May 24, 2021

'I have to clear chats': Feds detail how Oath Keeper tried to wipe online evidence after attacking..

'I have to clear chats': Feds detail how Oath Keeper tried to wipe online evidence after attacking the Capitol


Last week, federal authorities arrested a number of Capitol rioters, including a New Jersey man by the name of James Breheny. Breheny is a member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right paramilitary group that bills itself as a continuation of the mission for current and retired military and law enforcement.

In a new report, NBC4 New York detailed the ways that Breheny, realizing he was in trouble, belatedly sought to wipe evidence of his participation in the riot from the internet.

"Investigators further connected the New Jersey man to the siege through videos posted online. They said Breheny is seen among the mob who clashed with police at the East door of the Capitol building and followed the rioters inside the rotunda," said the report. "Federal officials also said that Breheny, on the day of the riot, sent messages from his phone bragging about making it into the U.S. Capitol. A search of his phone revealed messages saying, 'I breached the Capitol door!' and 'I have to clear chats,' according to prosecutors."

"Breheny's phone also contained warning messages from contacts that told him to delete all pictures and messages, even advising him to get a new phone. 'They're going through social media looking at pictures to try and prosecute anyone in the Capitol building,' one message read," said the report. "Two days after the riot, officials claim Brehney deactivated his Facebook account. Six days after that, he met with officers and claimed he entered the Capitol unwillingly, telling investigators he was forced inside among the siege of rioters. Prosecutors also allege Breheny said he didn't know he wasn't allowed to go inside." ..........(more)

https://www.rawstory.com/james-breheny-2653090839/

May 24, 2021

Michigan bars and restaurants mixed on 11 p.m. indoor curfew being lifted

(Detroit Free Press) Hallelujah.

That was Sue Burrows' reaction to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's recent announcement that the 11 p.m. curfew for bars and restaurants would expire June 1.

Burrows, who manages Gusoline Alley in Royal Oak, said that while the curfew hasn't impacted the bar's business during the week — even at 50% capacity — as much as it has on Fridays and Saturdays, Whitmer's announcement last Thursday signals another welcome step toward normalcy.

"We all enjoyed getting out at a reasonable hour (but) now it's back to reality, which will be good," Burrows said, noting that the bar was typically busy until the 2 a.m. pre-pandemic closing time.

....(snip)....

Mike Forsyth, co-owner and founder of the popular Detroit City Distillery in Eastern Market, says he's ready to get back to business as usual, after months of COVID-19 restrictions.

“We've seen more demand than ever as the weather has warmed up,“ Forsyth said in an email to the Free Press. “Being able to operate after 11 p.m. means that Detroit nightlife will come back to life — and we're so ready for it." ............(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/dining/2021/05/24/michigan-bar-restaurant-curfew-lifting/5209919001/

May 24, 2021

Urban Walkability Gains a Foothold in the U.S.

Urban Walkability Gains a Foothold in the U.S.
The 15-Minute City, an urban concept in which all basic needs can be satisfied with a 15-minute walk or bike ride, is catching on in the U.S. as an indirect reaction to the pandemic.

BY ANDY HIRSCHFELD
9 MIN READ MAY 5, 2021




(YES! Magazine) Jake Poznak, co-owner of Moonrise Izakaya, a Japanese restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, could have easily been a statistic of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the National Restaurant Association, more than 100,000 restaurateurs across the country had to close their businesses because of the pandemic. After the first wave, when restaurants began to reopen, the city helped restaurants build outdoor dining enclosures that take up spots on the street otherwise reserved for parked cars. Expanded outdoor dining in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic was a lifeline for Poznak, the business, and the vibrancy of the neighborhood.

“Without outdoor dining, we would be out of business,” Poznak says. “I was shocked that all winter, people were willing to get on the sidewalk. I have one of these street enclosures.”

....(snip)....

New York is the standout example for a more pandemic-induced move in this direction in the United States—following in the footsteps of Paris, where the idea of the 15-Minute City first caught on.

....(snip)....

Known for its almost nonexistent zoning, Houston is a city where the idea of a 15-Minute City is more of an uphill battle, but it’s far from off the table. The layout of Houston is actually fairly conducive to this. While the city is sprawling, it has multiple urban centers, unlike most other cities. Downtown Houston, the Texas Medical Center, Uptown Houston, Greenway Plaza, and Westchase all act as concentrated urban cores with sprawling neighborhoods intertwined between them. ..............(more)

https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2021/05/05/15-minute-city-walk

May 23, 2021

Toronto: Construction of Kipling Transit Hub complete

Construction of Kipling Transit Hub complete
The transformation of a train station into a transit hub for Toronto’s west region includes improved passenger amenities, as well as sustainability features, such as a green roof.




Metrolinx completed the Kipling Transit Hub, where riders in Toronto’s west region can connect to GO Transit, MiWay bus and Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) services at a single location in Etobicoke, Ontario.

