*Bill Cosby Trial Shocker: Defense Rests After Just 6 Minutes:

Bill Cosby’s attorneys raced through a startlingly brief, six-minute defense Monday, bringing to a close testimony in one of the most high-profile criminal cases in recent American history. Cosby and his wife, Camille — who made her first appearance at the courthouse Monday — watched as defense attorneyBrian McMonagle called a single police witness to confirm the existence of a police report. That detective had led the investigation into allegations brought by Andrea Constand that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her 13 years ago at his suburban Philadelphia estate. The brevity of the defense case contrasted with the presentation by prosecutors, who called 12 witnesses over five days of often-emotional testimony. At the end of last week, a spokesman for Cosby hinted that the 79-year-old entertainer might testify. Legal experts and courtroom observers generally dismissed that suggestion as a bluff, perhaps designed to throw the prosecutors off-balance at a time when they had momentum.

*U.S. Cyberweapons, Used Against Iran and North Korea, Are a Disappointment Against ISIS: 

America’s fast-growing ranks of secret cyberwarriors have in recent years blown up nuclear centrifuges in Iran and turned to computer code and electronic warfare to sabotage North Korea’s missile launches, with mixed results. But since they began training their arsenal of cyberweapons on a more elusive target, internet use by the Islamic State, the results have been a consistent disappointment, American officials say. The effectiveness of the nation’s arsenal of cyberweapons hit its limits, they have discovered, against an enemy that exploits the internet largely to recruit, spread propaganda and use encrypted communications, all of which can be quickly reconstituted after American “mission teams” freeze their computers or manipulate their data. It has been more than a year since the Pentagon announced that it was opening a new line of combat against the Islamic State, directing Cyber Command, then six years old, to mount computer-network attacks. The mission was clear: Disrupt the ability of the Islamic State to spread its message, attract new adherents, pay fighters and circulate orders from commanders. But in the aftermath of the recent attacks in Britain and Iran claimed by the Islamic State, it has become clear that recruitment efforts and communications hubs reappear almost as quickly as they are torn down. This is prompting officials to rethink how cyberwarfare techniques, first designed for fixed targets like nuclear facilities, must be refashioned to fight terrorist groups that are becoming more adept at turning the web into a weapon.

*GE CEO Jeff Immelt Stepping Down

Jeff Immelt confirmed Monday morning that he will step down as CEO of General Electric, effective Aug. 1. The conglomerate announced that John Flannery, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, will take over for Immelt, who will remain on as chairman until he retires at the end of the year. The multinational is billing the transition as part of a longer-term succession plan for the 61-year-old Immelt, who took over as CEO in 2001 after Jack Welch retired.

*Thanks to Pornhub, We Know Way Too Much About How People Watch Porn:

*Report: Trump Tells Priebus to Fix White House by July 4

*‘The Mummy’ No Match for ‘Wonder Woman’ at Box Office

*LBN-VIDEO LINK: Jimmy Fallon and Paul McCartneySwitch Accents (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon) —— 

*LBN-SPOTLIGHT: Your Brain and Business —- 

*LBN-A DIFFERENT VIEW:….

*Long Before It Lost Turf, ISIS Was Already Targeting Britain:

In the weeks after Islamic State operatives struck Paris in November 2015, the group released a prerecorded video of the killers. They stared into the camera, waved serrated knives, raged at the West and specifically warned Britain: You’re next. Footage showed scenes of London through a gunsight. For the next 13 months, the Islamic State and those inspired by the group killed and maimed in Brussels, Berlin, Nice and Normandy as well as across the Atlantic in California and Florida. Yet the rhetoric against Britain began to feel like the frothy threats made by the group toward other countries that had avoided attacks, including Iran: loud and menacing but ultimately empty. Until now. The strikes in the past week against the capitals of the United Kingdom and Iran followed back-to-back attacks in recent months in Britain, by an assailant who used an S.U.V. to smash into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in March and a suicide bomber at a pop concert in Manchester in May. “This is for Allah!” the attackers were heard screaming in the latest bloodshed in London as they plunged knives into their victims.

