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Trump’s going to win the election he lost, no matter what he has to do to make that happen. Surrounding himself with a better set of sycophants this time around has really allowed him to gain some ground in his “be the despot you wish to see in the world” efforts.

His top appointees are just as willing to lie, defame, deride, and overstep the long-accepted limitations of their positions as the president himself. Now that Trump has pardoned the people who raided the Capitol on his behalf in January 2021, he’s going after everyone and everything that pissed him off about that particular election cycle.

Trump’s Revenge Time Machine is taking him and his administration back to Georgia to engage in an unprecedented seizure of voting records, as ABC News reports:

Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county’s Elections Hub and Operations Center.

[…]

The search warrant authorized the FBI to search for “All physical ballots from the 2020 General Election,” in addition to tabulator tapes from voting machines and 2020 voter rolls, among other documents, according to a copy of the warrant obtained by ABC affiliate WSB. 

The warrant says the material “constitutes evidence of the commission of a criminal offense” and had been “used as the means of committing a criminal offense.”  It was signed by Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas.

It’s not surprising that Trump would attempt to extract some sort of penance from Georgia after he failed to convert that state into electoral college votes. The governor of the state, Brian Kemp, did all he could to swing the state back into Trump’s favor post-election, including being sued by the DNC for claiming (with zero facts in evidence) that the Democratic party had “hacked” his state’s voting machines.

Trump kept this issue alive by bringing Heather Honey — a fellow 2020 election denier from Georgia — into the in-group, appointing her to a high-level position in the DHS where she would [vomits] help oversee future election security efforts.

What is surprising is that any judge would sign this warrant. The allegations range from “threadbare” to “hallucinatory.”

Specifically, the warrant listed possible violations of two statutes — one which requires election records to be retained for a certain amount of time, and another which outlines criminal penalties for people, including election officials, who intimidate voters or to knowingly procure false votes or false voter registrations.

Records were seized, which means it’s unlikely records were deleted prematurely. And there’s been nothing shown to this point that any sort of voter intimidation occurred… at least not on the behalf of the Democratic Party.

This appears to be voter intimidation of a different sort. Last month, the DOJ sued Fulton County (where the raid took place) for access to 2020 election records. This followed attempts to hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election — acts that included Trump asking the Secretary of State to “find” the votes needed to swing the state, as well as its targeting of Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who brought election interference charges against the then-outgoing Trump.

And, for some fucking reason, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard attended the raid to seize these voting records.

Accompanying FBI agents on a raid is unprecedented for the chief of U.S. intelligence, whose job is to track threats from foreign adversaries. In her role overseeing the country’s spy agencies, Gabbard is prohibited by law from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Her predecessors took pains to keep their distance from Justice Department cases or partisan politics.

Asked about the rationale for her visit to Georgia, a senior administration official said: “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.”

Whatever, “senior administration official.” This is Gabbard hoping to show up on Trump’s radar again, after being sidelined during actual foreign-facing activity, like the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president. Perhaps she’s tired of seeing Kristi Noem flouncing from photo op to photo op as Barbie-in-Chief of the DHS’s invasion of the United States.

I mean…

Two senior officials with knowledge of the matter said Gabbard’s presence in Fulton County was unnecessary and was not requested by the Justice Department. 

Yes, it’s another performance from the most performative administration in US history. And it will always play well because people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. The GOP is a flat circle, or perhaps more accurately, a human centipede.

Breaking up this endless cycle of shit ingestion and shit creation are the side effects of this sort of mutual masturbation: the constant shedding of talent from agencies that already don’t have enough of it, thanks to the administration’s constant purging of anyone who’s not MAGA enough.

The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office was forced out this month after questioning the Justice Department’s renewed push to probe Fulton County’s role in the 2020 election, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW.

Paul Brown was ousted after expressing concerns about the FBI’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the county anchored by Atlanta, and for refusing to carry out the searches and seizures of records tied to the 2020 election, according to the sources, who spoke to MS NOW on condition of anonymity.

Remember all the shit we talked about the USSR and its efforts to rid itself of anyone but party loyalists? Well, we’re doing it right here and now, nearly 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The GOP says there’s nothing wrong with this as long as it’s the GOP doing it. The MAGA faithful have no problem with this as long as it’s the MAGA front doing it. And the rest of us are expected to live with it, because the opposition party still seems to believe there’s a polite, non-confrontational set of options to be deployed. Let’s hope they’ll realize that’s no longer the case long before they have to issue a strongly-worded social media post about objecting to being first against the wall.

Nearly 45 years after the first HIV diagnosis, science is closer than ever to a cure for the virus that causes AIDS — but we’re not there yet, researchers say.

While perhaps a dozen people worldwide have been declared free of the virus, those results haven’t been replicated widely, and treatments for some involve continuing therapies or procedures, like stem cell and bone marrow transplants, that aren’t feasible for widespread use.

Related

Groundbreaking HIV-prevention med won’t harm trans people’s hormone therapy

So far, there is no “magic bullet” to cure HIV for good. But scientists are making rapid progress on several fronts and say a cure is within reach. Here’s a roundup of where the latest progress stands.

A golden “supertherapy” that gives HIV a one-two punch

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A study from the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), published in August, details how a team of researchers in Brazil succeeded in eliminating HIV from a patient’s body for 78 consecutive weeks with a “supertherapy”, achieving the result with a combination of medications alone and without stem cell transplants or gene therapy.

The study combined potent antiretroviral drugs with innovative compounds including auranofin, a gold salt, that were designed to both activate and eliminate viral reservoirs of HIV while also stimulating the immune system to destroy infected cells in a one-two punch at the virus.

