An American tourist is at fault for mowing down several people in Mexico after a high-speed chase back to the American border, ABC7 reported.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the American threatened a Mexican man with a knife on a Tijuana boulevard about a mile from the border crossing. he then fled in his black truck with a Utah license plate when officers tried to intervene.
The man hit five people with his car as well as 14 vendor stalls and 17 vehicles.
He ultimately stopped just outside the U.S. border. The driver and a female passenger were dragged from the vehicle by bystanders and beaten until police intervened.
Police have not released the names of the individuals. The woman was interviewed and claimed that they couldn't stop the car or they would have been killed.
On May 5, 2019 USA Today's Richard Wolf wrote an article titled, "Trump on collision course with Supreme Court."
"Disputes over congressional subpoenas for documents and testimony, as well as legal battles over administration policies and Trump's businesses, finances and personal affairs, are moving inexorably toward a court Trump has sought to shape in his image," Wolf reported.
Fast forward ten days.
The Washington Post's Robert Costa reports on the "unusual group on Air Force Two today: Vice President, Senate Majority Leader, and Chief Justice all on the plane. Rare to have that trio together, particularly on a flight."
Rare indeed, especially given that the Trump administration has and will have a "deluge" of critical cases involving President Donald Trump and his administration's policies before the Supreme Court in the coming months, and possibly years.
(The three Republicans traveled Wednesday to the funeral of the late Senator Richard Lugar.)
Republicans went ballistic when former President Bill Clinton in June of 2016 spent 20 minutes speaking with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch while her plane was on an airport tarmac.
"It was really a sneak," Trump told conservative talk show host Mike Gallagher. "You see a thing like this and, even in terms of judgment, how bad of judgment is it for him or for her to do this? Who would do this?"
Republican Senator John Cornyn lashed out, saying the incident "does nothing to instill confidence in the American people."
Libertarian magazine Reason called the impromptu meet-up, "corruption."
The chance encounter caused Attorney General Lynch to recuse herself from the FBI's then-ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, which led to FBI Director Jim Comey's very public denouncement of the former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate.
More than a year after the chance meet-up, Fox News was still reporting on it:
President Donald Trump plans to hold off on imposing steep tariffs on imported autos while the US pursues agreements with key trading partners, industry sources told AFP Wednesday.
Trump has threatened to impose 25 percent punitive duties on autos -- a possibility that has worried the European Union and Japan in particular, as well as Mexico and Canada.
Facing a deadline to announce a decision by Saturday on whether to implement the tariffs based on national security concerns, the sources said Trump would hold off as negotiations proceed.
New tariffs risk exploding already tense trade relations with Washington's major trading partners, who are angry about punitive duties on steel and aluminum imposed last year.
CNBC and other media earlier Wednesday cited government sources also saying that Trump was expected to try negotiations before imposing any new import taxes.
German carmakers are especially concerned about the tariff threat, but Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declared a truce in July 2018 in order to pursue negotiations.
EU officials have repeatedly said they expect the US to abide by the agreement to hold off on any new tariffs.
Under US law, Trump must make a decision 90 days after receiving the report from the Commerce Department on the national security threat faced by the American auto sector -- or Saturday.
If he decides to impose tariffs, they must take effect 15 days after the announcement.
However, he can delay implementation for 180 days if he decides to negotiate.
The White House currently is negotiating trade deals with the EU and Japan, and late last year completed a revised accord with North American trading partners Mexico and Canada.
The world's largest survey of sexual harassment in the legal profession has found one in three women said they had suffered abuse from their bosses and colleagues.
The report published on Wednesday by the London-based International Bar Association (IBA) also found that 75 percent of victims who reported abuse in the survey did not speak up and file complaints at work.
Half did so for "fear of repercussions" or because the perpetrator was someone more senior.
The global sexual harassment rate among men in the legal profession was reported at around seven percent.
"I didn't report it because who believes that a man says no to sex?" a man from a Swedish law firm said.
