Hasta La Gadget!

As people accumulate massive data troves on Gmail, Google Photos and other Google apps, the search giant wants to help people find what they’re looking for among their own personal content. While Google’s core search product already shows some person…

Polar, a leading company when it comes to wearable sports and fitness technology for more than four decades, has just announced the brand new Polar A370, which is a fitness tracker that comes complete with Polar 24/7 continuous wrist-based heart rate and advanced Polar Sleep Plus analytics. In other words, this is a fitness tracker that is quite unlike any other as it merges daily activity goal alongside Polar Sleep Plus. This would enable the Polar A370 to deliver a complete picture of the user’s fitness, which will be based on the intersection of activity, rest and recovery.

Of course, what is the whole point of having something that is nice to look at when it does not look good at all? With the Polar A370’s sophisticated and premium design, it will not only be waterproof in nature, but it also has a vibrant glass lens color touch display as well as vibrating notifications. This is certainly above and beyond what a regular fitness tracker comes with. Not only that, it increases the level of personalization since it sports lightweight, interchangeable band colors so that users will be able to customize the A370 according to their style preference.

Interested parties in the Polar A370 can place a pre-order for it for $179 or €199 apiece, depending on the region, and shipping is set to begin this June. With its ability to offer continuous wrist-based heart rate that automatically measures one’s heart rate during rest and physical activity, it is also smart enough to figure out the time when users move their wrists in times of higher activity levels. At higher intensities, it will be triggered by a 3D accelerometer. All of the collected data will be used to provide immediate guidance toward reaching activity goals, while you will also benefit from a more detailed daily overview and insightful fitness guidance that can be found via the Polar Flow App.

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[ Polar A370 fitness tracker aids in your fitness and sleep as well copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

The Bee Informed Partnership has released a new study conducted in collaboration with the Apiary Inspectors of America, and the results are largely favorable. According to the study, beekeepers lost a bit over one-third of their bee colonies over the past year, and while that sounds like a startling number, researchers say it is the second-best figure recorded over the … Continue reading

The primary bogeyman that’s been seared into our consciousness during the sprawling, ongoing investigations into Russian interference into the 2016 election has been the specter of collusion between members of and adjacent to President Donald Trump’s inner circle and Russian malefactors. There’s a solid argument to be made that the intense attention to this alleged connivance has been, as Just Security’s Julian Sanchez puts it, “misplaced.” But, as recent revelations demonstrate, you don’t need to connect the dots of collusion to conclude that Russian actors managed to breed some dire discord into our democracy.

And, if you think we might soon retrieve a sense of order from this chaos anytime soon, let’s briefly consider the Curious Case Of The Dubious Russian Document, which has caught former FBI Director James Comey and his defenders spinning some contradictory tales.

Back in April, the public learned about the document in question when it made an appearance in a New York Times magazine piece penned by Matt Apuzzo, Michael S. Schmidt, Adam Goldman, and Eric Lichtblau. In it, they describe how U.S. intelligence agencies could, from time to time, successfully “peer … into Russian networks and see what has been taken” during “Russia’s hacking campaign against the United States.” On one of those occasions, FBI agents saw something unusual in a tranche of hacked documents. As the Times reported:

The document, which has been described as both a memo and an email, was written by a Democratic operative who expressed confidence that [U.S. Attorney General Loretta] Lynch would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far, according to several former officials familiar with the document.

As the Times’ report makes clear, this document was discovered at a time during which Comey was apparently more and more certain that Hillary Clinton was not going to be charged with any crime, and the case into her email server was going to be closed. However, as the Times went on to report, the implications this document presented colored everything Comey did from there. If the FBI recommended that the case be closed, there was going to necessarily be a public to-do about it. So, who would stand in front of the press and make the announcement? If it fell to Lynch, then the threat of this document becoming public would raise serious questions about the independence and credibility of the investigation.

In the end, Comey took it upon himself to explain the closure of the case. This left Justice Department officials feeling like the FBI director just wanted some attention for himself. However, as the Times noted, “Mr. Comey’s defenders regard this as one of the untold stories of the Clinton investigation, one they say helps to explain his decision making.”

