News You Can Use

[Joel]

WikiLeaks Offers to Hire James Comey After Trump Fired Him

James Comey may have just been fired by President Donald Trump from his position as FBI Director, but he already has a new job offer from a surprising source: WikiLeaks. Shortly after he was fired, Julian Assange tweeted that he would be happy to offer Comey a new job if he wanted to continue to properly investigate the U.S. government from WikiLeaks’ D.C. office.

WikiLeaks would be happy to consider hiring James Comey to help lead its DC office should he like to properly investigate the US government.
4:36 PM - 9 May 2017

The tweet was a bit of a surprise, considering that around the same time today, WikiLeaks retweeted a tweet from March 20 that called out Comey for misleading Congress about Republican emails not being released in 2016:

FBI Dir Comey mislead Congress today when he stated that emails on Republicans were not released during 2016. Proof:
http://archive.is/jmZse
2:17 PM - 20 Mar 2017

WikiLeaks also announced Comey’s firing with the following tweet, which pointed out a highly criticized statement he had made about WikiLeaks:

FBI Dir James Comey has been fired by President Trump (coincidentally, or not, shortly after calling WikiLeaks "intelligence porn").
4:07 PM - 9 May 2017

WikiLeaks also stated that it would welcome any information from Comey or other FBI officers about exactly why he was fired:

If James Comey or any other former or current FBI officers have information as to why he was fired, we want to help: https://wikileaks.org/#submit
4:28 PM - 9 May 2017

This tweet runs counter to the rumor often shared during the primary and the general election that WikiLeaks was not at all interested in any information that might be damaging to Trump.

Comey’s tenure this past year has been full of rumors, including unfounded rumors that he and WikiLeaks were working together. In October and November, some people believed that Comey’s announcement about the FBI investigating Clinton’s emails was timed to hurt her chances at being re-elected. But then after Trump was elected, Comey’s investigation into potential ties between Trump and Russia fueled rumors that Comey was siding with Democrats. It seemed that no matter what he did, his decisions sparked a lot of rumors.

Assange’s offer to hire Comey might quiet unfounded rumors that WikiLeaks was working with Russia, since Russia’s involvement with Trump’s campaign was exactly what Comey was last investigating when he was fired. (Comey doesn’t need to take Assange’s offer, however. His net worth is high enough to support him and his family, even without a salary.)

The bottom line is that rumors about Comey seem to be flip-flipping a lot lately. At one point, people speculated that Comey was on the Republicans’ side. Now that he’s been fired by the Republican President, rumors are pretty much flipped. Ultimately, this makes it seem that Comey was likely not on any political side, but just trying to do his job in a volatile and difficult environment.

Assange, meanwhile, is also encouraging Comey to run for President in 2020:

Comey's firing will be an extraordinary boon for transparency as his loyalists leak and the admin counter-leaks. Will he run for 2020?
5:31 PM - 9 May 2017

[TimmyB]

I just made this 3 min. music video about "Secret Combinations". Please pass it along. Very important wake up call...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGL6Ax_rnXY

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Reporter arrested after repeatedly questioning Health secretary | TheHill

According to Heyman’s account, he waited for Price to come into the building and then reached past those accompanying Price with his phone and repeatedly asked his healthcare questions, adding that a number of other reporters wanted to bring up the issue of preexisting conditions. 

He said capitol police at some point “decided I was just too persistent in asking this question and trying to do my job and so they arrested me.”

According to the criminal complaint by the capitol police, Heyman was "aggressively breaching the secret service agents to the point where the agents were forced to remove him a couple of times from the area walking up the hallway in the main building of the Capitol. The defendant was causing a disturbance at Ms. Conway and Secretary Price.”

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Search For Suspect In ‘Unprovoked Attack’ On Edlerly Man In The Bronx « CBS New York

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — The search for a suspect continues in what police called “an unprovoked attack” on an 83-year-old man in the Bronx.

Valentine Hernandez had just crossed Westchester Avenue at Fox Street Monday afternoon when police said he was sucker punched by a much younger and much larger man.

The entire incident was captured on surveillance video.

