Though the trenches ranged in location from Japanese to Chilean waters, all of them were within the “hadal zone,” meaning they were at least 6,000 meters under the sea. The study even includes amphipods collected at Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, which is the lowest known point in the seabed at 10,890 meters below the ocean surface.

Despite such remote habitats, Jamieson’s team found plastic and synthetic fibres such as nylon, polyethylene, and polyvinyl alcohol in the guts of most amphipods they examined.

Within hours, I used my mobile to scroll through my Facebook account and, with growing unease, noticed adverts for LASIK laser eye surgery and a selection of spectacles from LadyBoss glasses appearing alongside the usual updates from friends. I don’t even wear glasses myself. Surely, I thought, it must be a coincidence? And yet the timing felt troubling.

Could it be possible that our phones are somehow eavesdropping on our conversations – and that key phrases are being logged and used to send us targeted adverts? The implications, if true, are chilling.

Those highest bidders include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.” Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building? That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

This is the age of surveillance capitalism. Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc. Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

“Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper. No one is spared.

It allegedly became the face of a sickening online trolling effort targeted at children, even making its way into Peppa Pig videos. It was also the subject of the 'Momo Challenge' where children  were 'challenged' to communicate with an unknown number and take part in sickening forfeits. In a haunting voice, chilling threats allegedly meet those who view the tainted videos. There were reports of a schoolgirl left so terrified after being exposed to Momo that she banged her head against school walls, refused to go to the toilet alone and suffered from paralysing nightmares 

However, the artist does admit that he's glad his work is getting exposure - despite an eye being the only remnant of the original piece. He also said he feels 'responsible' for the wave of fear that the doll and its perceived menace has caused. 'People do not know if it is true or not but apparently the children have been affected and I do feel a little responsible for it,' he said. 

The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of diGenova's commentary on her show and agreed with him - although she placed the blame squarely on the president.  Trump, she said, "greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he's done, that might be it." 

With the report by special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there's talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.

A date for the merger of the consulate into the embassy had not been announced, but a State Department official told AFP on condition of anonymity that it “is expected to take place on March 4 [2019]. The Jerusalem consulate general, which has acted independently as a de facto embassy to the Palestinians since the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, will be replaced by a new Palestinian affairs unit within the embassy.

The closure of the consulate general means that Palestinian affairs will come under the direction of US ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who has been a supporter of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank. Some Palestinians view Friedman as biased in favor of Israel.

Democrats are living in a dream world of horrors they’ve invented to scare themselves into mass hysteria, and they are committed to rejecting whatever reality they don’t like. This is further underscored by the evil tech giants — Facebook, Apple, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc — all being run by delusional Leftists who are living in their own “Truman Show” fake world. To make sure no one threatens their false reality, they now censor and de-platform all channels that question their worldview by labeling such content “hate speech.”

To a Democrat, “hate speech” is anything that doesn’t confirm their twisted, fabricated worldview rooted in complete fiction. For example, if you oppose murdering children that are already born — a new “right” the Left has granted women in New York and elsewhere — you are condemned for being involved in “hate speech.” Yet if you openly support murdering children that are born alive, you’re celebrated as being “pro choice” and “pro women.”

The French action comes as perhaps the strongest signal yet that European governments are reevaluating basic defense doctrines that have underpinned the Western alliance for the past 70 years. Senior officials in France and Germany say Europe needs new security concepts that address the rise of China, the return of Russia as a belligerent actor and the disengagement of the United States.

France and Germany have collaborated well in fighting terrorism and in building a military-industrial complex that accounts for almost half of Europe’s capabilities. Nonetheless, both countries have basic conflicts in their strategic and military cultures that will prove difficult to reconcile. But mounting alarm in Berlin and Paris about the reliability of the United States is pushing both governments to take actions that once seemed inconceivable.

The Guardian reports that the deadly assault occurred at around 4 am near the town of Maro, in Kajuru County of Kaduna state, where the attackers set fire to several buildings, including homes and churches. The extremists shot civilians with rifles as they fled the burning establishments.

