Government
Pennsylvania County Bans Ballot Drop Boxes
Pennsylvania County Bans Ballot Drop Boxes
Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A standing room-only crowd made up…

Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A standing room-only crowd made up mostly of organized, left-leaning, political activists shouted, “Shame! Shame!” when commissioners in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County voted to remove a ballot drop box placed at the county building on Monday, the day before the primary election.
Now, instead of placing absentee ballots in the drop box located just three steps inside the door of the county building, voters will have to walk about 30 steps into the building, from the same door, to get to the Board of Elections office where they will hand their ballot directly to one of the workers.
Anyone entering the building beyond the drop box must go through a metal detector manned by the sheriff department. Opponents say this makes voting “too difficult and complex” for voters.
At the time of the commissioners’ vote on Monday, the county’s lone drop box had only been in place since Friday.
Around the nation, the use of unmanned drop boxes has met with scrutiny amid evidence of suspected fraud. The Dinesh D’Souza film “2000 Mules” features government surveillance footage showing people stuffing drop boxes with multiple ballots in multiple locations in numerous states.
Another investigation by Pennsylvania’s Lehigh County District Attorney’s Office, in which detectives reviewed hours of video of the county’s drop boxes for the October 2021 elections, found hundreds of people putting multiple ballots into unmanned drop boxes.
Pennsylvania law requires a voter to send an absentee ballot by mail or deliver it personally. Yet, Gov. Tom Wolf’s wife, Frances Wolf, broke this law in the October 2021 election, when she deposited her own ballot along with her husband’s ballot in a York County ballot drop box. The governor later called it an honest mistake.
Lancaster County had not intended to provide a drop box for the primary election, but the county was sued last week by the American Civil Liberties Union, claiming that it had failed to meet in the sunshine to decide not to use drop boxes.
But a judge ruled on May 13 that the decision not to used drop boxes was administrative and did not need to be discussed in a public meeting, Lancaster County Commissioner Ray D’Agostino told The Epoch Times. The judge ordered the county to return to status quo, which he considered to be with drop boxes. He also allowed for the commissioners to meet on Monday and vote on the use of ballot boxes in the county.

With one commissioner out of town, two of the three commissioners met at 11 a.m. on May 16 and passed a resolution banning ballot drop boxes from being used in Lancaster County for this primary or any future election, unless compelled by Pennsylvania statute or by an official legal authority.
Before the vote, commissioners took about an hour of public comment.
In a group email, Duncan Hopkins, an organizer with the advocacy group Lancaster Stands Up, rallied Democrats to attend the meeting. In the email, he alleged that commissioners “are working so hard to confuse voters and make it more difficult for many to cast a ballot so close to an election.”
Representatives from the NAACP, League of Women Voters, Lancaster Democratic Party, Lancaster City Democrats, Pennsylvania CASA, and Lancaster Stands Up implored the commissioners to expand drop boxes to every community in the county instead of removing the county’s only drop box.
“It is a sense of privilege to say everyone can get here to vote,” said one woman, whose mother is 96 and uses oxygen.
Often, activists would snap fingers in unison or murmur support when one of their group spoke.
“I don’t understand why you want to make it harder to vote,” another person told the commissioners.
LaRock Hudson, political action chair for the local NAACP, challenged commissioners to provide data proving that drop boxes cause voter fraud, as preventing possible fraud was a reason mentioned in the resolution for banning drop boxes.
The introduction of drop boxes was a decision made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lancaster County used a drop box in 2020 and 2021 for COVID-19 mitigation. The drop box was placed near sheriffs handling security for the building, they had an election person watching the box at all times, and it was surveilled by camera.
“Things have changed, COVID is no longer such an issue, we are short staffed,” D’Agostino said. “We can’t have sheriffs doing a job of election staff, and election staff have better things to do than sitting at a box when people aren’t there. They could be sitting at their desk and as people come in, take the ballot. But when they’re not taking ballots, they can be doing other work, so there’s no need, quite frankly, to have that box there anymore.”
Several people spoke in favor of removing the drop box.
Kirk Radanovic, chairman of the Lancaster County Republican Club, said he was representing the 176,000 Republicans of Lancaster County who expect the commissioners to remove the ballot drop boxes to keep election integrity safe.
