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[Apple’s iPhone 6S announcement: what to expect]

Apple’s iPhone 6S announcement: what to expect
from The Verge

It's that time of year again. For five years now, Apple has held a big event around September to announce the next iPhone â€" or, as in the past two years, the next iPhones. This year is no different. Apple is holding a major event on Wednesday, September 9th in one of the biggest San Francisco conference halls it's ever occupied. We're expecting two new iPhones, but the announcements won't stop there.

This is going to be a big event. If the reports coming out of Cupertino are accurate, we may also be seeing a long-awaited refresh of the Apple TV, a bigger and more capable iPad, and even an updated iPad mini. For all of the details on what to expect â€" including which of these announcements are a lock and which are just maybes â€" we've put together a full preview of the event below.

The event itself kicks off Wednesday, September 9th at 1PM ET / 10AM PT. As always, you'll be able to follow along with our live blog for immediate updates on Apple's announcements.

iPhone 6S & 6S Plus

The basics

Wednesday's main event will be two new iPhones: the iPhone 6S and the iPhone 6S Plus, as they'll almost certainly be named. As with prior "S" years, these two phones should maintain the same design that the iPhone already has, albeit with some minor tweaks. Most notably, both phones are expected to be ever so slightly thicker, according to analyst projections and leaked prototypes. That's for a few possible reasons, such as to make room for new components, to account for a change over to the tougher aluminum used in the Apple Watch Sport, or simply to strengthen areas prone to bending.

Force Touch

The biggest new feature of the 6S and 6S Plus is expected to be pressure sensitivity, which Apple calls Force Touch. Force Touch was first introduced on the Apple Watch earlier this year, allowing the Watch's display to detect when pressure is being applied to it. It'll likely work much in the same way on the iPhone: when you press down on the screen, it'll be able to detect where you're pressing and how hard.

PRESS THE SCREEN FOR... MORE MENUS?

Force Touch on the iPhone could be used to pull up new menus or perform specific actions. It might even allow the iPhone to duplicate the functions of a pressure sensitive stylus. More than likely, we'll have to wait for developers to figure out the most interesting uses for Force Touch â€" certainly, some games will be able to take advantage of it in clever ways.

Oh, and one final note on Force Touch: according to 9to5Mac, the feature may end up being renamed for the iPhone. "Deep Press" seems to be the leading candidate. As if that name is any better.

Better camera, better specs

Apple will also be giving these iPhones the usual spec bumps. That includes a new, faster processor and supposedly a jump up to 2GB of RAM â€" finally. The more interesting changes may be around the camera: the new iPhones are expected to have a 12-megapixel rear camera, rather than an 8-megapixel camera like the last four models, according to several reports. It's also expected to be able to shoot 4K video.


There'll be a big change for both iPhones' front cameras, too. That camera is believed to be jumping up to a 5-megapixel sensor with an accompanying flash, which should result in some improved selfies. A flash and a 5-megapixel sensor are pretty standard features across other top smartphones at this point, and given how widely used that camera is for selfies, it's probably about time Apple caught up.

6 ON THE OUTSIDE, 6S ON THE INSIDE

A new color

So how will you let everyone know that you have the latest iPhone and not just an iPhone 6? It sounds like there'll be at least one way: Apple is said to start offering the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus in rose gold, matching the Apple Watch color. It'll just be aluminum â€" not actual gold â€" which means it's something you'll actually see around, and not just under Apple's display cases.

All the rest

There have also been some predictions that Touch ID will get a bit faster or more reliable on the new iPhones. Otherwise, that's it for the major changes. The phones are expected to keep their existing pricing and storage tiers, according to 9to5Mac, so the iPhone 6S should start at $199 for a 16GB model, and go up to $299 for the 64GB and $399 for the 128GB model; iPhone 6S Plus models should all be $100 extra. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 5S should each remain on sale, both having their prices cut by $100. That means the iPhone 5C will vanish â€" and there isn't expected to be a new iPhone 6C to take its place. Not yet, at least.

Apple TV

The basics

It's been close to three years since the Apple TV was updated, so it's no exaggeration when we say that Wednesday's announcement is long overdue. Since its inception, the Apple TV has done a fine job of streaming movies and TV shows into the living room, but its capabilities stopped at that. Now, Apple is finally about to take the position beneath your TV seriously and let the Apple TV become a lot more powerful.

App Store

The main way it's going to do that is with an app store. According to BuzzFeed News, Apple is planning to let developers start creating Apple TV apps, allowing them to put games, new video services, and other apps right on your TV. That alone will make the Apple TV far more capable. While we don't really know what â€" if anything â€" makes for a good TV app, games and new streaming services will quickly open up far more possibilities for the set-top box than it's had before.

Siri, search, and interface updates

We're also expecting some big changes around how you navigate the Apple TV. Right now, the interface is just an endless grid of rectangles that you scroll through until you find the service you want. Worse, if you want to find a specific movie, you have to go look for it in every service you have until you find it.

The new Apple TV is supposed to solve that. The main way is with Siri and a universal search, according to BuzzFeed News. Rather than typing out the name of a movie, you should just be able to speak it to Siri and have the Apple TV show you which services are streaming it. And that's it. Done. It's not a unique feature â€" Amazon introduced something like this over a year ago, for instance â€" but it's going to be extremely helpful.

The interface itself is also expected to get some sort of design overhaul. It's not clear if that'll just be stylistic or if it'll go deeper and actually make the system's menus more intuitive, but the latter would certainly be preferred.

A new remote

The good news is that the way you navigate the Apple TV is supposed to change big time. For the most part, that's thanks to a fancy new remote with Siri built in. You'll just hit a button and speak into the remote, and that'll be what activates the universal search feature mentioned above.

The remote is also supposed to have a swipeable touchpad, which will hopefully make moving around the Apple TV's endless menus a bit quicker. It may also be helpful for gaming â€" the remote is supposed to double as a basic game controller, according to 9to5Mac, with it even having motion sensitivity built in just like an iPhone. Other than that, you can probably expect it to maintain some sort of home or menu button and a play / pause button.

But no Apple streaming service

It's been widely reported that Apple eventually wants to offer its own streaming TV service. Unfortunately, that's not going to start next week. Or even necessarily this year, as Recode previously reported.


PLENTY OF APPLE TVS SHOULD BE READY WHENEVER THE DEALS ARE DONE

Content deals aren't easy to make, and content providers are likely hesitant to work with a behemoth like Apple, which can turn an industry inside out. Instead, Apple seems to be interested in getting Apple TVs next to as many television sets as it can, so that when the service is ready, plenty of people will be able to sign up.

That hardly means that there won't be anything to watch, however. If you're a cable subscriber â€" or you know the password of someone who is a cable subscriber â€" you should be able to stream TV from a number of major networks. There'll also still be all of the apps you expect, like Netflix and Hulu, and likely a whole lot more once app developers get to work.

All the rest

The Apple TV box itself is believed to be getting a bit slimmer on the outside. On the inside, it should be much more powerful, too. According to 9to5Mac and BuzzFeed News, it's expected to receive some version of the A8 processor that's currently in the iPhone 6, and it'll include either 8GB or 16GB of storage (we'd obviously love to see the latter, but never count on Apple to be generous with storage). Pricing is reported to start at $149, and it wouldn't be surprising to see models with additional storage sell for a premium.

The only big downside that's been reported about the new Apple TV so far is that it isn't believed to support 4K video, according to 9to5Mac. That isn't a problem if you only plan on keeping it for a couple years, but 4K TVs are making their way into the market in a big way. If you're buying a TV soon, there's a good chance you'll be going 4K, and this model of the Apple TV won't be ready for that. For most people, that's not going to be a problem â€" there isn't much to watch in 4K yet anyway â€" but it's worth keeping in mind.

iPad Pro

The basics

For about a year now, word has been going around that Apple is working on a larger iPad. Apple supposedly wants the new iPad in stores by the end of this year, and that means it could see an announcement on Wednesday, according to 9to5Mac. Its announcement isn't a sure thing, but if we don't hear about it this month, we'll almost certainly hear about it next.

There's no guarantee that the bigger iPad will be called the iPad Pro, either; but the name fits with Apple's existing naming schemes, so we're running with it until Apple says otherwise.

A way bigger display

Don't just think bigger tablet. Think: "this is basically the size of a laptop."

A BIGGER SCREEN THAN THE MACBOOK

The iPad Pro is expected to include a 12.9-inch display â€" for context, the new MacBook has a 12-inch display, and the MacBook Pro starts with a 13.3-inch display. This is going to be one big iPad. Expect that display to be every bit as sharp as the iPad Air's, too. This is almost certainly going to be a high-end tablet.

Plenty powerful

The iPad Pro is almost certainly going to be as powerful â€" and very likely more powerful â€" than the current top-of-the-line iPad. Chances are, this new iPad will get filled with the same general specs as the new iPhones, including an A9 processor and 2GB of RAM. If Apple really is designing this iPad for the office, than it might make sense to see extra connectivity features â€" be it additional ports or wireless systems like NFC, as AppleInsider has reported â€" to let the tablet do a bit more.

With a stylus?

Steve Jobs famously derided the stylus when introducing the first iPad. But times have changed, and so have touchscreens. At least one analyst â€" and a reliable one, at that â€" has been guessing that Apple will sell a stylus alongside the iPad Pro. And as of Friday, 9to5Mac was reporting that a stylus may actually ship with the iPad Pro. Either way, Apple creating a stylus in would mark a big shift in how it sees the iPad being used.


GET READY FOR SOME SERIOUS IOS MULTITASKING

There's a good chance that the iPad Pro will use the same Force Touch technology as the Apple Watch (and soon the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus) in order to let its users get more done. Combined with the tablet's big size, a stylus could make this iPad into an excellent tool for creating art. It's possible that pressure sensitivity will make the iPad better for note-taking, too, which may finally make the iPad a viable alternative to a notepad when walking into class or a meeting. 9to5Mac also reports that Apple is working on a keyboard accessory for the iPad; it sounds like the keyboard won't be included, but â€" like the Surface â€" it's possible that it'll be a must-have accessory. Between that and a stylus, Apple should be able to set the iPad Pro apart from the iPad Air in a real way.

Customized iOS

Every time Apple introduces a new screen size, it adds some new features into iOS to take advantage of the difference. That'll likely be no different here, even if the changes are small. 9to5Mac reports that some changes are expected in how Siri and Notification Center are presented. One big feature that we're certain to see is multitasking. Apple is introducing true multitasking with iOS 9, and it's sure to play a prominent role here. With a screen that big, perhaps the iPad Pro will even be able to handle more than two apps at a time.

All the rest

The iPad Pro is by far the upcoming Apple product that we know about the least. It's easy to guess at what's in a bigger iPad, but it looks like we're going to have to wait for Apple to explain what extra software features are in it â€" not to mention why you'd actually want to buy this thing. According to 9to5Mac, even if the iPad Pro is announced on Wednesday, it likely won't ship until November. That'll give you plenty of time to decide if you really need one.

iPad mini 4

That's right: we may see two new iPads on Wednesday. If 9to5Mac is right that Apple is introducing iPads at this event, then we're expecting to see a new version of the iPad mini, too. Last year, it was left behind when the iPad Air received a spec bump, and it looks like the mini is now finally due to receive an upgrade of its own, putting the small tablet on par with the iPad Air 2.

The iPad mini 4 is supposed to take after the iPad Air in one other way: design. Though they already look a lot alike, the mini is supposed to shrink down even more to match the size of its bigger sibling. That means an even thinner and more portable tablet â€" basically, it's shaping up to be the iPad mini we wanted to see last year but never got.

And the iPad Air?

Oddly enough, there hasn't been any word about an iPad Air 3. The iPad Air 2 came out about 10 months ago, so an update is due in the near future, but it's possible that Apple is changing up its plans. With the arrival of the iPad Pro, Apple may want to put more of an ability gap between its tablet lines, and one way to do that is by making one of them cool off for a year. Another effect of that decision: producing the iPad Air would get a bit cheaper, which is something that Apple could definitely use.

New Apple Watch bands

The Apple Watch was first announced this month last year, but it wasn't actually released until this April. That means Apple's smartwatch isn't anywhere near due for an update, and it isn't likely that Apple will tease details that early again, either. But 9to5Mac reports that Apple may still have something to share: new color options for the Apple Watch's sport bands. A bit more variety is something the bands could definitely use… especially since, I dunno, maybe everyone isn't into pastels?

iOS 9

Apple has likely already announced iOS 9's biggest features, but there's one big thing we don't know about it: when it's coming out. As usual, the new version of iOS will ship with the new iPhone, and that means it'll likely be pushed out to the public a few days beforehand. Expect Apple to give a release date for iOS 9 sometime in mid-September. As for OS X El Capitan, you'll probably have to wait until October, if history is any indication.

[In awesome feat of engineering, paralyzed man takes steps with robotic exoskeleton]

In awesome feat of engineering, paralyzed man takes steps with robotic exoskeleton
from The Washington Post

It wasn't far -- mere yards -- but when Mark Pollock recently took his first steps in four years, it represented a major victory for scientists who work at the intersection of medical science and engineering.