Wheelchair-bound 98-year-old woman terrorized as teens ransack her Barrie home |

BARRIE - A 98-year-old woman told a judge of the horror and degradation she felt as she lie in her bed pretending to sleep while two teens poured maple syrup all over her and ransacked her home in the middle of the night.

Sitting in a wheelchair at the front of the court Tuesday, wearing a mauve shawl, matching mauve slippers, pink lipstick and gold earrings, Jean Knox, the traumatized grey-haired lady, listened as her son read aloud her victim impact statement.

The teens, aged 16 and 17, who can not be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, where charged with break and enter, assault and mischief after they broke into her home through a window after a boozy night out Dec. 29, 2016.

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Updates and Reactions to F.B.I. Director Comey’s Firing - The New York Times

■ President Trump has fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, the White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Tuesday.

■ Mr. Comey was delivering a speech in Los Angeles when he learned he had been fired.

■ His dismissal drew a quick rebuke from Democrats and concern from several Republican lawmakers.

■ Several lawmakers called for a special counsel to take over the investigation into Russian meddling in the election.

[Joel]

[mes5464]

The ACLU to travelers: Maybe don’t go to Texas right now

The ACLU is advising travelers to avoid Texas after the state passed SB4, a new law that allows police officers to investigate a person's immigration status during a routine traffic stop. The group says that the law will lead to "widespread racial profiling baseless scrutiny, and illegal arrests of citizens and non-citizens alike." The travel alert applies to both U.S. citizens and those who might be considering a trip to Texas from abroad.

[Joel]

[Joel]

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Microsoft CEO: tech sector needs to prevent '1984' future

Seattle (AFP) - Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said Wednesday tech developers have a responsibility to prevent a dystopian "1984" future as the US technology titan unveiled a fresh initiative to bring artificial intelligence into the mainstream.

At the start of its annual Build Conference, Microsoft sought to showcase applications with artificial intelligence that could tap into services in the internet "cloud" and even take advantage of computing power in nearby machines.

Silicon Valley may find a lot to fear in Trump’s FBI director replacement - Recode

U.S. President Donald Trump’s sudden dismissal of FBI director James Comey today has left even the longtime law enforcement official’s critics — from tech companies to civil-liberties advocates — wondering if the new administration may seek to expand the government’s surveillance powers.

From the campaign trail to the Oval Office, Trump has criticized tech giants like Apple that have tried to rebuff federal requests for greater access to their customers’ data and devices. Meanwhile, the president has appointed a number of key individuals to national security posts who want to expand government’s snooping programs.

Emotion reading technology claims to spot criminals before they act 

Emotion reading technology could soon be used by police after a Russian firm created a tool that can identify people in a crowd and tell if they are angry, stressed or nervous. 

The software, created by NTechLab, can monitor citizens for suspicious behaviour by tracking identity, age, gender and current emotional state. It could be used to pre-emptively stop criminals and potential terrorists. 

"The recognition gives a new level of security in the street because in a couple of seconds you can identify terrorists or criminals or killers," said Alexander Kabakov, NTechLab chief executive. 

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AI detective analyses police data to learn how to crack cases | New Scientist

A system called VALCRI should do the laborious parts of a crime analyst's job in seconds, while also suggesting new lines of enquiry and possible motives

MOVE over, Sherlock. UK police are trialling a computer system that can piece together what might have happened at a crime scene. The idea is that the system, called VALCRI, will be able to do the laborious parts of a crime analyst’s job in seconds, freeing them to focus on the case, while also provoking new lines of enquiry and possible narratives that may have been missed.

“Everyone thinks policing is about connecting the dots, but that’s the easy bit,” says William Wong, who leads the project at Middlesex University London. “The hard part is working out which dots need to be connected.”

VALCRI’s main job is to help generate plausible ideas about how, when and why a crime was committed as well as who did it. It scans millions of police records, interviews, pictures, videos and more, to identify connections that it thinks are relevant. All of this is then presented on two large touchscreens for a crime analyst to interact with.

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Black student group at UC Santa Cruz threatens more campus takeovers if additional demands not met - The College Fix

‘There will be more Reclamations’

University of California Santa Cruz administrators recently agreed to meet to all four demands lodged by a black student group who commandeered a campus building and would not leave until their conditions were met.

