August 17th, 2019

This is a mashup of various clips taken from Twitter at today's protests in Portland.

Mr. Marks said that, based on documents about the program he had received under the Freedom of Information Act, he had concluded that Admiral Turner “seems to be practicing what used to be called ‘a modified limited hangout’” when he called the agency's activity “a program of experimentation with drugs.”

“To be sure, drugs were part of it,” he said, “but so were such other techniques as electric shock, radiation, ultrasonics, psychosurgery, psychology and incapacitating agents, all of which were referred to in documents I have received.”...

Channel 4 News can reveal that the Metropolitan Police began a review of “available evidence” in 2015 after receiving a complaint over claims in court papers that a girl was “forced to have sex with Prince Andrew”. Channel 4 News also understands that lawyers for Virginia Roberts independently contacted the Metropolitan Police in 2016.

The Metropolitan Police said it “reviewed the available evidence” and decided that the matter “would not progress to a full investigation”...

But hidden within the article there's this little snippet:

Tonight, lawyers for Virginia Roberts told Channel 4 News she is “hopeful” that “the London authorities will view the abuse she suffered while in London … as a serious investigative matter.”

Hopefully there will be justice.

The brother of the leader of the Afghan Taliban is reported to have been among those killed in a bomb blast at a mosque in southwest Pakistan. Police said four people were killed and more than 20 injured on August 16 in the explosion at the mosque some 25 kilometers from the city of Quetta, the capital of restive Balochistan Province. Taliban leader Haibatullah was not in the mosque when the bomb went off but his younger brother, Hafiz Ahmadullah, was among those killed, according to Afghan Islamic Press and Reuters, which cited two Taliban sources.

UPS announced an investment in TuSimple, an autonomous truck startup, on Thursday in an effort to cut costs and time in the ever-increasing race for more-efficient ground deliveries. UPS has already contracted TuSimple to deliver packages between Phoenix and Tucson since May, UPS revealed in the announcement... Neither company commented on the size of the investment. In May, the United States Postal Service (USPS) contracted with TuSimple to drive five round trips between distribution centers in Phoenix and Dallas.

Hong Kong protesters may be in for an electrifying experience after Chinese riot police were pictured training with 'terrifying giant fork devices' designed to subdue humans and pin them to the ground... While unconfirmed, the 8-foot poles with U-shaped prongs are believed to be able to deliver an electric shock. The protests, now in their 11th week, have been alternating between the streets, subways, and airports of Hong Kong. While largely peaceful, there is a growing contingent of activists using violence and property destruction to protest the government, resulting in police tear gassings and beatings. As we have been noting over the last week, satellite images confirmed President Trump's warning that Chinese troops were massing on the Hong Kong border.

The 9th U.S. Court of Appeals’ ruling Friday night will allow the policy to take effect while lawsuits from states, medical groups and reproductive rights advocates continue. Chief Judge Sidney Thomas, a Bill Clinton appointee, said in a brief statement that none of its judges requested a vote on whether to hold a hearing on a request from Planned Parenthood for an emergency injunction.

Ultimately, when things start to really get bad it is inevitable that the mainstream media will place the blame directly at the feet of Trump...

China claims Taiwan as a breakaway province, and last month accused the United States of a “vain plot” to arm the island. The Trump administration approved more than $2 billion in lower-level arms sales to Taiwan last month, and allowed Taiwan’s leader to visit New York.

Approval of the latest sale also comes amid pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous part of China, and fears that China could launch a military crackdown there. Such a crackdown could embolden Beijing also to confront Taiwan, which is backed by the United States.

Taiwan requested 66 American-made fighter jets, which lawmakers have said is a test of U.S. resolve...

Nancy Parker, 53, was killed along with the pilot, Franklin J.P. Augustus, on Friday when the plane crashed into a field near the New Orleans Lakefront Airport. The cause of the crash in under investigation, local officials said.

Standing by the towering 15ft-high solid oak front door, Prince Andrew gives a nod and a cheery wave to the pretty brunette as she leaves the £63 million Manhattan mansion. He appears entirely at ease but then, for a split second, glances around the door as if to check that no one had witnessed the brief encounter. As well he might. For these exclusive pictures come from a never-before-seen video of the Duke of York staying at the New York home of convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. And some of the other images caught on camera make for disturbing viewing. The footage of the Duke of York – then the UK's Special Representative for International Trade – was taken less than an hour after Epstein, who had been convicted of sex with a child in 2008, left the house in the company of a young, shivering blonde woman.

Drones attacked oil and gas facilities at the Shaybah field in southeast Saudi Arabia but failed to disrupt production, the kingdom’s Oil Minister Khalid Al-Falih said. Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Aramco as the company is known, extinguished a small fire at a natural gas liquids plant at Shaybah on Saturday morning, it said in a statement. There were no casualties and oil operations were not interrupted by the incident.

The head of NASA is set to announce plans on Friday to name the U.S. space agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama as headquarters for its human lunar lander program, signaling progress in its drive to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024, three people familiar with the plan said. NASA also will designate its Johnson Space Center in Houston to oversee development of a spacecraft to launch astronauts off the moon’s surface to a platform in lunar orbit dubbed Gateway, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an “ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.” Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2019

The chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is demanding that President Trump either provide evidence to support his claim that he would have won New Hampshire's electoral votes in 2016 if not for voter fraud, or cease mentioning the claim. Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, wrote in a letter to the president reported by CNN that Trump risks "undermining the faith" of the American electorate in the fairness of U.S. elections... Weintraub's letter to the White House came a day after the president told supporters at a New Hampshire campaign rally that it wasn't their "fault" that he had lost the state in 2016, while insinuating that the state had been "taken" from his campaign.

The U.S. Commerce Department is expected to extend a reprieve given to Huawei Technologies that permits the Chinese firm to buy supplies from U.S. companies so that it can service existing customers, two sources familiar with the situation said. Commerce initially allowed Huawei to purchase some American-made goods in May shortly after blacklisting the company in a move aimed at minimizing disruption for its customers, many of which operate networks in rural America. An extension will renew an agreement set to lapse on August 19, continuing the Chinese company’s ability to maintain existing telecommunications networks and provide software updates to Huawei handsets.

The detection, called S190814bv, was likely triggered by the merger of a black hole and a neutron star, the ultra-dense leftovers of an exploded star. Though astronomers have long expected such binary systems to exist, they’ve never been seen by telescopes scanning the heavens for different wavelengths of light. (See the first image of a black hole's silhouette, made using a gigantic array of radio telescopes.)

However, astronomers also expect such systems to create ripples known as gravitational waves if and when the black hole and neutron star merge. These spacetime ripples were predicted more than a century ago by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which suggested that the collision of two extremely massive bodies would cause the very fabric of the universe to wrinkle.
[...]
Whatever the signal ends up being, it will be a first, Berry says: “It’s a win-win situation.”...

Here's a timelapse of images over 2.5 hr from May from @keckobservatory of the supermassive black hole Sgr A*. The black hole is always variable, but this was the brightest we've seen in the infrared so far. It was probably even brighter before we started observing that night! pic.twitter.com/MwXioZ7twV

— Tuan Do (@quantumpenguin) August 11, 2019