In an admirable example of why local reporting is so important, the LA Times has counted up all the expletives thrown at the LA County Board of Supervisors since 2016. Up through 2017, board meetings were fairly clean and decorous, but in 2018 things started spiraling out of hand:

According to reporter Matt Stiles, “It’s a common problem in government proceedings across the nation, including for the Los Angeles City Council and even the Los Angeles Police Commission. At those weekly meetings, profanity-laced tirades and middle fingers regularly outnumber the officers assigned to keep watch.”

Hooray for the First Amendment?

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on June 3rd. Last week, we shared exclusive details about iOS 13 and macOS 10.15. Today, we are sharing details about new features and APIs for developers that should be announced at the event, according to sources familiar with the development of Apple’s new operating systems.

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The post WWDC 2019 for developers: Siri, Marzipan and AR improvements, more appeared first on 9to5Mac.

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver said Trump's saving grace may have been that his staff was too inept to work with the Russians. Via CNN:

"The news that the President ordered subordinates to do things that might constitute obstruction and then they just ignored him is both reassuring and also terrifying," Oliver said.

Oliver also slammed Attorney General William Barr's press conference and pre-release summary about the report.
"It's like Barr summarized the 'Twilight' novels as 'a girl in Florida goes to third base with a wookie.' No! No! That's not what happens," Oliver joked. "I'm not even sure we're reading the same underlying material."

The host concluded that the report's findings are "very depressing" and there's a lot the public still doesn't know due to redactions and other investigations. However, he did say that the report shedding light on Russia's interference was ultimately a good thing.

"The point is, having the knowledge that the Mueller report provides is infinitely better than the alternative," Oliver said. "'Cause that knowledge can inform Congress going forward and — crucially — voters a year and a half from now."

As Apple and Amazon compete for a greater share of consumer dollars and attention, they also have a particularly intimate business relationship: Apple is spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon's cloud, CNBC reported Monday, citing citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Apple's cloud expenditure reflects the company's determination to deliver online services like iCloud quickly and reliably, even if it must depend on a rival to do so. [...] In a February job posting, Apple said it was looking for someone who could "lead and architect our growing AWS footprint." Indeed, that expenditure is on track to expand. At the end of March, Apple's spending was on track to average more than $30 million per month in the first quarter of 2019. That would be more than 10 percent higher than a year earlier, according to two people familiar with the spending. If Apple's AWS use stays at those levels for the rest of 2019, its annual spending would exceed $360 million. Apple spent approximately $350 million in 2018, one of these people said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal today, Samsung is officially delaying the Galaxy Fold launch in the US until further notice following some major display issues that popped up last week. Yikes.

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This morning, another bomb exploded in Sri Lanka as officials tried to disarm it.

"The bomb squad was called to a van they thought was suspicious," said Janis Mackey Frayer.

"They looked inside and found an explosive device. As they tried to diffuse it, it went off. This is after finding a bomb at several airports. Secondary explosions are a tactic of many militant groups. It's part of the reason the government is imposing a state of emergency tonight to try to get a handle on public safety as they figure out who is behind the violence."

"There's a domestic group authorities are blaming for the attacks. Who are they?" Stephanie Ruehl asked.

"It's not an official blame, but several members of the government are pointing to a group called the National Thowheed Jamath. They believe they had international help. Authorities are stunned by how coordinated the attacks were. There are three explosions at churches, three explosions at hotels at pretty much the same time. The forensic evidence they have collected from the six sites show they were suicide bombers that carried out the attacks. We have the FBI on the ground and another team combing through the disaster scenes, trying to find evidence. They are experts in counterterrorism and in identifying victims."

"Officials reportedly did get some kind of warning before the attacks took place?" Ruehl asked.

