August 20th, 2019

So much for Tesla's renewed solar power efforts getting off to a good start. Walmart has sued Tesla after rooftop solar panels on seven of the retailer's stores caught fire, allegedly due to poor safety practices. Tesla supposedly didn't ground its electrical and solar systems properly, according to Walmart, and regularly sent inspectors who "lacked basic solar training and knowledge." Walmart also asserted that Tesla's panels were rife with visible defects.

Noah McAdams was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia earlier this year. The 4-year-old's parents, Joshua McAdams and Taylor Bland-Ball, stopped chemotherapy two days into treatment. Instead, McAdams and Bland-Ball turned to medical marijuana and CBD oil... McAdams and Bland-Ball took Noah to Kentucky where they sought a second opinion. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office had asked for the public's help to locate the family after McAdams and Bland-Ball failed to bring Noah to the hospital for a medically necessary procedure on April 22. "The parents have further refused to follow up with the life saving medical care the child needs," the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office wrote on Facebook. "The parents have possible criminal child neglect charges pending"... The parents were found one week later and the state of Florida placed Noah in the custody of his grandparents, who were ordered in May to resume chemotherapy... Now, McAdams and Bland-Ball are back in court fighting to get their son back.

Trump directed the Department of Transportation to issue public guidelines within a year for commercial companies seeking a license to launch spacecraft with nuclear systems.
The memorandum also gives NASA 180 days to create an Interagency Nuclear Safety Review Board to ensure the safety of launching radioisotope power systems, fission reactors used for power and propulsion and more...

Unfortunately, the answer is likely that law enforcement simply does not yet have sufficient evidence to ensure a conviction of Maxwell. The bottom line is that prosecutors would need to prove that Maxwell knew Epstein abused the girls and that he used force, threats of force, fraud, or coercion to do so.

That isn’t as easy as it sounds, particularly if Epstein’s estate pays for Maxwell to have a top-flight legal team. Unlike Epstein, Maxwell does not have a prior conviction, which could have been used against Epstein at trial... Ultimately it will come down to Giuffre’s word against Maxwell’s...

Telstra yesterday blocked access to 4chan, 8chan and Voat, the blog Zerohedge and video hosting platform Liveleak. "We understand this may inconvenience some legitimate users of these sites, but these are extreme circumstances and we feel this is the right thing to do," Telstra networks and IT executive Nikos Katinakis said in a statement. Optus and Vodafone declined to name which domains they blocked but the same platforms also failed to load on their networks on Tuesday afternoon. The ban on 4chan was lifted a few hours later. Vodafone said while blocking requests normally came from the courts or law enforcement agencies "this was an extreme case which we think requires an extraordinary response".

Les Zaitz, publisher and editor of the Malheur Enterprise, denied any wrongdoing from his staff, after an attorney for Malheur County went to Sheriff Brian Wolfe with the allegations that reporters may have broken the law by using officials’ personal contact information to call and email them outside of business hours. “Suggesting that professional journalists are behaving as criminals in gathering vital information for the community appears to be an effort to silence and intimidate the Enterprise,” Zaitz said. The Enterprise had been investigating Greg Smith -- a Republican state legislator and director of the Malheur County Economic Development Department -- over potential conflicts of interest concerning government contracts.

The eight-page interim report, authored by former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), doesn't come to a definitive conclusion about whether anti-conservative bias exists on the platform. But it says the company "has taken some steps to address the concerns we uncovered"... In the report, Kyl outlines the raft of complaints that were lodged against Facebook during interviews with more than 130 conservatives. Those concerns include how the company ranks posts in its News Feed feature, and what it designates as spam or fake news. Some also took issue with how Facebook defines hate speech. But the report stops short of substantiating those criticisms and does nothing to suggest auditors found actual bias. Instead, it outlines many of the efforts Facebook has already undertaken to make its content moderation decisions more transparent to users.

