, some security companies even have access to Clearview AI, which sets a dangerous precedent.

Clearview AI features a database of over three billion images, which were scraped from websites like Facebook, Twitter, and even Venmo. Other databases pale in comparison, according to marketing materials the company provided to law enforcement agencies. The FBI has a database of 411 million photos, while more local authorities, like the Los Angeles Police Department, only have access to about eight million images.

Sure, Clearview AI isn't readily available to the public, and when you visit the company's website, there isn't really much information on the app at all. You have to request access to learn more, let alone use the service. However, both the Times and investors in Clearview AI think that the app will be available for anyone to use in the future.

That's frightening, and it's led technology think tanks like Fight for the Future, a nonprofit based in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Washington, D.C.-based Demand Progress, to call on legislators to take action on facial recognition tech.

Even Google Wouldn't Build This

When companies like Google—which has received a ton of flack for taking government contracts to work on artificial intelligence solutions—won't even build an app, you know it's going to cause a stir.

 Back in 2011, former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said a tool like Clearview AI's app was one of the few pieces of tech that the company wouldn't develop because it could be used "in a very bad way."

Facebook, for its part, developed something pretty similar to what Clearview AI offers, but at least had the foresight not to publicly release it. That application, developed between 2015 and 2016, allowed employees to identify colleagues and friends who had enabled facial recognition by pointing their phone cameras at their faces. Since then, the app has been discontinued.

Meanwhile, Clearview AI is nowhere near finished. Hidden in the app's code, which the New York Times evaluated, is programming language that could pair the app to augmented reality glasses, meaning that in the future, it's possible we could identify every person we see in real time.

Early Pushback

Perhaps the silver lining is that we found out about Clearview AI at all. Its public discovery—and accompanying criticism—have led to well-known organizations coming out as staunchly opposed to this kind of tech.

Fight for the Future tweeted that "an outright ban" on these AI tools is the only way to fix this privacy issue—not quirky jewelry or sunglasses that can help to protect your identity by confusing surveillance systems.

Demand Progress tweeted that "our worst fears have become real."

These fears and disavowals of facial recognition tech come just months after two senators introduced a bipartisan bill to limit how the FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency could use it.

"Facial recognition technology can be a powerful tool for law enforcement officials," Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, said in a statement at the time. "But its very power also makes it ripe for abuse."

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

State of Ignorance: California Pushes False Information to School Kids on the Second Amendment. (Please teach your children the FACTS not just someone's OPINION. Let them have facts.)



State of Ignorance: California Pushes False Information to School Kids on the Second Amendment

Sunday, January 19, 2020
State of Ignorance: California Pushes False Information to School Kids on the Second Amendment
As an incorporated provision of the United States Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment is the supreme law of the land, applying to all U.S. jurisdictions and to the actions of federal, state, and local officials. The U.S. Supreme Court provides the final and authoritative interpretation of that provision, as well as other provisions of the U.S. Constitution. All of this is elementary civics.

But the State of California believes it knows better, requiring publisher McGraw-Hill to annotate a discussion of the Bill of Rights in a popular social studies textbook with the state’s own peculiar view of the Second Amendment’s meaning.

According to pictures from the California edition in the New York Times, the annotation states:

Right to Bear Arms This amendment is often debated. Originally it was intended to prevent the national government from repeating the actions of the British, who tried to take weapons away from the colonial militia, or armed forces of the citizens. This amendment seems to support the right of citizens to own firearms, but the Supreme Court has ruled it does not prevent Congress from regulating the interstate sale of weapons.

The Times article goes on to state that the publisher “said it had created the additional wording on the Second Amendment and gun control for the California textbook.” The same language, however, does not appear in a national version of the same section, according to the Times report.

The point of the New York Times article is to suggest that different states emphasize different aspects of U.S. history in otherwise similar textbooks, depending on the prevailing political outlook among the state’s education officials.

Whatever might be said of that approach, the problem with California’s account of the Second Amendment isn’t just one of emphasis but of accuracy. California, which prides itself on being one of the most anti-gun states in the nation, simply gets it wrong, using language that falsely portrays the Second Amendment as a “debated” provision that has changed meaning over time and that only “seems” to protect an individual right.

Any “debate” about the Second Amendment’s protection of an individual right have been authoritatively settled by the U.S. Supreme Court: The Second Amendment protects “the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation,” independent of service in an organized militia. That fact was unambiguously articulated in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008.

That decision, moreover, was based on the public understanding of the Second Amendment at the time it was ratified. In other words, not only was the Second Amendment an individual right as of 2008, it has always been an individual right. As the Supreme Court noted, “virtually all interpreters of the Second Amendment in the century after its enactment interpreted the Amendment as we do.” It is false to suggest, as the California textbook does, that it originally meant something different and then somehow changed meaning in 2008.

