Miscreants are actively exploiting two new zero-day vulnerabilities to wrangle routers and video recorders into a hostile botnet used in distributed denial-of-service attacks, researchers from networking firm Akamai said Thursday.

Both of the vulnerabilities, which were previously unknown to their manufacturers and to the security research community at large, allow for the remote execution of malicious code when the affected devices use default administrative credentials, according to an Akamai post. Unknown attackers have been exploiting the zero-days to compromise the devices so they can be infected with Mirai, a potent piece of open source software that makes routers, cameras, and other types of Internet of Things devices part of a botnet that’s capable of waging DDoSes of previously unimaginable sizes.

Akamai researchers said one of the zero-days under attack resides in one or more models of network video recorders. The other zero-day resides in an “outlet-based wireless LAN router built for hotels and residential applications.” The router is sold by a Japan-based manufacturer, which “produces multiple switches and routers.” The router feature being exploited is “a very common one,” and the researchers can’t rule out the possibility it’s being exploited in multiple router models sold by the manufacturer.

Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota said in a tweet Saturday that claims that President Joe Biden could defeat former President Donald Trump were “delusional.”

Phillips cited Biden’s declining poll numbers, sharing a report by Politico in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Saturday morning. Trump led Biden in polls by NBC News, Quinnipiac, Fox News and Morning Consult. (RELATED: Things Are Going From Bad To Worse For Joe Biden, Polls Show)

“As a member of House Democratic Leadership, I supported and promoted the Biden agenda,” Phillips posted. “I campaigned for him, voted for him, and respect him. But how can anyone read this and conclude he’s positioned to defeat Donald Trump?”

President Joe Biden's poll numbers are continuing to slide downward, while former President Donald Trump, the clear front-runner in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, is enjoying poll numbers that are at a higher point than at any time over the past year, spelling trouble ahead for Biden's chances at reelection.

Biden's standing, when matched in head-to-head polling against Trump, is showing worse in all but two of the latest surveys from 13 pollsters. Earlier this month, Trump was showing as being ahead in four of the six swing states in a New York Times/Siena College poll, reported Politico.

Even though the polls suggest that most of Biden's drop is coming from voters abandoning him, that doesn't mean that they are swinging over to back Trump.

Since October 7, Israeli police have implemented full dictatorship from the river to the sea. This has included preventing any anti-war protest within the Green Line and filling the prisons with ‘freedom-of-expression’ prisoners. Today, November 18, after a month and 11 days of massive bloodshed, there was the first anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv. I joined the protest mostly because I felt obliged to support the call for immediate ceasefire and call for an “all for all” captives and prisoners’ exchange. But I also wanted to assess what this demonstration teaches us about the current policies of the repressive Israeli regime and about the protest movement.

Court ruling allows demonstration

Hadash (“The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality,” organized around the Israeli Communist Party) applied for a license to demonstrate in Tel Aviv against the war and for a prisoners’ exchange. Their initial application was refused by the police, which suggested they hold a meeting in a closed venue instead. Then Hadash, with the help of ACRI (The Association for Civil Rights in Israel), appealed to the Bagatz (Hebrew acronym for “High Court of Justice”), which finally forced the police to allow the demonstration.

As cases of pneumonia rise among children in China, the ruling class is now blaming it on “multiple pathogens,” and not a novel disease. The World Health Organization is investigating the illnesses and says that

WHO Investigates Mysterious Pneumonia Cases In Children In China

The first suspicion of Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) is that this is “a series of already recognized respiratory pathogens,” due to the fact that illnesses are reportedly occurring in children. “If it was a new pathogen, it would be showing up in kids and adults equally, ” he told Fortune.

According to a report by NDTV World, influenza is one of the main causes of the spike in cases. National Health Commission spokesman Mi Feng said at a press conference on Sunday that rhinovirus, mycoplasma pneumonia, and respiratory syncytial virus are also circulating. Because of these pathogens, China should guarantee medicine supply and open more areas for medical treatment, Feng said.

Pope Francis has canceled a series of meetings this week after falling ill, the Vatican said on Monday.

The Pope is suffering breathing difficulties due to inflammation of the lungs and has postponed some of his meetings until he recovers, the Vatican told the Daily Caller News Foundation. He does not have pneumonia or a fever and has begun taking antibiotics to treat his ailment.

“Today I cannot appear at the window because I have this problem of inflammation of the lungs,” the Pope said during his weekly Angelus address on Sunday, adding that a priest would read the day’s reflection.

