https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/02/01/world/europe/ap-eu-romania-offender-pardon.html
>BUCHAREST, Romania — Romania's government decriminalized official misconduct overnight Wednesday, defying mass protests and warnings from prosecutors and the president that the move will reverse the country's fight against corruption.
>An emergency ordinance decriminalizing abuse in office was published at 3 a.m. in the official government monitor and will soon automatically become law.
>The development alarmed critics with the hour and the speed in which the center-left government, less than one month in office, passed a proposal that will benefit government allies and Romanian officials facing corruption charges.
>"It shows that the government is willing to use backdoor methods with no scrutiny or checks and balances in order to protect and promote itself," said Dan Brett, an associate professor at the Open University.
President Klaus Iohannis called the measure's adoption "a day of mourning for the rule of law."
>In recent years, Romania been touted as a regional leader for a fierce anti-corruption fight that has targeted the rich and the powerful, but the drive has proved unpopular with politicians.
>Leaders of the center-left Social Democratic Party and the junior Alliance of Democratic Liberals, which form the current coalition government, both face corruption charges that bar them from serving as ministers.
>Social Democrat chairman Liviu Dragnea was unable to become prime minister because in April 2016 he received a two-year suspended jail sentence for vote rigging. On Tuesday, he went on trial for abuse of power while he was president of the Teleorman local council from 2006 to 2012. He denies wrongdoing.
>Justice Minister Florin Iordache said the emergency ordinance will decriminalize cases of official misconduct in which the damages are valued at less than 200,000 lei ($47,800).
...
>The government on Tuesday evening also sent to Parliament a proposal that will pardon thousands of prisoners. It says the measure, which will free about 3,000 convicts, will help reduce overcrowding in prisons. Prisoners interviewed by The Associated Press on Tuesday scoffed at the idea, saying the changes are likely to benefit senior officials rather than ordinary convicts.
>Protests erupted in cities around the country after the emergency pardon plan was made public last month and the chief anti-corruption prosecutor, Laura Codruta Kovesi, said it "will render the anti-corruption fight irrelevant."
>The National Anticorruption Directorate has prosecuted 1,170 cases of abuse in office during the past three years with damages worth euros 1 billion euros ($1.07 billion.), just under one-third of all of its cases, she said.
>Both the EU and Germany criticized the move.
>European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic told reporters that the bloc is "following the latest developments in Romania with growing concern. "
>"The fight against corruption needs to be advanced and not undone," Sefcovic said.
>German foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said that "With these decisions the Romanian government has obviously ignored massive concerns on the part of the president, the judiciary and large parts of the population. We are watching these developments with some concern because large parts of Romanian civil society have already expressed their concerns about the decisions and the subject matter very clearly."
>Brett said the Social Democratic Party moved fast because "they consider that the world's attention is on the U.S. at the moment and so international condemnation and pressure will not be forthcoming. "
>"As we've seen in Poland and Hungary, the slide into authoritarianism isn't overnight but slowly one law at a time," Brett said.
>>107125
Literal south american tier banana republic of gypsies.
>>107125
One step forwards 2 steps back, like clockwork. I gave up on that shithole and left after Klaus "the cuck" Iohannis proved himself to be an incompetent retard when he allowed the thiefves to give themselfves special extremely large pensions for the entire political class. The only thing that could stop that shithole from sinking completly into the balkanic shit filled sinkhole would be a hero taking a bomb into the parliament and even that would only do little since presence at work in the parliament is under 40%(they still get paid doe). Just bomb our shit up pham, end it all. All the work and progress made in the last 5 years wiped in a hidden rushed coup made overnight. I have no country anymore, i give up
https://www.cnet.com/news/ny-attorney-general-sues-charter-over-internet-speeds-spectrum-time-warner-cable/?ftag=CAD-04-10aae9d&bhid=27022878728378952242344496348508
>>107716
>Charter's Spectrum sued for slow internet speeds
>New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman believes the company has failed to live up to its promises.
