A representative for the families involved in the Sacramento hotel pool incident has spoken out on behalf of the women recorded in the viral Instagram clip, saying that the story being told about the situation is "false and defamatory."

"This incident had nothing to do with homophobia, racism or even kissing. It involved what appeared to be sexual intercourse and inappropriate activity in close proximity of children," Terry Fahn, a spokesperson for the family's attorney, said in a statement to SFGATE.

President Donald Trump is demanding that the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania State Senate conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election, similar to the audit currently taking place in Maricopa County, Arizona. Trump is making it clear that “If Pennsylvania Senate leadership doesn’t act, there is no way they will ever get re-elected!”

The U.S. Department of Justice is elevating investigations of ransomware attacks to a similar priority as terrorism in the wake of the Colonial Pipeline hack and mounting damage caused by cyber criminals, a senior department official told Reuters.

Internal guidance sent on Thursday to U.S. attorney’s offices across the country said information about ransomware investigations in the field should be centrally coordinated with a recently created task force in Washington.

“It’s a specialized process to ensure we track all ransomware cases regardless of where it may be referred in this country, so you can make the connections between actors and work your way up to disrupt the whole chain,” said John Carlin, principle associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department.

The era of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not ended quite yet.

On Thursday, only hours after a rebel coalition of eight parties agreed to form a new government, a pro-Netanyahu bloc was putting enormous pressure on several lawmakers to defect from the new coalition and deprive it of its slim majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

Potential defections mean the “change” coalition, led by Naftali Bennett’s far-right Yamina party and Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party, is not assured of forming a government, even though the eight parties reached an unprecedented deal late Wednesday night to end Mr. Netanyahu’s 12-year premiership.

“The question is not whether the new government will last, the question is whether it will even be born,” Yehuda Ben-Meir, a former Knesset member who is now a senior research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, told The Globe and Mail. “I think the new coalition has a 50-50 chance.”

The dust piled up everywhere. Pushed around by the Martian winds, it stifled the InSight lander, whose solar panels—the source of its power—have been coated in red grime. Now, NASA has announced a step in the right direction for the sedentary probe: By commanding it to drop dirt on top of the dust, they managed to dislodge some of it, boosting InSight’s power supply.

The counterintuitive means of clearing the panels couldn’t have come at a better time. Mars is approaching its aphelion, the farthest point in its orbit from the Sun, so InSight already needed to conserve energy. Though the team had prepared for lower power usage during this point—InSight’s work runs through at least 2022—its data collection had stalled due to how dirty the solar panels had become. In February, the panels were operating at just over a quarter of their full capacity, according to a NASA release.

Project Veritas released a new video today obtained from a Facebook insider showing the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a top executive by the name of Heidi Swartz discussing former Facebook employee Morgan Kahmann and the actions being taken to root out whistleblowers that come to Veritas.

The Government of Panama announced the closure of its land, sea and river borders with Colombia.

"The National Government has determined to temporarily suspend the entry into the national territory, by land, sea and river, of any person coming from the border with the Republic of Colombia, as of May 20, 2021," says a statement from the ministry of Foreign Relations of Panama published Wednesday night.

The measure is a response to Colombia's decision to open land, river and sea crossings along all its borders.

The Colombian government reopened from zero hours on Wednesday its borders with Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil, closed 14 months ago to prevent the spread of the covid-19 pandemic, which at that time was just beginning in the country.

President Biden signaled he could accept a narrower infrastructure package that didn’t include raising the corporate tax rate, telling a top Senate Republican that he wants $1 trillion in new spending and floating alternative ways to pay for the measure, according to people briefed on the matter.

The new proposal, which includes a minimum corporate tax of 15% for the nation’s largest companies and the repurposing of some Covid-19 aid funding, marks a late shift from the White House, as Mr. Biden and Senate Republicans kick off what is expected to be a final flurry of talks on the size of the infrastructure plan and how to fund it.

In the segment below on last night’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson said evidence shows Dr. Anthony Fauci has been “implicated in the very pandemic he had been charged with fighting.”

Emails obtained by BuzzFeed via the Freedom of Information Act show “Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible,” Carlson said.

