US shooting down of Syrian jet seen as ‘act of aggression’ by Russia, which will track coalition warplanes west of the Euphrates

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/19/russia-target-us-led-coalition-warplanes-over-syria

by Hannah Osborne, newsweek.com

> Yellowstone supervolcano has been hit by a series of earthquakes, with more 30 recorded since June 12. The latest was recorded on Monday, June 19, with a magnitude 3 earthquake striking 8.6 miles north north-east of West Yellowstone, Montana.

> The swarm began last week, and on June 15 saw a magnitude 4.5 earthquake take place in Yellowstone National Park. “The epicenter of the shock was located in Yellowstone National Park, eight miles north-northeast of the town of West Yellowstone, Montana,” scientists from the University of Utah, which monitors Yellowstone Volcano, said in a statement.

> This earthquake was the largest to have hit Yellowstone since March 30, 2014, when a magnitude 4.8 earthquake was recorded 18 miles to the east, near the Norris Geyser Basin.

> “[The 4.5] earthquake is part of an energetic sequence of earthquakes in the same area that began on June 12,” the statement continued. “This sequence has included approximately thirty earthquakes of magnitude 2 and larger and four earthquakes of magnitude 3 and larger, including today's magnitude 4.5 event.”

> As of June 16, 235 events had been recorded. Most of these ranged in the magnitude of 0 to 1, with five less than zero.

> The probability of a large eruption at Yellowstone in the next year is currently calculated at one in 730,000.

> But what would happen if it did erupt? In 2014, scientists with the USGS published a report where they modeled what would happen if a large, explosive eruption took place at the supervolcano. Their findings showed most of the country would be covered in a blanket of ash, with some areas being buried up to a meter deep.

http://www.newsweek.com/yellowstone-supervolcano-earthquake-swarm-eruption-risk-627189?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=fb

THEY SAY IT STARTS WITH AN EARTHQUAKE...

Trendy Instagram moms are pioneering a new parenting trend – asking their babies for permission before picking them up.

Enterprising new parents claim to be expanding the boundaries of consent, even though their infants can’t talk and barely understand the world around them.

They claim that picking up babies without checking in with them first is an aspect of “rape culture” – and that raising them without involuntary lifting will make sure their sons don’t become rapists in later life.

The trend broke out of social media last week, when parent Nisha Moodley posted a selfie with her six-month-old son, Raven, describing her approach:

She claims she can “feel for his ‘yes'”, and that her parenting strategy will help #endrapeculture.

Others were more supportive, and said they do the same thing. Robin Weir, mother to a seven-month-old boy, wrote “We do this too… makes it feel more like we’re doing things ‘with’ him rather than ‘to’ him.”

More than 600 other users “liked” the post.

The breakout photo landed Moodley an interview with Yahoo! Beauty, where she expanded on the dangers of turning your offspring into a rapist by picking them up too eagerly.

She said: “I don’t ever want my son to be a sexual perpetrator or the victim of one, and the best thing I can do is honor his choices about his own body.

“I also want him to pay attention to his instincts, and forcing physical touch could interfere with that.”

However, even Moodley admits that there are exceptions to her rule, because, well, babies cry, and can’t talk or make their own decisions – which is why they need parents in the first place.

When asked on Instagram what she does if he starts crying, she replied: “I do what I need to do as a mama, first and foremost So if I need to pick him up, I do! Or I say ‘Oh, honey, I’m going to pick you up.'”

https://heatst.com/world/trendy-moms-are-asking-their-babies-permission-to-pick-them-up-so-they-dont-turn-into-rapists/

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northkorea-detainee-idUSKBN19A2TW
An American university student held prisoner in North Korea for 17 months died at a Cincinnati hospital on Monday, just days after he was released from captivity in a coma, his family said.

Otto Warmbier, 22, who was arrested in North Korea while visiting as a tourist, had been described by doctors caring for him last week as having extensive brain damage that left him in a state of "unresponsive wakefulness."

"Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today," the family said in a statement after Warmbier's death at 2:20 p.m. EDT (1820 GMT).

His family has said that Warmbier lapsed into a coma in March 2016, shortly after he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea.

Physicians at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, where he died, said last Thursday that Warmbier showed no sign of understanding language or awareness of his surroundings, and had made no "purposeful movements or behaviors," though he was breathing on his own.

There was no immediate word from Warmbier's family on the cause of his death.

The circumstances of his detention in North Korea and what medical treatment he may have received there remained a mystery, but relatives have said his condition suggested that he had been physically abused by his captors.

The University of Virginia student and Ohio native was arrested, according to North Korean media, for trying to steal an item bearing a propaganda slogan.

North Korea released Warmbier last week and said he was being freed "on humanitarian grounds."

The North Korean mission to the United Nations was not available for comment on Monday.

U.S. President Donald Trump issued a statement offering condolences to the Warmbier family and denouncing "the brutality of the North Korean regime as we mourn its latest victim."

