Alton Sterling, 37, was shot and killed by police officers on Tuesday, July 5, while he was selling CDs outside of a convenience store. The following day, Philando Castile, 32, was shot and killed by a police officer after he was stopped for a broken tail light. Videos of both killings were widely shared on social media, causing hundreds to take to the streets in protest of police actions, as well as memory of the two men killed. Thursday night, snipers shot and killed five officers at such a protest in Dallas, Texas. Questions of police brutality, America's historic racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, and second amendment rights have been pushed to the forefront of the nation's consciousness.
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The suspected gunman behind the Dallas shootings has been named as US Army Reserve member Micah Xavier Johnson, a US government source told Reuters.
Johnson, 25, is reportedly the shooter who was involved in the standoff with police overnight on Thursday.
The Mayor of Dallas said the suspect died after officers used explosives strapped to a robot to “blast him out”.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that, during a lengthy standoff with police, the suspect - who he did not name - said he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers”.
Three other suspects are in custody.
Five police officers were killed and seven others wounded after snipers targeted a crowd during a Black Lives Matter protest.
The demonstration was being held following two recent fatal police shootings of black men.
It is unclear how many shooters were involved in the attack.
The city's police chief said that the suspect who died following the standoff had told officers he was working alone.
The incident is reportedly the deadliest day for US law enforcement since the 9/11 attacks.
Brown told a press conference on Friday: “The suspect said that he was upset about black lives matter.
“He said that he was upset about the recent police shootings. The suspect said that he was upset at white people.
“The suspect stated that he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers. The suspect stated that we will eventually find the IEDs.
“The suspect stated that he was not affiliated with any groups and he stated that he did this alone.”
Reports are circulating that Black Power Political Organisation (BPPO) has claimed that it was behind the attack.
The group's Facebook page, where the post was originally seen, has since been deleted.
President Barack Obama said: “Let's be clear, there's no possible justification for these kinds of attacks, or any violence against law enforcement.”
Gunfire broke out about 8.45 pm Thursday as hundreds of people were gathered to protest fatal police shootings this week in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St Paul, Minnesota.
Brown told reporters the snipers fired “ambush style” upon the officers.
Mayor Mike Rawlings said one member of the public was wounded in the gunfire.
Brown said it appeared the shooters “planned to injure and kill as many officers as they could.”
Officer Brent Thompson, 43, has been named as one of the officers who was fatally shot.
The Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) said in a statement: “As you can imagine, our hearts are broken.
“This is something that touches every part of our organisation.
“We have received countless expressions of support and sympathy from around the world through the evening. We are grateful for every message. Thank you.”
Black Lives Matter protests were held in several other cities across the country last night after a Minnesota officer on Wednesday fatally shot Philando Castile while he was in a car with a woman and a child.
The aftermath of the shooting was livestreamed in a widely shared Facebook video.
A day earlier, Alton Sterling was shot in Louisiana after being pinned to the pavement by two white officers. That, too, was captured on a cellphone video.
Obama told a press conference on Friday morning: “Yesterday I spoke about our need to be concerned as all Americans about racial disparities in our criminal justice system.
“I also said yesterday that our police have an extraordinarily difficult job and the vast majority of them do their job in outstanding fashion.”
Video footage from the Dallas scene showed protesters marching along a street, about half a mile from City Hall, when the shots erupted and the crowd scattered, seeking cover.
The search for the shooters stretched throughout downtown, an area of hotels, restaurants, businesses and some residential apartments.
The scene was chaotic, with helicopters hovering overhead and officers with automatic rifles on the street corners.
One woman was taken into custody in the same parking garage where the standoff was ongoing, Brown said. Two others were taken into custody during a traffic stop.
This week we looked at the expenses that actually cost more when you're poor, got our hands dirty learning how to change a car's brake pads, tried out a handheld Linux computer, and more. Here's a look back at this week's most popular posts.
Spend less than you earn, save your money, and—poof!—your financial problems are solved. If only it were this easy. Being broke sucks enough on its own, and then there are obstacles that make it extra hard for poor people to fight their way to financial security. For example, here are a few expenses that actually cost more for low-income individuals.
I grew up with a standard, cheap rice cooker my mom bought at a grocery store. Shopping for my own cooker as an adult, I was surprised at how many options there are to choose from and how expensive those options can be. Cooking rice is a pretty straightforward task, so what's with the super expensive cookers? Here's what I found.
Your car is a big expensive machine that, over its life, will cost you a ton in maintenance. If you learn to do some of those jobs yourself, you can save a ton of cash. Replacing your brake pads, for example, is one of those jobs that sounds much harder than it is, and we're going to walk you through it from start to finish.
