August, 2019

“Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale” by Donald Barr has been thrust into the spotlight in the wake of the convicted pedophile’s apparent suicide, and eBay sellers — quick to link the two men — are now hawking it for as much as $4,999, Vice’s Motherboard reported... “Parallels have been drawn between the plot of the novel and the current allegations of sex trafficking brought against the now-deceased Jeffrey Epstein,” one listing says...

The fantasy novel portrays an Earthling named John Craig, who is sold into slavery on a planet called Kossar. Craig falls in love with Lady Morgan Sidney — a Kossar leader described as having “high breasts and long thighs.” Craig goes along with Lady Morgan’s demands to sexually assault a teenage slave as part of a clinic used to “breed” people, Motherboard said. The novel includes other instances of rape.

Donald Barr and Epstein are loosely linked by their time working at the elite Dalton School in Manhattan. Donald served as headmaster there from 1964 to 1974, while Epstein began teaching math and science there three months after Donald left.

A federal appeals court sided with the Trump administration on Friday in the legal battle over its efforts to limit asylum claims from Central America – blocking, for now, a nationwide injunction that blocked the implementation of the rule.

Last month a California federal judge blocked the rule that would require migrants to first apply in one of the countries they cross on their way to the U.S. – with certain exceptions. The rule is tailored to target Central Americans from the Northern Triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras who would travel across multiple countries, including Mexico, before claiming asylum in the U.S.

The fingerprints of more than 1 million people — as well as facial recognition information, usernames and passwords, and personal information of employees — were detected by security researchers working with vpnmentor on a publicly accessible database for biometrics lock system Biostar 2... The information was unprotected and largely unencrypted, enabling researchers to add new users with new fingerprint data, edit existing user accounts, and see data from organizations partnering with Biostar 2 in the US and Indonesia.

President Donald Trump held a conference call Wednesday amid a plunge in the stock market with three of Wall Street’s top executives -- JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon, Bank of America Corp.’s Brian Moynihan and Citigroup Inc.’s Michael Corbat. The three chief executives were in Washington for a previously scheduled meeting with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on banking secrecy and money laundering, according to people familiar with the matter. On a conference call, they briefed the president, who was at his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey... Moynihan, speaking in a Bloomberg Television interview on Friday, said the turmoil has been driven by issues outside the U.S., and that recession risks are low.

Last year, Amazon enlisted an army of fulfillment center employees to write positive comments about working in its warehouses. They are called “FC Ambassadors.” But the program has backfired after going viral this week. The ambassadors were ridiculed for writing “propaganda for amazon” and some were even asked if they were being held at gunpoint to write their tweets. Other users pointed to the flaws in the system. Some of the ambassador accounts appear to have changed hands, leading to confusion over whether the accounts are real.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday was to meet U.S. top advisers about negotiations with the Taliban and the potential for a political settlement that could prompt a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, a senior administration official said. Trump has been adamant that he would like to withdraw U.S. forces, possibly ahead of the November 2020 election, although a pullout would raise concerns among some in the national security community that the United States could be sacrificing gains it has made there.

Last week, model Josh Kloss came forward and accused Katy Perry of sexual misconduct at a party they were both attending. Now, a female TV host from Georgia – the country – has accused Perry of harassment at an industry party.

According to Russian publication Rossiyskaya Gazeta, via Consequence of Sound, a woman named Tina Kandelaki came forward and alleged that Perry had drunkenly tried to kiss her, as well as touch her inappropriately, at an industry party. While Kandelaki says she managed to fight Perry off, the pop giant allegedly continued to harass and behave inappropriately with other people at the event.

President Trump said Thursday that he had no fear that Chinese economic retaliation in the ongoing trade war would lead to a recession in the U.S. He argued that China was unlikely to retaliate in the first place and it would do more damage to itself if it did. "No, the longer the trade war goes on the weaker China gets and the stronger we get," Trump told reporters. "I have a feeling it is going to go fairly short." Trump noted that talks were currently happening between the two nations, and further ones were expected in two weeks...

Two suspicious packages reported in a New York City Subway station during Friday's morning rush and a third in another location a short time later were all determined to be empty rice cookers and not explosives, police said. The New York City Police Department is looking to talk with a man who can be seen on surveillance video placing one rice cooker on the mezzanine and another of the platform of the Fulton Street Subway station in Manhattan's Financial District. YPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism John Miller said the man, described as white with dark hair and in his 20s or 30s, is "not a suspect, but certainly somebody we want to interview."

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Update 18:00
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Cops believe Larry Griffin II, of Bruno, is the same man caught on CCTV leaving two rice cookers in a subway station, sparking an evacuation in Lower Manhattan around 7 a.m. during the rush-hour commute. According to police in West Virginia, Griffin was charged in 2017 for showing a video to a minor that involved him having sex with a chicken. The case is still pending.

