A 52-year-old man has become the third Las Vegas massacre survivor to die in a crash just weeks after the deadly mass shooting.

Roy McClellan was mowed down and killed in the hit and run while hitchhiking just outside of Las Vegas on State Route 160 in Pahrump, Nevada, on November 17.

His death occurred just over a month after California couple Dennis and Lorraine Carver were killed when their vehicle crashed outside their gated community in Riverside County, California bursting into flames, on October 16.

As the Sheeple lined up and mobbed retail stores after Thanksgiving dinner and early Friday morning for deals to kick off the holiday season, one person has already been shot, fights have shut down malls, and a baby (!) was hit with a shoe.

Many people lost all sense of perspective as they got caught up in it at Walmart, Macy’s, and other stores during this grim holiday tradition in American stupidity.

It’s a bright, sunny day and you’re alone in your spanking new self-driving vehicle, sprinting along the two-lane Tunnel of Trees on M-119 high above Lake Michigan north of Harbor Springs. You’re sitting back, enjoying the view. You’re looking out through the trees, trying to get a glimpse of the crystal blue water below you, moving along at the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit.

As you approach a rise in the road, heading south, a school bus appears, driving north, one driven by a human, and it veers sharply toward you. There is no time to stop safely, and no time for you to take control of the car.

The US military wants to deploy plants as “the next generation of intelligence gatherers”.

Genetically modified plants could be employed as self-sustaining sensors to gather information in settings unsuitable for more traditional technologies.

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for the development of emerging technologies in the US military, has called for scientists to submit ideas for how to harness the power of plants.

In the past, DARPA has produced information-gathering technologies such as the satellites and seismographs employed to ensure Soviet compliance with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

But in this new initiative, termed the Advanced Plant Technologies (APT) programme, the agency is looking to the natural world for help.

Parents should turn off the cameras and automatic tracking devices in their children’s Christmas presents because of the risk of hacking, the Information Commissioners’ Office has warned.

With a rise in the number of ‘smart’ toys and devices gracing the wish list this year, parents should consider the safety of them being connected directly to the internet before giving them as gifts, according to the data regulator.

When adults are not going to personally use cameras in toys to view what is happening remotely then they should consider turning the function off all together, Deputy Commissioner Steve Wood said.

The warning comes amid growing concerns about the ability of criminals to hack into toys containing sensors, microphones, cameras, data storage and other multi-media capabilities.

An international aid group says an estimated 130 children or more die every day in war-torn Yemen from extreme hunger and disease.

Save the Children said late Wednesday that a continuing blockade by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen's Shiite rebels is likely to further increase the death rate. It says over 50,000 children are believed to have died in 2017.

Saudi Arabia blocked Yemen's ports after a rebel missile attack near Riyadh. It said Monday the coalition would lift the blockade after widespread international criticism.

Ukraine fired its deputy-head of foreign intelligence and expelled a Belarussian diplomat a day after the government of Belarus claimed that it busted a Ukrainian spy ring that recruited local agents. The chain of events began on October 25, when the Belarussian Committee for State Security (KGB) arrested a Ukrainian journalist. The journalist, Pavlo Sharoyko, is based in the Belarussian capital Minsk and works as the Belarus correspondent for the National Radio Company of Ukraine —the country’s public broadcaster. Even though Sharoyko was arrested in October, his imprisonment was not publicly announced by Belarus until last Saturday. On Tuesday, November 21, at a press conference held at the KGB headquarters in Minsk, KGB spokesman Dmitry Pobyarzhin told reporters that Sharoyko was arrested for engaging in espionage on behalf of the Ukrainian government.

Washington's past decade of Syria policy has been driven by fears of the so-called "Shia crescent" or Iranian land bridge which would conceivably connect Tehran with the Mediterranean in a continuous arch of influence. With events rapidly unfolding in Iraq and Syria, foremost among them the defeat of ISIS and the connection of Syrian and Iraqi national forces at the shared border, that land bridge has now been established for the first time in recent history.

But now as 2017 comes to a close, the Syria-Hezbollah-Iran alliance appears victorious, and it's the House of Saud and US-backed alliance that is fragmented and in shambles. And consistent with what Hersh predicted all the way back in 2007, the US has for years supported a jihadist corridor in Syria in order to "isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)."

In political matters, the public are taught to believe that some political Party is ‘good’, and that the others are “bad”; but the reality in recent times, at least in the United States, has instead been that both Parties are rotten to the core (as will be clear from the linked documentation provided here).

Belief in this myth (that the opposition between Parties is between ‘good’ ‘friend’ versus ‘bad’ ‘enemy’) is based upon the common adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

One side is believed, and ones that contradict it are disbelieved - considered to be lying, distorting: bad. But, maybe, both (or all) Parties are deceiving; maybe all of them are enemies of the public, but just in different ways; maybe each of them is trying to control the country in the interests of (and so to obtain the most financial support from) the aristocracy, while all of them are actually against the public.

Can it really be false that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

The wealthy have tucked billions into private nonprofits... where the IRS can’t touch it.

Congress is still scrambling to find ways to pay for its tax cut, so perhaps it should pay closer attention to last month’s news that George Soros had transferred $18 billion of his fortune to a private charity that he controls. There it will be sheltered from the Internal Revenue Service forever. This may be the single biggest tax dodge in U.S. history, yet no one on the right or left seems to have raised an eyebrow.

True tax reform is predicated on the principle that all income should be taxed at a low rate once, and only once. But much of the wealth that Mr. Soros spent years moving into his Open Society Foundations will never be taxed. A gift of billions of dollars of appreciated stock escapes any capital gains tax, and the estate tax as well. So Mr. Soros can donate appreciated stock that Open Society Foundations can liquidate without the government ever taking a cut.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has denounced Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the "new Hitler of the Middle East", as tensions simmer between the regional rivals.