Pollock -- who is 39 and from Northern Ireland -- was paralyzed from the waist down after falling from a second-story window in 2010.

The idea of a using a mechanical exoskeleton as a way of enhancing what the human body can do has been popularized in everything from "Avatar" to "Iron Man," but Pollock is the first time a person with complete paralysis to regain enough control to use the device.

Researcher Parag Gad from the University of California at Los Angeles and his co-authors said they first treated Pollock with a type of electrical current at selected sites in his spinal cord vertebrate to try to reactivate neurons and put him through a series of physical therapy sessions. According to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, which provided funding for the study, Pollock "reported feeling tension and tingling in his lower limbs during the exercises." They also noticed he was sweating on the skin on his lower back and legs -- a phenomenon he hadn't experienced since his injury.

Next the scientists fitted him with a suit with robotic controls. Developed by a California company called Ekso Bionics, the device helps the wearer move in a step-like fashion.

Writing in a paper presented at the proceedings of the 47th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society this week, Gad said the team found that spinal-cord stimulation enhanced the level of effort that the subject could generate while stepping in the exoskeleton."

"Based on this case study it appears that there is considerable potential" for this type of technology.

"It will be difficult to get people with chronic, complete paralysis to walk completely independently, but even if they don't accomplish that, the fact they can assist themselves in walking will greatly improve their overall health and quality of life," V. Reggie Edgerton, senior author and a UCLA professor of integrative biology, said in a statement. "For people who are severely injured but not with complete paralysis there's every reason to believe they could improve even more with these types of interventions.

[US Open 2015 Match Interrupted Due to Drone Crashing into Stadium]

US Open 2015 Match Interrupted Due to Drone Crashing into Stadium
from Bleacher Report


Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

A scary incident occurred during Thursday night's action at the U.S. Open in a match between Flavia Pennetta and Monica Niculescu, as a drone crashed into an empty seating section in Louis Armstrong Stadium.

According to Chris Chase of USA Today, police arrested a 26-year-old teacher who was charged with reckless endangerment. No one was injured as a result of the incident, though Pennetta is quoted in the report saying it shook her up.

“It was a little bit scary, I have to say,” Pennetta told reporters. “With everything going on in the world … I thought, ‘OK, it’s over.’ That’s how things happen.”

According to ESPN.com's report on the situation, the teacher who was arrested is named Daniel Verley, and the drone was in pieces after crashing. The match did continue with Pennetta winning in straight sets.

As unusual as the situation seems, it's actually the second time in two years something like this has happened during a Pennetta match.

CNN.com's Morgan Winsor reported last September that a man was arrested for allegedly flying a drone over the U.S. Open venue during a Pennetta matchup with Serena Williams.

Given the necessary extensive security measures taken at sporting events, flying objects of any kind are going to be a frightening situation for everyone involved. The good news is no one has been hurt in these two incidents, though having it happen twice in the last 12 months should lead to increased awareness.

[Facebook's WhatsApp hits 900 million users, aims for 1 billion]

Facebook's WhatsApp hits 900 million users, aims for 1 billion
from USA Today

WhatsApp has reached 900 million monthly active users, cementing Facebook's dominance in mobile messaging.

Facebook owns the world's two most popular apps: WhatsApp, which it bought for billions, and its homegrown app, Facebook Messenger, which recently announced it has 700 million monthly active users.

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum made the announcement on Facebook on Thursday evening.

Monthly active users isn't the best way to measure activity on a messaging app. WhatsApp did not say how many messages are being sent each day, for example. But the growth is impressive. WhatsApp added 100 million users in the past six months. It announced it had crossed 800 million in April. That is no small feat for either app: Smartphone owners spend more time in messaging apps than any other app.

By way of comparison: Twitter has a bit more than 300 million monthly active users. Instagram, the photo and video sharing app owned by Facebook, also has about 300 million.

Still, WhatsApp faces fierce competition from Asian rivals. And those apps are making money from games, virtual goods and other in-app wares, moneymaking opportunities that Koum has rejected.

So far Facebook has not tried to milk WhatsApp and it's still unclear how it plans to. In the first half of 2014, WhatsApp made $15 million from subscription fees on a loss of $232.5 million. WhatsApp was charging users $1 a year, with the first year free, before it was bought by Facebook.

Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call that the company is not yet ready to turn on the moneymaking spigot with Messenger or WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg has said Facebook has "many clear ways" to make money from a product once it reaches one billion users.

"This may sound a little ridiculous to say, but for us, products don't really get that interesting to turn into businesses until they have about 1 billion people using them," Zuckerberg said in 2014.

One billion people, one out of seven on the planet, used Facebook on a single day last week.

"This was the first time we reached this milestone, and it's just the beginning of connecting the whole world," Zuckerberg wrote.

[Britain offers to take more refugees; hundreds are crossing Hungary on foot]

Britain offers to take more refugees; hundreds are crossing Hungary on foot
from Los Angeles Times

Prime Minister David Cameron announced Friday that Britain will help resettle thousands more Syrian refugees amid mounting pressure to deal with the growing humanitarian crisis.

His announcement came the same day hundreds of frustrated and exhausted migrants stranded in Hungary made a break for the border on foot.

One group left Budapest’s Keleti station saying they were planning to walk to Vienna, a distance of about 130 miles, after trains in that direction were indefinitely suspended Thursday.

They snaked through the Hungarian capital in the blazing sun forming a long line that reportedly contained people in wheelchairs, on crutches and barefoot.

Another group of migrants broke out of train carriages in Bicske station, northwest of Budapest, where they had been holed up since Thursday when their journey came to a halt near one of the country’s large camps for asylum seekers.

Several hundred people made a break for it, overwhelming police and running down the tracks in the direction of Austria, more than 80 miles to the west.

Speaking in Lisbon, Cameron that said there was a “moral responsibility” to help the thousands of people fleeing to Europe and that Britain will act with “our head and our heart” in providing refuge for those in need.

But he added that the new arrivals in Britain will not come from among those now on European soil but from a program already in operation that resettles refugees in camps bordering Syria.

“Given the scale of the crisis and the suffering of people, today I can announce that we will do more in providing resettlement to thousands more Syrian refugees,” Cameron said.

Stressing that Britain had not been a silent partner in this growing humanitarian disaster, Cameron said Britain already has accepted 5,000 Syrians and provided more than $1.3 billion to help those affected in Syria and the surrounding region.

“Were it not for massive aid, the numbers making the perilous journey to Europe today would be even higher,” he said.

The prime minister’s promise to take in more refugees marked a shift in policy â€" he previously had argued that simply taking in more people was not the solution.

That stance received increased and intense criticism in recent days after heartbreaking images emerged of a drowned Syrian toddler named Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up this week on a beach in Turkey.

His mother and 5-year-old brother also died after the inflatable boat they were traveling in from Turkey to Greece capsized. The child’s father survived and has spoken of their harrowing ordeal.

The front pages of Britain’s newspapers, typically a strong barometer of the national mood, also have noticeably changed their tone. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper on Friday used the headline “For Aylan” to announce it had started a campaign to help thousands of children caught up in the migrant crisis.

Aylan’s father, Abdullah Kurdi, buried his wife and two sons Friday in their hometown of Kobani in northern Syria. A small crowd gathered as their bodies were lowered into the ground wrapped in clean white cloth.

Earlier, as the bodies were transferred across the Turkish border, the grieving father called on governments â€" particularly those along the Persian Gulf â€" to do more.

“I want Arab countries â€" not European ones â€" to see my children,” said Kurdi, according to Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman. “And because of them to help people.”

More than 2,500 migrants and refugees have died trying to cross the Mediterranean this year, according to U.N. estimates.

Kurdi also said he has abandoned any plans to again leave his homeland, which is in the fifth year of a civil war.

“He only wanted to go to Europe for the sake of his children,” an uncle of the father told the Associated Press. “Now that they’re dead, he wants to stay here in Kobani next to them.”

The decision by hundreds of migrants in Hungary to start walking west came at the end of a fraught week.

On Monday, more than 1,000 people at Keleti station were allowed to board westbound trains, but the next day, authorities suddenly closed the station. A squalid camp quickly sprang up in the area with an estimated 3,000 people.

On Thursday, the station was reopened, but trains heading west into other European countries were suspended, causing mass confusion and frustration. Many people had tickets but lacked travel documents.

Austria, Germany and other wealthier European nations have been seen as the most desirable destination for the thousands fleeing their war-torn homelands in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Tensions also remained high Friday at Bicske station, near one of the country's asylum-seeker camps, where hundreds of people had refused to leave a train that halted there the day before.

Some have tickets to Berlin or Vienna and do not want to register as an asylum-seeker in Hungary, thinking their chances will be much better if they can make their claim in Germany or Austria.

On Friday, hundreds of the refugees made a frantic dash away from their holdout inside the carriage, breaking through a police cordon and leaving riot police scrambling to grab their helmets and push back those still on board. Those who remained stuck inside the train were heard shouting and screaming, and infants could be heard crying.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken a tough stance against migrants and refugees, including building a razor-wire barrier along the border with Serbia and sending 3,500 troops to defend it. On Friday, his parliament passed tough measures to crack down on migrants and human traffickers.

Attempts to come up with a unified European Union-wide solution to the problem appear to be foundering.

In Prague, a meeting of Czech, Hungarian, Slovakian and Polish prime ministers rejected calls that each EU nation accept a quota of people seeking refuge.

The International Organization for Migration in Greece estimates that more than 5,000 migrants and refugees a day have crossed the Aegean Sea into Greece in the past week. It says the largest group are Syrians, followed by Afghans, and the groups are predominantly men, families with children and minors accompanied by close relatives.

IOM Greece says many of the families, especially the Afghans, include pregnant women and newborns.


Hundreds of refugees walk on the Elisabeth Bridge after leaving the transit zone of the Budapest main train station on Friday intent on walking to the Austrian border. They were part of an estimated 2,000 migrants stuck in makeshift camps after railway authorities had blocked them from boarding trains to Austria and Germany. (Ferenc Isza / AFP/Getty Images)

[Drowned refugee boys buried in Syria; crackdown crumbles in Hungary]

Drowned refugee boys buried in Syria; crackdown crumbles in Hungary
from Reuters

A Syrian father on Friday buried his wife and two little boys, drowned as they tried to flee to Europe, while hundreds of migrants fled from a detention camp and escaped a train stranded under police siege in Hungary.

Hungary's hardline leader said Europeans could end up a minority on their own continent as a crackdown appeared to crumble in his own country, main entry point for tens of thousands of refugees and migrants reaching the EU by land over the Balkan peninsula.

Hungary has canceled all trains to western Europe to prevent migrants from traveling on and seeking sanctuary in richer countries north and west. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, says he is enforcing EU rules by forcing all migrants into camps to register, rather than let them proceed on to other countries.

But hundreds escaped on Friday from a camp near the southern border and later clashed with police there. Hundreds more fled from a train that had been halted west the capital Budapest. Others crossed police barricades to set off on foot from the capital's train station, heading west for the distant border led by a Syrian refugee with one leg.

In neighboring Austria, police said the driver of a truck found abandoned last week with the bodies of 71 migrants in the back was among a group of people arrested in Hungary, and gave new details about their deaths. Dozens more had narrowly avoided death by using a crowbar to escape from another truck owned by the same Bulgarian man, they said.

More than 300,000 people have crossed to Europe by sea so far this year and more than 2,600 have died doing so. Many of those making the voyage are refugees from the civil war in Syria, now in its fifth year.

More deaths at sea were reported on Friday. About 30-40 people drowned in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya after a dinghy carrying 120-140 Somalis, Sudanese and Nigerians deflated, causing panic on board, the International Organization for Migration said.

In the Syrian town of Kobani, 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi was laid to rest alongside his mother and 5-year-old brother at the "Martyr's Cemetery" in the predominantly Kurdish community near the Turkish border.

Images of Aylan's tiny body washed up on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum gave a human face to the casualties and prompted a global outpouring of sympathy this week. He drowned with his brother Galip, his mother and at least nine others while trying to cross in two small boats to the Greek island of Kos just a few kilometers away.

While pressure is rising on European governments to tackle the crisis more effectively, the boys' weeping father, Abdullah Kurdi, called on countries closer to home to act.

"I want Arab governments - not European countries - to see (what happened to) my children, and because of them to help people," he said in footage posted online by a local radio station.

The head of the United Nations' refugee agency, Antonio Guterres, called on Friday for the European Union to mobilize its "full force" to help the migrants.

The crisis has divided the 28-member EU, with countries that have accepted large numbers of migrants, led by Germany, which is planning for 800,000 asylum seekers this year, accusing those who have accepted few of shirking their moral duty.

Countries that have kept their doors more tightly shut say too big a welcome would make the problem worse by encouraging more people to make the journey. But this week's scenes, especially the photos of Aylan on the beach, may prompt relative hardliners like Britain's David Cameron to give way.

