January, 2019

Former Harrison Police Chief Anthony Marraccini pleaded guilty to a tax evasion charge in federal court in White Plains on Wednesday, admitting he failed to pay more than $900,000 in federal and state taxes over six years.
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Marraccini, 54, admitted that between 2011 and 2016, he failed to report on tax returns more than $2.3 million in revenue from his business, Coastal Construction Associates, as well as $224,000 in rent he received on two houses he owned in Purchase and another house in Rye.

Senate Democrats blocked a White House–backed plan to end the 34-day partial shutdown, turning it down in a 50-47 vote on Thursday.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) joined with Republicans to advance the measure, but it fell short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster.

In an unexpected development, GOP Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Tom Cotton (Ark.) voted against Trump's plan. Lee is considered a fiscal hawk, and Cotton is one of the Senate’s most conservative members on immigration.

According to a news release, Mathis took the girl, who had run away from a residential treatment house in Duluth, to a nearby apartment where through a combination of physical beatings, sexual assault, electric shocking and psychological control, he coerced her into submitting to sexual acts with Koech.

Koech also took nude photos of the girl and Mathis attempted to extort money from her parents in return for her safe release. The girl was eventually rescued by Duluth police officers and was found hiding in a closet 20 days after going missing, a news release said.

Salmond, who was Scotland's leader from 2007-2014 and took the country to the brink of independence, says he is “innocent of any criminality whatsoever.”
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There are 14 charges against the 64-year-old who has been released on bail. He is accused of two charges of attempted rape, nine of sexual assault, two of indecent assault and one breach of the peace.

Mike Poplardo is an economics teacher at Fox Lane High School in Bedford. In May of 2018, he spent two days on a “mini-unit” designed to prepare students for college. During this lesson, he showed students the Fox News documentary titled “Fox News Reporting: The Truth about Sex and College.”

The documentary (which includes commentary from this reporter), hosted by Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, tells the stories of several male students who say they were falsely accused of sexual assault, in one instance also talking to the female accuser for her perspective. It also debunks some common myths surrounding sexual assault statistics.

The judge’s order reads:

“The parties are DIRECTED to appear for a status conference before the undersigned on January 28, 2019, at 11:00 A.M. in Courtroom 4D South to discuss issues concerning the irrevocable trust (the “Trust”) that is paying the legal fees of all Defendants (except Clare Bronfman) and certain witnesses.

“All Defendants are required to attend. In particular, the court plans to address issues it has identified in its review of the Trust’s indenture and the declaration that Defendants submitted in response to the court’s 266 January 9, 2019 order. The court will schedule the anticipated Curcio hearings at a later date. Ordered by Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis on 1/23/2019. (Haddad, Andrew) (Entered: 01/23/2019)”.

In 2012, documentary filmmaker Maria Stanisheva raised $6,000 on Kickstarter to make a movie about Phillips, centering on his then-wife’s struggle with cancer and a trip the family planned to try to cure her with Native American methods that involved a ceremonial healing ritual.

After the confrontation with the Catholic high school student, the media rushed to defend Phillips, in part under the false pretense that he was a Vietnam War veteran.In reality, Phillips was never deployed to Vietnam. And it looks like Phillips’ misleading Vietnam story helped documentary’s crowdfunding campaign.

Nathan Phillips, the Native American activist who falsely accused Covington Catholic High School students of blocking him during a confrontation he initiated, has a criminal record — including assault and escape from jail — and appears to have misrepresented his military service.

In his own teenage years and early 20s, Phillips, using his adoptive name Nathaniel R. Stanard, was charged with escaping from prison, assault, and several alcohol-related crimes, according to local news reports at the time from his hometown of Lincoln, Neb.

The NetBlocks' Internet Shutdown Observatory sounds alert. A non-governmental organization that monitors cybersecurity reported there were disruptions affecting social media in Venezuela on Wednesday .
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"Social media services are notably disrupted ... intermittently cut off and the disruptions have increasingly affected other services," the organization's statement said. The disruptions were happening as tensions were rising in Venezuela. Whiles tens of thousands of people were marching in Venezuela to demand that Nicolas Maduro step down

The entire CRISPR machinery is designed in a test tube, and once constructed it’s always on. When introduced into animals or humans, CRISPR is set to roam the entire body, seeking its target gene to edit or destroy until it loses steam and gets metabolized by the body.
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Using a technique called circular permutation, the team reorganized CRISPR into a programmable tool dubbed ProCas9 that silently lurks within cells until external factors—viral infection, for example—wakes it up.
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ProCas9 can potentially respond to Boolean inputs such as “and” or “not,” meaning that it will only activate if a specific set of instructions are met—for example, “the cell is cancerous” or “the cell is infected” leads to the response “sacrifice the cell,” which activates CRISPR and instructs it to chop up genes essential for survival. The study was published in the prestigious journal Cell.