“The transit connections offered at the new Kipling Transit Hub will provide residents with better access to job and housing opportunities, both locally and across the Greater Golden Horseshoe,” said Ontario Minister of Transportation Caroline Mulroney.

Ontario Associate Minister of Transportation (GTA) Kinga Surma added, ““By supporting communities and delivering a seamless transit experience, we will meet the needs of the over five million people who will call this region home by 2051.”

The new facility has 14 bus bays, 90 bike spaces, an elevated pedestrian bridge connecting the GO train platform with the bus terminal and underground tunnels linking the bus terminal to the TTC station. ..............(more)

https://www.masstransitmag.com/technology/facilities/article/21223792/construction-of-kipling-transit-hub-complete

May 23, 2021

A look at Michigan's disappearing shorelines

(WDIV Detroit) LAKEPORT, Mich. – With the recent heat, it’s hard to not think about spending the day on one of Michigan’s many lakes, but there’s a growing problem for many towns along the lakes: erosion.

It’s been happening for years, but as climate change continues to impact the lakes, experts and those who live on the shore are beginning to worry.

“Sometimes we could feel spray up against the windows of the house, and big waves, you would actually feel the house vibrate when they hit the seawall,” said Geof Kusch. “Now you can see that the beach is about a foot below my sidewalk at the height of the high water. It was four to five feet from the sidewalk, down to what beach was there.”

Kusch has lived along Lake Huron for nearly a decade. In 2020, the water came a little too close for comfort. At its worst, the water has practically knocked on their back door. ..........(more)

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2021/05/21/a-look-at-michigans-disappearing-shorelines/?

May 23, 2021

Why Are These Spider-Scorpion Things Showing Up Everywhere?

Why Are These Spider-Scorpion Things Showing Up Everywhere?
A bathroom in Greece. A Harry Potter film. Sold as pets.

BY ERIC BOODMAN




(Slate) About 18 years ago, Andrea Colla got an unusual request. Would he come survey the fauna of a Nazi air-raid shelter? Even by entomologists’ standards, the task was weird. This warren lay under the Italian city of Trieste, and it was built in secret between 1943 and 1944 at the orders of a war criminal who wanted a subterranean escape route from his villa. Eventually, the tunnels had become a museum, managed by the cave enthusiasts of the Trieste Alpine Club; they wanted to know who else was hanging out down there, besides tourists, school groups, and them.

One afternoon, after finishing his work at Trieste’s natural history museum, Colla went down with a headlamp to poke around and set some traps. For bait, he used Gorgonzola because, he said, it’s “better if it is a cheese that smells a lot.”

Colla is a man of cave insects. Like many Triestinos, he’d grown up spelunking: Instead of going to the cinema, he and his tobacconist dad spidered down ropes and followed waterworn paths through limestone — a hobby that became part of Colla’s job. Aboveground Europe, he believed, had few creatures left uncatalogued. To describe and classify new species — advancing the science of taxonomy, one bug at a time — he looked to the isolated spots he’d explored as a child. “In caves,” he said, “there are still surprises.”

....(snip)....

So he was taken aback in 2019 when one of the air-raid tunnel guides sent him a snapshot of a cartoonishly evil-looking creature — like a cross between a tarantula and a crab, with skin-crawlingly long legs, barbed pincers, and a brownish coat of armor. To Colla, it was unmistakable. This was a harmless arachnid called an amblypygid, sometimes known as a whip spider or tailless whip scorpion, which was neither spider nor scorpion. And it was not supposed to be in Italy at all.

Amblypygids were popping up elsewhere, too. In 2018, an undergraduate in suburban Athens found a few scuttling through his bathroom and kitchen — now he’s credited with uncovering the species’ presence in continental Europe. In 2019, there was the first confirmed record of amblypygids in Jordan, also in a bathroom. In both cases, the person who helped identify the critters was Brazilian arachnologist Gustavo de Miranda. And he’s just outdone himself: Last year he submitted a paper, the publication of which is forthcoming, describing 33 new amblypygid species, one of which has only ever been seen in the pipes and storage sheds of a Rio de Janeiro museum. ............(more)

https://slate.com/technology/2021/05/great-whip-spider-boom-why.html

May 21, 2021

Airbnb Shows How San Francisco's Office Shortage Is Suddenly a Historic Glut

Airbnb Shows How San Francisco’s Office Shortage Is Suddenly a Historic Glut: Hogging Vacant Space for a Future that Never Came
by Wolf Richter • May 19, 2021 •

They all did it, from Salesforce, Uber, and Twitter on down. It was pure magic, a show produced with enormous hype. Now they’re all trying to get out at the same time.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.


When Airbnb reported a net loss of $1.17 billion for Q1 last week, it also disclosed in its shareholder letter that this loss included a $113 million expense that it expects as it is trying to “exit” an office lease in San Francisco “that we deemed no longer necessary given our restructuring and cost cutting efforts.”