The report noted that many victims were speaking up thanks to the #MeToo movement that spread globally in response to sexual harassment charges filed against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
The IBA found that men and women who did report their cases most often felt frustrated with their employer's response.
"In three-quarters of sexual harassment cases, the perpetrator was not sanctioned," the 130-page report said.
"In more than half of cases, the situation was unchanged or deteriorated."
The report was based on a survey of 7,000 respondents from 135 countries.
The survey focused heavily on Western countries and the group said the study may be under-representing respondents in countries where the subject is either taboo or where there is limited awareness about it.
This could make it seem like abuses are most prevalent in "progressive" countries that speak more openly about sex crimes. It calls this problem a "perception paradox".
But the IBA stressed that its analysis remained the most comprehensive global assessment of sexual harassment in the legal profession ever undertaken.
Abuses are "driving people away from their workplaces and the profession as a whole," the IBA said.
Last week NCRM reported on a legally-married same-sex couple who are in court – again. After having won their case months ago, the federal government appealed. They are battling the U.S. State Dept., which is insisting one of their twin boys is not a U.S. citizen, even though both twins are their biological children.
Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks married in 2010. Andrew is an American citizen, Elad is not.
Trump's State Dept. is actually ignoring settled law, according to Aaron C. Morris, executive director of Immigration Equality.
If you read that story and thought it was a one-off, some random act by the State Dept., it turns out it's not.
The Daily Beast reports today that a different same-sex couple, both U.S. citizens, and had a daughter born in Canada with the assistance of an egg donor and a gestational surrogate.
The U.S. State Dept. is refusing to grant her U.S. citizenship.
"We are both American citizens," Adiel Kiviti told The Daily Beast, saying, "we live in the U.S.; I have a business here, Roee has his job here; we file our taxes as a married couple here... and the State Department is saying that our daughter isn’t entitled to U.S. citizenship because she was born ‘out of wedlock.’"
Apparently, the State Dept. under Secretary Mike Pompeo, has redefined the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952 which, "along with the 14th Amendment, codifies eligibility for U.S. birthright citizenship," The Daily Beast explains.
Assisted reproductive technology, most of which did not exist in 1952, produces children born “out of wedlock,” according to the State Dept.'s flawed and very targeted interpretation.
“They basically take our marriage, and they say ‘it doesn’t mean anything. Your child was born out of wedlock,’” Adiel says. “We were there when she was born, she took her first breaths in our arms. Make no mistake: we are her parents—we are her only parents on her only birth certificate.”
There is no mistake here: The Trump administration is targeting U.S. citizen same-sex couples, doing everything it can to tear apart their families and depriving them of their 14th Amendment rights, merely because they are same-sex couples.
Researchers in Germany have unearthed a new species of flying dinosaur that flapped its wings like a raven and could hold vital clues as to how modern-day birds evolved from their reptilian ancestors.
For more than a century and a half since its discovery in 1861, Archaeopteryx -- a small feathered dinosaur around the size of a crow that lived in marshland around 150 million years ago -- was widely considered to be the oldest flying bird.
Palaeontologists from Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich and the University of Fribourg examined rock formations in the German region of Bavaria, home to nearly all known Archaeopteryx specimens.
They came across a petrified wing, which the team initially assumed to be the same species. They soon found several differences, however.
"There are similarities, but after detailed comparisons with Archaeopteryx and other, geologically younger birds, its fossil remains suggested that we were dealing with a somewhat more derived bird," said lead study author Oliver Rauhut from LMU's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
They called the new bird-like dinosaur Alcmonavis poeschli -- from the old Celtic word for a nearby river and the scientist who discovered the fossil, excavation leader Roland Poeschl.
The study, published in the journal eLife Sciences, said Alcmonavis poeschli was "the most bird-like bird discovered from the Jurassic".
As well as being significantly larger than Archaeopteryx, the new specimen had more notches in its wing bones that pointed to muscles which would have allowed it to actively flap its wings.
