Western PA News

In a statement Saturday, the city’s top public-safety official pledged that “we will ensure public safety.”

Source: Report: Pittsburgh eyed among threatened targets of unrest as inauguration approaches | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

North Korea’s Kim Jong Un plans to beef up the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal and warned that the United States better tone down its “hostile policy,” state media reported

Kim also said the country should advance the precision attack capability on targets in a 9,320 mile striking range, meaning the U.S. mainland, and develop technology to manufacture smaller, lighter nuclear warheads.

Kim’s remarks are viewed as a pre-emptive verbal strike against the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden who’s labeled Kim a “thug.”

Kim said the “key to establishing new relations between (North Korea) and the United States is whether the United States withdraws its hostile policy,” according to the Korean Central News Agency.

Kim stressed that he won’t unleash his nukes unless “hostile forces” try to use their nuclear weapons against North Korea first. But he said North Korea must up its military and nuclear capability in light of what he said could be a possible US invasion — but failed to cite any examples of such a threat by Americans.

Source: Kim Jong Un threatens to build more nuclear weapons

 Andrew Steele tells people his thoughts on ageing – that we might one day cure it as if it were any other disease – they are often incredulous and sometimes hostile. Once, at a friend’s wedding, he left a group of guests mildly incensed for suggesting that near-future humans might live well into their 100s. A similar thing happens at dinner parties, where the responses are more polite but no less sceptical. He understands the reaction. We think of ageing as an inescapable fact of life – we’re born, we grow old, so it goes. “That’s been the narrative for thousands of years,” he says, on a video call. But what if it didn’t have to be?

Steele began professional life as a physicist. As a child, he was fascinated by space, the way many scientists are. But he has spent the past three years researching a book about biogerontology, the scientific study of ageing, in which he argues the case for a future in which our lives go on and on. Steele considers ageing “the greatest humanitarian issue of our time”. When he describes growing old as “the biggest cause of suffering in the world,” he is being earnest. “Ageing is this inevitable, creeping thing that happens,” he says. He is wearing a button-down shirt and, at 35, a look of still-youthful optimism. “We’re all quite blind to its magnitude. But what do people die of? Cancer. Heart disease. Stroke. These things all occur in old people, and they primarily occur because of the ageing process.”

In our 60s a kind of cliff edge appears, and often we have no choice but to stumble over it. Easy movements become hard. We begin to lose our hearing and our sight. Frustrating and embarrassing things start to happen. Why can’t I feel the tips of my toes? What on earth has happened to my hip? The body has worked tirelessly for years, and the cumulative internal effects of that action – the problematic buildup of aged, “senescent” cells; the dangerous mutations of other cells; the steady decline of the immune system; the general wearing-down of the body’s structures – suddenly predispose us to a variety of age-related diseases: cancer, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, dementia. A 10-year-old’s risk of death is 0.00875%. At 65, the risk has risen to 1%. By the time we turn 92 we have a one in five chance of dying that year. For decades we are mostly fine, Steele says, and then, all of a sudden, we’re not.“The dream of anti-ageing medicine,” Steele writes in his book, Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, “is treatments that would identify the root causes of dysfunction as we get older, then slow their progression or reverse them entirely.”

Source: Do we have to age? | Ageing | The Guardian

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has announced a reconstruction and widening project is starting Monday in Somerset County between mileposts 102 and 109.

Source: Turnpike announces reconstruction project in Somerset County | Somerset | dailyamerican.com

On a 3.5-hour caucus call, lawmakers criticized Capitol Police tactics and vowed to investigate what went wrong.

Source: ‘Inside job’: House Dems ask if Capitol rioters had hidden help – POLITICO

WASHINGTON (AP) — Warnings flashing, Democrats in Congress laid plans for swift impeachment of President Donald Trump, demanding decisive, immediate action to ensure an “unhinged” commander in chief can’t add to the damage they say he’s inflicted or even ignite nuclear war in his final days in office.

As the country comes to terms with the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters that left five dead, the crisis that appears to be among the final acts of his presidency is deepening like few other periods in the nation’s history. With less than two weeks until he’s gone, Democrats want him out — now — and he has few defenders speaking up for him in his own Republican party.

Source: Democrats plan lightning Trump impeachment, want him out now

(CNN)Twitter has suspended President Trump from its platform, the company said Friday evening.

“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said.

“In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action.”

Twitter’s decision followed two tweets by Trump Friday afternoon that would end up being his last. The tweets violated the company’s policy against glorification of violence, Twitter said, and “these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.”The first tweet was about Trump’s supporters.”The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

Source: Twitter bans President Trump’s account – CNN

Japan has denounced as “utterly unacceptable” a South Korean court ruling ordering it to pay damages to women who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military before and during the second world war.

The Seoul central district court on Friday said Japan was liable to compensate 12 women who were forced to work as so-called “comfort women”, in a ruling that is expected to inflict further damage on the countries’ already fraught ties.

Some historians say that as many as 200,000 women – mostly Koreans, but also Chinese, south-east Asians and a small number of Japanese and Europeans – were coerced or tricked into working in military brothels between 1932 and Japan’s defeat in 1945.

‘Unforgivable’: Japan decries wartime sex slave statue likened to PM Shinzo Abe

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While some survivors of wartime sexual slavery have accepted “humanitarian” payments from the Japanese government, many others have called for formal compensation and an official apology.

Source: Seoul court orders Japan to pay damages over wartime sexual slavery | Japan | The Guardian

Events in Washington spark dismay and criticism of America’s politics and leader.

One commentator in Argentina’s leading daily Clarin called it “the ‘scorched earth’ legacy of Donald Trump“.

“Narcissism prevailing over all dignity, he harasses institutions, tramples on democracy, divides his own camp,” says an editorial in France’s Le Figaro.

“In refusing to quit, Donald Trump exposes the fragility of the American system in a final destructive offensive,” a columnist says in France’s Le Monde. Another headline in the paper calls him “the insurrectional president“.

In Turkey, the pro-government Turkiye paper notes: “Trump’s stubbornness stirred the US”.

“I expect Trump to be tried after this turmoil,” said one pundit on Egypt’s MBC Misr TV, adding that “the US is no longer a superpower in the full sense of the word”.

Source: Capitol riots: World media see Trump ignite an ‘insurrection’ – BBC News

The chain is introducing a new visual design in its first complete rebranding in more than 20 years.

Source: Burger King is changing its logo