Pentagon officially releases UFO videos
Michael Conte | CNN
The Pentagon has officially released three short videos showing "unidentified aerial phenomena" that had previously been released by a private company.
The videos show what appear to be unidentified flying objects rapidly moving while recorded by infrared cameras. Two of the videos contain service members reacting in awe at how quickly the objects are moving. One voice speculates that it could be a drone.
The Navy previously acknowledged the veracity of the videos in September of last year. They are officially releasing them now, "in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos," according to Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough.
"After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems," said Gough in a statement, "and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena."
The Navy now has formal guidelines for how its pilots can report when they believe they have seen possible UFO's.
The Navy videos were first released between December 2017 and March 2018 by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a company co-founded by former Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge that says it studies information about unidentified aerial phenomena.
In 2017, one of the pilots who saw one of the unidentified objects in 2004 told CNN that it moved in ways he couldn't explain.
"As I got close to it ... it rapidly accelerated to the south, and disappeared in less than two seconds," said retired US Navy pilot David Fravor. "This was extremely abrupt, like a ping pong ball, bouncing off a wall. It would hit and go the other way."
The Pentagon has previously studied recordings of aerial encounters with unknown objects as part of a since-shuttered classified program that was launched at the behest of former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada. The program was launched in 2007 and ended in 2012, according to the Pentagon, because they assessed that there were higher priorities that needed funding.
Nevertheless, Luis Elizondo, the former head of the classified program, told CNN in 2017 that he personally believes "there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone."
"These aircraft -- we'll call them aircraft -- are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," Elizondo said of objects they researched. He says he resigned from the Defense Department in 2017 in protest over the secrecy surrounding the program and the internal opposition to funding it.
Reid tweeted Monday that he was "glad" the Pentagon officially released the videos, but that "it only scratches the surface of research and materials available. The U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this and any potential national security implications."
And some members of Congress are still interested in the issue, with senators receiving a classified briefing from Navy officials on unidentified aircraft last summer.
"If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them at risk, then Senator Warner wants answers. It doesn't matter if it's weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely — we can't ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily," Rachel Cohen, spokeswoman for Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, told CNN at the time.
Should People Without Coronavirus Antibodies Be Second-Class Citizens?
Let’s stop and think before we start issuing “immunity passports.”
By Kenneth Roth and Annie Sparrow | The New York Times
One of us tested positive for the coronavirus. The other one probably had it, too — we are married and live together — although symptoms were mild. We both were fortunate to recover.
Some public health experts suggest that if we could show that our blood has antibodies to the coronavirus, we could be given a “certificate of immunity” that would enable us to resume normal lives. Chile is already taking this step, and officials in other countries, including Italy, France, Germany and Britain, have considered it. We would welcome knowing whether we had antibodies and, of course, would be happy to be able to resume something like normal life. But we worry about the effects such certificates could have on people’s rights to privacy, work and freedom of movement.
Antibody testing is certainly a useful thing. If research shows that people with antibodies have significant immunity, medical personnel with antibodies could choose to be on the health care front lines, taking on such dangerous tasks as intubating or resuscitating seriously ill Covid-19 patients. Other people with immunity might offer to assume riskier jobs facing the public in retail, transport or services. That would help to protect people who are currently taking great personal risks in these sectors.
And as more people felt safe to venture from their homes, they would be more likely to help revive the economy. We are nowhere near the herd immunity that would enable us to avoid a second or third round of the virus. And a vaccine is still far away. Masks, social distancing, testing and contact tracing will be parts of our lives for some time. If we are going to try to gradually restart our stalled economy, people who know they are probably immune to further contagion from the coronavirus could play a part.
Moreover, studies using antibody testing would give us a good idea of the percentage of a given population that remains vulnerable to infection — an important factor in deciding how rapidly to ease social distancing.
But using antibody tests for the purpose of issuing certificates or “passports” is another matter. The threats to people’s rights posed by a system that distinguishes between those with and without coronavirus antibodies should make governments considering such systems proceed with caution.
To begin with, we should rarely force someone to take an antibody test or reveal the result. Like all health matters, the decision whether to know one’s antibody status should be presumptively voluntary and confidential. There may be the rare employer that can justify insisting on its workers having antibody certificates — such as to work with people who are especially at risk — but these should be the exception, not the rule.
It’s too easy to imagine antibody tests becoming a new form of discrimination: Employers might insist on antibody certificates simply to minimize absenteeism or medical costs among their workers; employees might find it easier to work with colleagues who have antibody certificates rather than to continue with face masks and social distancing. Workers in grocery stores and other essential services have already taken risks by working throughout the crisis; imagine if they lost their jobs for want of an antibody certificate.