Regarding the prefatory militia clause, the Supreme Court took pains to explain the difference between the justification for including the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights and the scope and substance of that right.  

 “The debate with respect to the right to keep and bear arms, as with other guarantees in the Bill of Rights, was not over whether it was desirable (all agreed that it was) but over whether it needed to be codified in the Constitution,” the court wrote. What justified its codification was “the threat that the new Federal Government would destroy the citizens' militia by taking away their arms … .” But, the court noted, the prefatory militia clause announcing the reason for the right’s codification “does not limit or expand the scope of the operative clause.”

That scope, meanwhile, included using arms for “self-defense and hunting,” with self-defense being “the central component of the right itself,” according to the Supreme Court.

The California textbook also misconstrues what the term “militia” meant to the founding generation at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment. It wasn’t just a discrete, organized military force, the court explained, but members of the population “physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense,” whether they were mustered in that capacity or not. Thus, the terms “militia” and “the people” are not at odds with each other in the Second Amendment. The people, with their own arms, are the basis of the militia. To protect the peoples’ private right to arms is therefore to protect the militia’s ability to muster with arms and to preserve its viability.

As for Congress’ ability to regulate the interstate sale of weapons, the Supreme Court indicated in Heller that “laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” are part of the “longstanding” history and tradition of the Second Amendment, and are thus “presumptively lawful.” That does not mean, however, that every such law trumps the amendment’s protections, especially if there is no longstanding precedent for it.

In any event, the Supreme Court has yet to hear a case that pits the Second Amendment against the Commerce Clause, and it explicitly reserved that and other questions for later consideration. “[S]ince this case represents this Court’s first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the entire field,” the court wrote. “[T]here will be time enough to expound upon the historical justifications for the exceptions we have mentioned if and when those exceptions come before us.”

California likes to emphasize how it sees things differently than the rest of the United States. That’s why common consumer products come with warnings that they include substances “known to the State of California” to pose various hazards, including cancer or birth defects. So numerous are these warnings that people at this point are most likely to ignore them as sensational and unreliable.

The state’s students would be wise to take the same approach to official state pronouncements about firearms and the Second Amendment.

California, as the saying goes, is entitled to its opinions. But it’s not entitled to its own facts.
And when it comes to the Second Amendment, the facts are different than the opinions expressed in the California-specific version of McGraw-Hill’s social studies textbook.

Activist Wilma Mankiller is quoted as saying, “Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future.”

Year after year California chips away at the Second Amendment with its ever-expanding gun control regime.  

If this continues unabated, the right to keep and bear arms will effectively be nullified for future generations of Californians.

What’s worse – if California’s educational bureaucrats have their way – is that those generations will be too ignorant of their liberties to even understand what has been taken from them.

Our advice to these students is to exercise their First Amendment rights to learn and speak the truth, and as soon as they are able, exercise the right to vote in favor of those who respect their fundamental liberties, rather than those who try to write them out of history.











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Saturday, January 18, 2020

Can we now forget about harry and meghan? They let down the Royal Family.....



Now lets find more important stories.

We have heard way to many stories about these two. YES I"m just as guilty.


OVER NOW.


Friday, January 17, 2020

Piers Morgan leaked a private message Meghan Markle sent him before she was a royal, where she said she was a 'big fan' of the TV host





Piers Morgan leaked a private message Meghan Markle sent him before she was a royal, where she said she was a 'big fan' of the TV host

mfriel@businessinsider.com (Mikhaila Friel)



piers morgan, meghan marklepiers morgan, meghan markle
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for BAFTA LA, Getty Images
Piers Morgan leaked a private message that he claimed Meghan Markle sent him back in 2015.
Writing on Twitter, the TV host said: "In happier times... when Meghan first slid into my DMs... think it's fair to say she's probably not such a 'big fan' of mine now."

He shared a photo of a message that appeared to be from the then-actress, which read: "Well hello there — thanks for the follow. Big fan of yours!"