Senior EU officials said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who failed earlier this year to persuade the bloc's leaders to agree to a system to share 40,000 Syrian refugees, would try next week to convince them to take 160,000.

U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for a global response: "The entire world has to come together. It should not be just one or two countries, or not just Europe and the United States," Clinton told MSNBC.

AIR FOR ONLY 90 MINUTES

In Austria, police said the 71 dead migrants found alongside a motorway near the Hungarian border last week were Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans, but none had been identified. They included a baby girl, her brother, two other children and eight women.

There was enough air inside the truck for no more than 90 minutes and the people appeared to have slowly lost consciousness, suffocating before they crossed from Hungary.

In southern Hungary, police gave chase as about 300 migrants fled the crowded reception center in Roszke on the border with Serbia. Another 2,300 migrants still inside were threatening to break out too. After the escapees were returned to the camp, migrants stormed barricades and clashed with police.

Hungary's MTI news agency said hundreds of others had escaped from a train that had been halted west of Budapest in the town of Bicske, where riot police had failed since Thursday to force them to go to a registration camp.

"No camp. No Hungary. Freedom train,” someone had written with shaving foam on the side of the train.

Hungary blames the chaos on Germany, which has said it will let Syrians register for asylum regardless of where they entered the EU, suspending normal EU rules.

Prime Minister Orban, emerging as one of the continent's most outspoken opponents of large-scale migration, took to the airwaves to warn of dire consequences if the influx was not checked.

"Now we talk about hundreds of thousands but next year we will talk about millions and there is no end to this," he said. "All of a sudden we will see that we are in a minority in our own continent."

Back in Turkey, only a few days after Aylan Kurdi and his family set off on their fatal voyage, more Syrian refugees were planning the same crossing to the Greek island of Kos.

"We saw the picture of the baby, (but) we have no other chance," said 36-year old Abdulmenem Alsatouf, a father of three who once ran a supermarket in the Syrian city of Idlib.


Migrants and refugees wait for a registration procedure after crossing the Macedonian-Greek border near Gevgelija, Macedonia, September 4, 2015. REUTERS/STOYAN NENOV

[Kentucky clerk's office ends ban on same-sex marriage licenses]

Kentucky clerk's office ends ban on same-sex marriage licenses
from Reuters

Deputies of a county clerk in rural Kentucky issued marriage licenses to three gay couples on Friday after she defied a U.S. district judge's orders for months because as a Christian she opposes same-sex unions.

With Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis jailed for refusing to follow the orders of U.S. District Judge David Bunning, her deputies processed a marriage license to James Yates and William Smith on Friday. The couple had previously been denied one five times.

Attorneys for Davis have questioned the validity of the licenses, saying she would not authorize her deputies to issue them. Davis' name does not appear on the licenses issued on Friday.

With people weighing in on both sides, Davis' jailing has come to symbolize the cultural gap over gay marriage in the United States.

A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll in the United States this week showed 49.2 percent of those surveyed support same-sex marriages, 36.5 percent oppose them, and 14.3 percent are unsure. The poll had a credibility interval of 2.6 percent.

Davis, who as an Apostolic Christian believes that a marriage can only be between a man and a woman, had refused to issue any marriage licenses under a policy she created after the U.S. Supreme Court in June made gay marriage legal across the United States.

Yates and Smith, who held hands entering and exiting the building, paid $35.50 in cash for the license. Deputy clerk Brian Mason, who had a sign in the office reading "marriage license deputy," shook their hands and congratulated them.

As Yates and Smith left the building, supporters chanted "Love has won!" Yates said all he wanted to do was hug his parents.

Off to the side, a Davis backer holding a Bible preached against homosexuality.

It was the 100th marriage license issued by the clerk's office this year and the first one since the Supreme Court ruling.

About two hours later, another couple, Timothy and Michael Long, got their marriage license.

"People shouldn't have to go through what we've been through just to get a basic right," Timothy Long said.

"SAD DAY IN AMERICA"

In the afternoon, April Miller and Karen Roberts, one of four couples who sued Davis in July for not issuing them licenses, received one. A fourth gay couple planned to obtain a license in the afternoon.

Emotions have run high on all sides as Davis and an attorney for one of the four couples who sued said they had received death threats. The judge also reportedly received a death threat.

Outside the courthouse in Morehead, Kentucky, where the clerk's office is located, about 40 people demonstrated, far fewer than the 200 protesters on Thursday at the federal courthouse in Ashland, where Davis was found in contempt.

On Friday morning, Davis' husband stood outside the county courthouse, holding a sign that read, "Welcome to Sodom and Gomorrah." He said his wife was in good spirits after her first night in jail, adding she had no plans to resign and was prepared to remain in jail for as long as she felt necessary.

Lifelong Morehead resident Michele Kinder, 44, voiced support for the county clerk. "It's a sad day in America when you can be arrested for your Christian beliefs."

Bunning did not give a time frame for how long Davis would remain in jail.

Meanwhile, she is waiting for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, Ohio, to rule on her request to set aside Bunning's ruling. In denying the request for a stay on the order, the appeals court said there was little chance she would prevail.


Demonstrators stand on the front steps of the federal building waving a rainbow flag in protest of Rowan County clerk Kim Davis' arrival to attend a contempt of court hearing for her refusal to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples at the United States District Court in Ashland, Kentucky, September 3, 2015. REUTERS/Chris Tilley

'Orange Is The New Black' Season 4 Spoilers: Laura Prepon Hints At Alex, Piper's Relationship
From Design and Trend

"Orange is the New Black" star Laura Prepon recently dished on her character Alex Vause's relationship with Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling).

In an interview with TV Guide, Prepon also confirmed that she will still be part of the upcoming season 4 of the hit Netflix series. In fact, Prepon added that Alex will be pissed after she was attacked and almost killed in season 3.

Prepon also said that Alex will become more mindful of the other inmates at Litchfield prison, especially after she learned that she was a target.

"I don't think you're going to see a more timid side of Alex. If anything, she's justified in her paranoia... That empowers her, in my opinion," she said.

Talking about Alex and Piper's relationship, Prepon said that the two will always have a strong connection with each other.

"You can't control where you heart goes, and Alex and Piper will always have a connection. I definitely think that if Alex needed her or she needed Alex, they would be there for each other completely," she said.

Meanwhile, Alex and Piper wouldn't be the only two lovebirds in "Orange is the New Black" season 4.

Cast member Uzo Aduba, who plays the role of Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren, also hinted on her budding relationship with Maureen Kukudio (Emily Althaus).

Aduba said that Suzanne will become more open with expressing her feelings. Her character will also learn a lot of things about relationships and love.

"I think she would be in that space of openness and trying to learn. I think that she would be giving of her heart and her mind and her soul, in complete fullness and complete abandon. And that might be pretty, messy, sticky - but beautiful," she said.

"Orange is the New Black" season 4 will premiere on Netflix sometime in 2016.

Virginia reporter, photographer killed on live TV
from USA Today

A manhunt was underway in Virginia after two members of a local TV station's news team were fatally shot Wednesday during a live TV broadcast near Roanoke, Va., WDBJ7-TV said.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe told WTOP radio the suspect was a "disgruntled"  WDBJ employee and that authorities expect to have him in custody soon.

The station said the shooting took place at about 6:45 a.m., at Smith Mountain Lake, a resort about 35 miles from Roanoke. Killed were WDBJ7 cameraman Adam Ward, 27, and reporter Alison Parker, 24. A woman being interviewed on live TV was wounded.

The live broadcast at the time of the shooting showed Parker interviewing someone at a resort when, just off camera, shots rang out and Parker was heard screaming. The recording appears to include a  glimpse of the gunman dressed in black.

"This kind of loss will resonate in these halls for a long, long time as we remember in their short lives what dedicated journalism they produced and what outstanding journalists they were," WDBJ7 general manager Jeffrey Marks said.

Authorities were "working very diligently to track down the motive and the person responsible for this terrible crime against two fine journalists," Marks said. "They were just out doing their job today."

Marks said it appeared that Ward was shot first, and that Parker was shot trying to flee. Marks said authorities told him they were pursuing a possible suspect. He said Ward was engaged to producer Melissa Ott, who was working at the station at the time of the shooting and saw the tragedy unfold.

The victims were from the Roanoke area, the station said. Adam graduated from Salem High School and Virginia Tech. Parker grew up in Martinsville and attended Patrick Henry Community College and James Madison University.

McAuliffe tweeted that he was "heartbroken over senseless murders today in Smith Mountain Lake." He said State Police were aiding local authorities in the effort to capture the gunman.

Chris Hurst, an anchor for the station, said he was Parker's boyfriend.

"She was the most radiant woman I ever met. And for some reason she loved me back. She loved her family, her parents and her brother," Hurst tweeted. And later: "I am comforted by everyone at @WDBJ7. We are a family. She worked with Adam every day. They were a team. I am heartbroken for his fiancee."

[NAJIB'S STATEMENT]

Malaysia links debris to MH370; France, US, Australia more cautious
From Fox News

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that a wing piece that washed up on Reunion Island last week is from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. However, French, U.S. and Australian authorities stopped short of full confirmation, frustrating relatives with mixed messages.

A guide to the biggest aviation mystery's latest twists.

NAJIB'S STATEMENT

Past midnight in Kuala Lumpur, Najib appeared at a news conference announcing that the metal wing piece known as the flaperon that washed ashore on the French island of Reunion in the western Indian Ocean has been confirmed to belong to Flight 370 â€" making it the first part of the aircraft that has been found since the plane vanished on March 8, 2014, with 239 people aboard while on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

"We now have physical evidence that, as I announced on 24th March last year, flight MH370 tragically ended in the southern Indian Ocean," Najib said.

He said he hoped that this confirmation, "however tragic and painful, will at least bring certainty to the families and loved ones of the 239 people onboard MH370."

In a separate statement, Malaysia Airlines said the conclusion was reached in Toulouse, France, by the French agency that investigates air crashes, known as the BEA, the Malaysian investigation team, a technical representative from China â€" where most of the passengers are from â€" and the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau.

OTHERS MORE CAUTIOUS

At a news conference in Paris, Deputy Prosecutor Serge Mackowiak didn't outright confirm that the debris belonged to Flight 370, but said there were strong indications that it was the case.

"The very strong conjectures are to be confirmed by complementary analysis that will begin tomorrow morning," Mackowiak said. "The experts are conducting their work as fast as they can in order to give complete and reliable information as quickly as possible."

The Australian government, which leads the seabed search for wreckage west of Australia, said that "based on high probability, it is MH370."

A U.S. official familiar with the investigation said the flaperon clearly is from a Boeing 777. However, a team of experts in France examining the part hadn't yet been able to find anything linking it specifically to the missing plane, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because there was no authorization to talk publicly about the case.

With no other 777s or flaperons known to be missing, it makes sense that the part comes from Flight 370, but the U.S. and Boeing team members are merely trying "to be precise," the official said.

RELATIVES' ANGUISH

The mixed messages only added to the relatives' frustrations.

"Why the hell do you have one confirm and one not?" asked Christchurch, New Zealand, resident Sara Weeks, whose brother Paul Weeks was aboard the flight.

"Why not wait and get everybody on the same page so the families don't need to go through this turmoil?" she said.

In the Chinese capital, Xu Jinghong said she could not understand why Malaysian and French authorities did not make their announcement together.

"I am very angry â€" so angry that my hands and feet are cold," Xu said. "The announcement was made without experts from France present. I don't understand how the procedure can be like this."

One relative was pleased with the confirmation.

Irene Burrows, the 85-year-old mother of missing Australian passenger Rod Burrows, who was lost with his wife Mary, said that the announcement was a simple wish come true.

"We're quite pleased that it's been found," she said in Biloela in Australia's northeast.

WHAT NEXT?

Analysts say the investigators will examine the metal debris with high-powered microscopes to gain insight into what caused the plane to go down. It is also not known why Flight 370 â€" less than an hour into the journey â€" turned back from its original flight path and headed in an opposite direction before turning left and flying south over the Indian Ocean for hours.

Australia has said the find will not affect its sonar search of a 120,000-square-kilometer (46,000-square-mile) expanse of seabed more than 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) east of Reunion Island. That search, which began in October, has covered almost half that area without finding any clues.

The Reunion Island debris would be consistent with the working theory that the jet went down in the Indian Ocean and the debris was carried by the current, which moves counterclockwise.

Malaysian officials have said the plane's movements were consistent with deliberate actions by someone on the plane, suggesting someone in the cockpit intentionally flew the aircraft off course.

Malaysia has also appealed for help from territories near Reunion to try to find more plane debris.

Another Reason To Love Spicy Food
From The Huffington Post

People who love to feel the burn of jalapeño peppers on their lips, or the numbing of Sichuan peppers in their mouths, have a new reason to celebrate their passion for spicy food.
 
A massive population study from China finds that people who eat spicy food every day are less likely to die early than those who only spiced things up once or twice a week -- or avoided the sensation altogether.
 
