August, 2019

USA TODAY's headquarters in McLean, Virginia was evacuated Wednesday amid a heavy police presence after what authorities said turned out to be a mistaken report of a person with a weapon at the suburban Washington office. Fairfax County, Virginia police reported that they were clearing the building without incident... Lt. Eric Ivancic said police received a call at 11:56 a.m., reporting that a man with gun was seen at the building, which holds the headquarters for USA TODAY, its parent company, Gannett Co., and offices for a variety of other businesses. Police were continuing to investigate, but there has been no evidence of shooting and they have not located anyone with a weapon, Ivancic said.

The photos were taken by a member of the Shock Theater collective, a group that lays on haunted house tours and horror scenarios, but the company said it was not responsible for creating or posting the fliers. Suffolk County police said they weren’t alerted to the fliers, which now appear to have been removed.

Lambert went by the name “Eric Pope” and pretended he’d graduated from NYU law school while outfitting his fake website with bios ripped from other law firms’ websites, according to prosecutors. “Lambert’s de facto career was one of a grifter: he had never been to law school and certainly wasn’t an attorney,” US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement. “Today, Lambert admitted to his crimes and faces time in prison for his misdeeds.” He faces up to 20 years behind bars when sentenced on Nov. 4.

A suicide car-bomb attack struck the heart of Afghanistan again Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and injured a further 145. The morning rush hour onslaught – which targeted a police station in the capital of Kabul and was swiftly claimed by the Taliban – took the lives of four police officers while the rest were civilians, with women and children among the dead, the government stated. Images showed scores of people being carted from the carnage to nearby hospitals and expressions of exhausted devastation from within the remnants of the blast. A Taliban spokesperson, according to Reuters, said in a statement that their forces had bombed a “recruitment center” and boasted that a “large number of soldiers and police were killed or wounded.”

We have not yet found a source for this claim that the Taliban carried out this attack, yet the MSM is parroting it. There are also numerous accounts on twitter saying that no civilians are allowed in the area where the bomb was detonated. Is it a coincidence that this happened when just yesterday the Taliban says it has reached peace agreements with the U.S., and that the U.S. is preparing to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan?

Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke, who is embarrassed by my last visit to the Great State of Texas, where I trounced him, and is now even more embarrassed by polling at 1% in the Democrat Primary, should respect the victims & law enforcement - & be quiet!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2019

The U.S. Air Force has confirmed the ability of its newest F-35A fighter jet to deploy directly from the factory into combat...

Police believed the explosion was not an accident.

“It is still too early to tell who might be the perpetrators, but we take this incident very seriously and have launched an extensive investigation. We neither can nor will accept an act like this one,” Skov said...

A lawsuit filed late Monday against the Boy Scouts of America says hundreds of former Scouts have come forward in recent months with accounts of sexual abuse, allegations from across eight decades that reach nearly every state. Lawyers began collecting the accounts this spring as they prepared a suit, which they filed on behalf of a client who alleges his former scoutmaster plied him with drugs and alcohol before repeatedly sexually abusing him.

At a news conference Tuesday morning, the lawyers said they have nearly 800 other clients who were abused while Scouts. The suit says at least 350 abusers do not appear in the Boy Scouts’ disciplinary files, citing that as evidence that the organization has not adequately vetted its volunteers and hidden the extent of the sexual abuse scandal.

These details come from a DOJ case opened against Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan, and his co-conspirator, Ghulam Jiwani, believed to be deceased. The DOJ charged the two with paying more than $1 million in bribes to several AT&T employees at the company's Mobility Customer Care call center in Bothell, Washington.

The bribery scheme lasted from at least April 2012 until September 2017. Initially, the two Pakistani men bribed AT&T employees to unlock expensive iPhones so they could be used outside AT&T's network...

“Hong Kong’s crisis ... has continued for 60 days, and is getting worse and worse,” Zhang Xiaoming, one of the most senior Chinese officials overseeing Hong Kong affairs, said during a meeting in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen... The protests have drawn millions onto the streets in opposition to an extradition bill that would see suspects tried in mainland courts controlled by the Communist Party. Many feared it would undermine Hong Kong’s independent judiciary and was another step toward full mainland control of Hong Kong... Protesters are demanding a complete withdrawal of the extradition bill, an independent inquiry into the crisis, an investigation into what they say is excessive use of force by police, and for Lam to step down.

McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and AmerisourceBergen Corp. have proposed paying $10 billion to settle claims they helped to fuel the U.S. opioid epidemic -- the first sign of progress in resolving state lawsuits against the drug distributors, according to people familiar with negotiations. The companies, which deliver the majority of prescription medications to U.S. pharmacies, made the verbal proposal as part of talks with a group of state attorneys general, said three people familiar with the offer who asked that their names not be used because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

...a bipartisan proposal by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is gaining momentum following weekend mass shootings in Texas and Ohio that left 31 people dead. The emerging plan would create a federal grant program to encourage states to adopt “red flag” laws to take guns away from people believed to be dangers to themselves or others.

A similar bill never came up for a vote in the GOP-controlled Senate last year, but both parties express hope that this year will be different...

View from the fairing during the STP-2 mission; when the fairing returns to Earth, friction heats up particles in the atmosphere, which appear bright blue in the video pic.twitter.com/P8dgaIfUbl

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 3, 2019

Dominican University in California has added a new major, wholly focused on social justice that will begin accepting students in the fall... The school created the major after a “growing number” of students became interested in social justice careers... Students who major in social justice will have the chance to “examine the links between well-being, social justice, and diverse worldviews”... Additionally, students will “analyze social injustices and work toward positive social change.”...

Thanks to yet another FOIA lawsuit, more bad news about the tail end of collection's lifespan has been released. Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports the NSA's claims about its purge of over-collected data were as hollow as any of the dozens of public statements it has offered in response to a steady stream of leaked documents.

Even after the National Security Agency announced last year that it had purged records about Americans because some were inappropriately collected, the agency inadvertently continued to retain some of the data, according to a newly declassified report.
The National Security Agency deleted the remaining data in October 2018 after its inspector general discovered it, the report said. The problem surfaced just as the agency was separately discovering that it was again collecting phone records it had no authority to gather, which came to light last month.

For the first time, researchers have teleported a qutrit, a tripartite unit of quantum information. The independent results from two teams are an important advance for the field of quantum teleportation, which has long been limited to qubits—units of quantum information akin to the binary “bits” used in classical computing.

These proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate that qutrits, which can carry more information and have greater resistance to noise than qubits, may be used in future quantum networks...