There has been a swathe of mass killings this year, leading UN peacekeepers to declare a state of alert.
Supreme Court tosses out Curtis Flowers's conviction in sixth trial of 1996 murders, citing racial bias.
As early as next Monday night, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a cluster of 24 satellites for the US Air Force. From a report: Known as the Space Test Program-2 mission, the rocket will deposit its payloads into three different orbits. Perhaps the most intriguing satellite will be dropped off at the second stop -- a circular orbit 720km above the Earth's surface. This is the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft. After a week in space, allowing the satellites deposited in this orbit to drift apart, LightSail 2 will eject from its carrying case into open space. About the size of a loaf of bread, the 5kg satellite will eventually unfurl into a solar sail 4 meters long by 5.6 meters tall. The Mylar material composing the sail is just 4.5 microns thick, or about one-tenth as thick as a human hair. This experiment, which will attempt to harness the momentum of photons and "sail" through space, is the culmination of decades of work by The Planetary Society. "This goes back to the very beginning, to Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Lou Friedman," the organization's chief executive, Bill Nye, told Ars in an interview. "We are carrying on a legacy that has been with us since the founders. It's just an intriguing technology because it lowers the cost of going all over the place in the Solar System."
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An idea for a destination resort. Buy some land in the mountains, build an old-style summer camp but for adults. Sleep on bunks, but they’re nice bunks. Everyone eats together. Arts and Crafts, you go on canoeing trips, softball, hikes, campfires, you can smoke weed and have sex, but you have to keep it wholesome, no orgies, this is summer camp (or maybe you had orgies in summer camp). You get to take a kitten home. And of course the lanyard and pottery you make.
An idea for a destination resort. Buy some land in the mountains, build an old-style summer camp but for adults. Sleep on bunks, but they’re nice bunks. Everyone eats together. Arts and Crafts, you go on canoeing trips, softball, hikes, campfires, you can smoke weed and have sex, but you have to keep it wholesome, no orgies, this is summer camp (or maybe you had orgies in summer camp). You get to take a kitten home. And of course the lanyard and pottery you make.
An idea for a destination resort. Buy some land in the mountains, build an old-style summer camp but for adults. Sleep on bunks, but they’re nice bunks. Everyone eats together. Arts and Crafts, you go on canoeing trips, softball, hikes, campfires, you can smoke weed and have sex, but you have to keep it wholesome, no orgies, this is summer camp (or maybe you had orgies in summer camp). You get to take a kitten home. And of course the lanyard and pottery you make.
An idea for a destination resort. Buy some land in the mountains, build an old-style summer camp but for adults. Sleep on bunks, but they’re nice bunks. Everyone eats together. Arts and Crafts, you go on canoeing trips, softball, hikes, campfires, you can smoke weed and have sex, but you have to keep it wholesome, no orgies, this is summer camp (or maybe you had orgies in summer camp). You get to take a kitten home. And of course the lanyard and pottery you make.
Voters set to choose among six candidates vying to succeed President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz.
Son of late former president named several incumbent Egyptian officials as being responsible for his father's death.
Hundreds demonstrate across Georgia over Russian MP scandal that prompted protest before heavy-handed police crackdown.
In May, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes shocked many when he expressed grave concerns about Facebook's CEO, its business and its impact on the world. He went as far as suggesting that Facebook should be broken up. Two months later, Hughes has another interesting remark to share. He has warned that Facebook's new planned digital currency Libra would shift monetary power to corporate giants. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] In an op-ed he wrote today: If even modestly successful, Libra would hand over much of the control of monetary policy from central banks to these private companies, which also include Visa, Uber, and Vodafone. If global regulators don't act now, it could very soon be too late. I've been a cryptocurrency sceptic, believing that the instability and regulatory challenges are just too sizeable. But Libra is different because it is a "stablecoin", with a value pegged to a basket of currencies and other assets. Anyone, whether they use Facebook or not, can buy in with a local currency and cash back out at any time. Vital decisions about Libra's administration, security and underlying assets will be made by the Switzerland-based Libra Association -- essentially Facebook and its largely corporate partners. To avoid complaints that setting up this coin would give a single company dangerous powers, Facebook has smartly limited itself to a single vote on the commission.
That doesn't make the prospect of Libra's success any less frightening. This currency would insert a powerful new corporate layer of monetary control between central banks and individuals. Inevitably, these companies will put their private interests -- profits and influence -- ahead of public ones. [...] The Libra Association's goals specifically say that ability will encourage "decentralised forms of governance." In other words, Libra will disrupt and weaken nation states by enabling people to move out of unstable local currencies and into a currency denominated in dollars and euros and managed by corporations. The Libra Association promises to choose stable currencies and assets unlikely to suffer inflationary crises. The sponsors are right that a liquid, stable currency would be attractive to many in emerging markets. So attractive, in fact, that if enough people trade out of their local currencies, they could threaten the ability of emerging market governments to control their monetary supply, the local means of exchange, and, in some cases, their ability to impose capital controls.
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Washington came close to a military response against Tehran following following the downing of a US unmanned aircraft.
It's just over two weeks until AMD's full Ryzen 3000 family of processors arrive, and it appears Intel is concerned about the effect they may have on its own chip sales. From a report: As such, the company is reportedly planning to reduce the price of its eighth- and ninth-generation CPUs by 10 to 15 percent. The report comes from DigiTimes, citing sources from motherboard makers. It claims Intel has already notified its downstream PC and motherboard partners about the processor price drops, which could see anything from $25 to $75 knocked off the CPUs. If the report is accurate, the enthusiast eight-core/16-thread Core i9 9900K will be one of the chips to see a price reduction, as will the i7-9700K, and the i5-9600K.
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The Trump administration added five Chinese entities to a United States blacklist on Friday, further restricting China's access to American technology and stoking already high tensions as President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China prepare to meet in Japan next week. From a report: The Commerce Department announced that it would add four Chinese companies and one Chinese institute to an "entity list," saying they posed risks to American national security or foreign policy interests [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The move essentially bars the entities, which include one of China's leading supercomputer makers, Sugon, and a number of its subsidiaries set up to design microchips, from buying American technology and components without a waiver from the United States government.
The move could all but cripple these Chinese businesses, which rely on American chips and other technology to manufacture advanced electronics. Those added to the entity list also include Higon, Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit, Chengdu Haiguang Microelectronics Technology, and Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, which lead China's development of high performance computing, some of which is used in military applications like simulating nuclear explosions, the Commerce Department said. Each of the aforementioned companies does businesses under a variety of other names.
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