To analyze the effect of a spicy diet on health, an international group of researchers looked at data from 487,375 study participants between 30 to 79 years old. The subjects, who had no history of chronic disease, first enrolled in the study between 2004 to 2008. Researchers controlled for factors affecting longevity, such as marital status and education, and followed up after an average of seven years.
 
They found that spicy food eaters had 14 percent reduced relative risk of dying between the start of the study and the follow up. What's more, those who ate spicy food one to two days a week had a 10 percent reduced risk compared to people that didn’t eat any spice at all. The researchers also found that eating spicy food three to seven times a week led to a lower risk of death from cancer and heart and respiratory disease, particularly among women.
 
Humans have been using spices for thousands of years, to flavor and preserve food as well as to heal. Modern science has drawn attention to spices’ medicinal qualities with research that shows certain spices â€" and specifically the chemical capsaicin, which gives chilis their burn -- help reduce inflammation, clear the respiratory tract,  lower disease risk and do a whole bunch of other good stuff for the body. Taken all together, this body of work suggests that spices could have a “profound influence” on human health, the researchers wrote.
 
The catch: We don’t exactly know yet how or why this may be. This latest study doesn’t show that spicy food will lead to a longer life; it's merely correlative, rather than causal. What it does show is a relationship between spice and a healthy life -- and more research in this field will likely lead to more discoveries. And puns. 
 
"Should people eat spicy food?” wrote Dr. Nita Forouh of the University of Cambridge in an editorial that accompanied the study. "It is too early to say, but the debate and the research interest are certainly [heating] up," she deadpanned.
 
Of course, you don't need many health reasons to seek out spice. The reason we've been using spices for so long is because they taste good.

NASA extends contract with Russia for rides to Space Station
From Sydney Morning Herald

NASA extended its contract with Russia to fly astronauts to the International Space Station due to budget cuts that have delayed commercial US alternatives, the US space agency said on Wednesday.

Extending the contract through 2017 will cost the United States about $US490 million ($668 million), NASA chief Charles Bolden wrote in a letter to Congress.

The deal for US taxpayers to pay Moscow more than $US80 million per seat on a Soyuz rocket comes at a time when Washington is ratcheting up sanctions against Russia in response to its actions in Ukraine.

"Unfortunately, for five years now, the Congress ... has not adequately funded the Commercial Crew Program to return human spaceflight launches to American soil this year, as planned," Mr Bolden wrote.

"This has resulted in continued sole reliance on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft as our crew transport vehicle for American and international partner crews," he added.

NASA retired its space shuttles in 2011. It is partnering with privately owned SpaceX and Boeing to develop space taxis that can ferry astronauts to and from the station, a $US100 billion research laboratory that flies about 400 km above Earth.

NASA had hoped to begin US flights by 2017, but House and Senate budget proposals for the fiscal year beginning on October 1 would short the agency's Commercial Crew Program, likely resulting in additional delays and higher costs, Mr Bolden wrote.

Mr Bolden's letter was sent to the heads of congressional committees that oversee NASA, the agency said.

The reliance on Russia for station crew transportation stands in sharp contrast to a congressional ban on imports of Russian rocket engines for US military satellite launches.

Spurred by Russia's involvement in Ukraine, the ban covers Russian-built RD-180 engines used in United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 rockets. United Launch Alliance is a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Also on Wednesday, Orbital ATK, one of two companies that fly cargo to the space station under a separate NASA program, said a pair of Russian engines for its refurbished Antares rocket had arrived in the United States. Orbital's rocket has been grounded since a launch accident in October.

The rocket is expected to return to flight in March.

The congressional ban on Russian rocket engines does not affect non-military missions.

[What you can do about it]

Windows 10 isn’t spyware but it wants your data
From The Australian

We’re used to talking about how Facebook and Google use our personal data. But Microsoft Windows has long been an island of disconnect from the internet economy, for better or worse. It was simply an operating system for running software made by others.

Now, Windows 10 goes further than any past PC operating system to incorporate the internet, allowing us to do things like speak to the Cortana virtual assistant, store files in the cloud, log in quickly to Wi-Fi networks, and stay protected from new cyberthreats. But these capabilities also mean Microsoft has never been more interested in collecting â€" and building businesses around â€" our personal data.

A number of readers have asked me if Windows 10 is, in fact, “spyware,” designed to intrude into our lives and mislead about its true intentions. I think that description goes too far. Despite some broad and foreboding language in its privacy policy, I’ve not yet seen evidence yet that Microsoft is pushing the envelope further than other big tech companies.

But let’s be clear: Microsoft made Windows 10 a free upgrade because it has the explicit goal of making money from internet services, ads, apps and games that run on it. Microsoft’s financial people call this new business model “customer lifetime value” â€" they don’t want to make money just when you buy a new PC, but on an ongoing basis. Microsoft made $US3.6 billion from search engine advertising last year. They’re not selling our data, but they’re certainly making use of it.

Any information shared with Microsoft is at your discretion â€" we will not collect information without your permission,” says a Microsoft spokesman.

That’s good to hear, but many of Microsoft’s data collection systems are turned on by default. Opting out requires knowing where to look, and disabling some of the features in Windows 10.

What you can do about it

The most active data collector is Cortana, the virtual assistant. She tracks your Web searches and looks through your email to learn your tastes and schedule. Much of this is information is stored in an editable Notebook, available inside Cortana when you click on the button with a square-and-circle icon. Information is also stored by Microsoft’s Bing search engine, whose memory you can clear by tapping Settings, then “Manage what Cortana knows about me in the cloud” or by going to bing.com/account/personalization.

Microsoft says it protects the data Cortana collects about us using “a variety of security technologies and procedures” including encrypting it while in transit to Microsoft’s computers. But the company may share some of your data if it is compelled to by law enforcement or government agencies.

If you don’t want Microsoft in your personal life, you can choose not to link Windows 10 to a Microsoft account. (During setup, when you’re asked for your Microsoft login, instead look for “Create a new account” and “Sign in without a Microsoft account.”) The Windows 10 search bar will still work, but Cortana won’t be around to help without a Microsoft account. Updates to Windows and Defender, the built-in antivirus, will still come through.

Even if you don’t log in to Windows with a Microsoft account, Windows 10 may collect data in numerous other ways. In particular, the new Edge browser defaults to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which tracks some activity (anonymously, if you’re not logged in) and attempts to serve personalised ads. You can opt out of the ad tracking by going to choice.microsoft.com. Edge also does page prediction, which pre-loads your likely next click. You can turn that off in Edge’s settings.

Microsoft put a host of other privacy controls in the Windows Settings menu, including Microsoft’s ability to receive and share data about your computer’s unique ID, location, microphone, camera, even how you write and type. All of these are turned on if you use the “express” setup in Windows 10. You must manually turn off anything you aren’t comfortable with, and in the Settings menu you can also limit the specific applications that have access to those capabilities.

Confused yet? Sites such as fix10.isleaked.com have collected a helpful gallery of all the privacy controls you can adjust.

About that Wi-Fi password sharing tool

There has also been some concern about a Windows 10 feature called Wi-Fi Sense that’s supposed to make it more convenient to join Wi-Fi networks by letting you share passwords with friends. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but you should understand what’s going on.

When you log in to a new Wi-Fi network with Windows 10, it lets you check a box to share the ability to log in with your Outlook.com, Facebook and Skype contacts. When you do that, the password gets stored on an encrypted Microsoft server, where it’s handed off to friends who need it when they’re nearby. Your friends don’t see the passwords â€" they just get the ability to log in automatically when they are physically nearby. You can stop sharing any particular network inside the Windows Wi-Fi settings.

If you don’t want anybody to be able to store and share the password of your own home network, type it into your friends’ computers yourself and turn off the share checkbox. You can also completely avoid Wi-Fi Sense sharing by adding “_opt out” to your network’s name.

No doubt, Windows 10 is a new approach for Microsoft. And like anything else “free” on the Web, it puts the responsibility for vigilance squarely on us. We all need to decide how much we allow our data to become part of the product, and what we get in exchange.

Tennessee Theater Attacker Said to Have Schizophrenia: Police Report
From NBC News

A man who attacked moviegoers with pepper spray and an ax at a Tennessee theater Wednesday before being fatally shot by police had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2006, his mother told police when making a recent missing person report, according to documents.

Metropolitan Nashville police will try to learn more about what may have motivated Vincente David Montano, 29, to carry out the attack during a screening of "Mad Max: Fury Road" at the Carmike Hickory 8 theater in the suburb of Antioch shortly before 1:15 p.m. local time (2:15 p.m. ET).

None of those who were attacked suffered serious injuries. Montano, who police said was armed with an "airsoft" pellet gun that resembled a semi-automatic handgun, was shot dead by SWAT officers as he left the theater through a back door.

"We have no motive for this today," Nashville police spokesman Don Aaron told reporters Wednesday night. "We need to see where he has been, who he may have been talking to, who his friends may have been."

"There's still a lot of work to do as far as his background," he said.

Montano's mother reported Montano missing to Murfreesboro police on Aug. 3, just two days before the violence at the theater, according to police documents.

She told police when making the report that Montano was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2006, and had a hard time taking care of himself, according to police documents.

Montao's mother told police that she had not seen her son since March of 2013, but had learned her son had recently obtained a state identification card that listed his address as being in Nashville, and she said the ID matched his personal information, according to the police report.

Montano was arrested by Murfreesboro police in 2004 on a charge of assault and resisting arrest, Aaron said. Police used the fingerprint from that arrest to identify him after Wednesday's attack, he said.

Authorities in Rutherford County, where Murfreesboro is located, told police Montano had been committed for mental health issues twice in 2004 and twice in 2007, Aaron said.

Montano moved to Tennessee from Illinois with his mother and sister, and records show his mother bought a home in Murfreesboro in 2003, NBC affiliate WSMV reported. Neighbors told the station that police had frequently been called to the home, and that Montano's mother told neighbors her son had a history of mental problems.

Montano stopped at a dollar store and bought a mango drink before buying a ticket to the movie and entering the theater, police said.

He wore a surgical mask as he filled the theater with pepper spray and wore a backpack across his chest, Aaron said. The backpack contained what authorities described as a "hoax device" made to look like a bomb, but which was not explosive.

The man who was cut in the arm with the ax, who only identified himself as Steven, said he had no idea why Montano attacked his family.

"I would ask anyone to pray for his family, because obviously he has some mental problems or something else," Steven told reporters.

The attack at the theater occurred almost two weeks after a gunman in Lafayette, Louisiana, stood up in a theater during a screening of "Trainwreck" and opened fire on moviegoers.

Two people were killed and nine others were wounded. The gunman, John Russell Houser, 59, killed himself.

Shonda Rhimes teases next season's themes for 'Grey's,' 'Scandal,' 'HTGAWM'
from LA Times

Thank God it's Shonda Rhimes.

ABC is banking on the mega-producer and Shondaland's twisty female-led dramas â€" "Grey's Anatomy," "Scandal" and "How To Get Away With Murder" â€" to carry Thursday's prime-time block of programming.

Joined by the leading ladies of her "TGIT" lineup, Viola Davis, Kerry Washington and Ellen Pompeo, executive producer Betsy Beers "HTGAWM" co-creator Pete Nowalk during the Television Critics Assn. panel in Beverly Hills, Rhimes on Tuesday remained tight-lipped about the shows' upcoming story lines but did tease to Meredith's rebirth on the next season of "Grey's Anatomy" after the death of her husband (Patrick Dempsey) and noted that "Scandal" and its Season 4 cliffhangers would pick up right where they left off.

The shows return and air back to back on Sept. 24.

Rhimes' long-running medical soap "Grey's Anatomy" is going into its 12th season, despite its exodus of numerous original lead characters. Season 11 saw the departure of Dempsey, whose Dr. McDreamy met his end in a car crash. Rhimes said that move was the only way they could preserve Meredith and Derek's love story and she is excited about the show's "lighter tone" moving forward.

"We ended last season in which we said the sun is going to rise again," Rhimes said. "We do have this world in which Meredith is single and she is living this life that she hadn't thought she was going to be living again. She's living in a house with her sisters, and she's surrounded by women who are dating and having a whole life, and she's not into any of that and starting to wonder if there's a there a second life here or are the best years of your life behind you."

The writer and producer said she's excited about the medical growth of the character as a leader and the evolution of that woman.

Pompeo said that it's an important human story to tell.

"So many people lose their spouses in a myriad of different ways and a lot people feel like they can't get up again," the actress said. "To tell that story about how life does go on after what you think is impossible is something that so many people can relate to."

The "Grey's Anatomy" star said that it's a story worth telling if it can provide even one person comfort.

Washington politics drama "Scandal" enters its fifth season by hitting the ground running. Gladiators will have to stock up on their wine and popcorn and settle in to see what becomes of several of the Season 4 finale's cliffhangers.

With the successful arrest of Papa Pope in the finale, Olivia (Washington) finally â€" and passionately â€" reunites with Fitz (Tony Goldwyn), the president of the United States, on the White House terrace after he gives the first lady the boot.