North Korea launched a small military spy satellite Tuesday on the country's first successful orbital launch since 2016. This, alone, would be newsworthy, but this launch comes with a twist.

An automated camera operated by Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, captured the launch. The camera is part of a worldwide network of all-sky cameras to detect meteors streaking through Earth's atmosphere. On Tuesday night, it caught a glimpse of North Korea's Chŏllima 1 rocket climbing higher in the night sky until its booster engine cuts off. Then an upper stage engine fires to continue powering its payload into orbit, leaving behind the rocket's spent expendable booster to fall into the Yellow Sea west of the Korean Peninsula.

Then, the night vision camera recorded a bright fireball. Instead of plunging into the sea, the booster explodes. It's unusual to see a spent booster blow up during the launch of expendable rocket, so this raises questions. Did North Korea intentionally explode its rocket?

 With the Thanksgiving holiday weekend coming to an end, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced his plan for a quick vote on President Joe Biden’s request for roughly $106 billion in funds for Israel, Ukraine, and other national security priorities.

 A U.S. Destroyer took five individuals into custody on Sunday after they attempted a terrorist hijacking of an Israeli owned tanker in the Gulf of Aden.

Webmaster addition: Israel has lost the war in the court of public opinion!

 Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said during an interview over the weekend that the only way to stop Iranian attacks against U.S. forces in the Middle East would be to launch a “massive retaliation” against the country.

 Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani dodged a question during an interview over the weekend about what would happen to Hamas’ leaders that are living inside the country.

If you’re just tuning in, Israeli intelligence ignored mountains of information that the October 7 attack was coming and left Israelis completely undefended, then the IDF killed significant numbers of Israelis with indiscriminate fire and pinned the blame for 100% of Israeli deaths on Hamas, and all those deaths are now being used as justification to push Gazans off their land to the south and shoot them if they try to return while Israeli officials keep talking about how great it would be to get all Palestinians out of all of Gaza.

Such a crazy coincidence how every single step of Israel’s military operations against Hamas in Gaza has looked exactly the same as what you’d expect to see if Israel was trying to permanently drive Palestinians off a large stretch of Palestinian land.

This isn’t a war against Hamas. It’s not a war at all. It’s a military operation to facilitate an ethnic cleansing. 

Hamas aren’t the targets, it’s the excuse.

You work for your bank, which pushes you to spend a long time navigating its automated telephone system after the announcement, “We have installed new features to better serve you.”

You work for your service repair companies. A friend recounts her hurdles getting Sears to fix an ailing refrigerator under warranty. After many telephone disconnects, an email said a technician would be out the following Saturday between 8 and 5. At 4:30 that afternoon a new message announced, without explanation, the appointment would be rescheduled. No one called to ask what was best for her schedule.

You work for your preferred airline (or any airline), which wants you to use its website to solve a computer screw-up to your upcoming ticket. When you call Delta, an automated voice urges you to send a text before it puts you on hold for an agent.

Then there is the discount travel company, Priceline, which recently sent me a customer service telephone number that did not have enough digits to be useful.

I use those companies as examples, but this phenomenon is ubiquitous.

According to a recent study out of the UCSF School of Medicine, the average American female now lives 5.8 years longer than the average American male. The gap hasn’t been this big since 1996.

Speaking to The New York Times, Dr. Brandon Yan, the lead author of the study, called the findings “unsettling.”

“We need to understand which groups are particularly losing out on years of life expectancy,” he noted, “so interventions can be at least partially focused on these groups."

When discussing the causes of the life expectancy gap between men and women in the United States, Dr. Yan responded:

“All of these point to a picture of worsening mental health across the board, but particularly among men.”

The trial of Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber is on pause until next week after the Crown abruptly decided to end its case, telling the court it will not call forth any new witnesses. 

The trial has been ongoing for nearly three months, having started on September 5, 2023. Despite seeing a few breaks here and there, including being off most of November, the Crown prosecution had been taking its time calling forth its witnesses. That changed this Monday, which was sitting day 27 of the trial.  

On this day, the Crown decided to abruptly finish its case against Lich and Barber, who appeared in court via teleconference, with their defense arguing that the protest organizers’ actions were within the law, and they should not be considered co-conspirators as the Crown claims. 

A group of over 25 Democratic members of Congress have raised allegations against X, once again ignoring the First Amendment and calling for online censorship.