It would be one thing for an antibody certificate to, say, exempt a person from the need to wear a mask, but quite another to allow employers to insist on a certificate as a cheaper alternative to testing, enforced social distancing and other preventive measures. An antibody certificate should not relieve businesses of their duty to ensure the safety of their staffs and customers. Nor should it be used to restrict travel and other liberties when less discriminatory precautions are available.
The norm should be for one’s antibody status to be a tool for enhancing the risks that a person voluntarily feels comfortable assuming rather than a mark to limit the possibilities that government allows. Yes, it might be easier and even safer to permit only people with antibody certificates to re-enter society, but do we really want such a two-tiered society? The cost for a large majority of people who have not been exposed to the coronavirus could be enormous.
There are some situations today in which vaccinations are required, for measles for a child to attend school, for example, and for yellow fever to visit certain countries. But requiring people to have been exposed to a dangerous virus is an entirely different matter. It raises worrying possibilities, like people trying to catch the coronavirus to develop the antibodies needed to obtain a certificate. That would not only put those individuals at risk but also could undermine efforts to “flatten the curve” of infection, potentially creating a dangerous surge of patients and prolonging the isolation of older and other at-risk people.
If an antibody certificate were to become a prerequisite for work or travel, it could spawn a black market in counterfeits. And because we are likely to encounter shortages of antibody tests similar to the shortages of the coronavirus test itself, the difficulty of obtaining access might exacerbate inequality for people in poverty, undocumented immigrants, prisoners, older people and people with disabilities. Equitable, low-cost availability would be important.
If proved effective, antibody testing is likely to be seen by governments and the public as an important part of the path toward resuming normal lives before a coronavirus vaccine is widely available. But before anyone rushes to issue certificates or passports — and require them for work, travel or other activities — we need to stop and ask ourselves if we’re ready for a society divided between new classes of “haves” and “have-nots.”
A man hit the Powerball jackpot twice in the same day, after playing the exact same numbers for 30 years.
After 30 years of playing the same set of numbers, one man finally won big.
Leah Asmelash | CNN
"Joe B" from Pueblo, Colorado, finally collected his prize money on Monday, after getting doubly lucky last month and winning two $1 million Powerball prizes, the Colorado Lottery said in a news release.
He bought the two tickets last month, once in the morning and once in the evening. The tickets, bought at separate places, were for the same set of numbers: 5-9-27-39-42.
The Colorado man has been playing that same set of numbers for 30 years. Now, with a couple million in his pocket, that dedication has paid off.
As for what he plans on doing with the money, he told the claims staff that "the boss," also known as his wife, "has plans for it."
Though the chances of winning the lottery twice in one day are rare, this has happened before.
Earlier this year, a man in Delaware accidentally bought two of the same Powerball tickets, resulting in a $100,000 win before taxes.
The same thing happened to a woman in Virginia, back in 2012. She also mistakenly bought two Powerball tickets with the same number, and -- exactly like "Joe B" -- won two $1 million prizes.
In Colorado, though, this kind of anomaly hasn't happened with Powerball before, Meghan Dougherty, communications manager for the Colorado Lottery, told CNN.
It has, however, happened with Cash 5 and Pick 3, where several have won multiple times in a single drawing. Those prizes, though, were upwards of $20,000 -- nowhere near "Joe B"'s $1 million.
AS AMAZON, WALMART, AND OTHERS PROFIT AMID CORONAVIRUS CRISIS, THEIR ESSENTIAL WORKERS PLAN UNPRECEDENTED STRIKE.
Daniel A. Medina | The Intercept
AS AMAZON, WALMART, AND OTHERS PROFIT AMID CORONAVIRUS CRISIS, THEIR ESSENTIAL WORKERS PLAN UNPRECEDENTED STRIKE
AN UNPRECEDENTED COALITION of workers from some of America’s largest companies will strike on Friday. Workers from Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx are slated to walk out on work, citing what they say is their employers’ record profits at the expense of workers’ health and safety during the coronavirus pandemic.
The employees will call out sick or walk off the job during their lunch break, according to a press release set to be publishedby organizers on Wednesday. In some locations, rank-and-file union members will join workers outside their warehouses and storefronts to support the demonstrations.
“We are acting in conjunction with workers at Amazon, Target, Instacart and other companies for International Worker’s Day to show solidarity with other essential workers in our struggle for better protections and benefits in the pandemic,” said Daniel Steinbrook, a Whole Foods employee and strike organizer.
The labor action comes as workers and organizers say Amazon, in particular, has not been forthcoming about the number of Covid-19 cases at its more than 175 fulfillment centers globally.
