Mediaboss Marketing

WASHINGTON Investigators from both the Department of Justice and the House Jan. 6 committee appear to be edging closer to former President Donald Trump and his immediate family for their roles in the events leading up to that days violent assault on the Capitol.

In a federal court filing Tuesday, lawyer Bilal Essayli said prosecutors asked his client, Jan. 6 defendant Brandon Straka, about his connections to Trump personally.

The government was focused on establishing an organized conspiracy between defendant, President Donald J. Trump, and allies of the former president, to disrupt the joint session of Congress on January 6, Essayli wrote.

Straka, who spoke at a Stop the Steal rally in Washington the day before the Capitol attack, is awaiting sentencing for his involvement in the January 2021 insurrection, an attempt to overturn Trumps 2020 election loss. He was originally charged with a felony for egging on rioters to take away a police officers shield and to enter the building itself, but was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge in exchange for his cooperation.

Meanwhile, the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday issued subpoenas to three of Trumps lawyers involved in spreading his lies that he had actually won the election and suggesting extraconstitutional and possibly illegal means of remaining in power. Among them is personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

And the committee has also subpoenaed the phone call and text message logs of middle son Eric Trump, who spoke at the pre-insurrection rally near the White House and told the audience that Democrat Joe Biden had not actually won the presidency.

Eric Trump, through a spokeswoman for the family business, said Wednesday that he had nothing to conceal. The witch-hunt continues. This partisan committee is welcome to review my phone records, Eric Trump said in a statement. I have absolutely nothing to hide.

Bill Clark via Getty Images

In fact, the House committee is bipartisan, with two Republican members, although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not permit two other Republicans who had helped spread Trumps election lies from serving on the panel.

CNN and ABC have both reported that the committee has also subpoenaed the phone records of Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of eldest son Donald Trump Jr. He, Guilfoyle and Eric Trumps wife, Lara Trump, also spoke at the Jan. 6 rally, as did Giuliani.

The former president capped off that event with a 72-minute speech in which he repeated his false claims that the election had been riddled with fraud and that he had actually won, and then urged the tens of thousands in attendance to march on the Capitol to pressure lawmakers and his own vice president to install Trump for a second term. We fight like hell. And if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore, he told them.

While federal prosecutors have charged some 700 Trump supporters in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, the filing by Strakas lawyer is the first clear indication that investigators are looking for a link to Trump personally, and appears to back up a pledge by Attorney General Merrick Garland to pursue the investigation wherever it may go.

The Justice Department remains committed to holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law, whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy, Garland said on the eve of the insurrections first anniversary. We will follow the facts wherever they lead.

And House Jan. 6 committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, in a statement accompanying the subpoenas of Trumps lawyers, said the panel is seeking to understand the pressure campaign to overturn the election. The four individuals weve subpoenaed today advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results, or were in direct contact with the former president about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes, said Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat.

A year ago, Trump became the first president to refuse to turn over power peacefully to his successor. He spent weeks attacking the legitimacy of the November 2020 contest that he lost. Hours after polls closed and it appeared that Biden would be the winner, Trump stated that he had really won in a landslide and that his victory was being stolen from him. Those falsehoods continued with a string of failed lawsuits challenging the results in a handful of states.

After the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, making Bidens win official, Trump instead turned to a last-ditch scheme to pressure his own vice president into handing Trump the election during the pro forma congressional certification of the election results on Jan. 6.

Trump asked his followers to come to Washington that day and told the thousands who showed up that they should march to the Capitol to intimidate Mike Pence into doing what Trump wanted. When you catch somebody in a fraud, youre allowed to go by very different rules, Trump said.

Having a mob presence at the Capitol was key to two possible scenarios Trump and his allies were pushing: One, pressuring Congress and Pence into declaring Trump the winner notwithstanding the actual election results, or, two, delaying the certification vote long enough for GOP lawmakers in states won by Biden to send their own slate of Trump electors.

The mob of supporters stormed the building and chanted Hang Mike Pence when the vice president did not do Trumps bidding. The riot left five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer, and four other officers took their own lives in the following weeks and months.

Though the House impeached Trump for inciting the attack, all but seven Senate Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, chose not to convict him thereby letting Trump continue his political career even as he is the subject of several investigations.

See the original post here:
Both DOJ And Jan. 6 Committee Closing In On Trump And His Family, New Filings Show - HuffPost

Altos Labs just redefined big in biotech. Where to start? The $3 billion in investor support? The C-suite staffed by storied leadersBarron, Bishop, Klausneridentifiable by one name? Or the wildly ambitious plan to reverse disease for patients of any age? Altos is all that and more.

Early details of Altos leaked out last year when MIT Technology Review reported Jeff Bezos had invested to support development of technology that could revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life. The official reveal fleshes out the vision and grounds the technology in the context of the nearer-term opportunities it presents to improve human health.