Significantly, this "flapping" trait found in Alcmonavis poeschli is present in more recent birds, but not in Archaeopteryx.
"This suggests that the diversity of birds in the late Jurassic era was greater than previously thought," Rauhut said.
The discovery is likely to fuel debate among dinosaur experts over whether birds and dinosaurs developed the ability to flap their wings from earlier gliding species.
"Its adaptation shows that the evolution of flight must have progressed relatively quickly," said Christian Foth, from the University of Fribourg, and a co-author of the research.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Russia on Tuesday that Washington would brook no interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election and wanted Moscow to take action to show there would be no repeat of its suspected 2016 meddling.
President Vladimir Putin, who met Pompeo in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, pushed back, telling him that Russia never interfered in U.S. elections and that a report by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which he praised as being "objective overall", had found no evidence of collusion with President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Relations have long been strained by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement findings - denied by Moscow - that Russia tried to influence the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to boost Trump's chances of winning the White House.
Pompeo's visit followed the publication of the long-awaited report by Mueller into the nature of Russia's role in that election that spoke of "sweeping and systematic" interference by Moscow but did not establish that members of Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia during the 2016 election.
Now that the Mueller report was out of the way, Putin said he hoped ties would start improving.
"I've formed the impression that your president wants to repair Russia-U.S. ties and contacts and wants to solve issues which are of common interest for us," Putin told Pompeo.
"We've said many times that we also want to fully restore our relations. I hope that the necessary conditions for that to happen will now be created."
Visiting Russia for the first time as secretary of state, Pompeo earlier clashed with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on issues from Ukraine to Venezuela. After their meeting, both men said they had been far apart on many issues.
"I made clear to Foreign Minister Lavrov ... that interference in American elections is unacceptable. If the Russians were engaged in that in 2020, it would put our relationship in an even worse place than it has been," said Pompeo. "I'd encourage them not to do that. We would not tolerate that."
Both Lavrov and Pompeo said they shared a desire to improve battered ties despite not being able to confirm a suggestion by Trump that he would meet Putin on the sidelines of a meeting of the G20 in Japan next month.
Putin would agree to such a meeting if formally asked, a Kremlin aide told reporters.
"The United States stands ready to find common ground with Russia as long as the two of us can engage seriously," Pompeo said.
"President Trump has made clear that his expectation is that we will have an improved relationship. This will benefit each of our peoples. And I think that our talks here today were a good step in that direction."
A Kremlin aide said the talks had not yielded any breakthrough but had been held in a business-like atmosphere.
'Places we can work together'
Pompeo told reporters after his talks with Putin that the two sides had a "very productive" conversation on Syria and how to move the political process there forward and were able to "make some truly constructive process points" on Afghanistan.
They also discussed North Korea, which both want to see give up its nuclear weapons.
"I think we share the same objective and I hope that we can find ways that we can work together," Pompeo said on North Korea. "He (Putin) understands that the U.S. is going to be in the lead, but I think there are places we can work together."
Pompeo said Trump had made clear he wanted to try to keep the Russia relationship "on the high ground".
"We have places where we just have very different views," he said of the U.S.-Russia relationship. "It's about trying to find solutions, compromises, places where there are overlapping interests. You can make progress in unlocking some of the most difficult problems that are facing us."
As well as the issue of interference in U.S. elections, the two sides clashed over Venezuela, with Lavrov sharply criticising Washington for trying to undermine President Nicolas Maduro, who Pompeo said must step down in the face of an economic crisis and large-scale protests against his rule.
On Ukraine, Pompeo told Lavrov the United States would not recognise Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea and would keep in place economic sanctions imposed on Russia over that move.
Russia should now work with Ukraine's new president-elect to bring peace to eastern Ukraine, said Pompeo, adding that he wanted Moscow to free a group of captured Ukrainian sailors.
Pompeo said he had also complained to Lavrov about U.S. citizens being detained in Russia, a reference to the case of Paul Whelan, a former Marine accused of espionage, and Michael Calvey, an investor accused of fraud. Both men deny wrongdoing.