Silencing me & treating me like a criminal is not what she wants for me. It would kill a piece of me. I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in--fighting against racism, oppression & injustice. https://t.co/z5t5j3qk4H

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 16, 2019

On July 30, NASA captured an image of the bloom from space. At the time, the bloom covered 300 square miles, roughly the size of New York City. By Aug. 13, the bloom had doubled to more than 620 square miles, according to NASA. That's eight times the size of Cleveland, which sits on the shore of Lake Erie.

Outbreaks of microcystis cyanobacteria, the organism responsible for harmful algae blooms, has become a yearly occurrence on Lake Erie. Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a severe bloom this summer, which became a reality in July primarily as a result of calm winds and abundant rainfall.

Citing conflicts of interest reminiscent of the "Uranium One" transaction, Senator Chuck Grassley announced he is probing the Obama admin’s decision to approve the sale of a sensitive U.S. tech company to the Chinese & an investment firm run by the sons of Joe Biden and John Kerry.

"The direct involvement of Mr. Hunter Biden and Mr. Heinz in the acquisition of Henniges by the Chinese government creates a potential conflict of interest. Both are directly related to high-ranking Obama administration officials. The Department of State, then under Mr. Kerry’s leadership, is also a CFIUS member and played a direct role in the decision to approve the Henniges transaction."

The lawsuit was filed by state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra in federal court in Northern California just days after the Trump administration published a new rule that could make it harder for many immigrants to get legal status in the United States... Gov. Gavin Newsom also criticized the federal policy change in a statement: “This latest move by the federal administration to demonize immigrants is personal for us, in a state where half of our children have at least one immigrant parent,” the governor said. “This new rule, designed to create fear in immigrant families, is cruel and threatens our public health. That is not who we are in California, and not who we are as Americans.”

Fitch Ratings, examining the direction but not magnitude of central bank shifts, found that more than a third of them have loosened monetary policy in the past six months. Those central banks range from the U.S. to Turkey, with only Norway and the Czech Republic going in a different direction by raising interest rates... “Deterioration in global growth prospects, rising uncertainty about the future direction and impact of trade policy and a slump in global manufacturing and trade have all contributed to this very widespread shift in central bank policy direction,” the Fitch report said.

Breaking a long silence about a high-profile National Security Agency program that sifts records of Americans’ telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists, the Trump administration on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down — but asked Congress to extend its legal basis anyway... The unclassified letter, signed on Wednesday by Dan Coats in one of his last acts as the director of National Intelligence, also conceded that the N.S.A. has indefinitely shut down that program after recurring technical difficulties repeatedly caused it to collect more records than it had legal authority to gather. That fact has previously been reported, but the administration had refused to officially confirm its status.

South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg reportedly helped create an alert system that would notify families if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided his residents' homes or businesses. The "phone tree," according to The Daily Beast on Wednesday, was one of several actions Buttigieg took to protect illegal immigrants in his town. Phone trees consist of an automated calling system that helps spread messages quickly and efficiently. Those would presumably help alert immigrants to the type of surprise raids that resulted in nearly 700 arrests in Mississippi.

Two more women are suing Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, claiming in their $100 million suit that they were lured to his home under false pretenses and sexually assaulted. The women were both working as hostesses at the now-shuttered Coffee Shop in Union Square when they were recruited by a woman in June 2004. They are not identified in the complaint filed late Thursday in Manhattan federal court. The recruiter, identified under the pseudonym Sue Roe, told the pair that her “boss” liked to give young girls “opportunities” — and offered them hundreds of dollars in cash in exchange for massaging him at his East 71st Street mansion, the suit said.

During his rally in New Hampshire on Thursday, Trump mocked an attendee as being overweight when a heckler caused a disruption. It turned out that Trump was actually mocking one of his supporters. Dawson, who was wearing a “Trump 2020” T-shirt, told Fox News after the rally that he has no hard feelings against the president.

A statement from an unnamed spokesman published by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency says that as a result of South Korea’s participation in the annual military drills, “The implementation of the historic Panmunjom declaration is now at a deadlock,” and “we have nothing to talk any more with the south Korean authorities nor have any idea to sit with them again,” according to an English-language translation.

The city’s DNA database has grown by nearly 29 percent over the last two years, and now has 82,473 genetic profiles, becoming a potentially potent tool for law enforcement but one that operates with little if any oversight.

The New York Police Department has taken DNA samples from people convicted of crimes, as well as from people who are only arrested or sometimes simply questioned. The practice has exposed the Police Department to scrutiny over how the genetic material is collected and whether privacy rights are being violated, civil liberties lawyers said...