New York's attorney general is suing the second-largest cable operator in the US, claiming the company lied about internet speeds.
Eric Schneiderman filed the lawsuit ( pdf) in Manhattan's State Supreme Court on Wednesday, following a 16-month investigation. The attorney general argues that Charter and its subsidiary, Spectrum, have provided subpar services, with internet speeds slower than the company advertised.
Spectrum had been known as Time Warner Cable before Charter purchased it for about $60 billion, in a deal that was completed in May 2016. Schneiderman wants Charter to pay back its customers for broken promises on internet speeds for a period stretching from Jan. 1, 2012, to today.
With 2.5 million New Yorkers using Spectrum-Time Warner, Charter would have to reimburse customers up to $1 billion for each year since 2012, according to the lawsuit.
In today's connected world, internet speeds matter greatly to consumers for countless everyday activities, from streaming Netflix shows and Spotify tunes to paying bills, doing homework, shopping for shoes and gabbing on social media.
The attorney general's investigation found that Spectrum-Time Warner's speeds were much slower than advertised, with executives ignoring engineers' warnings that the promised speeds were impossible.
Customers paying $110 a month for 300 Mbps, were on average, only getting 85 Mbps, Schneiderman said at a press conference Wednesday. Those paying $70 a month for 100 Mbps were barely getting 50 Mbps. On average, Wi-Fi speeds were 80 percent slower than what customers were promised.
The investigation found internal emails from the company's executives acknowledging their internet speeds didn't match what they advertised.
"It is a consistent story of bad performance and a long-term business plan built on deceit," Schneiderman said.
The lawsuit also criticized Spectrum-Time Warner for charging customers $10 a month to rent subpar modems that slowed down internet speeds even more. In internal emails, the company's engineers recommended at least D3 modems, even as Time Warner's executives continued dishing out D2 modems to save costs.
Between May 2012 and February 2016, subscribers paid $600 million in modem fees alone.
Charter said it had made "significant commitments" to improve Time Warner Cable's services since acquiring the company.
"We are disappointed that the NY Attorney General chose to file this lawsuit regarding Time Warner Cable's broadband speed advertisements that occurred prior to Charter's merger," the company said in a statement.
Schneiderman's office started looking into slow internet speeds in October 2015, through a survey asking New Yorkers what their actual speeds were compared to what their companies advertised.
"New Yorkers should get the internet speeds they pay for. Too many of us may be paying for one thing, and getting another," Schneiderman said in December 2015, when he launched the probe.
The attorney general had blasted Time Warner Cable in the past, telling Charter Communications in his letter than the company "earned the miserable reputation it enjoys among consumers."
When Charter first acquired Time Warner, Schneiderman warned the company to deal with Time Warner Cable's service issues, including slow speeds.
holy shit
finally some good news
President-elect Donald Trump on Friday said he would be open to lifting sanctions on Russia if he feels satisfied by the relations between the two countries.
>“If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?” Trump said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
>He said that for “at least for a period of time,” he would keep the sanctions imposed by President Obama on Russia in December after the intelligence community concluded the Kremlin interfered in the U.S. election.
>Trump also said he would be willing to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin soon after his inauguration next week.
>“I understand that they would like to meet, and that’s absolutely fine with me,” he said.
>Trump on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time that Russia was likely behind the hacks of Democratic groups and operatives during the election that led to damaging leaks.
>"As far as hacking, I think it was Russia," he said at his first news conference since last summer.
>Trump had long been skeptical of Moscow’s links to the hacks, even after the U.S. intelligence community publicly blamed Russia in October. And even with his acknowledgment this week, the president-elect has focused his blame on the Democratic groups for not sufficiently securing their data from hackers.
>The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday announced a bipartisan inquiry into Russian intelligence activities, including looking into whether Trump's allies were in contact with the Kremlin.
>The announcement came days after the public leak of an unverified outside dossier that claimed the Kremlin has compromising personal and professional information on Trump and that his campaign aides and Russian intermediaries have been in contact throughout the campaign.