Lavrov told reporters the two countries continued to disagree about Iran's nuclear programme and the international community's approach to Tehran, while Pompeo said he had raised U.S. concerns about escalating fighting in Syria's Idlib.
The failure of MySpace to care for and preserve its users’ content should serve as a reminder that relying on free third-party services can be risky.
MySpace has probably preserved the users’ data; it just lost their content. The data was valuable to MySpace; the users’ content less so.
What happened to MySpace
MySpace is a social networking media site where performers could upload music or other content for access and distribution to its user community. It has always been a free site, with revenues coming from ads and programming that targets users for specific products.
Formed in 2003 in imitation of the social gaming site Friendster, MySpace grew rapidly and was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005. By 2008, MySpace was the leading social networking site, valued at one time at US$12 billion But it declined in popularity – thanks to an overprevalence of ads, concerns about exposure of minors to sexual content and other issues. In 2011, News Corporation sold MySpace to Specific Media, who sold it again in 2016 to Time Inc., which was in turn bought by the Meredith Corporation in 2018.
So the company went through three changes in ownership over a 12-year period, and saw revenues and membership drop precipitously over that time. One sale might be fine, but three sales over short term suggests to me a troubled business that was not in a good position to watch over others’ intellectual property.
Anyone using MySpace as a storage service who did not have alternate backup is simply out of luck. You left your intellectual property sitting beside the information superhighway, and when you came back 10 years later it was gone.
MySpace is not alone in encountering problems. Amazon cloud services, for example, also experienced a a substantial outage in 2011 and another in 2017. Though temporary, and without actual loss of data, these outages left users without access to precious and important files for some time.
In a statement, Myspace said, ‘We apologize for the inconvenience.’
Preserving content or intellectual property on the internet presents a conundrum. If it’s accessible, then it isn’t safe; if it’s safe, then it isn’t accessible.
Accessible content is subject to tampering, theft or other sorts of bad actions. Only content that is inaccessible can be locked and protected from hacking.
The internet currently accesses about 15 zettabytes of data, and is growing at a rate of 70 terabytes per second. It is an admittedly leaky vessel, and content is constantly going offline to wind up lost forever.
Massive and desperate efforts are underway to preserve whatever is worth preserving, but even sorting out what is and what is not is itself a formidable undertaking. What will be of value in 10 years – or 50 years? And how to preserve it?
Acid-free paper can last 500 years; stone inscriptions even longer. But magnetic media like hard drives have a much shorter life, lasting only three to five years. They also need to be copied and verified on a very short life cycle to avoid data degradation at observed failure rates between 3% and 8% annually.
Then there is also a problem of software preservation: How can people today or in the future interpret those WordPerfect or WordStar files from the 1980s, when the original software companies have stopped supporting them or gone out of business?
A nonprofit startup called The Internet Archive is preserving snapshots of the web on an ongoing basis, but mostly this is for top-level public HTML webpages such as The New York Times website and Facebook, not for underlying content files. As of last fall, its Wayback Machine held over 450 billion pages in 25 petabytes of data. This would represent .0003% of the total internet.
Universities, governments and scientific societies are struggling to preserve scientific data in a hodgepodge of archives, such as the U.K.‘s Digital Preservation Coalition, MetaArchive, or the now-disbanded collaborative Digital Preservation Network.
Preservation is hard and expensive in time, money and equipment. To be most useful, it not only has to be stored, but hosted in a form that is accessible and available for future reuse.
Actual storage costs less than $0.05 per gigabyte, but storage is only a small percentage of the costs of preservation. Acquisition, networking, maintenance and administration all require substantial and costly human labor.
Budgeting models suggest a 10-year preservation expense of around $2.50 per gigabyte, or $2,500 per terabyte, or $625,000 for the files MySpace failed to preserve.
Huge amounts of new content are uploaded to the internet every day.