It's clear from work by Shinya Yamanaka, and many others since his initial discoveries, that cells have the ability to rejuvenate, resetting their epigenetic clocks and erasing damage from a myriad of stressors. These insights, combined with major advances in a number of transformative technologies, inspired Altos to reimagine medical treatments where reversing disease for patients of any age is possible, Hal Barron, M.D., said in a statement.

Barron is set to take up the CEO post when he leaves GlaxoSmithKline in August, completing a C-suite staffed by some of the biggest names in life sciences. The former Genentech executive will join Rick Klausner, M.D., and Hans Bishop at the top of Altos. Klausner, co-founder of companies including Juno Therapeutics and Grail, is taking up the chief scientific officer post. Bishop, who used to run Juno and Grail, is Altos president. The leadership team is rounded out by Chief Operating Officer Ann Lee-Karlon, Ph.D., formerly of Genentech.

RELATED: Barron quits GSK to take CEO post at $3B biotech startup

The team will use $3 billion in capital committed by investors including Arch Venture Partners to try to turn breakthroughs in our understanding of cellular rejuvenation into transformational medicines. That effort will build on the work of a galaxy of academic scientists Altos has brought under its umbrella.

Aiming to integrate the best features of academia and industry, the startup is setting up Altos Institutes of Science in San Francisco, San Diego and Cambridge, U.K. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, Ph.D., Wolf Reik, M.D., and Peter Walter, Ph.D., will lead the three institutes, overseeing the work of a current roster of almost 20 principal investigators across the sites. The scientific leadership team also features Thore Graepel, Ph.D., co-inventor of AI breakthrough AlphaGo, and Shinya Yamanaka, M.D., Ph.D., a Nobel laureate who gives Altos ties to Japan.

Klausner, who founded Altos with Bishop, and his colleagues brought the scientists together and created a board of directors that features luminaries such as CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., and fellow Nobel laureates Frances Arnold, Ph.D., and David Baltimore, Ph.D., to help bring cellular rejuvenation out of academic labs and into clinical development.

Altos seeks to decipher the pathways of cellular rejuvenation programming to create a completely new approach to medicine, one based on the emerging concepts of cellular health, Klausner said. Remarkable work over the last few years beginning to quantify cellular health and the mechanisms behind that, coupled with the ability to effectively and safely reprogram cells and tissues via rejuvenation pathways, opens this new vista into the medicine of the future.

Follow this link:
Altos bursts out of stealth with $3B, a dream team C-suite and a wildly ambitious plan to reverse disease - FierceBiotech

It's cool thatanyone can update Wikipedia with any info that they want. It's even better when they write something as awesome as this about Ryan Fitzpatrick.

If you've never used Wikipedia, it'sdescribed as "an online free content encyclopedia project helping create a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." So the idea is that anyone can update or edit Wikipedia at any time. While a lot of the info on that site is factual,unless you check with the sources of the update at the bottom, it's tough to verify it.

Catch Brett by listening live Mon-Fri 10am-3pm

Catch Brett by listening live Mon-Fri 10am-3pm

However, I will verify that whoever updated Ryan Fitzpatrick's Wikipedia page recently was right on. They could not have been more descriptive about Ryan Fitzpatrick and his involvement at the Bills game last Saturday night when they took on the Patriots at Highmark Stadium.

It has since been deleted, but luckily, someone took a screenshot:

attachment-Ryan Fitzpatrick Wikipedia page

Here's what's true about it:

Here's what's hilarious about it:

You know what? Now that I look at it, I'm not too sure that the whole thing isn't true.

16 Buffalo Bills With Some Of The Best And Worst Nicknames

Quiz: Bet Can You Remember If This Guy played for the Bills?

The Most Marketable Buffalo Bills

How To Dress For Foul Weather At A Home Bills Game

Every Pick Made By Buffalo Bills GM Brandon Beane

View original post here:
Someone Edited Ryan Fitzpatrick's Wikipedia And It's Amazing - wyrk.com

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopediacurated by volunteer community editors, found itself at the center of conversations about whether to categorize non-fungible tokens as "art." Da-Kuk via Getty Images

Fans of the Instagram account @depthsofwikipedia know that Wikipedia editors have a passion for lists, be they precise charts of animal sounds or catalogs of ill-fated inventors. On the free online encyclopedia, teams of community volunteers work to curate reliable sources and occasionally engage in lengthy forum debates about the finer details of maintaining the sites vast number of entries.

One such debate among editors attracted widespread attention in late December, as moderators on the Wikipedia list of most expensive artworks by living artists sparred over whether to include non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. The question hinged on whether an NFT, a relatively new digital phenomenon, could be classified as a work of art, reports Artnet News.

Earlier this month, five out of six community editors voted not to include NFTs on the most-expensive list, according to Brian Quarmby of Cointelegraph. (These changes have yet to take effect; as Artnet News points out, as of Monday.)

Some users debated the results and cited examples of conceptual art to argue in favor of NFTs inclusion, as Radhika Parashar reports for Gadgets 360. Others argued that NFTs are still a relatively new phenomenon and therefore too difficult to classify.

