NBC:
San Jose passed an ordinance years ago limiting donation bins and requiring permits, but officials said enforcement has lagged, allowing unapproved bins to multiply. They said it’s now unclear whether any permitted donation bins are even operating in the city
He was the person scheduled to perform at this year's White House Correspondents' dinner instead of a comic--and apparently makes frequent appearances on major podcasts and tv shows.
Pablos's latest podcast goes into detail revealing how some of his popular tricks work, and asks whether the techniques stray from the common definition of magic tricks to outright fraud. (Torre's guest previously posted a much longer expose that's supposedly good.)
(The Columbo episodes about a mentalist and magician are good fun, and were great inoculation against falling for such nonsense.)
In a case that dates back to 2021, [a California resident] originally sued the charity’s affiliated organization, Oorah Inc., when he discovered that the money from the car he donated ($250) was not going to underprivileged kids in California but rather to an Orthodox Jewish program in New York and New Jersey
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Kids in need aren’t even really the target of the organization’s financial efforts. Instead, those go to 17- and 18-year-olds seeking gap-year trips to Israel and their families. Landau testified that $16.5 million even went to purchasing a building in Israel in 2022, and $437,000 was spent on “Middle East outreach.”
Kars4Kids funnels about $45m annually to Oorah. Of the 120,000 cars donated nationwide, approximately 30,000 originated in California, per court documents
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Any future ads in the state must disclose its religious affiliation and geographic location. They also cannot include images of prepubescent children, given that several of Oorah’s programs support young adults.
FWIW:
Being the enthusiastic fact checker I hopped over to Seedance’s website and it only took 10 seconds to find green screen footage of two stuntmen performing the same fight choreography we see in the Cruise vs Pitt scene. Seedance had used the green screen footage for a different demo
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So the ball is in your court Seedance .... Was the input really just a 2 line prompt or was it actually 2 lines, green screen video footage, and face references too? The evidence appears to show that stuntmen were filmed from several angles, that a clip had to be generated for every angle, and then finally all clips were stitched together for marketing.
I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.
Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.
(He goes on to discuss other locations and the factor most likely tied to longevity.) Here's a list of the 2024 winners.
The investigation found that 120 matches had been fixed, with 41 football clubs involved
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The sport has long grappled with corruption, which fans have blamed for the underperformance of the men’s national team.
I don't want to ruin any of the twists and turns, but the purpose of a system is what it does:
Miss Universe is a multi-million-dollar business which operates like a franchise - you need to buy a licence which enables you to use the brand and sell tickets for the event.
Those licences are expensive and in small countries it’s hard to find anyone willing to fund a national pageant - which is why Fiji hasn’t entered a contestant since 1981.
But this year, one organisation was willing to buy the licence: [a] property development firm
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Apart from a voting scandal at the Miss America contest in 2022, recent controversies have tended to be in less developed parts of the world.
This is probably because they tend to be non-profit affairs in many Western countries . . . while pageants elsewhere have become more popular and more lucrative than ever.
“Historically, beauty pageants have been an amazing tool for social mobility for women,” . . . .
“Apart from the prestige and the glory, it gives you a platform to attract followers and sponsorships. When there’s money involved, the stakes are higher.”
WRAL:
The indictment said that when a music distribution company in 2018 suggested that he might be engaged in fraud, he protested, writing: “This is absolutely wrong and crazy! ... There is absolutely no fraud going on whatsoever!”
According to the indictment, [the musician] denied engaging in streaming fraud when confronted by the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which distributes streaming royalties. The MLC raised doubt in 2023 about how he could generate so much music so quickly without using AI.
while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.
The real-life version of the next season of AMC's The Terror:
[One of America’s largest chains of psychiatric hospitals], which charges $2,200 a day for some patients, at times deploys an array of strategies to persuade insurers to cover longer stays, employees said. [The hospital chain] has exaggerated patients’ symptoms. It has tweaked medication dosages, then claimed patients needed to stay longer because of the adjustment. And it has argued that patients are not well enough to leave because they did not finish a meal.
Unless the patients or their families hire lawyers, [the hospital] often holds them until their insurance runs out.
From April 2023:
How a former McKinsey consultant "built a booming enterprise by fanning false hopes in some families" that he could help get their loved ones out of prison
Now:
In a filing Monday, the bar accused [the attorney] of 18 violations of the rules of professional conduct for attorneys and the state business code, including moral turpitude and unconscionable fees. If found culpable, he faces possible penalties ranging from probation to disbarment by the state Supreme Court.
The theory is someone using the banned substance was giving him a lot of massages, thereby passing on the banned substance "transdermally."
An independent panel held a hearing on Aug. 15 and "determined a finding of No Fault or Negligence applied in the case, resulting in no period of ineligibility," according to the ITIA.
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He will, however, lose the $325,000 and 400 points that he had earned at the tournament in Indian Wells.
FWIW, a substack article from May:
Over the past decade the drug has resurfaced in Italian football and across Italy’s wider sporting landscape. Between 2019 and 2023, 38 Italian athletes have tested positive for clostebol despite the fact it is scarcely produced in oral or injectable form by pharmaceutical companies
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If an athlete handles the cream, even in applying it to another individual, then they can risk testing positive. This has been one of the common defences used in Clostebol cases.
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It remains bewildering, however, that Italy’s athletes are missing the warning sign printed on clostebol creams and sprays in Italy, which clearly states that the product contains ‘doping’ substances.