So yes, the internet is rotting, but archivists and digital librarians like myself knew it was rotten already, as did anyone who ever got a “404 File Not Found” error.
Where there is economic incentive to keep and use data – such as user information, profiles or browsing history – it may exist for quite a long time. It has been said by many that data is the new oil, and corporations are anxious to drill and exploit this resource.
However, where content is less valuable to whomever owns the servers, there is less incentive to invest in preserving it. A survey of 10 million hits from 25 random sites in 2004 suggests that 404 errors occur at close to 3% of targeted URLs. The internet is growing much faster than it is rotting, but both things are happening at once. No giant internet company has your interests closer to its heart than its own.
One preservation network is known under the acronym LOCKSS – Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe – and that’s a good rule of thumb. Always have a backup, and always have multiple backups. Guard your privacy and guard your content, at least that content you may wish to have preserved, like photos, email, that screenplay or novel, or video and music files. Copyright rules do not prohibit storing content you may have purchased, as long as you don’t put it out for public sharing.
Free storage is a great offer, but sometimes you only get what you pay for. The internet is neither secure nor permanent. It never promised to be, and users should not assume that it will become so. Parts are rotting and corroding and collapsing as I type this. Just hope and plan to not be resting on that platform when it falls.
Hawaiian "super corals" that have recovered despite living in warm and acidic water offer a glimmer of hope that dying reefs across the world could be saved, a new study says.
The research suggests that the gloomiest climate change picture of a world without the kaleidoscope underwater habitats could still be avoided, according to lead author Christopher Jury.
"It's unfortunately but inevitably true that things are going to get worse for reefs over the next 20-30 years, but that doesn't mean it's unstoppable," said Jury, a postdoctoral researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.
"We can still turn this thing around and end up getting back to better than what we have today within a reasonable timeframe," he told AFP.
Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean bed but support around 30 percent of all known marine life.
But they are suffering, with stressors including the warmer and more acidic oceans caused by climate change, as well as other human-made pressures including pollution and overfishing.
The UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change warned last year that just 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) of global warming could see 70-90 percent of Earth's coral reefs vanish.
But Jury's research shows that it is possible for coral to survive and even thrive in waters that are warmer and more acidic than where coral usually lives.
- Rapid recovery -
He studied coral reefs in Hawaii's Kane'ohe Bay that were devastated between the 1930s and 1970s by urbanization, dredging, coastal development and the discharge of sewage.
By the early 1970s, shallow coral cover across the bay had decreased by more than 70 percent on average, and by more than 95 percent in the southern bay, nearest the sewage output.
But in the late 1970s, the sewage was diverted and the coral began to recover rapidly.
AFP/File / PATRICK BAZ Jury studied reefs in Hawaii's Kane'ohe Bay devastated by urbanization, dredging, coastal development and the discharge of sewage
That happened despite the fact that Kane'ohe Bay has warmer and more acidic waters than are typically found in the area.
In fact, the conditions in the bay are what other parts of Hawaii could see in the decades ahead if climate change continues apace. And those conditions are not usually favorable for coral.
But in Kane'ohe Bay, simply removing the sewage output allowed the coral to recover to between 50-90 percent cover, "among the highest reported for any reefs in the Hawaiian Islands," says the study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal.
The key, said Jury, was that the coral populations in Kane'ohe Bay "naturally harbor a lot of 'super corals', which can thrive in moderately warmer, more acidic conditions."
So once the sewage pollution was removed, those "super corals" swiftly "came in and drove the reefs to a rapid recovery."
- 'Glimpse into the future' -
These corals appeared to be naturally able to survive in a climate that is usually hostile.
The recovery was a combination of both growth in remaining coral but also "recruitment", where larval coral floating along like seeds in the wind find a suitable environment and "settle".
Jury said it appeared that the larval coral came from both the bay but also other areas in Hawaii and that so-called "super corals" likely exist in many other places.
But elsewhere, under conditions that are cooler and less acidic, these corals don't thrive.
