St Martin “95% destroyed” by #Irma: official. “I’m in shock. It’s frightening”

http://trib.al/QesWAlI  #HurricaneIrma2017

Arrest warrant to be issued for former Thai PM Yingluck Shinawatra

Thousands of police stood guard in the streets around Bangkok’s Supreme Court Friday ahead of a long-awaited verdict in the trial of former Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

Thailand’s Supreme Court is preparing to issue an arrest warrant for former Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra after she failed to appear in court to hear the verdict in her two-year rice trial.

Yingluck faces up to 10 years in prison for alleged negligence over the rice-buying scheme which cost the country billions of dollars. The court has set a new date for the verdict of September 27.

Thousands of police stood guard in the streets around Bangkok’s Supreme Court Friday ahead of the long-awaited verdict.

The crowds came despite a plea from Yingluck on Facebook to stay away from court due to security concerns. Many were dressed in black to mourn the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died last October. Lines of police stood ready to repel any demonstrations.

Source: Arrest warrant to be issued for former Thai PM Yingluck Shinawatra – CNN

At least 17 dead in attack on restaurant in Burkina Faso

Barnaby Joyce tape recording: Call to dump him for stopping ‘Greenies’ comment

THERE are growing calls for federal Water Minister Barnaby Joyce to be stripped of his portfolio after he was recorded telling farmers he took control of water to stop “greenies running the show”.

Mr Joyce is heard telling those at a Shepparton pub on Wednesday night that an ABC Four Corners investigation into alleged water rorting in the Murray Darling Basin was trying to “create a calamity”.

“It’s about them trying to take more water off you … shut more of your towns down,” he says in the recording.

He admits the National Party took responsibility for water from the environment portfolio and into his agriculture portfolio to “look after” farmers.

“We’ve taken water and put it back into agriculture so we can look after you and make sure we don’t have the greenies running the show basically sending you out the back door.

“That was a hard ask but we did it.”

Responsibility for water was handed to the Nationals as part of the party’s coalition agreement with the Liberal Party in 2015.

Source: Barnaby Joyce tape recording: Call to dump him for stopping ‘Greenies’ comment | Perth Now

Hawking: Trump Could Damage the Planet Irreversibly. We are close to the tipping point

Eleven-year-old Melbourne student set to shake up the speed-solving world

 

YOUNG GUN: Meet the Melbourne Year Six student set to shake up the speed-solving world #TenNews
Read more: https://t.co/firMkFALJo http://pic.twitter.com/AMpUUJ1XgL

— TEN Eyewitness News (@channeltennews) June 20, 2017

Eleven-year-old Calven Lipec from St Albans, Melbourne, isn’t your ordinary schoolkid.

The talented Year Six student solved his first Rubik’s cube seven months ago after finding one in a drawer at home.

“He just picked up a cube seven months ago, and he started looking online for tutorials, and then he came up to me and said that he could solve it… he did it in four minutes,” father Jeremy Lipec said.

Now, young Calven can solve the popular puzzle toy in just under 14 seconds.

“He just kept at it… for two or three hours a day he’s been going on it, it’s quite an addiction,” Jeremy said.

“A lot of times we have to call him off the cubes to have dinner, have a shower, do his homework and what not.”

He said his son was always into hobbies that exercised the mind, such as origami.

“He’s just got the knack for it,” he added.

Since then, the 11-year-old has smashed local competitions, facing off opponents nearly twice his age.

Calven’s potential has been recognised internationally, so much so that he’s scored an invite to compete at the World Speed Cubing Championships at Paris in July.

‘Never seen anything like this’: Inside Indonesia’s LGBT crackdown

In less than 18 months, being gay in Indonesia has gone from widely tolerated to just plain dangerous.

An unprecedented wave of police raids, vigilante attacks, and calls for the criminalization of homosexual sex have left many in the country’s LGBT community fearing for their safety.

“(Gay Indonesians) are exhausted and they’re horrified,” Kyle Knight, a Human Rights Watch researcher with the LGBT rights program, told CNN.

“Even the activists I know who started the very first organizations in the 1980s say they’ve never seen anything like this.”

It’s a dark turn for a country that for decades prided itself on its diverse, heterogeneous society…

MORE: Indonesia LGBT crackdown: How gay rights are at risk in the world’s largest Muslim country – CNN.com

Facebook stores vast amounts of info about its users + it can all be downloaded

Facebook is holding a vast amount of information on you. But a little trick will let you see it all. The site’s data tools allow anyone to head into the site and see everything it has collected — including locations, activity, personal data and everything you’ve ever said to anyone else. Most of the data saved within the download information is available through other means, like on your own profile. But other parts of it are highly specific and not easily found elsewhere, like full information of every time you logged into Facebook, where and how you did it.