A member of local church Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) told Morning Star News that members “ran out of the church building as the shooting was going on.” She added, “Many have been killed, and I have not seen my family members since morning. I have escaped out of the area.” Some villagers and local policemen tried to resist the radical Muslim assault but were forced to retreat as the attackers overwhelmed them by sheer numbers and firepower.

But some of the most startling claims are against the growing gluten-free bread industry. Chris Young, a spokesman for the Real Bread Campaign, said gluten-free loaves should not be branded as bread. "You've got these loaves with a dozen or more things in them, things that you probably don't recognise the names of," he said. Mr Young highlighted one supermarket's own-brand product that had "thrown in something like 27 different things" that were "not strictly speaking food substances".

"You start off with water, rice flour, tapioca starch and maize starch. Instead of just one flour you've got several different grains there," he said. "Then you start getting to things like humectant and glycerine, which you find in make-up. That's to keep it moist." Mr Young told how this particular product also contained xanthan gum, which is used in the oil drilling industry as a lubricant. "There are things that we couldn't actually get hold of because you need a licence to buy them," he said."I'm not sure if I want to be feeding that to myself or my kids.”

War is one of the elements of “the perfect storm” that I have been warning you about, and I have a feeling that this is just the beginning of the conflict that we are going to see in 2019. The Pakistani military was greatly embarrassed by the successful Indian airstrikes on Monday, and on Tuesday military aircraft from both sides were shot down…

In addition to airstrikes, it is being reported that both armies “have been shelling across the LoC (Line of Control)”.  Needless to say, a lot of civilians that live along the border are really freaked out, and on the Indian side of the border a total of 14,000 bunkers are hastily being constructed to give concerned citizens some shelter. Most westerners don’t really think of India and Pakistan as prominent global military powers, but the truth is that they both have very large standing armies.  And at this point India is allocating even more money than the UK toward military spending…

But the big concern is that this crisis could go nuclear. If India and Pakistan fought a war and it stayed strictly conventional, the rest of the world would probably not be affected too much. However, it is being reported that India and Pakistan both “possess more than 100 nuclear warheads each”, and if such weapons are actually used the global impact would be “devastating”…

And let us not forget that it looks like the US is about to enter another new war as well.  In an article that I posted yesterday, I discussed the fact that Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev has just accused the United States of shipping troops to Colombia and Puerto Rico in preparation for an invasion of Venezuela.  China has come out very strongly against western military intervention in Venezuela, and the Russians already have special forces there.

If someone makes the wrong move, it could end up sparking World War 3. We are living in one of the most pivotal times in all of human history, and most people don’t even realize it.

There are 434 fighters in the combat aircraft in Pakistan and also 273 helicopters. But India is still in front, as it has 889 combat aircraft and 805 helicopters in the Indian army too. However, India will struggle to outdo Pakistan’s nuclear forces, as Pakistan has between 140 to 150 warheads in its nuclear army, while India has between 130 to 140. 

India has 54 ballistic missiles at both short-range and medium-range sizes, but Pakistan still beats this as it has more than 60 ballistic missiles.

Professor Hanappi is Jean Monnet Chair for Political Economy of European Integration  —  a European Commission appointment  —  at the Institute for Mathematical Models in Economics at the Vienna University of Technology. He also sits on the management committee of the Systemic Risks expert group in the EU-funded European Cooperation in Science and Technology research network.

In his new paper, Hanappi concludes that global conditions bear unnerving parallels with trends before the outbreak of the first and second world wars. Key red flags that the world is on a slippery slope to a global war, he finds, include:

• the inexorable growth of military spending;

• democracies transitioning into increasingly authoritarian police states;

• heightening geopolitical tensions between great powers;

• the resurgence of populism across the left and right;

• the breakdown and weakening of established global institutions that govern transnational capitalism;

• and the relentless widening of global inequalities.

These trends, some of which were visible before the previous world wars, are reappearing in new forms. Hanappi argues that the defining feature of the current period is a transition from an older form of “integrating capitalism” to a new form of “disintegrating capitalism”, whose features most clearly emerged after the 2008 financial crisis.