“The patient benefits not only from drug treatment but also from the ability to reduce the viral load to the lowest possible level. The lower the viral load, the closer the patient gets to a cure,” lead investigator Ricardo Sobhie Diaz, director of the Retrovirology Laboratory at UNIFESP told Medscape.

Self-replicating “Stemmy” CD8 cells could help defeat the virus

While now-common antiviral drugs (AVRs) knock back levels of HIV in both blood and tissues, they don’t overcome one major obstacle for an HIV cure: The stubborn “reservoirs” of cells that harbor dormant viral DNA in the body. When people stop taking the drugs, the virus almost always resurges within weeks.

In two independent studies at the University of California at San Francisco and the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard zeroed in on a class of white blood cells known as memory T cells, studded with CD8 receptors, structures on the cellular surface that are essential to immune defense.

Both studies found that precursors to these “killer T cells” are strongly tied to long-term control of HIV after treatment was stopped in some study participants. The precursors have a stem cell–like quality, and they more readily made copies of themselves when the virus started to return.

Stimulating the production of these “stemmy” CD8 cells “might be the key to getting control [over HIV] in more than the small percentage of people who are currently achieving it,” the Ragon Institute’s David Collins told Science magazine.

Steve Deeks, co-leader of the UCSF study, said those cells “may be the magical biomarker we need for a cure.”

A “kick and kill” strategy that may have actually cured one woman

A years-long study in Rwanda has yielded promising results with a strategy that researchers call “kick and kill.”

“HIV doesn’t live in our blood, it lives in reservoirs, whether in the lymph nodes or the liver or the brain, so you need to kick it out” in order to kill it, Krista Dong, an assistant professor also with the Ragon Institute, told NPR in August.

In the study, 20 young women on antiviral therapy for an average of seven years were asked to pause the drugs, allowing the HIV lurking in those reservoirs to emerge.

Researchers flushed it out of hiding with a unique drug called vesatolimod, followed a week later by a one-time infusion of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). Those antibodies were predicted to bind to the virus and summon immune cells to eliminate it.

By trial’s end, four women remained in remission. One would later experience a viral rebound, while two resumed AVR’s, one to ensure a safe pregnancy and the other because a new job precluded her ability to receive regular monitoring.

More than two years after stopping medication, one woman remains HIV-free and off treatment. She could be cured.

“Novel vaccines” can train the immune system to kill HIV

In tandem with research on a cure for HIV, an HIV vaccine is a priority for scientists. So-called “novel vaccines” are key to that effort.

Two research teams reported in May that HIV vaccine approaches — aimed at training the immune system to produce specialized antibodies against the virus — have taken steps forward, POZ magazine reports.

Both studies showed that different engineered immunogens — substances that trigger a specific immune response in the body — could inspire production of precursor immune cells with the potential to produce those same broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) introduced in the Rwanda study to kill off diverse strains of HIV.

“We’ve now shown in humans that we can initiate the desired immune response with one shot and then drive the response further forward with a different second shot,” William Schief, PhD, of Scripps Research, said of the institute’s study of 18 participants in South Africa and Rwanda. “These trials provide proof of concept for a stepwise approach to elicit custom-tailored responses — not just for our vaccine but for the vaccine field at large, including non-HIV vaccines.”

That second shot, or boosting strategy, is designed to guide the immune response along the path toward bnAb production. All those who received both the primer and booster ended up developing antibody responses — most showed “elite” responses with multiple mutations linked to bnAb development.

“What really surprised us was the quality of the immune response we saw after just two shots,” Schief said. “We didn’t anticipate it would be that favorable.”

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Our Neighbors in Minneapolis

More than 230 malicious packages for the personal AI assistant OpenClaw (formerly known as Moltbot and ClawdBot) have been published in less than a week on the tool's official registry and on GitHub. [...]

The ICE-tracking service says it doesn't store usernames or addresses

ICE-reporting service StopICE has blamed a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent for attacking its app and website and sending users text messages warning them that their information had been "sent to the authorities."…

Voir la vidéo ici ou via le lecteur ci-dessous :

[Dave] over at Usagi Electric has a mystery on his hands in the form of a computer. He picked up a Motorola 68000 based machine at a local swap meet.  A few boards, a backplane, and a power supply. The only information provided is the machines original purpose: gas station pump control.

The computer in question is an embedded system. It uses a VME backplane, and all the cards are of the 3u variaety. The 68k and associated support chips are on one card.  Memory is on another.  A third card contains four serial ports. The software lives across three different EPROM chips. Time for a bit of reverse engineering!

[Dave] quickly dumped the ROMs and looked for strings. Since the 68k is a big endian machine, some byte swapping was required to get things human readable. Once byte swapped, huge tables of human readable strings revealed themselves, including an OS version. The computer runs pSOS, an older 68k based real time operating system – exactly what one would expect a machine from the 80’s to run.

The next step was to give it some power and see if the gas station computer would pump once again.  The LEDs lit up, and a repeating signal showed up from one of the serial ports. The serial connections on this machine are RS-485.  Not common for home computers, but used quite a bit in industrial embedded systems.  Unfortunately, the machine wouldn’t respond to commands sent from a terminal. The communication protocol remained a mystery.

Since this video has gone up though, several people have provided a wealth of information at the vintage-micros channel over on [Dave’s] Usagi Electric Discord.

Gas pumps are a bit of a departure from [Dave’s] usual minicomputer work. We’re no strangers to embedded systems here though.