Month: June 2021

A 7-year-old boy in Taiwan who was allegedly body-slammed 27 times during judo practice — by both his classmates and coach — suffered a brain hemorrhage and was ultimately removed from life support, a report Tuesday said. The BBC, citing the Taipei Times, reported that the coach has been charged with assault and using a minor to commit a crime, but his charges would likely be upgraded to include or be replaced by “injury causing death.” The boy reportedly attended a judo practice in April and suffered a brain hemorrhage after the repeated injuries. He slipped into a coma and was on life support for 70 days, according to the reports.

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Robinhood will pay a record $70 million fine, the largest ever slapped down by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). The regulator found the popular trading platform misled millions of customers, allowed unqualified accounts to trade options and mishandled a widespread outage in March of 2020. The penalty sends a “clear message” about breaking the brokerage industry’s rules. “The fine imposed in this matter, the highest ever levied by FINRA, reflects the scope and seriousness of Robinhood’s violations, including FINRA’s finding that Robinhood communicated false and misleading information to millions of its customers,” said Jessica Hopper, executive vice president and head of FINRA’s Department of Enforcement in the disclosure.

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CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” has shed a staggering 75% of its audience since the liberal network experienced a January spike in viewers. Tapper’s program averaged 2.8 million viewers in January but settled for only 706,000 in the 4 p.m. ET timeslot from May 31 through June 23, losing three-quarters of its audience in the process. Tapper’s second-quarter viewership is down 49% compared to the first quarter. CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” has shed a staggering 75 percent of its audience since the liberal network experienced a January spike in viewers. While January featured a historic news cycle with the Capitol riot, the inauguration of President Biden and the lead-up to former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, his direct timeslot competition on Fox News has lost a fraction of the viewers that “The Lead” has. “Your World with Neil Cavuto” has kept 1.1 million of the 1.5 million that tuned in during the jam-packed first month of 2021.

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California State University East Bay (CSUEB) is reportedly offering $1,200 for faculty to attend a professional development program that seeks to understand how Whiteness can be “eradicated.” The College Fix reported Tuesday on the program, which is set for July and will involve multiple sessions on “critical race theory,” “becoming an anti-racist educator” and other topics. The university had issued a “call for self-nominations” that was due on May 21, according to the document obtained and published by the Fix. The introductory section reads in part: “So how do we counter the stories we have been told and that we might even (re)tell to ourselves about how teaching and learning should be? How do we equip ourselves with the knowledge, tools, resources and beloved community to counter the systems of oppression, particularly racism, that saturates us? How can our vigilant work in countering racism also aim toward liberatory conditions where whiteness has been eradicated?”

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Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction was overturned by Pennsylvania’s highest court. The court said Wednesday that it found an agreement with a previous prosecutor that prevented him from being charged in the case. The disgraced actor has served more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a state prison near Philadelphia. He had vowed to serve all 10 years rather than acknowledge any remorse over the 2004 encounter with accuser Andrea Constand. Cosby, 83, who was once beloved as “America’s Dad,” was convicted of drugging and molesting the Temple University employee at his suburban estate.

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Zion National Park received more than an inch of rain in an hour Tuesday afternoon, leading to flash flooding that shut down the park’s main road. State Road 9 near Zion filled with water during the storm. The park closed canyons and The Narrows because of the flash floods. A search and rescue operation had to be paused during the rain but resumed Tuesday evening. Zion will be in “modified operations” Wednesday as the park staff cleans up after Tuesday’s damage — and keeps an eye out for more flash flooding. According to the National Weather Service, scattered showers and thunderstorms are expected through Wednesday evening — and some will produce heavy rain, with the potential for flash flooding in slot canyons, small streams and normally dry washes. There’s also the potential for debris flows near recent burn scars. Wednesday’s flash flood warning for Zion is “probable.”

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Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell — dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm — depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984. Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

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President Vladimir Putin has revealed that he continues to oppose compulsory vaccination against Covid-19, despite the country’s ever-worsening case numbers. He did, however, encourage all citizens to get inoculated. Speaking at his annual ‘Direct Line’ call-in show on Wednesday, Putin noted that mass vaccine uptake is the only way to halt the further spread of Covid-19, but said he would not force any Russians to take the jab. “I once said, as you may recall, that I do not support compulsory vaccination. And I continue to hold the same point of view,” he explained. Last month, Putin revealed his view that inoculation should not be forced on the population, but each person should choose to get it voluntarily after realizing its importance.

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On June 29th, flash floods hit the region of South Limburg which lies in the southernmost province of Holland. The region around the Dutch municipalities of Kerkrade and Landgraaf was affected badly. Local observation stations measured more than 100 mm (4 inches) rain. It rained particularly hard between 6 PM and 7 PM. Police have been receiving many calls about water damage in houses and basements. A resident of Landgraaf writes on Twitter: “Really not normal. Kitchen and cellar just flooded. Roof tiles could not handle the amount of water.” The flooding caused a gas leak in the Dutch village of Eygelshoven. The water washed away part of the sidewalk and damaged a gas pipe. As a precaution, the fire brigade evacuated a supermarket and a care center. Technicians are currently present to seal the leak. A lot of rain also fell at the observation station of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute at the airport near the Dutch city of Maastricht. At 9 PM more than 75 mm (3 inches) of…

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he is unlikely to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, because the country’s policies are set not by lawmakers in Kiev, but overseas in America and the European Union. Speaking as part of his traditional televised ‘Direct Line’ question-and-answer session with the public on Wednesday, Putin dismissed the idea of a summit. He asked: “Why should I meet Zelensky? If he has given up his country to full external control, the key issues about life in Ukraine are resolved not in Kiev but in Washington, and, to some extent, in Berlin and Paris. What then would we talk about?” He added that he would not “refuse a meeting of this kind,” but said he would have to first “understand what we could talk about.”

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