Targeted Bioweapons | Sinking East Coast | Wildfires in Deadly Weapons Sites, and more

Austrian People’s Party Promises to Ban Far-Right Identitarians (AFP)
Austria’s center-right People’s party, led by former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has said it will insist on the banning of the far-right Identitarian Movement as a condition of any coalition after parliamentary elections next month.
The Identitarian Movement (IBOe), previously best known for its anti-immigration stunts, sparked controversy in Austria earlier this year after it was revealed that its leader, Martin Sellner, allegedly received money and exchanged emailswith the suspected perpetrator of gun attacks on mosques in New Zealand in March which left 51 people dead.
The OeVP’s call for the movement to be banned comes as it tries to maintain its commanding poll lead ahead of parliamentary elections on 29 September while at the same time distancing itself from its former coalition partner, the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe).

Video: California High-School Students Sang Nazi Song and Gave Hitler Salute (David Richardson, Daily Beast)
Athletes performed an homage to the Third Reich before an awards ceremony. Their school won’t say how they were disciplined.

Wildlife Now Roam Where U.S. Once Forged Its Deadliest Weapons (Dan Elliott, AP)
From a tiny Pacific island to a leafy Indiana forest, a handful of sites where the United States manufactured and tested some of the most lethal weapons known to humankind are now peaceful havens for wildlife.
An astonishing array of animals and habitats flourished on six obsolete weapons complexes—mostly for nuclear or chemical arms—because the sites banned the public and other intrusions for decades.
The government converted them into refuges under U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service management, and they now protect black bears and black-footed ferrets, coral reefs and brushy steppes, rare birds and imperiled salmon.
But the cost of the conversions is staggering, and some critics say the sites have not been scrubbed well enough of pollutants to make them safe for humans.

Bioweapons Designed to Kill Only People of Particular Race (Chukwuma Muanya, Guardian)
Scientists warn that humans should be worried about being wiped out by a killer pathogen that is specifically designed to kill people of only a particular race, based on their genetic material/ Deoxy ribonucleic Acid (DNA).
A new report from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk says that world governments have failed when it comes to preparing against threats like futuristic bioweapons powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic manipulation. Such weapons would have to power to target specific DNA, and kill certain races of people leaving other swaths of the population unharmed.
Imagine it being sprayed in the form of the tinfoil hat conspiracy of chemtrails, and wiping out certain portions of the population. The authors warn: “The technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated at ever cheaper prices, democratizing the ability to harm more quickly and lethally. In a particularly bad case, a bio-weapon could be built to target a specific ethnic group based on its genomic profile.”
A biological weapon is any infectious agent, such as bacteria, virus or toxin, which is used intentionally to inflict bodily harm to people, animals or nature. They can be used to cause massive casualties, social disruption, economic losses, and environmental problems as a means of warfare or terrorism. Biological weapons are difficult to handle after release because they are infectious agents that spread uncontrollably beyond the target area.
Rapid scientific developments and the possible misuses of scientific achievements to create biological weapons make this an area of growing concern for the disarmament community.
The only major confirmed use of bio-weapons was the Japanese attack on Manchuria in the 1930s. However the number of states with biological warfare programs has been estimated to be in the range of 16 to 20. The number of states with the capacity to make biological weapons is over 100. Due to the secrecy with which such programs are conducted and the fact that facilities for producing biological weapons are easier to hide than the ones for nuclear and chemical weapons, it is hard to know exactly how many states possess biological weapons or to detect bio-weapons programs. A further problem is the dual-use nature of many installations; it is difficult to distinguish defensive from offensive uses.

Where Will Evolution Take Us in the Fourth Industrial Revolution? (Benjamin Seet and Juliana Chan, World Economic Forum)
The study of evolution allows us to reconstruct the past and to understand how life evolved from simple to complex organisms. Evolutionary reasoning can help us make sense of the biggest questions in science, from the origin of the universe to the inner workings of the human brain.
But can evolution also give us a hint of what is to come? Will technologies like gene editing make natural selection redundant? Might evolution tell us about the limits of planetary resources and what can be done to avoid environmental collapse, or how human society might evolve?
The late Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner addressed these questions in a year-long lecture series in 2017 that took us on a 14-billion-year scientific odyssey through cosmology, chemistry, biology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology and sociology.
We captured these ideas in a book,Sydney Brenner’s 10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution, which offers a glimpse of the future by considering where evolution can take us.