"We are picking up almost, pretty much where we left off, which is a pretty harrowing place, where the world had been fairly blown apart for everybody," Rhimes said.

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Cyrus (Jeff Perry) is fired as the president's chief of staff, the president's wife, Mellie (Bellamy Young), loses Fitz's support after getting a grand jury massacred, Jake (Scott Foley) walks away from Olivia, and Quinn (Katie Lowes) is considering killing Huck (Guillermo Diaz) after he's revealed as the grand jury murderer.

"How To," a law school-set murder series, is the newest of the trio and is going into its second season. The whodunnit sophomore drama already clinched a lead actress Emmy Award nomination for Davis' role as complex, no-nonsense criminal defense attorney Annalise Keating, a law professor who finds herself and her students at the center of a campus murder. Guest actress Cicely Tyson, who plays Annalise's estranged, house-burning mother, also received a nod.

The series picks up about a week after Rebecca's surprising murder.

"The big question for Annalise is what has she wrought and the consequences of the first season," said its showruner, Nowalk.

They would delve into several characters' backstories, including how they met each other and "what dark and twisted things that happened to them in the past," he said.

"There's these fresh new strorylines for these people you think you know at this point in the show but don't really know anything at all."

Ahead of the panel, ABC President Paul Lee said that he is "obviously very pleased" with the year ABC had and boasted about Rhimes' shows giving the network a ratings boost that helped define ABC as a premier brand.

At the network's upfronts presentation in May, ABC announced a midseason order for yet another Shondaland drama: a fraud investigation thriller called "The Catch," spotlighting Mireille Enos of "The Killing" as the female lead.

None of the Shondaland's dramas are without sex, murder, twists and strong female leads, but the producer said that she is just drawn to projects she thinks are good rather than female-led procedurals.

"Scandal's" success is belived to have given rise to more empowered African American characters on television (see: "Empire"), but Rhimes declined to comment on that being her legacy.

"I don't think we spend our time focusing on awards or accolades," she said. "I'm focusing on work that I do as a writer. I certainly don't spend any time thinking about legacy because we're still doing this ... staying in the present is way more useful to me."

Despite her Emmy nomination, Davis chimed in saying: "If you're in this business for awards you're in the wrong business."

Apple Is Slipping in a Universe Where Success Is Relative
from Wired

Take a peek at the stock market today, and you might get the impression that Apple wasn’t one of the most mind-blowingly profitable companies of all time.

The company’s stock price fell by as much as 4 percent today to about $114â€"its lowest close in more than six months. And shares are down more than 14 percent since right before reporting its earnings late last month. Such a steep decline for such a successful-seeming company is a little tough to fathom. But these days Apple occupies its own universe, where the normal rules of stock market physics don’t seem to apply. Success, it turns out, is relative.

The drop began after Apple slightly missed analyst predictions for iPhone sales last quarterâ€"a mere 47.5 million units sold versus 48 to 50 million expected.

Then, little more than a week after its earnings call, where Apple execs acknowledged they weren’t going to reveal exactly how many of its new Watches were sold, more nuggets began to surface that suggested the answer was “not that many.” The latest hint comes from Taiwan-based supplier Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, which crams Apple Watch sensors into their compact cases. According to the Wall Street Journal, a company subsidiary said during an investor conference call that Apple did not reach its “break-even volume” of two million Watches per month during the second quarter of the year and didn’t expect it to hit that mark during the third quarter, either.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the Journal report. But the company has repeatedly warned the public against reading between the lines when it comes to supplier comments since, Apple has said, no one vendor has a complete picture of its multi-phase supply chain.

“This isn’t a matter of not being transparent, but a matter of not giving our competition insight,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the earnings call of not releasing specific Apple Watch figures.

While anything less than a blockbuster launch into a new product category might make investors anxious, perhaps of more concern is any sign of weakness in Apple’s biggest success. According to a report from industry research outfit Canalys, the iPhone dropped from the top spot for smartphone shipments in China, falling to number three behind homegrown companies Xiaomi and Huawei. That’s notable because the story of Apple’s success in China has been pretty consistent recently: it’s massive. (In April, Apple reported that for the first time that it had sold more iPhones in China than in the US.)

Still, though Wall Street handwringing has knocked billions off Apple’s market cap in little more than a week, Apple is the company that always seems to bounce back. Despite losing market share in China, it still more than doubled its revenue there in the last quarter, even as the country’s maturing smartphone market shows signs of saturation. As the iPhone’s success shows, China still has a potentially huge pool of users primed to upgrade just as Apple likely gets ready to unveil its new iPhone model this fall. Remember: Apple may not make all the phones, but unlike its rivals in China and elsewhere, it sure makes all the money.

MH370: French experts examine Reunion wing part
from BBC News

Experts are due to examine part of a wing that washed up on the island of Reunion last week and is thought to have belonged to missing flight MH370.

The Boeing 777 piece has been taken the south-western French city of Toulouse.

An Australian transport expert is helping out in the examination at the invitation of the French authorities. Malaysian experts are also attending.

They may pronounce on the origin of the wing part either on Wednesday or later this week, officials say.

For reasons that remain unclear the Malaysian Airlines plane veered off course on its way to Beijing in March 2014 and crashed into the sea with 239 people on board.

Investigators hope to be able to determine the speed at which MH370 hit the water, and use that information to advise search teams to look for a plane that remains largely intact, or one that disintegrated on impact.

The examination of the wing part will start early on Wednesday afternoon, AFP news agency reported.

Attending will be French and Malaysian experts, Boeing employees and representatives from China - the country that lost most passengers in the disaster.

Jean-Paul Troadec, the former head of the French BEA agency that investigates air accidents, was quoted by AFP as saying that the examination would concentrate on two issues - whether the wing part belongs to MH370 and if so, whether it can provide any information on the final moments of the plane.

Mr Troadec said paint on the wing part - which has already been confirmed as coming from a Boeing 777 plane - was a vital part of the investigation.

"Every airline paints their planes in a certain way... and if the paint used is used by Malaysia Airlines and other companies, there may be more certainty," he said.

At the same time he cautioned that the analysis was highly unlikely to give any clues as to why the plane so bafflingly went off course.

"One should not expect miracles," he said.

An Australian-led search for the plane has focused on a vast area of the southern Indian Ocean about 4,000km (2,500 miles) east of Reunion.

[City Pages:]

'The haters' defined YouTube sensation Miranda Sings
from City Pages

Colleen Evans (née Ballinger) is best known as Miranda Sings, an eccentric and narcissistic YouTube character who boasts over 4.6 million subscribers and 600 million views. Sings has been delighting her “mirfandas” with a combination of music videos, farcical tutorials, and ridiculous commentary since 2008.

Evans (who also posts as herself on the PsychoSoprano and ColleenVlogs channels) was a 2014 Teen Choice Awards nominee and has appeared on the Tonight Show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and The View. She recently released Self-Help, a book written in Miranda’s voice, and kicks off her Summer Camp Tour in Minneapolis on Wednesday.

City Pages: How did your classical training prepare you to create Miranda Sings?
Miranda Sings: I studied classical music at Azusa Pacific University. I was a vocal performance major. Miranda is inspired by a lot of the girls I was in school with who were snooty and cocky and rude. I don’t feel like it was justified behavior because they weren’t even that good, so I was poking fun at them. I would get bored in class sometimes, so I would sing just above or below the pitch in choir to annoy my friends and make them laugh.

CP: How did you develop her fashion style and makeup?
MS: When Miranda was first created seven years ago, she was much more normal-looking. The only thing that’s remained the same is the middle part with the two clips pulling my hair back. Everything else has changed over time depending on what the hate comments said. I was fascinated at the thought of strangers watching my videos and leaving mean comments. Whenever they said they didn’t like something, I would do it more. If they didn’t like my lipstick color, I made it brighter. They said my lipstick was sloppy, so I made it sloppier. They didn’t like my clothes, so I made them uglier. The haters kind of created Miranda’s persona.

CP: Do those comments affect you personally?
MS: It depends on the type of hate comments. For the most part, they don’t upset me because they’re talking about a character that isn’t real. Sometimes there are comments that attack me personally, or my family or husband, and those do irritate me. I’ve learned over time how to let go of the hate comments and focus on the positive ones, because I do get a lot of lovely, positive comments from my viewers â€" and they stick up for me, which is really cool.

CP: Do you know how the Miranda Sings story will end? Have you planned her death?
MS: [Laughs] I have not planned her death â€" yet. I take it one day at a time. When this character started, I was not anticipating a career out of it. I was just being silly and trying to make my friends laugh. I never had a path for Miranda or a plan for her life. Even when it started to get success, I thought, “This will only last a day. There’s no way people will watch in a month.” I assume it’s going to be over tomorrow so I work as hard as I can today and try to enjoy it and live out the career to its fullest. I’m married now, and if I have kids, Miranda’s going to have kids. Miranda’s going to live as long as people want to see her.

CP: You got married in July [to fellow YouTuber Joshua David Evans]. How did knowing that millions of people were going to watch your wedding video impact the planning?
MS: There was definitely extra pressure [but] I was not nervous at all to get married to Josh. I love him so much. In the planning of it, I wasn’t thinking about the viewers; I was thinking of how to keep the wedding as authentic as possible to who Josh and I are, because I know that’s why people watch us in the first place. The wedding really reflected our personalities, and I think that’s how the viewers would have wanted it. If we had tried to impress the viewers, they would have seen right through it because they know us so well.

CP: Given that you’re both YouTube celebrities, is there anything off-limits as far as filming goes?
MS: My husband films every single day of his life so there’s not a lot that’s off-limits, but we do have a private life. We’re hermit crabs. We spend most of our days at home. I cook dinner for him every single night that I possibly can. We certainly do fight like anyone else does but that’s not broadcasted. We don’t want to put any more hate or negativity out in the world. We want our channels to be a place for people to escape and be part of a positive environment. Anything negative, we try to keep out. Every once in a while it still creeps in there, because it’s life and we’re human.

CP: Have you ever regretted a video or deleted one after posting it?
MS: There have been a few videos I put on private, but not because I was ashamed or regretted them; it was more because they were old videos and I don’t think they’re that funny. There are things I’m embarrassed about or videos that are hard for me to watch, but I don’t regret anything. I feel like I’ve been authentic to who I am. I’m proud of everything I’ve got on the Internet right now.

CP: Beyond Miranda Sings, what are your aspirations for your career?
MS: I think the Internet is the future of entertainment. I need to keep writing and creating quality content that’s uplifting. Whether that’s on YouTube, or on television or in movies, I’m down for anything.

[1. She's Engaged]

Lady Gaga Announces New Album On Instagram & Here Are 7 Things We Can Expect From Her New Music
From Bustle

Lady Gaga just finished up a tour with Tony Bennett, promoting their joint album Cheek to Cheek and she's jumping right into her next project: a new album. On Monday night, Lady Gaga teased her new album by posted a very up-close selfie on Instagram with the caption, "LG5 time," which signaled to her fans that she is indeed starting to work on her fifth solo studio album. In the photo, Gaga looks serene and tough all at once. Her nude face paired with oversized glasses and a men's style blazer reminds us that Gaga means business. Fans have already started taking to Twitter with the hashtag #LG5Time, and everyone is losing it over the announcement. One thing is clear: the world is ready for a new Lady Gaga album.

But what can we expect from the new album? Well, it is Lady Gaga, after all, and the musical chameleon has proven time and time again that she is predictably unpredictable. Just when you think she'll drop another dance pop record, she released a jazz tune. However, since releasing Artpop in 2013, a lot has changed in Lady Gaga's life, and in the world, which will certainly influence her next album.

Here's what will likely make an appearance in her next body of work.

1. She's Engaged

On Valentine's Day, 2015, Lady Gaga and Taylor Kinney (Her video stud from "You and I") got engaged. In the past, Gaga's music focused a lot on broken hearts and fierce independence. Now that she's happily coupled up, the tune may change a little about how she writes about love. Though I reckon her take on being her own person won't change a bit.

2. She's Shown Her Classical Training

Gaga stunned the audience at the 2015 Oscars with her rendition of songs from The Sound of Music. She might be an edgy pop star, but she's also studied at New York University's Tisch School for the Arts and can sing Broadway and Opera with the best of them. Fingers crossed we get more of this.

3. Gay Marriage Was Legalized on a Federal Level

2015 was a pivotal year in the gay rights movement, as same-sex marriage was legalized on a federal level. Lady Gaga, who has always been a vocal supporter of the LGBTQ community, was moved on the day and tweeted to her fans, "Same-sex marriage is now legal all across the US! Free to love. Free to marry. Free to be equal!" I imagine the subject will be a big part of her songwriting process.

4. She Made Duets a Thing Again

Most artists like to write up other artists as "featured" or "including" on their track listings, but Lady Gaga is all about making music with someone, as she showed the world with Cheek to Cheek. Here's hoping LG5 brings in even more people to her work, especially artists who her target demo may have never heard of before.