The emails, which date back to the early winter of 2020, show Fauci was worried the public would think COVID originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Why?

“Possibly because Tony Fauci knew perfectly well he had funded gain-of-function experiments at that very same laboratory,” Carlson said.

President Biden does not have a Monday deadline for an infrastructure deal with Republicans, the White House said Thursday amid a report that he is willing to drop his corporate tax hike in exchange for getting an infrastructure deal done.

Press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden intends to continue negotiations next week with Republicans led by Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.) and said the White House is open to a wide range of potential ways to pay for a bill as Republicans balk at tax hikes.

“We’re going to keep our options open to see what paths we can move forward on,” Psaki said at her daily press briefing.

Biden’s spokeswoman fielded questions at the White House as the president joined first lady Jill Biden for a bike ride near his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., where he’s spending two nights to celebrate his wife’s 70th birthday.

In the battle to defend the United States border, it seems like Joe Biden does not have our back.

He erased many protections set in place by Trump. The result, as we all know, has resulted in a major influx, breaking 20 year records.

The border crisis continues to impact states along the border. Officials from these states, including some Democrats, are demanding action.

But the Governor of Texas isn’t waiting for Sleepy Joe to wake up. He has been fighting for months to defend the Lone Star State.

And now, he’s just announced something that will freeze border jumpers in their tracks.

The Biden budget removes the Hyde Amendment, a provision attached to annual appropriations bills that has historically prevented federal funding for over 40 years under presidents of both parties. The bill initially passed in 1976 with over 100 Democratic votes in the House.

Biden, whose own position on abortion evolved as he began to harbor presidential ambitions in the 1980s, supported the Hyde Amendment up until 2019.

A year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan – a short distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the virus – was dismissed as a crackpot theory, supported only by Donald Trump, QAnon and hawks on the right looking to escalate tensions dangerously with China.

Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President Joe Biden has announced an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged, rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered by liberals.

Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.

California kicked off a two-year study into how the state might compensate African Americans for slavery and its lingering effects on Tuesday, when a newly formed reparations committee met for the first time.

The first-in-the-nation committee is the result of Gov. Gavin Newsom last year signing a bill authored by then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber, whom he subsequently appointed as California’s first Black secretary of state. The nine-member task force will draft an apology to Black Californians and recommend ways the state might make up for discriminatory policies

Imagine living in Seattle, Washington. You are a citizen of King County (renamed to “honor” Martin Luther King Jr. in 1986, because William Rufus DeVane King – who it was originally named after – was a slave owner). It’s a 71 percent white county.

The 2020 King County Firearm Violence report, published by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office – Crime Strategies Unit, was released.

It matter-of-factly states:

76 percent of the shooting victims are non-white (55.19 percent being black)
80 percent of those charged were non-white (53.85 percent being black)
King County is roughly six percent black.

Whites, who represent the vast majority of the citizens of Seattle and King County, are a peaceful, docile people. Gun crime in Seattle and King County has a color, and racially speaking, it isn’t white.

For the purpose of making your way adaptively and smartly in a society that is systemically anti-white, you need to understand what distinguishes Critical Race Theory from Marxism and quit the socialism/Marxism theoretical escapism, for once and for all.

Get this into your head: For conflict in society, Marxism fingers social class; critical race theory saddles whites. You, if you are white!

More on this do-or-die distinction in my latest YouTube video, “Distinguish Critical Race Theory From Marxism: Your Life Depends On It!”

Google announced it's removing its global lead on diversity strategy and research from his post after it was discovered he'd made antisemitic comments in a past blog post.

Kamau Bobb will be reassigned to a STEM research role after The Washington Free Beacon uncovered a 2007 blog post by Bobb titled "If I were a Jew."

"If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself," he wrote in the now-deleted post.

"If I were a Jew today, my sensibilities would be tormented. I would find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the long cycles of oppression that Jewish people have endured and the insatiable appetite for vengeful violence that Israel, my homeland, has now acquired."

The post appeared to be written following an outbreak of violence between Lebanon and Israel in late 2007.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in a tweet, slammed "The Squad" for simultaneously voicing support for the LGBTQ community as well as Hamas.