The date of the message shows it was sent in September 2015 — 10 months before she met Prince Harry in July 2016.
Morgan has repeatedly criticized the Duchess of Sussex over the years.
"Like all good actresses, Meghan knows how to distract attention and self-promote herself as a 'charitable' person," he wrote in his recent column for the Daily Mail.
"Yet what does it say about her that she would take a seaplane to go and see complete strangers (after taking four transatlantic flights between the UK and Canada in just seven weeks), yet has never once got on a plane to go see her own father after he suffered a heart attack amid the stress of her wedding?
"It says to me that Meghan Markle's pretense to be the Queen of Hearts is built on the flimsiest of self-interested sand. Oh, she's all heart for strangers when there are cameras around," he added.
Before she became a member of the royal family, the pair seemed to be on friendly terms.
According to Morgan, he met Markle for drinks at his local pub back in 2016 after a year of exchanging messages on social media.
On "Good Morning Britain," Morgan recalled: "To cut a long story short, we then spent the next year trading funny messages, then she began emailing me the 'Suits' episodes early."
When the duchess was in London to watch her friend Serena Williams play in Wimbledon that summer, she reportedly asked to meet up.
"She sent me a message: 'Hey, I'm in town, do you want to meet up?' and I said 'Sure, come to my local pub for a pint," he said.
However, the TV host says Markle "ghosted" him after she met Prince Harry in July.
"I was friendly with Meghan but she ghosted me. I am not impressed," he told The Mirror.
"There seems to be a pattern of her doing that to people, it's a bit worrying," he added.
"From my personal experience, she is someone I thought I was pretty matey with and 'bang,' she met somebody more ­important and that was it, and told other members of her show who I was friendly with to stop talking to me," Morgan added, referencing Markle's former cast members on legal drama "Suits."
"It is rather poor social climbing. The moment she met Harry she cut everybody off who she thought might be no longer desirable in her friend and family circle.

Illegal immigrant freed under NYC sanctuary law charged with murdering elderly woman




Illegal immigrant freed under NYC sanctuary law charged with murdering elderly woman





Thursday, January 16, 2020

Prince Harry 'Cut Off' Close Friends During Meghan Markle's Pregnancy: 'There's a Lot of Resentment'



People

Prince Harry 'Cut Off' Close Friends During Meghan Markle's Pregnancy: 'There's a Lot of Resentment'

Stephanie Petit
 
 
 
 

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Many close to Prince Harry are concerned about the growing distance between him and the rest of the royal family — especially given that he has recently pulled away from many longtime friends.
A well-connected source tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story that the Queen’s grandson, 35, “cut off” many of his close pals “about six months into” Meghan Markle‘s pregnancy with son Archie, born May 6.
“Most no longer even have his cell number,” says the insider. “They totally understand that men often drift from their friends after marriage, but there’s still a lot of resentment because they had been so close for so long.”
One exception is Charlie van Straubenzee. The pals met at Ludgrove Prep School and have remained close ever since — in fact, they were all smiles attending each other’s weddings just months apart in 2018. Van Staubenzee is also a godfather to Archie.
RELATED: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Felt Their ‘Hand Was Forced’ to Leave Royal Family Amid ‘Bad Blood’
Neil Mockford/GC Images
Neil Mockford/GC Images
Charlie van Straubenzee, Prince Harry and James Middleton attend the England vs. Australia match during the Rugby World Cup 2015 | Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty
Charlie van Straubenzee, Prince Harry and James Middleton attend the England vs. Australia match during the Rugby World Cup 2015 | Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty
Meghan, 38, remains close to many of her friends from her pre-royal days. It is believed that Archie stayed in Canada with Meghan’s longtime pal Jessica Mulroney, whose three children served as page boys and a flower girl in the couple’s royal wedding in May 2018, while the Duke and Duchess of Sussex returned to London last week for engagements. In addition, Meghan’s Suits costar Abigail Spencer was spotted with the couple during a New Year’s Day hike. Both women also attended Meghan’s baby shower in Feb. 2019, held in New York City.
Meghan Markle and Jessica Mulroney | George Pimentel/WireImage
Meghan Markle and Jessica Mulroney | George Pimentel/WireImage
A fracture between Prince Harry and Prince William began when the older sibling voiced concern that Harry and Meghan were moving too fast — and the split widened as the newlyweds increasingly felt ostracized from the rest of the family.
Those close to Prince Charles deny reports that the heir sought to slim-down the monarchy by squeezing out his younger son and daughter-in-law.
“Charles has always envisioned working with both of his sons and their families in the future,” says a close source. The leaner monarchy that has been proposed by Charles for cost-cutting purposes “included Harry and whoever he married,” adds a palace insider.
Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry | Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage
Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry | Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex released a statement last week announcing their intent to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution” — however, the public announcement came with little formal warning and left senior royals “hurt,” a royal source says.
But in this week’s cover story, a family friend tells PEOPLE that the couple felt they had no choice but to manage things the way they did, even as they went against the family’s “never complain, never explain” mantra.
“This is not how they wanted to handle this, but Meghan and Harry’s hand was forced,” says the friend. “There is so much bad blood in that family — it’s toxic.”

The friend adds, “If relationships had been better, things would have been different.”