Civilians and veterans of Ukraine suffer injury, displacement and the need for the basics of life. In this brief we offer ways to #StandwithUkraine and support the people, soldiers and sovereignty of the country.
To Date
2.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began
13 million have been impacted by Russian aggression
1.5 million are currently refugees in Poland
1,300 Ukrainian solders have died in the conflict
1,761 civilian casualties in the country – Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
5 million people in total could eventually be displaced
Our donations can help ease the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ukraine and support the efforts for the country to remain free of Russian subjugation. As we consider support, we want to ensure that our donations are properly channeled. Charity Navigator has compiled a list of responsible nonprofits engaged in relief efforts in Ukraine and the surrounding areas.
Below are more than 30 organizations that have earned trust as being financially effective and transparent.
Jersey Girl Book Reviews: In her debut thriller novel, Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller, author Valerie Webster transports the reader to the locales of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C., for an intriguing thriller that will keep the reader guessing and turning the pages.
The story centers around Rita Mars, ex-investigative journalist turned private investigator, who is determined to find the killer of her friend and ex-journalist co-worker, Bobby Ellis. Rita was supposed to meet up with Bobby at a Harpers Ferry hotel, but when she got to the hotel, Bobby was found hanging by the shower rod by a hotel maid, and the coroner concludes the cause of death as a suicide. Rita knows that Bobby didn’t kill himself, so she embarks on an investigation that will lead to the halls of Congress, determined to piece together what Bobby had been working on, and who would shut him up permanently before he could reveal what he knew in a newspaper article. Rita also has a new client, Karin Van Dreem, a PR Consultant, who hires her to provide security because of her psychotic ex-husband, Dr. Douglas Servier, who has been stalking her, and she’s afraid that he’s going to kill her. And if that isn’t enough, Rita is dealing with her own personal issues that continue to haunt her. Can Rita find who killed Bobby while keeping Karin safe from the psychotic ex-husband, or will this driven private investigator put herself in danger as well?
In her debut thriller novel, author Valerie Webster weaves a slow-building and suspenseful tale written in the third person narrative that follows Rita’s investigations into Bobby’s killer and Karin’s psychotic stalker of an ex-husband. As the reader follows Rita’s investigations, incidents occur and flashbacks to her traumatic past reveals an interconnection that has a lot of drama, tension, and a threat of danger around every corner, and where everyone is considered a suspect.
The reader is easily drawn into this well written story with its richly descriptive plot and setting. It is filled with enough family drama and secrets, motives, possible suspects, action, and intriguing twists and turns that definitely keeps the reader guessing until the surprising conclusion.
This was a really interesting story to read! The author does a wonderful job of providing enough clues to engage the reader, and I found myself so caught up on trying to figure out who is behind Bobby’s murder, and the craziness behind Karin’s stalker. I loved how Rita used her expertise as an ex-investigative reporter to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. I was absolutely stunned by the conclusion, I never saw it coming! I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I was also intrigued by Rita’s backstory, she is a broken person who is still trying to overcome her traumatic childhood and ex-relationship issues. I look forward to reading Rita’s next investigative adventure.
Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller will definitely take the readers on one heck of a thrilling roller coaster ride.
Congratulations to Kathleen Kelly! Kathleen is the prize winner of the $25 Amazon gift card presented by Valerie Webster, author of Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller. The gift card was awarded as part of Ms. Webster’s recent book tour through Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tours.
Another security update from valeriewebster.com to help keep you and your information safe.
What is the security issue? Companies and online sites (Facebook and Twitter, for example) place a miniscule image pixel in your emails that detect the exact time and date you open your email and report back on whether you looked at it, as well as your location and the time of day, even how many times you go back and open that message.
Those tracking emails contain an embedded line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1×1 pixel image, so tiny it’s invisible. And it’s not just companies hoping to sell to you or predict behavior patterns. Scammers, business partners and competitors, even your spouse can employ one of the currently available email tracking software packages.
There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools. Google trackers are present on 82% of all web traffic. Also according to OMC’s data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked. That’s one in five of the emails you get from your friends.
Research from October looked at emails from newsletter and mailing list services from the 14,000 most popular websites on the web, and found that 85 percent contained trackers—and 30 percent leak your email addresses to outside corporations, without your consent.
Do the big-name email services offer any help? Gmail retired its practice of reading your emails for targeted ads in 2017. Outlook has never tracked but features like auto-filled calendar events, as well as spam and scam protection, still depend on scanning incoming mail. Because Google, Microsoft and Yahoo don’t encrypt your mail end-to-end, it’s tough to know for sure how much of it they access, privacy experts say. Unless your email provider is end-to-end encrypted, there’s nothing stopping that provider from accessing your mail.
So how do you protect yourself and your information? The following will give you some tools to upgrade your email protection.
In Gmail on a desktop, go to Settings -> See all settings -> General -> Images. Hit “ask before displaying external images,” then scroll to the bottom and save your changes.
If your Outlook email is a work account or if you’re using the Windows app, images are blocked by default. If you’re using a personal account on the Web, you can block some tracking pixels by going to Settings -> View all Outlook settings -> Mail -> Junk mail -> Filters. Choose to only accept attachments, images and links from people and domains in your safe senders list.
Get a privacy protective email service. These are some of the best.
ProtonMail, a free email service from Switzerland-based privacy company Proton, is end-to-end encrypted, which means your mail isn’t visible even to Proton itself. (And if the company gets hacked — an increasingly frequent problem in the digital world — the hackers couldn’t see your data, either.)
Tutanotais another privacy-oriented free email service. They offer one email address and 1GB of storage for free. Tutanota is designed to strip IP addresses from the header of emails, and it can even encrypt metadata. Users can even send self-destructing emails.
SecureMyEmail another free service works with popular services such as Yahoo, Outlook and Gmail rather than being a replacement.
Mailfence is also free, users are permitted to get a single email address with 500 Mb of storage.
Anti-tracking software – because “Do Not Track” is a joke.
It’s easy to assume that what we send and receive in our email accounts stays private. But email is a perfect environment for tracking and big providers do little to stop it. Your information is just too valuable for trackers to ignore. They use it to boost sales. They sell it at significant prices. Forget self-regulation. It’s up to you and me maintain our own privacy.
I hope you have found this information useful. I will be posting at least one up-to-the-minute security article a month on https://bit.ly/3chtdST. Feel free to let me know what you think of these updates at [email protected].
A Long Island, New York grandmother is being hailed for setting up and helping capture a suspected scammer in a trap that was all caught on video.
The 73-year-old former 911 dispatcher Jean Ebbert received an odd call this week from a man claiming to be her grandson who was in jail for DUI and needed bail.
Ebbert eventually spoke to another man on the phone who claimed to be her grandson’s lawyer and asked to come to the house to collect the bail money. He claimed he needed $8,000 to post the grandson’s bail. Jean told the man to come to the house to pick up the money but also called the police to wait for the man when he arrived.
When the man showed up at Jean’s house, she handed him an empty envelope full of paper towels before officers swarmed him in an exchange that was captured on her doorbell camera.
Valerie Webster and Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller in the spotlight via Author of the Day interview.
Make your next book club event an author event with a writer who’s lived the cases, developed the crime fighting technologies. Contact Valerie Webster today.
