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[US territory in reach?]

Putin warns against 'intimidating' North Korea after latest missile launch
from CNN

Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned North Korea's latest missile launch as "dangerous" but warned against "intimidating" Pyongyang.

Speaking in China, Putin called for a peaceful solution to the ongoing tensions on the Korean peninsula, Russia's Sputnik news agency reported.

"I would like to confirm that we are categorically against the expansion of the club of nuclear states, including through the Korean Peninsula," Putin told reporters. "We are against it and consider it counterproductive, damaging, dangerous," he said.

But in comments that appeared aimed at the US, he said that "intimidating (North Korea) is unacceptable."

For its part, North Korea said the missile test was in response to the nuclear dangers and threats posed by the US and its followers.

"We will conduct ICBM tests anytime and anywhere in accordance with the decisions made by our central leadership," North Korea's ambassador to China Ji Jae Ryong said at an impromptu press conference at the country's embassy in Beijing Monday.

US territory in reach?
North Korea tested a Hwasong-12 missile Sunday which reached an altitude of 2,111.5 kilometers (1,312 miles) and flew 787 kilometers (489 miles), according to state news agency KCNA.

Analysts estimated its ranged as 4,500 kilometers which would put the US territory of Guam within its reach.

A small island in the Pacific, Guam is home to Andersen Air Force Base, through which the US Air Force rotates heavy bombers including B-1s, B-2s and B-52s.

KCNA said the test showed North Korea "has all powerful means for retaliatory strike" should Washington take any military action to stop its nuclear weapons program.

Putin made the comments on the sidelines of the One Belt One Road summit in Beijing, a meeting of 29 heads of state convened by Chinese President Xi Jinping to push his vision for China's global expansion.

The Russian president called on all parties to "find peaceful solutions."

Putin's partial defense of North Korea came after White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested that the missile test may provoke a more forceful response from the Kremlin.

In a White House statement released Sunday, Spicer said: "With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil -- in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan -- the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased."

The US and Russia also offered differing estimates for where the missile splashed down. The US said it terminated flight just 96 kilometers (60 miles) from the Russian port city of Vladivostock, whereas the Russian Defense Ministry said it landed 500 kilometers (311 miles) from its Pacific coast line.

Russia's relations with North Korea

While Russia and North Korea don't have strong trade ties, they are building on their economic relationship. New ferry services are running between the countries and Russia has given permission for some 50,000 North Koreans to carry out manual work on projects in Russia.

Russia is one of the few countries that has diplomatic relations with North Korea. Kim Jong Un's father, Kim Jong Il, went to Moscow on a state visit during his rule in 2011, and Putin visited Pyongyang in 2000.

"While Russia is concerned about North Korea and its missiles, it also sees North Korea as an opportunity to gain leverage with the West, the US in particular," said Matthew Chance, CNN's Moscow correspondent.

"Russia doesn't want North Korea to have nuclear weapons, but the response from officials in Moscow has been minimal because they know Russia isn't one of Pyongyang's targets," he added.

UN Security Council to meet

Last month, Russia and China backed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning a previous missile launch, demanding that it "immediately" cease further actions that violate resolutions.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) will meet on Tuesday to discuss Pyongyang's latest defiant move.

Since US President Donald Trump took power in January, rhetoric has ramped up on both sides. Senior US officials made it clear early on that the Obama administration's policy of "strategic patience" on North Korea had failed.

The Trump administration declared early on that the waiting was over, and followed through by deploying a US strike group, led by the aircraft carrier the USS Carl Vinson, to the waters off the Korean Peninsula. North Korea responded with threats and accusations.

"The US has recognized that direct military confrontation didn't work all that well last time, didn't have the effect that they had desired so will let (further developments) play out in the UNSC," Baker said.

[DISCLAIMER: Posting about politics is not intended to start a flame war. The political climate in the U.S. is feeble. Please take political news with a grain of salt.]

At Liberty, Trump Calls Critics 'Pathetic,' Praises Putting 'Faith Into Action'
from NPR

DISCLAIMER: Posting about politics is not intended to start a flame war. The political climate in the U.S. is feeble. Please take political news with a grain of salt.



For his first commencement speech as president, Donald Trump went back to a place that was once key to his efforts as a candidate to shore up support among the Republican base.

Standing before tens of thousands of members of the Class of 2017 and their families at Liberty University's open-air stadium in Lynchburg, Va., Trump thanked the crowd for helping him achieve the presidency.

"I wanna thank you because, boy, did you come out and vote — those of you that are old enough; in other words, your parents," Trump said. "Boy, oh boy, you voted. You voted!"

A strong majority of evangelicals voted for Trump in November despite some predictions to the contrary. Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., was one of the first leading white evangelical figures to endorse Trump during the Republican primary season, though that decision wasn't universally supported at his university.

In his speech, Trump jokingly nodded to the difficult odds he'd once faced.

"Right here, the Class of 2017, dressed in cap and gown, graduating to a totally brilliant future; and here I am, standing before you as president of the United States. So I'm guessing there are some people here today who thought that either one of those things — either one — would really require major help from God," Trump said, drawing laughter and applause from the crowd.

Trump bypassed more traditional options for a first presidential commencement speech, like the University of Notre Dame, instead sending Vice President Mike Pence. As graduation speeches go, Trump struck familiar themes: he urged students to be persistent, follow their passions and chart their own paths in life.

He occasionally sounded self-reflective as he imparted wisdom to the graduates.

"I've seen so many people, they're forced through lots of reasons — sometimes including family — to go down a path that they don't want to go down, to go down a path that leads then to something that they don't love, that they don't enjoy," Trump said. "You have to do what you love, or you most likely won't be very successful at it."

Trump also seemed to allude several times to the 2016 campaign — advising students to claim the label of "outsider" and not be discouraged by naysayers.

"The more that a broken system tells you that you're wrong, the more certain you should be that you must keep pushing ahead, you must keep pushing forward," Trump said. "And always have the courage to be yourself."

The president's speech included plenty of language tailored to the conservative Christian audience. He alluded to his recent executive order billed as protecting religious freedom, though some critics said the language actually changes very little.

"America is better when people put their faith into action," Trump said. "As long as I am president, no one is ever going to stop you from practicing your faith or from preaching what's in your heart."

Trump's visit to this bastion of support came after a tumultuous week in which he fired FBI Director James Comey and faced questions about whether the timing of the firing could be related to an ongoing investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Russian officials — after a determination by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had meddled in the election to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

He steered clear of that subject, making only sidelong swipes at his critics.

"No one has ever achieved anything significant without a chorus of critics standing on the sidelines explaining why it can't be done," Trump said. "Nothing is easier or more pathetic than being a critic, because they're people that can't get the job done."

He found few critics at Liberty University. Falwell, Jr., praised Trump's first few months in office, pointing to Trump's selection of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, his decision to stack his Cabinet with religious conservatives and what Falwell described as bombing "those in the Middle East who are persecuting and killing Christians."

Falwell said he's pleased with Trump's performance so far.

"I do not believe that any president in our lifetimes has done so much that has benefited the Christian community in such a short time span than Donald Trump," he said.

Several Liberty graduates and their families said they felt much the same.

Lanora Hale came from Millville, N.J., to watch her son graduate with a master's degree. Hale said she's solidly behind Trump.

"I really think he's doing great. He's trying — if people give him a chance, you know. People gotta give him a chance," Hale said.

Hale said she wants to see a tighter connection between religion and government — perhaps prayer in public schools — and she sees Trump as friendly toward that goal.

"I really am glad that he's putting God back into everything," she said.

Newly-minted elementary education graduate Rachel Kreisel of Boca Raton, Fla., agrees.

"[I want] to bring Christ back into our nation and into our schools, since we don't have him in schools rights now; it's just silent prayers," she said, "I would love to see the prayers back into schools because it makes a big difference."

For Josh Kirkland of Pensacola, Fla., graduating with a bachelor's degree in cinema, it was an "honor" to have the president speak at commencement. But he said it's "early to say" what to make of Trump's unconventional presidency.

"He's certainly been busy," Kirkland said, "both in the office and on Twitter."

Hey guys, no news story here. I'm just here to explain myself.

I took pride in this board when I ran it. I love the news and I love posting about the news. I like being able to create a conversation about current events. I think it's important to stay on top of what's going on in the news and that's why this board was started.

I took a 6-month hiatus from this board for two reasons:

1. I got a new job in November and moved across the country to start it.
2. All of the news post-election has been Trump and it's exhausting.

The ironic thing is that my new job is very similar to what I do on this board. I write and post news articles online and for a magazine about medical devices, medical research and medical advances.

I am going to try to post to this more often because an informed citizen is the cornerstone of democracy. Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people (bonus points if you know what that's from without looking it up).

['It just adds to the chaos']

Whirring, Purring Fidget Spinners Provide Entertainment, Not ADHD Help
from NPR

Fidget spinners — the trendy toy of the moment — are causing a commotion. A lot of kids love them, just as many teachers hate them and some people think they're more than just toys.

The basic fidget spinner has three prongs centered around a circle with bearings in the middle. Take one prong, give it a spin and watch as the triangle shape becomes a blur, sort of like a ceiling fan. The toys are manufactured by several different companies, and sold all over the place — airports, gas stations, train stations, toy stores.

In many places where fidget spinners are sold, they're touted as miracle toys that help people focus as well as aid people dealing with post-traumatic stress and other disorders, but one expert says those claims aren't backed up by science. And some teachers have complained that the toys are causing disturbances in the classroom.

'It just adds to the chaos'

While fidget spinners may seem simple and harmless, music teacher Elizabeth Maughan is not a fan.

"They do make a noise," she says. "When you have 10 or 15 in a room, it's just this whirring and it's an irresistible siren call for everyone else to turn around and look at whoever has it out, and [it's] completely distracting."

Maughan teaches fifth and sixth graders in a school just outside Oklahoma City. She says the toys appeared there in the middle of April.

"It seemed like one day there was a few, and the next day there was a few, and the next day everyone had them. They just appeared really fast," she says. "Of course, they drop them, and they clatter and pieces of them fall out and then they're chasing ball bearings around the room. It just adds to the chaos."

Fidget spinners got to be so much of a problem that Maughan's school banned them.

And, her school isn't the only one putting a stop to the spin, many others are prohibiting the toys in the classroom.

But some people are convinced fidget spinners are more than a just a distraction.

Don't believe the spin

In fact, many retailers market the devices as a tool to help people focus, and help with controlling things such as PTSD, anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But according to Scott Kollins, a clinical psychologist and professor at Duke University, "there's no evidence to support that claim."

Kollins says that there's been no research shown that proves fidget spinners are effective at addressing those issues.

"I know there's lots of similar toys, just like there's lots of other games and products marketed toward individuals who have ADHD, and there's basically no scientific evidence that those things work across the board," Kollins says.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of 2011 as many as 6.4 million children between the ages of four and 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD.

Kollins says that because there is such a large number of children with ADHD, a lot of parents are searching for help, making them vulnerable to targeted — and potentially false — marketing.

"If their description says specifically that this can help for ADHD, they're basically making false claims because these have not been evaluated in proper research," he says.

Kollins says he hasn't had parents or patients ask him about fidget spinners, yet, but he would rather they focus on some of the tried and true treatments.

"It's important for parents and teachers who work with kids who have ADHD to know that there are very well studied and documented treatments that work, and that they're out there, so there's not really quick and easy fixes like buying a toy," he says. "It's important that people don't get into trying these fads when we do have treatments that can help these kids."


Do you have a fidget spinner? Let me know in the replies if you have one and if it has been more an entertaining device than a focusing device.

There's bad news if you like sushi
from Morning Ticker



An alarming new report claims that sushi has one big potential problem that you might not be aware of despite all of its benefits.

Sushi lovers, beware: scientists have just found out something about this food that should cause you great alarm if you eat it on a regular basis. Although it's been praised as an awesome food both because it is low in fat and high in protein, not to mention rich in Omega 3 fatty acids, a new report finds that there is a dangerous parasite lurking inside sometimes that is causing more problems than ever before.

The report, published in the medical journal BMJ Case Reports, discusses the case of a Portugal man who began experiencing stomach pain and then started vomiting and reported a high fever. Doctors determined that he had recently eaten sushi, and after an endoscopy, they found a parasite larvae that had attached itself to his stomach lining.

They diagnosed him with anisakiasis, which is caused by parasitic worms that can be found in sushi, and as the food rises in popularity, so do cases of this unpleasant disease.

The statement from BMJ is below.

An unseen hazard of eating raw or undercooked fish/seafood is on the rise in Western countries, where dishes, such as sushi, are becoming increasingly popular, warn doctors today in a.

The warning comes after they treated a 32 year old previously well man who had had severe upper gut (epigastric) pain, vomiting, and fever for a week.

A blood test indicated mild inflammation, and the area below his ribs was tender. But it was only when the man revealed that he had recently eaten sushi that the doctors suspected that he might have anisakiasis.

Anisakiasis is caused by eating raw or undercooked fish/seafood infected with nematode parasites of the species Anisakis.

Endoscopy–the insertion of a long tube with a camera on the end down the gullet and into the stomach–revealed the larva of a worm-like parasite firmly attached to an area of swollen and inflamed gut lining.

After the larva was removed with a special kind of net, the man's symptoms cleared up straight away. Laboratory analysis showed that the larva belonged to the species of Anisakis.

Most of the reported cases to date have been in Japan, where a raw fish diet is very common say the authors.

"However, it has been increasingly recognised in Western countries," they add, and advise clinicians to consider the condition in patients with pain, nausea, vomiting and other complications, such as bowel obstruction and bleeding, who have recently eaten raw or undercooked fish.

[The rVSV Zebov-GP Ebola Vaccine]

New Ebola Outbreak In Congo: Can Vaccines Prevent An Epidemic?
from Tech Times

The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed a new ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) Bas Uele Province on May 12, just over a week since it celebrated the collective effort that created the rVSV Zebov-GP vaccine.

Since the world now has a vaccine for the deadly virus that took thousands of lives, some may believe that the spread of the disease would be cut short. However, can vaccines really prevent an epidemic from happening in the future? Let's take a closer look.

The rVSV Zebov-GP Ebola Vaccine

The ebola vaccine came forth from the combined effort of WHO, governments, health workers, international and local scientists, and private and public funding organizations. Of course, it would not have seen a successful clinical trial without the people who consented to test the vaccine.

The rVSV Zebov-GP vaccine offers 100 percent protection against the disease for people who live in close contact with ebola patients. It also extends protection to unvaccinated individuals through "herd immunity," which means that the vaccine can prevent the spread of disease up to a certain degree. The experimental ebola vaccine, however, works on only one subtype of ebola and has yet to receive a proper license.

Congo Ebola Epidemic

The DRC's ebola epidemic currently affects a small number of people and is still manageable with proper handling. WHO, however, is still investigating the scale of the outbreak.

"An investigation team led by the Ministry of Health and supported by WHO and partners has deployed and is expected to reach the affected area in the coming day," Dr. Peter Salama, WHO Executive Director for Emergencies, said.

Despite WHO's involvement and the presence of a vaccine, the small epidemic could still reach pandemic levels if the vaccine and disease subtype don't match and patients don't cooperate.

To be fair, DRC has already experienced several ebola epidemics since 1976 but the last three outbreaks all involved fewer than 100 cases, even without a vaccine.

Conditions For The Vaccine To Work

Experts believe that the world is still underprepared when it comes to facing deadly infectious diseases and, as mentioned above, there are still certain conditions before a vaccine would be able to efficiently prevent large-scale epidemics.

The current ebola vaccine is still very limited since it only protects against one subtype-the Zaire ebolavirus-but, as we all know, viruses have a tendency to mutate and become even more deadly faster than experts can produce vaccines.

In the instance that the vaccine perfectly matches the disease that is circulating, success would still depend on patient consent and government support before healthcare workers can be deployed to administer vaccines from the supplier.

That part can be considered the trickiest since conditions become worse as time passes without immediate action. According to a report, Merck - the manufacturer of rVSV Zebov-GP vaccine - and the DRC government are still in the middle of discussions whether the vaccine should be administered to the remote communities affected by the current epidemic.

While that is a frustrating situation, it does have its merit since administering a vaccine that is not sure to work on an unidentified subtype of virus seems fruitless, especially if the strain turns out to be different.

Vaccines are not cures and do not guarantee that a person would never have the disease, especially if the disease has many subtypes and has the tendency to mutate. They do, however, guarantee that the chances of contracting a deadly disease and dying from it become slimmer.

Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO Assistant Director-General for Health Systems and Innovation, believes that an efficient healthcare system is a better prevention than vaccines. For economically challenged communities and countries that cannot provide this, however, vaccines could be the people's best bet at preventing large scale outbreaks by limiting the number of possible carriers that would aid in the virus distribution.

Scientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beach
from The Washington Post

A giant sea creature, possibly with tusks and possibly straight out of your nightmares, washed up on a beach in Indonesia last week, freaking out people on the island of Seram and launching a global guessing game to determine what, exactly, it used to be.

As images of the floating carcass rocketed around the Internet, the scientific community asked itself: What is it? How did it get to an Indonesian island? And what does its presence say about climate change and whale migration habits?

The people of Seram have a more pressing query: How do we get rid of it?

Asrul Tuanakota, a 37-year-old fisherman, initially thought he had discovered a boat stranded in shallow water, according to the Jakarta Globe. On closer inspection, he determined that it was the rotting corpse of a 50-foot-long dead sea creature — possibly a giant squid because the remains looked like tentacles.

Blood seeping from the dead sea beast had turned the water near the coastline a bright red, which didn't stop locals from wading in for a closer look and snapping pictures.

George Leonard, the chief scientist at the Ocean Conservancy, told HuffPost that the rotting carcass was probably a baleen whale, judging by parts of a protruding skeleton and what appear to be baleen plates used to filter out food.

Decomposition gases bloated the whale into a very un-whale-like shape, and some of the noxious gases were seeping out. Can nightmares have smell?

Seram, the largest island in the Maluku Island group, is near the migration routes for baleen whales, so it makes sense that one would be nearby. Locals have asked the government to help remove the carcass, HuffPost reported.

But dead whales usually sink to the bottom of the ocean, providing a years-long buffet for the creatures that dwell there, according to Live Science. The publication theorized that the whale had a bacterial infection that produced more gases or that it possibly died in warm waters, allowing bacteria to accumulate and gases to expand its body. It also could have died an unnatural death after being clipped by a ship.



Of course, things die in the ocean all the time producing all kinds of weird phenomena. But now fishermen and villages and tourists — and their smartphones — are coming into contact with dead sea things as they go through the circle of life.

For example, fishermen off the western coast of Australia found a humongous, floating balloon of flesh that looked as if it was the first sign of an alien invasion. At first, the father and son thought they had encountered a hot-air balloon.



"When we got closer we realized it had to be a dead whale because of the smell," Mark Watkins told the West Australian.

They snapped photos of the whale balloon, then headed to shore. By then, they said, circling sharks had taken bites of the dead creature, causing it to deflate.

And earlier this year, a giant, hairy sea creature washed up on a beach in the Philippines, according to the Daily Mail. Locals believe the unusual occurrence was brought on by a recent earthquake.

Pictures showed people climbing on top of the carcass to take selfies.

Box-Office Bomb: 'King Arthur' Opens to Disastrous $14.7M Debut Behind 'Snatched'
from The Hollywood Reporter



'King Arthur' is a flop of epic proportions after costing $175 million to make; 'Snatched' cost far less ($42 million) but opened well behind Amy Schumer's 'Trainwreck.' Holdover 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2' easily beat both new offerings.