>Trump has slammed the dossier as "fake news."
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/314323-trump-open-to-removing-russia-sanctions
Trump doesnt want a world war.
Best plan is to divide Russia and China. But Russia would have to drop communism more.
We can fight the chinese/African/south america axis of evil later.
tell them that
>>104603
How much spray paint do you go through in a day?
In an effort to curb the adverse environmental impacts of paper production, researchers in a new study have developed a light-printable paper—paper that can be printed with UV light, erased by heating to 120 °C (250 °F), and rewritten more than 80 times. The secret to printing with light lies in the color-changing chemistry of nanoparticles, a thin coating of which can be easily applied to conventional paper to transform it into the light-printable version.
The researchers, Wenshou Wang and coauthors at Shandong University in China; the University of California, Riverside; and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have published a paper on the light-printable rewritable paper in a recent issue of Nano Letters.
"The greatest significance of our work is the development of a new class of solid-state photoreversible color-switching system to produce an ink-free light-printable rewritable paper that has the same feel and appearance as conventional paper, but can be printed and erased repeatedly without the need for additional ink," Yadong Yin, Chemistry Professor at the University of California, Riverside, told Phys.org. "Our work is believed to have enormous economic and environmental merits to modern society."
Currently, paper production and disposal have a large negative impact on the environment: paper production is a leading source of industrial pollution, discarded paper is a major component (approximately 40%) of landfills, and even recycling paper contributes to pollution due to the process of ink removal. There is also the issue of deforestation: in the US, about one-third of all harvested trees are used for paper and cardboard production.
Working to address these problems, researchers have been investigating alternatives to disposable paper.
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-ink-required-paper.html#jCp
One possibility is to take advantage of the color-switching ability of certain chemicals when exposed to light, although in the past this approach has faced challenges in terms of stability, limited reversibility, high cost, toxicity, and difficulty in applying the coating to ordinary porous paper.
The light-printable paper developed in the new study improves in all of these areas, bringing the technology closer to applications, which could include any medium on which information is printed and needed for only a short time.
"We believe the rewritable paper has many practical applications involving temporary information recording and reading, such as newspapers, magazines, posters, notepads, writing easels, product life indicators, oxygen sensors, and rewritable labels for various applications," Yin said.
The new coating consists of two types of nanoparticles: those made of Prussian blue, which is a common inexpensive, nontoxic blue pigment that turns colorless when it gains electrons; and titanium dioxide (TiO2), a photocatalytic material that accelerates chemical reactions upon UV light exposure.
When the Prussian blue and TiO2 nanoparticles are evenly mixed and coated onto paper, the plain unprinted paper appears solid blue. To print text or images, the paper is exposed to UV light, which photoexcites the TiO2 nanoparticles. These nanoparticles then release electrons that are picked up by the adjacent Prussian blue nanoparticles, which turn from blue to colorless.
Since it's easier to read blue text on a colorless background than colorless text on a blue background, it's the background rather than the text that is typically printed by light, turning colorless (although the paper can also be "reverse-printed" to show colorless text on a blue background). Different colors besides blue can also be achieved by using Prussian blue analogues of various colors.
Once printed, the paper retains its configuration for at least five days with high (5-µm) resolution, and then slowly fades back to solid blue through oxidation under ambient conditions. To erase the paper more quickly, the paper can be heated for about 10 minutes to return it to its solid blue state.
The researchers predict that light-printable paper will be inexpensive when produced on a commercial scale.
"The light-printable paper is indeed cost-competitive with conventional paper," Yin said. "The coating materials are inexpensive, and the production cost is also expected to be low as the coating can be applied to the surface of conventional paper by simple processes such as soaking or spraying. The printing process is also more cost-effective than the conventional one as no inks are needed. Most importantly, the light-printable paper can be reused over 80 times, which significantly reduces the overall cost."
Future plans focus on bringing the technology closer to practical use.
"Our immediate next step is to construct a laser printer to work with this rewritable paper to enable fast printing," Yin said. "We will also look into effective methods for realizing full-color printing."
