SEEMS LEGIT: Jussie Smollett Tells ‘Empire’ Cast ‘I Swear to God, I Did Not Do This.’

PRIVACY: You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.

The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed.

It is already known that many smartphone apps send information to Facebook about when users open them, and sometimes what they do inside. Previously unreported is how at least 11 popular apps, totaling tens of millions of downloads, have also been sharing sensitive data entered by users. The findings alarmed some privacy experts who reviewed the Journal’s testing.

Facebook is under scrutiny from Washington and European regulators for how it treats the information of users and nonusers alike. It has been fined for allowing now defunct political-data firm Cambridge Analytica illicit access to users’ data and has drawn criticism for giving companies special access to user records well after it said it had walled off that information.

That’s it. Break ’em up.

FLASHBACK: Comey’s FBI Embraced American ISIS Terrorist, Helped Him Get DOJ Job.

SUBURBAN WOMAN WANT THE WALL, BUOYING TRUMP AFTER FLEEING IN 2018.

SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Leftist Thug Caught on Video Assaulting Conservative Berkeley Student While Fellow Students Laugh.

DEEP STATE: IRS analyst charged with leaking financial documents on Michael Cohen.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: University of Minnesota backs off proposal to punish people for not using preferred gender pronouns.

RED FLAG: US Air Force F-35s wrecked their enemies in mock air combat — even the new pilots were racking up kills against simulated near-peer threats.

During the intense fight, aggressor aircraft blinded many of the “blue” fourth-generation aircraft using electronic attack capabilities, such as those advanced adversaries might employ in battle.

“Even in this extremely challenging environment, the F-35 didn’t have many difficulties doing its job,” Col. Joshua Wood, 388th Operations Group commander, explained in a US Air Force statement summarizing the exercise results.

Novice F-35 pilots were able to step in and save more experienced friendly fourth-generation fighter pilots while racking up kills against simulated near-peer threats.

“My wingman was a brand new F-35A pilot, seven or eight flights out of training,” Wood said, recounting his experiences. “He gets on the radio and tells an experienced 3,000-hour pilot in a very capable fourth-generation aircraft. ‘Hey bud, you need to turn around. You’re about to die. There’s a threat off your nose.'”

That’s impressive, since more-experienced pilots in older jets typically outperform less-experienced pilots in newer jets.

THIS IS A CONSPIRACY TO DEPRIVE PEOPLE OF THEIR CIVIL RIGHTS, A FELONY UNDER 18 USC 241. WHERE’S THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT? SERIOUSLY. Antifa threatens to ‘shut down’ conservative event.

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F.I.R.E.: State comptroller report about Sex Week at the University of Tennessee raises serious First Amendment questions. “Boyd and Davis’ decision to stop funding student organizations raises serious First Amendment concerns. Ending student group funding will silence a multitude of student voices on campus simply because members of Tennessee’s legislature disapprove of the message of one student organization. Depressingly, the university traded its prior defense of students’ expressive rights for unquestioning obedience to state legislators — and it doesn’t appear to have any plan to replace its current system.”

Personally, I’d like to see them end mandatory “activity fees” entirely. Let students fund the things they want to fund voluntarily, out of their own pockets. When I was a student, I resented the fees because I felt like the money was being used for things I mostly would rather have not seen done at all, and the fees were a lot lower back then. Universities take enough money from students as it is; making student organizations run off self-raised donations would eliminate the coercion, and encourage entrepreneurship.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Smollett arrested, charged and much, much more. “This is shameful because it painted this city that we all love and work hard in, in a negative connotation. To insinuate and stage a hate crime of that nature when he knew that as a celebrity he’d get a lot of attention … It’s despicable. It makes you wonder what’s going through someone’s mind.”

STACY MCCAIN: Another Dot on the ‘Hate Map:’ Why is the SPLC smearing so many conservative groups? Because they’re a Democratic Super-PAC masquerading as a human rights organization, with the help of a complicit media.

I WILL GLADLY PAY REPARATIONS TO EACH AND EVERY SLAVE I EVER HELD: 2020 Democrats Embrace Race-Conscious Policies, Including Reparations.

CONRAD BLACK: The Real Scandal Of Trump Term Starts To Unravel.

For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives: that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the second narrative is the correct one.

The authors, accomplices, and dupes of this attempted overthrow of constitutional government are now well along in reciting their misconduct without embarrassment or remorse because — in fired FBI Director James Comey’s formulation — a “higher duty” than the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution compelled them. Or — in fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s words — “the threat” was too great. Never mind that the nature of “the threat” was that the people might elect someone he and Mr. Comey disapproved of as president, and that that person might actually serve his term, as elected.

It’s the entitlement mentality here that’s most striking.

THIS DOESN’T COME AS A HUGE SURPRISE: The U.S. Navy Won’t Bring Back Mothballed Ships to Boost the Fleet. “Vice Admiral Tom Moore said the service had taken a look at decommissioned vessels and concluded it just wasn’t worth it. Not only are the ships old, some have been cannibalized to keep existing ships still in the fleet running.”

HMM: Canadian shelves ‘would run dry’ if U.S. imports drugs.

Importing prescription drugs from Canada has long been seen as an easy solution to skyrocketing drug prices for U.S. patients.

But now that President Donald Trump and Democrats are pushing to make those cross-border sales legal, Canadian health experts are issuing a dire warning: It could destroy Canada’s drug market.

Attempting to fill the United States’ needs with pharmaceuticals from its much smaller northern neighbor could sap supplies in Canada, creating shortages and driving up prices in a government-run health system that itself is struggling to make drugs affordable, opponents of the import proposals say. And the result, they say, would be little if any relief for high prices in the United States.

“The Canadian shelves would run dry,” said Steve Morgan, a Canadian health economist who has advised the government on pricing reform.

Supply and demand, how do they work?

FELLOW TRAVELERS: Ilhan Omar traveled with anti-US group that supports Cuban, Venezuelan socialism, wants US to return Gitmo to Cuba.

THE OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY RAN OUT: Crews to abandon two Venezuelan tankers stuck in Portugal.

The crew of Venezuelan oil tanker, the Rio Arauca, that has been stuck in the middle of the river Tagus in Lisbon for nearly two years due to unpaid debt, is set to be dismissed, managers Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM) said on Thursday.

BSM also said in a statement sent to Reuters another Venezuelan tanker, the Parnaso, which is in dry dock at the port of Setubal, south of Lisbon, will also have its crew removed later this week due to a lack of payment from owners PDV Marina, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA.

Lisbon’s maritime court ruled to take possession of the Parnaso last August. Both vessels are under BSM management.

PDVSA had no immediate comment on the issue.

Really, what’s left to say?

MARK ELLIS: Trump’s Chances to Win in 2020 Improve with Every News Cycle.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: China’s CRISPR twins might have had their brains inadvertently enhanced: New research suggests that a controversial gene-editing experiment to make children resistant to HIV may also have enhanced their ability to learn and form memories.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Nuclear War Survival Skills, 2016 Edition.