haaz (Slashdot reader #3,346) tells us that history has just been made as part of the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals annual online game-playing fundraiser, Extra Life:
A man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin is trying to play pinball long enough to break the standing Guinness World Record for Longest Marathon Pinball Play of 30 hours 10 minutes.

He's using Extra Life's gaming/DIY fundraising site to webcast his attempt and raise money for Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. He gets a five minute break every hour, and yes, he's wearing an adult diaper.
Just minutes ago on Twitter, the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin announced he'd beaten the record. And lots of other fundraising game-playing marathons are happening around the world today, including one in Canada -- and many of them are being streamed online.

The event began in 2008, and over the last four years has raised close to $10 million each year. As one gaming site put it, "Let's help the future programmers of our cyborg overlords fulfill their mission by streaming some video games for the kids this weekend!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: New details about how Uber responded to a massive hack attack in 2016 raise questions about the way it handled sensitive customer information. Instead of reporting the hackers to police, the company allegedly paid $100,000 in exchange for a promise to delete 57 million user files the men stole off a third party server, prosecutors said. Within weeks of paying the ransom, Uber employees showed up at Brandon Glover's Winter Park, Florida, home and found Vasile Mereacre at a hotel restaurant in Toronto, Canada, the Justice Department said. The pair admitted their crimes, but Uber didn't turn them over to the cops. Instead, they had the hackers sign non-disclosure agreements, promising to keep quiet. The two hackers pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

But there was a third person involved who was unknown to Uber, U.S. attorney for Northern California Dave Anderson told CBS News correspondent Kris Van Cleave in an exclusive interview. Anderson, who investigated the hack, said there's "no way to know definitively" what actually happened to the stolen data. [...] The hackers also targeted a company owned by LinkedIn in December of 2016, but prosecutors say LinkedIn did not pay and promptly reported the hack to police. Uber eventually did as well -- a year after the hack, when new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, publicly disclosed the attack. The two known hackers were eventually arrested and pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiracy to commit extortion charges. They face a maximum of five years in prison. The third person involved remains at large.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Globe and Mail: A confidential Sidewalk Labs document from 2016 lays out the founding vision of the Google-affiliated development company, which included having the power to levy its own property taxes, track and predict people's movements and control some public services. The document, which The Globe and Mail has seen, also describes how people living in a Sidewalk community would interact with and have access to the space around them -- an experience based, in part, on how much data they're willing to share, and which could ultimately be used to reward people for "good behavior." Known internally as the "yellow book," the document was designed as a pitch book for the company, and predates Sidewalk's relationship and formal agreements with Toronto by more than a year. Peppered with references to Disney theme parks and noted futurist Buckminster Fuller, it says Sidewalk intended to "overcome cynicism about the future."

But the 437-page book documents how much private control of city services and city life Google parent company Alphabet Inc.'s leadership envisioned when it created the company, which could soon be entitled to some of the most valuable underdeveloped real estate in North America, estimated by one firm to be worth more than half-a-billion dollars. Since 2017, Sidewalk has been in negotiations with the government agency Waterfront Toronto to redevelop a lucrative section of the city's derelict eastern waterfront. Both parties have been working toward a development deal ahead of an Oct. 31 vote, which The Globe reported Tuesday is expected to be on terms that are favorable to Waterfront Toronto. That includes a reduction in the amount of land Sidewalk would have control over, better guarantees for privacy in the neighborhood and better opportunities for Canadian entities to profit from innovations there. "Sidewalk will require tax and financing authority to finance and provide services, including the ability to impose, capture and reinvest property taxes," the book said. The company would also create and control its own public services, including charter schools, special transit systems and a private road infrastructure.

As for public safety and criminal justice, the book mentions "an alternative approach to jail," using data from so-called "root-cause asseessment tools." "This would guide officials in determining a response when someone is arrested, such as sending someone to a substance abuse center," reports The Globe. "The overall criminal justice system and policing of serious crimes and emergencies would be 'likely to remain within the purview of the host government's police department,' however."

Sidewalk Labs released its official plan in June, which includes building ten new buildings, integrating Toronto's light-rail system to serve the new neighborhood, and installing public Wi-Fi.

