[NYPost] Northern California police are on the hunt for two men who attacked and poured beer on city robots tasked with surveying the city’s sidewalks for safety improvements.
The Hollister Police Department said that the two new robotic assessment units from Daxbot operating in the city this week were attacked by vandals who kicked and knocked the robots over while they were doing assessment of sidewalks, curbs, etc. for accessibility and ADA compliance.
Surveillance footage captured by the robot camera showed in one incident a person riding up on a bike, before knocking the robot over on its side and taking off, per the department’s post on Facebook.
[FoxNews] The operation is part of the broader Operation Iron Pursuit, which arrested more than 350 offenders nationwide in April.
A sweeping joint takedown between the FBI and Texas authorities in recent months netted more than 276 arrests for suspected child exploitation and the rescue of 89 children, authorities said Friday.
How many of each group are illegal aliens?
The figures were a result of Operation Soteria Shield, part of the agency's national effort, Operation Iron Pursuit. The initiative targeted individuals involved in the online sexual exploitation, abuse, trafficking and production and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in North Texas, the FBI said.
"Every single day, this FBI is moving more aggressively than ever before to destroy child predator networks and save innocent victims all over the country, and today’s brilliant numbers out of FBI Dallas and partners are the latest milestone in that righteous mission," FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News Digital.
The operation, which was conducted in March and April, aimed to find offenders who exploit children through online platforms, social media, messaging applications and other digital applications.
"Protecting children from those who seek to exploit them is among the most important work we do in law enforcement," said Dallas Police Department Chief Daniel Comeaux.
It must be so much more satisfying to work for theFBI now than it was in 2024.
Soteria Shield involved 91 law enforcement agencies across Texas, the FBI said.
"These are young lives saved, families reunited, and future crimes prevented by brave law enforcement doing their jobs," Patel said.
"I’m proud of our teams for their execution, and let this be a message to any criminal who may try similar heinous actions — this FBI has located more than 6,940 child victims since last year — up 144% — and arrested almost 3,000 child predators over the same time period, up 70%. This pace of justice we’re on will not slow down."
Earlier this month, the FBI announced the arrests of more than 350 child sexual abuse offenders as part of Operation Iron Pursuit, a sprawling nationwide initiative conducted in April in an effort to find child victims of sex abuse and arrest child sex predators.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] Reports of an explosion from people across New England Saturday afternoon sent police agencies and others scrambling to understand what caused a double boom that was so loud it shook buildings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Boston residents were left petrified after the loud blast rattled their homes with the police probing the 'bizarre' incident.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) later confirmed the sound was likely from a suspected meteor.
'Unlike earthquakes which occur at discrete location in the earth, sonic boom events occur along a linear path in the atmosphere. Therefore, the location provided is an approximation,' the USGS stated.
The American Meteor Society said that the booms heard about 2:30pm and were actually caused by a meteor about 3 feet wide entering the atmosphere around the New Hampshire border with Massachusetts, north of Boston.
Robert Lunsford, the Fireball Program Monitor with the society, said the group received dozens of reports from Delaware to Montreal with people either hearing the double boom, feeling the ground shake or seeing the fireball - which he said looks like a shooting star in the daytime sky.
'It was definitely bigger than a normal fireball, about a yard wide,' he said.
But Lunsford said it's unlikely the meteor struck the ground.
'We would need more information about the trajectory the speed and other aspects to know for sure if it hit the ground, but if it didn't burn up, then it would have landed in the ocean,' he said. 'Most of them do burn up before they hit the ground.'
The sound of the bang was so loud that it appeared to be more locally based rather than in the sky. Boston PD sent its officers to the Brighton area of the city to investigate.
Dropping out at the last minute is sooo unprofessional.
[IsraelTimes] As some performers back away from ‘Great American State Fair’ due to ties to president, he calls their music ‘boring’ and claims he gets ‘larger audiences than Elvis in his prime’
An upcoming celebration of the United States of America’s 250th anniversary, "The Great American State Fair," recently had several musical guests back out, partly over the event’s ties to US President Donald Trump ...Oh, noze! Not him!... . Now, Trump himself is slated to headline the festivities, the organizers said Saturday.
