You can all relax: The government has a plan for the coming Zombie Apocalypse.

A few years ago, the Center for Disease Control launched a zombie preparedness initiative that drew significant attention. The Department of Defense followed suit and developed an entire training course intended for the Joint Operational Planning and Execution System (JOPES). The complete response plan, called CONPLAN888, was recently declassified, and it’s just as weird and creepy as you might imagine.
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Reading at times like the treatment to a campy science fiction script, CONPLAN888 categorizes eight classes of zombies:

Pathogenic zombies — Zombie life forms created after infection by a viral or bacterial contagion.
Radiation zombies — Zombie life forms created after infection from electromagnetic or particle radiation.
Evil Magic Zombies — Zombie life forms created by occult experimentation, or “evil magic.”
Space Zombies — Zombies that come from space or are created by extraterrestrial toxins (this also includes Zombie Satellites that could pose a threat to SATCOM services like DirecTV)
Weaponized Zombies — Zombie life forms engineered through bio-mechanical technology for the purposes of attacking another nation.
Symbiant-Induced Zombies — Zombie life forms created after the “introduction of a symbiant life form into an otherwise healthy host.”
Vegetarian Zombies — Zombie life forms that cause no threat to humans because they only eat plant life (could nevertheless “cause massive de-forestation or elimination of basic food crops essential to humans [rice, corn, soybeans])”
Chicken Zombies (yes, this is real)— Zombies that are essentially old hens that can no longer lay eggs. Farmers euthanize them with carbon monoxide and stack them in piles; however, some of the hens are still alive and crawl out. Though they ultimately die of organ failure, chicken zombies are “simply terrifying to behold” and are likely only to make people become vegetarians in protest of animal cruelty.

silencing dissent

A paper published last week in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that "the government’s online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion.”
"What this research shows is that in the presence of surveillance, our country's most vulnerable voices are unwilling to express their beliefs online."
The NSA’s “ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of US citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly” and “can contribute to the silencing of minority views that provide the bedrock of democratic discourse," the researcher found....
For the majority of respondents, the study concluded, being aware of government surveillance “significantly reduced the likelihood of speaking out in hostile opinion climates.”
Although more nuanced than a blanket silencing, the study still concluded that “knowing one’s online activities are subject to government interception and believing these surveillance practices are necessary for national security play important roles in influencing conformist behavior.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most significant conformist effect was from people who supported surveillance. They turned out to be more likely to conceal other dissenting opinions, which they felt strayed from the majority view.

Hacked behind the wheel

The growing number of high-tech cars that connect to the Internet is making Americans increasingly at risk of being hacked behind the wheel, the FBI warned Thursday.
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"While not all hacking incidents may result in a risk to safety — such as an attacker taking control of a vehicle — it is important that consumers take appropriate steps to minimize risk. Therefore, the FBI and NHTSA are warning the general public and manufacturers — of vehicles, vehicle components and aftermarket devices — to maintain awareness of potential issues and cybersecurity threats related to connected vehicle technologies in modern vehicles."
But eight months after security researchers demonstrated how a commercially available Jeep Cherokee could be remotely hacked — and prompted Chrysler to recall roughly 1.4 million vehicles in response — experts said this week that the government's warning is more than just a little late.

World's financial defenses are too low

The global financial safety net has become increasingly fragmented, making it harder to respond to crises in a world roiled by volatile capital flows, International Monetary Fund staffers warned.
Defenses haven’t kept up with the growth of external debt in recent years, the Washington-based fund said in a report released Thursday. As a result, a system-wide shock could overwhelm the world’s crisis resources, which include nations’ foreign-exchange reserves, central-bank swap lines, regional funds such as the euro area’s European Stability Mechanism, and the IMF itself, the lender said.
Financial cycles have been “growing in amplitude and duration, capital flows have become more volatile, and non-banks have gained importance, altering the nature of systemic risk,” IMF staff said in the report, which was presented to the fund’s executive board on March 7. In a major event, “the needs could exceed the collective resources available,” the fund said.

Central banks losing control of currencies

Efforts by many of the world’s central banks to weaken their currencies are failing, raising concerns about whether policy makers are losing the ability to wield control over financial markets. This was the case again in Japan on Thursday, when the dollar fell 1.1% against yen, to ¥111.39. Despite the Bank of Japan’s efforts to push down its currency and jump-start the economy with negative interest rates, the yen is up 8% this year and is at its strongest level against the dollar since October 2014. European central bankers are having similar problems containing the strength of the euro and other currencies. These difficulties are a reminder that the long stretch of exceptionally low rates in response to the 2008 financial crisis has created market distortions that may be difficult for central bankers to contain.
This disconnect could produce more volatility in financial markets. Even if investors can predict what actions central banks are likely to take, they are having a hard time predicting how markets will react, potentially sparking a pullback from riskier assets, such as emerging markets or commodities. It also underscores long-standing concerns about the prospects for global growth. A number of central bankers are reaching for the lever of lower interest rates to weaken their currency and make their exports more competitive. But because policy makers are all following the same approach, they are in effect canceling each other out. “There is a rising concern that central banks are testing the limits of their policies,” said Brian Daingerfield, a currency strategist at RBS Securities. “Each time you take a tool out of the tool kit, it gets closer to being empty.”

Brazil's House of Cards

The plot to Brazil's political crisis has become so complicated that even makers of political drama 'House of Cards' joke they are now following events.
There is even an online quiz where one has to guess: did it happen in Brazil or in House of Cards, or both?
But this is no laughing matter in Brazil.
This is the country's toughest political crisis since the early 1990s, when its first democratically-elected President in the modern era, Fernando Collor, was removed from power.
On Wednesday night the crisis took a bizarre turn, as a judge revealed phone conversations between President Dilma Rousseff and her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and suggested they are trying to obstruct the course of an investigation into corruption.
Spontaneous protests erupted in more than 15 cities across the country and riot police acted against demonstrators in Brasilia.

Transparent!

(AP) -- The Obama administration set a record for the number of times its federal employees told disappointed citizens, journalists and others that despite searching they couldn't find a single page requested under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a new Associated Press analysis of government data.
In more than one in six cases, or 129,825 times, government searchers said they came up empty-handed last year. Such cases contributed to an alarming measurement: People who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests, also a record. In the first full year after President Barack Obama's election, that figure was only 65 percent of cases.

Not a coincidence

The Obama administration has long called itself the most transparent administration in history. But newly released Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show that the White House has actually worked aggressively behind the scenes to scuttle congressional reforms designed to give the public better access to information possessed by the federal government.
The documents confirm longstanding suspicions about the administration's meddling, and lay bare for the first time how it worked to undermine FOIA reform bills that received overwhelming bipartisan support and were unanimously passed by both the House and Senate in 2014 — yet were never put up for a final vote.
Moreover, a separate set of documents obtained by VICE News in response to a nearly two-year-old FOIA request provides new insight into how the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also tried to disrupt Congress's FOIA reform efforts, which would have required those agencies to be far more transparent when responding to records requests.

Meanwhile in the White House

“There seems to be an alternative reality out there from the some of the political folks that America’s down in the dumps. It’s not. America’s pretty darn great right now,” he said in a White House meeting with his economic team on a day when the Labor Department announced the economy added 242,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate remained at 4.9 percent.