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Elijah Cummings says that even if the House moves to impeach Trump and the Senate votes against it, "history would smile upon us for standing up for the Constitution."
Via CBSpic.twitter.com/OPrjACfQFN

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 21, 2019

Counter-argument, which refutes itself in the person of the panty-sniffer making it:

Ken Starr says Democrats shouldn't pursue impeachment of Trump because "it's so bad for the country" pic.twitter.com/EamjLAPK1U

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) April 19, 2019

I never thought much about impeachment. Viewed it solely as a “base” issue for political space.
Today, Mueller invites us to reconsider impeachment through the lens of politics and instead through the lens of fitness and Trumps loyalty.

So consider me accepting the invite. https://t.co/fmYHSaw2dS

— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 18, 2019

As I noted yesterday, if this was 2010 and the subject of the Mueller Report was Barack Obama, Tea Party Republicans would have finished impeachment by noon and would right now be building a gallows on the National Mall. https://t.co/1lPBfgsRGM

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) April 19, 2019

Every time the media asks what are the Democrats going to do on impeachment, they simultaneously should ask what is the GOP going to do on holding this administration accountable. We shouldn’t discuss one without the other.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) April 21, 2019

It's a sign of the rot in our political system that all conversation about holding the president accountable takes the form of discussing "What Democrats should do," because Republicans have utterly abdicated their oversight role.

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) April 19, 2019

By not acting on Trump’s obstruction, we tell the witnesses who gave SCO truthful information that truth doesn’t matter & isn’t worth it. And we send that same message to future witnesses in future investigations of powerful people. That’s just not the message we should send.

— Mimi Rocah (@Mimirocah1) April 21, 2019

On impeachment:

1) We're just 18 months from election day, providing some flexibility to HJC on timing.

2) There's abuse that Mueller didn't mention. (Posts incoming)

3) There's other shit that is akin to Mueller report coming down the pike.

Start the process.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 21, 2019

But seriously, every Democrat should watch this 35 seconds of @JoyAnnReid explaining why they should impeach Trump. Period. pic.twitter.com/XuMYO3pUIA

— Tormund XtopHodor, First of His Name (@tommyxtopher) April 20, 2019

One of the most amazing things about this Fyre Festival of a Presidency is the amount of duped attendees who angrily insist that the leaky tents and soggy cheese sandwiches really are luxury villas and gourmet meals.

— Marko Kloos (@markokloos) April 18, 2019

OJ Simpson was acquitted, too. He’s never been able to outrun the stink. People watched, and they knew. Same here. The object isn’t to perform an ‘intervention’ w/ Trump’s base, but to speak to the whole country.

— Rick Petree (@RickPetree) April 19, 2019

FURIOUS ABOUT THE #BarrPressConference?
TAKE ACTION NOW! Expand our hold on the U.S. House by donating *directly* to up to 40 Democratic candidates at once:https://t.co/iwKdKhsTl9

— Charles Gaba (@charles_gaba) April 18, 2019

As a public advocate, as a senator, and now as a presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren's primary focus has been leveling the playing field for all Americans. On Monday, she rolled out another visionary policy proposal to do just that: a comprehensive student debt cancellation and universal free public college plan.

Warren's first step in dealing with what she calls a higher education crisis, "a huge student loan debt burden that's crushing millions of families and acting as an anchor on our economy," is a plan to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt owed by 42 million Americans, 95 percent of the nearly 45 million who hold debt. People with household income below $100,000 would be eligible for $50,000 in debt cancellation; Warren’s proposal creates a sliding scale for eligibility for people with up to $250,000 in annual income, with debt phased out at a rate of $1 for every $3 in income above $100,000, so that someone making $130,000 a year would get $40,000, and so on. It would be available for both public and private school debt, and the canceled debt would not be taxed as income.

"Once we've cleared out the debt that’s holding down an entire generation of Americans," Warren writes, "we must ensure that we never have another student debt crisis again. […] We need to fundamentally change the broken system that created the crisis in the first place." That means making free public education available to every Americans for primary and secondary school as well as for two- and four-year public college. The federal government and states would partner to split tuition and fees and would expand eligibility and funding for Pell grants to cover non-tuition costs, "to make sure lower-income and middle-class students have a better chance of graduating without debt."