"I understand Artists are getting ’the yips’ having to do with their performance," Trump posted to his social media platform Truth Social Saturday, adding that he was thinking of bringing "the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ’Artists.’"
The group organizing the June fair on Washington’s National Mall, Freedom 250, confirmed the billing in a statement, writing: "We are excited to announce that President Trump will personally kick off this historic celebration on Wednesday, June 24."
Trump’s social media post twice referenced him holding a rally "Wednesday," without a specific date. The White House did not immediately clarify the discrepancy.
Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for Freedom 250, emphasized that the broader fair that is scheduled from June 25 through July 10 includes an array of exhibits, family-friendly attractions, musical performances, flyovers and more.
In another post on Truth Social on Saturday, Trump suggested the concert series may no longer be necessary if performers continue to back out. He floated the possibility of giving a speech on the National Mall instead, portraying himself as a more powerful draw than any musical act.
"The fact is that I am, according to many, the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World," Trump wrote. He added that he gets "much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime" and "does so without a guitar."
The president said he was "ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally."
Trump was dismissive of the acts that backed out, suggesting that the solution is to "Cancel it."
"We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain," Trump said on social media.
Freedom 250 is billed as nonpartisan, but was launched last year by Trump and is led by a former State Department appointee from Trump’s first term. Several artists, including Bret Michaels, the Commodores and Martina McBride, dropped out last week.
Michaels and other artists have said that they were misled about the theme of the shows or were otherwise wary of being caught up in a political fight. McBride, in a statement on Instagram, said she had been "presented with an opportunity to perform at a nonpartisan event but that turned out to be misleading."
Other artists plan to attend, including Flo Rida, Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice. The latter’s representative previously said that the "Ice Ice Baby" rapper was "proud to help celebrate America’s 250th Anniversary!"
It remains unclear whether replacement musicians will be recruited, or whether Trump’s proposal to substitute a rally for the performances is being seriously considered by organizers.
Yinz guys I feel like there is a solution to this problem; there are hundreds, likely thousands of fearless musicians & rappers out there in the country, hungry to be able to have an opportunity to showcase their music and celebrate the country--the kind of musicians that… https://t.co/RM6GuxkUolpic.twitter.com/7Z8Iovjreb
[NPR] The head of the World Health Organization arrived in Congo's capital, Kinshasa, late Thursday to witness efforts against an outbreak of a rare type of Ebola virus, as medical personnel struggle with a lack of equipment, a distrustful population and armed groups in a volatile region.
"To come here is to really show to the community that they're not alone," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at the airport. "Plus, I get some neat fundraising PR photos. Now, when's lunch?"
"Pushing orders from my comfortable office in Geneva is easy, but I'm asking my colleagues to work with the community and I am asking communities to protect themselves," he added.
Congo's Ebola outbreak is spiraling, with health workers struggling to contain the virus
Medical aid donated by the European Union arrived in Ituri province, the heart of Congo's Ebola outbreak, on Thursday. The United States announced the same day $80 million in additional aid, bringing its total commitment to more than $112 million.
Health workers with scant supplies have been struggling to contain an outbreak of the Bundibugyo virus, a kind of Ebola that has no approved treatment or vaccine. In some areas, doctors have resorted to wearing expired medical masks while treating suspected patients.
According to WHO, 1,077 suspected cases and 238 suspected deaths have been recorded as of Tuesday,
Dangers faced by health workers have been heightened by anger among residents over the stringent medical protocols for dealing with the bodies of victims, which clash with local burial rites. Residents have launched at least three attacks against health centers. "local burial rites" that feed the sickness, like handwashing the dead bodies
Tedros said other challenges are also complicating the containment of the outbreak, including the high number of people displaced by armed conflict in the region, and food insecurity.
On Wednesday, he had called for a ceasefire in a region where armed groups have staged violent attacks for decades.
"We cannot build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling," Tedros said.
Tucked in the northeastern part of Congo close to the Ugandan border, Ituri province has been reeling from attacks by the Allied Democratic Force, a rebel group allied with the Islamic State group, and a coalition of ethnic militias. In early May, the ADF killed at least 40 people and burned several homes in Ituri.
The illness also has been reported in the Congolese provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, south of Ituri, where the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group controls many key cities, including Goma and Bukavu. The rebels have reported two cases.
