IT’S COME TO THIS: McDonald’s is Cutting Back on Ronald McDonald Appearances as ‘Creepy Clown’ Sightings Grow.
UPDATE: Regarding Ed’s post below, there’s no reason for alarm or to mock people for dunking McD fries in their milkshakes. Since McDonald’s removed the beef tallow from their fryers, you’ve got to do something to add some flavor back to the fries.
NOW THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: What radiation-resistant space fungus can do for drug discovery.
These fungi are radiation resistant. Thirty years ago, they survived when a routine test led to an explosion that blasted radioactive material throughout northern Ukraine. By sending these fungi to the International Space Station, Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and Clay Wang, a professor at the USC School of Pharmacy, have tried to push them to adapt again.
The day the capsule landed, Venkateswaran and Wang made the hour-long drive to Long Beach, Calif., to pick up the samples, loading the cylindrical tubes of fungi into coolers. Back in the lab, Venkateswaran and Wang have spent the past month studying how the trip changed the fungi. Their goal is to use these impressively resilient organisms to point the way to drugs that could impart similar resilience to humans, such as those getting cancer treatment.
Faster, please.
FOLLOW THE MONEY: Major GOP Donors Are Asking Trump for Their Money Back.
ALLIES: Turkey purges NATO military envoys after failed coup.
In a classified military dispatch seen by Reuters, 149 military envoys posted to the alliance’s headquarters and command centers in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain were ordered on Sept. 27 to return to Turkey within three days.
Most were dismissed from service on their arrival, arrested and imprisoned, according to a Turkish military official at NATO and two farewell letters sent by departing Turkish officials emailed to colleagues at NATO and seen by Reuters.
One of those letters wrote of a “witch-hunt” of senior air force commanders serving overseas.
It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Have a Note 7? Here Are the Best Phones to Replace It.
WELL, GOOD: White House Sending THAAD to ROK As “Soon As Feasible”
The US military is to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) counter missile battery to the Republic of Korea (RoK) as quick as possible, the White House said on 10 October in response to an official protest.
“The United States is working with the RoK to deploy this system as soon as feasible in order to more safely defend our RoK ally and US military personnel deployed to the region from the North Korea nuclear and ballistic missile threat,” read the statement. A written petition decrying the deployment, created in July, garnered enough signatures (more than 100,000) to warrant a response.
The petition called the looming THAAD deployment “a controversial move that will likely … escalate tension in the region, by provoking North Korea, China, and Russia into a spiralling arms race in the region that is already heavily militarised”.
THAAD is a purely defensive weapon which can only shoot down hostile missiles after they’ve been fired. Its presence in South Korea might be politically uncomfortable for Pyongyang and Beijing, but THAAD makes a North Korean first strike less inviting and ought to reduce military tensions in the region.
Kudos to the Obama Administration for making the right call.
POLL: Trump falls into tie with Clinton among Utah voters.
The Deseret News writeup adds that “16 percent said they would skip the election if Trump and Clinton were their ballot choices.”
But the big news might be Gary Johnson pulling 14%, which if that holds on election day would be by far the best performance statewide for an Libertarian Party presidential candidate.
HMM: Deadly small plane crash near Connecticut aerospace factory may have been intentional.
The FBI is now investigating whether the Tuesday crash in Hartford was intentional, law enforcement officials told The New York Times.
The Piper PA 34 crashed near a Pratt & Whitney around 3:40 p.m., on its final approach to Hartford-Brainard Airport. Officials said the small plane took off from the airport’s flight school.
The pilot — who was treated for serious burns — has not been identified.
Stay tuned.
DON’T BE EVIL: YouTube blacklists PragerU educational videos
“We’ve worked quietly behind the scenes for months to resolve this, but YouTube’s censorship continues, leaving us with no option but to go public,” PragerU announced Tuesday on its Facebook page.
YouTube is owned by Google, and PragerU states on its website that “in response to an official complaint we filed, Google specialists defended their restriction of our videos, and said, ‘We don’t censor anyone,’ although they do ‘take into consideration what the intent of the video is’ and ‘what the focus of the video is.’”
“There is no excuse for Google and YouTube censoring and restricting any PragerU videos, which are produced with the sole intent of educating people of all ages about America’s founding values,” the conservative nonprofit states on its website.
The videos feature “the best ideas from the best minds and distill them down to five focused minutes,” according to the group, which was founded by conservative scholar and radio show host Dennis Prager.
Shameful.
BILL CLINTON ON VIDEO: Trump’s Base Is ‘Your Standard Redneck’
Either Clinton has lost his common touch, or feels confident enough about his wife’s chances to publicly disdain millions of American voters.
ERDOGAN ABHORS A VACUUM: Turkey says its troops to stay in Iraq until Islamic State cleared from Mosul.
The United States on Tuesday urged the two governments to resolve the spat, which could affect the planned U.S.-backed assault on Mosul, the headquarters of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in northern Iraq since 2014.
“Turkey does not move on orders from others … Turkey’s presence in the Bashiqa camp will remain until Mosul is rid of Daesh,” Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told the state-run Anadolu Agency, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
“Whoever the Mosul population is, Arabs or Turkmen, they have lived together for centuries and will continue to do so. If you change the ethnic structure here, the people there will not allow it … This is our perspective as Turkey. Turkey’s force in the region cannot be questioned,” he said.