The second weekend of summer at the North American box office took no prisoners.

Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow's male-fueled King Arthur: Legend of the Sword — costing $175 million to make before marketing — is a flop of epic proportions after launching to $14.7 million from 3,702 theaters to mark the first big bomb of summer 2017 and one of the worst openings ever for a big-budget studio event film. It also is falling on its sword overseas, and could be facing a loss of well north of $100 million.

Piling on more bad news, the movie was topped in the U.S. by Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn's Snatched in a surprise upset. The Mother's Day action-comedy opened to $17.5 million from 3,501 theaters. Fox spent a relatively modest $42 million to make the R-rated movie, but was certainly hoping for a bigger bow, considering Schumer's Trainwreck debuted to $30 million in summer 2015. Overall, it was one of the slowest Mother Day weekends in years in terms of revenue.

Produced by Chernin Entertainment, director Jonathan Levine's Snatched follows a mother and daughter who find themselves trying to escape after being abducted on vacation in Ecuador. The comedy, which received mediocre reviews and a B CinemaScore, marks Hawn's first turn on the big screen in 15 years, as well as Schumer's first film since Trainwreck.

Schumer may be controversial, but Snatched succeeded in red states. The comedy overindexed in all parts of the country, save for the Rockies and Western states. Specific markets that overindexed included cities in Florida, as well as Oklahoma City and San Antonio. Females made up 77 percent of the audience, while 51 percent of ticket buyers were between the ages of 18 and 34.

"Teaming an edgy comedian with a comedian who is America's sweetheart is like the consummate political ticket that makes sure all of your constituents are served," said Fox president domestic distribution Chris Aronson.

Snatched placed No. 2 behind Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which easily stayed atop the box-office chart in its second weekend, declining a respectable 57 percent to $63 million from 4,347 theaters. (The Disney and Marvel sequel grossed $16.4 million on Friday alone, more than King Arthur did over its entire weekend.) Guardians Vol. 2 has now grossed $246.2 million domestically and $384.4 million overseas for a global haul of $630.6 million, including $80.5 million in China.

King Arthur, starring Charlie Hunnam as the mythical king, is a dark origin story about the future royal's tough upbringing in the back alleys of his city. But once Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, he is forced to acknowledge his true legacy. Jude Law, Astrid Berges-Frisbey, Djimon Hounsou, Aidan Gillen and Eric Bana also star.

"The concept didn't resonate with a broad audience, and we're disappointed. We had higher hopes," said Warner Bros. domestic distribution chief Jeff Goldstein. The studio also missed with Pan (2015) and Jack the Giant Slayer (2013), which were likewise attempts to spin new live-action franchises based on classic IP, as leader Disney has done with any number of hits, including the recent Beauty and the Beast.

King Arthur, whose release was delayed numerous times, was skewered by critics, but received a B+ CinemaScore from audiences. Males made up nearly 60 percent of the audience.

Overseas, the pic lagged behind both Guardians Vol. 2, which raked in another $52.2 million in its third weekend, and the $42 million launch of Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant in 34 markets. Conversely, King Arthur debuted to a tepid $29.1 million from its first 51 markets, including a miserable $5.1 million in China. It still has numerous major markets in which to open, including the U.K. and Australia.

Rounding out the top five domestically were The Fate of the Furious and The Boss Baby.

Elsewhere on the North American chart, Lowriders, from Blumhouse's BH Title and Imagine in association with Telemundo, cracked the top 10 despite playing in only 269 theaters. Targeting Hispanic audiences, the drama earned a pleasing $2.4 million to place No. 8.

The Met: Live in HD continued to prosper as Saturday's live broadcast of Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier opera grossed $1.7 million from 900 screens to come in No. 10.

At the specialty box office, Eleanor Coppola's Paris Can Wait, starring Diane Lane, Alec Baldwin and Arnaud Viard, fared nicely for Sony Pictures Classics, earning $101,825 from four theaters for a per screen average of $25,456, the best of the weekend for any film. It is the first narrative feature directed by Coppola, who is Francis Coppola's wife.

[CBS News]

Researcher, 22, unintentionally discovered "kill switch" that halted worldwide cyberattack, officials say
from CBS News

The cyberattack that spread malicious software around the world, shutting down networks at hospitals, banks and government agencies, was stemmed by a young British researcher and an inexpensive domain registration, with help from another 20-something security engineer in the U.S.

Britain's National Cyber Security Center and others were hailing the cybersecurity researcher, a 22-year-old identified online only as MalwareTech, who - unintentionally at first - discovered a "kill switch" that halted the unprecedented outbreak.

By then, the "ransomware" attack had hobbled Britain's hospital network and computer systems in several countries, in an effort to extort money from computer users. Hackers tricked victims into opening corrupt links in emails disguised as invoices, CBS News' Jonathan Vigliotti reports. It's still unclear who is behind the attack.

But a researcher's actions may have saved companies and governments millions of dollars and slowed the outbreak before computers in the U.S. were more widely affected.

MalwareTech said in a in a blog post Saturday that he had returned from lunch with a friend on Friday and learned that networks across Britain's health system had been hit by ransomware, tipping him off that "this was something big."

He began analyzing a sample of the malicious software and noticed its code included a hidden web address that wasn't registered. He said he "promptly" registered the domain, something he regularly does to try to discover ways to track or stop malicious software.

Across an ocean, Darien Huss, a 28-year-old research engineer for the cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, was doing his own analysis. The western Michigan resident said he noticed the authors of the malware had left in a feature known as a kill switch. Huss took a screen shot of his discovery and shared it on Twitter.

MalwareTech and Huss are part of a large global cybersecurity community of people, working independently or for security companies, who are constantly watching for attacks and working together to stop or prevent them, often sharing information via Twitter. It's not uncommon for them to use aliases, either to protect themselves from retaliatory attacks or for privacy.

Soon Huss and MalwareTech were communicating about what they'd found: That registering the domain name and redirecting the attacks to MalwareTech's server had activated the kill switch, halting the ransomware's infections - creating what's called a "sinkhole."

Who perpetrated this wave of attacks remains unknown. Two security firms - Kaspersky Lab and Avast - said they identified the malicious software in more than 70 countries. Both said Russia was hit hardest.

These hackers "have caused enormous amounts of disruption- probably the biggest ransomware cyberattack in history," said Graham Cluley, a veteran of the anti-virus industry in Oxford, England.

The ransomware exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that was purportedly identified by the U.S. National Security Agency for its own intelligence-gathering purposes. Hackers said they stole the tools from the NSA and dumped them on the internet.

A malware tracking map showed "WannaCry" infections were widespread. Britain canceled or delayed treatments for thousands of patients. Train systems were hit in Germany and Russia, and phone companies in Madrid and Moscow. Renault's futuristic assembly line in Slovenia, where rows of robots weld car bodies together, was stopped cold. In Brazil, the social security system had to disconnect its computers and cancel public access.

But while FedEx Corp. reported that its Windows computers were "experiencing interference" from malware - it wouldn't say if it had been hit by the ransomware - other impacts in the U.S. were not readily apparent on Saturday.

The worldwide effort to extort cash from computer users spread so widely that Microsoft quickly changed its policy, making security fixes for this vulnerability available for free for the older Windows systems still used by millions of individuals and smaller businesses.

Britain's home secretary said one in five of 248 National Health Service groups had been hit. Home Secretary Amber Rudd said all but six of the NHS trusts back to normal Saturday.

The U.K.'s National Cyber Security Center was "working round the clock" to restore vital health services, while urging people to update security software fixes, run anti-virus software and back up their data elsewhere.

All this may be just a taste of what's coming, another cyber security expert warned.

Computer users worldwide - and everyone else who depends on them - should assume that the next big "ransomware" attack has already been launched, and just hasn't manifested itself yet, said Ori Eisen, founder of the Trusona cybersecurity firm in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The attack held hospitals and other entities hostage by freezing computers, encrypting data and demanding money through online bitcoin payments. But it appears to be "low-level" stuff, Eisen said Saturday, given the amount of ransom demanded - $300 at first, rising to $600 before it destroys files hours later.

This is already believed to be the biggest online extortion attack ever recorded, disrupting services in nations as diverse as the U.S., Ukraine, Brazil, Spain and India. Europol, the European Union's police agency, said the onslaught was at "an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits."

Huss and others were calling MalwareTech a hero on Saturday, with Huss adding that the global cybersecurity community was working "as a team" to stop the infections from spreading.

"I think the security industry as a whole should be considered heroes," he said.

But he also said he's concerned the authors of the malware could re-release it - perhaps in the next few days or weeks - without a kill switch or with a better one, or that copycats could mimic the attack.

The MalwareTech researcher agreed that the threat hasn't disappeared.

"One thing that is very important to note is our sinkholing only stops this sample and there is nothing stopping them removing the domain check and trying again, so it's incredibly important that any unpatched systems are patched as quickly as possible," he warned.

The kill switch also couldn't help those already infected. Short of paying, options for these individuals and companies are usually limited to recovering data files from a backup, if available, or living without them.

Security experts said it appeared to be caused by a self-replicating piece of software that enters companies when employees click on email attachments, then spreads quickly as employees share documents.

The security holes it exploits were disclosed weeks ago by TheShadowBrokers, a mysterious hacking group. Microsoft swiftly released software "patches" to fix those holes, but many users still haven't installed updates or still use older versions of Windows.

CBS News
cbsnews.com

[Amanda Knox Says 'Coercive' Police Interrogation Led Her to Change Her Story]

Amanda Knox Says 'Coercive' Police Interrogation Led Her to Change Her Story
from TIME Magazine

Amanda Knox said in a new interview that she lied to Italian police about where she was at the time of her roommate's 2007 killing because of their severe interrogation tactics.

"I was hit on the back of the head, I was yelled at. Police were coming in and out of the room telling me that I was a liar," Knox said in a Nightline interview that aired Friday, saying police used "coercive interrogation techniques."

"It was utter chaos," she said.

Knox was twice convicted and acquitted in the November 2007 death of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, who was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in their apartment in Perugia, Italy. She was exonerated last year by Italy's top criminal court. The case, which drew global attention, is the subject of a Netflix documentary that premiered on Friday.

During a 53-hour interrogation, Knox said she told police she had been in the apartment when Kercher was killed, changing her story after telling them she had spent the night with her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.

"The police told me that I had amnesia, and that I better remember the truth," Knox said on Nightline. "And so what they were forcing me to consider was that my memories that I had—that I had spent the night with Raffaele—were wrong and that I needed to re-scramble my brain around in order to bring out the truth."

[Volkswagen agrees to $1.2B settlement with dealers]

Volkswagen agrees to $1.2B settlement with dealers
from USA Today

Volkswagen Group agreed to pay its 652 U.S. dealerships up to $1.21 billion to settle claims stemming from the company's emissions scandal.

The German automaker revealed the settlement late Friday in a federal court filing, reflecting an average payout of $1.85 million. Many dealers suffered steep losses over the last year as VW's U.S. sales slumped in the wake of the scandal.

The deal would resolve one of the episode's lingering questions: whether franchised dealers would be compensated after the manufacturer admitted to rigging nearly 600,000 U.S. diesel vehicles with illegal software to cheat emissions standards.

The accord, which must still be approved by a judge in San Francisco, is separate from a sweeping settlement between VW, the U.S. government, California regulators and consumers that will cost the company up to $14.7 billion.

Attorneys representing consumers said Friday that less than 1% of the consumers included in the settlement had opted out before a September deadline. Owners of the affected cars will get buybacks or a payment and a free repair. If VW can't come up with a fix, vehicle owners will be given a second chance to opt out.

For their part, dealers have been prohibited from selling the affected diesel vehicles until that fix is ready. Now, they'll get payments for their financial injury — with 50% upfront after a federal judge approves the settlement and the rest in equal installments over 18 months, according to the court filing.

Volkswagen also agreed to buy back the affected diesel cars still owned by dealers at the same terms consumers are receiving.

"Dealers had and still have thousands of new and used (diesel) cars on their lots that became immediately unsalable when Volkswagen issued its broad stop-sale orders," VW dealers said in a separate court filing. "When consumers learned of the emissions scandal, the entire market for Volkswagen's diesel cars immediately disappeared and the tarnished brand name also caused precipitous decreases in sales of all Volkswagen cars.

"This factor weighs in favor of approval of the settlement because there is clear and meaningful relationship between the strength of the case and the benefits provided in the settlement."

Dealers who don't sign up for the settlement negotiated by a class-action group of attorneys can opt out and take their changes in a legal battle against VW in the courts.

The $1.21 billion figure represents the amount of the settlement if all dealers accept the offer, which would resolve their legal claims against the company.

[Adele, Beyoncé, Bowie lead Grammy contenders]

Adele, Beyoncé, Bowie lead Grammy contenders
from The Detroit News

Friday marked the cutoff for eligibility for this year's Grammy Awards, meaning anything released between now and February's ceremony won't be considered until the following year's show.

Putting aside the inanity of the Grammy timeline — who else counts years as starting in October and ending in September? — here are the albums that will figure heavily into the mix in the Album of the Year field when nominations are announced in December:

Shoo-ins

Adele, "25" — A no-brainer nominee for the Album of the Year contention. Adele's third album was a record-smashing blockbuster, selling 3.38 million copies its first week in stores, shattering the previous record for one-week sales by nearly a million copies, and was recently certified as 10-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Those types of numbers don't go unnoticed, and you can bet the farm Adele will be in the mix for the night's top prize come Grammy night.

Beyoncé, "Lemonade" — Another slam dunk contender. Queen Bey's sixth album, surprise-released in April, lit up the internet upon its release with fans theorizing about the album's origins and its subject matter, which delves deeply into rumored extramarital affairs in the Beyoncé-Jay Z partnership. There are alternate theories (it's all fiction, it's about Beyoncé's father), but whichever narrative you choose, the album is a stunning, cohesive work of art which could become her first album to be crowned Album of the Year, a category she's been nominated in twice before (for "I Am ... Sasha Fierce," which didn't deserve to win, and "Beyoncé," which did).

David Bowie, "Blackstar" — The biggest roadblock in Beyoncé's path to Album of the Year supremacy is Bowie, whose 25th and final album was released just two days before his shocking death in January. The album became his first to reach the No. 1 spot in the U.S., and a big win on Grammy night could help shore up the Grammys' oversights with regard to Bowie while he was alive (he won just one Grammy statue, for Best Short Form Music Video). The last artist to win a posthumous Album of the Year Grammy was Ray Charles for 2004's duets set "Genius Loves Company," which was released two months after his death. That win was strictly an honorarium; in Bowie's case, the stark, heavily jazz-based "Blackstar" actually deserves its recognition.

Safe bets

Chance the Rapper, "Coloring Book" — The Grammys revised their eligibility rules to allow streaming-only projects to be nominated specifically for this set, which could make for a great Grammy underdog story.

Sia, "This is Acting" — The Aussie singer-songwriter has written a lot of hits for a lot of artists — from Kelly Clarkson to Rihanna to Beyoncé — which counts for a lot among voters.

Wild cards

Bon Iver, "22, A Million" — The 2012 Best New Artist winner's first album in five years — released Friday, just under the Grammy deadline — is a knotty, experimental, deeply rewarding listen.

Frank Ocean, "Blonde" — His second album is more challenging than his previous set, 2012's Album of the Year-nominated "Channel Orange," but it's a deep, progressive work by a boundary-breaking artist, which carries weight in Grammy circles.

Drake, "Views" — The Canadian rapper has garnered just one win in 27 nominations at the Grammys. He could find himself in the running this year, but "Views" isn't strong enough to net him the big prize.

Kanye West, "The Life of Pablo" — The 21-time Grammy winner has never won in the Album of the Year category; a "Pablo" nod would be his first in the category since 2008's "Graduation."

Rihanna, "Anti" — The superstar has only been nominated for Album of the Year once before, for 2010's "Loud," but her stirring "Anti" could put her back in the mix.

Radiohead, "A Moon Shaped Pool"; Coldplay, "A Head Full of Dreams" — Need a British rock band in the mix? Either of these will do.

Justin Bieber, "Purpose" — The Canadian pop superstar has earned just three Grammy nominations to date and is still seen as an outsider by Grammy voters. "Purpose" could change that.

Paul Simon, "Stranger to Stranger" — Simon has been nominated for Album of the Year five times, and is one of just five artists to win more than one trophy in the category. Never count him out.

[If Trump thinks debate prep is for chumps, his advisers can't save him from himself]

If Trump thinks debate prep is for chumps, his advisers can't save him from himself
from The Washington Post

Donald Trump has one week to prepare for his next debate with Hillary Clinton. It is a critical event for him. Yet everything he's done before and after the first debate sends a loud, clear message: He seems to think debate prep is for chumps.

A candidate charged with lacking discipline just spent the week providing evidence for the prosecution. His Friday morning tweet storm — beginning at 3:20 a.m. with a rant about unnamed sources and resuming just after 5 a.m., with a series of tweets that expanded his sexist attacks on a Latina former Miss Universe — punctuated a days-long spiral that has put at greater risk his hopes of winning the election.

To see some of his allies in the hours after Monday's debate at Hofstra University was to recognize how let down they were with his performance. They could see the missed opportunities and knew that his problem wasn't whether his advisers had tried to prepare him. It was his inability to follow the advice. They saw him fall into traps set for him by a Clinton campaign that has been studying his weaknesses for months.

No matter what his advisers try to do ahead of next Sunday's town-hall debate at Washington University in St. Louis, his performance is utterly unpredictable. Those advisers can run him through mock debates and put him through murder-board, rapid-fire exercises. They can give him a dozen good ways to try to attack Clinton. They can prepare binders of background information, game out answers and give him as many flashcards to study as they can.

In other words, they can give him the best information and game plan in the world. But based on the first debate, they cannot trust him to execute. Trump's weakness is his capacity to forget in the heat of battle the advice he's been given. Clinton seemingly can knock him off stride with the flick of a phrase.

After the 90-plus minutes at Hofstra, a wiser candidate and a smarter campaign would have shrugged and admitted the obvious, that he had a bad night. A more experienced candidate, one with some humility, would have promised to do better and moved on. He might even have made a joke about it. Rick Perry at least had the wherewithal to own up to his embarrassing "oops" moment — forgetting the name of a federal agency he wanted to eliminate — with a wisecrack.

When President Obama lost the first debate of 2012 to Mitt Romney, he didn't immediately realize how badly he had done — or how harsh the judgments were about his performance. In the hours afterward, one after another of his advisers told him that it wasn't that his critics were bashing him unfairly, it was that his performance had fallen short.

His advisers began with gentle descriptions, which became more blunt. Obama didn't fully understand what had gone wrong until he watched a video of the debate a few days later. "I get it," he told campaign manager David Plouffe. He vowed to win the final two debates.

Trump has done the opposite, rejecting post-debate polls and the assessment even of many Republicans that he lost the debate during the final 60 minutes. Instead, he's grasped onto unscientific Internet surveys that portray him the winner. When Jason Miller, the campaign's senior communications adviser, appeared Thursday on MSNBC's "MTP Daily" and cited several online polls that are subjected to no statistical rigor, an exasperated Chuck Todd, the host, said the campaign was "creating a reality that does not exist."

This is an alternative reality created by Trump for Trump. My Post colleagues Phil Rucker and Bob Costa and I got an insight into this personality trait when we interviewed him almost a year ago at his office in Trump Tower overlooking New York's Central Park. Trump was riding high at the time, leading the polls for the Republican nomination and feeling buoyant.