"How does the #JihadSquad support Hamas and the #LGBTQ community when Hamas kills gay people and has annihilating Israel in its charter?" wrote Greene.

"You can't have it both ways girls," Greene continued. "#pride and supporting Hamas don't go together."

So Dr. Anthony Fauci in the pandemic’s early months was casting doubt on the lab-leak theory of COVID’s origins — even as he was also receiving at least one alert from a genomic researcher that “some of the features look (potentially) engineered.”

Notably, he forwarded “anti-conspiracy theory” articles that quoted Peter Daszak — the head of a US nonprofit that used some grant money from Fauci’s agency to fund coronavirus work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — ­attacking the lab-leak idea. Daszak and others wrote Fauci personally to thank him for dumping on the theory.

We still don’t know if the virus evolved normally and somehow jumped to humans, but Chinese researchers have been searching hard for evidence of the bug in some intermediate species (as the “natural” theory would require) and have so far come up empty.

Barack Obama has waded into the conversation about alien life – and has predicted that if evidence of aliens emerges, it will lead to sweeping changes around our planet.

The former US President said that proof of aliens would likely result in the emergence of new religions, and there would be calls for huge sums of money to be spent on weapons systems so we can defend ourselves from possible attack.

But he said the existence of aliens wouldn’t change his own perspective on life.

President Obama was speaking on a New York Times podcast just days after it emerged that UFOs had been regularly spotted by US military personnel.

We are currently witnessing the formation of nothing less than a “new world order,” with the existing international legal system fracturing and states taking sides in a fresh Cold War, Russia’s deputy defense minister has told RT.

Colonel General Aleksandr Fomin spoke to the network ahead of the 9th Moscow Conference on International Security, scheduled to take place on June 22-24 in the Russian capital. The event brings together military officials and security experts from different countries, with some 49 nations having already confirmed their participation.

The upcoming conference is an explicitly non-partisan event, and the countries are invited to partake regardless of their current relationship with Russia, Fomin stated.

“At the forum, we give the floor not only to partners who share our approaches to solving major world problems, but also to opponents, countries with which cooperation today is at bare minimum or equal to zero,” Fomin said.

Local leaders are stepping up the pressure on President Biden to tackle the issue of student debt by taking official action in their own jurisdictions that they hope will urge him to forgive some college loans.

The District of Columbia and several other city governments have passed resolutions that call on the federal government to act on student loan cancellations. The moves come as Biden laid out new measures toward economic equity this week, an issue that student loan advocates say could be tackled in part by canceling student loans.

The resolution D.C. passed on Tuesday unanimously urges immediate attention from the federal government and to “begin the transition to education as a public good,” outlining how student loans impact the District’s residents.

On the day in April 2020 that Valerie Mekki lost her job, she was scared to share the bad news with her children. So she hid in her room for 45 minutes.

"I just didn't want to face them," says Mekki, who worked in fashion merchandising for more than 18 years and was the sole provider of health insurance for her family. "I had the shame and the guilt."

But her teenagers surprised her with their optimism.

"They had seen me work so hard in the fashion industry. To them, it was like — you're going to figure it out," she says.

More than a year later, Mekki is still figuring it out. She is among millions of women who have yet to return to work full time, despite an economic recovery boosted by the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and falling rates of coronavirus infection.

In response to the corporation’s left-wing political agenda, a county in North Carolina has banned Coca-Cola machines, declaring they will fight back in the cultural war.

“The left wing in America, they defund, they boycott, they cancel, they tear down statues — all sorts of egregious actions. The expectation from them is the opposing political side will cower in the corner and we’re supposed to accept that and it’s supposed to be OK. And it’s not OK.” Eddie Harris, Surry County county commissioner, said.

The first of the gas-giant orbiter's back-to-back flybys will provide a close encounter with the massive moon after over 20 years.

On Monday, June 7, at 1:35 p.m. EDT (10:35 a.m. PDT), NASA's Juno spacecraft will come within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of the surface of Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. The flyby will be the closest a spacecraft has come to the solar system's largest natural satellite since NASA's Galileo spacecraft made its penultimate close approach back on May 20, 2000. Along with striking imagery, the solar-powered spacecraft's flyby will yield insights into the moon's composition, ionosphere, magnetosphere, and ice shell. Juno's measurements of the radiation environment near the moon will also benefit future missions to the Jovian system.