>>107575
>What is a photo
>Trump reportedly claimed 2 were shot dead in Chicago during Obama’s speech. But it never happened.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-trump-chicago-violence-abc-interview-met-20170126-story.html
http://archive.is/uqkLw
>An ABC News transcript of its interview with President Donald Trump on Wednesday quoted him as saying that two people were fatally shot in Chicago while his predecessor, Barack Obama, was giving his farewell speech at McCormick Place — a claim shown to be false by Police Department records.
>The passage in question was not included in the broadcast aired Wednesday night, but the network posted a longer transcript on its website that contained the remarks in question. An ABC spokesman confirmed to the Tribune on Thursday that the transcript accurately depicted the president's words, but the network did not immediately share the video with the Tribune.
>Not only did no homicides take place in Chicago during Obama's address of about an hour Jan. 10, but the official Police Department records and the Tribune's crime database show that no shootings at all occurred over that time frame.
>Trump apparently made the erroneous claim during an interview with ABC News anchor David Muir, who asked the president about the tweet he'd sent Tuesday that read: "If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible 'carnage' going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!"
>After once again characterizing Chicago as a war zone, Trump told Muir that two people had been fatally shot in the city during Obama's speech. He didn't say where or how he'd come across the information.
>"So, look, when President Obama was there two weeks ago making a speech, very nice speech," Trump said, according to the transcript of the interview. "Two people were shot and killed during his speech. You can't have that. >They weren't shot at the speech. But they were shot in the city of Chicago during his speech. What — what's going on?"
>According to the Tribune database, the city had no slayings for about 24 hours before and after Obama's speech, which lasted from 8:02 to 8:53 p.m. A man was shot about 20 minutes after the speech about eight miles away in the West Side's Lawndale neighborhood, but that victim survived, according to Police Department data.
>Calls and emails seeking comment from the White House media affairs office were not immediately returned.
>Trump, who campaigned on a law-and-order platform, has often cited Chicago's violence as an example of rampant urban crime that he would address as president.
>But like many of his comments on social media and in interviews, Trump's ruminations on the city's gun violence issue have often left more questions than answers.
>In August, Trump told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly that a "very top police" official in Chicago had told him the city's crime problem could be stopped within a week with tougher tactics.
>"And I believed him 100 percent," Trump said without naming the official or expanding on what tactics he was talking about. At the time, Chicago police said Trump had not met with top brass since at least March.
>In September, Trump suggested in a TV interview that Chicago "is out of control" and needed to employ controversial "stop-and-frisk" police practices to stem violence.
>"We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well," Trump said about the controversial practice of making street stops. "I think Chicago needs stop-and-frisk. Now, people can criticize me for that or people can say whatever they want."
Recent findings suggest that the aristocrats of the ancient Han dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) really knew how to have a good time.
During a series of excavations of the tombs of 2,000-year-old elites in Jiangsu province, archaeologists uncovered a treasure trove of items including ceramics, vessels, loofahs, and, most intriguingly, bronze dildos and jade butt plugs.
However, researchers believe that the butt plugs were used less for sexual purposes and more for spiritual ones. At the time, jade was a priceless commodity believed to be able to ward off the ravages of spiritual and bodily decay. Therefore, embalmers used the butt plugs to "seal up" a corpse in case of any nasty after-death leaks.
“The jade plugs are used to seal the body and keep in vital essences that can leak out during life and death," exhibition curator Fan Zhang told IFLScience. "Basically, it is to maintain the qi. The most important orifice was the mouth, and we have a beautiful example of a mouth seal in the shape of a cicada in the exhibition."
While the use of the jade butt plugs may have been disappointingly less than sensual, the two hollow bronze phallus-shaped objects do appear to have been worn as massive strap-on dildos, likely by men.