So let’s pause right here to review. This New York Times story, in which Comey’s defenders are contending that this whole matter “helps to explain his decision making,” was published on April 22, 2017. So it was just one month ago that the Comey-backing sources of this story were contending that this document was the key to unlock Comey’s mindset on the Clinton case back in the summer of 2016.

Now, let’s flash-forward. Earlier this week, The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett returned to the story about a “secret document that officials say played a key role in then-FBI director James B. Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.” The Post provided further details about the document ― which apparently described an email correspondence between then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to an official with the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundation. Per The Washington Post:

In the supposed email, Wasserman Schultz claimed [U.S. Attorney General Loretta] Lynch had been in private communication with a senior Clinton campaign staffer named Amanda Renteria during the campaign. The document indicated Lynch had told Renteria that she would not let the FBI investigation into Clinton go too far, according to people familiar with it.

But I’m burying the lede. The most important revelation that the Post provided this week was that this document was actually a forgery ― and that it had “long been viewed within the FBI as unreliable.”

How long had it been viewed that way though? Per the Post:

Current and former officials have said that Comey relied on the document in making his July decision to announce on his own, without Justice Department involvement, that the investigation was over. That public announcement — in which he criticized Clinton and made extensive comments about the evidence — set in motion a chain of other FBI moves that Democrats now say helped Trump win the presidential election.

But according to the FBI’s own assessment, the document was bad intelligence — and according to people familiar with its contents, possibly even a fake sent to confuse the bureau. The Americans mentioned in the Russian document insist they do not know each other, do not speak to each other and never had any conversations remotely like the ones described in the document. Investigators have long doubted its veracity, and by August the FBI had concluded it was unreliable.

In the most charitable interpretation of these events, we can allow that if consensus within the FBI about the document’s lack of authenticity had not yet been achieved by August, then Comey could have been understandably influenced by its contents in July, when he abruptly closed the case amid a controversy that would only swing back with a fury at the end of October, when Comey announced that new emails had been discovered.

But why were FBI sources ― Comey defenders ― treating the document as if it were legitimate, in conversations with New York Times reporters months after this consensus had been reached, assuring them that this was the linchpin in Comey’s strategy?

This does not add up, and so it’s no surprise to see some damage-control efforts being manifested. Here’s the new version of the story, being woven Friday morning on the pages of CNN.com:

Then-FBI Director James Comey knew that a critical piece of information relating to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email was fake ― created by Russian intelligence ― but he feared that if it became public it would undermine the probe and the Justice Department itself, according to multiple officials with knowledge of the process.

That’s right, sources are now telling CNN’s Dana Bash, Shimon Prokupecz, and Gloria Borger, that “Comey and FBI officials actually knew early on that this intelligence was indeed false,” and that if Russians ever released this document, then ― false or not ― it would cloud the entire case and put the FBI in a no-win situation, where agents could not “discredit it without burning intelligence sources and methods.”

“It is unclear why Comey was not more forthcoming in a classified setting,” reports CNN. Yeah, I’ll say!

Still, it’s not hard to see why Comey might have been reticent to disclose that this document was a forgery. Without revealing sources and methods, he wouldn’t have been able to demonstrate the fakery. He’d have been asking the public to trust him ― and walking straight into a partisan buzzsaw that would have likely dogged those efforts. Reasonable people can probably understand that he and his agency might have emerged from that effort with diminished public trust.

But that doesn’t explain why Comey-backing sources were treating the document as authentic in conversations with reporters from The New York Times in April. Once it was clear that discussion of this dubious document was going to happen in full view of the public, it’s puzzling why no one simply reverted to the story that’s being told by CNN today. After all, the threat posed to trust and credibility is the same: As soon as The New York Times reports the document as legitimate, the clock starts ticking on the eventual reveal that it’s not.

At the very moment the FBI, through these sources, should have been cutting its losses and giving The New York Times the straight story, it was instead running a cover-your-ass operation ― and a misguided one at that, considering it didn’t diminish any of the risk to which the bureau would be exposed when the truth about the forged document came out. The end result is that the FBI has ended up with the same diminished trust and credibility over the matter that it feared in the first place. And, as an added bonus, four very reliable and clear-eyed Times reporters now know they got burned in the process.

