OH, GREAT: Utah doctors say Zika may be passed on through tears, sweat. “A 38-year-old man in Salt Lake City appears to have contracted Zika while caring for an elderly man who died from complications related to Zika infection, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The younger man came into direct contact with the older man’s tears and sweat while taking care of him, and that appears to be the way he contracted Zika, doctors at the University of Utah School of Medicine wrote in the journal.”

VIDEO: NY Governor Raises Possibility NJ Train Crash Was Work Of ‘Our Enemies’

“I would like to take this opportunity to say that these are difficult times over these past weeks and months between terrorist attacks and natural disasters,” Cuomo told the gathered crowd of reporters. “We have had our hands full in this country. We have had our hands full in the Northeast.”

“I want to thank the linden police who did an extraordinary job in apprehending Rahami in connection with the Chelsea bombing, and they did a fantastic job,” he continued. “I want to thank the coordination and the cooperation of our neighbors and partners in making that happen.”

“Today is another situation for us to deal with, but, I also believe as many challenges as Mother Nature sends us, or our enemies send us, we are up to handling them,” he noted. “We’ll handle them one at a time, but when we work together, there is nothing that we can’t accomplish and nothing that we cannot over come.”

Accident or terrorism, one way or the other we’d better figure it out quickly.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Watchdog knocks administration for misusing Obamacare funds.

In 2014, the industry-funded reinsurance program was supposed to provide $10 billion to insurers and $2 billion to the federal Treasury. But when total collections from insurers amounted to only $9.7 billion, the Department of Health and Human Services opted to funnel all of the money toward insurers. The agency paid insurers $7.9 billion in claims for 2014, the first year of exchange coverage, and held over the remaining $1.7 billion for future payments.

Republicans, who asked the GAO investigate the issue, hailed the GAO’s finding as vindication for their longstanding claims that the Obama administration is wrongly prioritizing insurers over taxpayers.

“This new opinion from the government’s top watchdog confirms that the Obama administration is not above the law,” said Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a statement. “The administration needs to put an end to the Great Obamacare Heist immediately.”
HHS told the GAO that its funding decision was within its discretion under the Affordable Care Act. But the GAO ruled otherwise, finding that the statute clearly requires that the Treasury get a share of the funds.

Hey, insurance companies had to get some kind of payback for all the support they gave ObamaCare in the early days.

That is, the support they gave the law before they were losing hundreds of millions selling ObamaCare policies, and started pulling out of the exchanges.

THE PUSHMEPULLYOU OF TRUCKS: This Self-Driving Mining Truck’s Front Is its Back and its Back Is its Front.

NOW WE JUST HAVE TO AVOID IMPORTING MORE: It’s official, measles has been eliminated from the Americas. “More than 50 years since a vaccine became available, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has officially declared measles eliminated from the Americas – not just the US, but the land mass stretching from Canada to Chile, and all the countries in between. It’s the first region in the world to have rid itself of all local cases of the viral disease, and a pretty huge deal for public health.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists fix fractures with 3-D printed synthetic bone.

The team found that when used in spinal injuries in rodents and to mend the skull of a monkey, the hyper-elastic bone, made mostly of a ceramic and polymer, quickly integrated with surrounding tissue and began regenerating bone.

It swiftly mended bones in the spines of the rats and healed the monkey’s skull in just four weeks, with no signs of infection or other side effects, the scientists said.

“Another unique property … is that it’s highly porous and absorbent – and this is important for cell and tissue integration,” said Ramille Shah of Northwestern University’s department of material science, engineering and surgery, who co-led the work.

“Even when it’s deformed or squeezed into a space, it still maintains high porosity, and this is also very important for blood vessels to infiltrate the scaffold so that it can further support cell and tissue growth.”

Human trials are scheduled to begin “within five years,” but given that my younger son’s favorite activity is throwing himself off of things, I do wish they’d speed that up.

UH-OH: New Galaxy Note 7 reportedly explodes in China, burns customer’s fingers.

A Chinese customer has reported that a Note 7 that he bought this week exploded within 24 hours of acquiring it from an online retailer, causing minor injuries to two fingers and damaging his Apple MacBook.

“We are currently contacting the customer and will conduct a thorough examination of the device in question once we receive it,” the Korean company said in a statement sent to Bloomberg. Samsung, following an earlier Note 7 fire in China, had previously reported that there were no issues with the batteries used in Note 7s sold there.

The story doesn’t make clear whether this particular phone was manufactured pre- or post-recall, but if you have a Galaxy Note 7 subject to the recall, you’ll want to trade it in immediately.

HMMM: National Review Figured Out Why Hillary Wasn’t Indicted (Video).

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Fox’s Scream Queens Jokes About Shooting Liz Cheney in the Face.