"Useable bronze dildos are still relatively rare finds, though far from unheard of, and they are occasionally found in elite tombs," Zhang added. "They were all definitely made for use, and we can speculate based on their various bases how they were worn. They’re all bespoke, and the ones we have here might have been laced into place with leather or silk thongs, though it’s not clear if they were designed for men or women — they’re not heavy at all — though the phallus without the ring form was likely for a man since it was found in a king’s tomb."
Perhaps Chinese villagers have their own theories as to their use though.
http://shanghaiist.com/2017/02/01/bronze_dildos_jade_buttplugs.php
Genuinely cool
i have a feeling that these things were not fun to use
Of course it was for sexual use. Why else would it look like a dick
Five people have been shot to death at a mosque in quebec.
here's the link:
http://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/4-reported-dead-in-shooting-at-quebec-city-mosque
>>105841
That's a shame. I guess even Canada has its tolerance problems too.
>>105844
that basturd trump is behind these shenanigans
>>105841
>>>/pol/109855190
As far as I can tell, this is prior to the shooting
http://time.com/4651464/mexico-donald-trump-boycott-protests/
Pastebin link: http://pastebin.com/c7XUxBdn
>>104940
And this:
> www.independent.co.uk/environment/donald-trump-great-wall-mexican-border-damage-environment-insane-self-sabotage-wildlife-mexico-a7548861.html
>>Conservationists pointed out that the amount of concrete needed to build a solid wall across the whole border would produce vast amounts of carbon dioxide – with Bloomberg New Energy Finance calculating a figure of up to 1.9 million tons depending on how high it might be.
Your Precedent is mentally challenged: We will, all of us, suffer him. Of course, we'd have suffered Hillary if not him, and some other smuck if not her. Maybe it's better society hit bottom sooner than later and get past it. Maybe and somehow, only the intelligent will survive. An idiot plague need not be bad. Anyone else feel confident enough to wish for this, for fair?
>>104942
>"drumpf" didn't work but I'm out of ideas!
>>104942
Anon, are you OK?
I understood like 1% of your post.
http://time.com/4652725/texas-mosque-fire/
>An early-morning fire Saturday destroyed a Texas mosque that was a target of hatred several years ago and experienced a burglary just a week ago.
Not very often my town is the subject of news media at large. With the attack in Quebec, is it possible that violence against Muslim institutions and people is on the rise in America? Is this an isolated incident, or will we see more of this in the coming years?
The Quebec attack was Muslim on Muslim though.
>>106187
The goyim know. SHUT IT DOWN.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/breitbart-advertising-activists-campaign-petition-milo-yiannopoulos-a7559441.html
>Hundreds of advertisers are pulling away from ultra-conservative news website Breitbart, and campaigners are confident the backlash is snowballing.
>According to a database from grassroots campaign group Sleeping Giants, a total of 818 companies have pledged to remove Breitbart from their media plan so far.
>In the last few months, giant corporations such as Kelloggs, BMW, Visa, T-Mobile, Nordstrom and Lufthansa have all severed ties with the company.
>And in the same week that President Donald Trump has threatened to pull funding from the University of California, Berkeley after it cancelled a speech by Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, two universities in Canada have also signed up to the advertising ban.
>Emma Pullman, lead campaign strategist at separate campaign group SumOfUs, told The Independent said most of the companies were pre-existing advertisers while some have put the website on their black list, as Breitbart has been accused of writing misogynist and racist articles.
>Stephen Bannon, who now works as Mr Trump's chief strategist, boasted last year that Breitbart was a "platform for the alt-right", the white supremacist movement.
>Trump threatens to remove Berkeley funds after anti-Breitbart protest
>Breitbart could not be reached for comment.
>SumOfUs is now looking to target third-party ad agencies, and larger players like Amazon and Google.
>"If Google stops engaging with Breitbart that would be a really big step as a lot of advertising wouldn’t appear on the site," she said.
>A petition for Amazon to cancel its relationship with the news outlet has reached more than 300,000 signatures.
>SumOfUs launched their campaign around a month ago. Ms Pullman said at that point only around 200 companies had dropped their adverts, and the campaign has since snowballed.
>"We are reaching fever pitch," she said.