AFP/File / EMILY IRVING-SWIFT The UN warned last year that just 1.5 Celsius of global warming could see 70-90 percent of Earth's coral reefs vanish
"Our thinking is that this bay is giving us a glimpse into the future where the corals that are at a disadvantage today have the advantage tomorrow," Jury said.
It is too early to say whether these "super corals" could recolonize devastated reefs elsewhere, and Jury stressed that the findings were not cause for complacency.
"Even the very tough corals from Kane'ohe Bay die under the temperatures they'll see in a few decades if we don't substantially reduce climate change," he warned.
And the survival of "super corals" also depends on reducing other stressors, like pollution.
"If we take the necessary steps now then we will begin to see this reestablishment by corals during our lifetime, and our children and grandchildren will be able to witness the recovery of coral reefs during theirs because we make the decision that reefs are worth saving," he said.
Facebook announced Wednesday it is tightening access to livestreaming to prevent the rampant sharing of graphic video as took place with the Christchurch massacre.
People who have broken certain rules, including those against "dangerous organizations and individuals," will be restricted from using the Facebook Live streaming feature, said vice president of integrity Guy Rosen.
"Following the horrific recent terrorist attacks in New Zealand, we've been reviewing what more we can do to limit our services from being used to cause harm or spread hate," he said in a statement.
A self-described white supremacist gunned down 51 people at two Christchurch mosques in March, and broadcast live footage of the violence on Facebook from a head-mounted camera.
A "one-strike" policy at Facebook Live will be applied to a broader range of offenses, with those who violate serious policies suspended from using the feature after a single offense.
Such violations would include sharing a link to a statement from a terrorist group with no context, according to Rosen.
"We plan on extending these restrictions to other areas over the coming weeks, beginning with preventing those same people from creating ads on Facebook," Rosen said.
He added that technical innovation is needed to get ahead of the kind of "adversarial media manipulation" seen after the New Zealand mosque massacre, such as users modifying videos in order to slip past filters.
"One of the challenges we faced in the days after the attack was a proliferation of many different variants of the video of the attack," Rosen said.
"People -- not always intentionally -- shared edited versions of the video which made it hard for our systems to detect."
Facebook announced that it was putting $7.5 million into research partnerships with three US universities to improve image and video analysis technology.
handout/AFP/File / HANDOUT This image grab from a self-shot video that was streamed on Facebook Live on March 15, 2019 by the man involved in two mosque shootings in Christchurch shows the man reaching for guns from the boot of his car before he enters the Masjid al Noor mosque
"This work will be critical for our broader efforts against manipulated media, including deepfakes," Rosen said, a reference to videos altered using artificial intelligence.
"We hope it will also help us to more effectively fight organized bad actors who try to outwit our systems as we saw happen after the Christchurch attack."
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern welcomed the move as "a good first step".
"The March 15 terrorist highlighted just how easily livestreaming can be misused for hate. Facebook has made a tangible first step to stop that act being repeated on their platform," she said.
Ardern was set to join other world leaders in launching the "Christchurch Call" to curb online extremism at an international meeting in Paris on Wednesday.
Top executives from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Twitter were also expected to attend, though Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was to be represented by another executive from the social media giant.
Emmy Award-winning US actor and comedian Tim Conway, known for his deadpan delivery and cast of bumbling characters on "The Carol Burnett Show," died on Tuesday at the age of 85, his publicist said.
The versatile entertainer, who underwent brain surgery last September, had been suffering from a long-term illness in Los Angeles, Howard Bragman said.
A native of Willoughby, Ohio, Conway served in the army for two years before embarking on his showbiz career as a television presenter and writer. He then starred on the 1960s ABC series "The Steve Allen Show" and "McHale's Navy."
He was a fixture throughout the 1970s on "Carol Burnett," where he made his mark with memorable characters like the Oldest Man and Mr. Tudball -- as well as demonstrating a gift for ad-libbing and on-set pranks.
