June 16th, 2019

Arrivato ora a Washington 🇺🇸🇮🇹
Vi tengo aggiornati, buona serata Amici! #SalviniUSA🇮🇹🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/9gz9Ui0MIN

— Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi) June 16, 2019

Responding crews found three displaced manhole covers with smoke emanating from below, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department. A witness said it "sounded and felt like a bomb" had gone off with manhole covers being blown into the air and people panicking. The incident was reported at about 12 p.m. The cause is under investigation. Fire officials did not immediately release additional information.

An estimated 10 million people in Argentina and Uruguay were left without electricity Sunday, following a breakdown in their shared power grid. Power was restored throughout Uruguay by the afternoon, but half of Argentina remained in the dark throughout the day... The precise reason for the collapse was unknown and still under investigation. Countries that border Uruguay and Argentina were not affected.

The New York Times wants more of its journalists to have those basic data skills, and now it’s releasing the curriculum they’ve built in-house out into the world, where it can be of use to reporters, newsrooms, and lots of other people too...

That desire turned into pilot training programs, then an intensive boot camp; more than 60 Times journalists have gone through the training, which focuses on spreadsheet skills, so far. In its current form, that’s two hours of class every morning for three work weeks, with plenty of followup support from there...

You can access the Times’ training materials here.

The court ruling settled allegations that Sara Netanyahu had misused some $US100,000 in state money on lavish meals. She was indicted on charges of fraud and breach of trust last year after the State Attorney's office accused her of running up large tabs at luxury restaurants while the official residence employed a full-time chef between the years 2010 and 2013...

The alleged trespasser broke into Ocasio-Cortez’s office in the Jackson Heights neighborhood before 5 p.m. Saturday and barricaded himself into a closet, the New York Post reported.

The man allegedly sprayed cops with a fire extinguisher before hiding out in a utility closet with a broken bottle. Police eventually hauled the man out and took him to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation...

“The intelligence community has lots of data, lots of evidence – the world will come to see much of it,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The American people should rest assured we have high confidence with respect to who conducted these attacks, as well as half a dozen other attacks throughout the world over the past 40 days.”...

It seems there will be no war, but lots of psychological pressure until Iran comes to the table.

The NIH and the FBI are targeting ethnic Chinese scientists, including U.S. citizens, searching for a cancer cure...

The FBI is telling companies, universities, hospitals—anyone with intellectual property at stake—to take special precautions when dealing with Chinese business partners and employees who might be what Wray calls “nontraditional” information collectors. U.S. Department of Justice officials are doing roadshows to brief local governments, companies, and journalists about China’s perfidy. Visas for Chinese students and researchers are being curtailed, and more Chinese engineers and businesspeople, especially in the tech sector, are being detained at U.S. airports while border agents inspect and image their digital devices. The FBI is pursuing economic espionage investigations “that almost invariably lead back to China” in almost every one of its 56 field offices, Wray said...

Officers said they were alerted by the FBI to comments in an online chatroom and that they traced them to Farca. They said the comments included threats against Jewish people, threats to shoot law enforcement and claims to possess an assault rifle along with the synagogue threat.
Police said they arrested Farca earlier this month and searched his home, finding an illegal AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and high capacity magazines. They also said they found Nazi literature...

Agencies like the U.S. Postal Service, the Social Security Administration, Veterans Affairs, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ask several questions of a new user and match their answers to information held in an individual’s credit file. The logic is that these credit files have information only the person signing up for services can know.

But following the Equifax breach in 2017 those answers are no longer safe, the watchdog said...

Will flattery buy access?

Trump slammed it as "Treason" and "ALSO, NOT TRUE!"...

The Times responded to the "treason" charge as follows:

Accusing the press of treason is dangerous.
We described the article to the government before publication. As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns. https://t.co/MU020hxwdc pic.twitter.com/4CIfcqKoEl

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) June 16, 2019

Crucially, as CNN describes of the NYT report, "Two administration officials told the Times they believed President Donald Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the US computer code being implanted inside the Russian grid."

And further, the story is outright suggesting the White House's own intelligence briefers are actually withholding vital national security information from the president...

Sounds like an Obama holdover is about to be fished out.

The official weight of the trash recovered is still being tallied, and the number is likely to grow, said Tyler Bourgoine, who participated in and helped organize the cleanup. Ocean conservation group Project AWARE estimates that the cleanup might have removed as much as 3,200 pounds of marine debris.

“There were countless lead sinkers … everything from a boat ladder to a barbell,”

Certain users of online forum 8chan may want to lawyer up, after a recently unsealed affidavit reveals that the FBI served the website with a search warrant in April for the IP addresses and metadata information on Chabad of Poway shooter John Earnst, along with "all of the individuals who responded to his posts on the forum.

The bad part is this investigation might implicate the entirety of 8chan:

And if you're wondering how the fbi is able to id posters on 8chan, well it's really simple - IP's:

Instead, it's mainly American and French individuals, via Notre Dame charitable foundations, that are behind the first donations paying the bills and salaries for up to 150 workers employed by the cathedral since the April 15 fire that devastated its roof and caused its masterpiece spire to collapse. This month they are handing over the first private payment for the cathedral's reconstruction of 3.6 million euros ($4 million).

"The big donors haven't paid. Not a cent," said Andre Finot, senior press official at Notre Dame. "They want to know what exactly their money is being spent on and if they agree to it before they hand it over, and not just to pay employees' salaries."...