March 18, 2022

Frenzy at open house.. Crowd showed up to compete for one house

March 17, 2022

Four shot on fort lauderdale bus

March 17, 2022

Where were you two years ago at start of pandemic?

And how did it change your life?

I worked at a big city college. Events had been cancelled because people didnt want to gather in large events. We were at work following news.

Were told to stay home indefinitely. I thought it would last a few weeks. Never really returned to campus full time.

Two years later, staff is accustomed to working at home. Fighting for that option to continue. Are working in person 2 or 3 days.

March 17, 2022

black man tries to cash check at Arizona bank. Manager calls 911. 5 cops show up.

March 17, 2022

Fresno city employees wired $600K to scammers

Fresno city employees wired a large sum of money, then another, thinking the funds were going to a contractor building a police station.

Those payments never reached the contractor.

The city was a victim of wire fraud. But it would take two years for the truth to come out.

Fresno had lost more than $600,000 after falling victim to a phishing scam in 2020, but it kept the loss secret from the public until recently — which city officials said was done to protect a federal investigation.

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In January 2020, Fresno officials wired roughly $324,473 to who they believed was the contractor building a new police station in the city. Less than two months later, in early March, the city sent another $289,254. All told, it cut $613,727 in electronic payments.

The invoices looked identical to previous ones, except for one crucial aspect: the account number where the money would be sent was different, Dyer said

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-16/fresno-swindled-out-of-600000-in-wire-fraud-case

March 17, 2022

assistant fire chief attacks his neighbor right in front of Ring camera, Cleveland area (arrested)

Nice big big yards and they still can't get along





https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/crime/lorain-assistant-fire-chief-matthew-homolya-arrested-neighbor-incident/95-91271b6b-af79-43c6-a36d-1387a7b4b1ef

According to the police report, the situation started when Homolya’s dog wandered into a neighbor’s yard and was attacked by two German Shepherds. The neighbor says he went out to talk with Homolya when he was attacked himself.

March 17, 2022

The DuckDuckGo Users Furious at Its Response to the War in Ukraine

Last week, Gabriel Weinberg announced that his company would be combating Russian disinformation. “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” he wrote on Twitter. “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”

Although the move was more or less in line with how other major online platforms have been responding to the Russian invasion, pushback from DuckDuckGo’s user base has been pronounced. More than 30,000 users on Twitter have responded to Weinberg’s post with largely negative comments about the decision, accusing the company of engaging in censorship and injecting bias into search results. Breitbart ran a piece attacking DuckDuckGo as “Diet Google,” and high-profile libertarian YouTubers have also told their followers to stop using it.


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DuckDuckGo’s executives have been trying to quell the unrest. “The whole point of DuckDuckGo is privacy,” Weinberg wrote back to one of his critics. “The whole point of the search engine is to show more relevant content over less relevant content, and that is what we continue to do.” The company also released an official statement, which read in part, “It’s also important to note that down-ranking is different from censorship. We are simply using the fact that that these sites are engaging in active disinformation campaigns as a ranking signal that the content they produce is of lower quality, just like there are signals for spammy sites and other lower-quality content.”

DuckDuckGo didn’t originally set out to be a conservative-friendly “free speech” platform, even though many of its users seem to see it that way. Its core promise to users is that it won’t track searches in order to curate results, a practice that Google relies on. As Google has faced accusations of de-prioritizing conservative content, though, users have also flocked to DuckDuckGo for what they perhaps mistakenly saw as unmoderated search results.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/duckduckgo-russian-disinformation-downranking.html

March 17, 2022

Texas ballot rejection rate: counties that lean Democratic (15.1%) than Republican (9.1%).

Texas Ballot Rejections Soar Thanks To GOP-Backed Voting Rules, AP Finds
The number of rejected mail ballots in Texas soared to nearly 13% across most counties in the nation's first election of 2022.

Roughly 13% of mail ballots returned in the March 1 primary were discarded and uncounted across 187 counties in Texas. While historical primary comparisons are lacking, the double-digit rejection rate would be far beyond what is typical in a general election, when experts say anything above 2% is usually cause for attention.


“My first reaction is ‘yikes,’” said Charles Stewart III, director of the Election Data and Science Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It says to me that there’s something seriously wrong with the way that the mail ballot policy is being administered.”

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The AP counted 22,898 rejected ballots across Texas by contacting all 254 counties and obtaining final vote reconciliation reports. Some smaller counties did not provide data or respond to requests, but the 187 counties that provided full numbers to AP accounted for 85% of the 3 million people who voted in the primary.

Last week, AP reported that 27,000 ballots had been flagged in Texas for initial rejection, meaning those voters still had time to “fix” their ballot for several days after the primary and have it count. But the final figures suggest most voters did not.

The most rejections were around Houston, a Democratic stronghold, where Harris County elections officials reported that nearly 7,000 mail ballots — about 19% — were discarded. During the last midterm elections in 2018, Texas’ largest county only rejected 135 mail ballots. Harris County elections officials said they received more than 8,000 calls since January from voters seeking help, which they attributed to “confusion and frustration” over the new requirements.

March 17, 2022

Republican in Ohio Senate Primary Spoke Offensively About Asians "They're very good at copying"

Republican in Ohio Senate Primary Spoke Offensively About Asians
Mike Gibbons, a leading contender to succeed Senator Rob Portman, made the comments in a 2013 podcast on doing business in China

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“I’ve often thought that when I’ve run into Asians they’re all — you know, if you’ve ever read ‘The Bell Curve,’ it’s a book, a very controversial book, I can’t even remember who wrote, I think his name is Murray wrote this book,” Gibbons said in the Nov. 3, 2013, podcast, according to a transcript of his comments reviewed by The New York Times. He was referring to Charles Murray, a co-author of the 1994 book..

Gibbons continued: “And it said that the smartest people in the world as far as measurable I.Q. were Ashkenazi Jews. And then right below them was basically everybody in China, India and, you know, throughout the Asian countries.”

About a minute later, Gibbons, who earned a master’s degree from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, described being in a class with “mostly Asians” during graduate school.

“It was astounding to me how much they studied, how they were incredibly bright, but they memorized formulas,” Gibbons said. “And when we ran into a word problem — and you know, I think this is a function of the educational track they put them on — they got lost in the weeds.”

As the discussion continued, his co-host asserted that the Chinese education system did a poor job of teaching critical thinking.

“They’re very good at copying,” Gibbons added.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/us/politics/mike-gibbons-ohio.html

March 17, 2022

conservative US estimate is that 7,000 Russian soldiers have died... a staggering number

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/russia-troop-deaths.html

As Russian Troop Deaths Climb, Morale Becomes an Issue, Officials Say
More than 7,000 Russian troops have been killed in less than three weeks of fighting, according to conservative U.S. estimates.

WASHINGTON — In 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima during World War II, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed. Now, 20 days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, his military has already lost more soldiers, according to American intelligence estimates.

The conservative side of the estimate, at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths, is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

It is a staggering number amassed in just three weeks of fighting, American officials say, with implications for the combat effectiveness of Russian units, including soldiers in tank formations. Pentagon officials say a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.

With more than 150,000 Russian troops now involved in the war in Ukraine, Russian casualties, when including the estimated 14,000 to 21,000 injured, are near that level. And the Russian military has also lost at least three generals in the fight, according to Ukrainian, NATO and Russian officials.