5. She's Joining American Horror Story

The dark, violent, and absolutely nightmarish quality of American Horror Story Hotel will no doubt seep into the psyche of the artist who calls herself "Mother Monster." Expect things to get extra creepy this time around.

6. She's Proven She Knows How to Do A Cover

Gaga performed a beautiful cover of John Lennon's "Imagine" at the 2015 European Games. She might be known for her theatrics and otherwordly fashion, but, when it comes to performing other acclaimed artists' work, she sticks to the basics and is somehow more astounding than ever. If Adele can do it on 21, Gaga can do it on LG5 and still be the inventive, game-changing artist that she's always been.

7. There's A Woman Running for President

Gaga has been supporting Hillary Clinton's campaign for months now â€" she showed her partnership with the Presidential candidate by performing at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser. The two share political beliefs on many subjects, including women's rights and LGBTQ rights. Could one of Gaga's songs become Hill's campaign song? It's highly possible. Gaga has always been an outspoken advocate for women, and having a woman run for President will definitely influence the more politically-charged songs Gaga writes.

Lady Gaga, who is endlessly full of surprises, is really going to deliver with her upcoming album.

Obama will echo Kennedy’s American University nuclear speech from 1963
from The Washington Post

An eloquent young president, elected with only brief experience in the Senate, is facing a nuclear weapons threat abroad and a chorus of criticism at home. So he chooses to make the short trip to American University to give a speech urging Americans to take a chance for peace and explore a weapons agreement with a country no one trusts.

In it, he calls for a “practical, more attainable peace” that is “the necessary rational end of rational men.”

The president was John F. Kennedy, the year was 1963, and his purpose was to reach a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union just eight months after the Cuban missile crisis.

On Wednesday, there will be echoes of that Kennedy moment when President Obama goes to American University to deliver a similar message, urging Americans â€" and Congress â€" to support an agreement that would limit Iran’s nuclear weapons program despite an atmosphere of mistrust.

A White House official said Obama would call the vote on the deal “the most consequential foreign policy debate since the decision to go to war in Iraq.” The president will link the two, asserting that “the same people who supported war in Iraq are opposing diplomacy with Iran and that it would be an historic mistake to squander this opportunity.”

“What’s appropriate about that comparison is President Kennedy, more than 50 years ago, entered into a diplomatic agreement with an adversary of the United States that did succeed in advancing the national security interests of the United States,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.

Obama’s task may be even more difficult than Kennedy’s. On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did a webcast for more than 10,000 Jewish Americans in which he said that “this is the time to oppose this dangerous deal.” And Congress is likely to vote against the Iran deal. House GOP leaders said Tuesday that they would vote in September for a formal resolution of disapproval introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.).

But Obama hopes that he can protect the Iran agreement by using his veto power and that opponents will not be able to summon enough support to override it. The administration got a big boost Tuesday when three influential and previously undecided Senate Democrats â€" Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Timothy M. Kaine (Va.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.) â€" endorsed the agreement.

The president is still working to persuade other undecided Democrats, most notably Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.).

Boxer, after meeting with senior diplomats from Britain, France and Germany, endorsed the deal, saying that she was “more convinced than ever that a rejection of the Iran nuclear agreement would be a victory for Iranian hard-liners and would accelerate their ability to obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Kaine said the talks with Iran had “shown that patient diplomacy can achieve what isolation and hostility cannot.” Acknowledging compliance risks and the lack of broader change in Iran, Kaine said on the Senate floor that “this deal does not solve all outstanding issues with an adversarial regime. In that sense, it is similar to the nuclear test-ban treaty that President Kennedy negotiated with the Soviet Union in the midst of the Cold War.”

Being compared to Kennedy is rarely a bad thing for Democrats in politics these days. And Obama had a “special affinity” for the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, said presidential historian Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a partner at West Wing Writers.

In the June 1963 American University commencement address, Kennedy was at the peak of his rhetorical power. Much as Obama has recently portrayed war as the alternative to the negotiated deal with Iran, Kennedy warned that “too many of us think it [peace] is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable.”

Peace, Kennedy said, “does not require that each man love his neighbor. It requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.” He added: “Let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests.”

“Kennedy was intensely concerned with finding a way with the Soviet Union over nuclear arms,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek. “The missile crisis frightened him and frightened [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev because they came within hailing distance of nuclear war.”

At the same time, Shesol said, “no one could credibly accuse John Kennedy of being soft on the Soviets or soft on communism. If there’s an analogy to be made, it’s that you negotiate out of strength. And you negotiate to strengthen national security. That clearly is how President Obama sees this agreement with the Iranians.”

Obama could tear a page from Kennedy’s speech without altering a word. Like Obama with Iran, Kennedy did not ask Americans to trust the Soviet Union.

“No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion,” Kennedy said. “But it can â€" if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers â€" offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”

The White House on Tuesday did not enumerate similarities with Kennedy and the nuclear test-ban treaty, worried about taking on even more baggage than the Iran deal already has.

Earnest said that Kennedy had to make concessions to the Soviet Union in the test-ban treaty that was reached in August 1963, two months after the AU speech. Earnest said that Obama, by contrast, “didn’t have to make any concessions.” He stressed that “there’s no impact from this nuclear agreement on the United States and our â€" either our nuclear programs or our military programs.”

The president deployed all his arguments in a nearly two-hour meeting Tuesday evening at the White House with two dozen leaders of the American Jewish community and pro-Israel groups, some supporters and others opponents of the plan. People involved in the discussion said Obama was forceful in arguing that the nuclear agreement, while not perfect, is a preferable to alternatives that would be likely to lead to a military confrontation.

Obama, while acknowledging some of the activists’ concerns, expressed frustration at the intensity of the public criticism some of the opponents were mounting, participants said.

“At one point, he essentially said this would not be as big an issue and as big a fight if basically the pro-Israel community was not making it into a big fight,” said one participant who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting. “That’s the only reason why we are where we are. So essentially, the takeaway was that he was broadly asking the organizations to consider stepping back.”

Obama pointedly noted that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was spending $20 million in an ad campaign to denounce the deal. The activists countered that Obama was unfairly characterizing opponents of the deal as preferring a military confrontation, according to people in the room.

The president suggested to AIPAC that “if you guys would back down, I would back down from some of the things I’m doing,” said the person involved in the discussion, who added, “I don’t think AIPAC will take him up on it.”

Obama said that if the deal were to fall apart, he would likely face calls within three to six months to use military strikes to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. “To the president’s credit, he kept acknowledging the legitimacy of the concerns of the critics,” the person in the room said. “He wasn’t saying that the concerns and criticisms were not warranted. Iran is a terrible actor on one hand; he wasn’t going to the point of saying, ‘You guys are just crazy,’ but he was saying, ‘To suggest there’s a better way to do this is not realistic.’­ ”

Netanyahu in his webcast took on Obama’s suggestion that rejecting the deal would mean war. “I don’t oppose this deal because I want war, but because I want to prevent war,” Netanyahu said. The time limits of the agreement mean Iran would have an easier time developing a bomb in 10 or 15 years, he said, calling that period “the blink of an eye.”

Obama’s speech is also a bookend to a more ambitious speech he delivered in Prague in 2009. Then, Obama said the United States would “seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons.” But Pakistan, which some experts say will add 20 nuclear weapons to its stockpile this year, has blocked moves to cut off such supplies in international talks that require unanimity.

Obama also vowed to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but the review conference failed to approve a consensus document earlier this year.

The president did win congressional approval for an important new START pact on Christmas Eve 2009, but more recent efforts to engage Russia have fizzled.

How Amazon became bigger than Walmart
From The Telegraph

Amazon took the retail world by surprise last week, first by producing a quarterly profit, and then by briefly turning into the planet’s biggest retailer.

Walmart, the ubiquitous American chain that Amazon overtook on the stock market, still has the edge when it comes to sales: quarterly revenue of $114bn from its bricks and mortar sprawl dwarfs the online firm’s turnover of $23.2bn. And Walmart could match Amazon’s unexpected $92m quarterly profit in about two and a half days of trading.

Nevertheless, enthusiastic investors sent the price of Amazon stock hurtling higher after Thursday’s results, in the hope that the 20-year-old online behemoth can capture even more of the online world.
“It looks like they beat across every major revenue line,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Baird. “That, along with the surprise profit beat, is icing on the cake, so to speak.”

The share price move valued Amazon at more $250bn by Friday night â€" keeping it above Walmart’s market value of about $230bn, and making founder Jeff Bezos up to $7bn richer on paper, via his 18pc stake in the firm. Based in his garage in Seattle, Mr Bezos set up the company online in 1995 as a bookseller, with a basic website offering “one million titles, consistently low prices”.

The idea caught on quickly. Amazon’s stock market debut in 1997 characterised the clamour for internet retailers by jumping 30pc on its first day Unlike many contemporaries, it withstood the dotcom crash at the turn of the century, posting a 68pc rise in sales to $2.76bn in 2000 as management brushed off the stock market carnage to put their “heads down working to build a heavier and heavier company”.

Even in its early years, Amazon bought into the online land rush, even if some projects such as Pets.com yielded little. The group expanded into Ebay’s turf with Amazon Auctions and set up its own payments system. By 2001 its had produced its first quarterly profit of $5m.

The firm has made a pro-forma profit in 10 of the 12 years since its first earnings, but earnings have played second fiddle to Mr Bezos’s growth ambitions.

Amazon ploughs billions back into new projects, but despite its attempts to diversify, its profits also retain a traditional retailer’s dependence on seasonal spending sprees such as Christmas and Prime Day, a manufactured summer sales event held this month to drum up subscribers to its premium service.

The Kindle, which first appeared in 2007, and the Fire, a belated and so far unsuccessful foray into smartphones in 2014, are among the few physical items on sale bearing the Amazon logo. As the firm itself has admitted, it focuses more on projecting an attractive brand for customers rather than churning out products.

The closest Amazon gets to bricks and mortar are the orange lockers installed in the disused space in railway stations, enabling customers to collect parcels during their commute. Behind the scenes, more than 100 distribution centres around the world stockpile and distribute the website’s wares.

The potential market for the firm remains vast. US consumers have moved from spending less than 3pc of the retail spending online in 2006 to 7pc in the most recent quarter, totalling $75bn.

Analysts at Cowen & Co, which has long been a cheerleader for the firm’s potential, last week predicted that Amazon would overtake Macy’s to be America’s biggest seller of clothing by 2017. It estimated that 11pc of US shoppers who buy clothes from Target and Walmart already pick up items from Amazon too.

Other sector-watchers have pointed a more ephemeral corner of Amazon’s business as its biggest source of growth. Amazon Web Services, founded in 2006, offers cloud computing infrastructure to other websites and has quietly grown to represent almost a tenth of the firm’s turnover.

Separate financials figures for AWS have only been available since April, but the most recent stats show quarterly revenues up 81.5pc to $1.82bn, with margins of more than 21pc, as Amazon hosts the myriad businesses piling onto its home turf.

Even less is known about Amazon Prime, the £79-a-year service that plugs customers into everything else the firm has developed: on-demand television, next day delivery, and book loans through the Kindle.

Amazon has not disclosed its subscriber numbers for Prime, but finance chief Brian Olsavsky told analysts last week that the service was adding customers at rates “higher than we’ve ever seen”, with the fastest growth coming from outside the United States.

“In some ways, Amazon is among the simplest stories we cover because these two areas are far and above the key. Everything else revolves around them,” said analysts at Macquarie.

Meanwhile, Mr Bezos is extending his reach even further. He bought the Washington Post in 2013 and continues to fund its experiments in digital news. And earlier this month, his Blue Origin venture began accepting sign-ups for his most ambitious project yet: commercial flights into space.

President Barack Obama Makes Birth Certificate Joke on Kenya Trip
From NBC News

If you can't beat members of the "birther" movement, join 'em.

That's the approach President Barack Obama took on Saturday night in Kenya, his father's homeland, when he made a wisecrack about his birthplace â€" which suspicious critics have harped on for years.

"Some of my critics back home might be suggesting I'm here to look for my birth certificate," Obama said while making a toast at a state dinner hosted by President Uhuru Kenyatta. "That's not the case."

In 2011, Obama made his birth certificate public after so-called birthers questioned his eligibility to be president, claiming he was not a U.S. citizen. The certificate lists Honolulu, Hawaii, as his place of birth.

But the controversy persisted, with birthers insisting the detailed birth certificate was a fake, and that the president was in fact born in Kenya. The issue resurfaced earlier this week when outspoken Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio told CNN he still believes the birth certificate was forged.

Obama's quip during the Kenyan state dinner was met with laughs.

His visit to Kenya marks the first time a sitting U.S. president has traveled to the East African nation, and fulfilled a wish of many Kenyans, who see him as one of their own. On Friday evening, Obama reconnected with Kenyan family, some of whom were present at Saturday night's dinner.

Obama told dinner attendees he came to Kenya in part because his step-grandmother had asked him to.