Warren's plan focuses on "fixing our higher education system so it better serves lower-income families and communities of color." That includes creating a $50 billion minimum fund for historically black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions to "ensure that spending per-student at those schools is comparable to colleges in the area." It would provide addition federal funding to states that show "substantial improvement in enrollment and graduation rates for lower-income students and students of color." It would end federal funding, including military benefits and federal student loans, going to for-profit colleges that have disproportionately preyed on people of color. It would require public colleges to complete an annual audit examining enrollment and graduation rates for lower-income students and students of color, and would ban public colleges from "considering citizenship status or criminal history in admissions decisions."

A Tim Cook Earth Day tweet has shown off four ‘Shot on iPhone’ nature photos. These show two penguins against a mountain backdrop, a tiny frog sitting in a flower (above), a close-up of a snake and a giraffe beneath a tree on an open plain with rain in the background …

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The post Tim Cook shares four stunning Shot on iPhone nature photos for Earth Day appeared first on 9to5Mac.

The European Parliament voted last week to interconnect a series of border-control, migration, and law enforcement systems into a gigantic, biometrics-tracking, searchable database of EU and non-EU citizens. From a report: This new database will be known as the Common Identity Repository (CIR) and is set to unify records on over 350 million people. Per its design, CIR will aggregate both identity records (names, dates of birth, passport numbers, and other identification details) and biometrics (fingerprints and facial scans), and make its data available to all border and law enforcement authorities. Its primary role will be to simplify the jobs of EU border and law enforcement officers who will be able to search a unified system much faster, rather than search through separate databases individually. "The systems covered by the new rules would include the Schengen Information System, Eurodac, the Visa Information System (VIS) and three new systems: the European Criminal Records System for Third Country Nationals (ECRIS-TCN), the Entry/Exit System (EES) and the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS)," EU officials said last week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With Apple’s months-long patent royalty battle with Qualcomm settled as of last week, the pathway to reliable 5G iPhones seems clear. Now reliable supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities has new predictions about what to expect for iPhones including new details about 5G iPhone chips.

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The post 5G iPhone using Qualcomm and Samsung chips, Apple could ship 200 million iPhones in 2020 appeared first on 9to5Mac.

Donald Trump is taking his fight to keep his finances a secret to court. Trump is suing to block a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee to Mazars, an accounting firm Trump uses. 

“Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the President politically,” according to Trump’s court filing, itself a part of Trump being singularly obsessed with keeping his finances a secret even as he profits from the presidency.

House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings issued a subpoena to Mazars last week after he had requested Trump’s financial information, and after the firm had indicated it would comply with a subpoena. Cummings informed members of his committee that he was seeking “to determine whether [Trump] has undisclosed conflicts of interest that may impair his ability to make impartial policy decisions, to assess whether he is complying with the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution, and to review whether he has accurately reported his finances to the Office of Government Ethics and other federal entities.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of grifter preacher and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, couldn’t take a break from lying even during the Easter holiday. Appearing on Fox News (where else?) against the backdrop of the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll, Sanders claimed reporters have said that she deserves to be choked, shunned, and, most incredibly, decapitated.

As first reported by Pam Zubek at the Colorado Springs Independent, on Wednesday, April 17, the Air Force Academy hosted a talk promoting the alleged authenticity of the “Shroud of Turin,” which carbon dating and other evidence strongly indicates is actually a 14th-century forgery, as pointed out by Academy computer science professor Barry Fagin.

“I’ve been at the Academy for 25 years and in that time I've heard this talk 3 times,” Fagin told Crooks and Liars. “I find these talks to be embarrassing.”

The talk was given by Dr. Rolf Engler, a member of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), which has been promoting the authenticity myth for over 40 years.

Hosting the talk violated two core responsibilities of the academy: first, its Constitutional responsibility—codified in Air Force Instruction 1-1—not to favor one religion over others, and second, its educational responsibility as a science-oriented institute of higher learning.

“If we take ourselves seriously as an academic institution – we shouldn't have people here talking about Bigfoot or talking about astrology,” Fagin said. “At the very least, if we do that, then we ought to have people present the alternative, and have a robust debate. And then, I think the answer would pretty much reveal itself.”