They assert that the company is both allowing and profiting from the dissemination of false and violent content, particularly regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

On Tuesday, these lawmakers, including notable figures such as Reps. Dan Goldman, Jamie Raskin, Jerry Nadler, Bennie Thompson, Katie Porter, and Adam Schiff, addressed a letter to Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, and Elon Musk, its owner.

The paper trail documenting Oswald’s look-a-likes may provide the best proof CIA elements orchestrated the JFK assassination plot.

Few things unite Americans like the certainty that John F. Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. This November 22, on the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, polls show the overwhelming majority of US citizens do not believe accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted without accomplices. Many contend the Communist “lone nut” shooter was in fact merely an innocent “patsy”, as he himself proclaimed not long before being snuffed out by mafioso Jack Ruby.

That such skepticism overflowed in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and has endured ever since, is highly unusual. Almost without exception, mainstream politicians, pundits, and journalists have enforced the official narrative of a single bullet taking Kennedy down. Along the way, Western audiences have been deluged with articles, books, “documentaries” and more reinforcing the findings of the Warren Commission, a politicized whitewash set up by Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, specifically to convict Oswald, and Oswald alone.

According to the Turkish president's office, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi discussed approaches toward a durable ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and agreed to sustain coordinating efforts on the topic.

According to a statement by the office, the two leaders spoke via phone and discussed the "illegal attacks by Israel against the Gaza Strip, efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians and steps that could be taken to ensure a permanent ceasefire in the region."

Erdogan and Raisi decided to continue working together to achieve long-term stability in the area, the statement also disclosed.

Iranian news agency Mehr cited the Iranian President as saying that the people of Gaza are the decision-makers to determine the future of the Strip, through the Hamas administration, which represents the legitimate government in Gaza, as it assumed authority through a legitimate process and with the votes of Gazans.

With Kim Jong Un escalating nuclear threats from the North, South Korea has found a cost-effective solution: its homegrown fighter jets.

The country unveiled its first domestically-produced supersonic fighter jet, the KF-21, also known as the Boramae, to the public at the Seoul Airbase, joining an elite group of nations to demonstrate such technology. The KF-21 could boost the allies’ deterrence capability against the likes of North Korea.

The aircraft, introduced at the Seoul International Aerospace & Defense Exhibition (ADEX) 2023, was developed by Korea Aerospace Industries, and set for mass production in 2026. The homegrown project is a part of a broader plan to strengthen South Korea’s resilience in the face of increasingly intrusive neighbors that include North Korea and China. 

The evil, stupid doctrine of ”disparate impact” is once again eating its corrosive way through job requirements.

The jobs here are for social workers in Washington, D.C. You have to be licensed to do social work in the capital, and to get a license you have to pass an exam. It’s not a severely academic exam, only a series of ”multiple choice tests, which ask social workers what they’d do in hypothetical scenarios.”

As with well-nigh any kind of written test there are, nonetheless, different pass rates by race.

A severe storm on the Black Sea hit parts of Ukraine and southern Russia on Sunday night, killing at least four people and knocking out power to nearly 2 million, with strong winds continuing into Monday. 

"About 1.9 million people remained without power supply as of 10:00 Moscow time due to unfavorable weather conditions," Moscow's energy ministry said, listing the Russian regions of Dagestan, Krasnodar and Rostov, as well as the occupied Ukrainian regions of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

The storm peaked on Sunday evening, with some parts of Russian-annexed Crimea receiving 33 millimeters of precipitation and winds reaching speeds of 144 kilometers per hour. 

A deadly storm wreaks havoc in the Black Sea region, leaving nearly half a million without power, claiming one life, and causing widespread destruction in Crimea and southern Russia. 

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later as Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the Red Army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an abrupt end.

The world had descended into a “77-Years War”. It had incepted with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations that germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into World War II and the Cold War that followed inexorably thereupon.

Upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and the follies of Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.

Andy Stone, spokesman for the Meta tech conglomerate, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been placed on a wanted list in Russia, according to the database of the country’s Interior Ministry.

Izvestia, Ria-Novosti and other Russian media outlets reported on Sunday that Stone’s name can now be found on the database. His file reads that the US citizen is sought over a criminal case, but reveals no further details.

Meta was branded an extremist organization in Russia shortly after the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine in February 2022. Its apps, Facebook and Instagram, were blocked in the country for allowing hate speech against Russian nationals and for distributing what had been deemed false content about Moscow’s military. WhatsApp avoided restrictions due to being classed as solely a communication tool.