Exactly what a pedo would say….no thank you
Nearly $500K discovered hidden inside chair at Miami airport
Customs officers at Miami International Airport were sitting pretty after discovering nearly $500,000 hidden inside a chair being smuggled out of the US, officials said.
The US Customs and Border Protection officers seized the $491,280 in the chair, which sat along with other furniture in a recent shipment bound for the Dominican Republic, the agency said in a statement.
Authorities selected the crate for examination during outbound enforcement operations, officials said.
“Criminal organizations will attempt to export large sums of cash to launder their ill-gotten gains,” said Robert Del Toro, the CBP’s acting port director.
“This is a significant seizure and represents the impact we can make on criminals’ profits and was the direct result of our officers’ vigilance and watchfulness,” he added.
Officials didn’t say whom the money belonged to or whether criminal charges would be filed.
Travelers bringing more than $10,000 out of the US must report it to customs officials. Failure to do so can lead to the money’s seizure and forfeiture, as well as possible criminal charges, officials said.
On a typical day, CBP seizes an average of about $207,000 in unreported or illicit currency along the US borders, the agency said.
https://nypost.com/2020/09/11/nearly-500k-discovered-hidden-inside-chair-at-miami-airport/
Voting Gone Viral? How TikTok Creators Plan To Influence The 2020 Election
On Friday, a coalition of creators on the popular social media platform TikTok are launching a national voter registration campaign for the upcoming election. The initiative, which plans to leverage TikTok to inspire users to register to vote, comes as the popular social media platform itself remains a controversial political issue.
The “Tok the Vote” campaign is focused on encouraging users of the digital platform to post a short video with the #TokTheVote hashtag and update their profiles to include the campaign's image and link to the campaign website, www.tokthevote.com. The campaign is open to all creators on TikTok, regardless of the number of followers they have.
According to a statement on the campaign’s website, Tok the Vote is a “creator-led coalition to empower Gen Z to vote and mobilize young leaders in the fight for progress.” Founded by TikTok creator Colton Hess, “the Tok The Vote team endeavors to use this online platform to drive social change and to empower them to be leaders int he fight for progress.” The campaign, which links to Vote.org’s registration portal, claims to already have hundreds of creators that collectively reach millions of viewers. Yet given the viral nature of TikTok and its enormous popularity among its over 175 million U.S. users, the campaign undoubtedly has a huge potential to reach new and first-time voters among it’s large user base.
TikTok, which boasts over 1 billion users globally, has seen its popularity soar over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Yet TikTok has also been the subject of controversy for much of the summer, as the company has weathered a political firestorm resulting from its ownership by ByteDance, a China-based technology company.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/09/10/tok-the-vote-how-tiktok-creators-plan-to-influence-the-2020-election/#2ba80a99144f
Trump Is…? Biden Is…? Google Removes Autocomplete For Candidates And Voting
MOUNTAIN VIEW (CBS SF / CNN) — Google is making changes to its autocomplete search suggestions ahead of the US presidential election.
Google’s autocomplete feature tries to predict what someone is searching for based on what they’ve typed so far. That’s based on factors like popularity and what other people have already searched for.
On Thursday, the Mountain View-based tech giant said it will remove suggestions that could be seen as endorsing or opposing political parties and candidates. It will also eliminate autocomplete predictions related to information concerning participation in the election, such as voting methods, requirements or the status of voting locations. For example, phrases like “you can vote by phone” or “you can’t vote by phone” would not appear in autocomplete.
However, even though such phrases won’t auto-populate, people can still search for whatever phrases they want and see those results.
The move comes as Facebook, Twitter and other Silicon Valley tech giants are trying to get a handle on misinformation ahead of the November election.
“We want to be very careful about the type of information that we highlight in the search feature given its prominence. Given the concern around elections and elections information, we want to be particularly conservative here,” said David Graff, Google’s senior director of global policy and standards, in an online event with reporters.
Graff said that seemingly innocuous suggestions may get swept up as a result of the policy change, but that the company wants to err on the side of caution. “We really want to prevent bad information … from surfacing in a feature like autocomplete,” he said.
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/09/11/google-removes-autocomplete-for-candidates-and-voting-trump-biden/
India, China agree to disengage thousands of border troops
NEW DELHI — The Indian and Chinese foreign ministers agreed that their troops should disengage from a tense border standoff, maintain proper distance and ease tensions in the Ladakh region where the two countries in June had their deadliest clash in decades.
India’s S. Jaishankar and China’s Wang Yi met in the Russian capital on Thursday night and concurred that "the current situation in the border areas is not in the interest of either side,” according to a joint statement issued Friday.
