An FBI agent who worked together with at least 12 FBI informants to allegedly entrap a small group of patsies in a plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was criminally charged on Monday for beating his wife.
The alleged inability of FBI special agent Richard Trask, 39, to resist beating his wife for just a couple of months as the case go to trial may now end up jeopardizing the FBI’s entire suspected entrapment operation.
The Department of Homeland Security reminded Floridians ahead of a flotilla scheduled to travel near Cuba on Thursday that it was “illegal” to travel to the island nation without permission from the federal government.
“It is illegal for boaters to depart with the intent to travel to Cuba for any purpose without a permit,” the department said in an advisory, noting that penalties could include fines of $25,000 per day and up to 10 years in prison.
If at least 100 boaters show up, Cuban South Florida residents are planning to sail from the United States’ southernmost point in Key West on Thursday to within 12 miles of Cuba’s border — technically in international waters — to show support for the country’s protesters.
“We are trying to show a peaceful protest against this regime. To show the people that we are with them, that we want to help them, that we have seen what is happening with the protests and we support the movement,” a coordinator for the flotilla, 24-year-old Osdany Veloz, told The Daily Mail. However, he said, “If Cuban authorities open up and let us through, then we will definitely go in and hand over anything useful that we have on board.
Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.
As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.
Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) declared on Monday that the Republican Party “cannot be allowed to prevail,” reducing it to a gang of conspiracy theorists who seek to suppress votes and engage in “anti-science vaccine rejection.”
“Here is what the modern Republican Party is all about: cult-like devotion to Trump, big lies and conspiracy theories, voter suppression, climate denial and anti-science vaccine rejection,” the Democrat socialist said.
The estranged wife of Andy Rubin has accused the former Google executive who invented the Android operating system of defrauding her of millions of dollars and squandering money on affairs and a “sex ring.”
In court documents unsealed by a California judge this week, Rie Rubin, who married Rubin in 2009, claims her husband spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on sexual favors and “affairs with multiple women” during their marriage.
These affairs, her lawsuit says, included ”‘ownership’ relationships with other women, whereby Rubin would pay for their expenses in exchange for offering them to other men.”
The complaint also accuses Rubin ― who left Google in 2014 after a female subordinate accused him of sexual assault ― of running a “sex ring” involving at least one woman. The woman, identified as “M” in the documents, would “agree to perform various sexual acts with multiple men” which would be filmed for “the enjoyment of Rubin and other men,” according to the documents.
“After these orgies, Rubin would himself have sex with ‘M’ off-camera,” the complaint alleges.
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