The discussion turned to the debates. He had done well in the first Republican debate in Cleveland but less well in the debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.

At one point, he reached across his big desk, which was piled with magazines featuring him on the cover, and handed us several sheets of paper with the results of several online polls, all of which declared him the winner of both debates. It was immediately clear to him that we found his evidence unconvincing.

"Why don't people trust online polls?" he asked. We told him that online polls are "not scientific." For a quick second, he seemed to accept that criticism as valid. "Okay," he said. But then he pivoted back to his own view of things. He wanted to believe, and so he would. "It must mean something, right?" he said of the online polls.

For Republicans who have bought into his candidacy, this is the candidate they must live with as they plot out strategy for two more Clinton-Trump debates, plus Tuesday's vice-presidential debate at Longwood University in Farmville, Va., and then the last weeks before Election Day.

Vice-presidential debates are sometimes memorable but rarely consequential. Tuesday's encounter between Republican Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana and Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia might end as unmemorable and inconsequential. Perhaps.

The two principals in the presidential campaign so overwhelm everything else that it's hard to imagine Kaine and Pence breaking through. In another way, however, their encounter could be a helpful distillation of the choice for voters, absent the theatrics and outsize personalities of the two presidential nominees.

The debate will provide Pence an opportunity to prosecute the case against Clinton that Trump failed to do consistently at Hofstra. Kaine can use it to reinforce Clinton's argument that Trump is unfit, while trying to force Pence to embrace everything the GOP nominee has said and done, which could squeeze Pence between loyalty and future ambition.

These must be trying days for those in Trump's campaign. They can craft a broad message about change vs. status quo and about the Clintons as the embodiment of the kind of cozy insider environment of Washington that so many Americans dislike.

Republicans can try to build a superstructure around the candidate. His advisers can give him scripts and a teleprompter. They can pump emails raising questions about Clinton's emails, the Clinton Foundation and its benefactors, and Clinton's foreign policy record. The Republican National Committee can organize an effective ground operation.

In the end, they are all hostage to a candidate who can undo all their good work with one middle-of-the-night tweet, a candidate who has the capacity to turn a brief sideshow into a debilitating, days-long story, who cannot resist dwelling on petty grievances and who, when it mattered most, did not rise to the moment.

[Pokemon GO v0.39 Brings Capture Location Back]

Pokemon GO v0.39 Brings Capture Location Back
from Android Headlines

Pokemon GO has been a hit since launching in July. However, it has seen a pretty big drop in the number of players that are still playing the game. In fact, it isn't even number one in the Google Play Store (or the Apple App Store) anymore. But that hasn't kept Niantic from giving up on the game. The company just pushed out a new update to the game, bringing it to v0.39. The update is fairly small, actually, but does bring in a few fixes as well as tweaks for the Pokemon GO Plus wearable that is finally available for purchase. The biggest tweak for Pokemon GO Plus is the fact that players can now attempt to capture Pokemon that appear when they are using incense. This is all done from the Pokemon GO Plus wearable, without needing to open the game on your smartphone.

The changelog that Niantic published with this update include bringing back the capture location. So now you'll be able to see where a Pokemon was captured. This was available in the initial launch of the game, but in updates that came out afterwards, it was removed. Other than that, Niantic only lists minor bug fixes for the game. While bug fixes are always nice to see available for any app or game, it definitely isn't the big update that Pokemon GO players were truly hoping for.

Pokemon GO is still hugely popular, just not at the levels it was about a month ago. The game broke all sorts of records when it came to downloads, active users and revenue coming in from the game. This was all done without the game being officially available globally. While it is available in most countries, there are still a handful of countries that have yet to see Pokemon GO be officially available. Niantic is working hard to change that, however.

If you are wanting to have the latest version of Pokemon GO on your smartphone, then head to the download link below. It will take you to version 0.39. Simply download the APK linked below, to your smartphone. Make sure that "Unknown Sources" is checked (Settings > Security, for most phones), and you'll be all set to install the update. Remember that it will replace your current version of Pokemon GO.

[Apple Said to Be Planning Amazon Echo Alternative]

Apple Said to Be Planning Amazon Echo Alternative
from Fortune Magazine

Apple may get into the smart home market with a rival device to Amazon's Echo, according to a report on Friday.

Apple is testing a prototype for a smart home hub that would control home appliances, lights, and other devices, as well as use Apple's virtual personal assistant Siri for voice control, Bloomberg is reporting, citing people with knowledge of the product. The device would be Apple's answer to Amazon's Echo, which in addition to controlling home electronics, doubles as a music speaker and a virtual personal assistant that can order Uber rides, put meetings on online calendars, and search online.

To top Amazon's Echo, Apple's product would come with a better microphone and speaker technology, and could even include facial-recognition tools, the Bloomberg sources say. By incorporating Siri, the device could be used to read e-mails and send text messages, according to Bloomberg's sources.

The Amazon Echo, which premiered in 2014, is among Amazon's most popular products, according to the e-retailer's listing of most popular products. The wireless device has a built-in microphone that can recognize voice commands from across the room. Over the last two years, Amazon has added new features to the Echo including the ability to read audio books and provide real-time traffic information.

The Echo's momentum with shoppers has prompted Amazon to expand its smart home hardware line to include the Echo Dot and Amazon Tap, which have some, but not all of the Echo's features.

Apple has been dipping its toes in the smart home market for the last few years. The company arguably made its biggest move yet into the market this year by bundling a newly developed app called Home in its iOS 10 mobile operating system. The app connects with several smart home products, including the Philips Hue line of smart light bulbs. At its press event earlier this month, Apple said hundreds of devices coming into the market in the next several months will also connect to Home.

Until now, Apple has been content to keep its smart home focus on software. But with iPad sales tumbling and long-term uncertainty across its Mac and iPhone lines, shareholders and analysts have called on Apple to expand its reach in hardware.

However, while Echo appears to have caught on with consumers, and Amazon has said as much, the company hasn't revealed exact sales figures. Apple, a company that makes massive profits on each product it sells, will likely only debut an Echo alternative if it believes there is sufficient demand and profits. Apple also has a history of creating experimental products, but never releasing them.

According to Bloomberg's sources, Apple started developing its Echo alternative in 2014 and it has since tested a prototype, suggesting Apple is at least somewhat serious about it. That said, Apple is exceedingly selective in the products it eventually launches, and it's possible the device, which hasn't yet been named, will be killed before it even reaches store shelves.

[Will Jeremy Corbyn cling on? U.K. opposition decides]

Will Jeremy Corbyn cling on? U.K. opposition decides
from USA Today

Amid the fallout from Britain's decision to leave the European Union, a political storm is brewing over who will take charge of the opposition Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn, the embattled, far-left renegade who was elected leader in September 2015, is likely to triumph over rival Owen Smith when the vote is announced at the party's conference in Liverpool on Saturday.

The leadership election was sparked by party members unhappy with Corbyn's leadership and his handling of the campaign this past spring to remain in the EU.

Although Corbyn is bookmakers' favorite to win the party race, his chances of leading Labour to oust the ruling Conservatives from power in a general election in four years appear slim.

Corbyn "has almost no chance whatsoever" of triumphing in 2020, said Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent. "He is the most unpopular opposition leader in postwar history and is lagging well behind Prime Minister Theresa May in public ratings of their leadership qualities and economic competence."

A poll by market research form Ipsos MORI last month said 58% of respondents were dissatisfied with Corbyn as Labour leader.

Adrian Pabst, another Kent academic, said one of Corbyn's first moves if re-elected will be to try and put together a shadow cabinet — an alternative to that of the Conservatives — but most Labour members of Parliament won't serve under him.

Pabst predicted that Corbyn will try to amend the party's leadership election rules so that a far-left candidate will always be on the ballot, and "will try to recruit even more militants to entrench his position."

"What all this signifies is that Corbyn will stick to his politics of protest," Pabst said. "Far from reaching out to the whole country and positioning himself as a credible alternative PM to Theresa May, he will further alienate the electorate."

Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair called Corbyn "the guy with the placard" after he opposed U.K. airstrikes in Syria and attended nuclear disarmament rallies after becoming party leader.

[Pound slumps after Boris Johnson hints at Brexit timing]

Pound slumps after Boris Johnson hints at Brexit timing
from Market Watch

The pound resumed its slide on Friday, heading sharply lower after U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said he expects his country will start formal Brexit negotiations early next year.

Sterling  traded at $1.2944, down from $1.3078 Thursday in New York. Against the euro, the pound  dropped to €1.1546 from €1.1668.

Speaking with Sky News in New York late Thursday, Johnson said the U.K. government is in talks with its European partners in the "expectation that by the early part of next year, you will see an Article 50 letter." Triggering Article 50 is the action that officially would kick off the U.K.'s exit from the European Union.

"The comments suggest that Britain could be on a somewhat faster track to an EU divorce, and the market has the perception that if there's a shorter time frame for Britain to negotiate a favorable deal, that would increase the risk of a 'hard' Brexit," said Joe Manimbo, senior market analyst at Western Union Business Solutions.

Manimbo added that the pound could fall as low as $1.29, a level it hasn't seen in months.

The pound, along with other major currencies, had risen firmly against the dollar earlier in the week when the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged near a record low.

The greenback was modestly higher on Friday, with the ICE Dollar Index  up 0.2% to 95.60. The WSJ Dollar Index , a measure of the dollar against a basket of major currencies, rose 0.3% to 86.49.

While the euro  was little changed against the dollar, trading at $1.1208 from $1.1209, there was more action in the Canadian dollar . Following an unexpectedly weak read on retail sales, the U.S. unit fetched C$1.3138, compared with C$1.3045.

"This continues Canada's worrisome trend of economic weakness, which adds weight to the notion that the next move to rates could be down, rather than up," Manimbo said.

The yen  fell slightly, with the dollar trading at ¥100.91 from ¥100.75 late Thursday in New York. Earlier, the dollar moved as high as ¥101.24.

Japan's currency has been volatile this week, after the country's central bank on Wednesday said it would start targeting 10-year interest rates, committing to keep them around zero as part of a new policy framework aimed at steepening the yield curve as it continues its longstanding effort to bolster inflation.

[Syria conflict: Aleppo remains thorn in government's side]

Syria conflict: Aleppo remains thorn in government's side
from BBC News



With Syrian government forces insisting that the air and artillery bombardment of eastern Aleppo is the preliminary for "a comprehensive" ground assault, it would be easy to see the current upsurge in fighting as marking perhaps the start of the final battle for this key city.

Indeed, the intensity of the bombardment certainly suggests that a significant push is under way.

Aleppo matters. It is one of the few major urban areas to be held - in this case partially - by the rebels. Before the war the city was Syria's great commercial centre, and it thus represents a key strategic and psychological prize.

As long as parts of the city are held by the rebels, it is a thorn in the government's side.

But if captured by government forces it would be an important step in ensuring Russia's main strategic goal: the survival of a pro-Assad statelet with effective strategic depth, making the President Assad a factor that would have to be dealt with in any future peace arrangements.

Of course we have been here before. During the earlier part of this year Syrian government forces, along with various pro-Iranian militias, launched a major offensive that resulted in the siege of the rebel-controlled eastern part of the city.

This siege was consolidated in early July, but just a few weeks later the rebels launched an offensive of their own.



This resulted in the cutting of a key communications link to the south-west of Aleppo, effectively bringing the government-held area under siege.

Bitter taste

Each side can thus hold the others' territory at risk. Russian and Syrian commanders - always sceptical about the merits of the latest ceasefire - now appear to have been given a green light to sort out the Aleppo problem once and for all.

Imagery of the shattered city presents a gaunt vista in which thousands of innocent people remain trapped on both sides. Targeted attacks by government forces against medical and civil defence facilities add another element of horror to the situation.

The fact that this new onslaught is taking place against a backdrop of the total failure in the US and Russian brokered efforts to implement a ceasefire in Syria is also significant.

In the wake of this failure there is a good degree of bitterness on all sides. This provides space for the stepping up of military action on the ground.

Indeed the pause may well have enabled government forces to consolidate their positions, reposition in key areas, and to improve their intelligence gathering.

The military picture though is complex. In the past, despite support from Russian air power, Syrian government forces and their allies have run out of steam.

Rebel groups have been able to draw in fighters from around the city, holding back localised offensives and ultimately going on to the attack themselves. There is no way of knowing if this pattern will be repeated this time.

Outside actors

Aleppo, now the epicentre of the Syrian crisis, will draw in forces from many outside players.

The Russian are already engaged - certainly from the air - and one can only speculate about other potential niche areas where they may be involved on the ground.

Hezbollah and other pro-Iranian fighters may also take a role. And Turkey may encourage rebel groups that it backs to reinforce the eastern part of the city.

And the failure of the ceasefire may well serve to drive rebel groups into the arms of more extreme Islamist elements linked to al-Qaeda.

So the scene is set for a battle that could mark a significant turning point for rebels and government forces alike.

The weakness though of the Assad regime's forces may mean that it simply doesn't have the muscle to impose a definitive outcome on Aleppo.

The result then would be a stalemate with an even greater level of destruction and loss of life.

US Secretary of State John Kerry warned that in the absence of a ceasefire deal things in Syria could get a lot worse. In Aleppo that seems already to be happening.

[Adele: 'Quitting smoking has made my voice worse!']

Adele: 'Quitting smoking has made my voice worse!'
from Music News

Adele is convinced her voice is weaker because she has quit smoking.

The 28-year-old singer made the decision to stop inhaling nicotine sticks five years ago, as she embarked on a healthy lifestyle change after a vocal cord haemorrhage in 2011 led to her having surgery.

While Adele looks noticeably better for calling time on her habit, she has revealed in a new interview that she believes kicking the cigarettes had actually adversely affected her vocal skills.

"The people with the best voices, they always smoke. I've given up smoking and I'm convinced that's made my voice weaker," she is quoted as telling Canada's etalk.

At the height of her addiction, Adele smoked up to 25 cigarettes a day. But after quitting the habit, the Hello singer told Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper she had given up because she was afraid smoking would eventually kill her.

"If I'd carried on smoking, I'd probably have died from a smoking-related illness, and I think that's really bad," she said. "If I was dying from lung cancer I would have potentially given it to myself and that wouldn't be something I'd be proud of."

Adele hit headlines earlier this week when she dedicated her concert at New York's Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night (20Sep16) to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, after it was revealed the actress had filed for divorce from her husband.

However, as she took to the stage at the venue again on Thursday night (22Sep16), Adele set the record straight and told the audience she had been joking about saying that the Brangelina split represented the "end of an era".

"I don't care if they've broken up. I couldn't give a f****ing s**t," she said. "I don't care, I don't know them. It's ridiculous, what's going on in the world, and that's front-page news."

[Rocket League will go under the sea in October with new arena and cars]

Rocket League will go under the sea in October with new arena and cars
from Windows Central

Developer Psyonix has announced it will add a new free arena, the undersea-based AquaDome, to its hit eSports game Rocket League as part of an update in October for the PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platforms. Two more cars for the game will also be released for purchase.

The trailer that shows off AquaDome shows that players will be able to view sharks, fish, wrecked ships and more sea life while they are trying to score goals in their vehicles. It adds:

In addition to the new Arena, we'll also be launching two new Battle-Cars in the AquaDome update. Triton (a slick, futuristic ocean sub) and Proteus (a more science-minded research vessel) are both made to cruise below the waves and sail over the pitch. Both cars will be individually priced at USD $1.99 (or regional equivalent) per car.

More info on the Rocket League October update will be released in the coming weeks.

[Samsung: Galaxy Note 7 Available Across Europe Late November]

Samsung: Galaxy Note 7 Available Across Europe Late November
from Android Headlines

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is currently in an unprecedented state of recall where Samsung is looking to round up all the Galaxy Note 7s that were sold prior to September 15 and replace them with newer ones. The reason being is that those earlier batch devices are thought to be prone to an issue with the battery. While the general recall is still ongoing, Samsung has also been working hard to make sure that the Galaxy Note 7 can get back to an 'on sale' state as soon as is humanly possible. However, when that time is, depends and differs for different regions. For instance, Samsung is expected to begin sales of the Galaxy Note 7 in South Korea from as early as September 28. Likewise, Canada and the US is expecting to see its general availability commence in October. In Europe though, while the wait will be a little longer Samsung seems very keen to make sure the Galaxy Note 7's full European availability is back up and running before the year is out and presumably, before that crucial Holiday season is missed.

In particular, it seems Samsung's European goal is to have the Galaxy Note 7 widely available across the region before the end of November. At least, according to a report today from Reuters and comments made by Samsung's European Chief Marketing Officer, David Lowes. While Lowes was unable to provide exact dates on when availability in Europe will commence, Lowes was noted stating that Samsung "will be looking at the shape of our business and the forecast for that over the coming weeks". Although, Lowes does expect the Note 7 to make a full appearance in Europe "well before the end of the fourth quarter" and likely "by the end of November".

While it stands to reason that Samsung would want the Note 7 available as soon as possible for sales alone, the end of 2016 goal seems much more than simply getting the Note 7 back in shops. In fact, the comments by Lowes, in many ways suggest this is as much about the mental aspect for Samsung as anything else. With Lowes noting that Samsung wants to "get that momentum back" and further adding, that the hope is to "set ourselves up for a strong 2017". So while sales will be of a high importance in the period leading up to Christmas, Samsung does seem equally as keen on making sure they can put this chapter to bed long before this year closes out, with a view to starting 2017 under much better circumstances. Presumably, so the company can move forward and start to get the market interested in the next upcoming Samsung flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8. Interestingly, Lowes also did make it clear that in spite of the company wanting to get back on track by 2017, they are not looking to push the Galaxy Note 7 under the carpet and move on. In fact, if anything, the comments by Lowes seem to suggest the opposite as Lowes notes that Samsung intends to "give Note7 all the support we were going to give it in the first place", while further adding that Samsung is hoping to fulfill the demand that "we created" as quickly as they can.

[Yahoo hit in worst hack ever, 500 million accounts swiped]

Yahoo hit in worst hack ever, 500 million accounts swiped
from CNET

Hackers swiped personal information associated with at least a half billion Yahoo accounts, the internet giant said Thursday, marking the biggest data breach in history.

The hack, which took place in 2014, revealed names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and, in some cases, security questions and answers, Yahoo said in a press release. Encrypted passwords, which are jumbled so only a person with the right passcode can read them, were also taken.

The internet pioneer, which is in the process of selling itself to Verizon, said it's "working closely" with law enforcement. It called the hackers a "state-sponsored actor," though it didn't identify a country behind the breach.

Yahoo urged users to change their passwords if they haven't since 2014. The company has 1 billion monthly active users for all its internet services, which span finance, online shopping and fantasy football. Its mail service alone has about 225 million monthly active users, Yahoo told CNET in June.

The hack serves as a reminder of how widespread hacking is and highlights the vulnerability of passwords. Cybersecurity specialists recommend using a different password for each account you have on the internet. Other experts are working on alternatives to passwords, such as biometrics like your fingerprint or retina.

"Cybercriminals know that consumers use the same passwords across websites and applications, which is why these millions of leaked password credentials are so useful for perpetuating fraud," said Brett McDowell, executive director of the FIDO Alliance, an organization that vets the security of password alternatives. "We need to take that ability away from criminals, and the only way to do that is to stop relying on passwords altogether."

Verizon, which is paying $4.83 billion for Yahoo, said it was notified of the massive breach within the last two days. The telecommunications giant had "limited information and understanding of the impact," according to a statement.

"We will evaluate, as the investigation continues, through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders and related communities," Verizon said.

