August 18th, 2019

The state pension age is set to rise to 75 over the next 16 years — based on a plan by new PM Boris Johnson ’s favourite think tank. It would go up to 70 just nine years from now as the change is phased in. A report out today by the Centre for Social Justice says Britain can no longer afford the current plan to raise the pension age to 67 in 2028 then 68 by 2046, so it must be speeded up. The pensions bill has ballooned from £17billion in 1989 to £92billion now, making up £4 of every £10 of welfare spending, the report adds. By 2023 it will cost £20billion more as the population ages and the birthrate falls. It proposes raising the eligible age to 70 by 2028 and 75 by 2035.

The National Park Service has closed several portions of Indiana Dunes National Park after a chemical spill killed hundreds of fish in the area, according to a statement by Portage, Indiana, a nearby city. The spill occurred last week at the east branch of the Little Calumet River, about three miles upstream from Lake Michigan, Indiana Dunes National Park confirmed in a statement. The National Park Service has closed the Portage Lakefront, the Riverwalk beach area and waters out to 300 feet. The company responsible is ArcelorMittal, a steel and mining company headquartered in Luxembourg. In a statement released Friday, the company said the incident was due to a failure in a blast furnace water recirculation system at its steelmaking plant in nearby Burns Harbor.

James Reardon Jr., 20, has been charged with telecommunications harassment and aggravated menacing and is being held in the Mahoning County Jail on $250,000 bond with a court hearing planned for Monday morning. On Friday, the FBI Violent Crimes Task Force raided Reardon’s house and seized a cache of weapons and ammunition, including dozens of round of ammo, multiple semi-automatic weapons, a gas mask and bulletproof armor... Police initially became aware of Reardon on July 11 when he posted a video on Instagram of a man shooting a semi-automatic rifle with sirens and screams in the background. He tagged the Jewish Community Center of Youngstown in the post.

Scuffles break out on 40th weekend of #YellowVests protests pic.twitter.com/66pK1wa6jD

— RT (@RT_com) August 17, 2019

Paris, #Acte40 #ActeXL

A Samedis#Acte41 #ActeXLI #WeAreAllAssange #Anonymous #GiletsJaunes #ISF #RIC pic.twitter.com/VcCjedJc4x

— GiletJaune (@AnonGilet) August 17, 2019

Voici un autre angle. Charge, gazage et la femme traînée au sol

Paris, #Acte40 #ActeXL

A Samedis#Acte41 #ActeXLI #WeAreAllAssange #Anonymous #GiletsJaunes #ISF #RIC pic.twitter.com/sbnYmkEoKQ

— GiletJaune (@AnonGilet) August 17, 2019

Live #acte40 #GiletsJaunes #Paris https://t.co/Di4qqHrJ3G

— 💎 gem (@G3MM4_gtto) August 17, 2019

An accusation of assault against CNN host Don Lemon in the Hamptons last summer has been corroborated by a second man.

Lemon was accused by Dustin Hice, who worked as a bartender at the time, of grabbing his own genitals and making sexually explicit comments to him. Hice filed suit against Lemon last week seeking unspecified damages resulting from the encounter...

#METOO

With assistance from the Texas Military Department and Texas A&M's Cyberresponse and Security Operations Center, the information resources department is deploying resources to those jurisdictions most seriously impacted, though the state did not specify where they are...

Google has released the results of a large-scale study about password habits that shows why hackers use 'password-spraying' attacks on online accounts: many users stick with the same password, even when they're warned it's been compromised.

Password spraying has emerged as an effective technique to brute-force or guess passwords, as well as to bypass systems that lock accounts after too many wrong guesses.

When it comes to CRISPR, there’s the US, China—and everybody else. A recent analysis shows the US still holds more CRISPR-related patent applications (872 versus China’s 858). For comparison, all of Europe has 186 patents. The same study shows US-based scientists have released 2,976 CRISPR-related scientific papers to their Chinese counterparts’ 2,059. Japan, in third place, has 228. In some areas, such as agriculture and industrial applications, China holds more patents and has published more papers than anyone else.

Patents and papers alone do not make a science superpower. Other important factors include the backing of government organizations and educational institutions’ renown. Traditionally, US universities have drawn top scientists from around the world, but for CRISPR that seems to be changing. Chinese universities have successfully enticed Chinese gene-editing scientists to return from the US, and international scientists are immigrating to China to do their research. In its latest five-year plan, the Chinese government highlighted gene editing as a focus point and committed to easing the surrounding bureaucratic framework...

Proud Boys protest organizer Joe Biggs said his group sought national attention and they got it... “Look at President Trump’s Twitter,” Biggs said in a tweet that went viral. “He talked about Portland, said he’s watching antifa. That’s all we wanted. We wanted national attention, and we got it. Mission success”... Mayor Ted Wheeler was less pleased at Trump's perspective. He described the contentious rallies as "potentially dangerous and volatile"... Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio promised monthly rallies until Portland, a liberal city with a strong antifa following, is freed from the group's "grip."

A man in Daytona is facing charges after the Volusia County Sheriff's Office arrested him on Friday for threatening to commit a mass shooting in a series of text messages. Tristan Scott Wix, 25, was arrested after the sheriff's office was alerted to several messages he sent detailing his plans to shoot at a large crowd and kill as many people as he could. "I'd wanna break a world record for longest confirmed kill ever," one of the messages said in part, according to the sheriff's office... After his arrest, the sheriff's office says Wix told them he didn't own any firearms but is fascinated with mass shootings.

Although Iowa established limits on asset forfeiture, the practice is alive and well in the state...