June, 2019

Millions of people demonstrated on the streets of Hong Kong this month against a bill that would allow people to be extradited to the mainland to face trial in courts controlled by the Communist Party.

It triggered the most violent protests in decades... “What I can tell you for sure is that G20 will not discuss the Hong Kong issue. We will not allow G20 to discuss the Hong Kong issue,” Zhang said, when asked whether Trump and Xi would discuss Hong Kong at the G20.

“Hong Kong is China’s special administrative region. Hong Kong matters are purely an internal affair due China. No foreign country has a right to interfere,” Zhang said...

It's called Carbon Engineering, and it uses a combination of giant fans and complex chemical processes to remove carbon dioxide from the air in a procedure known as Direct Air Capture.

Direct Air Capture isn't new, but Carbon Engineering says its technology has advanced enough for it to finally make financial sense...

“I was a trooper for a long time and it was a common practice for troopers to run someone’s name through the [Massachusetts criminal record] system for reasons besides law enforcement,” Michael Szymanski, a former state trooper who was disciplined for abusing a police database, told CommonWealth Magazine in May. “I can’t tell you how many times I saw troopers run their next-door neighbor through [the system], run their old girlfriends’ names, or run someone who they’re having a dispute with.”

The problem goes beyond DMV and criminal records databases. Law enforcement officials have also been caught abusing technology that allows them to monitor the location of people’s cellphones...

Pompeo told reporters on June 23 before leaving Washington: “We’ll be talking with them about how to make sure that we are all strategically aligned and how we can build out a global coalition, a coalition not only throughout the Gulf states but in Asia and in Europe that...is prepared to push back against the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.”...

It said that it would ban posts or content supporting Trump, but it would not delete project data, nor would it ban members who support Trump, as long as they don't talk about it. "We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy," a Ravelry blog post said. "Support of the Trump administration is undeniably [in] support [of] white supremacy."...

Last Monday evening, Ocasio-Cortez compared detention facilities for illegal aliens caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to “concentration camps,” adding the phrase “never again,” which commonly refers to the Nazi Holocaust.

Numerous Holocaust educational foundations, including Israel’s Yad Vashem, offered to educate Ocasio-Cortez... But Ocasio-Cortez refused the invitation, citing the fact that Rep. Steve King (R-IA) had been on a similar tour...

...all five officials who spoke with the Washington Examiner confirmed McAleenan's decision to go rogue and stymie the operation was what prompted the White House to call off the 10-city operation...

Two officials said the acting secretary, who was promoted internally in April, had fought for months during closed-door discussions with White House officials, the former acting ICE Director Ronald Vitiello, and the new acting ICE Director Mark Morgan against the plan, which they noted was similar to one the Obama administration carried out in 2015.

The account was compromised by a hacker who used a Raspberry Pi to gain unauthorized access to the JPL network. The attacker then took advantage of the weaknesses in the laboratory’s network to remain undetected for 10 months, stealing 23 files in the process. Two of these files contained information on International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which controls the transfer of military and space-related technology, related to the Mars Science Laboratory Mission...

Jacob Schwartz, 31, faces one to three years behind bars when he’s sentenced next month for downloading more than 3,000 child porn images and 89 videos from the internet, some with victims as young as 6 months old. Schwartz had worked for the city Department of Design and Construction for two years when he was arrested in May 2017. He claims he was often paid in “comp time” instead of time and a half when he clocked more than 40 hours a week, and is owed more than $18,000. Schwartz was fired after his arrest.

In a new report in Quanta Magazine by Kevin Hartnett, Hartmut Neven, the director of Google's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, reveals that the growth in power with each new improvement to Google's best quantum processor is unlike anything found in nature. It's growing at not just an exponential rate, like in Moore's Law, but at a doubly-exponential rate, meaning we may be mere months away from the beginning of the practical quantum computing era.

Google's Hartmut Neven is Telling Us to Get Ready...

A White House executive order last month to restrict some foreign-made networking gear and services due to cybersecurity concerns started a 150-day review of the U.S. telecommunications supply chain. As part of that review, U.S. officials are asking telecom-equipment manufacturers whether they can make and develop U.S.-bound hardware, which includes cellular-tower electronics as well as routers and switches, and software outside of China, the people said.

The conversations are in early and informal stages, they said. The executive order calls for a list of proposed rules and regulations by the 150-day deadline, in October; so, any proposals may take months or years to adopt...

The documents also reveal how Omar's campaign worked to keep the story of her marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi out of the press, the Minnesota Star Tribune reports. The Star Tribune found little information about Elmi in public records and could neither confirm nor rebut the claim that he is Omar's brother...

Omar did not make her tax or immigration records available for the report...

Citing a tax code that was “discriminatory” against non-heterosexual married couples, Warren tweeted Saturday, “It wasn’t until marriage equality became law that gay & lesbian couples could jointly file tax returns—so they paid more in taxes. Our government owes them more than $50M for the years our discriminatory tax code left them out. We must right these wrongs.”...

Critics had accused Erdogan of refusing to give up control of Istanbul, Turkey's economic powerhouse and a crucial source of patronage for Islamic conservatives since he won the mayorship himself a quarter of a century ago.

But the Turkish leader conceded defeat this time, writing on Twitter: "I congratulate Ekrem Imamoglu who has won the election based on preliminary results."...

The White House declined to confirm that Trump had sent a letter to Kim... Kim "said with satisfaction that the letter is of excellent content," Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency reported. "Appreciating the political judging faculty and extraordinary courage of President Trump, Kim Jong Un said that he would seriously contemplate the interesting content," the agency said, without elaborating.

Despite the postponement, Morgan insists ICE's aggressive removal tactics to remove any individual, criminal or not, who has a court-ordered deportation won't stop. "I've got the green light to anyone that's here in violation of federal immigration law, I have the authority and the support to go after them, apply consequences, and remove them." "It's just not about the numbers, Morgan said. "We need to continue to do interior enforcement against anyone who is here illegally including families because [if] we do that, I promise the American people, we start removing people that had final orders including families, the numbers will go down, this crisis will be positively impacted."

The prevalence of human trafficking is difficult to measure. However, a number of international organizations have estimated that traffickers exploit a majority of human trafficking victims without moving them from one country to another...

In the U.S., traffickers prey upon children in the foster care system. Recent reports have consistently indicated that a large number of victims of child sex trafficking were at one time in the foster care system...

Tier 3 designations – the lowest possible designation – were given once again to China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela, among others. A few countries were added to the Tier 3 list, including Cuba...