But in addition to the four initial stipulations, the group made three other demands to the university, and it has warned UC Santa Cruz that it has four months to comply with these demands or “more Reclamations” will result.

After three days of occupation by students of Kerr Hall, Chancellor George Blumenthal agreed to give all black and Caribbean-identified students a 4-year housing guarantee to live in the Rosa Parks African American Themed House; bring back the building’s lounge; paint its exterior the “Pan-Afrikan colors” of red, green and black; and force all new incoming students to go through a mandatory diversity competency training.

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Mexicans Are Upset About Immigrants Committing Crime | The Daily Caller

Residents of a Mexican city are upset about immigrants causing crime, according to a Tuesday report from El Universal.

The report said that there was a press conference held in Tapachula by a leader of a local group called: “For a different Mexico.” The group’s president, Victorino Alvarez Fuentes, said that immigrants were urinating in public and sexually assaulting women and minors.

Tapachula is near the Guatemalan border and besides immigrants from Central American countries, there has been a recent influx of African immigrants entering Mexico seeking to eventually get to the U.S.

The El Universal story centered around a home for immigrants called “Bethlehem,” and said just a couple weeks ago an immigrant staying there was arrested for sexually assaulting a five-year-old boy.

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St. Olaf: Racist note that spurred student protests was 'fabricated' - StarTribune.com

NORTHFIELD, MINN. – A racist threat against a St. Olaf student that touched off campuswide protests and forced the college to cancel classes earlier this month was a hoax, the school revealed Wednesday.

A student confessed to writing the note, St. Olaf President David R. Anderson wrote in a message to students. The threat — an anonymous, typewritten note — was “fabricated,” he said, as an apparent “strategy to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate.”

“This was not a genuine threat,” Anderson wrote in the first of two messages Wednesday to students. “We’re confident that there is no ongoing threat from this incident to individuals or the community as a whole.”

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US Army training AI using brainwaves of supersnipers | Daily Mail Online

Army researchers are teaching artificial intelligence to learn from humans to become sharper shooters.

At the annual Intelligent User Interface conference, scientists from DCS Corp and the Army Research Lab revealed how training a neural network on datasets of human brain waves can improve its ability to identify a target in a dynamic environment.

The approach teaches AI to spot when a human has made a targeted decision, with hopes that it could one day be used to assess a battlefield scenario in real-time. 

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‘Build that wall’ and other quotes cause NC high school’s yearbook to be confiscated, canceled | Charlotte Observer

ROCKINGHAM, N.C.
All of the yearbooks that had been distributed at the Richmond Early College High School near Rockingham have been taken back by the school after some senior quotes were deemed controversial, the school system says.

Graduating students at the 10-year-old school, which has 259 students, were allowed to share a quote under their picture in the yearbook. After the book was published, officials in the school and district administration found several of the quotes inappropriate, including one credited to President Trump, said district spokeswoman Ashley-Michelle Thublin.

The Trump quote, which said “Build that wall,” has been slammed on social media by some students and others who called it racist and hurtful to classmates, some of whom are minorities. After RECHS announced on its Facebook page that it had discovered the errors and the inappropriate comments, many people voiced their opinions both for and against the decision to cancel the book.

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US signs international declaration on climate change despite Trump's past statements

While President Trump has talked tough in the past about his skeptical views on climate change, his administration appears to be taking a more cautious approach to the issue on the world stage in the early days of his presidency.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed a document today calling climate change a “serious threat” to the Arctic and noting the need for action to reduce its potentially harmful effects.

The document, known as the Fairbanks Declaration, concluded Tillerson's chairing of a meeting of the Arctic Council, a board made up of indigenous groups and the eight countries bordering the Arctic, in Fairbanks, Alaska.

While the council only has the power to issue advisories, the language in the statement signed by Tillerson comes in stark contrast to statements and promises made by President Trump about climate change.

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First autonomous container ship to launch in 2018  | Daily Mail Online

It is set to be the first ship to sail the seas without a single human on board. 

Norway-based Yara has revealed its plans to develop the world’s first all-electric and autonomous container ship that is predicted to remove 747 tons (678 tonnes) of carbon dioxide from the air by reducing diesel-powered truck haulage by 40,000 journeys a year.