>One company that has not yet budged is Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce company that sells Breitbart merchandise such as $19.95 t-shirts telling migrants to "Get in line".
>More than 21,000 people signed a petition to ask Shopify to stop selling the items, but it has reportedly refused.
>Shopify could not be immediately reached for comment.
>As Breitbart aims for expansion in Germany, France and Italy, people are buying up French URLS like Breitbart.fr and large German companies like BMW, restaurant chain Vapiano, Deutsche Telekom and Lufthansa have cut ties with Breitbart.
>Lufthansa said its decision was due to Breitbart's "violent, sexist, extremist and radical political content".
> "The idea behind the campaign is if we can convene enough people we can interrupt its ability to expand," said Ms Pullman.
> "The campaign is symbolic. This is a really tangible way people can convince companies to not advertise and it's also a way to criticise the rise of the far-right and the hatred, xenophobia and racism that is coming out of Breitbart."
Yes. Good news for a change cause fuck those guys.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-missiles-cruise-idUSKBN15H0WR
>Iran has tested a cruise missile called "Sumar" that is capable of carrying nuclear weapons in addition to test-firing a medium-range ballistic missile on Sunday, German newspaper Die Welt reported Thursday, citing unspecified intelligence sources.
>No comment was immediately available from Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency or from Iranian authorities.
>The newspaper said the Sumar cruise missile was built in Iran and traveled around 600 km in its first known successful test. The missile is believed to be capable of carrying nuclear weapons and may have a range of 2,000 to 3,000 km, the paper said, citing intelligence sources.
>Cruise missiles are harder to counter than ballistic missiles since they fly at lower altitudes and can evade enemy radar, confounding missile defense missiles and hitting targets deep inside an opponent's territory.
>But the biggest advantage from Iran's point of view, a security expert told Die Welt, was that cruise missiles are not mentioned in any United Nations resolutions that ban work on ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
>International sanctions on Tehran were lifted in January last year under a nuclear deal brokered in 2015 by Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia and the United States.
>Under the nuclear deal Iran agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for lifting of most sanctions. According to a 2015 U.N. resolution endorsing the deal, Iran is still called upon to refrain from work on ballistic missiles designed to deliver nuclear weapons for up to eight years.
>News of Iran's reported cruise missile test came hours after Washington said it was putting Iran "on notice" for its ballistic missile test and signaled that it could impose new sanctions.
>Iran confirmed on Wednesday that it had test-fired a new ballistic missile, but said the test did not breach the Islamic Republic's nuclear agreement with world powers or a U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing the pact
I'm watching a US Senator right now on TV talking about how it was a "ballistic missile" and no mention of it being a cruise missile. The march to war continues.
>The march to war continues.
Is Trump still leaving NATO?
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/02/02/world/europe/ap-eu-france-election-fillons-troubles.html
>PARIS — French conservative Francois Fillon suffered new setbacks Thursday to his presidential candidacy, with prosecutors expanding an embezzlement probe into his wife's paid political job to include two of their children.
>An old interview, meanwhile, is coming back to haunt his wife, Penelope.
>French national financial prosecutors have been investigating Penelope Fillon's work as a parliamentary aide to her husband, seeking to determine whether there are grounds to suspect embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds.
>A person close to the investigation told The Associated Press that prosecutors have extended the probe to also cover the couple's daughter, Marie, and son, Charles. The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, because they were barred from discussing the investigation publicly.
>Allegations that Fillon's family used his political connections to enrich themselves with cushy parliamentary jobs have been particularly damaging for the former prime minister's image as an upstanding Catholic family man and country gentleman untainted by the long history of sleaze in French politics.
>The contrast between Fillon's words and his supposed actions sting because he has promised to slash public sector jobs and make the French work harder and longer.
>His nose-diving prospects of winning France's two-round presidential election in April and May have thrown open the race that had been expected to be between him and the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen.
>The Canard Enchaine weekly has reported that Fillon hired his children as parliamentary aides when he was a French senator from 2005-2007, and they earned 84,000 euros ($91,000) in total.