He won four Emmys and a Golden Globe Award during 11 years on the show -- capping his career with another two Emmy statuettes for guest appearances in "Coach" (1996) and "30 Rock" (2008).
He entertained modern audiences as the voice of Barnacle Boy in the animated series "SpongeBob SquarePants" and, on the big screen, starred as the title character in the "Dorf" comedy movies.
"I was born and then I did 'The Carol Burnett Show' for 11 years. What else is there to know?" the self-effacing humorist said on his website -- noting his Emmy wins and adding: "Big deal."
Comedian Larry Wilmore led tributes on social media, tweeting, "RIP to Tim Conway who was always always always always funny!"
"Dick Van Dyke Show" actress Rose Marie, who managed Conway and says she discovered his talent, described the actor as "a source of tremendous pride."
"He was, after all, one of the funniest men on the planet! My heart goes out to his family," she said.
"Delighting generations is a pretty good legacy for any entertainer," added sci-fi author John Scalzi, who came to know Conway's work through "SpongeBob Squarepants."
Conway is survived by his wife of 35 years, Charlene, a stepdaughter and six biological children from his first marriage, including KFI-AM talk show host Tim Conway Jr.
In the final months of his life, Conway was bedridden and unable to speak and under 24-hour care at a rehabilitation facility, according to court papers.
His daughter Kelly Conway had battled her stepmother in court over his care.
President Donald Trump on Monday rejected a report that he is considering sending 120,000 troops to counter Iran, but didn't rule out deploying "a hell of a lot more" soldiers in the future.
"I think it's fake news," Trump said of a New York Times report that the White House is considering a plan to send 120,000 troops to the region as part of a tightening pressure campaign against the Iranian government.
"Now, would I do that? Absolutely. But we have not planned for that," Trump told reporters. "Hopefully we're not going to have to plan for that. If we did that, we'd send a hell of a lot more troops than that."
The Pentagon has already dispatched an aircraft carrier and nuclear-capable bomber planes to the region in the last few days.
According to the Times report, the 120,0000 troops under consideration would not be used to invade Iran, something that planners say would require much bigger numbers.
But such a huge deployment would reverse Trump's push throughout his presidency to reduce the US military presence abroad and to wind down what he says have been failed wars in the region.
Despite that stance, his government has taken an increasingly hard line with Iran, a longtime foe of the United States and key US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Moscow and Washington's top diplomats said Tuesday it was time to build better ties, ahead of the highest-level bilateral talks in nearly a year as President Vladimir Putin hosts Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
US President Donald Trump's top diplomat arrived in the sunny Black Sea resort of Sochi amid a raft of disagreements, from arms control to the raging Venezuela and Iran crises.
Pompeo's visit to Russia -- his first as Secretary of State -- came as tensions mounted in the Gulf, with Iran and the United States engaged in a new war of words over Tehran's nuclear deal.
At the start of talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and before a planned evening meeting with Putin, Pompeo expressed hope the two rivals could "stabilise the relationship".
"I am here today because President Trump is committed to improving this relationship," he said.
"We have differences -- each country will protect its own interests and look after its own people -- but it's not that we have to be adversaries on every issue."
Lavrov said bilateral ties were in a "sorry state" and Russia was ready to turn the page over.
"I believe it's time to start building a new, more responsible and constructive model of mutual perception of each other," he said.
"We understand that a lot of suspicions and biases have accumulated on both sides. We win nothing from this."
Pompeo was all smiles and addressed Lavrov by his first name as they sat down for talks at a marble-floored spa hotel in the wooded outskirts of Sochi.
Lavrov and Pompeo, each joined by a half-dozen aides, met for an hour and a half, according to a US official, before continuing the conversation over a late lunch.
- 'Don't hold your breath' -
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the high-profile talks would change little in the US-Russia standoff.
"Don't hold your breath: no pivot in sight, no breakthrough in offing," he tweeted.
AFP/File / PATRICK BAZ 
AFP/File / EMILY IRVING-SWIFT 
handout/AFP/File / HANDOUT