http://wtop.com/dc/2017/09/police-person-interest-wanted-sexual-assault-case-metro-platform-dc/

WASHINGTON — After an alleged sexual assault on a Metro station platform in Northeast D.C. Wednesday night, police are looking for a person of interest and need the public’s help.

The suspect is described as a black woman in her 30s with a dark brown complexion, D.C. police said. She was last seen wearing glasses, a white short-sleeved shirt, white apron, black bag, green jacket, black pants and black shoes. She is pictured here.

Around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, she allegedly approached the victim and sexually assaulted him in the 700 block of First Street Northeast, in the area of Union Station.

Anyone with information about this case can call police at 202-727-9099 or send a text message to 50411.

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/?iid=hp-toplead-dom

Veles used to make porcelain for the whole of Yugoslavia. Now it makes fake news.

This sleepy riverside town in Macedonia is home to dozens of website operators who churn out bogus stories designed to attract the attention of Americans. Each click adds cash to their bank accounts.

The scale is industrial: Over 100 websites were tracked here during the final weeks of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, producing fake news that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump.

Here's a look inside the city’s fake news machine as it gears up for 2020:

One of the shadowy industry's pioneers is a soft-spoken law school dropout. Worried that his online accounts could be shut down, the 24-year-old asked to be known only as Mikhail.

He takes on a different persona at night, prowling the internet as "Jesica," an American who frequently posts pro-Trump memes on Facebook.

The website and Facebook page that "Jesica" runs caters to conservative readers in the U.S.

The stories are political — and often wrong on the facts. But that doesn't concern Mikhail.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/beauty-is-truth-and-truth-is-factual/2017/09/12/8f01493a-97ca-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html?utm_term=.02d162a1236e

By Garrison Keillor September 12 at 1:10 PM
Truth begins with facts. Facts are solid, like bricks. You build a house out of facts, the wolf won’t blow it down. But you drop a fact on your foot, it hurts.

I learned this as a boy, living near the Mississippi River in Minnesota when I discovered that where the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi near Cairo, Ill., the Ohio is actually larger than the Mississippi. So it’s the Mississippi that flows into the Ohio. The Ohio is the big show. This fact was shocking to me. I was proud of the river, spent hours on the shore, skipped stones on it, and I felt diminished by the new information. To go from Father of Waters to a mere tributary is a definite fall.

Facts have that tendency to bring us down a notch. I’d been 6-foot-3 since I was in high school and now I’m a half-inch short of that. If people ask, I still say six-three, but it’s not true and I know it. I’m shrinking.

Even presidents must yield to facts. The horse-faced William Henry Harrison lasted only a month in the White House. He was a military hero, having defeated the Shawnees at the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana, and he was anxious to show his intellectual acuity and so, having defeated Martin Van Buren in the 1840 election, Harrison composed a massive speech for his inauguration and stood and delivered it for two hours in a cold rain, a 68-year-old man, hatless, coatless, and then attended three inaugural balls. His wife had stayed home sick and wasn’t there to advise him. A couple weeks later, feeling very ill, he took to his bed. Pneumonia was the diagnosis, though it’s now believed he had a bacterial infection from drinking bad water, there being no sewers in Washington at the time. His doctor dosed him with opium and repeated enemas, and the treatment likely hastened his end.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/12/middle-class-income-hit-highest-level-on-record-in-2016-census-bureau-reports/?tid=a_breakingnews&utm_term=.3860f2157e70



America's middle class had its highest-earning year ever in 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

Median household income in America was $59,039 last year, surpassing the previous high of $58,655 set in 1999, the Census Bureau said. The figure is adjusted for inflation and is one of the most closely watched indicators of how the middle class is faring financially, as the Census surveys nearly 100,000 homes.

The Census said the uptick in earnings occurred because so many people found full-time jobs — or better-paying jobs — last year.

America's poverty rate also fell to 12.7 percent, the lowest since 2007, the year before the financial crisis hit. The percent of Americans without health insurance also dropped last year to just 8.8 percent, largely thanks to expanding coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Economists welcomed the news as evidence the recovery had finally taken hold after years of frustration for the middle class as they watched the stock market soar but their incomes barely budged. Donald Trump tapped into this anger in the 2016 campaign, often saying people were no better off economically than they were in 2000.

http://www.guacamoley.com/lol/2017/09/09/1Iaf5f/tomi-lahrens-ancestor-tried



On Tuesday, September 5th, President Trump announced he was planning on ending the DACA program and called on Congress to draft replacement legislation before Obama's signature immigration policy expired at the end of the next 6 months. The DACA program protects those were brought into the country illegally at a young age from deportation, and allows them to work in the U.S. while giving them no path towards citizenship. DACA recipients, known as Dreamers, were often raised in this country (they pay taxes and have committed no crimes), and are being threatened with deportation to a place they have no memory of or connection to. While the Trump administration defended his disavowal of DACA as an attempt to protect the rights of Americans whose jobs are being "usurped" and wages lowered by DACA recipients, protests began almost immediately in reaction to this new policy. Critics have accused President Trump's decision to put DACA in jeopardy as cruel, short-sighted, and racist.