*LBN-INTEL FOR INFLUENCERS:

*LBN-R.I.P.:   ***Adam West, the classically handsome baritone actor who turned a comic-book superhero into live-action Pop Art in the 1960s television series “Batman,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88. The cause was leukemia, according to Molly Schoneveld, a family spokeswoman.

*LBN-COMMENTARY by Maureen Dowd: Lordy, what a fine day to be Donald Trump. Three hours of earnest James Comey testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee and the president is not in immediate jeopardy of being indicted or impeached. High crimes can wait. The master of low expectations headed off to his New Jersey golf club to celebrate the fact that he still has plenty of time for further self-incrimination. If there’s going to be an auto-da-fe on the Potomac, Trump would prefer to light the match. He doesn’t want some shrewd, fired, leaking, taller-than-thou swamp creature to take him out when he can self-immolate.

*LBN-SPOTLIGHT: “Mountain tops inspire leaders but valleys mature them.” —– 

*LBN-MEDIA INSIDER:   ***At radio giant Cumulus Media, things have gone from bad to worse. A quick look at the stock price tells the tale. When former Chief Executive Lew Dickey exited in September 2015, the stock was already an anemic $5.45. On Friday, Cumulus shares closed at 52 cents. Back in the halcyon days of early 2014, Cumulus stock was trading at $64.04. Now things are in tatters, and a Nasdaq delisting looms — as does a possible bankruptcy.

*LBN-WHERE THE ELITE AND UNDERDOGS MEET:

*LBN-VIDEO LINK: The Beatles – A Day In The Life  .

*LBN-COMMENTARY by Kaitlyn Greenidge: It is a common complaint that modern communication has ruined romance. Wouldn’t so much heartache be avoided, people claim, if we still spoke on the phone, if romantic intent could not be categorized through the time lapsed since a text message is returned? I am not so sure. When I was a kid, I dreamed that someday, in the future, it would become socially acceptable to communicate with others via notes. It seemed like the easiest way to solve a problem that I saw all around me — that of misunderstanding. I grew up in a family where the written word was sacrosanct. Whenever there was an argument and one of my sisters or all three of us would retreat to our shared bedroom, wailing, unable to speak, it was resolved through notes furiously passed back and forth — impassioned letters about what we had done to each other, point by point rebuttals to prove why one sister was so utterly wrong. I was always devastated when my sisters would claim they didn’t remember what they said in the argument itself. If only we were talking via notes all the time, I could have some kind of transcript, some kind of way to prove that I was right.

*MY REVIEW: “I have proudly been reading LBN for years because it does an extraordinary job of holding power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. I can rely on LBN to bring fairness, a strong level of scrutiny and independence to the coverage of news and information.” —— Dr. Clay T., an LBN reader from Des Moines, Iowa.

*LBN – Before You Buy A New Computer, Consult With L.A. Premier Computer Consultant —- Free Phone Consultation To LBN Readers Only. Call David Slon  —–  (Winner, “Best of Los Angeles Award”)

*LBN-COMMENTARY by Charles Krauthammer: Having coined Bush Derangement Syndrome more than a decade ago, I feel authorized to weigh in on its most recent offshoot. What distinguishes Trump Derangement Syndrome is not just general hysteria about the subject, but additionally the inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences on the one hand and signs of psychic pathology on the other.  Take President Trump’s climate-change decision. The hyperbole that met his withdrawal from the Paris agreement — a traitorous act of war against the American people, America just resigned as leader of the free world, etc. — was astonishing, though hardly unusual, this being Trump. What the critics don’t seem to recognize is that the Paris agreement itself was a huge failure. It contained no uniform commitments and no enforcement provisions. Sure, the whole world signed. But onto what? A voluntary set of vaporous promises. China pledged to “achieve the peaking of [carbon dioxide] emissions around 2030.” Meaning that they rise for another 13 years.