Joel Morris, 30, was charged Monday with harassment, assault, and theft, according to NJ.com. Morris allegedly took New Brunswick Today editor Charlie Kratovil’s camera and then twisted his arm behind his back. Kratovil alleges his forearm and shoulder were injured in the incident. The journalist said he was invited to the Aug. 3 event at The Heldrich Hotel where Ryan was appearing by a public relations firm. He said he checked in at the event and recorded other speakers for a couple of hours without incident. But after Ryan took the stage, the guard began to question why he was there.

Here's the video which shows the guard confronting the journalist:

The suits claim that Epstein forcibly used a sex toy on one victim and confiscated the passport of another so that she couldn't leave his Caribbean island. One lawsuit even alleges that following his 2008 conviction on child prostitution charges, Epstein used his work-release program as a front for more sexual abuse. Victims' attorneys said the lawsuits aren't just about going after the multimillionaire's fortune... "We want to hold the Epstein organization to account first, it's not primarily about money," said attorney Stan Pottinger. Pottinger represents 20 Epstein accusers, including the three women who filed civil lawsuits overnight...

Situated at over 5,000 meters above sea level in the Himalayan Mountains, Roopkund Lake is home to the scattered skeletal remains of several hundred individuals of unknown origin. We report genome-wide ancient DNA for 38 skeletons from Roopkund Lake, and find that they cluster into three distinct groups. A group of 23 individuals have ancestry that falls within the range of variation of present-day South Asians. A further 14 have ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean. We also identify one individual with Southeast Asian-related ancestry. Radiocarbon dating indicates that these remains were not deposited simultaneously. Instead, all of the individuals with South Asian-related ancestry date to ~800 CE (but with evidence of being deposited in more than one event), while all other individuals date to ~1800 CE...

Individuals assigned to the Roopkund_A and RoopQkund_C groups cluster towards the top right of the PCA plot, close to present-day groups with Iranian ancestry, consistent with where populations with South Asian or East Asian ancestry cluster when projected onto such a plot13. Individuals belonging to the Roopkund_B group cluster toward the center of the plot, close to present-day people from mainland Greece and Crete

We searched near her dead mother’s estate east of here—and even at the bottom of a cliff in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, a few hours from Meyreuil, where her brother-in-law Al Seckel, giver of TED talks on optical illusions, reportedly fell to his death in 2015 after he was exposed as a swindler in Los Angeles. [His daughter, Elizabeth Seckel, built on her father’s work in optical illusion by pioneering “mirror box therapy”, which sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative and brought to Haiti after the earthquake in 2012 to help amputees with their phantom limb pain ...Seckel hosted a scientific conference on Epstein island with Gell-Mann, Leonard Mlodinow, who was Stephen Hawking’s co-author, and MIT’s Gerald Sussman.]

We also looked at the family tree of her other brother-in-law, an American astrophysicist whose genius rocket scientist father Frank Malina at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California pioneered what would become NASA before he fled to France with J. Edgar Hoover's G-Men on his heels... Their roots involved the pioneering, often reckless rocket scientists of the 1930s who were called the “Suicide Squad” for their risky work at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Among their circle: L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame; the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman; and Briton Aleister Crowley, known for black magic and a sex cult... Maxwell family observers don’t find it strange that Ghislaine and some of her sisters were drawn to larger-than-life, certifiably strange men. “They attach themselves to bizarre psychopaths like their father,” says a researcher who delved into the family years ago.

The daddy issues—and the mysterious death issues—began with Robert Maxwell... he very much wanted riches and fame. He achieved all of it, including a seat in the British Parliament. But two of his children died young... When Robert Maxwell mysteriously disappeared from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, and his naked body was retrieved floating in the waters off the Canary Islands in November 1991, he already had been drowning in debt. His business empire was on the verge of ruin and he’d stolen, Bernie Madoff-style, more than $400 million from his employees’ pension funds to forestall bankruptcy. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh had recently accused him of being a longtime Israeli intelligence agent...