B. Riley & Co. analyst Sameet Sinha told The Wall Street Journal the breach was unlikely to affect the sale to Verizon.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a member of the newly formed Senate Cybersecurity Caucus, criticized Yahoo for not discovering the breach when it originally happened in 2014.

"While we have seen more and more data breaches in the private sector in recent years, many of them affecting millions of consumers, the seriousness of this breach at Yahoo is huge," Warner said.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that tracks cybersecurity breaches, said the hack was the largest-ever publicly disclosed breach.

Yahoo has taken steps to protect its users, including invalidating security questions and answers, but the real risk lies in hackers using the passwords on other websites.

"We typically see a 0.1 percent to 2 percent log-in success rate from credential stuffing attacks, meaning that a cybercriminal using 500 million passwords to attempt to take over accounts on another website would be able to take over tens of thousands of accounts on most websites," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's former click-fraud czar and CTO of Shape Security.

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter account was hacked using a similar method after the passwords of more than 100 million LinkedIn members were leaked.

It will take Yahoo at least several months before it starts regaining users' trust, according to research from Alertsec. The encryption provider did a study that found about 97 percent of Americans lose trust in companies like Yahoo after massive data breaches.

"When a company has allowed their customers' data to fall into the hands of criminals, the resulting lack of trust is difficult to repair," CEO Ebba Blitz said in a statement.

On August 1, a hacker named "Peace" claimed to have breached 200 million Yahoo usernames and passwords from a hack in 2012, and offered to sell them on the dark web after trying to do the same with MySpace and LinkedIn accounts.

A person familiar with the situation said Peace's assertion prompted Yahoo to initiate an internal investigation. That investigation found no evidence that substantiated Peace's claim, but the investigating team found indications that a state-sponsored actor had stolen data in 2014.


Former Yahoo information security officer Jeremiah Grossman, now chief of security strategy at SentinelOne, said that internet companies, especially giants like Yahoo, face challenges protecting enormous computer networks because the networks offer so many points of entry to attackers.

"It's unsurprising when breaches, even of this magnitude, take place," Grossman said. "Yahoo certainly isn't the first. And they won't be the last."

[White Tulsa officer charged with manslaughter in death of unarmed black man]

White Tulsa officer charged with manslaughter in death of unarmed black man
from The Washington Post

A white police officer in Tulsa, Okla., who was shown on video fatally shooting an unarmed black man has been charged with manslaughter, authorities said on Thursday.

Tulsa District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler filed a first-degree manslaughter charge against Officer Betty Shelby, nearly a week after multiple cameras filmed her shooting 40-year-old Terence Crutcher as he stood beside his stalled sport utility vehicle.

Moments earlier, the video showed Crutcher walking toward his car with his hands above his head while several officers follow closely behind him with weapons raised. He lingers at his vehicle's driver's side window, his body facing the SUV, before slumping to the ground a second later.

"Shots fired!" a female voice can be heard yelling.

Tulsa police say Crutcher did not have a gun on him or in his vehicle.

The footage does not offer a clear view of when Shelby fired the single shot that killed Crutcher. Her attorney, Scott Wood, has said Crutcher was not following police commands and that Shelby opened fire when the man began to reach into his SUV window.

Wood told the Tulsa World that Shelby opened fire and another officer used a stun gun when Crutcher's "left hand goes through the car window."

In a statement, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) said she hopes the decision "provides some peace" to the Crutcher family and urged people to be patient as the case unfolds.

"No matter how you feel about the prosecutors' decision in this case, I hope Oklahomans will respect the views of your friends and neighbors because we still have to live peacefully together as we try to make sense of the circumstances that led to Mr. Crutcher's death," Fallin said.

Shelby thought Crutcher was behaving like someone under the possible influence of the drug Phencyclidine (PCP), Wood told the World, noting that Crutcher ignored the officer's commands to stop reaching into his pockets. Shelby feared Crutcher might have a gun in his pocket, he said. A police official told The World that PCP was found in Crutcher's vehicle; an attorney for Crutcher's family has said reports linking Crutcher to drugs were attempts to "intellectually justify" his death.

"Make no mistake, it was clear from the beginning that charges were necessary in this case. The officer responsible for the death of Terence Crutcher had to be brought to justice to be held accountable for her actions," Crutcher family attorney Benjamin Crump said in a statement Thursday. "We remain optimistic that the State Attorney will now do his job, and vigorously prosecute the officer to the fullest extent of the law, bringing some form of justice to the Crutcher family."

Shelby is a five-year veteran of the Tulsa Police Department. Wood, who did not return a request for comment, told The World that Shelby is "very distraught" over the shooting and that she has received death threats.

Shelby is one of at least three female officer to be charged in a fatal shooting in the past decade.

According to reports, Shelby is married to fellow officer David Shelby, who was in a helicopter that recorded the fatal shooting and was recorded talking with a fellow officer about how they believe Crutcher should be shot with a Taser. One of them said he looked "like a bad dude."

Betty Shelby worked at the Tulsa Sheriff's Department from June 2007 to November 2011, according to Deputy Justin Green, a department spokesman. Shelby was involved in a use of force incident at the department for "firearms presentation," Green said. Shelby and other officers entered a home with their firearms drawn as they were trying to serve warrants.

According to her 2007 application to the sheriff's office, Shelby said she had been married twice before and was on track to receive a biology degree from Northeastern State University in Broken Arrow, Okla. She had previously worked as a convenience store manager, teacher assistant and trainee in the Oklahoma Air National Guard. Shelby wrote that she sprained her knee during basic training and the guard did not want to "take car of my rehabilitation," so she was discharged.

On the application, which was obtained by KJRH television, Shelby answered "yes" to questions about whether she had used drugs and whether she had a victim protection order filed against her. Shelby said she had used marijuana twice as an 18-year-old.

In an expanded answer, Shelby wrote in 1993 she and a boyfriend had an argument where they ended their relationship. She said the boyfriend hit her car with a shovel and she did the same to his vehicle. The two filed orders against one another and asked a judge to dismiss them, she wrote.

In 2000, Shelby and an ex-husband were in a custody battle that was appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. In 2002, she wrote that her ex-husband's wife filed a protective order against Shelby, alleging she made harassing phone calls. Shelby wrote the order was denied.

In 2004, Shelby spoke at a rally attended by about 6,000 people, including members of Congress and Tulsa's mayor that showed support for U.S. troops deployed overseas. David Shelby was stationed overseas with the Army; according to The World he was a reservist who volunteered for duty.

"I knew there was always a possibility he was going to be deployed sometime," Betty Shelby said at the rally. "He knows this is his duty and he's proud to serve his country."

In a Facebook posting from Aug. 28, Shelby is pictured standing with a couple and holding a bouquet of flowers. The couple, identified as the Joneses, were robbed, and Shelby found their property and returned it to them.

"Well done, Officer Shelby and thanks to the Joneses for making her day," the post read.

[No-headphone-jack trend continues with rumored HTC Bolt]

No-headphone-jack trend continues with rumored HTC Bolt
from CNET

Hold on to your headphones, ladies and gents. An early rendering of what is said to be the upcoming HTC Bolt depicts another phone that loses its dedicated headphone jack.

The render posted to Twitter from Evan Blass, a frequent tipster known for leaking early information on consumer tech.

After HTC's revenue took a big hit this year, the company is hoping to get back up to speed. Perhaps more phone releases and the Samsung recall controversy is exactly what the company needs to slow its decline. HTC has just unveiled its HTC Desire 10 Pro, and a video of a rumored HTC Ocean recently surfaced on the internet.

The alleged image shows a silver device that looks very similar to the HTC 10. On the front of the handset we can see a camera and home button. On the back we see a camera, flash, and HTC logo.



What we don't see, however, is a headphone jack. Even though we don't have a clear view of the top or the bottom of the phone, it looks like there is some sort of USB charging-port at the bottom, while evidence of a headphone jack is nowhere to be found. Blass' Twitter followers, as well as Android Authority, were quick to point out the missing headphone jack. One such tweet was later retweeted by Blass himself.

Motorola's Moto Z and Apple's just-released iPhone 7 have both quit the headphone jack this year. While the trend is still new, a move to dongles, USB-C headphones and wireless hearphones might easily make this design the new normal.

HTC hasn't officially announced the Bolt, so for now, this is still no more than a rumor. HTC did not respond to CNET's request for comment.

[Chan Zuckerberg Initiative commits to investing $3 billion to cure diseases]

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative commits to investing $3 billion to cure diseases
from The Verge

The philanthropic initiative founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, will spend $3 billion over the next decade in an effort to cure and manage all human diseases. The Chan Zuckerberg's latest effort will begin with a $600 million investment in a project called Biohub, an independent research center located at the University of California at San Francisco that will work on developing new tools to measure and treat disease.

"Mark and I spent the past two years talking to scientists ranging form Novel Prize laureates to graduate students," Chan said during an emotional talk at UCSF. "We believe that the future we all want for our children is possible. We set a goal: can we cure all diseases in our children's lifetime? That does't mean that no one will ever get sick. But it does mean that our children and their children should get sick a lot less. And that we should be able to detect and treat or at least manage it as an ongoing condition. Mark and I believe this is possible within our children's lifetime."

Zuckerberg, who took the stage after his wife's remarks, laid out a plan for eliminating most disease over the next century. He noted that heart disease, infectious disease, cancer, and neurological diseases are the leading causes of death. No one breakthrough will eliminate any of those, he said. But an investment in basic science research and building new tools will advance progress in fighting them more quickly, he said.

"WE HAVE TO BE PATIENT"

Zuckerberg said that the existing scientific grant progress, which typically awards a few hundred thousand dollars to individuals, is inefficient at creating large breakthroughs. He said the Biohub would bring together scientists with software engineers, and provide funding for long-term initiatives, in an effort to accelerate scientific discoveries.

The initiative will also push others to invest in scientific research, he said. "It's going to take years before the first tools are built, and years after that before the first diseases are treated," Zuckerberg said. "We have to be patient."

Zuckerberg called for investments in artificial intelligence to better understand the brain, machine learning to analyze cancer genomes, chips that could diagnose any infectious diseases, and bloodstream monitors that could catch diseases at an earlier state. "These are the kinds of tools we want to develop at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative," he said.

BUILDING A CELL ATLAS

The initiative's scientific efforts will be led by Dr. Cori Bargmann, a neurologist who was most recently at Rockefeller University in New York. The Biohub will be led by Joe DeRisi, a professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, and Stephen Quake, a Stanford biophysicist and bioengineer. It represents a rare collaboration between three schools: UCSF, Stanford, and the University of California at Berkeley.

One of the Biohub's first projects will be in attempting to develop a "cell atlas" — a comprehensive accounting of every location and molecular property of all the cells in the human body, Bargmann said. That tool and others will be made available to the entire scientific community free of charge, she said.

The initiative was founded in December with the stated goal to "advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy." For its first investment, it put $24 million into Andela, which trains developers in Africa. Zuckerberg has said he plans to contribute $1 billion a year of his Facebook stock to the initiative, a limited liability company.

[Apple has been considering buying carmaker McLaren]

Apple has been considering buying carmaker McLaren
from Business Insider

Apple has been considering a purchase of the British automotive manufacturer McLaren Technology Group, and conducted talks with the company, according to a new report from Matthew Garrahan and Tim Bradshaw at the Financial Times.

Apple also bounced around the idea of a strategic investment as another option, though the FT's sources say an acquisition was also discussed.

But a McLaren denied that a takeover or investment was currently in the works.

"There's no takeover, no strategic investment," A McLaren spokesperson told Business Insider. "It's completely untrue."

Business Insider has reached out to McLaren to ask whether acquisition or investment talks happened in the past.

The price for McLaren Technology Group? Between £1 billion ($1.3 billion) and £1.5 billion, according to the report.

McLaren makes supercars, and it runs a British Formula 1 racing team. But it also does a fair amount of research and work with manufacturing processes and data collection and analysis.

Earlier this year, F1 blogger Joe Saward floated the possibility that Apple was laying the groundwork to buy the entire racing series.

F1 was eventually sold to Liberty Media for $8.5 billion, although the deal is not final.

McLaren lost £22.6 million on revenue of £265 million in 2014, the most recent figures that are publicly available, according to the Financial Times.

The news of talks between McLaren and Apple will renew speculation about what products and services the technology company is planning in the automotive industry.

Project Titan

Apple famously has a car department, codenamed "Project Titan," but the company has never confirmed that it is in fact working on an electric car or self-driving software.

Apple has recently focused its attention on self-driving car software instead of on the manufacturing processes that would go into making its own car, according to a slew of reports.

But Apple's core corporate strengths are design, supply chain management, and manufacturing processes, all of which lend strength to the argument that if Apple were to make a car, it would design both the hardware and software, as it does for the iPhone.

An investment or purchase in McLaren would give Apple an injection of racing technology, as well as a team of automotive-focused engineers. McLaren also owns several valuable patents, especially for high-tech materials such as carbon fiber and aluminum. It does manufacturing research and studies materials in its McLaren Applied Technologies group.

McLaren also does substantial work with sensors and data in a department called McLaren Electronic Systems. For example, the company compares real-time data collected during races with historical data, which means that it can solve several problems with dealing with the flood of data that a connected car can generate.

One of the challenges Apple's car project faces is dealing with and analyzing the flood of data generated by its sensor-laden vehicles currently driving around California. Those vehicles can produce 2 GB of data per mile.

Apple has already invested in a transportation company. It invested $1 billion earlier this year in Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing company.

"From a Didi point of view, we see that as, one, a great financial investment. Two, we think that there are some strategic things that the companies can do together over time," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in July.

[Boat carrying 600 migrants sinks off Egypt, killing at least 43]

Boat carrying 600 migrants sinks off Egypt, killing at least 43
from Yahoo News

A boat carrying almost 600 people capsized off Egypt's coast on Wednesday, killing at least 43, in the latest disaster among migrants trying to reach Europe.

The boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea off Burg Rashid, a village in the northern Beheira province. Officials said 31 bodies had been found, 20 men, 10 women and one child. A Reuters correspondent later saw a fishing boat bring in 12 more bodies, bringing the total so far to 43.

Rescue workers have so far saved 154 people, officials said, meaning about 400 could still be missing.

"Initial information indicates that the boat sank because it was carrying more people than its limit. The boat tilted and the migrants fell into the water," a senior security official in Beheira told Reuters.

The boat had been carrying Egyptian, Sudanese, Eritrean, and Somali migrants, officials said.

At a coastguard checkpoint in Burg Rashid, where the Mediterranean meets the Nile, dozens gathered, anxiously waiting for news of missing relatives.

"I am not going to leave until I see Mohamed," Ratiba Ghonim wailed. Her 16-year-old brother had left an impoverished village nearby in search of a better life.

"It is his destiny to leave yesterday and come back dead today. They still haven't pulled his body out of the water."

Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail said all resources possible would be directed into the rescue mission and that those responsible had to be brought to justice.

It was not immediately clear where the boat had been heading. Officials said they believed it was going to Italy.

"MORE WILL SAIL TONIGHT"

More and more people have been trying to cross to Italy from the African coast over the summer months, particularly from Libya, where people-traffickers operate with relative impunity, but also from Egypt.

Some 320 migrants and refugees drowned off the Greek island of Crete in June. Migrants who survived told authorities their boat had set sail from Egypt.

Some 206,400 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.

More than 2,800 deaths were recorded between January and June, compared with 1,838 during the same period last year.

World leaders, including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, gathered in New York this week at the United Nations General Assembly to discuss the migrant crisis.

Some 1.3 million migrants reached Europe's shores last year fleeing war and economic hardship, prompting bitter rows among states over how to share responsibility.

If they survive the perilous maritime journey, migrants this year face stronger EU border controls.

Mohamed Nasrawy, an Egyptian fisherman, said he knew seven people on the shipwrecked vessel, two of whom were still missing.

He made an abortive effort to travel to Greece a year ago.

"Look how this incident has shocked people, but tonight more people are going to set sail," he told Reuters.

"The poverty that they are living in is what is pushing them. Although we are not Europeans, they take good care of people, while our country doesn't."

[SanDisk Teases Protoype 1TB SD Card]

SanDisk Teases Protoype 1TB SD Card
from PC Magazine

The fight for more storage is on at SanDisk.

The company on Tuesday unveiled a prototype SanDisk 1TB SDXC card. The card doubles the size of the 512GB SanDisk Extreme Pro that SanDisk introduced in 2014, and according to the company, could be ideal in a world where higher-resolution video is becoming increasingly popular among those shooting virtual-reality content and footage in 4K and even 8K.

"Just a few short years ago the idea of a 1TB capacity point in an SD card seemed so futuristic – it's amazing that we're now at the point where it's becoming a reality," Sam Nicholson, CEO at Stargate Studios said in a statement. "With the growing demand for applications like VR, we can certainly use 1TB when we're out shooting continuous high-quality video. High-capacity cards allow us to capture more without interruption, streamlining our workflow, and eliminating the worry that we may miss a moment because we have to stop to swap out cards."

It's admittedly been a bit of a slog to get to 1TB of storage on an SD card. SanDisk noted that the company unveiled the first 64MB SD card in 2000. Since then, it's slowly but surely amped up its offerings.

SanDisk, which is owned by Western Digital, didn't say when the 1TB SD card might launch and how much it will cost. However, the company touted it as a crowning achievement as it tries to one-up itself each year.

"Over the years our goal has remained the same; continue to innovate and set the pace for the imaging industry," Western Digital content solutions business unit vice president Dinesh Bahal said in a statement. "The SanDisk 1TB SD card prototype represents another significant achievement as growth of high-resolution content and capacity-intensive applications such as virtual reality, video surveillance and 360 video, are progressing at astounding rates."

The 1TB SanDisk card is on display at the Photokina conference in Cologne, Germany (Hall 02.1 Stand A014), which Jim Fisher is covering for PCMag. Check out more from the show in the slideshow above.

[Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems]

Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems
from The Washington Post

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire's for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump's charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against "self-dealing" — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

In one case, from 2007, Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole.

In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump's club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people's money, according to tax records.



In another case, court papers say one of Trump's golf courses in New York agreed to settle a lawsuit by making a donation to the plaintiff's chosen charity. A $158,000 donation was made by the Trump Foundation, according to tax records.

The other expenditures involved smaller amounts. In 2013, Trump used $5,000 from the foundation to buy advertisements touting his chain of hotels in programs for three events organized by a D.C. preservation group. And in 2014, Trump spent $10,000 of the foundation's money for a portrait of himself bought at a charity fundraiser.

Or, rather, another portrait of himself.

Several years earlier, Trump had used $20,000 from the Trump Foundation to buy a different, six foot-tall portrait.

If the Internal Revenue Service were to find that Trump violated self-dealing rules, the agency could require him to pay penalty taxes or to reimburse the foundation for all the money it spent on his behalf. Trump is also facing scrutiny from the office of the New York attorney general, which is examining whether the foundation broke state charity laws.

More broadly, these cases also provide new evidence that Trump ran his charity in a way that may have violated U.S. tax law and gone against the moral conventions of philanthropy.

"I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I've never encountered anything so brazen," said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as "really shocking."

"If he's using other people's money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that's about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I've seen in a while," Tenenbaum said.

The Post sent the Trump campaign a detailed list of questions about the four cases, but received no response.

The New York attorney general's office declined to comment when asked whether its inquiry would cover these new cases of possible self-dealing.

Trump founded his charity in 1987 and, for years, was its only donor. But in 2006, Trump gave away almost all of the money he had donated to the foundation, leaving it with just $4,238 at year's end, according to tax records.