...
>Fillon has confirmed that he paid two of his children, "who were lawyers," for "specific assignments" when he was a senator. However, Marie and Charles still were in law school when they worked for their father, French media have reported. According to Le Canard Enchaine, they drew paychecks not for assignments, but for two full-time jobs.
>French politicians are allowed to hire family members as aides, as long as they actually do the jobs for which they are paid. Fillon insists that Penelope's work for him was genuine.
>Piling on the pressure on Fillon, France Televisions said it would screen extracts Thursday evening from an interview with Penelope Fillon in 2007, when her husband was prime minister, in which said she had never worked as his assistant. That appears to contradict the couple's defense in recent days that she was legitimately employed as his parliamentary aide.
>Fillon and his wife were separately questioned by investigators for five hours on Monday and the Canard Enchaine reported Wednesday that she made 830,000 euros ($900,000) over 15 years.
>With Fillon weakened and the catastrophically unpopular Socialist President Francois Hollande having abandoned hopes of running for a second five-year term, far-right leader Le Pen and independent maverick Emmanuel Macron are making hay.
>Senior conservatives rallied around Fillon on Thursday, declaring their "total" support and denouncing what they called an "attempt to kill" his candidacy.
>"They're throwing to the wolves a man, his wife, his children, his colleagues, without waiting for their arguments or listening to their defense," 17 conservatives, including former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said in a tribune in the Le Figaro newspaper.
This almost guarantees a win for LePen.
more coverage from france:
http://www.thelocal.fr/20170202/so-what-happens-to-the-french-election-race-if-franois-fillon-falls
>>107452
You clearly didn't read the article. Le Pen has nowhere near the support nationwide to not be crushed if she makes it to the second round. France pretty clearly wants the Socialists out this cycle for a variety of reasons, but there's a legit substitute who will obviously take the helm of Les Republicains even though he says he won't (because if he said he will he'd be seen as opportunist -- not very French-like), plus there's another mainstream qualified centre-right party candidate who's young and handsome and will eat the heart out of Socialists if he gets to the end. Even if it comes to Hamon vs. Le Pen it'll be a clear victory, if perhaps uncomfortably close this time now since Le Pen's seriously turned down her rhetoric this past years.
NEAT.
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-blueprint-unveiled-large-scale-quantum.html
Pastebin link: http://pastebin.com/y2xtGETW
>An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.
>This huge leap forward towards creating a universal quantum computer is published today (1 February 2017) in the influential journal Science Advances (1). It has long been known that such a computer would revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. But this new work features the actual industrial blueprint to construct such a large-scale machine, more powerful in solving certain problems than any computer ever constructed before.
>Once built, the computer's capabilities mean it would have the potential to answer many questions in science; create new, lifesaving medicines; solve the most mind-boggling scientific problems; unravel the yet unknown mysteries of the furthest reaches of deepest space; and solve some problems that an ordinary computer would take billions of years to compute.
>The work features a new invention permitting actual quantum bits to be transmitted between individual quantum computing modules in order to obtain a fully modular large-scale machine capable of reaching nearly arbitrary large computational processing powers.
it's happening
Finally. Soon we'll be able to simulate the sort of universe we all WANT to live in. Fuck you to whoever simulated this shitty one.
Globalized fetish time.
>President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday refused to take a question from a CNN reporter during his press conference, berating the network for “fake news.”
>"Your organization is terrible," Trump told CNN’s Jim Acosta when he tried to ask a question.
>"You're attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta replied.
>"Don't be rude. No, I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news," Trump responded, before calling on a reporter from Breitbart.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/313777-trump-berates-cnn-reporter-for-fake-news
related
>>94779
let the mass censorship begin
>>98949
We have to stop this bullshit.
There is a difference between biased news and fake news.
CNN is NOT fake news. Biased? Quite possible, but then so is Fox et al. But it is definitely NOT FAKE NEWS.
