JAPAN - Japan experienced a huge 6.4 magnitude earthquake overnight along with two smaller tremors following warnings of an active volcano just days earlier. A huge 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck along the Mariana Trench last night. Despite not being close enough to land to be felt, the earthquake comes at a time when seismic activity is high in Japan. A magnitude-6.0 earthquake also stuck in the same place a minute earlier, some 435 miles from Tokyo. Japan is on alert for seismic activity, after a warning was issued for Kuchinoerabu - or Kuchinoerabujima - island on August 14. The volcano warning was raised on the small island from level two to level four, despite an eruption not being detected. 

INDONESIA - A strong magnitude 6.3 earthquake has struck Indonesia's Lombok island. The quake's epicenter is located at a shallow depth of 7.9km. The island has been hit by a series of quakes recently, killing hundreds of people. The quake struck 64 km (40 miles) from the city of Mataram with a population of 400,000 people, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports. The tremor hit Lombok's northern shore, some 6km (four miles) from the Mount Rinjani volcano. Indonesia is located in a seismically active area and is frequently shaken by earthquakes. In 2004 it was hit by one of the deadliest quakes in recent history, a magnitude 9.1-9.3 event that triggered tsunami waves up to 30 meters tall. Over 220,000 people were killed or left missing then.

FIJI - A massive quake of magnitude 8.2 struck in the Pacific Ocean close to Fiji and Tonga on Sunday but it was so deep that it was not expected to cause any damage, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. The US Tsunami Warning Center also said the quake was too deep to cause a tsunami. The quake was initially reported as a magnitude 8.0 and then upgraded to 8.2, a magnitude that could cause tremendous damage had it not been so deep.

USA - Anyone who tells you the recent escalation of censorship by US tech giants is merely a reflection of private companies making independent decisions is either lying or dangerously ignorant. In the case of Facebook, the road from pseudo-platform to willing and enthusiastic tool of establishment power players is fairly straightforward.

USA - During a closed-door and off-the-record meeting last week, top Facebook executive Campbell Brown reportedly warned news publishers that refusal to cooperate with the tech behemoth's efforts to "revitalize journalism" will leave media outlets dying "like in a hospice." Reported first by The Australian under a headline which read "Work With Facebook or Die: Zuckerberg," the social media giant has insisted the comments were taken out of context, even as five individuals who attended the four-hour meeting corroborated what Brown had stated.

USA - It’s longstanding practice. Corporate predators bribe organizations, scientists, academics, and other experts to lie about the safety of their products. When hazardous to human health, they need endorsements from experts, willing to sacrifice their integrity for a big payday. The Organic Authority reports “the truth behind America’s food supply and consumer products industries – pulling back the curtain on how America’s food is grown and processed.”

USA - “People just don’t do it,” Wharton School professor and forecasting expert J Scott Armstrong told Brietbart.com after making the shocking claim that less that one percent of papers published in scientific journals follow the scientific method. “I used to think that maybe 10 percent of papers in my field… were maybe useful. Now it looks like maybe, one tenth of one percent follow the scientific method.” In particular, Armstrong talked about the proactive “alarmism” some scientists encourage regarding man-made climate change. He argued that scientists are more politically motivated or perhaps too focused on their own career advancement to want to publish accurate data.

USA - What I had feared and expected finally happened. Minutes ago upon waking up this morning, I discovered that WordPress has unilaterally and without warning shut down Fellowship of the Minds for alleged violations of “Terms of Service”. The signs are now clear that the Left are silencing all conservative voices before the November mid-term elections where Democrats will steal the election with MASSIVE voter fraud.

USA - The security of the US election system just lost a vote of confidence. At the annual hacker conference DefCon, Emmett Brewer, an 11-year-old boy from Austin, Texas, was able to change the results on a mock Florida election website. It took him 10 minutes. Though the website in question was a mere replica of the Florida Secretary of State website, the hack points to the larger vulnerabilities of the election infrastructure in the US. On the heels of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, Microsoft has already detected evidence of Russian interference in three races in the 2018 mid-terms. The hacking event was part of a hands-on workshop within the larger cybersecurity conference. “The site may be a replica but the vulnerabilities that these kids were exploiting were not replicas, they’re the real thing,” Nico Sell, the event organizer, told PBS.

USA - If you’re waiting for someone to save you from the tidal wave of corporate censorship, government authoritarianism and deranged left-wing violence, you’re following a mirage. No one is coming to save you. If you want to live as a free person in a free world, you’re going to have to demand it, fight for it and secure it. Tech giants, for example, absolutely will not stop their censorship unless they are forced to stop.

ISRAEL - The Israeli military uncovered a new effort by the Hamas terror group to trick soldiers into downloading spyware applications onto their phones by befriending them on Instagram with accounts purporting to belong to attractive women, the army said Wednesday. The Israel Defense Forces’ information security branch revealed a similar attempt last month by the Gaza-based Hamas that used the Facebook social media site to lure soldiers into installing software onto their phones that would allow the terror group to remotely control it, turning on the device’s cameras and audio recorders.

USA - A new anti-Facebook blog, giving small and mid-sized publishers a place to vent their frustrations over the tech giant's censorship policies and algorithms hiding their content, has gone live despite legal threats. FacebookZoo, hosted on niche publishing platform Maven, went live on Tuesday. It aims to give disgruntled publishers an avenue to criticize the company's censorship policy, as well as outline how its "ever-changing algorithms" have drastically affected their livelihoods in favor of shareholder profit.

USA - A right-wing pundit’s YouTube page is on the verge of a total ban after he racked up two “strikes” for violating community standards, likely the result of leftist targeting. “Almost immediately after returning from a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand, and after getting my final all-clear cancer checkup, the YouTube strikes against Freedomain Radio – the world’s most popular philosophy show – began,” he wrote. “Apparently, I had “violated community standards” by publishing a short video last year entitled “The Death of White Males,” which discussed the decline in life expectancy for white males, in part due to the opioid crisis,” he continued. He received another strike for a video he did with British right-wing firebrand Katie Hopkins. Molyneux is the latest victim of a series of social media attacks by leftists against anyone who is politically right of Stalin.

USA - There are many broken things about the US health care system. But one of the biggest and most overlooked problems is that patients still find it too hard to share their medical information between doctors, especially those working in different hospitals.

It’s a huge problem for many reasons: It makes it harder for consumers to access the highest-quality care, and new patients who walk into a hospital are like strangers — care-givers won’t know if they have an allergy or a chronic disease.

CHINA - Shunning all false modesty, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calls his idea the “project of the century”. The country’s fawning media hail it as a gift of “Chinese wisdom” to the world’s development. As for the real meaning of the clumsy metaphor to describe it — the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — debate rages.