August, 2019

The number of people moving to Taiwan from Hong Kong has risen rapidly — up 28 percent over the first seven months of this year compared with a year earlier — fueled in the past few months by anti-government protests that have swept the former British colony amid fear its autonomy from Beijing is being eroded.

Upwardly mobile entrepreneurs, salespeople and managers have said they are attracted by a better quality of life in the democratically run Taiwan — including cheaper property prices, business opportunities and a safer living environment...

“I want to move to Taiwan because Hong Kong is in a period of white terror and ruled by the police, which scares me,“ said 37-year-old retail salesperson Steven Chen, a Hong Konger who said he was working to move to Taiwan. “I saw no future for the city when it returned to China some 20 years ago, but now it’s dangerous to live in, as the police are not protecting people.”

Farmers have long contained its spread by quarantining and killing infected animals, but the disease's devastating march into East Asia is intensifying the search for another solution.

The virus hadn't been considered as high a priority for researchers until it turned up last year in China, home to half the world's pig population, likely by way of Eastern Europe and Russia. Since then, it has spread to other Asian countries including Vietnam and Taiwan, killing millions of pigs along the way. Though it does not sicken people, the disease is highly contagious and deadly to pigs...

“I know Alex so well. I’ve known Alex for like more than 20 years,” Mr. Rogan said Tuesday. “We’ve been hammered together so many times. That is the most misunderstood guy on the planet... “[Alex Jones] was saying that [Epstein and fixers] take a lot of famous people to this island and they have all these young girls that this guy hooks them up with,” Mr. Rogan continued. “He was talking about this years ago. Now, it is mainstream news. … This is a fact, man. … Some people don’t represent the best aspects of themselves right to people and then other people try and define them.”...

The world’s most-cited researchers, according to newly released data, are a curiously eclectic bunch. Nobel laureates and eminent polymaths rub shoulders with less familiar names, such as Sundarapandian Vaidyanathan.

Vaidyanathan, a computer scientist at the Vel Tech R&D Institute of Technology, a privately run institute, is an extreme example: he has received 94% of his citations from himself or his co-authors up to 2017, according to a study in PLoS Biology this month1. He is not alone. The data set, which lists around 100,000 researchers, shows that at least 250 scientists have amassed more than 50% of their citations from themselves or their co-authors, while the median self-citation rate is 12.7%.

The study could help to flag potential extreme self-promoters, and possibly ‘citation farms’, in which clusters of scientists massively cite each other, say the researchers. “I think that self-citation farms are far more common than we believe,” says John Ioannidis, a physician at Stanford University in California who specializes in meta-science — the study of how science is done — and who led the work. “Those with greater than 25% self-citation are not necessarily engaging in unethical behaviour, but closer scrutiny may be needed,” he says.

The data are by far the largest collection of self-citation metrics ever published...

Typically, family members, doctors and law enforcement have the power to petition a judge to deem the gun owner mentally unfit to own a firearm, at least for the time being... While they sound great on paper, they have a number of practicality issues. The biggest one is the lack of due process.

Just last week, a man in Florida had his firearms confiscated simply because he had the same name as a criminal... According to Ammoland, Jonathan Carpenter received a certified letter from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services saying his concealed handgun permit had been suspended for "acts of domestic violence or acts of repeat violations." Carpenter was forced to go to the Osceola County clerk's office to have a form filled out stating he wasn't the person law enforcement was looking for... Even though it was evident they had the wrong man, Carpenter was forced to hand over his firearms. There was no hearing or any kind of court proceeding... Here's where things get even more ridiculous. Carpenter's firearms had to remain in police custody until the plaintiff can say, in court, that he's not the man that she filed a complaint against. He'd then have to petition the court to get his firearms back...and he would have to bear the cost.

The announcement of the Act’s repeal marks a historic step in returning lawmaking powers from Brussels to the UK...

The tentative timing is that an announcement will be made in early September.

But the states did form a bipartisan, multistate unit called the Tech Industry Working Group months ago.

“As attorneys general, we need to evaluate and address specific conduct, utilizing our existing antitrust and consumer protection laws,” Jim Hood, the attorney general of Mississippi, a Democrat, said in a statement. He added that the working group was “looking at the intersection of technology and antitrust.”...

