March, 2019

Innocent people don't shut down investigations into themselves.

Hershey, along with French media group Publicis Media and The Global Audience Based Buying Conference & Consultancy (GABBCON), has reportedly joined AdLedger. AdLedger was founded by IBM, Tegna and blockchain company MadHive in 2018, and is a nonprofit consortium that develops shared ledger technologies for the digital advertising market.

Apart from advertising, Hershey’s deployment of blockchain technology could be expanded to the operation of chocolate factories, facilitating tracing of cacao “from bean to bar,” according to Vinny Rinaldi, head of addressable media and technology for The Hershey Company. “This would be a fundamentally massive shift in the way that we think,” Rinaldi reportedly added.

“Chicago police allege…when that letter didn’t get enough traction or enough attention, he decided to carry out with this alleged hoax. If the FBI determines that Jussie Smollett did send that letter to himself, he faces a charge of mail fraud, which is pretty substantial. Five to ten years in prison. Chicago police did tell us all along that the FBI is investigating that letter. The FBI just won’t confirm to us.”

This aligns with reporting from ABC7 Chicago, which confirms that Smollett is still being investigated by the FBI.

The U.S. Supreme Court has protected abortion as a constitutional right until a fetus has developed enough to live outside the mother's womb.

Yes, @JudicialWatch will investigate Smollett scandal.

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) March 26, 2019

“It’s possible to make a self-sustaining city on Mars by 2050, if we start in 5 years & take 10 orbital synchronizations,” Musk told his 25 million Twitter followers Monday evening.

The Starship is critical to these plans. The stainless steel ship is designed to send up to 100 people in space at once, with a Raptor engine that uses liquid oxygen and methane instead of the rocket propellant used for the Falcon 9’s Merlin engines. That’s important because, Musk hopes, humans will be able to establish propellant plants and create fuel from Mars to return to Earth — or even continue their journey and establish a planet-hopping network.

Thomas Goodman, 45 – who was convicted of sexually abusing multiple young children – regained consciousness shortly after, The Providence Journal reported.

Goodman was reportedly ordered to consecutively fulfill his prison sentence. He was convicted on eight counts of sexually exploiting children – getting 30 years on each – and one count of possessing sadistic and masochistic child pornography, for which he got an additional 20 years, the outlet said.

Goodman was accused of sexually abusing two 6-year-old girls, as well as a 3-week-old baby, according to The Journal.

Though it sounds like a fantastical feature of Jules Verne's Journey to The Center of the Earth, subterranean mountains are real, albeit different from any novelist's envisaged landscape. This strange range is part of the layered structure of our planet, rippling along a geologic boundary some 410 miles down. It contains tremendous peaks, with some that may tower even higher than the mighty Mount Everest.

Now, scientists have got their best look yet at these subsurface mountains using the seismic waves from multiple big earthquakes. Published recently in Science, their analysis suggests that the peaks are not just tall, but surprisingly rugged—a discovery that could provide clues to why Earth is a chemical oddball in our solar system.

No senator voted to begin debate on the legislation, while 57 lawmakers voted against breaking the filibuster. Democratic Sens. Doug Jones of Alabama, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona joined 53 Republicans in voting "no." Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats, also voted "no."

The vote had been teed up by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in a bid to make Democratic senators -- including several 2020 presidential candidates -- go on the record about the measure. McConnell had called the proposal "a radical, top-down, socialist makeover of the entire U.S. economy."

As artificial intelligence systems take on more tasks and solve more problems, it’s hard to say which is rising faster: our interest in them or our fear of them. Futurist Ray Kurzweil famously predicted that “By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people.”

We don’t know how accurate this prediction will turn out to be. Even if it takes more than 10 years, though, is it really possible for machines to become conscious? If the machines Kurzweil describes say they’re conscious, does that mean they actually are? Perhaps a more relevant question at this juncture is: what is consciousness, and how do we replicate it if we don’t understand it?

In a panel discussion at South By Southwest titled “How AI Will Design the Human Future,” experts from academia and industry discussed these questions and more.

Tanya Nguyen, 33, was parking her car in front of her house on March 20 when she was attacked by 20-year-old Christian Reyes, 19-year-old Andrew Bran and 18-year-old Jesus Morales, investigators alleged. In dashcam footage made public Monday, Nguyen could be heard screaming and pleading with her attackers, at one point telling them, "I'm pregnant!"

Despite her pleas, Nguyen was stabbed nearly a dozen times -- including in her face -- suffering a punctured lung and losing her front teeth in the process, Fox 11 reported. The attackers then took off in Nguyen's car, striking other vehicles as they tried to leave the scene.

And there is the slap in the face to Eddie Johnson and Rahm Emanuel knowing they can’t do a damn thing.

“I think we should leave it up to the judgment of the police chief and the mayor, of course, to give us some better sense of what’s going on. I don’t know," she added”

During an interview on Fox News, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee he is targeting "people who lied to Congress, perjury, criminal conspiracy."

Noting that "will be hopefully by the end of next week," Nunes said his team will work to "make as much public as possible."

Nearly half of all Americans still believe President Donald Trump worked with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after Special Counsel Robert Mueller cleared Trump of that allegation.

Americans did feel slightly more positive about Trump after learning the findings of the 22-month investigation into Russian meddling in the election, the national opinion poll released on Tuesday showed.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence announced on Tuesday an accelerated goal of putting Americans back on the moon within five years “by any means necessary,” and NASA’s top official immediately embraced the challenge.
[...]
The drive to reach the moon reflects President Donald Trump’s desire to champion a bold new national objective as he mounts a re-election bid, while also seeking to counter the potential space weaponry capabilities of Russia and China.

A Sprint cell phone tower will be removed from a California elementary school after four students and three teachers were diagnosed with cancer.
[...]
So while parents are blaming the Sprint cell phone tower is responsible for the cancer cluster at Weston Elementary School - it's entirely possible that other environmental factors are at play.

The order is the "first ever to establish a comprehensive policy to improve resilience to EMPs," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders explained.

Autonomous delivery drone networks are coming to the US in earnest. UPS and Matternet are launching a drone "airline" that will use the robotic aircraft to carry medical samples between WakeMed's health care facilities in Raleigh, North Carolina. The drone of choice (an M2 quadcopter) can only carry up to 5lbs at distances as long as 12.5 miles, but it should still be faster, cheaper and more consistent than the current system of driving samples across town using cars.