August, 2019

The suspect, 26-year-old Timothy H. Miller, was arrested and faces charges of kidnapping, resisting arrest with violence and child neglect, according to a probable cause affidavit. The boy told police officers that he got off his school bus in Boynton Beach, Florida, on Wednesday and started walking when a man driving a white pickup truck stopped and offered him a ride. The man, later identified as Miller, told the child that he "gives kids rides all the time and not to worry because he won't do anything weird," according to the affidavit. The boy said Miller "seemed nice and had a friendly smile" so he got in the truck, but started to get uncomfortable when Miller asked him if he had any drugs and looked at him "strangely," the affidavit states.

A report of a pipe bomb shut down the upper level of the George Washington Bridge in both directions for about two hours on Thursday evening before police determined it was not a threat, authorities said. The suspected pipe bomb was reported to be on the New Jersey side of the bridge soon after 9 p.m., cops said. Traffic in the area snarled before police determined the pipe found at the scene was not explosive, authorities said. The pipe had caps on the ends of it, and police are working to find out how it ended up on the bridge, law-enforcement sources said.

Grocery store employees in Washington got a shocking surprise when they opened up shipments of bananas over the weekend: dozens of pounds of cocaine. Three Safeway grocery stores -- in Bellingham, Woodinville and Federal Way -- received the boxes of bananas that yielded the drugs, according to the King County Sheriff's Office. The store in Woodinville was first to call police on Sunday at about noon and say they'd found the suspicious, brown-papered bricks -- labeled with the letters "CK" -- among the boxes of bananas... Deputies tested the substance, which proved to be cocaine.

The news organization spent more money on ads supporting President Trump than any group, except the Trump campaign itself. The organization reportedly shifted its spending on Facebook in the past month in order to obscure its connection to $2 million in ads advocating for fringe conspiracy theories and promoting the president, NBC News reports. A recent investigation found that the Epoch Times had promoted conspiracy theories. Many of those who run the news organization are followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, who believe that Judgment Day is nigh, and that Trump is helping to accelerate its approach.

The U.S. Justice Department has indicted 80 individuals who are accused of conducting a colossal business email phishing and money laundering scam many of which came from alleged "princes of Nigeria." Raids were carried out Thursday in Los Angeles and 11 people were arrested according to Thom Mrozek, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.

Rick Gates, President Donald Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman, testified on Thursday that he personally told two lobbyists hired by Paul Manafort that a think tank they were representing was actually a front for the government of Ukraine.

During questioning at the ongoing trial of Greg Craig, the former Obama White House counsel, Gates said the lobbyists, Tony Podesta and former Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.), knew that the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine was controlled by Ukraine. Such ties would have required Podesta, Weber and their lobbying firms to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and disclose contracts and payments related to the work.

An Obama-appointed federal judge is forcing Wisconsin taxpayers to provide costly sex reassignment surgery and hormonal procedures for low-income transgender residents who get free medical care from the government. In a recently issued ruling U.S. District Judge William M. Conley writes that Medicaid, the publicly funded insurance that covers 65.7 million poor people, cannot deny the medical treatment needs of those suffering from “gender dysphoria.” Officials estimate it will cost up to $1.2 million annually to provide transgender Medicaid recipients in the Badger State with treatments such as “gender confirmation” surgery, including elective mastectomies, hysterectomies, genital reconstruction and breast augmentation.

The Russian consulting firm accused of bankrolling social media meddling in the 2016 presidential election spent less than $5,000 on candidate ads and rallies that would be subject to government auditing, the company argues in a court filing... Concord is charged with failing to file with the Federal Election Commission. The firm says some of the online ads listed in an indictment brought by special counsel Robert Mueller cost less than $10 each and added up to $2,930. Conjured-up rallies cost another $1,833 in payroll.

An armed woman opened fire in the Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, wounding four people and triggering a hunt for the suspect, police said. The shooting occurred shortly after noon, but Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman officer Rosario Cervantes said circumstances surrounding the gun violence were not immediately known. She said two of the four victims were female, and that none of the injuries were believed to be life-threatening.

