Christopher Sign: Reporter Who Broke Story of Secret Arizona Tarmac Meeting Between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch in 2016 Before Hillary Email Probe Was Dropped Dies in ‘Apparent Suicide’
June 13th, 2021Update: Sign Had Received Death Threats
Via: Sun:
The journalist told Fox News in February last year that he and his family received death threats and his credit cards were hacked.
He said: “My family received significant death threats shortly after breaking this story.”
Sign revealed that he and his wife had given their children “secret code words” in case something happened to them.
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Via: Daily Mail:
The 45-year-old television news man who was the first to report of a secret meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch that was held on her private jet in 2016 has died of an apparent suicide.
Police in Hoover, Alabama, said they received a 911 call at 8:13am on Saturday of a person down at a home on Scout Trace.
First responders arrived at the home and found the body of Christopher Sign, a former University of Alabama football player and veteran broadcast journalist with Birmingham’s ABC TV affiliate WBMA-LD.
News of Sign’s death, which is being investigated by police as a suicide, was reported by AL.com.
In 2016, Sign reported that former President Clinton had met with Lynch on her private jet at Phoenix Airport.
It was alleged that their conversation centered around an ongoing investigation into whether Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while Secretary of State was illegal.
Bill Clinton and Lynch would go on to portray it as an impromptu friendly chat.
Days later, the FBI chose not to bring criminal charges against Hillary, who was in the midst of her presidential campaign.
Less than two weeks before the 2016 election, however, the probe was re-opened after emails were found on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the former congressman and husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
The FBI began investigating Weiner in 2015 after DailyMail.com revealed that he was in a ‘sexting’ relationship with a 15-year-old girl.
Then-FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress in late October announcing the re-opened investigation. Two days before the election, the investigation was closed.
Global Banking Regulators Call for Toughest Rules for Cryptocurrencies
June 11th, 2021Ha. Shocker.
Via: Guardian:
Global regulators have said cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin should come with the toughest bank capital rules to avoid putting the wider financial system at risk should their value collapse suddenly.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which consists of regulators from the world’s leading financial centres, is proposing a “new conservative prudential treatment” for crypto-assets that would force banks to put aside enough capital to cover 100% of potential losses.
ALiEn: Artificial Life Environment
June 11th, 2021Via: https: Alien-Project:
ALiEn is an artificial life simulation program based on a specialized physics and rendering engine in CUDA. It is designed to simulate digital organisms embedded in artificial ecosystems and to mimic conditions for (pre-)biotic evolution.
Lake Mead Falls to Lowest Water Level Since Hoover Dam’s Construction in 1930s
June 11th, 2021Via: USA Today:
Lake Mead has declined to its lowest level since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s following the construction of Hoover Dam, marking a new milestone for the water-starved Colorado River in a downward spiral that shows no sign of letting up.
The reservoir near Las Vegas holds water for cities, farms and tribal lands in Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico. Years of unrelenting drought and temperatures pushed higher by climate change are shrinking the flow into the lake, contributing to the large mismatch between the demands for water and the Colorado’s diminishing supply.
The lake’s rapid decline has been outpacing projections from just a few months ago. Its surface reached a new low Wednesday night when it dipped past the elevation of 1,071.6 feet, a record set in 2016. But unlike that year, when inflows helped push the lake levels back up, the watershed is now so parched and depleted that Mead is projected to continue dropping next year and into 2023.
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, now stands at just 36% of full capacity.
CDC Plans “Emergency Meeting” On Rare Heart Inflammation Following COVID-19 Vaccines
June 10th, 2021Mmm hmm.
Via: CBS:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that it will convene an “emergency meeting” of its advisers on June 18th to discuss rare but higher-than-expected reports of heart inflammation following doses of the mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
So far, the CDC has identified 226 reports that might meet the agency’s “working case definition” of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, the agency disclosed Thursday. The vast majority have recovered, but 41 had ongoing symptoms, 15 are still hospitalized, and 3 are in the intensive care unit.
Related: Young People Being Forced to Get COVID Vaccine, May Harm Them More Than COVID
Physicists Measure the Gravitational Force Between the Smallest Masses Yet
June 10th, 2021Via: Scientific American:
The research effort born on that day has now produced its first result: a measurement of the gravitational force between two tiny gold spheres, each about the size of a sesame seed and weighing as much as four grains of rice—the smallest masses whose gravity has been measured to date.
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It is hard to fathom just how extraordinarily weak gravity is for such small masses. The gravitational pull of one sphere (the “source mass”) on the other (the “test mass”) a few millimeters away is more than 10 million times smaller than the force of a falling snowflake. The central challenge facing Aspelmeyer’s team was to design a detector exquisitely sensitive to this gravitational force yet totally insensitive to much larger background forces pushing and pulling on the test mass from all sides.
The researchers achieved this sensitivity using a detector called a torsion pendulum, which looks like a miniature version of a mobile hanging above a child’s crib.
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They then repeated this process many times, changing the average separation between the masses, and measured forces as small as 10 femtonewtons at separations between 2.5 and 5.5 millimeters.
Half Of Pandemic Unemployment Funds May Have Been Stolen
June 10th, 2021Via: ZeroHedge:
As much as half of the unemployment benefits paid by the US government over the past year may have been stolen through fraud, with the bulk ultimately ending up outside the country – likely into the hands of foreign crime syndicates in China, Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere, according to Axios’ Felix Salmon.
According to some estimates, unemployment fraud during the pandemic could ‘easily reach $400 billion,’ as states weren’t prepared for the unprecedented wave of unemployment claims.
States knew that fraud was inevitable, but opted to rush money out to people with minimal oversight, as opposed to laboriously vetting each application.
Solar Modules Degrading Faster Than Expected
June 10th, 2021Via: PV Tech:
Solar asset underperformance continues to worsen, with projects “chronically underperforming” P99 estimates and modules degrading faster than previously anticipated, risk management firm kWh Analytics has found.
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Perhaps the most notable finding from the report, which builds on a finding from last year’s edition, is that operational solar assets are continuing to experience higher than expected rates of degradation, with annual degradation in the field observed at around 1%.
It cites recent research conducted by both National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as kWh Analytics, as demonstrating that assumptions made in 2016 – that annually solar modules would degrade by around 0.5%, is outdated and underestimates annual degradation by as much as 0.5%.
kWh Analytics’ most recent figures place the median annual degradation for residential solar systems as 1.09% and non-residential systems at 0.8%. The report states that over a 20-year asset life, project degradation could therefore be underestimated by as much as 14%, resulting in severally overestimated performance and revenue forecasts produced within a P50 model.
Starlink Ground Stations
June 9th, 2021Here’s another one for your herniating Physically Vulnerable Critical Infrastructure file folder.
Holy shit.
Via: Eliana Sheriff:
Cleveland Clinic: Already Had COVID? Vaccine Provides No Added Benefit
June 9th, 2021Via: The Defender:
A new preprint study by the Cleveland Clinic found people previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 were less likely to be reinfected than fully vaccinated individuals who never had the virus — suggesting the vaccine is of no benefit to people who already had COVID.