Ganymede is bigger than the planet Mercury and is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetosphere—a bubble-shaped region of charged particles surrounding the celestial body.

Don’t be one of those people who hears the words “solar eclipse” and ushers everyone into the house until it’s all over. That’s an overreaction to one of nature’s most awe-inspiring events being visible from where you live—and if you’re in North America that may be happening on June 10, 2021.

However, solar eclipses can be dangerous and you do need to be very careful.

Rule 1: never look at the Sun without an ISO-compliant solar filter/solar eclipse glasses.

Rule 2: never look at the Sun through an optical device of any kind even while wearing solar filters/solar eclipse glasses (they must always go in front of camera lenses, binoculars and telescopes).

Here’s some more detail on how to watch it safely—including some specialist advice from an eclipse eye safety expert:

NASA has just posted its monthly update (above) highlighting upcoming treats for sky watchers. Top of the list is a solar eclipse, though you may want to check out Scorpius and its blazing red star, too.

Solar eclipse

A solar eclipse occurs when the moon moves between Earth and the sun, obscuring Earthlings’ view of our nearest star. While the event taking place on Thursday, June 10, will be a partial eclipse, where a portion of the sun will remain visible, it still promises to be an amazing spectacle for those lucky enough to witness it.

With every new software update, Apple has been making its smartphones more inclusive. The brand has been adding features and functions that aim to make the iPhone experience more accommodating, making it easier for people with different needs to interact with technology. Because smartphone experience, in general, depends very heavily on a couple of senses, these diverse features turn out to be game-changers. Not just for many with impaired senses, but also for general users – remember how the “Live Listen” feature on the AirPods was designed to be a hearing aid but was also used by people in noisy areas?

Apple’s iPhone 13 lineup might still be a few months away but we are getting new rumors and information about the upcoming devices every now and then. It is tipped that a 120Hz display is finally making its way to the iPhone 13 lineup later this year. Apple is rumored to employ the LTPO (Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Oxide) tech instead of LTPS to achieve the high refresh rate numbers. The series is said to have a bigger camera bump as well. Now, more information regarding the cameras has emerged online.

The Justice Department has created a task force to centrally track and coordinate all federal cases involving ransomware or related types of cybercrime, such as botnets, money laundering, and bulletproof hosting.

“To ensure we can make necessary connections across national and global cases and investigations … we must enhance and centralize our internal tracking of investigations and prosecutions of ransomware groups and the infrastructure and networks that allow the threats to persist,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told US attorneys throughout the country on Thursday. She issued the directive in a memo that was first reported by Reuters. Investigators in field offices around the country would be expected to share information as well.

Facebook is confronting two separate antitrust investigations by European regulators that will probe whether the social network's use of data gives it an unfair advantage in online advertising.

The investigations could eventually result in hefty fines, and increase pressure on Facebook to make changes to its business model, which is already the focus of a lawsuit brought by the US government.

In a statement Friday, the European Commission said it is assessing whether Facebook breached EU competition rules by using data gathered from advertisers on its platform to compete against them.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who has launched multiple investigations into US tech companies, said in a statement that data collected via social networks "should not be used in ways that distort competition."

Over the last two days, two companies have outlined radically different—yet oddly familiar—visions for the future of air travel.

One idea is built around a buzzing network of small, electrically powered vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft ferrying commuters in and out of dense urban areas, a tantalizing vision prophesied since at least the 1950s. The other vision bets on a fleet of a few dozen supersonic airliners jetting well-heeled travelers from one global city to another, a dream that many thought died with the Concorde some 20 years ago.

Apple’s AirTags are effective little Bluetooth trackers, but the thing that makes them work so well—leveraging Apple’s extensive Find My network of devices that are constantly pinging each other—also makes them extremely problematic because you can be tracked without your knowledge in what is essentially real-time. Apple made some effort to prevent stalking when AirTags launched, but in our testing, the devices didn’t go far enough to alert people that they were being tracked. Today, the company is rolling out an update that slightly improves those features.