*Dr. Neil Gallagher Receives Marine Corps League Service Award

At their annual memorial banquet, honoring WWII veterans and other veterans, the Marine Corps League presented Dr. Neil Gallagher its award for meritorious service and support for the U.S. Armed Forces. Dr. Gallagher runs Gallagher Financial Group, Inc., with offices in both Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas. “Our mission is to be a vehicle of God’s peace and comfort to as many people as possible,” says Gallagher, “helping first with their financial peace of mind, then also with their spiritual, emotional and family well being.” (http://gallagherfg.com/about-our-agency/)

*LBN-A DIFFERENT VIEW:….

*LBN-OVERHEARD:   ***Nick Gordon, the ex-partner of the late Bobbi Kristina Brown, was arrested Saturday after allegedly beating up his new girlfriend in a jealous rage. A Sanford Police report says a heated argument early Saturday between Gordon and his girlfriend, Laura Leal, “became physical and lasted through the night,” with Gordon “hitting and punching her in the face and the back of the head with a closed fist.”

*Islamic State Propaganda Hard Hit by Killings, Battlefield Setbacks:

The Islamic State group’s propaganda machine used to be confident, promising that its self-declared caliphate would be “lasting and expanding.” But in recent months, as the group’s territory has shrunk, its messages have as well. Far from the boastful, self-aggrandizing videos of the past, the group is now urging fighters to resist and not run away from the battlefield. The quality of the videos has dropped as well after some of the extremists’ most prominent propagandists and producers were killed. Slickly produced IS propaganda videos shot from multiple angles with religious songs in the background used to spread fear among the group’s opponents, with gruesome footage of beheadings, shootings, confessions of detainees and sophisticated attacks against their rivals. In the videos, the group boasted that Muslims from all over the world were flocking to what they called the “first caliphate” since the fall of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Now the videos mostly urge fighters to be steadfast and call on the local population to join the group after hundreds of IS fighters have been killed over the past months.

*DID YOU KNOW? Did you know that over 300 Grammy Award winners read LBN daily?

*LBN-HEALTH WATCH: The results, published on Thursday in the journal Science, are so striking that the Food and Drug Administration already has approved the drug, pembrolizumab, brand name Keytruda, for patients whose cancers arise from the same genetic abnormality. It is the first time a drug has been approved for use against tumors that share a certain genetic profile, whatever their location in the body. Tens of thousands of cancer patients each year could benefit.

*LBN-MUSIC INSIDER:   ***Aretha Franklin’s hometown of Detroit has named a street after her. A section of Madison Street, between Brush and Witherell, was named Aretha Franklin Way for The Queen of Soul on Thursday. The area is at the heart of a performing arts district that includes the Detroit Opera House.

*LBN-WHERE THE ELITE AND UNDERDOGS MEET:

*LBN-SPORTS INSIDER:   ***What was more confusing in Game 4 of the NBA Finals Friday night: How the heck the Cavaliers did what they did against the NBA’s premier defense or what was going on with the officiating? Yeah, right. We voted for the officiating, too. When Game 4 ended with the Cavaliers having crawled back into the series at 3-1 and having averted a Finals sweep with a 137-116 victory over the Warriors, seven technical fouls had been assessed against the two teams. Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher of the game came whenDraymond Green was assessed a technical foul at 6:18 of the third quarter by ref John Goble.

*LBN-SPOTLIGHT: 

TV’s most intriguing, revealing TV interview show ——— “Without Notes” with M. Zuhdi Jasser M.D. – Episode 3: Getting Political ——

*LBN-NOTICED:  ***Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal walking arm in arm under an umbrella in the West Village in NYC.   ***Grammy award winning jazz pianist, Prof. Bill Cunliffe came in to Jimmy Au’s men’s clothing store in Sherman Oaks, California.

*LBN-SITE OF THE DAY:

“The fastest way to get customer service by phone, chat, email, or even by having the company call you back. GetHuman has millions of tricks and shortcuts to make sure you get help better and more quickly than ever before. The ultimate customer tool.”