Since last week, the Asian giants have accused each other of sending soldiers into rival territory and firing warning shots for the first time in 45 years, threatening a full-scale military conflict.
The foreign ministers did not set any timeline for the disengagement of tens of thousands of troops who have been locked in a standoff since May, but agreed that "both sides shall abide by all the existing agreements and protocol on China-India boundary affairs, maintain peace and tranquility in the border areas and avoid any action that could escalate matters.”
The disputed 3,500-kilometer (2,175-mile) border separates Chinese and Indian-held territories from Ladakh in the west to India’s eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims in its entirety.
The current standoff is over portions of a pristine landscape that boasts the world’s highest landing strip and a glacier that feeds one of the largest irrigation systems in the world.
Both sides accuse the other of provocative behavior including crossing into each other’s territory, and both have vowed to protect their territorial integrity.
Earlier this week, Jaishankar described the situation along their shared boundary, known as the Line of Actual Control, as “very serious” and said the state of the border cannot be separated from the state of the bilateral relationship.
On Thursday, the two countries agreed that as the situation eases, they should expedite work to conclude "new confidence-building measures to maintain and enhance peace and tranquility in the border areas."
In a separate statement, Wang said “China-India relations have once again come to a crossroads."
That statement said Wang “outlined China's stern position on the situation in the border areas, emphasizing that the imperative is to immediately stop provocations such as firing and other dangerous actions that violate the commitments made by the two sides."
https://www.wral.com/india-china-agree-to-disengage-thousands-of-border-troops/19280446/
12-year-old suspended in Colorado over toy gun seen in virtual class
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KDVR) – A 12-year-old boy has been suspended for having a toy gun he never brought to school.
Isaiah Elliott attends Grand Mountain, a K-8 grade school south of Colorado Springs.
In late August, the seventh grader was attending an online art class when a teacher saw Isaiah flash a toy gun across his computer screen. The toy in question is a neon green and black handgun with an orange tip with the words “Zombie Hunter” printed on the side.
The teacher notified the school principal who suspended Isaiah for five days and called the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office to conduct a welfare check on the boy without calling his parents first.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know if they were going to bust down the door,” said Isaiah. “My heart was beating super fast.”
“It was really frightening and upsetting for me as a parent, especially as the parent of an African-American young man, especially given what’s going on in our country right now,” said Isaiah’s father, Curtis Elliott.
Curtis’ wife Dani Elliott was equally furious with the school’s decision to notify her, only after deputies were on their way to the family’s home.
“For them to go as extreme as suspending him for five days, sending the police out, having the police threaten to press charges against him because they want to compare the virtual environment to the actual in-school environment is insane,” said Dani Elliott.
A sheriff’s department report confirms the teacher, “said she assumed it was a toy gun but was not certain.”
“If her main concern was his safety, a two-minute phone call to me or my husband could easily have alleviated this whole situation to where I told them it was fake,” said Dani.
Neither parent knew the school was recording their son’s virtual class but said the district refused to provide the video to them when they requested it.
The Elliotts said their son was traumatized by deputies telling the 12-year-old his behavior could’ve led to criminal charges and might in the future if he were to do something similar again.
“He was in tears when the cops came. He was just in tears. He was scared. We all were scared. I literally was scared for his life,” said Curtis Elliot, fearful that deputies might overreact to having the school principal tell them a young Black boy was potentially armed with a gun.
Administration with the school district refused an interview request from FOX31 but did email a statement:
“Privacy laws prevent us from sharing students’ personal information which includes disciplinary action,” the statement reads. “We follow all school board policies whether we are in-person learning or distance learning. We take the safety of all our students and staff very seriously. Safety is always our number one priority.”
The district is now receiving dozens of critical comments on its Facebook page. In response, the district denies its response was based on race or discrimination but seemed to acknowledge it recorded Isaiah Elliot’s virtual class without parental permission.
https://www.wtrf.com/news/national-news/12-year-old-suspended-in-colorado-over-toy-gun-seen-in-virtual-class/
Ex-Fremont police officer found guilty of child sex assault
FREMONT, Neb. (AP) — A former Fremont police officer has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a child and faces up to three years in prison when he’s sentenced in December.
Austin Williams, 35, was convicted of third-degree sexual assault of a child Thursday following a six-day trial in Dodge County District Court, the Omaha World-Herald reported.
Authorities began investigating Williams in 2018 after an advocacy center notified the Nebraska State Patrol of a possible assault. Prosecutors said Williams began the abuse in 2016, when the child was 10 or 11, and continued until August 2018.
Williams was a five-year veteran of the Fremont force when he was fired in February 2019.
https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Ex-Fremont-police-officer-found-guilty-of-child-15559644.php