Then, he transformed the Trump Foundation into something rarely seen in the world of philanthropy: a name-branded foundation whose namesake provides none of its money. Trump gave relatively small donations in 2007 and 2008, and afterward: nothing. The foundation's tax records show no donations from Trump since 2009.

[In 2007, Trump had to face his own falsehoods. And he did, 30 times.]

Its money has come from other donors, most notably pro-wrestling executives Vince and Linda McMahon, who gave a total of $5 million from 2007 to 2009, tax records show. Trump remains the foundation's president, and he told the IRS in his latest public filings that he works half an hour per week on the charity.

The Post has previously detailed other cases in which Trump used the charity's money in a way that appeared to violate the law.

In 2013, for instance, the foundation gave $25,000 to a political group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R). That gift was made around the same time that Bondi's office was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. It didn't.

Tax laws say nonprofits such as the Trump Foundation may not make political gifts. Trump staffers blamed the gift on a clerical error. After The Post reported on the gift to Bondi's group this spring, Trump paid a $2,500 penalty tax and reimbursed the Trump Foundation for the $25,000 donation.

In other instances, it appeared that Trump may have violated rules against self-dealing.

In 2012, for instance, Trump spent $12,000 of the foundation's money to buy a football helmet signed by NFL quarterback Tim Tebow.

And in 2007, Trump's wife, Melania, bid $20,000 for the six-foot-tall portrait of Trump, done by a "speed painter" during a charity gala at Mar-a-Lago. Later, Trump paid for the painting with $20,000 from the foundation.

In those cases, tax experts said, Trump was not allowed to simply keep these items and display them in a home or business. They had to be put to a charitable use.

Trump's campaign has not responded to questions about what became of the helmet or the portrait.

The four new cases of possible self-dealing were discovered in the Trump Foundation's tax filings. While Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns, the foundation's filings are required to be public.

The case involving the flagpole at Trump's oceanfront Mar-a-Lago Club began in 2006, when the club put up a giant American flag on the 80-foot pole. Town rules said flagpoles should be 42 feet high at most. Trump's contention, according to news reports, was: "You don't need a permit to put up the American flag."

The town began to fine Trump, $1,250 a day.

Trump's club sued in federal court, saying that a smaller flag "would fail to appropriately express the magnitude of Donald J. Trump's . . . patriotism."

They settled.

The town waived the $120,000 in fines. In September 2007, Trump wrote the town a letter, saying he had done his part as well.

"I have sent a check for $100,000 to Fisher House," he wrote. The town had chosen Fisher House, which runs a network of comfort homes for the families of veterans and military personnel receiving medical treatment, as the recipient of the money. Trump added that, for good measure, "I have sent a check for $25,000" to another charity, the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial.

Trump provided the town with copies of the checks, which show that they came from the Trump Foundation.

In the town of Palm Beach, nobody seems to have objected that the fines assessed on Trump's business were being erased by a donation from a charity.

"I don't know that there was any attention paid to that at the time. We just saw two checks signed by Donald J. Trump," said John Randolph, the Palm Beach town attorney. "I'm sure we were satisfied with it."



In the other case in which a Trump Foundation payment seemed to help settle a legal dispute, the trouble began with a hole-in-one.

In 2010, a man named Martin Greenberg hit a hole-in-one on the 13th hole while playing in a charity tournament at Trump's course in Westchester County, N.Y.

Greenberg won a $1 million prize. Briefly.

Later, Greenberg was told that he had won nothing. The prize's rules required that the shot had to go 150 yards. But Trump's course had allegedly made the hole too short.

Greenberg sued.

Eventually, court papers show, Trump's golf course signed off on a settlement that required it to make a donation of Greenberg's choosing. Then, on the day that the parties informed the court they had settled their case, a $158,000 donation was sent to the Martin Greenberg Foundation.

That money came from the Trump Foundation, according to the tax filings of both Trump's and Greenberg's foundations.

Greenberg's foundation reported getting nothing that year from Trump personally or from his golf club.

Both Greenberg and Trump have declined to comment.

Several tax experts said that the two cases appeared to be clear cases of self-dealing, as defined by the tax code.

The Trump Foundation had made a donation, it seemed, so that a Trump business did not have to.

Rosemary E. Fei, a lawyer in San Francisco who advises nonprofits, said both cases clearly fit the definition of self-dealing.

"Yes, Trump pledged as part of the settlement to make a payment to a charity, and yes, the foundation is writing a check to a charity," Fei said. "But the obligation was Trump's. And you can't have a charitable foundation paying off Trump's personal obligations. That would be classic self-dealing."

In another instance, from 2013, the Trump Foundation made a $5,000 donation to the D.C. Preservation League, according to the group and tax filings. That nonprofit's support has been helpful for Trump as he has turned the historic Old Post Office Pavilion on Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue NW into a luxury hotel.

The Trump Foundation's donation to that group bought a "sponsorship," which included advertising space in the programs for three big events that drew Washington's real estate elite. The ads did not mention the foundation or anything related to charity. Instead, they promoted Trump's hotels, with glamorous photos and a phone number to call to make a reservation.

"The foundation wrote a check that essentially bought advertising for Trump hotels?" asked John Edie, the longtime general counsel for the Council on Foundations, when a Post reporter described this arrangement. "That's not charity."

The last of the four newly documented expenditures involves the second painting of Trump, which he bought with charity money.
It happened in 2014, during a gala at Mar-a-Lago that raised money for Unicorn Children's Foundation — a Florida charity that helps children with developmental and learning disorders.

The gala's main event was a concert by Jon Secada. But there was also an auction of paintings by Havi Schanz, a Miami Beach-based artist.



One was of Marilyn Monroe. The other was a four foot-tall portrait of Trump: a younger-looking, mid-'90s Trump, painted in acrylic on top of an old architectural drawing.

Trump bought it for $10,000.

Afterward, Schanz recalled in an email, "he asked me about the painting. I said, 'I paint souls, and when I had to paint you, I asked your soul to allow me.' He was touched and smiled."

A few days later, the charity said, a check came from the Trump Foundation. Trump himself gave nothing, according to Sharon Alexander, the executive director of the charity.

Trump's staff did not respond to questions about where that second painting is now. Alexander said she had last seen it at Trump's club.

"I'm pretty sure we just left it at Mar-a-Lago," she said, "and his staff took care of it."

[Makers of Skittles to Donald Trump Jr.: Please leave us out of your analogies]

Makers of Skittles to Donald Trump Jr.: Please leave us out of your analogies
from The Washington Post

Sometimes it's not what is said but who says it that really speaks volumes.

Donald Trump Jr., eldest son, lifelong pupil and employee of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Sr., shares many of his father's beliefs and habits. One of them is making the time to pontificate via Twitter.

Among the many ideas Trump Jr. has expressed in the past 24 hours — and there are a lot of ideas on this dude's Twitter feed — was this:

Actually, it's the younger Trump's metaphor that says it all. Or, that's what Denise Young, vice president of corporate affairs at Wrigley Americas, the Chicago-based company that produces and sells Skittles, apparently thought. Trump's decision to compare the more than 4.8 million human beings that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says have been set adrift by conflict in Syria to a bowl of candy with assorted flavors was not welcome.

The comparison between candy and people — 39.3 percent of whom are children 11 or younger — just didn't sit right with Young. It seemed to strike Young as absurdly insensitive ... or maybe just absurd. The vast majority of the 4.8 million people scattered by the Syrian conflict are living in what are often tent cities and do not have the legal right to work in the countries to which they have fled. About 1.12 million have sought refuge and asylum in Europe. Exactly 13,828 Syrians have been admitted to the United States between Jan. 1, 2014, and Sept. 20, 2016.

MarketWatch, the economic news outlet, called Young's response simply "the best reply" to the younger Trump's refugee commentary. (See text of Wrigley's response at the top of this post. Seth Abramovitch is a journalist with the Hollywood Reporter.)

And really, there's a limit to what can and needs to be said here about why Wrigley responded the way they did.

We know that the men involved in the Paris terrorist attacks were Europeans of Middle Eastern heritage; some were born on the continent and as such, radicalized in Europe, according to the BBC. And as The Washington Post has reported, we know that one of the men had a passport — believed to be fake — indicating that he may have entered Europe as a refugee. However, nothing more has been determined. The matter remains under investigation.

We also know that the vast majority of bank robbers, rapists and other criminals are men. Few would consider it reasonable to treat all men as if they are suspects in these crimes when they occur until some unspecified process allows us to figure out who they are and what they have done and with whom they associate. But that's precisely how Donald Trump has suggested that a Trump administration would deal with refugee resettlement requests.

The Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged that refugee screening is a challenging task but has not suggested that a total shutdown is the solution. Instead, officials have said repeatedly that they will continue to adjust the process to render it more rigorous in an effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

Those are the facts. However, the younger Trump's Twitter feed reads like a running summary of the essence of his father's political philosophy.

There are various references to the threats posed by refugees and other immigrants, overt claims that refugees in Germany have spurred a rape crisis and several examples of what seems like a near obsession with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and his read on Merkel's recent comments acknowledging that admitting so many Syrian refugees came with a political cost for her party and created domestic tensions that bolstered the political cause of the far right. The younger Trump characterized Merkel's comments as Merkel having admitted to wrongly allowing in refugees.

Not quite, Donald Jr. Not quite. This is what Merkel actually said, according to the Guardian:

In an unusually self-critical but also combative speech, the German chancellor said on Monday afternoon she was fighting to make sure there would be no repetition of last year's chaotic scenes on Germany's borders, when "for some time, we didn't have enough control". "No one wants a repeat of last year's situation, including me," Merkel said.

However, she did not distance herself from her decision last September to keep open Germany's borders to thousands of refugees stranded at Keleti station in Budapest. The mistake, the chancellor said, was that she and her government had not been quicker to prepare for the mass movement of people triggered by conflicts in the Middle East.

"If I was able to, I would turn back time by many, many years, so that I could have prepared the whole government and the authorities for the situation which hit us out of the blue in the late summer of 2015," she said.

But the younger Trump's leap from Merkel's more nuanced comments to the conclusion that refugees are the source of so many, if not all, of Germany's problems offers a veritable illustration of the political philosophy that the elder Trump and some large portion of his supporters embrace.

To Trump and his supporters, America's problems are rooted in immigration, particularly illegal immigration and politically correct efforts to aid the millions of people made stateless by the Syrian war. As such, the Trump doctrine holds that most, if not all of America's problems can and will be excised by deporting millions, embracing the type of domestic "profiling" for which Israel has long been rebuked by international human rights agencies, a temporary halt to refugee admissions and withdrawal from various trade deals and defense pacts.

Trump's philosophy is what he calls America first. In effect it is America only.

But when corporations, which are not known for declining free publicity, must point out that a comparison born of that philosophy is callous, that really says quite a lot.

[macOS Sierra review: Apple reaches for the clouds]

macOS Sierra review: Apple reaches for the clouds
from The Verge



For the last few years, nearly all of OS X's biggest updates have come in response to iOS. First, the Mac got iOS's apps. Then it got iOS's looks. And now it's even getting iOS's naming format. This year, OS X is gone and replacing it is macOS — a new iteration on the same operating system, with a changed but still comfortably familiar name.

Perhaps the update is fitting for 2016. With today's release of macOS Sierra, the latest version of Apple's desktop OS, the Mac is at long last getting the one feature that's arguably come to define iOS more than any other, the feature that singlehandedly was supposed to alter the way we use our gadgets: Siri.

It's an exciting addition and something Mac users have been waiting years for. Siri's been on the iPhone since 2011, and in the meantime, Microsoft and Google have both introduced voice-controlled artificial intelligence on their own desktop operating systems. But the strange, and maybe most encouraging part of Sierra is that, for how big of a deal Siri is, it's hardly the most useful aspect of the new software.

Still, let's start with Siri. It's Siri! It's the virtual assistant with a helpfulness that's approximately inverse to the amount of public attention it's getting at any given moment. (Right as another celebrity showed up in a Siri ad, you were probably struggling to look something up.) But five years later, it's actually starting to pick up some useful skills.

On the Mac, Siri lives in a bunch of different places — dock, menubar, keyboard shortcut — and pops up as a black box on top of whatever you're looking at, ready to start fielding questions (notably, it is wholly distinct from Spotlight, despite their similar functionality). It can do all of the stuff you've been doing with Siri on the iPhone until now, like display sports scores, look up movie times, and solve math problems, Siri can also just open apps for you (e.g., "Open Contacts" or "Open Spotify"). And one of the most useful functions it has on the desktop is the ability to search your files.

I spent a lot of time asking different questions of Siri and came away both frustrated and impressed. Siri does a good job of looking through your files and is surprisingly competent at handling complex modifiers. So you can say, "Find me every PDF I worked on in the last 30 days," and it'll present you with a list of exactly that. That's the kind of multifaceted query I'd have expected to trip up Siri in the past.

SIRI DOES WELL WITH COMPLEX FILE SEARCHES, BUT CAN STILL MISS THE BASICS

On the other hand, working with Siri on the desktop can still feel like trying to guess the right passphrase to be let through a door. For example: Siri returned exactly what I asked for when prompted to "Show me emails I've received from Dieter." But that's not how I'd naturally phrase my request. What I wanted to say — and what I tried first — was "Show me emails Dieter sent me," but that doesn't work. The difference? "Sent" versus "received." It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's the kind of small hiccup that you still have to deal with.

There's also one big limitation to Siri on the Mac right now: it's not getting any of the third-party integrations that are currently popping up on iOS. That means you can't use Siri to hail an Uber, Venmo a friend, or order Seamless; you're stuck going back to your phone and asking Siri there. I suspect Apple will open Siri up to these services sometime down the road, but for now, it's a noticeable absence and makes its assistance a lot less useful.

Siri, or the promise of what Siri can do, makes a lot of sense on mobile, where it's often the fastest way to accomplish a task. Maybe you're driving and can't tap a screen, or maybe you have your phone stuffed in your pocket and are using headphones to communicate, or maybe you're even wearing an Apple Watch that uses Siri. But on the desktop, I suspect people will have diverging experiences with it.

For me, trying to look something up with Siri on my Mac was almost always slower and more disruptive than tabbing over to the right window and typing in my search. But for others, especially people less familiar with desktop computers, the story could be different. Siri's ability to dig through the file system so you don't have to could be a real help. It's not a stretch to say that locating a file you downloaded two weeks ago and only opened once can be a frustrating experience, and Siri can start to resolve that.

Assuming Siri can figure out what you're asking, of course.

But here's the thing about macOS Sierra: Siri isn't the most interesting part of it. It seems like it should be with all the emphasis on artificial intelligence right now, not just at Apple but at all of the major consumer tech companies. But the most interesting part of Sierra is actually iCloud.

Yeah, iCloud. Really! Sierra introduces a pair of very cool new features to iCloud, which don't just improve the operating system but actually feel as though they're extending Apple's hardware.

The two features work in conjunction: first, iCloud Drive can now store the contents of your Desktop and Documents folders and sync them to your other devices, whether Macs, iPhones, or iPads. It's basically Dropbox, but built right into the OS. (The only downside is this that you can't selectively sync files; it's all or nothing. So gigabytes of work files suddenly appeared on my home computer, where I really don't want to be reminded of how much work I have left to do.)

The second feature, and the more important one, is something Apple calls Optimized Storage. In short, Apple will automatically remove files from your computer and store them in the cloud so that there's always free space on your local drive. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is an incredible feature. My personal MacBook Air has persistently been running out of space for the last three years. After installing Sierra, I suddenly had 25GB of available storage.

THE FREE SPACE IS AMAZING, BUT YOU'RE TRUSTING APPLE TO MAKE THE RIGHT CALLS

Optimized Storage is only supposed to remove old files that you aren't actively using. For the most part, that seemed to be what happened — it pushed my old D&D manuals up to the cloud, as well as a bunch of documents from when I was in college years ago. But in at least one instance, I noticed it pushing a file to the cloud that I did need locally: a song recorded by a friend of mine, which I've been regularly listening to over the past few months. Recovering files happens as fast as you can download them, so restoring it wasn't an issue; but I do think I'll be double checking that any critical files are actually on my computer the next time I'm about to jump on a plane.

While I wish there were more granular controls here, Optimized Storage is still a remarkable addition. Apple has historically been quite stingy with storage capacity — hello, 128GB MacBook Air — and this feature essentially lets you extend your drive as far as you want, keeping only what (it thinks) you need and downloading the rest on demand. As someone who's struggled to free up space every few months for years, this could absolutely change the way I interact with my Mac.

There is, however, a big caveat here: you'll have to pay Apple monthly for all the iCloud storage you want. Apple only offers 5GB of free cloud storage, and that space gets split between photos, documents, iPhone backups, and anything else you put there. It's so little space that both of Sierra's big iCloud features are effectively unusable unless you pay.

Two quick side notes: since iCloud is already storing your files, I wish it would let you do a full Time Machine backup to the cloud, saving everything on your computer and keeping intact older versions of documents, just in case you lose something. And on a much nerdier note, Time Machine now supports network-attached storage (basically a wireless backup drive connected to your router); I've been waiting years for this.

There are a bunch of smaller feature additions to Sierra, like Apple putting tabs in basically every interface and bringing Apple Pay to Safari, but there are two in particular that I want to briefly highlight.

First, Apple has added something called Universal Clipboard, which is basically what it sounds like; it lets you copy something — text, images, and video — on your Mac and paste it on your iPhone, and vice versa. It works, but there's a short delay the first time you try to paste something. Still, worth it.

Second, Apple now lets you unlock Macs (made from 2013 onward) with an Apple Watch (running watchOS 3). It doesn't happen instantaneously — I could definitely type my password quicker — but I suspect it'll be fast enough for most people.

AUTO-UNLOCK IS WEIRDLY DIFFICULT TO SET UP

The bigger problem? The setting to enable auto-unlock is entirely hidden. You have to activate two-factor authorization in order to even see the setting, and it turns out, enabling two-factor involves jumping through quite a few hoops. (Did you know that Apple has a virtually identical security feature called "two-step authorization"?) Perhaps Apple wanted to use this feature to nudge people toward better account security, but if so, it probably should have done a better job of making people aware it exists; instead, you'll have to Google for a tutorial.

For the most part, Apple's own apps are unchanged in this update, which is to say, they're still not that great. Mail is better than you remember, but remains too tailored to Apple's other apps and services. Safari is fine (and way better on your battery), but I personally prefer Chrome. And iTunes... there's not enough space here to get into that.

The one app that is getting a big update this year is Photos, which Apple launched last year with the thankless task of replacing iPhoto and smoothing over years of frustration.

At launch in 2015, Photos was a bare-bones photo viewer with some simple editing tools. In macOS Sierra, it's pretty much a beat-for-beat clone of Google Photos, the key distinction being that it does all of its photo processing on your local machine, rather than on Apple's servers.

I was prepared to hate Photos — I may still have some lingering iPhoto resentment — but it's actually a nice app in a lot of ways. Its editing features hit the basics, so you can brighten a photo or remove a blemish, but where it really shines is in giving you ways to explore your library of photos.

OBJECT RECOGNITION, SCANNED ON YOUR COMPUTER, IS PHOTOS' BIGGEST DRAW

Apple added two new ways of doing that this year. The first is object recognition, which lets Photos detect what's in your images so you can search through them by subject — e.g., "beach" or "bird" or "playground." The second is a new section called "Memories," which automatically builds photo albums for trips, events, and pictures Apple thinks you'll want see again.