Wikipedia really cant be in the business of deciding what counts as art or not, which is why putting NFTs, art or not, in their own list makes things a lot simpler, argues one editor under the username jonas.

NFTs have their own list, which should be linked in the article, and entries generally shouldn't be listed in both, writes jonas.

Talk about NFTs flooded many corners of the internet early last year. Known as a form of digital tokens, they are unique and indivisible codes that indicate the authenticity of a digital file or piece of art. Systems for buying, selling and owning NFTs all take place online with the help of blockchain technology, used commonly in cryptocurrency trading.

Since then, NFTs of digital art have sold for unprecedented sums. A graphic designer, known as Beeple, sold Everydays: The First 5000 Days, an NFT of 5,000 of his daily sketches, for an eye-popping $69.3 million through Christies auction house in March 2021. And designer Pak sold an NFT, Merge, for $91.8 million in December. (Many economists interpret the sky-high prices of NFTs as result of a market bubble that will inevitably burst, similarly to the Beanie Baby craze of the 1990s, writes Emily Stewart for Vox.)

Beeple and Paks creations are two works that, if classified as art by Wikipedia editors, would rank third and eighth respectively on the most-expensive list, per Artnet.

Following the Wikipedia debate, some in the pro-cryptocurrency camp began to take notice. Duncan Cock Foster, a co-founder of digital art auction platform Nifty Gateway, took to Twitter to complain that NFTs exclusion from the most-expensive art list qualified as a disaster.

Speaking with Helen Holmes of the Observer, Foster added, Anyone with a bit of common sense knows that artists who create NFTs are artists [S]aying an NFT artwork shouldnt be included on a list of artworks is just because it is an NFT is arbitrary and wrong.

As Gareth Harris reports for the Art Newspaper, some museums have tentatively waded into the NFT frenzy. The British Museum (BM) in London put 200 NFTs of works by Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai up for sale last year. The museum now plans to repeat the feat by selling tokens of works by Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner. Prices for Turner tokens start at about $912 (799).

Jasper Johns, who sold Flag (1954-1955) in 2010 for $110 million, and Damien Hirst, who sold For the Love of God (2007) three years earlier for $100 million, currently top the living-artist list. Also on the list are sculptor Jeff Koons and painter David Hockney, whose 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million in 2018.

After Beeple sold 5000 Days for a record price in March 2021, Hockney criticized the workand the NFT trend writ largein a podcast interview.

I saw the pictures, says Hockney, referring to the mosaic of images that constitutes Beeples digital work.

But I mean, it just looked like silly little things, the artist adds. I couldnt make out what it was, actually.

Even Wikipedia itself has signed on as a participant in the NFT trend.Last year, co-founder Jimmy Wales sold the sites first edit for $750,000 as an NFT at Christies auction house, as Jack Guy for CNN reported at the time.

Per Artnet News, Wikipedia editors agreed to revisit the NFT conversation at a later date following the vote. Those interested can read the debate in full on the articles discussion page.

Recommended Videos

Continued here:
Should NFTs Be Classified as Art? Wikipedia's Editors Vote 'No' - Smithsonian

WikiTrivia is a deceptively simple game that has consumed my entire morning. Wordle is fun, but its over quickly. WikiTrivia you can play over and over again. Players sort random events in history along a timeline. When the game opens, you have one event and youre asked to place another either before or after the first event occurred. Did Philip the Apostle die before or after the sitcom New Girl completed its run?

WikiTrivia starts easy, but as the game goes on the dates get tighter and things get harder. Its also punishingly random. I had one game that asked me to order the start date of three game consoles before plunging into the depths of history. How was I to know that the Mughal Empire was founded after the founding of the Stavnger municipality in Norway?

The game lets you make three mistakes before it ends. It also keeps track of your best streaks. My current streak is 12. Both of my editors have streaks of 13. This eats at my guts and forces me to play another round after every sentence I type, yearning to beat them at the game before I publish this blog. I just lost another game because I didnt know that journalist Theodor Herzl was born after the publishing of The Lady of Shalott but before the birth of Javier Bardem.

This game also eats your time by sending you down Wikipedia rabbit holes. It generates each game pulling data from Wikipedia and Wikidata, so every entry has an attendant article you can dive into. I just learned a little about Constantine XI Palaigos, the last reigning Byzantine Empire thanks to WikiTrivia.

WikiTrivia is rough around the edges. In one of my games, it dated the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire as occurring in year 1. In another game, a colleague was told that the Puma clothing brand was founded in the year 0. Sometimes pictures or factoids dont load. The game is the work of software engineer Tom James Watson, and he keeps track of the game's various bugs on a Github page. Hes slowly working through them, always improving it.

As Watson seeks to refine and improve WikiTrivia, I too seek to improve my streak. The small bugs dont stop me from playing it. Every time I tab over to the screen to pull a piece of information, find a link, or take a screenshot for this blog, I find myself playing another round. I'm convinced, if I try one more time, I can beat my bosses streaks.

Just one more game.

Follow this link:
I Can't Stop Playing This Wikipedia History Game - VICE