That is not to say that Pissgate is not fake news. It could well be. That just means that CNN had a vetting failure (possibly influenced by a bias) but that does not make CNN fake news.
I am tired of the laziness in these debates.
Researchers working on ancient DNA extracted from human remains interred almost 8,000 years ago in a cave in the Russian Far East have found that the genetic makeup of certain modern East Asian populations closely resemble that of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The study, published today in the journal Science Advances, is the first to obtain nuclear genome data from ancient mainland East Asia and compare the results to modern populations.
The findings indicate that there was no major migratory interruption, or "population turnover", for well over seven millennia. Consequently, some contemporary ethnic groups share a remarkable genetic similarity to Stone Age hunters that once roamed the same region.
The high "genetic continuity" in East Asia is in stark contrast to most of Western Europe, where sustained migrations of early farmers from the Levant overwhelmed hunter-gatherer populations. This was followed by a wave of horse riders from Central Asia during the Bronze Age. These events were likely driven by the success of emerging technologies such as agriculture and metallurgy
The new research shows that, at least for part of East Asia, the story differs - with little genetic disruption in populations since the early Neolithic period.
Despite being separated by a vast expanse of history, this has allowed an exceptional genetic proximity between the Ulchi people of the Amur Basin, near where Russia borders China and North Korea, and the ancient hunter-gatherers laid to rest in a cave close to the Ulchi's native land.
The researchers suggest that the sheer scale of East Asia and dramatic variations in its climate may have prevented the sweeping influence of Neolithic agriculture and the accompanying migrations that replaced hunter-gatherers across much of Europe.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/2/e1601877
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-ancient-dna-reveals-stone-age.html#jCp
They note that the Ulchi retained their hunter-fisher-gatherer lifestyle until recent times.
"Genetically speaking, the populations across northern East Asia have changed very little for around eight millennia," said senior author Andrea Manica from the University of Cambridge, who conducted the work with an international team, including colleagues from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, and Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin in Ireland.
"Once we accounted for some local intermingling, the Ulchi and the ancient hunter-gatherers appeared to be almost the same population from a genetic point of view, even though there are thousands of years between them."
The new study also provides further support for the 'dual origin' theory of modern Japanese populations: that they descend from a combination of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists that eventually brought wet rice farming from southern China. A similar pattern is also found in neighbouring Koreans, who are genetically very close to Japanese.
However, Manica says that much more DNA data from Neolithic China is required to pinpoint the origin of the agriculturalists involved in this mixture.
The team from Trinity College Dublin were responsible for extracting DNA from the remains, which were found in a cave known as Devil's Gate. Situated in a mountainous area close to the far eastern coast of Russia that faces northern Japan, the cave was first excavated by a soviet team in 1973.
Along with hundreds of stone and bone tools, the carbonised wood of a former dwelling, and woven wild grass that is one of the earliest examples of a textile, were the incomplete bodies of five humans.
If ancient DNA can be found in sufficiently preserved remains, sequencing it involves sifting through the contamination of millennia. The best samples for analysis from Devil's Gate were obtained from the skulls of two females: one in her early twenties, the other close to fifty. The site itself dates back over 9,000 years, but the two women are estimated to have died around 7,700 years ago.
Researchers were able to glean the most from the middle-aged woman. Her DNA revealed she likely had brown eyes and thick, straight hair. She almost certainly lacked the ability to tolerate lactose, but was unlikely to have suffered from 'alcohol flush': the skin reaction to alcohol now common across East Asia.
While the Devil's Gate samples show high genetic affinity to the Ulchi, fishermen from the same area who speak the Tungusic language, they are also close to other Tungusic-speaking populations in present day China, such as the Oroqen and Hezhen.
"These are ethnic groups with traditional societies and deep roots across eastern Russia and China, whose culture, language and populations are rapidly dwindling," added lead author Veronika Siska, also from Cambridge.
"Our work suggests that these groups form a strong genetic lineage descending directly from the early Neolithic hunter-gatherers who inhabited the same region thousands of years previously."