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Despite the fact that it's fairly obvious to anyone who has given the redacted version of the Mueller report an honest read that what Mueller intended was for Congress to make the judgment on whether Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice, Republican Utah Senator and Trump enabler Mike Lee told CBS' Bob Schieffer this Sunday that he was "confused" as to the "tone" of the report on obstruction.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Your colleague, the junior senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, put out a pretty stunning statement yesterday. I just want to read this to you, this is Mitt Romney speaking, "I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty by individuals in the highest office in the land including the president. I am appalled that federal- fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia including information that had been illegally obtained, that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement, and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in the Ukraine," close quote. Your reaction?

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Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MA), chair of the House Oversight Committee, on Sunday predicted that history will "smile upon" the lawmakers who pursue the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

In an interview on Face the Nation, CBS host Bob Schieffer noted that several high profile Democrats are calling for impeachment proceedings to begin due to the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report.

"This is a political act, and if you do vote to impeach him and then the Senate votes not to remove him, won’t that look like a victory for him?" Schieffer wondered.

"It may very well, but you know, sometimes, Bob, I got to tell you, there comes a point in life where we all have to make decisions based upon the fact that it is on our watch," Cummings replied. "History, I think, even if we did not win possibly, if there were not impeachment, I think history would smile upon us for standing up for the Constitution."

"You know, I hear a lot of people say they’re tired of hearing about the Mueller report," he continued. "Well, we don’t have time to get tired, because the Russians aren’t getting tired. They are attacking our electoral system every single day, if not every hour."

In the lead-up to CNN's presidential town hall tonight, M.J. Lee interviewed Elizabeth Warren about her ambitious new education plan. She talked about it to Alysin Camerota:

"Alisyn, Elizabeth Warren made a huge splash when she called on the House to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump," she said. "Aides at the time said do not expect impeachment to be the central theme of her campaign going forward, that she plans to remain focused on policy. We are seeing the first real sign of that this morning, Elizabeth Warren putting out a major student loans and free college proposal.

"Senator Elizabeth Warren out with a sweeping new proposal to wipe clean millions of Americans' student loan debt and overhaul the country's higher education system. The Massachusetts Democrat dropping the ambitious plan ahead of CNN's five-candidate young voter town hall in New Hampshire."

WARREN: Anyone who has outstanding student loan debt can have up to $50,000 worth of student loan debt canceled out so long as their income is under $100,000, and then it steps in up to there's no help for anybody whose family income is above $250,000. That's it. The debt is gone.

LEE: The proposal would make all public colleges tuition- and fee-free, inject $100 billion in Pell grants over ten years and create a $50 billion fund for historically black colleges and other minority-serving institutions.

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This fucking guy:

Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, a third-term congressman who has pushed for a “new generation of leadership” in Washington, declared his candidacy for president on Monday, becoming the 19th candidate to enter the Democratic primary field.

“I’m running because I’m a patriot, because I believe in this country and because I’ve never wanted to sit on the sidelines when it comes to serving it,” Mr. Moulton said Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Mr. Moulton, 40, garnered attention in November when he helped lead a group of rebellious Democrats who had sought to deny Speaker Nancy Pelosi the gavel in the new Congress. The effort was unsuccessful, and Mr. Moulton ultimately voted for Ms. Pelosi. His online biography paints him as something of a disrupter, noting that he was “the only Democrat to unseat an incumbent in a primary” in the House of Representatives when he was first elected in 2014.

One of the other real problems created by the Trump presidency is that literally anyone thinks they can be President now. Here we’ve got some shmuck with no natural constituency and who hasn’t been in politics long enough to accomplish anything and whose name you only know because he came at the queen and failed thinking he has the right stuff. Not to mention, boy does he have his finger on the pulse of the Democratic party, wanting to ignore domestic issues and run on national security. Hoo boy.

Return to sender.

If you have a presentation that could benefit from a little movement, use a Keynote animation. Here’s how to animate objects on a slide in Keynote.