The region's main airport in Goma, which doubles as a staging ground for humanitarian efforts into the region, has been closed since January 2025, when M23 seized the city.
The conflict has precipitated one of the world's largest humanitarian crises, with at least 7 million people displaced in eastern Congo.
The WHO chief said Thursday he discourages countries from imposing travel bans against nationals of countries affected by the outbreak.
"There are ways to manage workers and to manage cases without having a strong, restricted travel ban and we don't encourage that as WHO," Tedros said.
The Trump administration last week announced a temporary ban on the entry of people without U.S. passports, as well as U.S. green-card holders, who have visited Congo, Uganda or South Sudan in the past 21 days. It said Wednesday it plans to send Americans who are exposed to Ebola to a new facility in Kenya instead of flying them to the U.S. Congo's neighbors, Uganda and Rwanda, recently closed their borders.
Are certain parties again pulling out all stops, for yet another pandemic or panic?
Or, just doing the usual Epidemic / Pandemic / War deflection stunt around national elections.
Like they have done or tried the last 4+ National Elections?
Or are we being too suspicious? Could we be blowing off a really serious Real World / USA issue and not the usual over-hyped media supported con job like years past?
Have we been lied to so much, that we don't believe this might be the real one?
What about all the still unaddressed, and suspicious Auto-pen pardons for Covid-19?
Either way We the people, have learned a few things.
* When told to trust the science RUN!
* If their lips are moving, follow the $$$$$, look for a power grab that is going on.
* If they start demanding new restrictions, see if they themselves are following their mandates.
* Take mental notes of their loopholes in their mandates for $$$$ and governing reasons.
* Do not trust suddenly, quickly develop, not properly tested, and widely available VAX's.
* Once the Election/Power Grab/Coup accomplished note if things quickly return to semi normal
#5
In scope this seems to be a large outbreak in a wartorn (no treatment) area. Also treatments developed for the Zaire variant don't work on this ungabunga(sp) variant.
30%-50% fatality rate with this one.
Posted by: Difar Dave ||
05/31/2026 16:46 Comments ||
Top||
#6
As per my inline comment: they persist with unhygienic treatment of victims and dead, including a handwashing of bodily fluids from the dead for burial. As Scott Bessent said of Gavin'Greaseball' Newsome: “There is no cure for stupid”
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/31/2026 16:54 Comments ||
Top||
[IsraelTimes] Colombians are set to vote on Sunday in what is likely the first round of a presidential election, amid deep polarization between those seeking continuity with the leftist government — including its severing of ties with Israel — and those pushing for a shift to restore security, economic growth, and relations with the Jewish state.
Ivan Cepeda, the candidate for the leftist Historic Pact coalition, has led in polling on his pledges to expand President Gustavo Petro’s social programs and pursue peace with illegal gangs to end a six-decade internal conflict, though he is expected to face an uphill battle in an eventual second round.
He has promised to stick to Petro’s stance on Israel, with which the current president severed ties in 2024 over the war in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... , which he cast as a genocide — a charge vehemently denied by Israel.
Last year, Cepeda filed a police complaint against former president Ivan Duque for "apology of genocide" over Duque’s trip to Israel and meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Cepeda, a 63-year-old philosopher and congressman since 2010, has proposed tax reforms to broaden the tax base, levy wealth taxes and reduce exemptions for large companies to fund social spending. He has said he is open to proposals from the left to rewrite the constitution.
Cepeda, whose communist leader father was killed in a 1994 paramilitary attack, faces a divided right led by independent businessman Abelardo De La Espriella and Senator Paloma Valencia, who former president Alvaro Uribe backs. Both candidates are pro-Israel and have strong ties with the local Jewish community.
PLEDGE TO OPEN JERUSALEM EMBASSY
Not that opening an embassy in Jerusalem is necessary, but it is symbolic of a sheaf of positions. Good luck, Colombia!
De La Espriella, a 47-year-old political outsider whose supporters call him "The Tiger," has centered his campaign on security, shrinking the state and reviving the economy. His proposals include an aggressive response to crime, drug trafficking and illegal gangs, strengthening the armed forces and building mega-prisons. He plans to cut taxes and revive the mining and oil sectors.
Last month, he promised to "renew a strategic alliance with the State of Israel" and "defend the Judeo-Christian principles that form the foundation of Western civilization."