Two of Maxwell’s sons, Kevin and Ian, were investigated for fraud involving their father’s empire after his death and both were cleared in 1996, although at one point Kevin was banned from running a company in the U.K. for eight years. Both landed back in court in 2015 and 2016 facing bankruptcy issues involving another U.K. financial company to which they owed money... two of her sisters, the twins Isabel and Christine, now 69, are the most accomplished of the family. They are internet content pioneers who started Magellan, one of the first search engines...

Convicted Australian paedophile George Pell will serve out his prison term after the state of Victoria's highest court rejected his appeal on Wednesday, in a 2-1 ruling. The Court of Appeal upheld the verdicts of the County Court jury that found Pell guilty on five child sex abuse charges last December.

However, Pell may continue his fight to walk from prison a free man. His lawyers could now take his appeal to the High Court in a final bid to have the cardinal's convictions quashed...

“I could certainly” support that he told reporters at the White House. “It’s much more appropriate to have Russia in. It should be the G8, because a lot of the things we talk about have to do with Russia.”

Trump said “if somebody would make that motion, I would certainly be disposed to think about it very favorably,” regarding including Russia in the group.

Russia was expelled from the old G8 format in 2014 after invading and then annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election...

Officials arrested former MLB pitcher Octavio Dotel during coordinated raids on suspected members of the crime ring led by César Emilio Peralta, Dominican newspaper Diario Libre reported. Former infielder Luis Castillo was also implicated in the drug-trafficking operation, though it remains unclear whether he, too, was detained. At a news conference Tuesday, the Dominican Republic’s attorney general, Jean Alain Rodríguez, described the players as front men for the drug ring, according to Diario Libre. The sweep that preceded the announcement marked the “largest operation against organized crime ever conducted in the country,” a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office said. It included searches of nightclubs, restaurants, shopping centers and apartments connected to Peralta in the National District, Santiago and La Romana, Diario Libre reported.

... they are actively distributing the bank Win32.Bolik.2 banking Trojan via the nord-vpn[.]club website, an almost perfect clone of the official nordvpn.com site used by the popular NordVPN VPN service. The cloned website also has a valid SSL certificate issued by open certificate authority Let’s Encrypt on August 3, with an expiration date of November 1.

"Win32.Bolik.2 trojan is an improved version of Win32.Bolik.1 and has qualities of a multicomponent polymorphic file virus," state the Doctor Web researchers who spotted the campaign. "Using this malware, hackers can perform web injections, traffic intercepts, keylogging and steal information from different bank-client systems."

The operators behind this malicious campaign have launched their attacks on August 8, they are focusing on English-speaking targets and, according to the researchers, thousands have already visited the nord-vpn[.]club website in search of a download link for the NordVPN clie...

Reid, during a newly published interview with Vice, specifically took aim at "Medicare-for-all" and calls by many candidates to decriminalize illegal border crossings. The blunt-talking former Nevada senator suggested any Democratic nominee running on these issues could face trouble. “People want a fair immigration system. They don’t want an open-door invitation for everybody to come at once,” Reid said in the interview with Vice. When asked if supporting decriminalization could be bad for Democrats in 2020, Reid said, “Of course it is.” Reid accused Democrats of not having their priorities in order going into the election.

This whole article from the NYTimes quoting AP is full of extreme bias. Extracting relevant snippets is almost too cringy, but here you go.

The vessel is expected to arrive at the Italian island of Lampedusa on Friday... The announcement came as at least 15 migrants jumped into the sea from the rescue ship Open Arms, which is named for the organization that runs it... Italy’s hard-line antimigrant interior minister, Matteo Salvini, whose government collapsed on Tuesday, has refused port access to the ship, even though six other European countries have agreed to take in the migrants...

The US State Department on Tuesday called on Turkish authorities to cease immediately any “unlawful activities” in Cyprus’ territorial sea and remove its drillship, Yavuz. Turkey has already established a presence in the region with its Yavuz and Fatih drillships and the Barbaros research vessel. On Monday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced that a fourth Turkish ship, the Oruc Reis research vessel, is on its way to the region...