Named ‘Yara Birkeland’, the high tech ship is set to sail in 2018 - it will initially be operated as a manned vessel, but the team has noted 2020 as when it will be fully autonomous.

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Does this look real or fake?

This Is the Best Dinosaur Fossil of Its Kind Ever Found

On the afternoon of March 21, 2011, a heavy-equipment operator named Shawn Funk was carving his way through the earth, unaware that he would soon meet a dragon.

That Monday had started like any other at the Millennium Mine, a vast pit some 17 miles north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, operated by energy company Suncor. Hour after hour Funk’s towering excavator gobbled its way down to sands laced with bitumen—the transmogrified remains of marine plants and creatures that lived and died more than 110 million years ago. It was the only ancient life he regularly saw. In 12 years of digging he had stumbled across fossilized wood and the occasional petrified tree stump, but never the remains of an animal—and certainly no dinosaurs.

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In Cashless Sweden, Even God Now Takes Collection Via an App - Bloomberg

In the most cashless society on the planet, even God now accepts digital payments.

A growing number of Swedish parishes have started taking donations via mobile apps. Uppsala’s 13th-century cathedral also accepts credit cards.

The churches’ drive to keep up with the times is the latest sign of Sweden’s rapid shift to a world without notes and coins. Most of the country’s bank branches have stopped handling cash; some shops and museums now only accept plastic; and even Stockholm’s homeless have started accepting cards as payment for their magazine. Go to a flea market, and the seller is more likely to ask to be paid via Sweden’s popular Swish app than with cash.

“Fifteen years ago I would withdraw my entire salary and put it in my wallet, so I knew how much I had left, but these days I never really carry cash,” said Lasse Svard, the acting vicar at the parish of Jarna-Vardinge, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Stockholm.

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Death spiral for cars. By 2030, you probably won’t own one : RenewEconomy

By 2030, you probably won’t own a car, but you may get a free trip with your morning coffee. Transport-As-A-Service will use only electric vehicles and will upend two trillion-dollar industries. It’s the death spiral for cars.

A major new report predicts that by 2030, the overwhelming majority of consumers will no longer own a car – instead they will use on-demand electric autonomous vehicles.

By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs), the report says, 95 per cent of all US passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand, autonomous, electric vehicles that will be owned by fleets rather than individuals.

The provision of this service may come virtually free as part of another offering, or a corporate sponsorship. Imagine, for instance, paying a token sum for a ride into town after buying a latte for $4.50. Or getting a free ride because the local government has decided to make transport easier.

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IRS execs: Our lives at risk in tea party case

Details about tea party bias claims against the IRS could remain secret because current and former agency officials say their lives are in danger if they publicly testify about the case.

Lois Lerner and Holly Paz both have argued in recent court filings that the threat to their lives outweighs the public's right to hear their testimony about how IRS employees in Cincinnati and Washington D.C. handled applications for tax-exempt status from tea party groups.

They recently filed evidence to support their claim under seal in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati. Though that evidence has not been made public, court records indicate it relates to death threats and other harassment the women say they endured after their names were connected to the bias claims against the IRS several years ago.

"This documentation, as the court will see, makes very personal references and contains graphic, profane and disturbing language that would lead to unnecessary intrusion and embarrassment if made public," their attorneys argued in a recent court brief. "Public dissemination of their deposition testimony would put their lives in serious jeopardy."

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Human jobs being taken by robots, new study shows | Daily Mail Online

Increased automation and technological advances are taking human jobs 
Changes in consumer culture, such as online holiday booking are costing jobs
Nail technicians, security guards and kitchen staff are being recruited widely 
The survey was a review of 79 million job adverts placed over the past two years

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Violence Against Republicans And Trump Supporters New Normal | The Daily Caller

Violence and intimidation against Republicans are quickly becoming the new normal in an increasingly tense political climate.

In one of the most recent incidents, police in Tennessee charged a woman with felony reckless endangerment on Thursday for allegedly trying to run Republican Congressman David Kustoff off the road after a town hall. The woman, Wendi Wright, was reportedly enraged over Kustoff’s support for the American Health Care Act and screamed at the congressman and his aide, striking his car windows and reaching inside the vehicle.