In a post on X hailing the Jewish community, De La Espriella added: "In my government, Colombia will take a clear step in its foreign policy: we will establish our embassy in Jerusalem and strengthen a direct, firm and strategic relationship with Israel."
Valencia, 48, a lawyer and candidate for the right-wing Democratic Center party, has similarly emphasized security and economic recovery. She has vowed to combat illegal gangs, end Petro’s efforts to negotiate peace deals, cut corporate taxes to boost employment and pursue reforms to healthcare, justice and pensions.
She chairs a congressional caucus advocating strong political, economic and cultural ties with Israel, has spearheaded condemnations of Petro’s remarks and steps taken against Israel, has called the severing of ties "irresponsibility and fanaticism," and has stressed the "need to work with Israel in cooperation on security, defense and trade." She has also fostered close ties with Colombian Jews.
However,
a hangover is the wrath of grapes... her running mate Juan Daniel Oviedo takes a different view and has accused Israel of genocide in the war in Gaza, which began with Hamas ..a regional Iranian catspaw,... ’s terror onslaught of October 7, 2023.
Centrist candidates in Sunday’s election, including former Antioquia Governor Sergio Fajardo and former Bogota Mayor Claudia Lopez, have lagged in the polls compared to previous elections.
Surveys suggest it is unlikely any candidate will secure more than 50 percent of the vote on Sunday, meaning the top two finishers would advance to a runoff on June 21.
Whoever wins will face major challenges, including stabilizing public finances in Latin America’s fourth-largest economy, reducing poverty, curbing violence linked to the internal conflict, and addressing social needs.
More than 41 million Colombians are eligible to vote in polls that open at 8 a.m. local time (1300 GMT) and close eight hours later.
[Reuters] At many law firms, calling a colleague at 2 a.m. is a last resort. At Ohio-based law firm Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, the colleague is always awake — because it's AI.
The 375-attorney firm is rolling out one of the more eye-catching uses of legal AI that I’ve heard about recently.
Working with an AI-focused research lab at Stanford Law School, Vorys has developed “AI personas” of 19 of its partners, which can be embedded within generative AI tools to offer responses to questions and edit documents in the style of individual partners.
Seemingly every major law firm is experimenting with AI right now, even as firm leaders wrestle with the unsettling question of how it could upend their entire business model. In conversations, firm leaders can’t yet answer how AI will reshape attorney training or the partnership model as the technology matures, but many acknowledge the bigger risk is falling behind.
Many firms are working with off-the-shelf AI products, though some are trying to get an edge by developing their own tools. Kirkland & Ellis, for instance, said this week it will invest $500 million to develop its own AI technology that will pull from Kirkland's internal intelligence.
BUILDING AI BRAINS
At Vorys, trying to stay ahead has meant partnering with Stanford along with separately developing other AI projects, like ones to help with labor-and-employment research for HR professionals and patent drafting.
When I first heard Megan Ma, the executive director of the Stanford Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology Lab, also known as liftlab, talk about what she dubbed “AI twins,” I pictured little online avatars crafting legal documents. The reality is slightly more nuanced but still intriguing.
The personas essentially work as an AI chatbot that spits out replies and edits documents in the mindset of the partner. The digital personalities are developed from hours-long interviews about the attorney’s approach to practicing law, values and experiences. They aren’t trained on work product from the partners, but instead seek to embody their individual thinking styles.
“It's almost like having a low resolution map of the person's brain,” said Nate Jedinak, Vorys’ senior director of software, data and innovation. He said the personas have been used by both associates looking to improve their work and partners using them to “be creative and be their best selves.”
Wayne Stacy, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said that while he sees AI personas as being novel, he doesn’t think they’ll fundamentally change the practice of law. He said a more impactful approach is building AI workflows around the specific skills needed to complete a task successfully, rather than mimicking one attorney.
“The problem with personas, at too granular of a level, it glorifies the individual personality of a lawyer” and how they think something should be done, Stacy said.
Scott Powell, a federal tax, aviation and transactional partner at Vorys, said the firm sees value in creating individual personas rather than an aggregate “best M&A lawyer” or “top litigator.” He said such aggregate personas work well with basic questions but that the nuance and skill of specific attorneys give better results. The ability to chat with personas based on actual partners also better reflects how people act in real life, he said, when lawyers seek feedback from a trusted colleague down the hall.