California's largest power utility began power shut-offs today for an estimated 2.35 million people -- expected to last two days -- after weather forecasts predicted extreme fire danger due to exceptionally dry weather and severe winds, according to the Washington Post. "Some gusts this weekend might reach 75 mph (120 kph) or higher as part of a 'historic' wind event, the National Weather Service said. The winds could lead to 'erratic fire behavior,' warned the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection..."

The San Jose Mercury News reports: PG&E won't restore power until inspections of de-energized lines are completed and any damage to the system is repaired. The utility also has requested mutual aid from 1,000 workers from other energy companies, including ATCO Energy in Alberta, Canada; Xcel Energy in Minnesota; and Florida Power & Light. Those crews are expected to be staged and in place to do repairs by Sunday, according to the company.
50,000 people living near Northern California's wine country were also ordered to evacuate, as firefighters struggled to contain an already-burning 25,955-acre wildfire nearby which is only 10% contained. And 40,000 people were ordered to evacuate homes in Southern California near Santa Clarita, where the 4,600-acre Tick Fire is now 25% contained.

In the turbid, frigid waters roaring from the glaciers of Canada's high Arctic, researchers have made a surprising discovery: for decades, the northern rivers secretly pulled carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a rate faster than the Amazon rainforest. From a report: The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, flip the conventional understanding of rivers, which are largely viewed as sources of carbon emissions. "It was a total surprise," said Dr Kyra St Pierre, a biologist at the University of British Columbia and lead researcher on the project. "Given what we know about the rivers though ... the findings are intuitive when you think about it. But we were initially very surprised to see what we did." The discovery came from time spent collecting meltwater samples on Ellesmere Island, in Canada's Nunavut territory, where several glaciers flow into Lake Hazen. The team of researchers also gathered samples in the Rocky Mountains and Greenland.

"We have a pretty good understanding of the state of glaciers globally," said St Pierre. "One thing we don't know much about is the meltwaters and what happens when it ... flows into rivers and downstream lakes." In temperate rivers, a bounty of organic material -- plant life and fish -- results in higher levels of decomposition, meaning the bodies of water emit a far greater amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they absorb. But glacial rivers, with their milky appearance and silt-laden composition, are not very hospitable to aquatic life, leading to far less organic decay -- and little carbon output.

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from Futurism: Canada's Hyperstealth Biotechnology already manufactures camouflage uniforms for militaries across the globe. But now, the company has patented a new "Quantum Stealth" material that disguises a military's soldiers -- or even its tanks, aircraft, and ships -- by making anything behind it seem invisible. Earlier in October, Hyperstealth filed a patent for the material, which doesn't require a power source and is both paper-thin and inexpensive -- all traits that could make it appealing for use on the battlefield. Alongside the news of the patent application, Hyperstealth released more than 100-minutes worth of footage describing and demonstrating the material.

For the third time, someone who vandalized a Tesla discovered that the car's "Sentry Mode" had filmed them -- and after the video went viral online, decided to turn themselves in.

An anonymous reader quotes Electrek: The 20-year-old said that he was frustrated after a car cut him off and he thought the Model 3 might have been the same car. The Edmonton man said that he saw the video online and "became overcome with disappointment and embarrassment." He added that he doesn't have anything against Tesla and he regretted doing it right away...

Earlier this month, we reported on the case of Alan Tweedie's Tesla Model 3 being keyed badly by a woman for seemingly no reason while he was at his daughter's soccer game. The Tesla Sentry mode video of her keying the car went viral and she ended up turning herself in. There was also another similar incident involving two men who ended up turning themselves in earlier this year and now this new incident in Canada becomes the third example of vandals turning themselves in because of Sentry mode.

While Tesla Sentry Mode is useful to capture those incidents and pressure the vandals, the hope is that the feature gets publicized enough that people become less inclined to vandalize Tesla vehicles in the first place.

