Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes sentenced to 18 years for Capitol riot

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was sentenced on Thursday to 18 years in prison, after being convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on Congress.

Prosecutors sought a 25-year term. Lawyers for Rhodes said he should be sentenced to time served, since his arrest in January 2022.

Before handing down the sentence on Thursday, the judge told a defiant Rhodes that he posed a continued threat to the US government, saying it was clear Rhodes “wants democracy in this country to devolve into violence”.

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How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’

Residents feel trapped and choked by dust, while experts warn environmental damage is ‘solving one problem by creating others’

Deep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror.

But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in orderly geometric ridges, like frozen waves.

“We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels.”

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ChatGPT hires human to pass ‘are you human’ test

AI life can lie to humans. Computer programs are perfectly happy to manipulate us in order to fulfil their programmed instructions – and they are getting creative with their deception.

Everyone sighs when faced with solving a CAPTCHA to ‘prove you are a human’. It usually involves the mundane task of clicking on pictures that contain some arbitrary item, like a bike. This is simple for us, but computers can’t do it. This is why it acts as a digital gate to keep roving AI bots out of certain areas of the internet.

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Excess Deaths in Young Canadians Jump to 27 Percent

Canadians up to age 44 saw 27 percent more deaths than expected in the last five months of 2022, a big jump compared to the 19 percent seen from the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 up until August 2022, according to Statistics Canada data analyzed by The Epoch Times.

The 27 percent excess deaths among Canadians below age 44 represents 1,597 more deaths than expected between August and September 2022, or 10 extra deaths per day.

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How The West Sanctions Enemies: Floods Them with Rewards

Some Western governments, in particular the U.S. administration, have a bizarre way of sanctioning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s staunchest allies: by flooding them with rewards. Take, for instance, Putin’s not-so-secret Trojan Horse in NATO, Turkey.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tirelessly struggles to harm Western interests. He should be punished and sanctioned for doing that. Instead, the UN, under U.S. direction, rewarded Turkey by appointing a close Erdoğan confidant to a critical Afghan post, and the Biden administration rewarded Erdoğan by requesting Congressional authorization to sell critical fighter jet parts to Turkey.

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NYC college professor who threatened Post reporter with machete is fired as her lawsuit against NYPD emerges

The manic Manhattan college professor who threatened a Post reporter with a machete has been fired, the school said Tuesday — as it emerged she is suing the NYPD for allegedly abusing her during the 2020 George Floyd protests.

Shellyne Rodriguez was sacked by Hunter College just hours after the adjunct professor was caught on camera holding the blade to the veteran reporter’s neck while threatening to “chop” him up outside her Bronx apartment.

h/t H

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Erin O’Toole blasts former Governor General David Johnston for ‘disappointing’ study of foreign interference

OTTAWA—Former Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole says the federal government’s point-person on alleged foreign interference – former Governor General David Johnston – only met with him as a “box-checking exercise,” and that he doesn’t trust his study of the issue to seriously address concerns about Canadian democracy.

O’Toole, the Oshawa MP who led the Conservatives in the 2021 election, added his voice to the chorus of opposition skepticism about how the Liberal government is handling allegations of Chinese state interference, which has grown in recent months into a political firestorm fuelled by a series of intelligence leaks to the media.

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