Powell said he was a bit skeptical about how the answers he gave Ma to create his persona would lead to meaningful advice. Once he started using it, he realized, “It was presenting results to queries that were shockingly sounding a lot like me.”
The firm is rolling out the AI personas firmwide after testing them with smaller groups. Leadership has made clear that they are not a replacement for an attorney. Like all AI, the tools that use the personas run the risk of hallucinations, but Powell said they emphasize that human review to check for accuracy is a necessary step.
During the test phase, one Vorys litigator gathered viewpoints from three AI personas to strengthen the legal theories in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief. An intellectual property lawyer worked with personas to do a deep dive on a troublesome portion of a patent. With the editing function, associates can redline a document in the style of a partner to get feedback before turning in a draft.
Vorys M&A partner Bruce Paige said he's used litigator personas "to essentially pressure test" deal documents to look out for potential litigation risks, a step that used to be too time and cost-prohibitive on smaller deals.
#3
These tools are only as good as the underlying programming. How many times have human lawyers been caught in court using false AI generated briefs etc. as P2K points out. How long until we get AI judges? Chat/GPT is already left leaning. The more you let computers do, the easier it is to game the system. My 42 years in the field tells me no good can come of this.
#5
AI hallucinates and cites non-existent cases in its briefs.
That seems rather judgemental and robo-phobic. And who hasn't done questionable things in their underwear?
From the AI's point of view, hallucinations and "facts" are all the same thing - just a stream of tokens generated by the probability that this follows that. Human judgement is what determines if the AI is hallucinating. It simply cannot tell.
These tools are only as good as the underlying programming.
Once upon a time, that was strictly true. But the neural networks that form the basis for modern AI are really a new New Thing. Programming them is mostly about configuring the layers and interconnections of the network. The tricky part is training the network.
Garbage-in/Garbage out still applies, but now we are talking about the training data. A neural network actually learns, but what it learns is dependent on what you feed it. A popular way to get training data is to hoover the Internet scraping up every bit of text, image, and audio you can find.
tl;dr: If you train your neural network on stupid things, your network will be stupid too.
There is an interesting feedback loop in play here. Given that a lot of training data comes from the internet, as more AI-generated content appears online, that generated content will be sucked up as training data for a new round of AIs. A self-licking ice cream cone that eventually leads to the Butlerian Jihad.
[IsraelTimes] US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth takes another swipe at Washington’s NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all.... and European partners, saying those that do not hike defense spending sufficiently "will face a clear shift in how we do business."
"For too long, polite pleas from our European allies to spend more on their own defense fell on deaf ears," Hegseth says at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue conference in Singapore.
"They are finally playing catch-up," he says. "Allies who refuse to step up and carry their own weight for our collective defense will face a clear shift in how we do business."
NATO members pledged last year to ramp up defense-related spending to five percent of GDP but, despite increased efforts, many states say they may not be able to reach that target.
In Asia, Hegseth reiterates that the region’s security has "rested disproportionately on American military power, while many of our allies and partners allowed their own defense capabilities to atrophy."
Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region were indeed stepping up, Hegseth says, using South Korea as a particular example.
"South Korea has invested consistently in its own defense, because it does not have the luxury of treating war like an academic exercise," he says. "They live on the front lines, and so they build real combat power."
This "reflects simply a clear-eyed understanding of the threat environment," Hegseth says.
He also praises the spending policies of other countries including Australia, the Philippines and Japan.
"You don’t have a strong alliance unless everyone has skin in the game. No freeloading," Hegseth says.
Hegseth agrees when asked by a New Zealand delegate whether he considers the Pacific island nation’s plan to increase defense spending from one to two percent to be "freeloading."
"If I’m being honest, two percent is not enough, and so two percent is freeloading," Hegseth says. "I don’t have anything against New Zealand, (but) I want partners to step up."
#1
...The issue of NZ is that their government (much like that of Canada) seems bent on eliminating their military forces. And as much as I hate to say this, having worked with the Kiwis a few times, maybe they would be a good example to the rest.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...Oh, noze! Not him!...
..a regional Iranian catspaw,...