One person who does not have any problem with DACA ending, however, is conservative pundit Tomi Lahren. Tomi's views on immigration are well documented:


That's right. Tomi's great-great-grandfather, Constantin Dietrich, was born in Odessa, Russia in 1887 and came to America looking for a better life. While living here, he was indicted by a grand jury for forging a document and swearing falsely to the date of his declaration (apparently because he had let too much time pass before completing the naturalization process). It looks like he was guilty of the crime and was in danger of being deported!

An ironic twist: the jurors took pity on poor Constantine and acquitted him of the charges. He became a full-fledged citizen in 1926 and now, just over 90 years later, his great-great-grandaughter would have wanted him thrown out of the country! Jennifer Mendelsohn, the genealogist who discovered the factoid, had no idea she was going to track down such a juicy detail:

I was curious how long it would take me to hit an immigrant if I dug into the tree of Tomi Lahren, the platinum blonde, snowflake-hating ultra-conservative firebrand recently hired by Fox News. The answer was ‘not long,'” Mendelsohn wrote, “but I never expected to hit pay dirt quite like I did.

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-monitor-your-own-credit-for-free-forever-1510277742

When retailers like Target get hacked and lose million and millions of customers' data, they usually apologize and offer a year or so of credit monitoring services to make amends. With Neiman Marcus, Michaels and Home Depot also struggling with data breaches, there's no reason to wait for them to throw you a bone. Here's how you can monitor your own credit, for free, for as long as you want.

Credit monitoring services keep an eye on your credit report and alert you to any significant changes or suspicious activity on any of your accounts that could influence your credit score. It's not the same as transaction monitoring or fraud alerts, but it's great at catching identity theft, as long as it happens while your accounts are being monitored. If someone opens a new account in your name, or maxes out one of your credit cards before you notice it, a monitoring service can alert you and your banks to take the appropriate action.

One of the big problems with taking retailers up on their credit monitoring offers is that sometimes they come with strings attached. They may ask you to give up your right to sue them and waive any liability they may have for losing your data if you take them up on it, forcing you into arbitration if you want to take action against them. None of the companies in the latest hacks have done that yet, but it only takes a trip down The Consumerist's arbitration tagpage to see how well that usually works out for consumers.

The bigger issue with retailer-offered credit monitoring is that it's temporary. Sometimes it lasts for a year, maybe two if you're lucky. Some of the smaller companies tap out at six months because they can't afford to pay one of the big credit bureaus what it costs to monitor customer credit for longer than that. Unfortunately, in any case, it's usually ineffective because the data thieves that took the information are often more interested in selling the data than using it themselves. Then, once the data is off of their hands and they've been paid, the groups buying the data will sit on it for a year, or a few months—however long it takes for the credit monitoring to expire—and then start duplicating cards and testing out bank and credit accounts.

While we're not saying you shouldn't take up a company or an organization on their free credit monitoring if it's offered, we are saying that the limitations are fairly obvious. Plus, there are ways to monitor your own account like a hawk without having to put more energy or effort into it than you probably already do. Let's take a look at some of them.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/08/politics/charlie-dent-paul-ryan/index.html

Washington (CNN)Amid the wall-to-wall coverage of Hurricane Irma and President Donald Trump's stunning debt ceiling deal with Democrats, you almost certainly never heard these two names: Charlie Dent and Dave Reichert. And, chances are, if you are a semi-normal person who doesn't follow politics obsessively, you don't recognize either man's name.

But the retirement announcements of these two moderate Republican House members from competitive swing districts is, without question, the most important political development of the week -- with potentially long-lasting consequences on Washington.

Why? Because both men represent an increasing abandonment of the current GOP by politicians in the ideological middle -- or, as Dent put it in a statement released Thursday night announcing his retirement, the "governing wing" of the Republican Party.
(Note: Democrats don't have much of a "governing wing" left, either, after losses in 2010 and 2014.)

It's worth quoting from that Dent statement as some length. Here's the key part: "As a member of the governing wing of the Republican Party, I've worked to instill stability, certainty and predictability in Washington. I've fought to fulfill the basic functions of government, like keeping the lights on and preventing default.

Regrettably, that has not been easy given the disruptive outside influences that profit from increased polarization and ideological rigidity that leads to dysfunction, disorder and chaos." It's hard to imagine a Democrat writing a more frank indictment of the current state of the Republican Party than that.

What Dent is making clear -- without exactly saying it -- is that he no longer thought it was worth fighting against the forces of rigid orthodoxy that had overrun his party. That he didn't leave the GOP -- it left him.