Jack Newcombe, the Chief Operating Officer of a syndication company with 44 million daily readers, describes the strange voice he heard talking to his 18-month old son: She says we have a nice house and encourages the nanny to respond. She does not. The voice even jokes that she hopes we don't change our password. I am sick to my stomach. After about five minutes of verbal "joy riding," the voice starts to get agitated at the nanny's lack of response and then snaps, in a very threatening voice: "I'm coming for the baby if you don't answer me...." We unplug the cameras and change all passwords...

Still helpless, I started doing the only thing I could do -- Googling. I typed "Nest + camera + hacked" and found out that this happens frequently. Parent after parent relayed stories similar to mine -- threatening to steal a baby is shockingly common -- and some much worse, such as playing pornography over the microphone to a 3-year-old... What is worse is that anyone could have been watching us at any time for as long as we have had the cameras up. This person just happened to use the microphone. Countless voyeurs could have been silently watching (or worse) for months.

However, what makes this issue even more terrifying is a corporate giant's complete and utter lack of response. Nest is owned by Google, and, based on my experience and their public response, Google does not seem to care about this issue. They acknowledge it as a problem, shrug their shoulders and point their fingers at the users. Their party line is to remind people that the hardware was not hacked; it was the user's fault for using a compromised password and not implementing two-step authentication, in which users receive a special code via text to sign on. That night, on my way home from work, I called Nest support and was on hold for an hour and eight minutes. I followed all directions and have subsequently received form emails in broken English. Nobody from Google has acknowledged the incident or responded with any semblance of empathy. In every email, they remind me of two-step authentication.

They act as if I am going to continue to use Nest cameras.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: While the 2020 U.S. presidential elections have lawmakers on edge over AI-generated fake videos, a new study by Netherlands-based deepfake-detection outfit Deeptrace shows that the main victims today are women. According to Deeptrace, deepfake videos have exploded in the past year, rising from 8,000 in December 2018 to 14,678 today. And not surprisingly for the internet, nearly all of the material is pornography, which accounts for 96% of the deepfake videos it's found online. The fake videos have been viewed 134 million times.

The numbers suggest deepfake porn is still niche but also growing quickly. Additionally, 90% of the fake content depicted women from the U.S., UK, and Canada, while 2% represented women from South Korea and 2% depicted women from Taiwan. "Deepfake pornography is a phenomenon that exclusively targets and harms women," the company notes. That small number of non-pornographic deepfake videos it analyzed on YouTube mostly contained (61%) synthesized male subjects. According to Henry Ajder, a researcher at Deeptrace, currently most of the deepfake porn involves famous women. But he reckons the threat to all women is likely to increase as it becomes less computationally expensive to create deepfakes. As for the political threat, there actually aren't that many cases where deepfakes have changed a political outcome.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Federal authorities in the U.S. have unsealed charges against the South Korean operator of a child porn ring that's been billed as the world's "largest dark web child porn marketplace." The child porn site, known as Welcome to Video, charged some users in Bitcoin and authorities say they successfully unmasked those Bitcoin transactions in order to catch the perpetrators. An additional 337 people from around the world have been charged in relation to the Tor-based site. Welcome to Video contained over 200,000 videos of child sexual abuse and had users from countries like the U.S., UK, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil, and Australia, according to the indictment, which was uploaded by NBC News reporter Cyrus Farivar. Users could download videos through a system of credits that could be gained by referring new users or by buying those credits with Bitcoin.

Charges in the U.S. against the site's operator Jong Woo Son were only unveiled today, but the 23-year-old Korean national was arrested in March of 2018 and is already behind bars in South Korea. The operation was a joint investigation by numerous law enforcement agencies around the globe. Between June 2015 and March 2018, Welcome to Video received Bitcoin transactions totaling over $370,000 in U.S currency. Undercover agents in Washington D.C. monitored the site, filled with images of child rape, and were able to deanonymize the Bitcoin transactions, something that average users often believe is impossible. The investigation uncovered at least two former federal law enforcement officials allegedly involved in the child porn site, a 35-year-old U.S. Border Patrol Agent from Texas, and a former HSI special agent, also from Texas.

