A forthcoming documentary about cave-dwelling arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden suggests he used the extensive (and incongruous) porn collection found in the cave hideout where he was killed to send messages to his followers.

When the Navy SEALS who raided the al-Qaeda leader’s Pakistani hideout to kill him in 2011 found what was reportedly a “vast collection of pornographic materials,” some were baffled by what they found there. Why would the fundamentalist terrorist leader have a stash of skin flicks hidden away in his cave?

But a soon-to-be released National Geographic documentary called “Bin Laden’s Hard Drive” (no pun intended, hopefully) argues the videos were anything but the lascivious entertainment they appeared – instead, they were used to encode secret messages and orders to his followers.

https://www.rt.com/news/500093-osama-porn-collection-documentary-messages/

https://www.rt.com/usa/500081-my-antifa-lover-book/

Maria Kolesnikova, one of Belarus’s leading opposition figures, has apparently been kidnapped in Minsk. She is the only one of the troika of women who led the election campaign against President Lukashenko still in the country.

According to an eyewitness report, as related by Belarusian news portal Tut.by, Kolesnikova was abducted on Monday morning and placed in a minibus with the sign ‘Communication’ on its side. It is not yet known who took her, and attempts by her associates to contact her have so far proved futile.

“I turned around and saw that people in civilian clothes and masks were pushing Maria into a minibus,” said the eyewitness, who gave her name simply as ‘Anastasia’. “Her phone flew from her grasp, one of the people picked it up and jumped into the minibus, and it left.”

Speaking to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, the Minsk Police Department denied any knowledge of Kolesnikova’s detention.

Kolesnikova entered the spotlight in July, when her boss, Viktor Barbariko – initially considered the leading opposition challenger to Lukashenko – was arrested and prevented from running against Lukashenko. Kolesnikova worked as his campaign manager. Along with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and Veronika Tsepkalo, whose husbands had also been barred from running, she led the charge to oust the Belarusian president. Tikhanovskaya and Tsepkalo have since left the country.

Following the allegedly rigged election, Kolesnikova joined the Belarusian Coordination Council, set up by former opposition candidate Tikhanovskaya to facilitate a peaceful transition of power. According to Maxim Znak, a member of the group, Kolesnikova is not the only Coordination Council-linked figure to have gone missing.

“I don’t know where Maria [Kolesnikova] and [council spokesman] Anton [Rodnenkov] are, and I can’t contact them. I also can’t get in touch with [software engineering services company] EPAM Senior Vice President Maxim Bogretsov and Executive Secretary of the Council Ivan Kravtsov,” he said, sparking worries that the council members may all have been targeted. Bogretsov later got in touch.

Belarusian President Lukashenko has previously been critical of the Coordination Council, calling its work “an attempt to seize power,” and has threatened “measures” to “cool some

https://www.rt.com/russia/500048-belarus-opposition-kolesnikova-abducted/

saved dog Pickles?

HOLLYWOOF! I saved Pickles from a cruel puppy farm – months later she was starring in What A Girl Wants with Colin Firth

Julie, 49, has now written a book, Will You Take Me Home? about rescue dog Pickles, who she taught to star in 2003 teen comedy movie What A Girl Wants.

And it was Pickles’ triumph over adversity that made Julie determined to use rescue animals as her career took off. What A Girl Wants was Julie’s first gig in charge of training company Birds & Animals UK — and she had to get it right.

In her book, she recalls: “I’d worked for Hollywood trainer Gary Gero for the past few years, but now I was striking out on my own. It was a chance to prove myself.”

What A Girl Wants tells the story of a rebellious American girl, played by Amanda Bynes, who discovers her long-lost dad is an aristocratic British politician, played by Colin Firth. A Yorkshire terrier was needed as the lapdog of Princess Charlotte, played by Sylvia Syms.

What A Girl Wants tells the story of a rebellious American girl, starring Amanda Bynes, Colin Firth and Sylvia Syms

more:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/12608548/julie-tottman-rescue-dog-pickles-movie-star/

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/12606654/world-first-cloned-horse-przewalski/

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/one-quantum-physics-greatest-paradoxes-may-have-lost-its-leading-explanation#

n October 2019, a state court determined that North Carolina’s congressional districts had been severely gerrymandered and struck down the state’s map. The court’s ruling was informed, in part, by tens of thousands of alternative maps demonstrating that the district boundaries had very likely been manipulated for political gain, the very definition of gerrymandering.

Researchers had generated a slew of alternative, computer-generated maps designed to help identify potential patterns of bias. The approach is increasingly used, alongside other tests, to ferret out alleged gerrymandering. District manipulations can be so subtle that they’re undetectable just by looking at them. “The eyeball test is no good,” says Jonathan Katz, a political scientist and statistician at Caltech.

U.S. states redraw their district lines every 10 years to adjust for changing demographics picked up by the national census. The last round a decade ago raised eyebrows, most notably for districts drawn in Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

“The post-2010 round of redistricting is widely viewed as a time of extreme, even egregious, partisan gerrymandering,” retired political scientist Richard Engstrom wrote in the January 2020 Social Science Quarterly.

more:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/gerrymandering-elections-next-gen-computer-generated-maps