President Donald Trump today “offered support for emerging technologies including unmanned aerial vehicles and next-generation wireless networks in a meeting on Thursday with the chiefs of AT&T Inc and General Electric Co and other business leaders,” reports Reuters.

At the White House today, Trump met with venture capitalists, and with telcom and drone executives, and they talked about how the federal government can speed technologies to market.

U.S. President Donald Trump (C) holds an event highlighting emerging technologies, in the East Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., June 22, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

The meeting, which lasted more than three hours including breakout sessions, is part of Trump's effort to tap industry experts on how to boost U.S. competitiveness in various fields and create jobs. On Monday, Trump met with the heads of 18 U.S. technology companies including Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp, seeking their help to make the government's computing systems more efficient. He will meet with energy industry leaders next week.

"We want them to create new companies and lots of jobs," Trump told the executives on Thursday. "We're going to give you the competitive advantage that you need."

In attendance were chief executives of several drone companies including Kespry Inc, AirMap, Airspace Inc, Measure UAS Inc, Trumbull Unmanned, and PrecisionHawk Inc.

Drone makers argued that the administration should move faster to approve broader commercial use of drones and noted that the Transportation Department does not require automakers to win pre-approval of self-driving vehicle technologies.

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They've been on the Endangered Species list for 42 years. Today, Trump removed the Yellowstone grizzly bear's federal protections under the Endangered Species Act. The reason? A reported population rebound. The U.S. Department of Interior announced their plan to strip the grizzly's protections and return species oversight to the states.

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The Washington Post was first to get a draft copy of the 'secret' GOP health care bill.

The 'discussion draft' is making the rounds among GOP Senators' aides and lobbyists. It would repeal Obamacare taxes, reduce Medicaid coverage, give states greater ability to opt out of Affordable Care Act regulations, and kill federal funding for Planned Parenthood. The GOP House bill linked insurance subsidies to your age, and the Senate's version links them to income, as ACA/Obamacare did.

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A police officer was stabbed in the neck today by a man at Bishop Int'l. Airport in Flint, Michigan. The FBI says the attack is now being investigated as an act of terrorism, and that while it's early in the investigation, they view the suspect "as a lone wolf attacker."

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A Reuters/Ipsos poll June 9-13 shows “a majority of the country thinks the American Health Care Act would be harmful for low-income Americans, people with pre-existing health conditions and Medicaid recipients.”

41 percent of American adults polled are opposed to the House plan. 30% support it. Another 29% said they "don't know."

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Executives from Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, and other Silicon Valley tech firms met with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner today, to talk about reducing government waste and improving information technology services.

Trump administration officials in attendance included Mike Pence, Steve Mnuchin andWilbur Ross.

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In London, an attacker drove a van into pedestrians outside a mosque in London, killing one person and injuring ten or more others.

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Theresa May, aloof and clueless, decided not to meet victims of the Grenfell tower fire. Her political rival Jeremy Corbyn and the Queen, however, each managed to fit them in. So May, accustomed as she is to politically transparent changes of heart, decided to meet some victims. It did not go well, and later she was filmed all but running to her car as a crowd taunted her.

I've never seen anything like this. Theresa May practically running to her car as a crowd shout "coward". This is not leadership. #Grenfell pic.twitter.com/AoOuH1Yvio

— EL4C (@EL4JC) June 16, 2017

Scuffles broke out in the crowd as the Prime Minister's car drove away from the scene of the disaster.

In an interview, the Prime Minister was questioned over whether there was a need for the Government to accept some responsibility for what had happened.

"Something terrible has happened," she answered. ...

Asked if she had misread the public anger, she replied: "What I have done since this incident took place is, first of all, yesterday ensure that the public services had the support they need in order to be able to do the job they were doing in the immediate aftermath."

A decade of punishing "austerity" policies, inflicted by the ruling Conservative party on the poor, ended in May's shock tie at the polls with Corbyn's Labour party in a snap election she was supposed to win in a landslide. And now more than 75 people — a total the authorities have consistently attempted to obfuscate — are missing after the fire, a fire they knew was coming because of the appallingly unsafe conditions in which they lived, a fire accelerated by cheap cosmetic renovations designed to make Grenfell more pleasing to the eye of rich neighbors. Read the rest

Amazon announced today it has agreed to buy the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.4 billion, as the internet retailer eyes a broader expansion of services.

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Russian President and funnyman Vladimir Putin joked today that if fired FBI director Jim Comey feels persecuted by U.S. President Donald Trump, Russia will grant him asylum as it has with NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

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Said one intellectual property attorney, “The speed with which these appeals were decided is mind-blowing.”

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Praise leaks. The Washington Post reports that special counsel Robert Mueller and his team are investigating President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice. The investigators have also been looking for possible evidence of financial crimes among Trump associates. If Trump did anything shady, he's probably getting very nervous right about now.

This should all get interesting pretty quickly. Perhaps Trump will fire Mueller first, or maybe Trump will try and pardon himself, or he could just pull a Sarah Palin and just walk away from the job.

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Remember when the President of Turkey came to Washington to visit Trump, and his goons beat the crap out of American protesters on American soil? The DC-based Turkish news site Washington Hatti reported today that Eyup Yildirim was arrested for playing a role in this incident, and the Daily Caller now reports that a second, Sinan Narin, was also arrested. Both men beat peaceful protesters outside of the embassy of Turkey.

Reports Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller:

U.S. Marshals have arrested two Turkish men living in U.S. for their role in beating peaceful protesters outside of the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. last month, a source with knowledge of the matter tells The Daily Caller.

The State Department confirmed in a statement to TheDC that arrests have been, and the Washington, D.C. Metro police department identified the two men as Eyup Yildirim and Sinan Narin.

“Now that charges have been filed, the Department will weigh additional actions for the named individuals, as appropriate under relevant laws and regulations. Any further steps will be responsive and proportional to the charges,” a State Department official said.

Yildirim, a 50-year-old construction company owner from New Jersey, faces charges of assault with significant bodily injury and aggravated assault. Narin, from Virginia, faces an aggravated assault charge.

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A rare joint alert from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation explicitly blames the government of North Korea for a series of hacking attacks on various American targets, dating as far back as 2009. The government alert warns that more such ”state-sponsored cyberattacks,” as they're known in security jargon, are likely to come.

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Beleaguered rideshare behemoth Uber is in hot water over an internal culture in which sexual and racial harassment ran riot. At a big company-wide meeting on Uber's sexual harassment problem, billionaire board member David Bonderman made what he later admitted was an “inappropriate” comment about women. Why are we not surprised?

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In Washington today, a bizarre development that breaks with years of political and press tradition. This can't have anything to do with their secret plan to take away health care, could it?

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Binky is an app equivalent of a baby pacifier. It presents an endless scroll of image posts that you can "like" or "re-bink" (which does nothing). It's easy to comment on a post, too. You just press random letters on your keypad to automagically generate words that write out coherent sentences.

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