This week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio rolled out new eligibility rules that will allow the city’s some 725,000 illegal alien residents to apply for subsidized, affordable housing — which has historically been reserved for American taxpayers.

The rules will no longer mandate that those applying to live in affordable housing show their credit rating, a legitimate Social Security number, and documents proving them to be a taxpayer. Instead, applicants will only have to prove that they paid rent on time every month for a year, a plan that is likely to allow thousands of illegal aliens to obtain affordable housing units over American citizens...

U.S. officials have confirmed that Israel was responsible for the bombing of an Iranian weapons depot in Iraq last month, an attack that would mark a significant escalation in Israel’s years-long campaign against Iranian military entrenchment across the region. The confirmation comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is strongly hinting that his country is behind recent airstrikes in Iraq. Two American officials said Israel carried out an attack on an Iranian weapons depot that killed two Iranian military commanders. The U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with the media.

The effect is not the same as the teleportation often seen in science fiction – where matter is moved through space – but instead is the transfer information about the quantum state of a particle. It could have huge and unimagined effects on the way we organise and transmit information, including the possibility of a vastly more complicated quantum internet...

While many who support this project claim they just want to see more “people who look like them” in publishing, that’s a fig leaf for something far stronger. We Need Diverse Books was started, according to its website, by a bunch of online Twitter activists after a 2014 BookCon event dared to allow three white men on a single panel.
[...]
The world’s biggest publisher and distributor of children’s books, like the rest of big corporate, clearly thinks it’s time to cash in on the identity politics trend. They don’t care about ideas, or about the children; they’re in this for the money.

That’s clear from a look at their offerings even if you strip out the politicized stuff — it’s a huge pile of trash. Cheap ideas, cheap writing, cheap characters, and cheap books...

The announcement came after Twitter and Facebook suspended nearly 1,000 accounts tied to a Beijing-backed disinformation campaign. YouTube has also faced pressure to remove Chinese state media advertisements from its videos. "Earlier this week, as part of our ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations, we disabled 210 channels on YouTube when we discovered channels in this network behaved in a coordinated manner while uploading videos related to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong," Shane Huntley of Google Security's Threat Analysis Group said in a blog post. "We found use of VPNs and other methods to disguise the origin of these accounts and other activity commonly associated with coordinated influence operations," Huntley added. Google's statement did not explicitly blame the Chinese government for the misleading accounts.

BIG: Court allows additional @JudicialWatch discovery into the many questions on Clinton email scandal! pic.twitter.com/atSuinbxF4

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) August 22, 2019

A Catholic priest in Michigan wrapped a teen boy in plastic and tape and kept him in a church janitor's closet against his will for more than an hour, investigators said Thursday, calling it a "sexually motivated crime." Father Brian Stanley, 57, of Coloma, faces a false imprisonment charge in the 2013 incident at St. Margaret's Church in Otsego, the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement. The teen's family asked Stanley to counsel him before he allegedly bound the boy in plastic and put masking tape on his mouth and eyes.

... MacCallum asked former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to respond to the former business executive's claims. "He's describing it like he was being used as a source and being inserted into a situation by the feds, and there are protocols for handling sources," Whitaker said. "All of this can be corroborated. That's the key. This whole situation has to be corroborated and the nice thing about John Durham is that he has the full picture of everything that was feeding into this investigation." When asked by MacCallum whether Byrne appeared credible, the former Iowa federal prosecutor said he was unsure. "It's hard for me to say," he remarked.

Police arrest 15yo Florida student for allegedly threatening to shoot up a school. An anonymous tipster on Discord app reported his comment to the FBI.

The comment was:

'I Dalton Barnhart vow to bring my fathers m15 to school and kill 7 people at a minimum' pic.twitter.com/5F7W5ZJnK8

— RT (@RT_com) August 22, 2019