James Earl Ray Escapes from Prison Again (1977)

In 1967, James Earl Ray, who was serving time for armed robbery, escaped from prison by hiding in a bread truck. He remained at large until 1968, when he was captured in London following an international manhunt sparked by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. Ray pled guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. In 1977, he once again escaped, but this time he was recaptured within days.

*LBN-R.I.P.: Actress Glenne Headly died Thursday night at age 63, The Hollywood Reporter reported. “It is with deep sorrow that we confirm the passing of Glenne Headly,” her representatives said in a statement. The cause of death was not given. The Emmy-nominated TV and film actress was best known for her roles in films including Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Dick Tracy, and Mr. Holland’s Opus. Most recently she appeared in the film The Circle, the HBO series The Night Of, and was working on the upcoming Hulu show Future Man.   ***Lili Ungar, a former Hollywood publicist and teacher, died Sunday in Vietnam, where she had been living and teaching English for several years, according to her Facebook page. Ungar, who served as a VP at PMK and later at BWR in the 1980s and ’90s, founded her own eponymous public relations firm in 1991 specializing in entertainment, corporate and multi-media clients.

*LBN-COMMENTARY by Jennifer Wright: Millennials are, according to Business Insider earlier this month, “Killing Chains Like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee’s.” This isn’t the first thing that we’ve killed and/or destroyed by stubbornly refusing to spend money on it. Last year millennials got accused of wiping out everything from mass-market beers like Budweiser and Coors to the diamond industry to bar soap. And, on behalf of all millennials, I can only say: You’re welcome. Because these institutions we’re obliterating are awful.

*LBN-COMMENTARY by Alex Williams: Anxiety has become our everyday argot, our thrumming lifeblood: not just on Twitter (the ur-anxious medium, with its constant updates), but also in blogger diaries, celebrity confessionals (Et tu, Beyoncé?), a hit Broadway show (“Dear Evan Hansen”), a magazine start-up (Anxy, a mental-health publication based in Berkeley, Calif.), buzzed-about television series (like “Maniac,” a coming Netflix series by Cary Fukunaga, the lauded “True Detective” director) and, defying our abbreviated attention spans, on bookshelves. With two new volumes analyzing the condition (“On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety,” by Andrea Petersen, and “Hi, Anxiety,” by Kat Kinsman) following recent best-sellers byScott Stossel (“My Age of Anxiety”) and Daniel Smith(“Monkey Mind”), the anxiety memoir has become a literary subgenre to rival the depression memoir, firmly established since William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation” in the 1990s and continuing today with Daphne Merkin’s “This Close to Happy.”

Adam Heller has created the Zero Pain Now® certification training, the first certification program with an emphasis on permanently eliminating chronic pain: https://zeropainnow.com/training/.  Heller states, “We here at Zero Pain Now have a 97.4% success rate in eliminating pain for our patients, specifically in patients diagnosed with bulging discs, herniated discs, spinal stenosis, or fibromyalgia.” Our training program provides an opportunity for graduates to maintain the same extraordinarily high success rate. A write-up from a Mayo Clinic Pilot stated, “Following the Zero Pain Now intervention, all patients were completely pain-free and ALL costs associated with managing their pain ceased!” Heller is now offering the first ever certification program for people to learn these proven pain relief techniques and apply them both in private practice and in the workforce. “This is the best opportunity for coaches, health workers, therapists and anyone who wants to help people get more clients and increase income,” says Heller.

*LBN-COMMENTARY by Bret Stephens: In the last year there have been four touchstone elections in the West: two in Britain, one in the U.S., one in France. Two of these were disasters, one was nearly so, and one was a huge relief. None went according to script. Maybe that’s because we have lousy pollsters and lackluster mainstream politicians. There’s also the matter of reckless voters. As of Friday, it seemed that Theresa May would cobble together a coalition government — just barely — with a small northern Irish party, which should keep her in office for a while longer. In every other sense she’s a humiliated politician, who squandered a huge lead in a lousy campaign against a vile opponent. Sound familiar?

*LBN-A DIFFERENT VIEW:….