"When she says you do something, you generally have to do it," he joked.

Earlier Saturday, in a joint news conference with President Kenyatta, Obama hinted at plans for Kenya in his post-White House legacy.

"Part of the challenge I've had in the course of my presidency is that given the demands of the job and the bubble, I can't come here and just go up-country and visit for a weekend," he said. "The lives of both our peoples can be advanced if both our countries deepened and expanded our cooperation."

Obama praised the entrepreneurial spirit of the Kenyan people as a way to confront the "insidious threats" that terrorists pose to the region.

He also urged Kenya to reconsider its treatment of gay and lesbian people. Like many African nations, Kenya outlaws homosexuality.

"When a government gets in the habit of treating people differently, those habits can spread," Obama said.

Kenyatta quickly dismissed the sensitive topic, calling it a "non-issue."

That small rift from earlier had smoothed over at Saturday night's state dinner, where the Nairobi Chamber Orchestra played a cover of Magnetic Fields' "Book of Love" before the presidents delivered toasts. The leaders shared the stage with Kenyan first lady Margaret Kenyatta and U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

In addition to Obama's step-grandmother, his half-sister, Auma, was in the audience. The president had backpacked in Kenya three decades ago, but met many of his extended family members for the first time on this visit.

"Mr. Obama, this is not your first trip to Kenya," Kenyatta said. "But yesterday you arrived riding on the wings of history."

[Will Apple’s iPhone 7 have tap and nudge controls? Patent reveals plans to move onscreen objects using touches anywhere on the phone.]

Apple patent reveals iPhone 7 planes to move objects effortlessly
from Daily Mail

Will Apple’s iPhone 7 have tap and nudge controls? Patent reveals plans to move onscreen objects using touches anywhere on the phone.

Touchscreens are easy to use thanks to swipes and pinches that even toddlers can get to grips with them quickly.

But fingers don't have the accuracy and precision of a stylus or mouse, so Apple has devised an alternative.

Patent files reveal a future iPhone could use its built-in motion sensors to register and respond to taps and nudges made anywhere on the handset - even the sides or the back.

The patent, called ‘Fine-tuning an operation based on tapping’, was filed in January 2013 and awarded earlier this week.

It explains: ‘The mobile device can use its sensors to detect a tapping motion against a non-touchscreen surface of that device.

‘In response to detecting such physical interaction, the mobile device can perform the operation with a level of precision that cannot be achieved when attempted via the touchscreen.’

These sensors include the phone’s accelerometer, gyroscope and compass.

Furthermore, the amount of force used in the taps could determine which action is taken.

For example, lightly tapping the left-hand side of the phone could precisely nudge an onscreen image one pixel to the left.

While tapping with more force could move it five pixels to the left.

These taps could also be used when selecting text. After the cursor is placed at the start of a word or line, a series of light taps could highlight letters or entire words to the right of the cursor depending on the strength of the tap.

Another example shown in the patent is selecting and expanding the boxes in a spreadsheet.

Tapping in various corners of the handset could select cells or rows to the left or right of the original.

‘The iPhone includes a variety of components, such as a GPS, an accelerometer, a compass, and a gyroscope, which the iPhone's OS can use to determine the iPhone's current location, orientation, speed, and attitude,’ continued the filing.

‘The iPhone's OS can detect events from these components and pass these events on to applications that are on the iPhone.

‘Those applications can then handle the events in a manner that is custom to those applications.’

And the technology wouldn’t just register taps.

Using its built-in components, the iPhone could detect shakes, and when used with the Photos app for example, could scroll through images each time this shakes are recognised.

Apple’s devices already have similar features.

When writing a message, shaking the phone will undo the typing. To make selecting words or letters more precise, the current iOS shows a magnifying glass when the screen is pressed for more than a second.

And the Apple Watch, as well as the firm’s latest Macbook, come with Force Touch.

Force Touch uses tiny electrodes to distinguish between a light tap and a deep press. This then triggers instant access to a range of controls.

'With Force Touch, pressing firmly on the screen brings up additional controls in apps like Messages, Music, and Calendar,' said Apple.

'It also lets you select different watch faces, pause or end a workout, search an address in Maps, and more. Force Touch is the most significant new sensing capability since Multiâ€'Touch.'

Authorities find human remains found in car after 43 years
from Fort Bragg News

Investigators following up on leads going back 43 years have found human remains in a 1968 Pontiac recovered from a lake in North Carolina.

Sheriff's investigators told local media outlets on Wednesday the car model matches the car belonging to a person reported missing on Feb. 19, 1972.

Sheriff's Lt. Aaron Barlowe said the remains will be transferred to the N.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for an autopsy and identification. He said there were no signs of foul play so far.

Barlowe said investigators and a dive team used advanced sonar to find the car in 30 feet of water.

The missing person's identity hasn't been released.

Lake Rhodhiss, where the car and remains were found, is approximately 75 miles northwest of Charlotte.

Britain Plans to Cut Subsidies for Renewable Energy
from The New York Times

The British government on Wednesday announced plans to curb the costs of subsidies for renewable forms of energy like solar power, arguing that the industry could survive without the support.

Representatives of Britain’s growing solar industry, which has been a surprising success story, expressed dismay, and environmental groups saw the move as a setback for the country’s efforts to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions associated with climate change.

The government also said that it was acting to decrease the costs for consumers, who pay for the renewables through taxes in their energy bills.

“We need to keep bills as low as possible for hardworking families and businesses while reducing our emissions in the most cost-effective way,” Amber Rudd, the energy and climate change minister, said in a statement.

Until recently, Britain had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of renewable energy. Encouraged by a subsidy program, the percentage of electricity generated from renewable sources like solar power and wind has roughly doubled in Britain to about 22 percent over the last three years.

Britain is joining other countries like Spain and Germany that have already reduced incentives for at least some renewable energy sources. In addition, sharp falls in the prices of oil and natural gas over the last year have undermined the competitiveness of green energy. When programs like Britain’s were created, it was widely assumed that oil and gas prices would continue to rise, making the projected high costs of renewable power seem more affordable.

From the viewpoint of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservative Party won a parliamentary majority in May elections, the renewables program has attracted too much investment. A complication of the program is that the more electricity the green sources generate, the more subsidies they command.

Although electricity costs have leveled off recently, household electricity bills have risen about 60 percent over the last decade. Green measures add about 15 percent to those bills, according to analysts’ estimates.

The government says that its projections show the cost of subsidies exceeding the target of 7.6 billion pounds, or about $11.8 billion, it has set for 2020, by about £1.5 billion.

A big portion of the increase comes from wind power, but despite its reputation for clouds and drizzle, Britain has also seen a boom in solar energy. The country was among the first in the European Union to set up sun-catching panels across many farms and rooftops in the last two years as investors and homeowners rushed to take advantage of the combination of subsidies and falling equipment costs. Electricity from solar energy increased 60 percent in the past year, though it remains a small portion of the overall power supply.

The government said it was proposing to cut subsidies on smaller solar projects of up to 5 megawatts, which usually equate to plots of about 25 acres. The government has already said that larger solar projects, as well as onshore wind facilities, would no longer be eligible for big subsidies. Some of the Conservative Party’s supporters in rural areas consider solar and wind farms to be a blight on the landscape. Projects that are already underway will probably keep their subsidies. The plans need parliamentary approval, which is expected under the Tory majority, and would take effect in April.

“This is very disappointing for the solar industry,” said Leonie Greene, a spokeswoman for the Solar Trade Association, an industry group.

Ms. Greene said that with costs of installations falling fast, solar farms were close to being competitive with new power plants fired by natural gas. But she said that a couple more years of government support was warranted to give the developers time to close the gap further.

Juliet Davenport, chief executive of Good Energy, a renewable energy business that owns six solar farms in Britain, said: “From our point of view, any change of policy means investors are concerned about investing.”

“It makes business strategy very difficult,” she added.

Deepa Venkateswaran, an analyst at Bernstein Research in London, said that electric power generation was the best bet for further reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, rather than other industrial sectors like transport. She said the government might be sacrificing big climate change gains for budgetary savings that amount to “small change.”

“Investors in the power sector are ready to make the investments in renewables,” she said. “If the government takes away the incentives or gives low clarity, clearly those investments won’t happen.”

Italy Arrests 2 Men Accused of Planning Terrorist Attacks
from The New York Times

The Italian police on Wednesday arrested two men accused of plotting attacks on national landmarks in Italy and of posting threatening messages online in support of the Islamic State.

One photograph identified by the police as evidence showed Milan’s central train station with a caption that said: “Islamic State in Rome. We are on your streets.”

The two men, a 35-year-old Tunisian and a 26-year-old Pakistani, lived near Brescia, in the Lombardy region. Prosecutors said the men had also set their sights on a military base near Brescia as a potential target and had expressed a desire to travel to the territory controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to receive military training.

“They spoke of many potential targets,” but the two were arrested before moving “into an active phase,” a Milan prosecutor, Maurizio Romanelli, said at a news conference on Wednesday.

McDonald's New 'All Day Breakfast' Underscores Challenging Times for Fast Food
from Vice News

McDonald's is inching closer to the long-awaited decision to offer its breakfast menu all day, a move that will allow it to make a play for a growing market that could help the struggling burger giant staunch its profit losses.

According to a memo sent to franchisees and obtained by the Wall Street Journal, McDonald's is preparing to have its restaurants offer some items from the company's breakfast menu all day long beginning as early as this fall. The company has been testing the idea of extending breakfast hours past the traditional 10:30 a.m. cutoff time in a few locations throughout the US.

McDonald's, in response to the report, said that "serving all-day breakfast is likely the number one request we hear from McDonald's customers. We're testing it out in a few markets to learn more about this possibility. We know your mouth is watering, but there's no news on this yet."

The all-day breakfast move is the latest strategy to try and boost profits amid slumping sales and increasing consumer demand for healthier, higher-quality foods, according to industry watcher Andrew Alvarez, who's with the market research firm IBISWorld. Alvarez said that over the past five years McDonald's has struggled to compete with restaurant chains like Chipotle that have placed an emphasis on humanely raised, healthy, GMO-free food in a hip setting. In response, McDonald's has begun testing touchscreen ordering menus and customizable menu items,  and said it will begin serving antibiotic-free chicken. It has also focused on growing its international market since the domestic one is so saturated, he said.

The expansion into breakfast would allow McDonald's to try and eke out extra earnings on high-profit items like coffee, which are cheap to make but can be marked up for consumer sales, Alvarez said. But it also represents a wider trend among many fast food and fast casual restaurants looking to get into the breakfast market, which isn't as saturated as lunch and dinner.

"Breakfast in general within the fast food industry has become crucial to win over and the reason for this is basically it's the only time of day where a lot of these companies have experienced steady growth during recent years," Alvarez said, noting that Millenials have primarily driven the growth in the breakfast category by demanding breakfast options later in the day. "There isn't much competition yet. It's still a place where you can get some market share and consumer loyalty."

According to the Journal, many franchisees are unhappy with some of the changes, especially the costly ones, after having to incur debt to remodel their restaurants. Alvarez said that McDonald's is moving more toward franchise-owned locations than it has in the past, and franchisees have become disillusioned with McDonald's hands-off approach to helping them respond to market changes.

"A lot of this results from top-down pressure. Among the franchisees there is a large amount of discontent with the lack of support the company itself offers to the franchises. That started to become a little more obvious to everybody in the media once the company decided they were going to raise minimum wage in all the company-owned stores but basically stopped short of forcing franchisees to do that," Alvarez said. 

"These are basically modest changes. It's a start for the company that has a lot to do and a long way to go in terms of fixing its brand image and bringing people back through the door, and to be able to build confidence in its ability to source high-quality natural ingredients to match consumer preferences that are not waning anytime soon it seems," he said.

Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley, said that McDonald's play for breakfast won't save it amid a widespread consensus among consumers that cheap food isn't worth the costs to quality food and fair labor.

"McDonald's is suffering because the 'value meal' idea is not working anymore," she told VICE News today. "Even Walmart is experiencing this. Cheap everything at the cost of so much has had its time, and it's come to an end. This is the wholesale rejection by the public of this idea that you can have very very very cheap things and not expect any external costs."

She said that a majority of consumers now support raising the minimum wage, as do bipartisan legislators in many states, and that McDonald's will have to prove it is committed to treating workers fairly as well as increasing food quality. The national campaign Fight for $15, arguing that minimum wage should be raised to $15 an hour, has focused much of its argument against McDonald's and other fast food chains. Members of both the Senate and the House said they introduced legislation Wednesday to raise the minimum wage to $15.

Jayaraman said she is convinced consumers are willing to pay higher prices for better quality, and that UCLA's research into the price difference shows it would only cost around 40 cents more per meal for McDonald's to pay higher wages and buy better ingredients.

Jayaraman and Alvarez said unless McDonald's can completely revamp its image to convey that it serves quality food, it won't be able to bounce back in the current consumer climate.