Another speaker said our parents and forefathers managed to get to the polls to vote, even when they worked or lived far away from the polls, and they expected to get election results on election day. She reminded attendees that verified absentee ballots have always been available for those who are too sick to get to the polls.
Dan Medbury, a Lancaster County resident and member of the John Birch Society, said the difficulty of voting is not in getting to the polls, but investing the time as a voter to research the positions of candidates.
“Too many people want extreme ease when they don’t take time to study the issues,” Medbury said.
After the resolution was passed, the ballot drop box was removed from the front door. The nearby election office will remain open until 8 p.m. until election day to receive any hand delivered ballots.
International
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International
People in Europe ate seaweed for thousands of years before it largely disappeared from their diets – we wonder why?
The decline of seaweed as part of the staple diet in Europe remains a mystery.

How are we sure people ate seaweed?
We identified several types of molecules in the dental calculus that collectively are characteristic of seaweed. We refer to these as “biomarkers”. They include a set of chemical compounds called alkylpyrroles. When we detect these compounds together in calculus, we can be fairly sure where they came from. The same goes for other compounds characteristic of seaweed and freshwater plants. To have become embedded in dental calculus, the seaweed and freshwater plants had to have been in the mouth and most probably chewed. Biomarkers do not survive in all our samples, but where they do, they’re found consistently across many individuals we analysed from different places. This suggests seaweed was probably a routine part of the diet.Perceptions of seaweed
Today, seaweed is often seen as the scourge of beaches. It accumulates at the high-water mark where it can create a slippery and sometimes smelly barrier to the sea. But it is a wondrous world of its own. There are over 10,000 species of seaweed worldwide living in the intertidal zone (where the ocean meets the land between high and low tides) and the subtidal zone (a region below the intertidal zone that is continuously covered by water). Around 145 of these species are eaten today and in parts of Asia it is commonplace. Seaweed is edible, nutritious, sometimes medicinal, abundant and local. Although overconsumption can cause iodine toxicity, there are no poisonous intertidal species in Europe. It is also available all year round, which would have been particularly useful in the past, when food supplies were less reliable.Reconstructing ancient diets
Reconstructing ancient diets is challenging and is generally more difficult as you go back in time. This helps explain why we’ve only just realised how much seaweed was being eaten by ancient Europeans. In archaeology, evidence for ancient diets often comes from physical remains: animal bones, fish bones and the hard parts of shellfish. Evidence for plants as part of the diet before farming, however, is rare. Techniques to study molecules from archaeological remains have been around for some time. A key method is known as carbon/nitrogen (C and N) stable isotope analysis. This is widely used to reconstruct ancient human and animal diets based on the relative proportions of these elements in bone collagen. But the presence of plants has been difficult to identify, due to their low nitrogen content. Their presence is masked by an overwhelming signal for animals and fish.Hiding in plain sight
The evidence for seaweed had been present all along, but unrecognised. Our discovery provides a perfect example of how perceptions of what we regard as food influence interpretations of ancient practices. Seaweed was detected in chunks that had been chewed (and presumably spat out) at the 12,000-year-old site of Monte Verde, Chile. But when it is found at archaeological sites, it is more commonly interpreted as having been used for things other than food, such as fuel and food wrappings. In European archaeology, there is a longstanding perception that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers ate lots of seafood, but that when people started farming, they focused on food sourced from land, such as their livestock. Our findings hammer another nail into the coffin of this theory. Today, only a few traditional recipes remain, such as laverbread made from the seaweed species Porphyra umbilicalis in Wales. It’s still not clear why seaweed declined as a staple source of food in Europe after the Middle Ages.What are the implications?
