August 31st, 2019

A suspect, who local police identified only as a white male in his mid-30s, was shot and killed at an Odessa movie theater, local police said. Odessa police chief Michael Gerke said that the tally of victims included three injured law enforcement officers and at least 21 civilians. It was not clear whether the number of dead included the shooter, nor was it clear whether that number was included among the 21 civilian victims. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) said the rampage began when two troopers attempted to stop a gold car on Interstate 20 westbound at 3:13 p.m.

Aaron Shamo, 29, will spend his life in prison after being found guilty of running a "continuing criminal enterprise," which carries a mandatory life sentence. He was also convicted of aiding and abetting the importation of a controlled substance, intentional adulteration of drugs while held for sale, and manufacture of a controlled substance after the jury found him guilty of 12 out of 13 charges.

Shamo and others were implicated in the drug crimes that consisted of importing fentanyl and opioids from China, then pressing them into pills and distributing them over the "dark web." Defense attorney for Shamo Greg Skordas said he had tried to avoid the life sentence by proving to the jury that his client was not the ringleader of the group of friends who manufactured and sold the drugs.

The Swedish Data Protection Authority (DPA) has issued a ban on facial recognition technology in schools after one of the country’s high-school students attempted to use the controversial software to keep track of attendance. Sweden’s Skelleftea municipality now faces a 200,000 Krona (€18,500) fine for violating the privacy of the 22 students engaged in the pilot program at Anderstorp High School...

Dramatic scenes near Victoria Park as a live round was fired by police skywards as a warning shot to protesters. #hongkongprotests

Video: SCMP/Kao Shan Shan pic.twitter.com/c2RDpUgPYO

— SCMP Hong Kong (@SCMPHongKong) August 31, 2019

A video on Facebook shows the moment protesters discover an undercover officer firing what appears to be pepper rounds.

Riot police sweep across the subway, in an attempt to make mass arrests.

unprecedented scene - riot police entered multiple stations, apparently trying to make arrests. police didn't allow press to report. #hongkongprotests#HongKong Masses Defy Police, Show China They're Ready to Fight https://t.co/JtIZo9EhGJ @bpolitics pic.twitter.com/pxrMMxVmWf

— Fion Li (@fion_li) August 31, 2019

“I had fat particles growing inside my lungs that were related to the glycerin in vape juice,” Maddie Nelson, 18, told Fox 13 Now. “So then my lungs were full of fluid. They said that my chest X-rays were one of the worst they’ve ever seen”... Nelson went to a local hospital in Payson in late July after several months of mild symptoms turned into a fever and vomiting. From there, she was transferred to Timpanagos Regional Hospital where she was admitted to the intensive care unit and placed in a medically induced coma for three days

Google will reportedly pay a fine of between $150 and $200 million to the Federal Trade Commission as a part of a settlement agreement. The FTC has investigating whether YouTube violated children's privacy laws with its data collection practices, and it could implement additional regulations as a part of the settlement. A report from Politico said FTC commissioners voted 3 to 2, along party lines, to approve the settlement, which is subject to review by the Department of Justice.

Nestor Lopez-Guzman is the sixth illegal immigrant to be arrested for “rape/sex abuse charges” since July 25... Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers took Lopez-Guzman, a 21-year-old Salvadoran national, into custody in Baltimore on Aug. 20, after his arrest for child sex abuse... according to police, the illegal immigrant molested a 12-year-old girl and her younger brother.

...looks like climate change just didn’t hold up in court.

Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks”... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news... By increasing the number algorithm checks, the military research agency hopes it can spot fake news with malicious intent before going viral.

“A comprehensive suite of semantic inconsistency detectors would dramatically increase the burden on media falsifiers, requiring the creators of falsified media to get every semantic detail correct, while defenders only need to find one, or a very few, inconsistencies,” the agency said in its Aug. 23 concept document for the Semantic Forensics program... The algorithm testing process will include an ability to scan and evaluate 250,000 news articles and 250,000 social media posts, with 5,000 fake items in the mix. The program has three phases over 48 months, initially covering news and social media, before an analysis begins of technical propaganda. The project will also include week-long “hackathons.”

The agency also has an existing research program underway, called MediFor, which is trying to plug a technological gap in image authentication, as no end-to-end system can verify manipulation of images taken by digital cameras and smartphones.

A shooting at a high school football game in Mobile, Ala., on Friday night wounded at least 10 people... Deangelo Dejuan Parnell, 17, was charged with nine counts of attempted murder, Lori Myles, the public affairs director for the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, said on Saturday. A motive for the shooting was not immediately known, nor was it was clear why Mr. Parnell had been charged with only nine counts of attempted murder after 10 people had been shot.

Will the MSM cover this mass shooting, or does it not fit the narrative?

The new tools will bolster industrial biotechnology by making it easier to vary the levels of proteins that microbes make, Liu and others say. They also promise an easy way to rewrite bacterial genomes wholesale, Meyer adds. One such project aims to alter genomes so they can code not just for proteins' normal 20 amino acids, but also for large numbers of nonnatural amino acids throughout the genome. That could lead to synthetic life forms capable of producing molecules far beyond the reach of natural organisms...

A reclusive, braces-wearing teen who lived behind a white picket fence with his devout Muslim family was secretly an ISIS sympathizer — and was plotting to launch a knife attack... Awais Chudhary, 19, planned to strike at the Dunkin’ just blocks from his East Elmhurst home, and was also targeting pedestrian bridges over the Grand Central Parkway to the Flushing Bay Promenade and the World’s Fair Marina, prosecutors said in court papers. Chudhary had texted back and forth with two undercover agents he believed were ISIS terrorists, sharing his attack plans and telling them that he’d pledged his allegiance to the terror organization, the feds said.

China's AI programs benefit greatly from its militaries integration with the private sector, something the US military has been struggling to cultivate. "If we do not find a way to strengthen the bonds between the United States government and industry and academia, then I would say we do have the real risk of not moving as fast as China when it comes to" artificial intelligence, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, explained to reporters Friday...

The woman walked into the office Friday afternoon and hurled a bottle filled with gasoline and a lit fuse. But the fuse disconnected from the bottle and didn't ignite, according to the report. Law enforcement officials believe she intended to cause harm but the incident wasn't related to other incidents where Homeland Security agencies were targeted... It wasn't clear what prompted the woman to launch the bottle. Security officers handcuffed her and subdued her until she could be taken into custody by Federal Protective Service officers who arrested her. The report did not list her name or what criminal charges she faced. No one was injured, though one person reported feeling ill from the smell of gasoline, and the offices were closed.

“If antifa gets to the point where they start killing us, I’m going to kill them next,” Kohfield, 32, said. “I’d slaughter them and I have a detailed plan on how I would wipe out antifa.” That threat pushed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task to take a series of extraordinary steps against Kohfield, including temporary seizure of a cache of his firearms under Oregon’s new “red flag” law aimed at preventing gun violence, The Oregonian/OregonLive has learned... The task force also had the ex-Marine committed to a veterans’ hospital in Portland. He spent the next 20 days there...

Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian refugee found guilty of shooting U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy to death in 1968, was wounded in a stabbing at a California prison on Friday, according to media reports... Replying to a request for confirmation that Sirhan was wounded, Jeffrey Callison, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said an inmate had been stabbed at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego. The wounded inmate was taken to a hospital outside the prison and is listed in stable condition, Callison said in a statement, and a suspect has been identified in the assault. In a follow-up email, Callison declined to identify the wounded inmate as Sirhan, citing department policy on not naming victims.