Jana Jumpp, an Indiana Amazon employee, along with her small team of fellow Amazon workers, has over the last month tallied Covid-19 cases at Amazon warehouses in the U.S. According to Jumpp, there have been at least 500 coronavirus cases in at least 125 Amazon facilities.
Jumpp suspects that the number is much higher, but says this is what she and her team have been able to directly confirm through their sourcing, which includes screenshots of internal company texts and voicemails to employees when cases have arisen, in addition to messages received from Amazon workers on private Facebook groups. The numbers, which have not been previously reported, are the most comprehensive to this point.
Amazon declined to comment on the numbers of sick workers compiled by organizers. “While we respect people’s right to express themselves, we object to the irresponsible actions of labor groups in spreading misinformation and making false claims about Amazon during this unprecedented health and economic crisis,” said Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty. She added, “We have gone to extreme measures to understand and address this pandemic.”
The May 1 strike is the latest in a wave of actions led by union and nonunion front-line workers. Last month, Amazon workers in New York City and more than 10,000 Instacart workers across the country staged a walkout. Whole Foods employees led a national sickout on March 31, while upwards of 800 workers skipped their shifts at a Colorado meatpacking plant as coronavirus cases were confirmed among employees. Sanitation workers in Pittsburgh and bus drivers in Detroit both staged wildcat strikes.
“These workers have been exploited so shamelessly for so long by these companies while performing incredibly important but largely invisible labor,” said Stephen Brier, a labor historian and professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. “All of a sudden, they’re deemed essential workers in a pandemic, giving them tremendous leverage and power if they organize collectively.”
The workers coalition will unveil a set of demands. Among them are:compensation for all unpaid time off usedsince the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis in March; hazard pay or paid sick leave to be provided for the duration of the pandemic;protective equipment and all cleaning supplies to be provided at all times by the company; and a demand for full corporate transparency on the number of cases in facilities.
The workers chose May 1, International Workers Day, as a signal to workers everywhere that collectively, they can take on corporate behemoths, said Christian Smalls, a lead organizer of the strike. Amazon fired Smalls on March 30, only hours after he led his colleagues at a company warehouse in Staten Island, New York, on a walkout in protest of Amazon’s response to the pandemic. Amazon said Smalls was fired for violating a company-enforced quarantine.
The firing galvanized front-line workers everywhere, who sent dozens of messages daily to Smalls asking how they too could organize work stoppages to protest their workplace conditions. Smalls joined forces with workers rights groups like Amazonians United, Target Workers Unite, Whole Worker, and the Gig Workers Collective, among others.
The coalition organized the strike over the last several weeks on Zoom calls and encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and Signal. Civil rights icon Rev. Jesse Jackson joined in on one Zoom call to briefly address the organizers, offering the full support of his Rainbow Push network. “I am with you in your struggle,” Jackson told the call’s participants.
The Intercept spoke to 20 organizers from more than half a dozen states, reflecting the widespread nature of the strike. From Whole Foods workers in Boston to Instacart gig workers in Silicon Valley to Amazon warehouse organizers in Kentucky and Michigan, their stories and demands varied but together illustrated a pattern of corporate neglect toward workers now regarded as essential — alongside doctors, nurses, and EMT workers — during the coronavirus outbreak that has forced much of the nation into home lockdown.
“All of these workers are coming together and building power,” said Vanessa Bain, an Instacart worker and co-founder of the Gig Workers Collective, which counts more than 17,000 members and advocates for gig workers’ rights. “May Day is not just a one-time symbolic action, but also about building real, vast, and broad sweeping networks of power.”
Companies Not Doing Enough
The company that has faced the most sustained criticism throughout the outbreak has been Amazon, whose CEO Jeff Bezos has personally become $24 billion richer during the pandemic.
Last week, Amazon announced that it was ending its temporary policy of unlimited, unpaid time off on April 30. In response, on early Sunday morning, more than 50 Amazon workers in Minnesota walked out of a company warehouse in suburban Minneapolis to protest the move and decry their working conditions.
In March, Amazon announced plans to hire 100,000 workers to meet surging demand and to cover for workers who had taken out the unpaid leave over fears of exposure to the virus at their workplace. This month, the company announced plans for an additional 75,000 hires. For its part, Instacart hired 300,000 new shoppers in March alone — more than its entire existing workforce to that point — and last week announced that it would hire an additional 250,000 workers to meet the historic demand.
The hiring binge by Amazon and Instacart exposed the winners and losers in the pandemic, as businesses not deemed essential by the state fight mass layoffs, said Brier.
