June 6th, 2019

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would decide whether to carry out his threat to hit Beijing with tariffs on at least $300 billion in Chinese goods after a meeting of leaders of the world’s largest economies late this month.

On May 30, the agency performed a daring maneuver which brought its spacecraft within 9 meters (approx. 30 feet) of Ryugu to drop a target marker on its surface. The success of the mission was documented by the spacecraft's official Twitter account (because it's 2019) but on June 5, images of the success were released by the agency -- and its photo is absolutely wild.

The target marker separation on May 30 during PPTD-TM1A was caught at the last moment by the small monitor camera, CAM-H! The image time was May 30, 11:18 JST (on-board time) at an altitude of about 9m. CAM-H was built with donations from all of you & is a big success! Thank you! pic.twitter.com/pHSwqPaywh

— HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) June 5, 2019

A southeast Iowa man was sentenced Monday to 120 years in prison after sexually abusing a girl from infancy to the age of 6, court records show. Steven Douglas Crook Jr. of Bloomfield pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual exploitation of a child. The sentence is the maximum allowed for the crime, which includes violent sexual abuse, U.S. Attorney Marc Krickbaum said Tuesday in a news release.

The agreement was signed on the sidelines of a meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The deal will see “the development of 5G technologies and the pilot launch of fifth-generation networks in 2019-2020”, MTS said in a statement on Wednesday.

U.S. border officers apprehended more than 132,000 people crossing from Mexico in May, an increase over the previous month and the highest monthly level since 2006, reaching what U.S. officials said on Wednesday were “crisis” levels... “Our nation is experiencing an unprecedented border security and humanitarian crisis on the southwest border, both at and between our ports of entry,” Randy Howe, the executive director for operations, Office of Field Operations at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), told reporters on a call. He said on June 4 alone, CBP apprehended more than 4,100 people and had 19,293 people in custody.

At one point in time, it was easy to spot a fake Rolex, as most knock-offs used a non-mechanical Quartz movement inside that resulted in a stuttered ticking movement of the watch’s second hand. But as the experts at Watchfinder & Co. discovered, that’s far from the case today. The best Rolex fakes can be almost impossible to spot, even for expert collectors... What’s even more interesting is that this level of forgery doesn’t come cheap. The fake Rolex Daytona 116500LN still costs well over $1,000—but at that price point, you’re actually getting a really decent timepiece that should keep time almost as well as a real Rolex does—and saving almost ten grand in the process...

In tests on mice, the researchers used the AAVs to get the CRISPR gene-editing system into different types of skin, blood and muscle stem and progenitor cells. To make it very clear whether the system worked or not, the stem cells were edited to activate "reporter" genes, which would glow a fluorescent red.

And the technique worked. The researchers found that up to 60 percent of the stem cells in skeletal muscle glowed red, indicating they'd been edited, as well as up to 27 percent of skin progenitor cells and 38 percent of stem cells in bone marrow.

Following up, researchers also noted that other dermal cells also appeared to be edited, indicating that changes to the skin stem cells were being passed down the line.

It’s amazing how by simply changing the structure of common materials it’s possible to significantly alter their properties.

A person who was not Smollett called 911 that night to report the attack. The caller did not name Smollett but said a person was attacked.

The caller said: “I just need police to come by…um.. I work with an artist…I don’t really want to say his name but he states that (REDACTED)… he went to Subway he was walking by some guys. I don’t know. They jumped him or something like that and I just want to report it and make sure he’s all right...

Operator: Does your friend need an ambulance?

Caller: I just think he’s startled. It’s really weird ma’am cause I’m scared. I don’t know what it is. They put a noose around his neck. ... You know, they didn’t do anything but they put a noose around his neck...

Mexican soldiers, armed police and migration officials blocked hundreds of migrants after they crossed the border from Guatemala in a caravan into southern Mexico on Wednesday, and detained dozens of them, a witness from a migrant aid group and an official said... “That many sailors and military police, yes, it’s new,” Cruz said...

Opioid prescriptions are down, naloxone prescriptions are up and doctors are increasingly using state prescription drug monitoring programs, according to the American Medical Association's 2019 Opioid Task Force Progress Report. By the numbers: Queries made to state PDMPs increased by about 650% between 2014 and 2018. That means doctors are checking patients' prescription history before giving them more opioids. Prescriptions for naloxone — the opioid overdose reversal drug — increased by about 340% between 2016 and 2018.

YouTube is changing its community guidelines to ban videos promoting the superiority of any group as a justification for discrimination against others based on their age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status, the company said today. The move, which will result in the removal of all videos promoting Nazism and other discriminatory ideologies, is expected to result in the removal of thousands of channels across YouTube...

Censorship is a fetish of the technocratic dominatrix.

BMIs, already the stuff of science fiction, facilitate crosstalk between biological wetware with external computers, turning human users into literal cyborgs... DARPA is looking to expand BMIs to the military... This month, the project tapped six academic teams to engineer radically different BMIs to hook up machines to the brains of able-bodied soldiers. The goal is to ditch surgery altogether—while minimizing any biological interventions—to link up brain and machine...

When trickled down to civilian use, these new technologies are poised to revolutionize medical treatment. Or they could galvanize the transhumanist movement with an inconceivably powerful tool that fundamentally alters society—for better or worse...

The DNA was recovered from the only human remains discovered from the era – two tiny milk teeth – that were found in a large archaeological site found in Russia near the Yana River. The site, known as Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site (RHS), was found in 2001 and features more than 2,500 artefacts of animal bones and ivory along with stone tools and evidence of human habitation.

She also clashed with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, who pressed her to begin impeachment proceedings... “I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison,” Pelosi said, according to multiple Democratic sources familiar with the meeting. Instead of impeachment, Pelosi still prefers to see Trump defeated at the ballot box and then prosecuted for his alleged crimes, according to the sources.

And if you're thinking, "Isn't the test set up so that 100 is always the average IQ?," that's only true because researchers rescale the tests to correct for improving raw scores. (Also, congrats, that’s the kind of critical thinking we don’t want to lose!)...

On another note, making the public dumber is extremely profitable. TV commercials don’t have time to inform so they go for affective, not cognitive, content.

“If the US doesn’t lift all additional tariffs [levied on Chinese products], bilateral agricultural product trade between China and the US, including soybean trade, will never go back to normal,” Han told the official Xinhua news agency. “If the US loses China’s market, it will be very difficult for the US to regain it.”... he said Chinese farmers would be able to weather the impact of American tariffs...

The Mexican cartels are exploiting a widespread opioid epidemic that’s killing nearly 130 Americans each day and Ohio, like other states, is at the epicenter of their deadly supply of narcotics.

The state is taking steps to fight back.