The variety of wayspeople have found to cram the palm-sized Raspberry Picomputer inside a handheld device are some of my favorite Pi projects. But those projects are usually expensive, and some even require a 3D printer. The PocketC.H.I.P. isn't nearly as powerful as a Pi, but it's still the handheld machine I've wanted for a long time. Plus, it's just $50.
It's easy to find movies to download or stream, but if you're flying straight and narrow or want to support and watch films that are free, public domain, or whose creators want them free and openly shared, here are some great sites to bookmark—and visit when you want something new to watch.
Ambient noise apps drown out distractions so you can focus on your work, or generate serene, peaceful environments that encourage you to fall asleep. But with dozens you can download, it's hard to know which is the best. Noisli, White Noise, and Rain Rain are all at the top of this game, so it's time to crank them up to 11 and see which one creates so much atmosphere you could practically breathe in it.
Alcoholic popsicles are a great concept but, thanks to ethanol's low freezing point, it's not as simple as throwing some booze into an ice pop mold and tossing it in the freezer. But don't let that deter you from making fabulous frozen, boozy pops. All you need to do is pay attention to the ABV.
Things get harder as you get older, and that includes recovering from a night of drinking. If it feels like you don't handle hangovers as well as you used to, here's why.
Few things can ruin a good run like turning a corner and facing a towering hill. You were making good time! You were flying along and everything felt great and the robot lady on your running app was whispering excellent numbers into your ear. Now that all comes to an end. You must trudge.
When you first get a new graphics card, your games run buttery smooth. Over time, you might start to notice that it doesn't run as well, even on the same games. What gives? This video explains what causes performance degradation over time.
Having a partner makes those regular workouts more fun and challenging, and can make them a great bonding experience as well. But that can all backfire if you only rely on the other person to step up. If you're buddying up, you need to pull your own weight too, and here's how.
Hopefully you never have to worry about a grenade going off near you, but it's good to know what to do just in case. This video explains how a grenade works, and how you can lower your chances of being injured if one explodes nearby.
If you don't grill very often that probably means you don't clean your grill regularly either. If your grill grates are covered in burnt food and rust, you can get it ready for a cookout with a few household staples.
SINGAPORE — They're cute and cheery, but are also packed with some of the advanced auto technology we may not be aware of.
This team of 10 robot cheerleaders from Japanese electronics maker Murata was on show here on Thursday. Each robot balances freely on a ball and is able to roll around in formation with the others while staying upright.
Koichi Yoshikawa, the spokesperson for Murata's development team, told Mashable that the cheerleaders each contain three gyro sensors working at a rate of 1,000 calculations per second to keep their bodies upright on the balls and move them in the right direction. Read more...
The horrifying details of Thursday night's mass shooting of five law enforcement officers in Dallas during an otherwise peaceful demonstration includes a startling revelation: Police apparently turned their bomb-disposal robot into an offensive weapon by attaching a bomb to it in order to kill a suspect.
According to Dallas PD Police Chief David Brown, police cornered one suspect in El Centro College and, after hours of negotiation and an exchange of gunfire, they brought in a "bomb robot."
"We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was ... The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb," he said. Read more...
Mountain View Voice | Robots rolling in dough Mountain View Voice Long answer the company is positioning itself to take advantage of automation, particularly the potential to have a pizza kitchen and delivery system that can essentially run on autopilot. That means a digitized ordering system, a robotic pizza ... and more » |
Inquirer | Robot brews: How AI could flavor your next beer CNET The idea is that after trying one of IntelligentX's four beers -- named Amber AI, Black AI, Golden AI and Pale AI -- consumers use a Facebook chat bot to give feedback on what they liked and didn't like about the flavor. The algorithm, named ABI ... AI system sifts through drinker feedback to make tastier beerInquirer Robot bar workers could soon be serving artificially intelligent beer… in a computer-simulated world, of courseRobotics and Automation News (press release) (registration) all 17 news articles » |
Read more: Marco Rubio, Florida, Environment, US Senate, Tea Party, Politics News
"An average human brain contains around 100 billion neurons and each neuron is capable of making around 1,000 connections (synapses) with the other neurons. These 1,000 potential synapses created by each neuron are responsible for data storage inside the brain. Now if we multiply the count of neurons (100 billion) by the number of connections (1000) that each of them can make, then we get a whopping 100 trillion data points -- which can at the very least account for storing about 1000 terabytes or 1 petabyte of information."
