May 11th, 2019

Sitting down with with Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes in a crowded room at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., Baker said he is “assuming that they will dig and find stuff” and that “we’ll try to sort it out and see what mistakes were made.” But Baker defended the FBI's actions, including its use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

35-year-old Rafaelle Alessandra Carbalho Sousa of Boca Raton was denied bond and remained behind bars on charges expected to include attempted murder and child abuse. The baby, weighing 6 pounds and 8 ounces, defied the odds and was found alive. A pair of maintenance workers near the scene reportedly heard noises coming from the dumpster and investigated... In addition to the charges directly related to this incident, immigration officials say she is the subject of a deportation detainer.

“I’ve decided … I’m not going to go to the Ukraine... I’m not going to go because I think I’m walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president... in some cases enemies of the United States, and in one case an already convicted person who has been found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election.”

City officials in the nation's capital were notified of Trump’s plan to address the nation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and move the traditional fireworks display from the Capitol Reflecting Pool to the nearby West Potomac Park, the Washington Post reported... The move to amend the July 4 celebrations in Washington comes after Trump floated the possibility of holding a military parade, an idea he got when he attended Bastille Day celebrations in France. But the military parade idea was dropped after senior White House and Pentagon leaders estimated it would cost $92 million.

U.S. states filed a lawsuit accusing Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc of orchestrating a sweeping scheme with 19 other drug companies to inflate drug prices - sometimes by more than 1,000% - and stifle competition for generic drugs, state prosecutors said on Saturday... The 20 drug companies engaged in illegal conspiracies to divide up the market for drugs to avoid competing and, in some cases, conspired to either prevent prices from dropping or to raise them, according to the complaint by 44 U.S. states, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut.

Assuming that estimate is on the mark, it would seem a trend that’s able to be sustained for only a few more years at best before the industry is comprehensively destroyed.

The project is called “Hacking History,” and the people behind it are freelance journalists Emma Best, and security researcher (and former NSA hacker) Emily Crose. The two are crowdfunding to raise money to cover the costs of the FOIA requests via the document requesting platform MuckRock...

A defamation case involving Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a British cave diver will go to trial on October 22nd, according to recent court filings. Vernon Unsworth sued Musk for defamation last year after Musk repeatedly accused Unsworth of being a pedophile. A judge rejected Musk’s claim that he wasn’t making a real accusation...

Echoing comments he shared with the Orlando Sentinel, Cook told TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino that it is "pretty impressive" what Rosenfeld is accomplishing with code at such a young age, serving as a perfect example of why he believes coding education should begin in the early grades of school...

Prosecutors said in court filings say that input from victims, who were underage at the time he committed the crimes, is essential to decide how to proceed with the case, the Associated Press reported...

Shanahan traveled to McAllen, Texas, to meet with officials and visit a migrant processing facility and Border Patrol station, two days after the White House announced Trump’s intention to nominate the former Boeing Co executive as defense secretary.

“We’re not going to leave until the border is secure,” Shanahan told about two dozen border patrol officials as hundreds of detained migrants waited in tents to be processed.

IS’s Amaq News Agency late on Friday announced the new province, that it called “Wilayah of Hind”, in a statement that also claimed IS inflicted casualties on Indian army soldiers in the town of Amshipora in the Shopian district of Kashmir. The IS statement corresponds with an Indian police statement on Friday that a militant called Ishfaq Ahmad Sofi was killed in an encounter in Shopian.

Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan ordered the new deployments Friday, just days after he approved the expedited deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group and a task force of B-52 bombers into the Middle East, the Pentagon said... “The United States does not seek conflict with Iran, but we are postured and ready to defend U.S. forces and interests in the region,” the statement read.

The defendants smuggled what they were told was methamphetamine onto commercial airlines from 2016 to 2018, the indictment said. They were rounded up last year when FBI agents learned that Pabon had offered to smuggle C-4 explosives on a flight. The arrests were the product of a two-year sting operation involving simulated drugs. A 10th defendants remains a fugitive.

...technology companies in Silicon Valley have taken on the role of prosecutors, judges, and juries in decisions about which words and images should be banished from the public’s sight. Lately, tech companies have become almost as skilled at muzzling speech as they are at enabling it... Government, in effect, is “subcontracting” social-media platforms to be its eyes and ears on all kinds of content it deems objectionable... But some of what governments ask tech companies to do, such as suppressing violent content, cuts against other legitimate goals, such as bringing warlords and dictators to justice...

When a hashtag deemed to return misinformation is blocked, search results will no longer appear when the tag is clicked, and the terms are even blocked from being searched on Instagram...

"We feel it’s our responsibility to challenge traditional methods," says New Story CEO Brett Hagler. "Linear methods will never reach the billion-plus people who need safe homes. Challenging our assumptions, iterating based on data, and taking calculated risks on innovative ideas will allow us to reach more families with the best possible solutions, exponentially faster."

Congressman Sherman, who’s from California, made the remarks May 9 at a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee. Sherman says the ban is necessary because crypto threatens to undermine the U.S. dollar and is only useful for criminal activities like money-laundering, drug-dealing, and tax evasion...