Cash-strapped WeWork, the office-sharing company that is trying to negotiate a financial lifeline, has a new problem that may prove costly. From a report: It has closed about 2,300 phone booths at some of its 223 sites in the United States and Canada after it says it discovered elevated levels of formaldehyde. The company, which abandoned plans for an initial public offering last month after investors questioned its mounting losses and the way it was being run, said in an email to its tenants on Monday that the chemical could pose a cancer-risk if there is long-term exposure.

After a tenant complained of odor and eye irritation, WeWork began testing and based on the results took 1,600 phone booths out of service, the company said in the email to tenants, which it calls members. An additional 700 booths are closed while more testing is conducted, it said. All the phone booths closed were installed over the past several months, WeWork said. Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine quips: "I don't understand what is happening here. Did WeWork founder Adam Neumann disturb a mummy and trigger an ancient curse? Was a WeWork built on a haunted graveyard, unleashing powerful dark energies and also elevated levels of formaldehyde? How do you have such a relentless parade of negative financial news and then find out that your phone booths cause cancer? 'Our phone booths might cause cancer' was not an IPO risk factor. Nobody had 'phone booths cause cancer' on their WeWork Disaster Bingo cards."

Google's Stadia game streaming service will launch on November 19th, the company's Rick Osterloh announced today at the company's fall hardware event. From a report: In a separate blog post published during the keynote, Google added that servers will open to the public at 12PM EST/9AM PST. Besides the US, Stadia will launch in Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. At launch, you'll be able to purchase Stadia's Founder's Edition for $129.99. The pack, which has been able to pre-order since June, includes a Chromecast Ultra, limited-edition Night Blue controller and two three-month Stadia Pro subscriptions. The Founder's Edition grants you access to Stadia's library of games at up to 4K resolution, 60 frames per second and with both HDR and 5.1 surround sound. Next year, Google plans to offer a Stadia Base subscription that allows you to buy games individually and play them at 1080p and 60 frames per second.

The Trump administration has begun inserting legal protections into recent trade agreements that shield online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube from lawsuits, a move that could help lock in America's tech-friendly regulations around the world even as they are being newly questioned at home. From a report: The protections, which stem from a 1990s law, have already been tucked into the administration's two biggest trade deals -- the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and a pact with Japan that President Trump signed on Monday. American negotiators have proposed including the language in other prospective deals, including with the European Union, Britain and members of the World Trade Organization. The administration's push is the latest salvo in a global fight over who sets the rules for the internet. While the rules for trading goods have largely been written -- often by the United States -- the world has far fewer standards for digital products. Countries are rushing into this vacuum, and in most cases writing regulations that are far more restrictive than the tech industry would prefer.

Europe has enacted tough policies to curb the behavior of companies like Facebook and Google and passed laws to deal with privacy, hate speech and disinformation. China has largely cordoned itself off from the rest of the internet, allowing Beijing to censor political content and bolster Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent. In India, Indonesia, Russia and Vietnam, governments are introducing regulations to ostensibly protect their citizens' privacy and build domestic internet industries that critics say will stymie the ability of American companies to provide services in those countries. The United States wants its more permissive rules to form the basis for worldwide regulation. But there is a rising debate about whether its regime of internet regulations has failed to protect consumer privacy, encouraged the spread of disinformation and supported a powerful forum for harassment and bullying.

The American rules, codified in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, shield online platforms from many lawsuits related to user content and protect them from legal challenges stemming from how they moderate content. Those rules are largely credited with fueling Silicon Valley's rapid growth. The language in the trade deals echoes those provisions but contains some differences. That freedom has come under intense criticism from lawmakers and advocates. They say the 23-year-old law has allowed companies like Facebook and Google to avoid responsibility for harm associated with content that reaches billions of users. That anger has been compounded by revelations about the role of Silicon Valley's business practices in the spread of disinformation and treatment of user data.

Dave Knott writes: A Montreal legal firm has requested authorization to launch a class-action lawsuit against Epic Games, makers of the widely-popular video game Fortnite. The legal notice, filed on behalf of two minors, likens the effect of the game to cocaine, saying it releases the chemical dopamine to the brain of vulnerable young people who can become dependent on playing. Much of the suit is based on a 2015 Quebec Superior Court ruling that determined tobacco companies didn't warn their customers about the dangers of smoking. Jean-Philippe Caron, a lawyer at Calex, said the firm was contacted by several parents whose kids had become addicted to the game.