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After the most recent mass shooting in the U.S. at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:
Other politicians echoed that sentiment. But prayers are not going to fix the fact that each year 30,000 deaths and many more injuries are caused by firearm violence. Recognizing gun violence for the public health problem it is might.
So what does it mean to view firearm violence as a public health problem? And how does that change the debate Americans are having about gun violence?
First, and most importantly, viewing firearms violence as a public health problem means declaring that the current situation is unacceptable, and preventable.
We did not successfully tackle the AIDS epidemic until we made it a national health priority, an act marked by the passage of the Ryan White Care Act in 1990. Today this position is reflected by the federal government's commitment to ensure that at least 90 percent of HIV-infected individuals in the U.S. are properly treated by 2020. Federal funding has increased over the course of the epidemic, and the government is spending US$28 billion on domestic HIV prevention and treatment programs during the current fiscal year.
Second, treating firearm violence as a public health problem also means conducting research to identify the underlying causes of the problem and to evaluate potential strategies to address it. For instance, research may reveal common sense structural changes - such as firearm safety features - that limit the potential damage that can be done by guns.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has avoided conducting research on firearm violence since 1996, when Congress passed an appropriations bill barring the CDC from using funds to advocate or promote gun control.
In 2012 President Obama ordered the CDC and other federal bodies to resume research on firearms violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting. But Congress has yet to allocate a single dollar for CDC research on firearm violence.
While the the National Institutes of Health is undertaking firearms research, very little funding is allocated for it, on the order of just $2 million over three years. That's not much out of the NIH's nearly $32 billion budget for fiscal year 2016.
Third, a public health perspective on firearm violence means moving beyond blaming individuals and toward societal programs and policies to curb this epidemic. Just as individual smokers are not to blame for the tobacco epidemic, individual gun owners are not to blame for what is a much larger societal problem.
Taking a broad, societal approach is exactly what we have done with other public health problems, such as smoking. Public health research helped identify a proven set of programs and policies that denormalized smoking, such as limitations on smoking in public places and anti-smoking media campaigns. Thanks in large part to these societal-level public health interventions, cigarette smoking prevalence dropped to its lowest level in history last year.
And fourth, a public health approach means the "public" is included in the discussion. This means that we need to listen to concerns across sectors, including gun owners, gun dealers, law enforcement officials and public health advocates. With a public health problem of this magnitude, everyone should be at the table. That might seem impossible now, given the deep polarization on both sides of the gun control debate. However, a lack of willingness to even discuss potential solutions to the problem is simply unacceptable.
A recent collaboration between the public health community and gun dealers to reduce firearms-related suicide in New Hampshire offers an example of what this might look like.
In 2013, Boston University's School of Public Health started to conduct research aimed at understanding social norms about firearms and gun culture. We have also created a dedicated Violence Prevention Research Unit. So what have we found so far?
In a 2013 study, we linked state homicide data from the CDC with data on gun ownership, which revealed a strong relationship between levels of household gun ownership and firearm-related homicide rates at the state level. We found that this relationship is specific to homicides committed by offenders who are known to the victim.
Earlier this year, we published a study that documented a strong link between gun ownership levels and firearm-related suicide rates. These findings suggest that responding to mass shootings by arming teachers and ordinary civilians is not only unlikely to reduce homicide rates, but the resulting increase in the prevalence of firearms might actually increase deaths from both homicide and suicide.
We have also found a strong relationship between the implementation of state laws that require universal background checks for all gun sales and lower rates of firearm-related homicide.
These findings suggest that the loophole in federal law that allows unlicensed dealers to sell guns to any individual without conducting a background check may be contributing toward higher rates of firearm violence. On June 20, the Senate blocked four gun control measures, including a measure to close the loophole for background checks.
Our future work will explore the impact of various state firearm policies and identify policies that are specifically effective in reducing urban violence, which disproportionately impacts the African-American community.
Even though much of this work has been done without external funding, it is essential that Congress allow the CDC to do its job and conduct research on gun violence, and that other federal agencies like the NIH increase allocations for research in this area.
Allocating $0 for research, as CDC currently does on a problem that results in more than 30,000 deaths each year, is not how we handle a public health issue.
Sandro Galea, Dean, School of Public Health, Boston University and Michael Siegel, Professor of Community Health Sciences, Boston University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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Ho Chi Minh City is the largest city in Vietnam with more than 10 million residents in its metropolitan area. Formerly known as Saigon, the city is expected to grow to 13.9 million by 2025. This stunning photo was sent to us by @imnardzval (at Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)
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Flower longhorn beetle (Xestoleptura crassicornis) collected in Skaha Bluffs Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG22381-D09; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=GMOSK841-15; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:AAF2123)