On Thursday, United Airlines announced it was purchasing a fleet of 15 planes that can travel faster than the speed of sound. With a cost per jet of $200 million, the deal is worth $3 billion. If the order goes through, this would be the first fleet of supersonic passenger aircraft since the Concorde.

United says that the planes, which are being purchased from the Denver-based supersonic flight startup Boom, are designed to go at speeds twice as fast as a typical flight. That would be fast enough to get someone from Newark to London in just three and a half hours. The first of these flights is scheduled for 2026, and the company plans to start carrying passengers by 2029. If all works out, United has the option to buy at least 35 more planes from the startup, which is one of several focused on making supersonic flight work for the 21st century.

The team behind NASA's InSight Mars lander has come up with an innovative way to boost the spacecraft's energy at a time when its power levels have been falling. The lander's robotic arm trickled sand near one solar panel, helping the wind to carry off some of the panel's dust. The result was a gain of about 30 watt-hours of energy per sol, or Martian day.

Mars is approaching aphelion, its farthest point from the Sun. That means less sunlight reaches the spacecraft's dust-covered solar panels, reducing their energy output. The team had planned for this before InSight's two-year mission extension. They've designed the mission to operate without science instruments for the next few months before resuming science operations later this year. During this period, InSight will reserve power for its heaters, computer, and other key components.

The Department of Homeland Security has officially terminated the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as "Remain In Mexico," initiated under President Donald Trump. The Remain In Mexico policy enabled immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol to keep illegal aliens in Mexico while waiting for their immigration court date in the U.S.

As one of his first acts as President, Joe Biden foolishly suspended the Migrant Protection Protocols in January, expanding the scope of the Biden border crisis overnight, but DHS instructed immigration officials on Tuesday that they will no longer be enforcing the mandate.

According to the new memo, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, tasked by Biden to "review" the effectiveness and impact of Remain In Mexico, erroneously stated that the program did not "adequately or sustainably enhance border management."

With over 4,000 reported deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries, the experimental COVID-19 jabs have harmed many people.

Yet, you’re censored if you attempt to shed light on the risks of the injections.

When the CDC & FDA paused the J&J experimental vaccine after reports of rare but serious cases of blood clots, that should have been enough to halt the entire vaccination program.

38-year old Kendra Lippy was one of the six cases of severe blood blots that led to the pause.

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a database managed by the CDC that collects reports of health problems experienced after taking a vaccine.

It aims to identify potential side effects that premarket safety testing may have missed. According to the CDC, VAERS is supposed to be “the nation’s frontline system for monitoring vaccine safety.” This is especially critical for the COVID-19 shots, since they were the first to go on the market without the long-term safety testing required for FDA approval. See Part 1 of this series.

You would hope that if a new vaccine wound up getting more death reports in five months than all the others combined over the entire previous 28 years, that might warrant some attention.

Think again.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday said a Georgia police officer had not violated the country’s main anti-hacking law by improperly accessing a government database for financial gain, a decision likely to curtail prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) of individuals who misuse computer systems to which they have legal access.

The police officer, Nathan Van Buren, was arrested and charged under the 1986 law after accepting payment from an FBI informant to search a law enforcement database of license plate information. The government charged Van Buren with violating the CFAA, which prohibits people from knowingly “exceeding” their “authorized access” to a computer system.

A large mob of Black Lives Matter militants looted a Target late Thursday evening in response to a fatal police shooting in the city.

Winston “Boogie” Smith, 32, was reportedly wanted on a state warrant for being a felon in possession of a firearm. After being stopped in his vehicle by law enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service say he “produced a handgun.”

At least one person has already been assaulted and was left unconscious at Target.

A Russia-based hacker group victimized JBS Foods, the world’s largest meat producer, in a ransomware hack this week, according to the FBI.

Other hackers, based in Russia and elsewhere, struck the Colonial Pipeline and other infrastructure, water-treatment plants, small businesses, Washington D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and even hospitals.

With easily accessible hacking tools and hard-to-trace financing amid the rise of cryptocurrency, cybercrime is soaring around the world, experts say.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said as much last month, adding that ransomware attacks cost victims a combined $350 million last year.