The $113 million expense represents its estimate of the difference between what it would get by subleasing the space to new tenants and what it will have to pay the landlord and related expenses over the remaining term of the lease. But that’s a cheaper way out than letting it sit vacant and paying the landlord until the lease terminates.

What’s fascinating about this is just how much office space Airbnb had secured with long-term office leases during the years of the so-called office shortage that it never even occupied, and that by leasing office space that it didn’t need, it had further increased the office shortage at the time.

Airbnb’s disclosure relates to its 287,000 square feet (sf) at 650 Townsend St. in the South of Market area. According to the San Francisco Business Times, Airbnb had leased the space in 2017 for a term of nine years. But it only ever occupied 170,000 sf of it. The rest had remained vacant for all these years. ...........(more)

https://wolfstreet.com/2021/05/19/airbnb-shows-how-san-franciscos-office-shortage-is-suddenly-a-historic-glut-hogging-vacant-space-for-a-future-that-never-came/

May 21, 2021

NYC subway's recovery put at risk by crime even as city rebounds

A spike in assaults and harassment incidents in New York’s transit system is threatening its ability to restore ridership to prepandemic levels just as it needs to start replenishing its coffers.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which carried 5.5 million people on its subways every weekday before the COVID-19 outbreak, faces a harsh reality: Even with $14.5 billion of federal aid, it must plug an estimated $1.5 billion deficit as soon as 2024 if ridership fails to hit prepandemic levels.

That scenario would bring back financial strains that could have dire consequences for the future of the nation’s largest transit system. At stake is the MTA’s $51.5 billion capital plan, which would improve access for the nearly 1 million New Yorkers who identify as disabled, expand service to underserved neighborhoods and replace aging signals that cause delays and limit service.

The key to it all, however, is revenue. The authority must lure people back in the face of concerns about both COVID-19 and personal safety. With the most-populous U.S. city reopening, subway ridership is as high as it’s been since the virus first hit. But it’s still a mere 40% of prepandemic levels, and by some estimates, 20% of riders may never return, with more people opting for remote work or preferring cars or bikes. The federal aid will eventually run out, so winning back passengers is crucial given that fares and tolls historically accounted for 50% of revenue. ...............(more)

https://www.masstransitmag.com/safety-security/news/21223788/ny-nyc-subways-recovery-put-at-risk-by-crime-even-as-city-rebounds

May 21, 2021

More and more Americans are dying from "diseases of despair," according to a new study

More and more Americans are dying from "diseases of despair," according to a new study
Salon spoke with an expert behind a new study on the connection between social ills and diseases of despair

By MATTHEW ROZSA
PUBLISHED MAY 21, 2021 9:40AM


(Salon) Nearly two years ago, I found myself standing in a humid, grimy motel room in Pennsylvania, talking to opioid addicts about what drove them to their addictions. At the time I was struck by the many differences in their stories: One was sexually abused and bullied as a child; another accidentally became addicted while taking pain medication. They were, in retrospect, all victims of what public health experts call "diseases of despair" —specifically, medical conditions that are often found in groups that feel despair due to a bleak economic or social outlook.

As evoked by the name, diseases of despair are profoundly political, in that nation-states with poor or non-existent welfare states see such disease more commonly. Drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide are among the most common diseases of despair. And and those diseases are killing an increasing number of people each year in the United States.

A recent study in the peer-reviewed open access medical journal BMJ Open found that suicide, alcohol-related diseases and accidental drug overdoses were the main factors driving a year-to-year drop in average life expectancy between 2015 and 2017 in the United States. Indeed, deaths in all of those categories have soared over the past decade, coinciding with a large-scale economic decline and the ongoing opioid crisis.

....(snip)....

"The formal category of 'diseases of despair' would refer to people who don't just feel down but actively seek out medical care for suicidality and substance abuse," (Penn State University professor Danny) George explained, adding that not everyone is able to do this because of America's health insurance system. "It's important to emphasize that 'despair' does not merely refer to an aberrant internal state but is rather the consequence of a particular set of political-economic and cultural conditions that are producing distress." ........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/05/21/diseases-of-despair-deaths-usa-inequality/

May 21, 2021

Selfie-Seeking Cyclist Suffers Humiliating Moment On Live TV

https://twitter.com/Guadvenegas/status/1394372474607849473?s=20


A bicyclist cruising past live TV cameras tried to snap a selfie.

But with one hand on her cellphone, one in the air and none on the handlebars... well... it didn’t exactly go according to plan.

The result was captured in the background of a live TV shot in which MSNBC’s Guad Venegas reported from Santa Monica, California, on how nurses were reacting to the latest guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on wearing masks. .........(more)

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bicyclist-falls-live-tv-msnbc_n_60a3179fe4b014bd0cafa9cb