Month: July 2018

Enlarge / Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. (credit: Sean P. Anderson / Wikimedia Commons)

YouTube issued a strike to the channel of radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones this week after some of his videos were found to have violated YouTube community guidelines. According to a report by The Verge, YouTube removed four videos from Jones' channel that allegedly contained instances of hate speech and child endangerment and issued one strike to his account. That new strike prevents Jones from live streaming for 90 days.

Two of the removed videos allegedly contained hate speech against Muslims, and one video was said to have contained hate speech against transgender people. The fourth video showed a child being pushed to the ground by an adult male and was titled "How to prevent liberalism." That video remains up on InfoWars' Facebook page.

"We have longstanding policies against child endangerment and hate speech,” a YouTube representative said in a statement. "We apply our policies consistently according to the content in the videos, regardless of the speaker or the channel. We also have a clear three-strikes policy and we terminate channels when they receive three strikes in three months."

Enlarge / SALISBURY, ENGLAND - JULY 06: Work is carried out behind a police cordon in front of John Baker House Sanctuary Supported Living after a major incident was declared when a man and woman were exposed to the Novichok nerve agent. (credit: Getty | Jack Taylor)

British officials announced Wednesday they are investigating whether attackers dropped multiple, hidden stashes of the deadly Russian Novichok nerve agent around an English town as part of a plot to poison former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March.

The Skripals were found March 4, slumped on a bench in Sergei’s home town of Salisbury, England. The two had been poisoned by the military-grade chemical weapon, but later regained consciousness and are recovering in an undisclosed location. Britain and its NATO allies united to blame Russia for the attack.

The new revelation that there could be more Novichok in the otherwise quiet town comes as a man poisoned by the same agent several weeks ago near Salisbury told the press that he came across the nerve agent in a branded, cellophane-wrapped box containing a bottle he thought was full of perfume. The victim in that case, Charlie Rowley, 45, didn’t reveal—or remember—exactly where he had found the box. He said that on June 30 he gave it as a gift to his girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess, who recognized the branding on the box.

Enlarge (credit: American Civil Liberties Union)

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said Thursday that in its new test of Amazon’s facial recognition system known as Rekognition, the software erroneously identified 28 members of Congress as people who have been arrested for a crime.

According to Jake Snow, an ACLU attorney, the organization downloaded 25,000 mugshots from what he described as a "public source."

The ACLU then ran the official photos of all 535 members of Congress through Rekognition, asking it to match them up with any of the mugshots—which ended up being 28.