...

SCATTERED ACROSS THE UNITED STATES are the remnants of a great battle that started over a century ago. Dozens of towns and cities joined the fray, duking it out for an honor like no other: to be the home of the largest chair in the world.

The first of these giant American seats was built in 1905 by the town of Gardner, Massachusetts. It was erected to showcase the town’s chair-making prowess and attract more tourists and furniture shoppers. Its title was eventually challenged, and the race really kicked into gear with the road transportation boom of the 1930s and after Guinness started recording incredible feats around the world in the 1950s.

Though the Guinness title was for the biggest chair in the world (determined by height—from the ground to the top of the back rest), the race particularly took hold in America, where the super-sized roadside attractions were a surefire way to catch the attention of drivers cruising by on the new highways that criss-crossed the country.

The mid-20th century saw the baton being passed around from chair to chair. Towns and businesses built taller and taller chairs with the express purpose of defeating the previous title holder by a foot or two. It was not enough to have a giant chair, it had to be the largest, and this became a point of local pride—not to mention a great tourism ploy.

The race eventually diversified into biggest chairs of different categories: There’s now an official Guinness designation for folding chairs, rocking chairs, Duncan Phyfe chairs, upholstered chairs, jiaoyi chairs, camping chairs, beach/deck chairs, and so on. (Not all of these have current title holders.)

But in recent years, many of the erstwhile American contenders for the throne have been bested by towering furniture creations in other countries, especially in Europe. The current Guinness record has been held for more than three years by a bright red chair in St. Florian, Austria.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-worlds-largest-chair

We are gonna have to pay extra money just to go to https://www.google.com/ now guys. They started a vote to take away Title II.

There’s a new contestant in the competition to see what kind of Hell-spawn, technologically enhanced doll can freak us out the most.

As New Scientist reports, this one’s fitted with a camera and an artificial intelligence (AI) chip that can interpret children’s emotions. Eight of them, to be precise, including surprise and happiness, which it gleans from a camera in the doll’s head.
The doll is just one of a host of devices equipped with computer vision that are described in a paper titled Eyes of Things from a team at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in Ciudad Real, Spain.

New Scientist quotes project leader Oscar Deniz:

In the near future, we will see a myriad of eyes everywhere that will not just be watching us, but trying to help us. [As AI chips get cheaper], we will have wearable devices, toys, drones, small robots, and things we can’t even imagine yet that will all have basic artificial intelligence.
The paper describes a new computer vision platform called Eyes of Things that could enable new applications and technologies such as deep learning, drones, home robotics, intelligent surveillance, wearable cameras, and yes, intelligent toys.

The emotion-reading doll described in the paper differs from its progenitor Hell-spawns in that it doesn’t need to send data off for processing in the cloud, where the privacy of children comes into play and breaches threaten exposure of things like children’s data and voices.

We saw that happen with CloudPets teddy toys around Christmas, with all user accounts and potentially up to 2.2m voice messages compromised by hackers who found the data, unprotected, using nothing more complicated than the Shodan IoT search engine.
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/06/22/coming-soon-maybe-to-toyshops-ai-doll-that-can-read-kids-emotions/

>Republicans calling Virginia baseball shooting a "killing field."
>Nobody died.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/14/republican-baseball-shooting-virginia-what-happened?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Am I missing something? Did Scalise die? Or do they think we're just that stupid?

Where are his revenge porn pics?

https://sputniknews.com/us/201612031048120290-revenge-porn-conviction/

"I am happy to hear today from Donald [Tusk] and from our consultations with other leaders of the European Union that the position of the EU is unity and solidarity with regard to Ukraine, which is vitally important for us," Poroshenko said at a news conference with the European Council president in Brussels on June 22.

The EU on June 19 extended the bloc's investment ban against Crimea for another year, while the United States on June 20 announced new financial measures against Russia-backed separatists involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The EU sanctions were introduced in 2014 in response to Russia's illegal annexation of the Ukrainian region and have since been extended on a yearly basis.

"The message about the rolling over of the sanctions is exactly what we are happy to hear these days," Poroshenko said.

Poroshenko, who returned from a trip to the United States, also said that he and U.S. President Donald Trump had "a very promising negotiation and coordination first of all about the sanctions."

The new sanctions announced by the U.S. Treasury Department on June 20 targeted more than three dozen fighters and separatist leaders in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine.

"You know that the United States introduced the new sanctions and confirmed that all sanctions remain in place until the full implementation of [the] Minsk [agreement]," Poroshenko said.

The Minsk peace agreement, brokered by France and Germany and signed by Russia and Ukraine in February 2015, calls for a cease-fire, the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front lines, and constitutional reforms to give eastern Ukraine more autonomy.

(Correction: Russia is not part of minks agreement and never signed anything there)

https://www.rferl.org/a/poroshenko-ukraine-tusk-european-union-solidarity-sanctions-russia/28573185.html