This week, [he] pleaded guilty in Cincinnati to three counts of Social Security number fraud tied to false identities he used to obtain employment with at least seven law firms, including three in California, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Ohio. The office did not provide the names of the hiring law firms.
[The three surgeons] allegedly left medical residents and fellows in operating rooms, “alone” and without patients’ knowledge, during critical moments of complex heart surgeries from 2013 to 2020 at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, according to a federal whistleblower lawsuit unsealed Monday. The practice allowed them to perform two and sometimes three heart procedures at the same time, then fraudulently bill the government for all the operations, according to the lawsuit, which was filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Texas.
Their hospital and its academic affiliate, Baylor College of Medicine, were aware of the practice and supported them
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An internal review of patient deaths found that at least four patients died under [one of the doctor]’s care during scheduled overlapping surgeries, according to the lawsuit. Officials were aware of broader problems, the lawsuit said. With each physician rushing from one surgery to the next, patients were under anesthesia for longer and suffered excessive internal bleeding that required re-opening their chest, the lawsuit said. Heart valve sutures came loose, the lawsuit said, and surgeries needed to be redone.
NYT:
[They were] arrested and accused of participating in a scheme to distribute Adderall and other stimulants for A.D.H.D. to patients who did not need the medications, and to bill insurers for these drugs
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[The CEO's social media] posts frequently featured young people “discovering” on camera that they had A.D.H.D.
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[The company] one of several telehealth companies that became popular during pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when the government relaxed restrictions around online prescriptions for controlled substances such as Adderall. Those looser regulations meant that clinicians could prescribe medications virtually without first conducting an in-person evaluation
The trial, now entering its seventh week, in the first one in a broader fraud case that prosecutors have called one of the largest pandemic fraud schemes in the country, totaling more than $250 million in federal money meant to feed needy children.
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The 23-year-old juror wasn't home when the woman showed up, but the unnamed person left the juror's father-in-law a bag of cash and told him to tell the juror that another bag of cash would be dropped off if she votes to acquit the seven defendants in the fraud case
The surprise pregnancy of Charlotte, a stingray living in a tank without any male rays, has captivated people across the world and stirred a sudden interest in parthenogenesis, a scientific term that essentially means virgin birth.
That’s when I was approached by a member of the Hendersonville police. Officer ... asked if I was a news reporter, then explained that they’d received a call that I was harassing people. I told her I’d only interviewed one couple who’d been eager to talk. [The officer] said I could carry on with my work, as long as I wasn’t harassing anyone, then she and a second officer walked into the aquarium.When they came back out, they told me that [the owner] wanted them to book me for “trespassing.” They weren’t going to charge me with anything, they said—I looked “sweet.” But if I went back into the aquarium, they would have no choice but to arrest me.
BBC:
[He] has received letters of thanks from the late Queen and the King and a Pride of Manchester award. He has been a guest on Good Morning Britain, BBC Breakfast, The One Show, Sky News and the Russell Howard Show
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[In one example, he] prevented one elderly woman from killing herself, the firm claimed. In fact, she had died years earlier.
He denied some of the BBC's allegations but admitted: "I've made mistakes."
The story of how Facebook became engulfed in Christian content can be told through the rise of one site, catholicfundamentalism.com.
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According to our data, provided by Newswhip’s real-time Facebook analytics, the vacuum of news content Meta created last year was quickly filled by religious content, or even just content that provoked vaguely religious reactions from users.
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As for why Catholic Fundamentalism is now Facebook’s top “news” site, it posts the exact kind of content that the platform’s news feed has been tailored to promote: blandly positive, removed from any news or current events, and arriving on a frequent and regular schedule.
Drivers can utilize the cars' push-to-pass button for an extra 50hp boost, but the cars' software is supposed to prevent use of the button on starts and restarts. However:
During last weekend’s event in Long Beach, the series found the three cars from [one team] were able to bypass that software restriction and use push-to-pass at any time.
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[The team] issued a statement . . . after the matter was made public by the series and blamed a software oversight
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[The team] also acknowledged [two of its three drivers] chose to use the illegal access to push-to-pass power, which calls into question whether the unfair advantage was known to exist in advance.
AP:
During an emotional 25-minute news conference at Barber Motorsports Park ahead of this weekend’s race, the two-time series champion insisted he is “not a liar” and didn’t intentionally break the rules.
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“That’s wrong. If he thought that, why didn’t he push it at the start?” [another driver] said. “He didn’t push it at the start. He pushed it on the restarts. You would think when everybody is stacked up the most, you would push it. So that’s a lie.”
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“I can guarantee you, it’s not just [the driver] in this,” [said another driver] said. “Obviously what he did was wrong, but I truly feel like him taking the fall for something that he needs a team of people to help with -- he can’t do it alone -- I think it’s a bit unfair to him.”
"If the DRS opened up [in F1], that's more visible you'd have everyone going 'what's going on'. So, I would like to understand how it was missed at the time and make sure that in the future there's the right information being looked at.
"I think on a restart is a little bit trickier because so many things are happening to see what car has got more speed, but they've all got onboard cameras, you can see the button getting pushed. So that's one thing from a series standpoint.
reportedly featured a kitchen, shower, plumbing and security cameras. Prosecutors said the two defendants worked together to keep the invoices for the work below $3,000 each to avoid scrutiny and skirt procedures meant to discourage such fraud.
(Sounds like they cleared out the apartments after they were discovered instead of turning them into airbnbs.)