SO ARE WE PUSHING TECHNOLOGY OUT OF THE COUNTRY VIA REGULATION? A Three-Parent Child Was Born in Mexico, Because the U.S. Won’t Allow It. “The infant came into the world thanks to a technique that involves manipulating the genetic material from two mothers before fertilizing the resulting egg with the father’s sperm. Variants of the process have been shunned by regulators in the U.S. despite the chance that they could help parents-to-be avoid passing down some rare genetic disorders.”

THANKS, FRACKERS! OPEC’s Prospective Deal May Not Create a Lasting Oil Rally.

Oil prices surged after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said late Wednesday that its members proposed to curb output, the first major agreement since the oil bear market began in 2014. But despite the surprise outcome, the price of crude was slightly lower on Thursday and many banks, including Goldman Sachs, Société Générale, Jefferies and UBS, are standing pat on their oil-price forecasts for the coming months.

Every time OPEC stops a pump, another one starts in North Dakota.

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Is your dog’s Halloween costume sexist?

Note that this is being asked at the Washington Post, a paper that once prided itself on toppling Republican presidential administrations, by an SJW disguised as a reporter who’s too chicken to petition her boss to stop selling his own “sexist” Halloween costumes for pets. As Iowahawk tweets, we’ve reached peak 2016. But with the election still over a month away, I suspect we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

WRONG TARGET: Team Trump Pivots To Bill Clinton’s Scandals.

How’d that work out for the Republicans in 1992 and 1996?

MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS: Our corner of the Milky Way may be bigger than previously thought.

Some galaxies are near perfect spirals, with two or four arms starting at the center of the swirling stellar mass and entirely encircling it as the arms stretch outward. But not our galaxy. According to new research, the Milky Way galaxy is more of a patchwork spiral galaxy.

The evidence lies in our own galactic neighborhood. The section of the Milky Way that contains our solar system is actually a substantial spiral arm, not just a small spur as previously thought.

But the Local Arm, as our corner of the galaxy is called, does not fully encircle the galaxy as a perfect spiral arm would. Instead, it extends about 20,000 light-years around the galaxy, while some of the other arms extend five to six times that length, scientists report in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

If only there were some way to take a galactic selfie.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: But Really, What Is SpaceX Going to Do With All That Poop? It’ll be worth its weight in gold on Mars.

ROGER SIMON: BRAINIACS SUPPORT TRUMP??? “Having been slightly involved with the formation of this list, I have been aware of the considerable courage of certain people (not me!) in allowing their names to appear.  Bravo for them.”

Read the whole thing.

CHOOSING THE STRONG HORSE: Philippine leader to end drills with U.S. that “China does not want”

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he was giving notice to the United States, his country’s long-standing ally, that joint exercises of Filipino and American troops next week will be the last such drills.

He told the Filipino community in Hanoi late Wednesday night that he will maintain the military alliance with the U.S. because of the countries’ 1951 defense treaty. But he added next week’s exercises will proceed only because he did not want to embarrass his defense secretary.

Duterte said during a two-day visit to meet Vietnam’s leaders that he wants to establish new trade and commercial alliances with China and Russia, and that the war games were something Beijing does not want.

“I would serve notice to you now that this will be the last military exercise,” he said. “Jointly, Philippines-US, the last one.”

I could have sworn we pivoted to Asia.

WELL, THAT’S A GOOD IDEA: What’s in Your Herbal Pills? Firm Promises DNA Testing for Proof.

VIDEO: Man Attempts to Steal Trump Sign, Receives Shocking Surprise.

Earlier: Karma comes swiftly for would-be Trump sign thief (video).

TRANSPARENCY: Six lessons from a five-year FOIA battle.

EVEN OUR THIRD- AND FOURTH-PARTY CANDIDATES ARE EMBARRASSING THIS YEAR: Jill Stein Attempts To Mock Gary Johnson For Being Unable To Name Any Foreign Leaders, Lists Names Of People Who Aren’t Foreign Leaders.

IT’S BECAUSE SHE’S A TERRIBLE POLITICAL CANDIDATE AND NOT A VERY LIKABLE PERSON: Why Clinton hasn’t put Trump away.

Sorry for the spoiler.

I HAD BEEN TOLD THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: New record extends global temperatures back two million years.

Most of the paper is solid, telling us new things about the recent history of our planet. But there appears to be some significant issues with one aspect of the analysis: the part that attempts to calculate how sensitive our climate is to rising greenhouse gasses. Unfortunately, that’s the aspect that’s most relevant to non-scientists, and it’s the detail likely to attract the most attention.

Yes, it would be most unfortunate if the American public understood that scientists still don’t understand greenhouse gasses, upon which so much public policy is made.