Both of these features are neat, if imperfect. When I searched for "forest," for instance, Photos identified four pictures, when I'd say there were closer to a dozen. It did better with specific objects, like "fence." Memories is also hit and miss. At one point, it created an album for me titled "Best of last three months" that included several close-up pictures of my foot, which my girlfriend took as a joke. I suppose that counts as a good memory, but the photos were pretty unflattering.

Where Photos does excel is when you're just browsing around. It uses all of the features mentioned above in a much more casual way, so that when you're viewing a photo you can scroll down to see others related to it — perhaps a photo with the same person in it, taken in the same place, or on the same trip. It's a great way to look back through your pictures, and it feels way more natural than something like an automatic photo album for a random set of dates.

STORAGE IS PHOTOS' BIGGEST LIMITATION

Combined with Photos on the iPhone, Apple's Photos apps are turning into solid options for sorting through your old pictures. They're not as accurate as Google or Flickr when it comes to object scanning, but they're close. And they come with the benefit of added privacy.

But if you're choosing an app to hold all of your photos, another factor enters the equation: storage space, which can fill up very, very quickly as you import hundreds and hundreds of pictures from your phone. This won't be a problem for everyone. But for me, there's no option but to keep them all in the cloud.

And that makes picking Apple Photos a much tougher decision. Google offers unlimited photo storage (up to a certain resolution) and Flickr gives everyone a free terabyte of space. Both will scan your photos, but neither requires a monthly payment. If you need space in iCloud — and I suspect a lot of people will — then you'll have to pay Apple for it.

It's fair to say that Apple has always been behind when it comes to cloud services. Either it's messed them up (MobileMe), or it's underwhelmed (early stages of iCloud), or it's just iterated at a glacial pace compared to its competitors (Google Photos, for instance, launched a new feature on Monday; its last significant update was less than two weeks ago).

But Sierra starts to change that, particularly when it comes to iCloud syncing and Optimized Storage. The two features feel like meaningful extensions of the Mac, which is what makes it so disappointing that not everyone will get to use them due to Apple's decision to charge for even a modest amount of cloud storage.

A small iCloud plan is available for $0.99 per month, offering 50GB of space. For me, that'll probably be enough to store my extra documents; in fact, I've signed up, and I intend to keep paying. But it's not enough to store my photos, so for that, I'm sticking with Google.

SIERRA'S BEST FEATURES ARE LIMITED TO THOSE WHO BUY ICLOUD STORAGE

One has to wonder why Apple, among the wealthiest companies in the world, would even bother charging $0.99 per month for a basic amount of storage if it really wants these features to create a better experience for everyone. (I seem to recall a designer once saying that file syncing is "a feature and not a product.") If Google is able to give a free 100GB of storage for two years to everyone who purchases a $300 Chromebook, certainly Apple can offer more than 5GB to everyone with a $1,300 Mac. I don't think that it needs to give away 100GB or even half of that, but what it offers now simply isn't enough.

So to the annual question: should I update my Mac to the new OS? So long as you're on recent hardware, I don't see a reason not to. (My five-year-old Air has been having a tough time, but my three-year-old Pro hasn't slowed in any noticeable way.) MacOS is at its core a great operating system, and this year's additions don't worsen the experience in any way. Sierra adds some handy new features, and while Siri eternally feels like it has room for improvement, everyone loves playing with it at least once in a while. Plus, it's a free update. There's not much to lose.

But will Sierra meaningfully improve the Mac? That's up to you and your wallet. Sierra's best features require you to pay Apple month after month, with no end in sight.

[Jared Leto to Play Andy Warhol in Biopic]

Jared Leto to Play Andy Warhol in Biopic
from The Hollywood Reporter



Jared Leto, Michael De Luca and Terence Winter are teaming up to tackle the life of Andy Warhol, the famed pop art artist whose blend of art and commerce made him a household name.

Leto will portray the artist for the biopic, titled Warhol, as well as produce it, along with De Luca, the producer whose credits include such Oscar-winning and -nominated true-life tales as The Social Network and Captain Phillips.

Winter, the Boardwalk Empire creator who wrote The Wolf of Wall Street, will pen the screenplay, using the Victor Bockris 1989 book, Warhol: The Biography, as a jumping-off point. (Leto and De Luca jointly acquired the rights to the book, having had a desire to partner on a project for some time now, according to sources.)

Warhol stormed the art world in the 1960s with works that elevated American consumerism to artistic heights, showing that even Campbell's soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles and celebrities can be spun into art.

Openly gay before such a thing was accepted, Warhol created an art studio called The Factory, that attracted swaths of New York society (not to mention an unbalanced person or two, as one artist nearly killed him when she shot him in 1968) and cranked out art ranging from silk screens to films to music. Warhol himself managed Lou Reed's Velvet Underground for a while. In later years, he was a fixture in New York's famed Studio 54 nightclub scene and mentored a new generation of artists, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, before dying in 1987.

Warhol was a hypochondriac who, according to friends and acquaintances, vacillated between a cold and shallow person — sometimes quiet, sometimes the center of attention — to a brilliant eccentric who wore wigs and even went to hairdressers to have them cut.

The part seems tailor-made for Leto, who won an Oscar for playing a gay man dying from AIDS in 2013's Dallas Buyers Club and drew legions of fans for his take on Batman's insane villain The Joker in this summer's Suicide Squad. (The actor is currently filming the untitled Blade Runner sequel being directed by Denis Villeneuve.)

And the project plays to De Luca's strengths of translating real-life figures to the screen. In addition to adapting the lives of Mark Zuckerberg and Captain Richard Phillips, he brought Oakland A's coach Billy Beane's story to screens with the Brad Pitt drama Moneyball. (His next movie heads in the opposite direction: Fifty Shades Darker, the sequel to S&M romancer Fifty Shades of Grey.)

Leto, producing via his Paradox production shingle, and De Luca, producing with his Michael De Luca Productions banner, are not aiming for a low-budget indie with Warhol but rather a strong mainstream project with prestige credentials. 

Part of that prestige comes from scribe Winter, who was Oscar-nominated for writing Wolf of Wall Street and won Emmys for working on The Sopranos and nominated for Boardwalk Empire. He last co-created HBO's Vinyl.

Leto, De Luca and Winter are all repped by CAA, which helped to broker the deal.

[7 questions we have about bombings in New York and New Jersey]

7 questions we have about bombings in New York and New Jersey
from CNN

The capture of bombings suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami alive gives investigators a rare opportunity to try to establish his motivations and affiliations -- if they can get him to talk.

Law enforcement officials launched a manhunt for Rahami after identifying him through a fingerprint, and he was taken into custody Monday after a shootout with police in Linden, New Jersey.

But questions remain about the events leading up to Saturday's bombings in New York and Seaside Park, New Jersey, and the discovery of pipe bombs Sunday night in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Did Rahami act alone?

Authorities believe the "main guy" has been caught, but the investigation continues to determine if Rahami had help.

Though FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. said there is "no indication" of an active operating cell in the New York area, evidence suggests Rahami was not acting alone, sources told CNN.

Surveillance video shows a man believed to be Rahami with a duffel bag in the area where an unexploded pressure cooker was found in New York's Chelsea neighborhood.

After he leaves, the video shows two other men removing a white garbage bag believed to contain the pressure cooker from the duffel bag and leaving it on the sidewalk, according to a senior law enforcement official and another source familiar with the video.

Investigators want to talk to the two men but appear to have moved away from the idea that the pair had been involved. New York police Commissioner James O'Neill described the men as "strolling" along the street and seeming "incredulous" when they took the bag.

Lenny DePaul, a US Marshals Service former commander, told CNN that investigators would be asking Rahami whether he had any help.

"The real question is: Is there anyone else out there? Was this him solely on his own? Is this a lone wolf or a known wolf that's slipped through the cracks?"

Investigators will likely look to leverage his personal relationships to get information, DePaul said.

"Is there an ability to say: If you don't work with us, everyone around you who may have been complicit may be hit with a conspiracy charge (that may happen anyway) so there's leverage now that he's here," DePaul said.

If Rahami is not a lone wolf, where's the rest of the pack?

Is Rahami affiliated with a terror group?

A notebook found in Rahami's possession when he was taken into custody contained ramblings, including references to previous terrorists, such as the Boston Marathon bombers, and Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was a spokesman for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula before a CIA drone strike killed him in 2011.

Rahami was born in Afghanistan and traveled home often -- common for immigrant families. He is married to a woman from Pakistan, who was in the United States recently but left just before the bombings.

Investigators will be looking into his travels to both countries -- especially to areas recognized as Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds -- to see if he was radicalized abroad.

ISIS -- which claimed the Minnesota mall stabbings over the weekend -- is less prominent in these countries than terrorist groups such as Pakistan's Tehreek-i Taliban, the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda.

ISIS first appeared in Afghanistan in 2015 -- after Rahami's last visit -- but has been calling for lone wolf attacks in the West.
The Afghan Taliban denies any involvement in the bombings and any ties with Rahami, said the group's spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid.

And the reference in the notebook to Awlaki -- a source of inspiration for several terror attacks -- appears to bolster an emerging view among investigators that this weekend's attacks weren't ISIS-inspired, at least not in whole.

Former New York state homeland security adviser Michael Balboni told CNN it appeared Rahami "didn't have a plan B or a plan C."
"This has the flavor of someone who was self-radicalized and perhaps who was inspired but not instructed," he said.

Evan Perez, CNN's justice correspondent, said authorities would be looking at whom Rahami was meeting and associating with when he was abroad and whether they could have taught him to make a bomb.

Rahami didn't immediately cooperate with police, but investigators expect to try to talk to him again on Tuesday, a law enforcement official said.

Why wasn't Rahami on a watch list?

Perez said Rahami had not aroused any kind of suspicion that he might have been radicalizing.

"They have hundreds of young men who are attracted to ISIS or following supporters of different terrorist groups and are speaking out online, doing things on social media -- he was not one of these people."

The FBI did discuss Rahami with his father once, in 2014, after the younger Rahami was arrested on suspicion of stabbing one of his relatives, two US officials said Tuesday.

That interview stemmed from a tip alleging that Rahami's father was calling his son a terrorist, the officials said. However, there were conflicting reports about who initiated the contact. The father told reporters Tuesday that he contacted the FBI to express concerns about his son.

In the FBI interview, the father downplayed his concern, the two US officials said. The FBI ran more checks but never interviewed Ahmad Rahami, according to officials. Ultimately, federal investigators believed it was just a domestic dispute, officials said.

Rahami was never charged in the incident; a grand jury didn't find sufficient evidence to indict him, according to court documents.

At the time, Rahami had just returned from an extended trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan, one of several he had made to the region.

According to an official who reviewed Rahami's travel and immigration record, he had spent several weeks in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2011 when he married. He was also in Pakistan almost a year -- and visited Afghanistan again -- from April 2013 until March 2014.

Rahami was questioned every time he returned from Afghanistan to the United States -- as is standard procedure -- and received secondary screening on both visits, telling officials he was visiting family and satisfying whatever concerns they had.

The law enforcement official said Rahami first came to the United States in January 1995, several years after his father arrived seeking asylum. The official said Rahami was given a US passport in 2003, while a minor, and again in 2007 after he said he lost his first one. However, Rahami only became a naturalized US citizen in 2011.

What did his family know?
Rahami's family lives above First American Fried Chicken in Elizabeth, the city's mayor says. The family has a history of clashes with the community over the restaurant, which used to be open 24 hours a day, Mayor Chris Bollwage said. Investigators searched the building Monday, Bollwage said.

Perez said investigators would be asking family members what they had noticed.

"Was he making trial runs at this? Where was he doing that? If he was making these bombs, was his house or home a bomb lab, and how did no one notice? How did no one -- his brother, his father, his family? He lived with them. Those are questions right now that are being asked of his family members and anybody who saw any changes in his demeanor in the last few months."

The family alleged discrimination and harassment in a lawsuit against the city and its police department in 2011, arguing that officials conspired against them by subjecting them to citations for allegedly violating a city ordinance on hours of operation.

Bollwage said Monday a 2012 ruling on the case favored the city, adding that the family's restaurant was "disruptive in the city for many, many years."

In a Facebook post Monday, a family member asked for privacy.

"I would like people to respect my family's privacy and let us have our peace after this tragic time," wrote Zobyedh Rahami, who's believed to be Rahami's sister.

Where is his wife?

Rahami's wife left the United States a few days before this weekend's bombings, and US officials want to speak with her, a law enforcement official said on condition of anonymity.

The official didn't provide details about her travels but said authorities are working with officials in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates to gain access to her.

Her timeline in the United States wasn't immediately clear. Rahami had tried earlier this decade to petition to bring his wife to the United States from Pakistan, though it wasn't clear when he succeeded.

A law enforcement official told CNN that Rahami filed the paperwork in 2011, and it was approved in 2012.

Then, in 2014, Rahami contacted the office of US Rep. Albio Sires, D-New Jersey, from Islamabad, Pakistan, saying he was concerned about his wife's passport and visa. It turned out her Pakistani passport had expired and the consulate wouldn't give her an immigrant visa until the passport was renewed, Sires said.

Once the passport was renewed, she found out she was pregnant, and officials told her they wouldn't give a visa until she had the baby, Sires said. They also told her an immigrant visa would be needed for the baby after the birth.

At that point, Rahami claims the consulate told him to go back to Karachi, Pakistan, but he claimed it was too dangerous to go there. The congressman doesn't know what happened after that.

How are the New York and New Jersey attacks connected?

Initially, a garbage can explosion near a Marine Corps charity race in Seaside Park, New Jersey, seemed to be an isolated incident. Two other unexploded bombs were found nearby, and no one was wounded in the blast.

Then came another blast Saturday night in West 23rd Street in Chelsea, injuring 29 people. As law enforcement cordoned off the area, investigators found a pressure cooker four blocks away on West 27th Street. The video of the man with the duffel bag -- thought to be Rahami -- shows him in both locations.

Authorities have said Rahami is "directly linked" to the Seaside Park and Chelsea bombings.

Sources told CNN he is also believed to be connected to pipe bombs found Sunday night in Elizabeth, New Jersey, though there is no direct evidence.

Rahami's last known address was in Elizabeth.

The five pipe bombs were found in a backpack outside a neighborhood pub --- one later detonated as bomb technicians deployed a robot to examine them.

What do the devices tell us?

The pressure cooker bombs found at the 23rd Street and 27th Street locations in Manhattan contained the homemade explosive hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD, according to law enforcement officials. It is a highly unstable explosive similar to TATP, used in the 2005 London bombings.

A device found at a second location in New York's Chelsea appears to be a pressure cooker.

The ingredients are easy to obtain, and recipes to make it are accessible online. Investigators believe Rahami used common precursor chemicals to make those explosives; now they are trying to find out where he purchased the ingredients, according to the officials.

CNN's Perez said it appeared Rahami did not have great expertise because the devices didn't work as well as they should have.

"Some of them were pipe bombs, some of them were pressure cooker bombs with cell phones to detonate. So the question is: How did he come up with this recipe? Who taught him to do this?"

[Steam puts 175 virtual-reality games on sale this weekend]

Steam puts 175 virtual-reality games on sale this weekend
from CNET

Purchasing a virtual-reality headset, such as the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, finding the right high-end computer to hook it up to, and getting the complex, sometimes finicky hardware up and running isn't the only hurdle to enjoying VR gaming. You also need a steady stream of quality content.

The library of available VR games is growing every week, but almost all of the games and applications thus far are small, indie projects, rather than highly polished games from established publishers. What's more, many carry premium prices, from $20-$40, for short, buggy, unfinished games that are often little more than beta software. That may be keeping VR headset owners from sampling more new games and supporting content creators.

Steam, the PC gaming online store (and a partner in the HTC Vive), is encouraging more VR game sampling with the Steam VR Weekend Sale, which offers 175 VR games at varying discounts. It's the second big sale on VR games Steam has held in the past few months.

Highlights include the pong-like Holoball, the dungeon-crawling RPG Vanishing Realms, and The Gallery: Ep 1, an excellent adventure game, each for 20 percent off. The full list of discounts can be found here.

[Get ready to clear some space: PlayStation VR asks for 60 square feet to play]

Get ready to clear some space: PlayStation VR asks for 60 square feet to play
from CNET

You might want to think about moving the furniture.

According to documentation for Sony's upcoming PlayStation VR headset, the suggested play space is a whopping 9.8 feet by 6.2 feet (3.0m x 1.9m), which works out to 60.8 square feet, or 5.6 square meters. Those dimensions come from a posting on Sony's asia.playstation.com website, which was first spotted by gaming news website Polygon.

In the various demo sessions of PlayStation VR we've tried over the past two years, the vast majority were either seated experiences or standing ones that required the player to stay in one spot. It seems likely, then, that a play area this large wouldn't be needed for most games. The HTC Vive virtual reality system, by comparison, is built around having a large "room scale" space, but many games can be played with only a small area to stand in.

The PlayStation VR costs $399, £349 or AU$550, and it's scheduled to arrive on October 13.

[Why Jason Bourne took so long: 'We didn't have a story,' says Matt Damon]

Why Jason Bourne took so long: 'We didn't have a story,' says Matt Damon
from Entertainment Weekly

Last we saw super-assasin Jason Bourne was in 2007 with The Bourne Ultimatum. Why did it take so long to finally come up with the sequel? During a recent SiriusXM Town Hall interview with EW Radio host Jessica Shaw, star Matt Damon laughed, "We didn't have a story." 

"We love making these movies, and there just wasn't a story to tell so I'm glad we waited this long," he said of Jason Bourne. "Over the course of all these years, people would come up and ask me if we were gonna make another, and the same thing was happening to Paul Greengrass, the director. People would come up to us and ask us, and I think that just became humbling."

He added, "Having made a lot of movies that nobody went to see, I definitely appreciate a loyal audience."

When Damon and Greengrass eventually considered returning to the franchise, the actor said they "looked at what the world was like in 2007 when The Bourne Ultimatum came out, and we just made a list of what had changed between then and now, and that was incredible."

Citing the presidency of George W. Bush, the economic crash, and the beginning of the social media age, the actor remarked, "It was alarming. It's such a different world, and so much has changed entirely."

"Our digital lives, the implications of our digital lives hadn't really dawned on us," he added, "and what does a digital life say about us and who should be privy to that information? And that whole debate, which is the centerpiece of our times, which is privacy versus security. None of that stuff, we weren't talking about any of it in 2007."

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[Ex-MySpace, Tumblr Users Should Change Their Passwords Now]

Ex-MySpace, Tumblr Users Should Change Their Passwords Now
from The Huffington Post

Your old social media accounts are back to haunt you.

Email addresses and passwords for MySpace accounts created before June 11, 2013, have been "made available" on a hacker forum, the social network said Tuesday. Tumblr logins from around the same time have also been posted, but those passwords are "salted and hashed," which means they're harder for a hacker to actually use.

If you're not in the habit of updating passwords, now might be the time to start. Using the same password on multiple sites leaves you vulnerable when breaches like this happen. For example, if your Gmail password matches an old MySpace one, a bad actor could now gain access to your inbox and all of the private information stored within it.

The revelations come after LinkedIn announced this month that more than 100 million accounts were potentially compromised as a result of hacking.

The best practice is to use a unique password for every account you create online. And you should enable two-factor authentication when you can — meaning you'll also have to input a separate password sent to a standalone device (like your mobile phone) when you log into a service for the first time.

To get a sense of whether your data is at risk, take a look at "have I been pwned?" It's a website that cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt compiled, which checks your email address against known breaches.

have I been pwned?

