In other news, the U.S. district court in Philadelphia has sided with the city against against the Trump regime's efforts to defund so-called "sanctuary cities." This one is headed to appeals.
Meanwhile, investigators in British parliament and the Senate here in the U.S. have reportedly been told that Cambridge Analytica funneled secret payments to Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange using cryptocurrency.
Visitor logs from the Ecuador embassy obtained by the Guardian and Focus Ecuador appear to show that Brittany Kaiser, a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica until earlier this year, visited Assange on 17 February 2017. Information passed to the DCMS committee in the UK and the Senate judiciary committee in the US states that the meeting was “a retrospective to discuss the US election”.
Kaiser is also alleged to have said that she had funnelled money to WikiLeaks in the form of cryptocurrency. She called the organisation her “favourite charity”. The reports passed to investigators say that money was given to her by third parties in the form of “gifts and payments."
Finally. a new study from government scientists published in the journal Nature says tropical cyclones and hurricanes are slowing down, meaning they will linger over a single area for longer periods of time and drop even more rain.
This isn’t about how powerful a storm’s winds are, just how fast it chugs along. Storms in the last few years — before 2017′s Harvey — were moving about 10 percent slower globally than in the late 1940s and 1950s, according to a study published in Nature Wednesday. Storms worldwide in 2016 moved about 1.25 mph (2 kph) slower than 60 some years ago. [...]
“The slower a storm goes, the more rain it’s going to dump in any particular area,” said study author James Kossin, a government climate scientist. “Hurricane Harvey last year was a great example of what a slow storm can do.”