Saudi Arabia and its arch-rival Iran have traded a bitter war of words after a missile fired from Yemen was intercepted near Riyadh airport on November 4. The missile was claimed by Yemen's Tehran-backed Huthi rebels.

Iran's "supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East", Prince Mohammed told The New York Times in an interview published Thursday.

Half a dozen British parliamentarians have launched a parliamentary Early Day Motion (EDM) condemning the military detention of Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli authorities.

The primary sponsor of the EDM, officially tabled on Monday, is Labour MP Richard Burden, joined by five co-sponsors: Labour’s Lisa Nandy, Andy Slaughter, and Grahame Morris, along with the Liberal Democrats’ Alistair Carmichael, and SNP MP Tommy Sheppard.

The EDM begins by noting “with concern that hundreds of Palestinian children continue to be arrested, detained and tried in Israeli military courts, despite the practice involving widespread and systematic violations of international law and being widely condemned.”

The motion also notes “allegations of ill-treatment at the hands of Israeli authorities include blindfolding, physical violence and arrest at night”, and “the disparity between the treatment of Israeli and Palestinian children by Israeli authorities”.

President Donald Trump’s top advisers are closer now to achieving what seemed unthinkable at the start of his presidency: Shipping millions of dollars of US weapons to Ukraine’s embattled military.

The president, whose former campaign associates nixed language supporting arms to Ukraine in the GOP’s party platform in 2016, was never going to be an easy sell on the issue.

Approving the measure would likely enrage Moscow and jeopardize Trump's hopes of cultivating better ties with the Cold War adversary. Key US allies including Germany oppose the decision out of concern that it could trigger Russia to step up its military intervention in Ukraine in ways that spiral out of control.

But US officials tell BuzzFeed News that they have a pitch they believe can win the president’s approval of providing $40-50 million in arms to the war-torn country, including powerful Javelin anti-tank missiles. Officials said the president could be presented with the proposal in the coming weeks.

Militants have launched a bomb and gun attack on a mosque in Egypt's North Sinai province, killing 235 people, state media say.

Witnesses say the al-Rawda mosque in the town of Bir al-Abed, near al-Arish, was targeted during Friday prayers.

It is the deadliest attack of its kind since an Islamist insurgency in the peninsula was stepped up in 2013.

Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has held emergency talks with security officials to decide how to respond.

What happened?

Local police said gunmen arrived in four off-road vehicles and bombed the packed mosque before opening fire on worshippers, the Associated Press reported.
Pictures from the scene show rows of bloodied victims inside the mosque. At least 100 people were wounded, reports say.
"They were shooting at people as they left the mosque," a local resident who had relatives there told Reuters news agency. "They were shooting at the ambulances too."

The air forces of South Korea and the United States are scheduled to hold a regular joint drill next month, deploying six F-22 Raptor stealth fighters in the exercise, a South Korean defense ministry official said on Friday.

The drill, called Vigilant Ace, will run from Dec. 4 to 8, the official told Reuters. The F-22 stealth fighters will be joined by F-35 aircraft, a U.S. Air Force official said.

The Vigilant Ace drill is held regularly by the United States and South Korea to simulate wartime defenses.

About 12,000 U.S. personnel will participate with South Korean troops while 230 aircraft will be flown at eight U.S. and South Korean military installations, the U.S. Seventh Air Force said in a news statement.

U.S. Marine Corps and Navy troops will also participate, it added.

“This realistic combat exercise is designed to enhance interoperability between U.S. and Republic of Korea forces and increase the combat effectiveness of both nations,” it said.

Both MBS, as he has come to be known, and his elderly father King Salman, the BND analysts wrote, want Saudi Arabia to be seen as “the leader of the Arab world” with a foreign policy built on “a strong military component.” Yet the memo also pointed out that the consolidation of so much power in a single young prince’s hands “harbors a latent risk that in seeking to establish himself in the line of succession in his father’s lifetime, he may overreach,” adding: “Relations with friendly and above all allied countries in the region could be overstretched.”

And so it has come to pass. In fact, despite being repudiated at the time by a German government more concerned about diplomatic and commercial relations with Riyadh, the BND warning turned out to be eerily prophetic.

If you can’t argue politics with your relatives, then just trash their Thanksgiving dinner for spite, says a politics column in GQ magazine, titled “It’s Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump.”

- Israel is putting in place the final pieces of a Greater Jewish Jerusalem that will require “ethnically cleansing” tens of thousands of Palestinians from a city their families have lived and worked in for generations, human rights groups have warned.

The pace of physical and demographic changes in the city has accelerated dramatically since Israel began building a steel and concrete barrier through the city’s Palestinian neighbourhoods more than decade ago, according to the rights groups and Palestinian researchers.

Israel is preparing to cement these changes in law, they note. Two parliamentary bills with widespread backing among government ministers indicate the contours of Jerusalem’s future.

Iranian warships are set to leave the waters of the Persian Gulf to sail across the world and tour another gulf—the one that lies between the U.S. and Mexico.

At a time when Iran is looking to expand and modernize its military in the face of what is seen as a growing U.S. threat, its newly appointed navy commander, Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi, held his first press conference Wednesday, announcing that a fleet of Iranian ships would soon depart for the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico en route to visits to a number of South American countries, Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim News Agency reported. The move is reportedly part of a push to project Iran’s military on a more global scale and establish international ties as President Donald Trump and his allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, seek to isolate the revolutionary Shiite Muslim power.