There are some obvious missing pieces here, and matters worthy of further explanation. We still don’t know why The New York Times’ sources didn’t just try to come clean on the nature of this document once they had the chance ― in hindsight it looks like that this would have been the more advantageous option. There is a clue, perhaps, elsewhere in CNN’s reporting from Friday (emphasis mine):

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that this Russian intelligence was unreliable. U.S. officials now tell CNN that Comey and FBI officials actually knew early on that this intelligence was indeed false.

In fact, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe went to Capitol Hill Thursday to push back on the notion that the FBI was duped, according to a source familiar with a meeting McCabe had with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

There you go. All of this michegas may have simply been caused by the fact that nobody wanted it to be known that they had ever, at any time, been tricked, even briefly.

This is the saddest, and most “Beltway” explanation ― which is why it’s also the most plausible reason why this happened. This is an unforgiving town where a lacerated pride is a fatal wound, and admitting error is a mortal sin. For Pete’s sake, the entire existence of a “Hillary Clinton private email server” scandal is completely down to the fact that Clinton didn’t just simply and forthrightly say something to the effect of, “Yeah, I screwed up.” Instead, she hardened her defenses to preserve her amour-propre.

And, as anyone who’s even done a cursory study of Beltway mores might say, “Typical, typical, typical.” From Clinton, to Comey, to Congress, and everywhere in between, our dumb political culture ― which holds that admitting a mistake is the worst thing you can do, and where the incentive to build a warren of spin and bullshit overrides everyone’s good judgment ― proves again and again to be the undoing of everything. And to a Russian spy, it might be the easiest and most obvious exploit of all.

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A former speechwriter for George W. Bush and current Washington Post columnist is criticizing conservative media figures for promoting a conspiracy theory about the death of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot and killed last summer. 

Michael Gerson, who served as Bush’s top speechwriter from 2001 through 2006, argues in a column published by the Post on Thursday that the “failure of decency” by popular right-wing personalities like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh indicates deeper problems within the conservative movement. 

“This is a concrete example of the mainstreaming of destructive craziness,” Gerson writes.

Rich was lethally shot near his home in Washington, D.C., in what police believe was a botched robbery. But because he was killed shortly before WikiLeaks published thousands of internal DNC emails, some conspiracy theorists (including Reddit users and right-wing bloggers) have claimed, with no evidence, that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party had Rich killed in retaliation for leaking the emails. 

The claim picked up steam again after Fox News and its Washington affiliate published a thinly sourced story tying Rich to WikiLeaks. (The network later retracted the story.) Both Hannity and Limbaugh promoted the conspiracy following the Fox report, despite pleas from Rich’s family to stop. 

Gerson argues that the movement of the story from fringe websites to cable news illustrates the way conservatism has morphed in the era of President Donald Trump ― himself a noted pusher of conspiracy theories.  

“The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” Gerson writes. “The movement has been seized by a kind of discrediting madness, in which conspiracy delusions figure prominently. Institutions and individuals that once served an important ideological role, providing a balance to media bias, are discrediting themselves in crucial ways. With the blessings of a president, they have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.” 

This abandonment, he argues, inevitably leads conspiracy theorists to ignore the tragedy at the center of these stories — in this case, Rich and his family — and instead focus solely on the political machinations they believe are at hand. 

“In Trump’s political world, this project of dehumanization is far along,” he concludes. “The future of conservatism now depends on its capacity for revulsion. And it is not at all clear whether this capacity still exists.”

Read Gerson’s full column here.

Hannity, by far the most prominent proponent of the Rich theory, has faced intense backlash for pushing the story on his Fox News show, radio program and Twitter account. Multiple advertisers have pulled their ads from his Fox show, and #FireHannity has become a popular rallying cry on Twitter. Some Fox staffers also expressed their disappointment in the host to CNN, saying they were “disgusted” by his coverage of the story.

Aaron Rich, the brother of the slain DNC staffer, pleaded with Hannity in an emotional letter to drop the story.

“Nobody wants to solve Seth’s murder more than we do,” Aaron Rich wrote. “However, providing a platform to spread potentially false, damaging information will cause us additional pain, suffering and sorrow. By airing this information, you will continue to emotionally hurt us.”

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.