Following Obama’s “red line” fiasco, the U.S. doesn’t have enough standing left in the region to settle much of anything.
ISN’T EVERYONE USED TO THAT FIRST PART BY NOW? Barack Obama’s Wrong: The New Cold War’s Only Just Begun.
Michael Weiss:
“Vladimir Putin,” [Mikhail] Zygar writes, “did not like the new American president from the start. For him, Barack Obama was both soft and intractable… Paradoxically, Obama, the most idealistic and peace-loving U.S. president in living memory, became a symbol of war in Russia, a target for Russian state propaganda and racist jokes, and a hate figure for millions of patriotic Russians. He was caricatured as an ill-fated enemy doomed to be defeated by Vladimir Putin.”
Surveying some much-buried news over the last seven days, one begins to appreciate the weight of this grim appraisal.
Read the whole thing.
JOHN KASS: Will Hillary explain her dream of ‘open borders’?
A better question might be, “Will Hillary be seriously called upon to explain her dream of ‘open borders’?
HE IS NO LONGER USEFUL TO THE CAUSE: Billy Bush’s Departure From ‘Today’ Is Imminent: ‘He’s Definitely Gone’
JUSTICE? Lawyers for Paris Attacks Suspect Stop Defending Him.
Frank Berton and Sven Mary said they’ve decided to stop representing Salah Abdeslam, who has chosen to remain silent in a protest against his prison conditions, including the 24-hour video surveillance of his cell.
Berton told a press conference on Wednesday that Abdeslam, who was arrested in Brussels in March then transferred to France, was psychologically damaged by his detention at Fleury-Merogis prison.
“I’ve been convinced for months that he is isolating and radicalizing himself, he is taking his video surveillance very badly,” Berton said. “This is not blackmail, it’s just the reality of his psychological and psychic state. The problem is related to his solitary confinement.”
According to Berton, Abdeslam was initially willing to speak and the lawyer urged French authorities to soften their tough approach.
I wonder if Abdeslam is testing a subtle new kind of lawfare meant to frustrate western legal systems.
D.C. MCALLISTER: A Conservative Woman’s Defense of the Brave Men Who Support Trump.
THE OBAMACARE STOOL WOBBLES: This is an opportunity for Republicans, if they can hold the House.
“If.”
BREAKING: Federal Appeals Court Finds Structure of CFPB Unconstitutional.
The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the consumer-finance watchdog violated the Constitution’s separation of powers because its director isn’t sufficiently answerable to the president.
It rejected the idea of shutting down the CFPB, and instead said the remedy is to give the president the power to remove the agency’s director at will and to supervise and direct the director. The court also sent the enforcement action back to the CFPB for review.
The CFPB, created by a Democratic Congress after the 2008 financial crisis and long-criticized by Republicans, is headed by a single director who can be removed by the president only for cause.
“In light of the consistent historical practice under which independent agencies have been headed by multiple commissioners or board members, and in light of the threat to individual liberty posed by a single-Director independent agency…We therefore hold that the CFPB is unconstitutionally structured,” the court said.
MIKE HUCKABEE: GOP Bed-Wetters Abandoning Trump.
FIRE BAD: Samsung to Permanently Discontinue Galaxy Note 7 Smartphone.
“Taking our customer’s safety as our highest priority, we have decided to halt sales and production of the Galaxy Note 7,” the company said.
The move comes on a day when investors wiped off about $17 billion from Samsung Electronic Co.’s market capitalization, as investors digested the possibility that the South Korean smartphone giant could discontinue the entire Galaxy Note series, more than a month after it launched its initial recall of the smartphone.
Samsung shares tumbled 8%, its biggest one-day decline in eight years, far outpacing the broader South Korean market’s 1.2% pullback, after Samsung told Galaxy Note 7 users world-wide to immediately switch off their devices Tuesday.
U.S. carriers are accepting trade-ins of Note 7s for other smartphones.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: How This Nashville Tech Company Challenged a State Regulatory Board and Won.
Project Belle connects beauty professionals and prospective clients, who can schedule appointments directly with cosmetologists, massage therapists, manicurists, hair stylists, fashion stylists, and chiropractors for the place of their choosing.
It’s Uber, but for beauty professionals, as the Nashville Business Journal put it.
But in July, the Tennessee Board of Cosmetology and Barber Examiners sent Lauzon and Project Belle a cease-and-desist letter after receiving a complaint from an established Nashville salon owner.
Lauzon, with the help of a lawyer, Daniel Horwitz, fought back on the grounds that Project Belle isn’t a cosmetology shop, but rather a technology company.
And on Monday, the regulatory board dropped its complaint, allowing the company to continue operating.
It’s an incomplete victory, but a real one.
THE WAGES OF WRONGTHINK: Clinton suggests intervention for protester wearing Bill Clinton ‘rape’ shirt.
Hillary Clinton encouraged supporters Monday to follow and stage an intervention for a protester who was removed by security after he interrupted her rally in Detroit.
“You know,” Clinton said after the demonstrator was forcibly removed from her campaign event, “I do hope somebody follows that gentleman out and stages an intervention.”
The demonstrator, an African-American man, was wearing a shirt featuring a likeness of Bill Clinton with the word “RAPE” printed across the front.
Because you must be crazy to think Bill Clinton might have molested a woman.
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