August 6th, 2019

A lawsuit filed late Monday against the Boy Scouts of America says hundreds of former Scouts have come forward in recent months with accounts of sexual abuse, allegations from across eight decades that reach nearly every state. Lawyers began collecting the accounts this spring as they prepared a suit, which they filed on behalf of a client who alleges his former scoutmaster plied him with drugs and alcohol before repeatedly sexually abusing him.

At a news conference Tuesday morning, the lawyers said they have nearly 800 other clients who were abused while Scouts. The suit says at least 350 abusers do not appear in the Boy Scouts’ disciplinary files, citing that as evidence that the organization has not adequately vetted its volunteers and hidden the extent of the sexual abuse scandal.

These details come from a DOJ case opened against Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan, and his co-conspirator, Ghulam Jiwani, believed to be deceased. The DOJ charged the two with paying more than $1 million in bribes to several AT&T employees at the company's Mobility Customer Care call center in Bothell, Washington.

The bribery scheme lasted from at least April 2012 until September 2017. Initially, the two Pakistani men bribed AT&T employees to unlock expensive iPhones so they could be used outside AT&T's network...

“We call this an artificial tongue because it acts similarly to a human tongue – like us, it can’t identify the individual chemicals which make coffee taste different to apple juice but it can easily tell the difference between these complex chemical mixtures,” says Alasdair Clark at the University of Glasgow.

The tongue has two different types of metal tastebuds, which provide more information about each sample and allows a faster and more accurate response. Once liquid is poured over the metals, measuring how they absorb light reveals some of its properties...

🚨BREAKING🚨: Homeland Security Chairman Thompson & Ranking Member Rogers sent a letter to 8chan owner Jim Watkins demanding he come before Congress and answer questions on the site’s extremist content.

cc: @infinitechan pic.twitter.com/8SDSI1rFLj

— House Homeland Security Committee (@HomelandDems) August 6, 2019

Today, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), Ranking Member of the Committee, sent a letter to Jim Watkins, the owner of the website 8chan, to request that he appear before the Committee to answer questions on what is being done to address the proliferation of extremist content on his platform. According to media reports, the killer who carried out the August 3rd domestic terrorist attack in El Paso, Texas, posted a manifesto describing his anti-immigrant, white supremacist beliefs on 8chan.

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Update 22:15
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“This message was identified as spam.” Just making sure you received it, @HomelandDems. pic.twitter.com/8K3JNpHPzp

— 8chan (8ch.net) (@infinitechan) August 7, 2019

Gov. Ron DeSantis is requesting that state police conduct an independent investigation into the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex abuse case and incarceration about a decade ago.

Specifically, the probe will focus on a work-release agreement Epstein had with the Sheriff’s Office and an agreement he reached with prosecutors.

“Floridians expect and deserve a full and fair investigation,” DeSantis said in a prepared statement.

Castro, whose district includes much of San Antonio, claimed the donors “are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.'” Castro is the twin brother of Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro and chairs his presidential campaign...

Thanks to yet another FOIA lawsuit, more bad news about the tail end of collection's lifespan has been released. Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports the NSA's claims about its purge of over-collected data were as hollow as any of the dozens of public statements it has offered in response to a steady stream of leaked documents.

Even after the National Security Agency announced last year that it had purged records about Americans because some were inappropriately collected, the agency inadvertently continued to retain some of the data, according to a newly declassified report.
The National Security Agency deleted the remaining data in October 2018 after its inspector general discovered it, the report said. The problem surfaced just as the agency was separately discovering that it was again collecting phone records it had no authority to gather, which came to light last month.

For the first time, researchers have teleported a qutrit, a tripartite unit of quantum information. The independent results from two teams are an important advance for the field of quantum teleportation, which has long been limited to qubits—units of quantum information akin to the binary “bits” used in classical computing.

These proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate that qutrits, which can carry more information and have greater resistance to noise than qubits, may be used in future quantum networks...

A federal judge has sentenced a former lieutenant to Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo " Guzman to 28 years in prison after rejecting prosecutors' claims that he offered Chicago street gang members $25,000 to beat a government witness. Judge Ruben Castillo said 35-year-old Jesus Raul Beltran Leon must pay the price for being a "very significant drug dealer" during the sentencing in Chicago on Tuesday.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is teaming up with the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota and The Ohio State University to produce digital elevation models of the world through a project called EarthDEM. By feeding satellite images of an area from different angles into the Blue Waters supercomputer, the team will be able to create 3D models of the terrain. Blue Waters is one of the most powerful and fastest supercomputers in the world, capable of performing more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second.

While the NGA is charged with producing geospatial intelligence and maps for other intelligence agencies, war fighters and policymakers, it also provides publicly accessible mapping data for navigation or disaster relief efforts...

In a three-page letter, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-.N.Y., asked the National Archives to complete its review of documents initially requested by the Senate last year. Nadler noted that the House will soon weigh legislation that would codify conduct rules for Supreme Court justices... according to Nadler, tens of thousands of documents still remain in the possession of William Burck, a private attorney hired to process Kavanaugh’s records for the Senate. Democrats bristled at the arrangement, arguing Burck’s proximity to Kavanaugh made it impossible for the attorney to be impartial. Burck served under Kavanaugh when they worked at the White House together under former President Bush.

“While many in law enforcement have faced attacks by this president, Pete Strzok has been a constant target for two years,” Aitan Goelman, a partner with Zuckerman Spaeder LLP and one of Strzok’s lawyers, said in a statement. “It’s indisputable that his termination was a result of President Trump’s unrelenting retaliatory campaign of false information, attacks and direct appeals to top officials.”

Goelman added: “The lawsuit shows that, in bowing to the president’s desires, FBI leaders trampled Pete’s free speech and due process rights in ways that should be deeply troubling to all in government, and indeed, to all Americans.”...

The newly-discovered ultramassive black hole resides in Holmberg 15A, a supergiant elliptical galaxy located in the center of a group of over 500 galaxies called Abell 85. Holmberg 15A’s ultramassive black hole is estimated to have a mass of 40 billion times that of the Sun. “This is the most massive black hole with a direct dynamical detection in the local Universe,” the researchers said... “This black hole is not only one of the most massive known, it is also 4 to 9 times larger than expected given the galaxy’s bulge stellar mass.”

Looking at the data from the Mass Shooting Tracker, widely utilized by the media, as of this writing, of the 72 mass shooters, perpetrators in shootings that killed or wounded 4 or more people, whose race is known, 21 were white, 37 were black, 8 were Latino, and 6 were members of other groups.

51% of mass shooters in 2019 were black, 29% were white, and 11% were Latino.

Three mass shooters were Asian, two were American Indian and one was Arab.

... are NOT planning to illegally subvert the 2020 Election despite all that has been said to the contrary. It all sounded good until I watched Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer, say terrible things about what they did in 2016 and that they want to “Make sure that Trump losses...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2019

...in 2020.” Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public. @peterschweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Trump. All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2019

Check out what @Google is up to for the 2020 election! #KAG2020 pic.twitter.com/roM2WNmUSP

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2019

Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey both attended services last weekend at Rev. Robert E. Fowler Sr.’s Victory Missionary Baptist Church in Las Vegas, while Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont held a town hall at the church last month. The Mercury News reported this week on the pastor's history, noting it's unclear whether the three candidates knew about his views -- which weren't exactly hidden. The Las Vegas Review-Journal covered the provocative pastor in 2017 and Fowler himself spoke publicly about the subject long before that.