June, 2019

The attack happened in front of Déja Vu nightclub in Allentown at about 1:56 a.m. and all of the victims are expected to survive, authorities said... "This does not appear to be an indiscriminate shooting; it appears that at least one individual was a target," according to a statement by Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin. "This is not the work of one armed suspect, but it appears that there were several shooters, likely three in number."

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of an unnamed Jane Doe born in 1979, outlines her lifetime of alleged suffering in Scientology where she was subjected as a child at the Clearwater headquarters to abuse inherent to auditing, Scientology's spiritual counseling that can more resemble interrogation. It states she joined the church's clergy-like Sea Org in California at 15, where people worked 100 hours a week for $46. She was at times held against her will. When she officially left Scientology in 2017, Doe was followed by private investigators and terrorized by the church as it published “a hate website” falsely stating she was an alcoholic dismissed from the sect for promiscuity, according to the complaint.

The president has signaled that he wants to curb the nation’s dependency on food stamps and wants those coming into the country to be self-sufficient.

The president told Breitbart News in an Oval Office interview that he does not want any immigrants coming into the U.S. to be dependent on welfare programs.

“I don’t want to have anyone coming in that’s on welfare,” Trump told Breitbart News in March...

Majorities of Americans across nearly all key demographic groups, except for Republicans, support allowing transgender men and women to serve in the U.S. military. Republicans (43%) are far less likely than Democrats (88%) and independents (78%) to support allowing trans servicemembers.

Ministry of Health communications director Carlos Suero told CNN on Wednesday that toxicology tests were being run on the samples to see if there’s anything out of the ordinary. The FBI’s involvement in the case was announced last week — with law enforcement sources telling The Post that agents were collecting blood samples from those who have died under mysterious circumstances.

Former Interpol President Meng Hongwei confessed to accepting more than $2 million in bribes and expressed regret for his crime, a Chinese court said Thursday... Elected president of the international police organization in 2016, Meng disappeared into custody after traveling to China from France at the end of September. Interpol was not informed of Meng’s detention and was forced to ask China about his whereabouts. The Tianjin court said Meng had abused his positions, including as a vice minister of public security and maritime police chief, to curry favor for others in return for bribes.

Visa seems to do everything on a massive scale. Last year, it moved $11.2 trillion over its payment rails across more than 200 countries for purchases ranging from cups of coffee to cars. Now it’s eyeing an even bigger market: cross-border, business-to-business (B2B) transactions, where banks transfer money on behalf of corporate customers. Visa says it’s entering a $125 trillion market and using distributed ledger technology—software where transactions must be confirmed by multiple computers on a network to be considered final—to make these payments faster, cheaper and more transparent...

One of the things learned since Apollo that Bezos highlighted is that there are deposits of water ice at the bottom of craters on the moon.

"We can harvest that ice and use to make hydrogen and oxygen, which are rocket propellants," Bezos said.

Blue Origin is developing its "Blue Moon" lunar lander, which Bezos unveiled last month. Bezos said Blue Moon is powered by a BE-7 engine, which uses hydrogen and oxygen as its two fuel sources...

So when do consumers get to use such an engine on earth?

The planets are orbiting a nearby star known as Teegarden’s Star. The star was first discovered back in 2003, but it wasn’t until much more recently that scientists have been able to see what may be orbiting it.

Teegarden’s Star is only around 12 light-years away, and it’s also incredibly old. Researchers believe the star to be at least eight billion years old, meaning that the planets surrounding it have likely had plenty of time to foster life. The star is rather tiny compared to our own Sun, with a mass less than 10 percent of our home star... Temperatures on the planets are right in the sweet spot where liquid water could flow on their surface, and they’re rocky worlds roughly the same size as Earth...

Jackson Cosko, 27, hacked into Senate computers and doxxed the lawmakers out of anger over their roles in US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings... During these break-ins, Cosko copied dozens of gigabytes of data, including the contact info for many sitting senators, court documents show...

After growing angry over the GOP’s handling of the nomination process he posted the personal info of Graham (R-SC), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and now-former Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch on Wikipedia. He then released the info about Kentucky Sens. McConnell and Paul...

He didn't act alone. Remember Sheila Jackson Lee handing an envelope to Crazy Blasey Ford's attorneys earlier the same day?

In a 7-2 ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court decided that a 40-foot World War I memorial cross that has stood on public land in Maryland for 94 years does not violate the First Amendment. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said the memorial, also known as the “Peace Cross,” has become a prominent community landmark and should be upheld.

