Friend of late model Christy Giles brain-dead after being dumped outside LA hospital

A 26-year-old aspiring architect who was mysteriously left unconscious outside a Los Angeles hospital is now brain-dead, her family said.

Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola spent two weeks in a coma after she was dropped off outside Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles hospital on Nov. 13.

Cabrales-Arzola’s organs will be donated to nine different people, her family said as they announced the devastating update over the weekend, according to KABC-TV.

The lifeless body of her friend, model and aspiring actress Christy Giles, 24, was also dumped two hours earlier outside Southern California Hospital in Culver City by two men allegedly wearing bandanas over their faces.

Keep reading

The FAA accidentally disclosed more than 2,000 flight records associated with Jeffrey Epstein’s private jets

In January 2020, Insider asked the Federal Aviation Administration for all the agency’s flight records, including departure and arrival data, associated with a fleet of private jets owned by Jeffrey Epstein. Filed under the Freedom of Information Act, our request seemed to have a decent chance of success: The agency in 2011 released its entire database of US-based flights to The Wall Street Journal.

In March 2020, however, the FAA denied our request, saying that “the responsive records originate from an investigative file” and were therefore exempt from disclosure. The agency cited Exemption 7(A), which Congress designed to shield records that were “compiled for law enforcement” and “could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceeding.” The FAA did not specify which enforcement proceeding the records might interfere with; Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and confidante, faces a trial over sex-trafficking charges this month.

But despite its original denial, the FAA inadvertently mailed Insider a portion of Epstein’s flight records alongside correspondence for an unrelated FOIA request earlier this year. The records contained data on 2,300 flights among four private jets registered to Epstein between 1998 and 2020. Most of them had appeared in Insider’s searchable database of all known flights connected to Epstein.

The new FAA records also reveal 704 previously unknown flights taken by Epstein’s planes. These include hundreds of trips from a three-year gap in the public record, from 2013 to 2016, when the jets’ movements were unaccounted for.

Keep reading

Team builds first living robots—that can reproduce

To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses.

Now scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction—and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.

The same team that built the first living robots (“Xenobots,” assembled from frog cells—reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble “baby” Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”—that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.

And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. Again and again.

“With the right design—they will spontaneously self-replicate,” says Joshua Bongard, Ph.D., a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.

Keep reading

Will Ghislaine Maxwell Trial Reveal Jeffrey Epstein Secrets?

Ghislaine Maxwell is used to being the woman of the hour. The 59-year-old British aristocrat was a fixture of the London and New York social scenes throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, rubbing shoulders and champagne flutes with an international cast of power players that included two US presidents and at least one prince. In her jet-setting, party-hopping days, she allegedly lived a double life as a groomer of girls, serving up underage victims to Jeffrey Epstein and the megawatt men who moved alongside him. 

All eyes are again on Maxwell as her trial opens in Manhattan federal court, just steps from the lower Manhattan jail where Epstein was found dead in his cell two years ago. The charges against her for her role in Epstein’s decades-long international sex abuse ring include six counts related to child sex trafficking in the decade spanning 1994 to 2004, involving four girls — the youngest aged 14. The alleged crimes occurred at Epstein’s residences in Manhattan, Palm Beach, and New Mexico, as well as Maxwell’s London apartment. 

Maxwell faces a separate trial, as yet unscheduled, for an additional two counts of perjury for statements she made in connection with a long-settled 2015 defamation suit against her. If convicted on all counts, Maxwell could face 80 years in prison. She has always denied any involvement in, or knowledge of, Epstein’s crimes, and pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Epstein’s death in federal custody in 2019 left Maxwell bearing the brunt of public outrage at the chronic mishandling of his sex crimes by law enforcement and the courts. Still, Maxwell’s time with Epstein raises many questions: If she did indeed assist in his crimes, what motivated her? Was she in love with him? Was she aiding and abetting him in exchange for financial support? Apparently, not even Maxwell can explain the nature of her partnership with Epstein. We know that they were lovers, and at one point she was managing his households. But when asked in a 2016 deposition if she was Epstein’s girlfriend, she responded, “That’s a tricky question. There were times when I would have liked to think of myself as his girlfriend.” 

Contradictions abound. On the one hand, she is a wealthy, Parisian-born heiress with an Oxford education and an enviable black book. On the other hand, she is, like Epstein, a person “mysteriously made and mysteriously protected.”

So Maxwell goes to trial in Epstein’s stead. The challenge for her defense team will be to wash away that guilt by association — to sever her public image from Epstein’s. But Maxwell without the Epstein tinge is still a strange figure with a strange past. And a closer look at the woman of the hour brings up more questions than answers.

Keep reading

Prestigious Weaponry Expert Censored After Demonstrating that a Deadly Poison Gas Attack—Blamed on the Syrian Government—Was Really a False-Flag Operation by U.S.-Funded Terrorists

Theodore Postol is one of the world’s leading authorities on warfare and weaponry. A physicist with a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, he is Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former top policy adviser to the chief of naval operations.

During a career full of honors, he received the Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society for “incisive technical analysis of national security issues vital for informing the public policy debate”; the Hilliard Roderick Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for “uncovering numerous and important false claims about missile defenses”; and the Richard L. Garwin Award from the Federation of American Scientists “that recognizes an individual who, through exceptional achievement in science and technology, has made an outstanding contribution toward the benefit of mankind.”

Professor Postol was also a senior editorial board member of the Princeton-based Science & Global Security journal for more than 30 years—until he quit in protest over the journal’s refusal to publish an article he wrote that embarrassed the CIA and the U.S. government.

The article provided incontrovertible evidence that the murderous April 4, 2017, sarin gas attack on Syrian civilians was not the work of the Assad government but a false-flag operation by U.S.-funded jihadists designed to make it look like Assad was to blame.

Keep reading