Last year, the World Health Organization classified addiction to video games as a disease. It defined the disorder as "a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming, increased priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences." According to Caron, Fortnite was designed by psychologists to make it more addictive. "They knew that their game was very attractive, yet they did not divulge the risks to the population. It's a little like tobacco."

A man in Florida has been arrested for cutting the brake lines on dozens of public scooters. The man has been identified by police as 59-year-old Randall Thomas Williams of Ford Lauderdale, though a possible motive has not yet been released. The BBC reports: According to Fort Lauderdale police, a surveillance operation was set up over the weekend after more than 140 scooters were vandalized. Randall Williams, 59, was captured on camera cutting brake lines over three days, police say. When Mr Williams was arrested on Sunday, he was found carrying two pairs of wire cutters and wearing one glove. He has been charged with criminal mischief as well as resisting arrest and "loitering or prowling."

"In the early morning hours on September 28, 2019... the defendant was observed walking around the neighborhood, hiding in the shadows, and utilizing the dark alleyways to conceal himself from public view," according to the police arrest report. It said he placed white stickers over the QR codes used by riders to activate the scooters. During his interrogation "the defendant failed to dispel officers' alarm as to why he was lurking in the shadows and using the alleyways behind closed business, which are not normal avenues of transport for law-abiding citizens," police said. The companies who owned the scooters have since removed the scooters in the vicinity to avoid rider injury.

The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings "erode public trust," critics said. From a report: Public health officials for years have urged Americans to limit consumption of red meat and processed meats because of concerns that these foods are linked to heart disease, cancer and other ills. But on Monday, in a remarkable turnabout, an international collaboration of researchers produced a series of analyses concluding that the advice, a bedrock of almost all dietary guidelines, is not backed by good scientific evidence. If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers concluded. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits. "The certainty of evidence for these risk reductions was low to very low," said Bradley Johnston, an epidemiologist at Dalhousie University in Canada and leader of the group publishing the new research in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The new analyses are among the largest such evaluations ever attempted and may influence future dietary recommendations. In many ways, they raise uncomfortable questions about dietary advice and nutritional research, and what sort of standards these studies should be held to. Already they have been met with fierce criticism by public health researchers. The American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other groups have savaged the findings and the journal that published them.

A powerful disaster-inducing geomagnetic storm is an inevitability in the near future, likely causing blackouts, satellite failures, and more. From a report: Unlike other threats to our planet, such as supervolcanoes or asteroids, the time frame for a cataclysmic geomagnetic storm -- caused by eruptions from our sun playing havoc with Earth's magnetic field -- is comparatively short. It could happen in the next decade -- or in the next century. All we know is, based on previous events, our planet will almost definitely be hit relatively soon, probably within 100 years. Geomagnetic storms are caused by sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, resulting in calamities to which our modern technological society is becoming ever more susceptible.

Most experts regard the Carrington Event, a so-called superstorm that occurred in September 1859, as the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record. But new data suggest that a later storm in May 1921 may have equaled or even eclipsed the Carrington Event in intensity, causing at least three major fires in the U.S., Canada and Sweden -- and highlighting the damaging effects these storms can have on Earth today. In a paper published in the journal Space Weather, Jeffrey Love of the U.S. Geological Survey and his colleagues reexamined the intensity of the 1921 event, known as the New York Railroad Storm, in greater detail than ever before.

Although different measures of intensity exist, geomagnetic storms are often rated on an index called disturbance storm time (Dst) -- a way of gauging global magnetic activity by averaging out values for the strength of Earth's magnetic field measured at multiple locations. Our planet's baseline Dst level is about -20 nanoteslas (nT), with a "superstorm" condition defined as occurring when levels fall below -250 nT. Studies of the very limited magnetic data from the Carrington Event peg its intensity at anywhere from -850 to -1,050 nT. According to Love's study, the 1921 storm, however, came in at about -907 nT. "The 1921 storm could have been more intense than the 1859 storm," Love says. "Prior to our paper, [the 1921 storm] was understood to be intense, but how intense wasn't really clear."