The most obvious way to do that is to head to Facebook’s “Activity Log”, which does exactly what it describes. It shows a chronological list of everything you’ve done on Facebook — down to which posts you’ve liked and anything you’ve searched for.

It’s activated by clicking on the little downward arrow in the corner of any Facebook page, and selecting Activity Log.

• Read more

Facebook friend requests from dead people hint at ‘profile cloning’

But there’s a more intense way: downloading your Facebook data from the special site. That’s done by going to settings and choosing the option to “Download a copy of your Facebook data”.

In there you’ll find just about everything that Facebook will admit to collecting on you, and there’s a lot. The downloaded file will include every computer that’s logged into Facebook, everything it thinks it has learnt about you from your posts and everyone you’ve tried to add as a friend or been added by.

The data will even include every message you’ve ever sent through Facebook chat, according to the company.

Tech companies that make their money from ads, like Facebook and Google, tend to give at least some of that same information back to users if they request it. It’s possible to get an even more detailed rundown of everything you’ve done on Google, for instance, by checking the “My Activity” part of its site.

But it also means that the same data could relatively easily fall into the wrong hands. Anyone who has access to your account can look at your activity and download your information — and then pick through it as they want.

Source: Facebook stores vast amounts of information about its users — and it can all be downloaded | The Independent

AFL sees huge increase in girls signing up to play – [well done the girls/ladies]

It could be due to the popularity of the AFL Women’s competition or because they’ve finally found a way to move out of the backyard and into a club, but there has been an unprecedented surge in the number of girls and women playing AFL this winter.

For the first time, every one of the nine WA Football League clubs will field a colts, reserves and league women’s team this year.

The WA Football Commission’s female football coordinator Allana Dickie said the number of secondary schools fielding girls’ teams had grown by 44 per cent this year.

While final figures on the number of female footballers enrolled to play at community clubs were not yet available, Ms Dickie said many clubs were fielding new girls’ teams.

This would come off the back of big growth in WA in recent years, from fewer than 5,000 female footballers in 2012 to more than 70,000 last year.

“There’s definitely been a very big influx of interest,” she said.

“To have 16 new secondary teams jump on board, that to me is alarm bells that there’s been an impact on the back of this AFL Women’s comp.”

Source: Women’s AFL sees huge increase in girls signing up to play in WA – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

‘Chevy Bolt Turned Me Into an Electric Car Believer’

It’s the practical, affordable electric vehicle consumers have been waiting for.

Driving the Bolt feels simultaneously transformative and prosaic. At first, you can’t help but think you’re in a car somehow delivered from the future. I became convinced that EVs are primed to explode in popularity, especially once people realize how much fun they can be to drive. Unlike in a gas-powered car, an all-eletric delivers power the instant you ask for it. The Bolt is like a zippy sports car in economical suiting. And, as with hybrids before it, you start to make a game out of recharging the battery via the Bolt’s regenerative breaking feature that converts some energy into useable electricity.

But after a while, all that world-changing mumbo-jumbo fades into the background. Once you get a feel for it, the Bolt drives like your typical sporty crossover. (One difference: There’s no engine shudder at high speeds, making it easy to absent-mindedly hit the upper 80s in a 55-mile-per-hour zone.) It’s a smooth ride, it’s unexpectedly roomy, and its infotainment system works well with your smartphone.

The Bolt isn’t a head-turner from the outside. That’s not to say it’s ugly, but rather there’s nothing about it that screams “I’m from the future,” a design pitfall that afflicts many electric and even hybrid vehicles. (It looks nothing like, say, GM’s vision for its ground-breaking Volt concept from a few years back.) That, says lead designer Stuart Norris, was an intentional choice: “We very conscious of not wanting to make the car look like a science fair project, which I think many other electrified entries have a tendency to do.”

As accomplished as the Bolt is, it may not be an ideal choice for everybody—the case for any of the currently available EVs, no matter the nameplate. I couldn’t exactly throw an extension cable down to the street from my fourth-floor Brooklyn apartment, for instance. Battery performance can be severely impacted by extreme temperatures, so the Bolt might be fine in San Diego, but less capable in Buffalo. Even with 200-plus miles of advertised range, road trips will require some logistical planning and, probably, compromises…

Source: 2017 Chevy Chevrolet Bolt Electric Vehicle EV Review | Time.com

‘Baby came back’ Incredible moment SpaceX rocket lands on its launch pad. Amazing video shows the historic moment

Falcon 9 touched down at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on the launch pad for the first time on land.

Video Here; Source: Incredible moment SpaceX rocket lands on its launch pad | Daily Mail Online