Iran made a very big mistake!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2019

According to Business Insider:

However, Iran and the US sharply differ over whether Iran had any right to take action, based on a technical argument over whose airspace the aircraft was in... The Guard's website, Sepah News, said it shot down a "spy" drone when it flew over the southern Hormozgan province, located by the Gulf, Reuters reported... IRNA, Iran's state news agency, also said the Guard struck the RQ-4A Global Hawk drone when it entered Iranian airspace, according to the Associated Press (AP)...

Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander of Revolutionary Guard, said in a televised speech that Iran does "not have any intention for war with any country, but we are ready for war," according to the AP...

The US has, however, denied flying any aircraft over Iranian airspace. It said instead that a US Navy drone — a [MQ 4C Triton drone] — was shot down in international airspace in the nearby Strait of Hormuz...

...there’s been no shortage of classified satellites to keep Molczan and his colleagues busy during the past 30 years. In fact, the National Reconnaissance Organization (NRO)—a government intelligence agency formed in 1961 that was so secretive its existence was classified until 1992—launched its most recent spy satellite just last month. Molczan and his colleagues were ready to track it...

So how does one begin tracking an object whose orbit is classified? The first step is to look for clues about the satellite’s trajectory that are publicly available. The most obvious place to start is with the rocket launch itself. Rockets are huge machines and a launch can be seen, heard, and felt for miles around, and details about the time and location of rocket launches are usually published weeks in advance...

Molczan said he wasn’t concerned that his activities pose a threat to others’ safety and said he’s never been contacted by a government official about his pastime. After all, if he and a loose network of amateurs are able to track these satellites so efficiently, it would be trivial for a national intelligence agency to do the same...

Today, amateur spy satellite hunters are tracking more than 360 satellites, rocket bodies, and other launch debris in their secret orbits. In the future, satellite hunters will have their work cut out for them as low Earth orbit becomes increasingly crowded with new spy satellites launched on a new generation of commercial rockets. The US military manifest already has dozens of launches on its schedule through 2023, DARPA is planning to launch a fleet of cheap spy satellites called Blackjack starting in 2021, and now the private sector is even starting to get in on the spy satellite business...

If you go outside near sunrise/sunset you can watch satellites fly overhead too. Go to heavens-above.com, put in your approximate location in the top-right, and click on any of the satellites on the main page. It gives you the time, altitude (in degrees above the horizon), and approximate cardinal direction. They've got lots of different satellites like the North Korean ones, Hubble, and ISS.

Over the past week, more than 180 Haitians have been arrested by Border Patrol agents at the Del Rio Station in Texas, a figure greater than the number of Haitians apprehended over the past three years nationwide, a Department of Homeland Security official told Fox News Wednesday. The apprehensions coincide with a slew of violent protests and uprisings in Haiti demanding that President Jovenel Moïse resign over allegations of government corruption.

Walmart Inc. came to dominate retailing through its mastery of logistics, the complicated choreography of getting goods from farm or factory to the consumer. But even the world’s biggest store doesn’t make money selling its wares online in the U.S., largely due to runaway shipping costs. So Walmart is turning to robots...

“This area has the least number of obstacles and the most certain return on invested capital in the near term,” said Mike Ramsey, an analyst with consultant Gartner Inc. “If you’re looking to start a business where you can actually generate revenue, this has fewer barriers than the taxi market.”...

Robert Shepherd at Cornell University and colleagues have developed a robot that is powered by its own artificial circulatory system.

It is powered by flow batteries, systems that consist of two electrodes and a liquid electrolyte that flows between them. As the liquid moves around, it powers pumps present in the robotic fish’s tail, dorsal and pectoral fins...

Last year, I shared my list of cheat sheets that I have been collecting and the response was enormous. Nearly a million people read the article, tens of thousands shared it, and this list of AI Cheat Sheets quickly become one of the most popular online!...

Over the past few months, we totally redesigned the cheat sheets so they are in high definition and downloadable. The goal was to make them easy to read and beautiful so you will want to look at them, print them and share them.

The project aims to design an urban system which integrates decentralised food, water and energy flows in order to create a nearly fully self-sufficient neighbourhood. It works based on the principle of “circularity”—recycling water, materials, and waste as much as possible within the system.

“Our current simulations show it should be possible to become 100 percent power, heat and water, and 50% food self-sufficient,” de Graaf said. “Living in a Smarthood will instantly reduce one’s ecological footprint by near 40 percent. We envision it as the circular, resilient neighborhood of the future, that solves many of the 21st century’s greatest challenges.”

The simulations demonstrate the potential viability of this model—the next step, which the de Graaf and his team are working on now, is to execute it on the ground in the Netherlands, and, from there, to encourage neighborhoods around the world to take it up...