We now can rig cells with preprogrammed nanos that kill them when they become cancer? Wow. An “On” switch is nice but and “Off” switch is important. Sounds like once this “gate” molecule is cut by a protease, there’s no going back. One of the founders said she is afraid of it being misused. it is because it could be done cheaply and quickly. This thing can wipe out billions in revenue at some big pharma by bringing a cure to something that currently only has a lifelong, expensive, treatment.

A mother in Maine is facing drug and child endangerment charges after police say her 7-month-old overdosed on methamphetamine.

Alyssa Murch, 20, is set to appear in court in February. She is charged with aggravated furnishing of drugs and endangering the welfare of a child.

Mexico said Wednesday that more than 10,000 people have requested visas to cross its southern border as it seeks to grant legal documents to members of a rapidly growing U.S.-bound migrant caravan from Central America.
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The soaring number of migrants requesting visas has raised questions about whether such mass movements may become a regular phenomenon. The border city of Tijuana has struggled to accommodate about 5,000 people who arrived in November in the last caravan. About 1,800 are still there, according to Cesar Palencia, the head of migrant affairs for the city — many facing long waits for asylum interviews with U.S. officials.

Michael Ertel, the newly appointed Secretary of State of Gov. Ron DeSantis, has resigned after photos emerged of him posing as a Hurricane Katrina victim in blackface at a private Halloween party 14 years ago.

The photos obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat were shown to the Governor's Office on Thursday morning. Hours later it issued a statement.

"The governor accepted Secretary Ertel's resignation," the Governor's Office said.

Animal rights group PETA held a confronting demonstration — in which its activists barbecued a “dog” as part of a nausea-inducing campaign to encourage people to go vegan.

Don’t worry. The simmering animal was a fake made by a British prop designer, but the organization was adamant it would still send a strong message.

PETA set up the gruesome stand slap-bang in the middle of the street and photos from the scene show the fake dog cooking over a banner that reads “If You Wouldn’t Eat a Dog, Why Eat a Lamb? Go Vegan!”

Japan's supreme court has upheld a law that effectively requires transgender people to be sterilised before their gender can be changed on official documents.
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The decision, issued Wednesday but published on Thursday, upholds a law that requires any individual wishing to change their documents have "no reproductive glands or reproductive glands that have permanently lost function," referring to testes or ovaries.

Nestle and Coca-Cola cause water shortages. They're worried about climate doing the same thing? They can go get lost.

In a report published Thursday by PlainSite, an independent research shop led by Aaron Greenspan, analysts calculated that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been regularly lying to investors and the public about the company's user metrics, and that the company could be overestimating the number of users by as much as 50%.

The team detailed their findings in a 70-page report published on their website.
"Facebook has been lying to the public about the scale of its problem with fake accounts, which likely exceed 50% of its network. Its official metrics—many of which it has stopped reporting quarterly—are self-contradictory and even farcical. The company has lost control of its own product."

Operation Boot Maduro seems to be moving to stage two.

Following this week's military mutiny, which was squelched, but not before locals ran out and attempted to defend the troops in pitched street battles, now at least sixty – sixty! – neighborhoods in Caracas have erupted into riots – big riots, with people reported shot dead. Take a look at the series of tweets posted by Caracas Chronicles on its Twitter feed enumerating the names of the neighborhoods now in open revolt.

#ÚLTIMAHORA | Derrumban estatua de Hugo Chávez en San Félix #22Ene pic.twitter.com/HqPlBh6wMc

— Venepress (@venepress) January 23, 2019

Without consulting with its users, Microsoft has installed an establishment media browser extension, purportedly designed to rate the accuracy of news websites, as a default setting on mobile versions of its Edge browser. In practice, it creates a news blacklist by warning users away from sites including Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail.

The browser extension, called “Newsguard,” presents users with a red warning label if they navigate to a website that it judges to be unreliable. A “green” rating is given to websites that NewsGuard considers trustworthy.