I promise not to do this to Greenland! pic.twitter.com/03DdyVU6HA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019

Virginia Giuffre — who has claimed Epstein and his gal pal Ghislaine Maxwell coerced her into being a “sex slave” when she was 15 — said in court papers that the girls who were flown in were molested by the financier and returned to France the following day. “The worst one that I heard from his own mouth was this pretty 12 year old girls he had flown in for his birthday,” she said, according to the document. “It was a surprise birthday gift from one of his friends and they were from France. I did see them, I did meet them,” she said. She said they were a gift from Epstein’s acquaintance Jean-Luc Brunel...

Until today, Italy has had 61 governments since World War II. We can now make that 62.

Brazil’s health watchdog Anvisa found that 20% of samples contained pesticide residues above permitted levels or contained unauthorized pesticides. It didn’t even test for glyphosate, Brazil’s best-selling pesticide, which is banned in most countries.

The silent hives, critics say, are a warning.

“The death of all these bees is a sign that we’re being poisoned,” said Carlos Alberto Bastos, president of the Apiculturist Association of Brazil’s Federal District...

Sandra Kuba, formerly a senior financial analyst in Disney’s DIS, +0.07% revenue-operations department who worked for the company for 18 years, alleges that employees working in the parks-and-resorts business segment systematically overstated revenue by billions of dollars by exploiting weaknesses in the company’s accounting software. Kuba said she has met with officials from the SEC on several occasions to discuss the allegations.

El Paso County sheriff’s spokeswoman Christina Acosta confirmed Monday that Patrick Crusius is on suicide watch in the El Paso County Jail. She said the watch was determined by medical staff, but she declined to elaborate citing privacy requirements.

The study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, used two measures to evaluate the amount of fluoride that women in six Canadian cities consumed during pregnancy. When their children ages 3 and 4 were given cognitive tests, researchers reported a small drop in IQ scores among kids whose moms had higher levels of fluoride exposure when pregnant.
[...]
“This decision to publish this article was not easy,” writes the journal’s editor, pediatrician and epidemiologist Dimitri Christakis of Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington...

A jury found John Kinsman and Maxwell Hare guilty of attempted gang assault, attempted assault and riot stemming from the confrontation near the Metropolitan Republican Club following a speech by former Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes in October 2018. Both men face up to 15 years in prison and will remain free until their sentencing.

The original unedited video:

NYPD's video shows that Antifa started the fight by throwing a bottle towards the proud boys:

NEW: NYPD video shows brawl between protestors—who police described as antifa—and Proud Boys https://t.co/0TMYQM5aTS pic.twitter.com/G4rAHcWE12

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 15, 2018

Last week, at the annual DEF CON Hacking Conference in Las Vegas — “hacker summer camp,” says Henderson — a hacker who goes by "MG” demonstrated an iPhone lightning cable that he had modified. After using the cable to connect an iPod to a Mac computer, MG remotely accessed the cable's IP address and took control of the Mac, as Vice reported in play-by-play fashion. MG noted that he could later remotely “kill” the implanted malware and wipe out all evidence of its existence. The enterprising hacker had a stash of so-called O.MG cables that he was selling for $200 apiece...

MSM wants a recession so badly this must have hurt so many feelings.

Jeffrey Epstein left his fortune of more than $577 million to his brother, according to Epstein's will obtained, obtained by The New York Post. The will, which is dated August 8 -- two days before Epstein was found dead by suicide in a federal jail in New York -- lists assets that he left to Mark Epstein, according to The Post. Among the assets, the will lists more than $56 million in cash and another $14 million in fixed income investments.

The manslaughter trial for a man involved in a deadly dispute last summer involving a handicapped parking spot in Florida, fueling renewed debate over the state's "stand your ground law," was set to begin Monday. Michael Drejka, a 49-year-old white man, initially was not arrested for fatally shooting Markeis McGlockton, a 28-year-old unarmed black man, on July 19, 2018. Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri declined to arrest Drejka, noting Florida's "stand your ground" law, which allows citizens to defend themselves if they fear “imminent death or great bodily harm." Prosecutors ultimately charged Drejka with manslaughter. Pinellas County State Attorney Bernie McCabe told USA TODAY last year he believes Drejka's self-defense claim can be disproved.