[Ex-Chad leader sentenced to life for war crimes]

Ex-Chad leader sentenced to life for war crimes
from CNN


Military officers escort former Chadian President Hissene Habre in Dakar, Senegal, in 2013.

An African court on Monday sentenced former Chadian President Hissene Habre to life in prison for crimes against humanity in a landmark case that rights groups say could open the door for more war crimes convictions on the continent.

Habre was found guilty of rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killings of 40,000 people during his rule between 1982 and 1990. He denied the accusations in the 11-month trial and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court.

The decision makes Habre the first African former head of state to be convicted on the continent, according to Human Rights Watch.

"This verdict sends a powerful message that the days when tyrants could brutalize their people, pillage their treasury and escape abroad to a life of luxury are coming to an end," tweeted a Human Rights Watch lawyer Reed Brody, who was inside the courthouse in Dakar, Senegal, where Habre was tried. Habre attended Monday's hearing wearing a turban and sunglasses.

The Extraordinary African Chambers was set up in Dakar, with the backing of the African Union in February 2013 to prosecute the "person or persons" most responsible for war crimes committed in Chad between 1982 and 1990 when Habre was President.

A Senegalese judge first indicted Habre in 2000, but the case stalled several times over the years. It wasn't until 2012 that progress was made on the trial when Macky Sall became Senegal's President, and the International Court of Justice ordered Senegal to prosecute Habre or extradite him.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed Monday's verdict. "This ruling is a landmark in the global fight against impunity for atrocities, including war crimes and crimes against humanity," Kerry said in a statement.

Amnesty International also praised the verdict as "a victory for those victims who fought tirelessly to ensure Hissene Habre could not get away with crimes under international law."

"This landmark decision should also provide impetus to the African Union or individual African states to replicate such efforts to deliver justice to victims in other countries in the continent," said Gaetan Mootoo, an Amnesty International West Africa researcher.

The trial against Habre opened in Senegal in July 2015, and 69 victims, 23 witnesses and 10 expert witnesses testified during the proceedings, Amnesty said, adding that the case "sets a new benchmark for efforts to end impunity in Africa."

Habre's attorneys refused to appear at the opening of the trial because they considered the court to be illegitimate. The court appointed three Senegalese lawyers to defend him, and after a brief adjournment, Habre was brought back in to court by force to be tried.

[Review: 'Roots' for a Black Lives Matter Era]

Review: 'Roots' for a Black Lives Matter Era
from The New York Times


Malachi Kirby, center, as Kunta Kinte in "Roots." Credit Casey Crafford/A+E Networks


The original mini-series "Roots" was about history, and it was history itself. Airing on ABC in January 1977, this generational saga of slavery was a kind of answer song to the 1976 Bicentennial celebration of the (white, often slave-owning) founding fathers. It reopened the books and wrote slaves and their descendants into the national narrative.

But as an event, it was also a chapter in that story. It shaped and was shaped by the racial consciousness of its era. It was a prime-time national reckoning for more than 100 million viewers. As a television drama, it was excellent. But as a television broadcast, it was epochal.

The four-night, eight-hour remake of "Roots," beginning Memorial Day on History, A&E and Lifetime, is largely the same story, compressed in some places and expanded in others, with a lavish production and strong performances. It is every bit as worthy of attention and conversation. But it is also landing, inevitably, in a very different time.

Viewers who watched "Roots" four decades ago have since lived with racial narratives of moving forward and stepping back. They've seen America's first black president elected and a presidential candidate hesitate to disavow the Ku Klux Klan.

So in timing and spirit, this is a Black Lives Matter "Roots," optimistic in focusing on its characters' strength, sober in recognizing that we may never stop needing reminders of whose lives matter.

The first new episode, much of it shot in South Africa, looks stunning, another sign of the cultural times. Kunta Kinte (Malachi Kirby, in the role made famous by LeVar Burton) is now not a humble villager but the scion of an important clan, and his home — Juffure, in Gambia — a prosperous settlement. Kunta is captured by a rival family and sold into slavery to a Virginian (James Purefoy), by way of a harrowing Middle Passage.

Mr. Kirby's Kunta is a more regal and immediately defiant character than Mr. Burton's. But his tragedy is the same: He rebels but fails and is beaten into accepting his slave name, Toby. The name — the loss of identity — is as much a weapon as the whip. As the overseer who beats him puts it: "You can't buy a slave. You have to make a slave."

Kunta stops running, but he preserves his traditions, including the practice of presenting a newborn baby to the night sky with the words, "Behold, the only thing that is greater than you."

That theme of belonging to something larger, of the ancestral family as a character in itself, is essential to "Roots." Although Alex Haley fictionalized the events of his novel on which the mini-series is based, his story offered black Americans what slavery was machine-tooled to erase: places, dates, names, memories. And that focus keeps the ugliness — the racial slurs, the gruesome violence — from rendering this series without hope. A person may live and die in this system, but a people can survive it.

Still, the individual stories remain heartbreaking, even in small moments, as when the slave musician Fiddler (a soulful Forest Whitaker) recognizes a Mandinka tune he overhears Kunta singing. He's moved — and, it seems, a little frightened by what the recognition stirs in him. As much as he's worked to efface his heritage as a survival strategy, it lingers, a few notes haunting the outskirts of his memory.

Kunta's daughter, Kizzy (E'myri Lee Crutchfield as a child, Anika Noni Rose as an adult), is teased with the possibility of a better life; she grows up friends with the master's daughter and learns to read. But she's sold to Tom Lea (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a struggling farmer who rapes and impregnates her. Rape — there are several assaults in this series — is another weapon against identity, another way you make a slave. Ms. Rose burns with Kizzy's determination to hang on to her sense of self.


From center left, Malachi Kirby, Forest Whitaker and Emayatzy Corinealdi in "Roots." Credit Steve Dietl/A+E Networks

Kizzy and Tom Lea's son, Chicken George (Regé-Jean Page, walking nimbly in Ben Vereen's footsteps) makes his name raising fighting cocks for his master-father. The series has lighter moments, especially with the charismatic George, but those can quickly turn dark at an owner's whim. Childhood friends grow up; promises get broken; there are no good masters.

At eight hours over four nights, each with a separate director, this "Roots" is about a third shorter than the original. It focuses less on white characters — gone is Ed Asner's conscience-stricken slave-ship captain, a sop to white viewers — though there are insights about how class resentment feeds bigotry.

You feel the story's compression most in the second half, especially the melodramatic, rushed final episode, which works in both the story of George's son Tom (Sedale Threatt Jr.) — named, under duress, for his slave-master grandfather — and George's service in the Civil War. This mini-series ends emotionally, but it emphasizes that there is no permanent happily-ever-after: "Every day," the younger Tom says, "always going to be someone wants to take away your freedom."

Overall, the remake, whose producers include Mr. Burton and Mark M. Wolper (whose father, David L. Wolper, produced the original "Roots"), ably polishes the story for a new audience that might find the old production dated and slow. What it can't do, because nothing can now, is command that audience.

As homogeneous as the old-school, three-network TV system could be, as many faces as it left out, "Roots" was an example of what it could do at its best. I watched it when I was 8 years old because it was all anyone was talking about, including the kids in my mostly white small-town school. A generation of viewers — whatever we looked like, wherever we came from, wherever we ended up — carried the memory of Kunta having his name beaten out of him.

Viewers will have to seek out this "Roots," like every program now. Today's universe of channels and streaming outlets presents a much wider range of identity and experience. But we see it in smaller groups and take away different memories.

That's not the fault of "Roots," of course; it's simply our media world. The legacy of representation now lives in a constellation of programs, among them dramas like "Underground," which imagines its slave-escape story as an action thriller; comedies like "black-ish" and "The Carmichael Show," with their complex ideas of black identity; and this "Roots," still a necessary story, but now one story among many.

[Google Photos Update Teases Unlimited Storage for Nexus Owners]

Google Photos Update Teases Unlimited Storage for Nexus Owners
PC Mag

If you aren't using Google Photos, it's worth checking out. Even if you aren't biggest Google fan, Google Photos gives users a free, easy-to-use way to backup all of their photos on their device.

That said, don't expect to have your crazy-high-resolution images go up to Google's cloud; currently, Google Photos limits those using the free version of its service to a maximum of 16 megapixels. If you upload photos larger than that (or videos larger than 1080p, they'll get downsized. Though, you can always pay Google for Drive storage and upload even higher-quality versions of your photos and videos (to a maximum limit of 75 megabytes or 100 megapixels for a photo, and 10 gigabytes for a video).

Recent reports indicate that Google might be relaxing these restrictions a bit, but there's a catch—you'll need to have one of Google's Nexus devices, which is an interesting promotion-slash-hook for Nexus if true. Photography and videos are a major aspect of most people's everyday experiences with their devices, and nobody likes paying money each month just to ensure their shots are safely protected in the cloud.

According to Android Police, text buried in the code of the latest update to the Google Photos app (1.21) suggests that this Nexus-themed promotion is on the way—ideally, soon.

"With Nexus, back up all you want! Unlimited free storage for original quality photos & videos upload from your Nexus device," the update reads.

Of course, even the best of today's Nexus devices shoot photos that are below 16 megapixels in size, so the "unlimited" bit doesn't really help there. However, they do shoot 4K video, which means that devices owners—at some point—will be able to upload their high-resolution videos to Google Drive without the videos counting against users' storage limits.

And if you want to get really creative, we wonder if you will be able to upload even higher-resolution photos shot with a different device—like a high-end DSLR—if you first transfer them to your Nexus and uploaded them from there. It's a bit of work, sure, but it's also... free.

We'll be curious to see the official rules for Google's new promotion once it goes live.

[Coke debuts 'proud to be an American' cans]

Coke debuts 'proud to be an American' cans
from CNN Money

The soda company's new "I'm proud to be an American" limited edition red, white and blue cans honor members of the military and feature the American flag in their design.

Coca-Cola (CCE) is rolling out the new cans to celebrate its 75-year partnership with the United Service Organizations.

The cans and packs will be in stores through July 4th. The song lyric and patriotic design will be on 16-ounce cans as well as 12-ounce cans that come in 20, 24 and 35-packs.

Coca-Cola is the latest company to adopt USA-themed packaging. Anheuser-Busch even changed the name of "Budweiser" to "America" -- the name change will last through the presidential election in November.

The cans also promote the joint "Campaign to Connect," which is being sponsored by Coca-Cola and the USO, which was reported earlier by AdAge.

The campaign aims to get Americans to send one million messages of support to members of the armed forces. Messages can be sent online via the campaign's website.

A special celebration of Coke's partnership with the USO begins this weekend at NASCAR's Coca-Cola 600 race.

[Three Shipwrecks and Over 700 Deaths as Migrant Crisis Flares on Mediterranean]

Three Shipwrecks and Over 700 Deaths as Migrant Crisis Flares on Mediterranean
from The New York Times


A woman was helped aboard an Italian Navy vessel on Sunday at a harbor in southern Italy. As of Wednesday, roughly 41,000 migrants had been rescued at sea this year after leaving Libya. Credit Antonio Parrinello/Reuters

The migrant ships kept sinking. First came a battered, blue-decked vessel that flipped over on Wednesday as terrified migrants plunged into the Mediterranean Sea. The next day, a flimsy craft capsized with hundreds of people aboard. And on Friday, still another boat sank into the deceptively placid waters of the Mediterranean.

Three days and three sunken ships are again confronting Europe with the horrors of its refugee crisis, as desperate people trying to reach the Continent keep dying at sea. At least 700 people from the three boats are believed to have drowned, the United Nations refugee agency announced on Sunday, in one of the deadliest weeks in the Mediterranean in recent memory.

The latest drownings — which would push the death toll for the year to more than 2,000 people — are a reminder of the cruel paradox of the Mediterranean calendar: As summer approaches with blue skies, warm weather and tranquil waters prized by tourists, human trafficking along the North African coastline traditionally kicks into a higher gear.

Taking advantage of calm conditions, smugglers in Libya send out more and more migrants toward Italy, often on unseaworthy vessels. Drowning deaths are inevitable, even as Italian Coast Guard and Navy ships race to answer distress calls. Last year, more than 3,700 migrants died in the Mediterranean, a figure that could be surpassed this year.

In a statement on Sunday, the United Nations Children's Fund said many of the migrants who drowned in the past week were believed to be unaccompanied adolescents.

The grisly week also underscored the complex problem that the refugee crisis poses for Europe. The Continent's leaders, facing an anti-immigrant backlash in many countries, have signed a controversial deal with Turkey that so far has sharply reduced the migrant flow into Greece; last year, roughly one million people marched through the Balkans toward Germany.

Yet closing the Greek route has shifted attention to the longer, more dangerous sea route from Libya to Italy. As of Wednesday, roughly 41,000 migrants had been rescued at sea after leaving Libya, nearly the same number from the same period last year, according to the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration.

The potential for a sudden increase in traffic is clear: An additional 4,000 migrants were rescued on Thursday alone, the same day that as many as 550 people died on the second migrant boat that sank.

"This was a very intense and exceptional week for the number of fatalities," said Federico Fossi, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The deaths also point to the lack of solutions to the migrant crisis, which has been exacerbated by the violent chaos in Libya and fueled by the conflict in Syria.


Migrants waited to disembark an Italian Navy ship in southern Italy on Sunday. Credit Antonio Parrinello/Reuters

Officials with the refugee agency have been interviewing survivors of the three shipwrecks after they have been delivered to Italian ports. Those interviews were the primary basis for the estimate of 700 deaths, though some migration specialists cautioned that the number might turn out to be higher. The Italian authorities have also released grisly video footage taken by rescue ships approaching at least two of the sunken vessels.

What was apparently the deadliest episode occurred on Thursday. A boat was towed away from the Libyan coastline by a larger smuggler ship. Survivors described being crammed onto a flimsy vessel filled with 670 people. Once the larger boat dropped the towline, the smaller one capsized.

There were already 100 people missing from the ship that sank on Wednesday — a wooden fishing boat that flipped within sight of the Italian Navy (which later released a video that showed desperate people clinging to the deck or being tossed into the sea). On Friday, the navy rescued 135 migrants — and recovered 45 bodies — from a sinking smuggling boat on its way from Libya to Italy.

"This week was a massacre," said Giovanna Di Benedetto, a spokeswoman in Sicily with Save the Children, the nonprofit humanitarian group.

Mr. Fossi, the United Nations spokesman, warned that the death toll could grow. "And surely many of those victims will be women and children, as usual," he added.

The vast majority of migrants trying to reach Italy are coming from sub-Saharan African nations like Eritrea, Gambia, Ghana and Nigeria. Last year, refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq poured into Europe, mostly traveling through Turkey into Greece.

Now that the Greece route is largely shut down, the question is whether Syrians and Iraqis will try to reach Libya for the dangerous journey to Italy. That was the case in 2014, before smugglers began focusing on Greece.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy has tried for months to force the European Union to focus on Libya. He raised the issue again at the recent meeting of the Group of 7 nations and has proposed holding a Group of 7 meeting next year in Sicily, which has borne the brunt of Italy's migrant crisis. Mr. Renzi also has proposed the creation of Euro bonds to help finance the response to the crisis — a move opposed by Germany so far.

Much attention has been focused on Germany, as it absorbs nearly one million refugees who arrived last year. But Italy is also feeling the strain. With the summer migrant season soon to arrive, more than 115,000 migrants are already in Italy, an enormous increase from only a few years ago.

Italian news media regularly broadcasts videos and photographs of sinking boats, as well as men, women and children wrapped in thermal blankets. In one striking image, a rescue official held a 9-month-old girl who had lost her pregnant mother.

On Saturday at the Vatican, Pope Francis showed a gathering of children a life jacket used by a Syrian girl who died while trying to reach the Greek island of Lesbos.

"Migrants are not a danger — they are in danger," Francis told his young audience.

[Trump invokes MLK at D.C. biker rally]

Trump invokes MLK at D.C. biker rally
from Politico


Donald Trump shakes hands with veterans during the annual Rolling Thunder "Ride for Freedom" parade ahead of Memorial Day in Washington, D.C. | Getty

Donald Trump observed Memorial Day weekend on Sunday by speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial at a rally of thousands of motorcyclists, where he praised veterans, called reporters "lowlifes," thanked "the great Bobby Knight" for endorsing him and performed a derisive impression of a general he saw on television.

The presumptive Republican nominee took the occasion — the annual "Rolling Thunder" motorcycle rally, which raises awareness of unaccounted-for POWs and soldiers missing in action — to malign Hillary Clinton and tout his own electoral successes.

He began with brief remarks about Monday's holiday — "It's our day, and we have to be very proud of it and we are very proud of it" — and then launched into an abridged version of his stump speech, which included a mocking impression of an unspecified general Trump says he saw on television questioning the businessman's asssertion that Japan should pay more for American military protection. "Doesn't Mr. Trump know that? Japan is paying 50 percent," Trump said, imitating the general. Trump said Japan ought to bear the entire cost of the American military presence there.

Event organizers say the rally draws hundreds of thousands of bikers annually, though police officers on hand for Trump's address said they were unable to provide an official estimate of either the crowd gathered for the speech or the entire attendance of the weekend-long rally on behalf of veterans, which first took place in 1988 and includes a "First Amendment Demonstration Run" from the Pentagon to the National Mall.

Trump spoke at a stage set up at the end of the reflecting pool closest to the Lincoln Memorial to a relatively sedate crowd of hundreds of bikers and assorted tourists, who did not entirely fill the space between the pool and the memorial. The businessman said it was not the scene he expected to encounter.

"I thought this would be like Dr. Martin Luther King, where the people will be lined up from here all the way to the Washington Monument," said Trump. King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a quarter-million supporters in August 1963.

In his Sunday remarks, the New York billionaire promised to improve veterans health care, called for rebuilding the American military, and condemned Clinton for remarks she made last year downplaying problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs. "She thinks the VA is doing good," Trump said.

He did not speak at length about any specific veterans or recount any tales of American soldiers' heroism — Trump himself is not a veteran, having received multiple draft deferments during the Vietnam War — though he did recount his own political successes.

"I have 73 people on my staff, and I won long ahead of schedule," Trump said, reveling in the clinching of his party's nomination before July's Republican National Convention.

The businessman praised his performance in Indiana, where his first-place finish May 3 effectively sealed his nomination. "I want to thank the great Bobby Knight," said Trump, recognizing the former Indiana basketball coach, who endorsed the businessman and campaigned with him across the state.

Trump's holiday weekend sojourn brought him face to face with one of his favorite niche constituencies. Trump has courted the support of motorcycle enthusiasts, and his campaign has coordinated with Bikers for Trump, an outside group of supporters, to give bikers tickets to Republican debates and VIP seats at campaign rallies, according to that group's founder, Chris Cox.

"No matter where I go, there's bikers," Trump said.

The billionaire praised the volunteer security assistance that Bikers for Trump has provided at some of his campaign rallies, saying his staff explained to him, "They're here to protect you, Mr. Trump."

Trump remarked, "It's an amazing thing."

Nancy Regg, a spokeswoman for Rolling Thunder, which invited Trump to speak at the rally, said the group and a majority of its members support the billionaire.

"Mr. Trump was thrilled to be invited and attend this amazing event with people who have always been supportive of him," said Trump's spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, in an email. "This was an opportunity to reciprocate that support."

While Trump's love affair with bikers made the event a match, his history with POWs has been rockier. In July, Trump said that John McCain, who was held captive by the Viet Cong for 5½ years during the Vietnam War, was not a hero. "I like people who weren't captured," said Trump at the time, a remark he has walked back but not apologized for.

