Trump Campaign Adviser Pleads Guilty to Child Porn, Sex Trafficking
January 14th, 2020Via: Courthouse News Service:
An informal adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign who testified in the Mueller probe pleaded guilty Monday to charges of child sex trafficking and possessing child pornography.
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This is not Nader’s first run-in with the law. He served six months after a 1991 guilty plea in Virginia to transporting child pornography.
Then in 2003, Nader was convicted in the Prague Municipal Court in the Czech Republic for sexually abusing boys. Facing 10 charges there, he served a year in jail in Prague before being expelled from the country.
The light sentences are believed to be, in part, the result of Nader’s 30-plus-year connection to prominent movers and shakers in Washington.
Court documents note that the now-deceased real estate developer Guilford Glazer, a friend of former President Ronald Regan extolled Nader’s character in a letter to a federal judge, naming Nader a critical conduit in the brokerage of conflict relief efforts between Israel and Hezbollah.
Nader was the longtime editor of Middle East Insight magazine throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In April 1996, some five years after he pleaded guilty to a transporting child pornography, Nader received a tribute from Representative Nick Rahall II, a West Virginia Democrat, when the magazine celebrated its 15th year in publication.
“Because of his reputation for fairness and his remarkable access to key political business leaders throughout the region, Nader has produced a magazine of distinction and high quality,” Rahall II said. “Both he and Middle East Insight deserve special recognition on their 15th anniversary.”
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Nader faces another prosecution in Washington unrelated to the child-sex charges. Prosecutors indicted Nader and seven others in December for conspiracy to conceal campaign contributions, saying they funneled $3.5 million to various political committees and presidential candidates.
Campaign-finance records made clear Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was one recipient, though her name does not appear in the indictment.
Visit Art Museums to Live Longer?
January 14th, 2020Hmm. I don’t know about the health benefits, but in the the pre-collapse California days of the late 1990s to early 2000s, I found that roaming around art museums was definitely pleasant. I wasn’t particularly interested in art, or, so-called art, but the air conditioning worked and it was generally quiet in museums.
Bonus feature of museums: No bum stench or lunatic ramblings like you get in libraries.
Via: Reuters:
Even after accounting for a wide range of other health and social factors, researchers from University College London found that people over 50 who regularly engaged with arts activities were 31% less likely to die during a 14-year follow-up than peers with no art in their lives.
Those who took part in arts-related activities only once or twice a year still had 14% lower odds of dying during the study.
“These findings support previous statistical analyses and anthropological work suggesting there may be benefits of the arts to individuals as they age,” said Daisy Fancourt, an associate professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London and co-author of the study.
FDA and NIH Let Clinical Trial Sponsors Keep Results Secret and Break the Law
January 14th, 2020Shocker.
Via: Science:
Many scientists who conduct clinical trials, and their sponsors or funders, have downplayed concerns about late or missing results in ClinicalTrials.gov. Researchers, doctors, and patients can instead learn about trial outcomes from peer-reviewed publications, they say. But thousands of trials are never published, particularly when they find treatments ineffective, history has shown.
Computer-Designed Organisms
January 14th, 2020Via: GitHub:
Thus, we here present a method that designs completely biological machines from the ground up: computers automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs are then built by combining together different biological tissues. This suggests others may use this approach to design a variety of living machines to safely deliver drugs inside the human body, help with environmental remediation, or further broaden our understanding of the diverse forms and functions life may adopt.
Walmart Expands Its Robotic Workforce to 650 Additional Stores
January 13th, 2020Via: Business Insider:
Walmart is moving forward with automation in more stores nationwide.
The superstore is adding shelf-stocking robots to 650 stores by the summer, the retailer confirmed to Business Insider. The robots are designed by the San Francisco-based Bossa Nova Robotics Inc. and made to scan items on shelves to assist with price accuracy and restocking. The robots are already present in 350 stores.
The six-foot-tall devices contain 15 cameras each, which scan aisles and shelves and send alerts to employees in real time.
‘Disastrous Mistake’: Iran Acknowledges Shooting Down Ukrainian Airliner
January 12th, 2020Via: Reuters:
Iran said on Saturday its military had shot down a Ukrainian plane killing all 176 aboard in a “disastrous mistake”, saying air defenses were fired in error while on alert after Iranian missile strikes on U.S. targets in Iraq.
Iran had denied for days after Wednesday’s crash that it had brought down the airliner, although a top Revolutionary Guards commander said on Saturday that he told authorities about the unintentional missile strike the day it happened.
Surveillance Plane Joins Intensifying Hunt For Mystery Drones Over Colorado And Nebraska
January 11th, 2020Via: The Drive:
The War Zone was among the first to report back in late December 2019 that eyewitnesses throughout northeastern Colorado had begun seeing formations of large drones flying at night in complex grid-like patterns over rural areas and farmland. Since then, the sightings have multiplied and the drones have begun appearing in neighboring Nebraska, as well. What was at first a curiosity has become a concern, especially after local law enforcement agencies, the FAA, DEA, the U.S. Army, and the Air Force all stated to have no knowledge of the drone activity. It seemed that something far more covert or possibly illegal might be occurring. Just this week, the FAA officially launched a task force to identify the operator of the drones, which includes Colorado’s most sophisticated surveillance aircraft, and has begun searching for some sort of command truck or van that may be controlling or at least monitoring the mysterious nighttime drone activity.
Chinese Deepfake A.I. App
January 11th, 2020Hilariously, this runs on phones.
In other news, I noticed that AMD just announced their 64-core Ryzen Threadripper CPU (the 3990X). Cost: $3,990.
In other words, don’t believe your eyes, when it comes to digital sources. (Or ears.)
Via: Sheila Allen:
U.S. Alcohol Related Deaths Doubled Over 20 Years
January 10th, 2020Via: NPR:
More Americans are ordering more rounds, and that’s leading to more funerals, according to a new study on alcohol-related deaths.
Looking at data from the National Center for Health Statistics, researchers estimate deaths from alcohol-related problems have more than doubled over the past nearly 20 years.
Death certificates spanning 2017 indicate nearly 73,000 people died in the U.S because of liver disease and other alcohol-related illnesses. That is up from just under 36,000 deaths in 1999.
Some of the greatest increases were found among women and people who were middle-aged and older.
The study comes from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which is part of the NIH. It was published on Wednesday in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Overall, researchers found men died at a higher rate than women. But when analyzing annual increases in deaths, the largest increase was among white women.
Surveillance Video from Jeffrey Epstein’s First Apparent Suicide Attempt ‘No Longer Exists’
January 10th, 2020Via: NBC:
The surveillance video taken from outside Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on the day of his first apparent suicide attempt has been permanently deleted, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing federal sex-trafficking charges, was found semiconscious in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, in New York around 1:27 a.m. on July 23.
But that video is now gone because MCC officials mistakenly saved video from a different floor of the federal detention facility, prosecutors said in a court filing.
The MCC “inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists,” the court papers say.