Our unexpected discovery changes the way we understand past people. It also alters our perceptions of how they understood the landscape and how they exploited local resources. It suggests, not for the first time, that we vastly underestimate ancient people. They had a knowledge, particularly about the natural world, that is difficult for us to imagine today. The finding also reminds us that archaeological remains are minute windows into the past, reinforcing the care required when developing theories based on limited evidence. The consumption of plants, upon which our world depends, has been habitually left out of dietary theories from our pre-agrarian past. Rigid theories have sometimes forgotten that humans were behind these archaeological cultures – and that they were probably similar to us in their curiosity and needs. Today seaweed sits, largely unused as food, on our doorstep. Making the edible species a bigger component of our diets could even contribute to making our food supplies more sustainable.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
european europeInternational
EUR/AUD bearish breakdown supported by additional China fiscal stimulus and AU inflation
Weak PMI readings from the Eurozone, an increase in China’s budget deficit ratio, and renewed inflationary pressures in Australia may trigger a persistent…

- Weak PMI readings from the Eurozone, an increase in China’s budget deficit ratio, and renewed inflationary pressures in Australia may trigger a persistent bearish sentiment loop in EUR/AUD.
- Watch the key short-term resistance at 1.6700 for EUR/AUD.
- A break below 1.6250 key medium-term support on the EUR/AUD may trigger a multi-week bearish impulsive down move.
The Euro (EUR) tumbled overnight throughout the US session as it erased its prior gains against the US dollar recorded on Monday, 23 October; the EUR/USD shed -104 pips from yesterday’s intraday high of 1.0695 to close the US session at 1.0591, its weakest performance in the past seven sessions.
Yesterday’s resurgence of the USD dollar strength has been attributed to a robust set of October flash manufacturing and services PMI data from the US in contrast with weak readings seen in the UK and Eurozone that represented stagflation risks.
Interestingly, the Aussie dollar (AUD) has outperformed the US dollar where the AUD/USD managed to squeeze out a minor daily gain of 21 pips by the close of yesterday’s US session. The resilient movement of the AUD/USD has been impacted by positive news flow out from China, Australia’s key trading partner.
China’s national legislature has just approved a budgetary plan to raise the fiscal deficit ratio for 2023 to around 3.8% of its GDP which was above the initial 3% set in March and set to issue additional sovereign debt worth 1 trillion yuan in Q4. This latest round of additional fiscal stimulus suggests that China’s top policymakers are expanding their initial targeted measures to address the ongoing severe liquidity crunch in the domestic property market as well as to reverse the persistent weak sentiment inherent in the stock market.
In addition, the latest set of Australia’s inflation data surpassed expectations has also reinforced another layer of positive feedback loop in the Aussie dollar which in turn may put Australia’s central bank, RBA on a “hawkish guard” against cutting its policy cash rate too soon.
The less lagging monthly CPI Indicator has risen to an annualized rate of 5.6% in September, above consensus estimates of 5.4%, and surpassed August’s reading of 5.2% which has translated into a second consecutive month of uptick in inflationary growth.
In the lens of technical analysis, a potential bearish configuration setup has emerged in the EUR/AUD cross pair from a short to medium-term perspective.
Major uptrend phase of EUR/AUD is weakening
Fig 1: EUR/AUD medium-term trend as of 25 Oct 2023 (Source: TradingView, click to enlarge chart)
Even though the price actions of the EUR/AUD have been oscillating within a major ascending channel since its 25 August 2023 low of 1.4285 and traded above the key 200-day moving average so far, the momentum of this up movement is showing signs of bullish exhaustion.
Yesterday (24 October) price action ended with a daily bearish reversal “Marubozu” candlestick coupled with the daily RSI momentum indicator that retreated right at a significant parallel resistance in place since March 2023 at the 65 level which suggests a revival of medium-term bearish momentum.
EUR/AUD bears are now attacking the minor ascending support
Fig 2: EUR/AUD minor short-term trend as of 25 Oct 2023 (Source: TradingView, click to enlarge chart)
The EUR/AUD has now staged a bearish price action follow-through via the breakdown of its minor ascending support from its 29 September 2023 low after a momentum bearish breakdown that was flashed earlier yesterday (24 October) during the European session as seen from the 4-hour RSI momentum indicator.
Watch the 1.6700 key short-term pivotal resistance (also the 50-day moving average) for a further potential slide toward the intermediate supports of 1.6460 and 1.6320 in the first step.
On the other hand, a clearance above 1.6700 invalidates the bearish tone to see the next intermediate resistance coming in at 1.6890.
stimulus budget deficit us dollar euro yuan gdp stimulus european uk china-
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