One introductory speaker said Trump "got all twisted up" in making the remark and was unfairly attacked for it. (Speakers following Trump included Hollywood actor Robert Patrick, who ended his remarks with "God bless America, and f--- ISIS.")
Lesia Butler, a 53-year-old retiree from Tennessee in a red bandana and "Harley Davidson" earrings, toted a newly purchased Bikers for Trump shirt and said the McCain comment did not bother her. "Sometimes we say things that we regret. I've done it. Sometimes we say things that's not so smart," she said.

Butler also approved of Trump's invocation of King's "I Have a Dream" speech during his remarks. "I like his confidence," she said.

Others did not approve of Trump, or of the decision to inject partisanship into the 28-year-old tradition.

Deb Teall, 61, who helped organize the rally, said she had reservations about inviting Trump to speak at an event created to help missing soldiers and POWs. "We don't want to lose that focus," she said. "We're not really sure what his stance is on POW/MIA and accountability."

"I don't think this is a political stage for anyone. So for him to come here, I don't agree with it," said Craig Peters, a 63-year-old member of a western Connecticut Harley Owners group, whose leather vest featured one badge with a picture of a hand with middle finger extended.

"He scares me in some respects," said Peters, who sported an American flag bandana and said he disapproved of Trump's loose talk. "Stand for something. Don't just say sh--."

Still others were unsure how to feel about it all.

"Hillary? Trump? I don't know, bro," said Mike McAleer, a 56-year-old union laborer from "Strong Island," sporting a leather vest and black POW/MIA skull cap.

[Over 40 hurt after being hit by lightning in France and Germany]

Over 40 hurt after being hit by lightning in France and Germany
from USA Today

More than 40 people were injured on Saturday when lightning struck a birthday party in Paris and a soccer game in Germany.

A Paris fire service spokesman says 11 people including eight children have been hit by lightning in a Paris park after a sudden spring storm overtook a child's birthday party.

The victims had sought shelter Saturday under a tree at Park Monceau, a popular weekend hangout for well-to-do families in Paris.

Spokesman Eric Moulin says six of those struck by lightning were seriously injured, including four children and two adults — and four of them were in life-threatening condition. He said a further five people were slightly injured, including four children and another adult.

A Paris fire service spokesman says an off-duty fireman ran immediately to the scene after a lightning strike disrupted a child's birthday party in a park.

Eric Moulin says the fireman saw nine of the 11 victims prone on the ground under a tree.

Moulin says "without his actions, it would have been much worse."

Moulin says six of those struck by lightning are seriously injured, including four children and two adults — and four of them are in life-threatening condition. He says a further five people are slightly injured, including four children and another adult.

He gave the children's ages as around 9-years-old.

In a similar incident, 35 people were taken to the hospital on Saturday afternoon after lightning struck a children's soccer match in western Germany.

Three adults were seriously injured in the incident Saturday afternoon in Hoppstaetten, including the referee. Another 32 people, among them 30 children aged from nine to 11, were taken to the hospital as a precaution, the dpa news agency reported.

The game had just finished when lightning struck suddenly at about 2 p.m., police spokesman Dominik Lentz told n-tv television.

He says "according to what everyone present says, there were no clouds in the sky ... so that this incident couldn't have been expected."

[In Hiroshima 71 years after first atomic strike, Obama calls for end of nuclear weapons]

In Hiroshima 71 years after first atomic strike, Obama calls for end of nuclear weapons
from The Washington Post

Nearly 71 years after an American bomber passed high above this Japanese city on a clear August morning on a mission that would alter history, President Obama on Friday made a solemn visit to Hiroshima to offer respects to the victims of the world's first deployed atomic bomb.

In the Hiroshima Peace Park guest book, Obama wrote:

"We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons." In later remarks, he said that scientific strides must be matched by moral progress or mankind is doomed.

Obama's visit, the first to Hiroshima by a sitting U.S. president, had stirred great anticipation here and across Japan among those who longed for an American leader to acknowledge the suffering of the estimated 140,000 killed during the bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, and its aftermath. That figure includes 20,000 Koreans who had been forced by the Japanese military to work in the city for the imperial war machine.

Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, a second U.S. atomic bomb hit Nagasaki, killing a total of 80,000, including an additional 30,000 Koreans. Most of those killed in both cities were civilians. The Japanese emperor announced his nation's surrender a week later.

On Friday, people lined streets as Obama's motorcade entered the city. The presidential limousine pulled up behind the Peace Memorial Museum.

In the park, guests were seated just in front of the curved, concrete cenotaph that pays tribute to the dead with an eternal flame burning just beyond it. The Genbaku Dome, or A-bomb dome, the preserved, skeletal remnants of a municipal building destroyed in the blast, was visible in the distance.

National security adviser Susan E. Rice and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy walked out from near the museum, along with their Japanese counterparts, followed by Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Then Obama was handed a wreath, and he laid it on a stand in front of the cenotaph. He bowed his head and stood silently for a minute. Abe then did the same.

"We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past," Obama said. The souls of the people who died in this city "speak to us," he added. "They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become."

The president called for nations to reconsider the development of nuclear weapons and to roll back and "ultimately eliminate" them.

"The world was forever changed here," he said. "But today, the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is the future we can choose, a future in which ­Hiroshima and ­Nagasaki are known not for the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening."

After the remarks, Obama and Abe walked to the front row to greet Sunao Tsuboi, a survivor of the atomic blast, who stood up clutching a walking cane. Then Obama greeted Shigeaki Mori, another survivor, giving him a hug.

The president and prime minister then walked north toward the dome. Reporters rushing to get photographs of the two got involved in an aggressive shoving match with Secret Service agents and Japanese security officials.

Obama and Abe stood together gazing at the dome for several minutes. Abe appeared to be explaining the significance to Obama. To their left was a statue of Sadako Sasaki, a child who died of radiation and became known for her colorful paper cranes, which have become a symbol of Hiroshima's effort to promote peace.

Nuclear nonproliferation experts said Friday's events at Hiroshima would be useful in highlighting the ongoing threat.

"It certainly was a powerful and important gesture of reconciliation and remembrance," said Daryl G. Kimbal, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. "Obama's visit puts the spotlight again on the continuing and grave risks posed by nuclear weapons, and the urgent need for renewed American and global leadership to deal with it. We hope President Obama will follow up with additional concrete actions to chart the course toward a world without nuclear weapons."

Obama's visit was infused with symbolism for the two nations that have evolved from bitter World War II enemies into close allies.

Before the ceremony, Obama visited the Marine Corps air station in Iwakuni, about 25 miles south of Hiroshima, and spoke to a group of U.S. and Japanese troops. He told them that his trip to Hiroshima was "an opportunity to honor the memory of all who were lost during World War II."

Obama added: "It's a chance to reaffirm our commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world where nuclear weapons would no longer be necessary. And it's a testament to how even the most painful divides can be bridged; how our two nations — former adversaries — cannot just become partners but become the best of friends and the strongest of allies."

The Iwakuni base, where U.S. Marines work side by side with Japanese forces, "is a powerful example of the trust and the cooperation and the friendship between the United States and Japan," he said.

Previous U.S. presidents had avoided Hiroshima over fears that a visit would be regarded as an apology for President Harry S. Truman's decision to authorize the bombings, which historians say were carried out in an attempt to avoid a planned invasion of Japan.

And this visit did not escape political criticism.

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, assailed Obama for what she described as an "apology lap" in Hiroshima. At a large Donald Trump campaign rally in downtown San Diego, Palin accused Obama of "dissing our vets" with the visit. She said the visit suggested that the president believes "the greatest generation was perpetuating the evil of World War II."

But Obama and his advisers believed the time was right, in his final year in office, to make the pilgrimage — not as an apology but rather to highlight the alliance between the two nations and to warn of the dangers of modern nuclear weapons exponentially more powerful than the bombs dropped in Japan.

Obama has had mixed success in reducing and safeguarding global stockpiles of nuclear weapons and fissile materials. Aides said he hoped his visit, with seven months left in office, would reaffirm the U.S. commitment to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation.

A day before his visit while attending an economic summit in Ise City, Obama called the use of atomic bombs an "inflection point in modern history" and said the fate of such weapons "is something that all of us have had to deal with in one way or another."

While Obama has called for deep cuts in nuclear weapons and measures to stop nuclear proliferation, he has come up short of targets he set himself early in his presidency. He has slashed spending on programs to stop nuclear proliferation, left intact military spending on a new generation of nuclear-capable weapons, failed to persuade Pakistan and India to give up their nuclear material stockpiles, and renewed a nuclear-cooperation accord with China that would allow it to pursue commercial plutonium reprocessing, heightening the risk of theft or purchase of dangerous nuclear materials.

Many proliferation experts say the deal with China could heighten the chances of a plutonium-
reprocessing arms race in northeast Asia, and four lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bill to tighten restrictions in the China agreement.

"They still need to do more," Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said of the Obama administration. "They should follow Congress's call to work with others to promote a pause to prevent the piling up of nuclear gunpowder in the form of plutonium for 'peaceful purposes.' "

For Obama, another challenge was to use the visit to advance the process of reconciliation in the ­Asia-Pacific region, where wartime grievances have been slower to heal than among some of the European combatants of World War II.

Obama sought to make clear that while all sides suffered, all sides also bear responsibility for the horrors of war, even as Japan and its neighbors continue a bitter debate over long-ago wartime atrocities.

The White House has said it would welcome Abe to Pearl Harbor, where plans are underway to mark the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Dec. 7. One senior U.S. official said he would be surprised if Abe did not come, though the prime minister said at a news conference this week that he had no such plans at this time.

Abe reminded reporters that he gave a speech to the U.S. Congress during a state visit to Washington last spring that reflected on the war and the sacrifices of Americans. The prime minister also accompanied Obama on a tour of the World War II Memorial, where Abe laid a wreath and prayed for the souls of the dead.

['X-Men: Apocalypse': The Confusing Chronology Behind the Movie's Cameo Appearance]

'X-Men: Apocalypse': The Confusing Chronology Behind the Movie's Cameo Appearance
from The Hollywood Reporter

This story spoils elements of X-Men: Apocalypse. For those who haven't seen the movie, stop reading right now.

It's not just the relaxed attitude towards aging that makes X-Men: Apocalypse so true to the worst traits of its source: thanks to a cameo appearance by Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, now the movies are beginning to have a continuity as tangled as the comic book mythology as well.

As teased in a late trailer for Apocalypse, Wolverine, last seen in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past, shows up as the brainwashed Weapon X in the movie — a plot development that not only ties into two previous X-Men movies, but may also be seemingly contradicted or entirely invalidated by a third.

The appearance is supported by 2003's X2: X-Men United and, to a lesser extent, 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, both of which establish Wolverine's connection with both William Stryker (Brian Cox) and the "Team X" program. The version of the narrative offered in X-Men Origins doesn't entirely jibe with that seen in Apocalypse, however; in the former film, it appears that Wolverine gets amnesia — as the result of being shot in the head by Stryker — almost immediately after the process of being given unbreakable bones, and then escapes Stryker, but Apocalypse instead suggests a period where the unbreakable Wolverine is essentially a brainwashed drone for Stryker before his escape.

It's tempting to suggest that difference is simply a result of the Days of Future Past, a time-travel movie that purposefully made "changing history" the entire point of the story. After all, if it could undo the events of 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand, inserting a short timeframe where Wolverine was a mindless killing machine controlled by the military is no problem whatsoever. But introducing the events of Days of Future Past into the timeline just makes everything far more confusing when it comes to Wolverine's backstory.

The last time "past" Wolverine appears in the 2014 feature, he's being kidnapped by Stryker after the showdown with Magneto — except that, as audiences quickly learn, that's not actually Stryker; it's Mystique in disguise. So how does Stryker have Wolverine under control in Apocalypse, exactly...?

The answer could be that the entirety of the 1970s sequences of X-Men: Days of Future Past take place in the middle of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in the six year gap referenced between Wolverine's leaving Team X and being approached by Stryker while living off the radar in Canada.

Or, alternatively, it could be that there's an entirely new sequence of events that overwrites X-Men Origins: Wolverine completely yet ends in roughly the same way, much as X-Men: The Last Stand was overwritten, thanks to history being changed in Days of Future Past — something that is arguably more likely, given that it was Wolverine that was actively changing history in the latter movie.

Confusing? Most definitely, but also in keeping with Wolverine's comic book history, which was enough of a confusing tangle of seemingly contradictory pieces of information that it took more than three decades, multiple comic book series and even more writers and artists to try and piece together a quasi-coherent sequence of events by the time the character was seemingly killed off in 2015's Death of Wolverine comic book series. (At various points in his career, the comic book version of Wolverine was intended to be a surly teenager, the son of Sabretooth and even the offshoot of a feral colony entirely separate from humanity, with "clues" seeded to each of these possibilities before calmer heads prevailed.)

With Jackman reportedly retiring as the invulnerable face of the X-Men movie franchise after the next solo Wolverine project, it's possible that the movies will be able to move back towards a continuity that is far more straightforward and less likely to contradict itself. At least until Deadpool 2 follows through on its promise to introduce Cable — the time-traveling son of Cyclops and Jean Grey who was sent to the future to recover from a deadly virus, only to arrive back in the present day as an adult cyborg older than his parents, from whom he hid his true identity.

Perhaps the X-Men franchise is just fated to be home to the most confusing elements of comic book superheroics.

[This year's Atlantic hurricane season could break pattern]

This year's Atlantic hurricane season could break pattern
from CBS News

U.S. government forecasters expect a near-normal Atlantic hurricane season, after three relatively slow years. But they also say climate conditions that influence storm development are making it difficult to predict how many hurricanes and tropical storms will arise over the next six months.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's outlook Friday called for a near-normal season with 10 to 16 named storms, with four to eight hurricanes and one to four "major" ones with winds reaching 111 mph and up.

The long-term season averages are 12 named storms, with six hurricanes and three major ones.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially starts June 1, but tropical weather got a head-start this year: Hurricane Alex made an unseasonable debut in January over the far eastern Atlantic.

The National Hurricane Center says an area of low pressure between Bermuda and the Bahamas had a high chance of brewing into something bigger Friday or Saturday.

Hurricane hunter aircraft will investigate the disturbance Friday, and communities along the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas should monitor its development, said NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan.

Forecast challenges

While they can't predict whether any storm will strike the U.S., and more tropical storms are expected than in the last three years, NOAA officials said significant variables are at play.

It's unclear whether a decades-long high-activity era for Atlantic hurricanes has ended, said Gerry Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. Meanwhile, El Nino is dissipating while La Nina looms for the season's peak from August through October.

El Nino is the natural warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide. That tends to reduce hurricane activity in the Atlantic, while La Nina tends to increase it.

The active storm era associated with warm Atlantic temperatures and stronger West African monsoons began in 1995, but recent hurricane seasons showed shifts toward a cooler phase marked by colder waters and a weaker monsoon, Bell said.

Each era can last 25 to 40 years, and it might take years to determine whether the transition has happened, Bell said.

The last transition to a less active hurricane era happened in the 1970s, without the data and computer models that forecasters have now. "We're watching it for the first time with very new eyes," Sullivan said.

2015 storm tally

The 2015 season was slightly below average with 11 named storms, including two tropical storms that made landfall and caused flooding in South Carolina and Texas.

Hurricane Joaquin, one of two storms to reach major hurricane strength, killed all 33 mariners aboard a cargo ship that sank off the Bahamas in October.

During U.S. Coast Guard investigative hearings this month into the sinking of the El Faro, one federal investigator characterized the disaster as "a colossal failure" of management.

Initial forecasts for Joaquin also were wildly inaccurate. Sullivan said NOAA is on track to meet storm track and intensity forecast improvement goals, and a new weather satellite launching this fall will produce much sharper images of hurricanes and other severe weather.

Coastal risks

The last major hurricane to strike the U.S. mainland was Hurricane Wilma, which cut across Florida in 2005. Wind speeds, not damage estimates, determine whether a hurricane is classified as "major" - that's Category 3 and up on the hurricane wind scale.

Since 2005, the population in the 185 coastline counties most threatened by hurricanes has grown 8.7 percent to 59.2 million people, according to U.S. Census estimates. Overall, 143.6 million people - 44.7 percent of the U.S. population - from Maine to Texas could be living in harm's way.

Other Census figures hint at the potential financial risks throughout those states: 60.1 million housing units and 3.3 million business establishments with 52.3 million paid workers.

Ferocious storm winds aren't the deadliest threat. According to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, storm surge and rainfall flooding combine for three-quarters of all U.S. deaths from hurricanes, tropical storms or tropical depressions.

Major damage

In the Bahamas, Joaquin caused over $60 million in damage, according to the hurricane center. The islands reported widespread flooding that contaminated drinking water, cut off an airport and swamped a local fishing fleet.

Even "minor" storms can leave misery behind. After Tropical Storm Erika swept through the Caribbean last year, damage estimates on the island of Dominica ranged up to $500 million for homes, roads, bridges and infrastructure, and Puerto Rico reported $17.4 million in agricultural losses for plantains, bananas and coffee.

The Northeast was wracked by catastrophic flooding, first from Hurricane Irene in 2011 and again from Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Damage estimates tallied in the tens of billions of dollars.

Due to the financial hardships left in Sandy's wake, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Monday that it's overhauling its appeals process for flood insurance claims with more transparency and oversight. Homeowners will be able to take disputes directly to FEMA instead of first going through the insurance companies they're fighting.

Climate change

Rising sea levels are expected to increase the vulnerability of coastal communities to flooding from tropical systems.

Recent research indicates climate change is likely to make hurricanes more intense in the future.

Improved computer models show that warming atmospheric conditions may hinder tropical cyclone development worldwide, says David Nolan, a University of Miami professor of atmospheric sciences.

But the hurricanes that do form could grow more intense because ocean temperatures will be higher, Nolan says. Warm ocean waters feed hurricanes like fuel in an engine.

"The ones that do occur could be a little bit stronger," Nolan says, "but the changes over the next 10, 20, 30 years would be very small, almost undetectable."

I'm curious as to what your driving pet peeves are.

As someone who is constantly traveling and driving across the country, basically all of these listed are my pet peeves. Some times my friends think they're going to get shot because I do roll down my window at stop lights and yell at people for weaving or texting and talking on the phone while driving.

So, I was reading old newspapers and browsing news sites online and I had an idea...

What if we had our own 'Dear Abby' here on the Newsstand on SFT?

For those of you who don't know what 'Dear Abby' is, 'Dear Abby' was an advice column for newspapers that was started in the 1950s. It was a weekly occurrence that people loved to read in the newspaper. It ranged from relationship advice to professional advice. It was a huge hit for 50+ years.

Here's my theory:

  A 'Dear So-and-so' (name to be determined) will be started on this board right here.
  Anonymous advice seeking will be established through a Google form.
  There would be a team of people giving advice on a variety of subjects.
  Frequency of said advice will be determined at a later time.

Now, maybe you're asking "why the heck would you do something like this..." In theory, I think that this could help promote forum activity. I mean, our demographic is generally young teens and teens who seek advice constantly. While you may not have the issue that someone else has, maybe you'll have it some time down the road or maybe you'll be able to help someone else with 'Dear So-and-so' advice.

It would all be unbiased advice and just advice that's like totally optional. I mean, none of us are professionals, but some of us do have more experience on certain things in life.

An example would be:
  "Ugh, I want to go to this college, but my mom wants me to go to this college. I want to do this, but I just don't know what to do. Help me! Signed Soon to be college student"


Just let me know what you avid Newsstand readers would like to see! You can suggest ideas here as well!