Google's hyperlocal news service called Bulletin is shutting down in November. Android Police reports: The idea behind bulletin was that users could post news from their neighborhood, allowing others in the same area to hear stories that would otherwise be lost in the shuffle. The service also relied on AMP to load pages quickly. Google started with just a few cities, but Bulletin later expanded to all of the U.S. and Canada. Bulletin never gained traction, probably because Google failed to promote it in any way, and now it's shutting down.

Google says Bulletin will close for good on November 22nd, at which time it will delete all remaining Bulletin content. If you used Bulletin and would like to save your stories, Google has added an export option. Google suggests Bulletin users can start posting on the Blogger platform, but that naturally lacks all the location-aware features of Bulletin.

NPR explains why a man "applied to borrow a 360-degree camera through Google's Street View camera loan program." Kanhema, who works as a product manager in Silicon Valley and is a freelance photographer in his spare time, volunteered to carry Google's Street View gear to map what amounted to 2,000 miles of his home country. The Berkeley, California, resident has filled in the map of other areas in Africa and Canada as well.... Google says it has "largely mapped" only 87 of nearly 200 countries on the platform, which launched in 2007. Many other countries on the planet have at least some Street View coverage, Google says. But there are sizable gaps in regions like Africa, Antarctica and Central Asia, while areas such as the U.S. and Europe are mostly filled in.

While users can see almost every street corner in places such as Paris or New York, they can't do the same for Algiers, Algeria, or Kabul, Afghanistan. "We start in the large metropolitan areas where we know we have users, where it's easy for us to drive and we can execute quickly," says Stafford Marquardt, a product manager for Street View. He says the team is working to expand the service's reach. To do that, Google often relies on volunteers who can either borrow the company's camera equipment or take photos using their own. Most images on Street View are collected by drivers, and most of these drivers are employed by third parties that work with Google. But when it comes to the places Google hasn't prioritized, people like Kanhema can fill in the gaps...

All this is a lot of work, but for Kanhema, it's a hobby. Google doesn't pay him or the other volunteers -- whom the company calls "contributors" -- for the content they upload. Kanhema, for example, spent around $5,000 of his own money to travel across Zimbabwe for the project. "What motivates me is just being that constant nudge on these companies and this system to pay attention to those parts of the world," he says.

Craig Dalton, an assistant professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University, says Google's business model plays a big role in which places are added to Street View first. "Google Maps is not a public service. Google Maps is a product from a company, and things are included and excluded based on the company's needs," Dalton says. "Sometimes that means that things are excluded that have a lot of merit but that don't fit the business plan..." Although the company's end goal is to make a global street map, Kanhema is unsure when places like his hometown would be visible on the platform without volunteered images. "There's not always going to be a business case to tell the story of how people live across the world," he says.
The volunteer contributors to Street View can sometimes receive funding from tourism boards or travel agencies, according to the article, but Street View's product manager adds that Google currently has no plans to compensate its volunteers. He says instead that Google compensates its volunteer contributors "in a lot of other ways" by offering "a platform to host gigabytes and terabytes of imagery and publish it to the entire world, absolutely for free."

Remember concerns about possible "sonic attacks" in Cuba? Long-time Slashdot reader kbahey shares an update: In the wake of the health problems experienced over the past three years by US and Canadian staff in Havana, Cuba embassies, Global Affairs Canada commissioned a clinical study by a team of multidisciplinary researchers.

Now, the working hypothesis is that the cause could instead be neurotoxic agents used in pesticide fumigation.

The BBC has more coverage on this, saying it may have been merely mosquito gas.
"The researchers found that since 2016, Cuba launched an aggressive campaign against mosquitoes to stop the spread of the Zika virus," reports the CBC: The embassies actively sprayed in offices, as well as inside and outside diplomatic residences -- sometimes five times more frequently than usual. Many times, spraying operations were carried out every two weeks, according to embassy records...

The researchers are now looking to collaborate with Cuban officials to determine whether any Cubans suffered similar brain injuries...