Critics say the opportunities to “cash in” on the pandemic have not come without risks. Pressured by worker protests and elected officials, companies granted some concessions to workers. Amazon, Walmart, and Target increased hourly pay by $2. Amazon now provides personal protective equipment at its facilities and more actively cleans workspaces, while Target has mandated its workers to wear masks after weeks of reports that they were reprimanded for doing so.
The Intercept reached out to all six companies targeted in Friday’s strike. FedEx and Walmartdid not offer comments. Instacart said the company remained “singularly focused on the health and safety of the Instacart community.”In a statement, Target said it had taken many measures to ensure the safety of itsemployeesand customers. Of the May Day strike, the company said, “While we take them seriously, the concerns raised are from a very small minority.The vast majority of our more than 340,000 frontline team members have expressed pride in the role they are playing in helping provide for families across the country during this time of need.”
After publication of this story, a spokesperson for Whole Foods said the company had taken measures to enhance its cleaning operations and impose policies to minimize the spread of coronavirus among its workers.“Our focus right now is ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our Team Members, which remains our top priority, while continuing to serve our customers and communities,” said the spokesperson.
A Staten Island Amazon worker, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the company, has been on unpaid leave for more than a month. As someone with a number of underlying health conditions, the worker said contracting the virus would be “a death sentence.”They are surviving off meager savings and had to move into a friend’s home because they could no longer pay rent.
“They need to close down the warehouse and do a thorough, deep cleaning for it to be safe,” the worker told The Intercept. “If someone dies, they have blood on their hands.”
An Amazon worker in Detroit, who plans to call out sick on Friday, described a warehouse where,forweeks, there was no enforced social distancing and no gloves, masks, and hand sanitizer provided to workers, even as the city became a national coronavirus hot spot. Multiple colleagues confirmed the worker’s claims to The Intercept.
“You either come to work or take an unpaid leave of absence,” said the worker, whohas a serious underlying health condition. “If I miss one paycheck, it would mean I lose my vehicle, I lose my place to live. I lose everything.”
A Whole Foods worker in Southern California spent weeks organizing colleagues to strike on May 1, as the number of coronavirus cases have increased at stores. The worker said that managers — even those sympathetic to their demands — are helpless against the Amazon subsidiary’s corporate office. The strike, like the sickout last month, is the only way that employees can get concessions from the company, said the worker: “Nothing happens unless they see their bottom line affected.”
Whole Worker, the group that advocates for Whole Foods workers rights, has compiled its own list of positive coronavirus cases at Whole Foods stores in a document shared with The Intercept. According to the group, there have been a total of 249 cases in at least 131 stores. (The Whole Foods spokesperson said, “Statements made by this group misrepresent the full extent of Whole Foods Market’s actions in response to this crisis and do not represent the collective voice of our more than 95,000 Team Members,” adding that the grocery giant wasfollowingguidance from authorities.)
Adam Ryan, a Target worker in southern Virginia and liaison with Target Workers Unite, said the May 1 strike is the first collective action by Target employees in the company’s nearly 60-year history.
Ryan said, “It’s up to us to fight for ourselves.”
YouTube removing videos disputing coronavirus health guidance.
James Leggate | FOXBusiness
Controversy over a video removed by YouTube highlights the challenges in preventing the spread of misinformation related to the coronavirus.
This week, the Alphabet-owned site removed a video of a press conference held by two doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, Calif., that had been posted by a local TV station.
Before its removal, the video had gone "viral." The clip drew more than 5.4 million views, according to the TV station, KERO. Even billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted in March that the "coronavirus panic is dumb," shared the video and wrote the doctors "make good points”.
A YouTube spokesperson told DailyMail.com that the video had been flagged for violating its "Community Guidelines" because it "disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended social distancing and other guidelines for preventing the spread of the coronavirus, which health officials said can be carried by people showing mild or no symptoms.
A spokesperson for the website added that content that provides more context - educational, documentary, scientific or artistic - is not removed under the guidelines, DailyMail.com reported. The spokesperson said news coverage of the interview with added context had not been removed.
"From the very beginning of the pandemic, we've had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time," the spokesperson told DailyMail.com.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has said the website would remove anything goes "against World Health Organization recommendations," according to the report.
The company's guidelines are actually more nuanced. YouTube said it relies on both global and local health organizations for expertise, such as the CDC in the U.S.
Whenever a video is flagged, it's reviewed for violations of the site's guidelines, according to YouTube.
YouTube has also recently added fact checks to search results in the U.S. on topics related to COVID-19. The company said the move was part of its efforts to "connect people with authoritative sources." Rather than curating the fact checks, YouTube said it uses fact check articles published by eligible publishers, which appear on searches algorithmically.