"It isn't just about making breakfast food available all day. Their whole business model is at stake," she said. "Just look at the extraordinary success of Chipotle in all ways -- that it has done so well in the shareholder world, that it is all about quality food and what's going into your body and the quality treatment of people and animals. They really market the hell out of that and it's working for them, it's really working for them."

"In contrast I don't think anything about what McDonald's is marketing, the McBudget or breakfast all day, is working," she said.

Federal Charges Including Hate Crimes for Accused Shooter
from ABC News

The man accused of killing nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, was motivated by racial hatred and a desire to commit a "notorious attack" when he opened fire inside a historic house of worship last month, according to a federal grand jury indictment issued Wednesday that makes him eligible for the death penalty.

The 33-count federal indictment charges Dylann Roof, 21, with hate crimes, firearms violations and obstructing the practice of religion in the June 17 shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The charges announced Wednesday by Attorney General Loretta Lynch are in addition to state murder charges brought against Roof days after the shooting.

The Justice Department has not decided whether it will seek the death penalty against Roof, nor whether its prosecution will come prior to the state's case. But in mounting a federal case, Justice Department prosecutors made clear that they consider the killings rooted in racial hatred and the type of attack that their hate-crime statutes are designed to cover.

Because South Carolina has no state hate-crime law, federal charges were needed to adequately deal with a defendant who "decided to seek out and murder African-Americans because of their race," Lynch said.

The state's case has so far been sparse in its details, but the federal grand jury indictment accuses Roof â€" who is white and had appeared in photos waving Confederate flags â€" of setting his sights for months on murderous attacks on blacks because of their race and of wanting to carry out violence in a black church.

The indictment describes Roof's use of a personal manuscript in which he decried integration, used racial slurs to refer to blacks and disparaged them as inferior to whites. Prosecutors believe he planned for months to increase racial tensions throughout the country and seek retribution for perceived wrongs he thought had been committed against white people.

And when it came to picking a target, he purposefully selected the historic church â€" a centuries-old religious institution rooted in South Carolina history â€" "in order to make his attack more notorious," according to the indictment. Survivors told police he used racial insults during the attack.

"To carry out these twin goals of fanning racial flames and exacting revenge, Roof further decided to seek out and murder African-Americans because of their race," Lynch said.

He took advantage of his victims' generosity when they welcomed Roof into their Bible-study group, she said.

"The parishioners had Bibles. Dylann Roof had his .45-caliber Glock pistol, and eight magazines loaded with hollow-point bullets."

Several of the counts â€" including weapons violations and obstructing the practice of religion, resulting in death â€" carry a possible death sentence, though the Justice Department has not decided whether to seek it. Lynch said the Justice Department would be consulting during the decision-making process with victims' families, some of whom expressed forgiveness for Roof when he appeared in court after the shooting.

The Justice Department has charged a couple hundred defendants in hate crime cases in the last five years, but even in circumstances in which the motive seems clear-cut, it can still be challenging to prove that a defendant was primarily driven by a victim's race or religion as opposed to other factors frequently invoked by defense attorneys, such as drug addiction or mental illness.

Last year, a federal appeals court in Ohio overturned hate-crime convictions against Amish men and women accused in beard- and hair-cutting attacks against fellow Amish people who were thought to have defied the community leader. The court held that the jury had received incorrect instructions about how to weigh the role of religion in the attacks and that prosecutors should have had to prove that the assaults wouldn't have happened but for religious motives. Their sentences have since been reduced.

Yet prosecutors in the Roof case appear to have a lot to work with, said Jens David Ohlin, a law professor at Cornell University who has followed the case.

It's going to be, he predicted, "very, very easy for a federal jury to conclude that the crime was committed for racial reasons because of the mountains of evidence that Roof left behind."

Teen's Nosebleed Leads to 3 in Family Diagnosed With Dangerous Illness
from ABC News

A teen's trip to the doctor for a nosebleed led to potentially life-saving diagnoses for three members of a Texas family.

Crystal Enns’ parents were first alarmed when in 2013 the teen had a serious nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. But they were astounded when, after a trip to the doctor, Crystal was diagnosed with a serious kidney disease called juvenile nephronophthisis. According to the National Institute of Health, the disease causes “inflammation and scarring of the kidneys and ultimately leads to a life-threatening failure of kidney function.”

It was so serious that Crystal, then 14, would need a transplant.

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” Crystal, now 17, told local station KTVT. “I didn’t want to think that that would have to happen.”

Dr. Albert Quan, a pediatric nephrologist at Medical City Children’s Hospital in Dallas who treated Crystal, said the nosebleed didn't actually have anything to do with the rare kidney disease, but standard lab tests revealed the disease.

"This kidney disease doesn’t get better," Quan told ABC News. "The best we can do is slow the decline. In mid- to late-adolescence you either have ... to put her on dialysis or you have to [get her a] kidney transplant."

Crystal’s parents, however, were immediately ready to jump in and donate a kidney if they were a match. The teen’s mother, Cristy, was first to get tested and seemed on board to be donor until the final screening, according to KTVT. A spot was detected on her kidney, negating her ability to be a donor and leading to more tests for kidney disease and cancer.

Crystal’s father was next to be tested, but his results were even more alarming. His doctor called to tell him that not only was he not a donor candidate but he had kidney cancer.

“The doctor that called said, ‘This is lights and sirens, this is top of your to do list, this needs to come out right away, this doesn’t look good,’” Mark Enns told KTVT.

The family was dealt another blow when a scan of Cristy’s kidney revealed she, too, had the same kind of cancer that her husband had. Because the cancer was caught so early, both parents were able to be treated with an operation and did not need chemotherapy.

"We are overwhelmed with gratitude to God for allowing us to find out about her kidney disease when we did because Mark and I would never have been tested otherwise," Cristy Enns wrote in an email for ABC News. "The timing of her nosebleed allowed us to begin the donor screening process early, with plenty of time to discover and take care of our alarming cancer diagnosis before it came time for Crystal's transplant."

Quan said they are now working with a geneticist to determine if there was any possible genetic factor that could have affected both the parents' and Crystal's kidneys.

“I have to tell you that’s never happened to me and I’ve been doing this about 25 years,” Quan said of the parents being diagnosed with cancer during donor screenings.

While both of Crystal’s parents were unable to donate a kidney, Crystal’s aunt turned out to be a perfect match. In April of this year, Crystal successfully underwent kidney transplant surgery and is now getting ready to head to school next month according to her doctor. Her parents say they hope their story encourages others to consider being organ donors.

"If anyone is considering organ donation, but they have fears about if it is safe to do so ... take courage," wrote Cristy Enns. "Being screened as a donor could be a win-win for you. ... Either you are able to save someone else's life, or you could end up finding out about a health issue in your own life that you may never have known about otherwise."

Where did the first Americans come from? New clues from new studies.
from Christian Science Monitor

Who were the first Americans? Two research papers this week have arrived at contrasting interpretations.

One study, published Tuesday in the journal Science, proposes that the earliest Americans had singularly Siberian origins, crossing into the continent via the Bering land bridge in a single wave. Another, published Tuesday in Nature, suggests that some early Native Americans may have had genetic roots in Australia and its neighboring islands, a region known collectively as Australasia.

The peopling of the Americas is a matter of great anthropological and archaeological interest. We see evidence of unique culture on the continent over 10,000 years ago, but exactly how these populations arrived on the continent, and from where, has been debated for decades. Scientists generally agree that the first Americans crossed over from Asia via the Bering land bridge, which connected the two continents.

This exodus most likely began between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. But some researchers have argued that Alaskan glaciers would have blocked entry into North America. The Beringia standstill hypothesis suggests that human populations would have remained stranded on this land bridge for some 15,000 years before ice melt finally allowed clear passage into the continent. From there, this main emigrant population would have split and diversified into many different first cultures.

Experts have noted that some early American skeletons, most older than 8,000 years, were found with physical features that seemed to contrast with those of historic and modern Native Americans. Some younger samples from South America also had these distinguishing traits.

“They have suggested that this morphology matches more closely with Australasian populations,” says Pontus Skoglund, who co-authored the Nature study. “But there has always been this question of how statistically informative this morphology is, and to what extent this actually reflects population relationships.”

Using genomic data from Native American populations in South America and Central America, Skoglund and his colleagues found a surprising pattern. In some of these populations, they found a small degree of Australasian genetic ancestry.

“We found the peak of that signal in Brazil, which is also where people have suggested that the last populations with this morphology existed,” Skoglund says. “We don’t think that it’s likely that there was a population much more closely related to Australasians than to the Native Americans of today. But perhaps this is one step toward an explanation.”

A genetic link between Amazonian Native Americans and Australasians, Skoglund says, was previously unknown, and could have serious implications.

“I think almost no geneticists would have expected this,” Skoglund says. “What it tells us in terms of history, which is more important, is that there was a greater diversity of Native American ancestral populations than people previously thought.”

Skoglund and colleagues propose that, just before heading for the Americas, ancient Siberian populations could have mixed with an Australasian "Population Y." But the "how" and "when" are confined to mystery. The genetic data, Skoglund says, simply doesn’t tell us about that.

“My speculation is that there was a population quite closely related to Australasians in Northeast Asia around the time of the peopling of the Americas,” Skoglund says. “This population could have mixed with other populations to form the ancestral population of Native Americans. But there were perhaps multiple pulses of people into the Americas, and they had slightly different proportions of this ancestry. But which of the pulses came first and which different routes they took, we just don’t know.”

“The genetics have so far suggest that, in terms of ancient migrations, there was only a single one,” Skoglund adds. “There were a few additional migrations in the northern parts of the Americas, but those were more recent events.”

Similar genomic testing conducted by UC Berkeley geneticist Rasmus Nielsen supports the notion of a single migration. But it also challenges the Beringian standstill hypothesis in the process.

“We wanted to test it by dating the divergence time â€" that is, the split time between populations that now live in Siberia and East Asia, and the Native Americans,” Nielsen says. “How long since they had a common population that lived in Siberia or somewhere in Asia? Using a number of new techniques and data, we could date that relatively precisely to be about 23,000 years ago.”

Given this approximation, a Beringian standstill would have been impossible.

“The first people appear in the Americas 14,000 or 15,000 years ago,” Nielsen says. “That doesn’t leave time for a Beringian standstill. They had to split off about 23,000 years ago, move all the way through Asia, and cross the land bridge into the Americas in 7,000 to 8,000 years. So clearly there was no 15,000-year Beringian standstill. There could have been a little bit of a standstill, but nothing like 15,000 years.”

Nielsen’s research offers a broader view of settlement. Migration would have occurred in a single wave, Nielsen says, before splitting into two main populations.

“We see that mostly all Native Americans are descendants from a migration wave into the Americas, maybe 20,000 years ago,” Nielsen says. “You see the first unique American culture about 13,500 years ago, which spreads through much of the Americas. Right around this time, we see that the Native American population first began splitting up. We find two major groups â€" what we call the southern group and the northern group.”

Nielsen says his colleagues found just two exceptions to their findings. The study doesn’t account for Inuit populations in the north because they arrived later, bringing a distinctive culture with them.

“The other little exception, which was very interesting, was that we found signs of some genetic affinity between Brazilian Native Americans and Melanesians,” Nielsen says. “They were just slightly more related than they really should have been, given previous data.”

Like Skoglund and colleagues, Nielsen’s team found Australasian ancestry in modern Native American people. This led them to investigate another hypothesis for the peopling of America â€" one Paleoamerican hypothesis, which suggests that the first people to come to the Americas were not from Siberia, but rather Australians and Melanesians who traveled by boat.

“We find a hint of evidence for this hypothesis in some South American populations,” Nielsen says. “We managed to extract some DNA from ancient samples of supposed Paleoamericans, who display more Australian and Melanesian-looking traits. But do these individuals actually have any genetic affinity with Australians and Melanesians? When we tested that, we found that the answer was no. They are clearly related only to modern Native Americans. We think this is evidence of a later migration, perhaps one that happened on a coastal route along the western coast about 8,000 years ago.”

According to Nielsen and Skoglund, both studies rely on the same genetic signals. But different interpretations of those signals resulted in a few contrasting conclusions.

“They saw the exact same signal, and they have even stronger evidence for that signal,” Nielsen says. “They feel, as was our first hunch too, that this may be support for a Paleoamerican hypothesis. But if so, we should be able to see evidence of it in the ancient DNA, and we don’t.”

But interpretations aside, both studies share a common goal â€" to answer the basic questions about how the Americas were populated.

“This has been a really old, very controversial question with lots of different theories,” Nielsen says. “What we have shown is that, with the caveat of this little signal in the South Americas, we’re back at the most boring, most vanilla theory â€" one big migration that happened around 20,000 years ago. We have no support for all of these more fanciful theories.”

With Caitlyn Jenner’s New Show, a Reality Producer Tries to Tame the Antics
from New York Times

“I Am Cait,” the new E! reality series starring Caitlyn Jenner, begins at 4:32 a.m. with Ms. Jenner wide-awake. Looking exhausted, she stares into a camera and agonizes over the stress in becoming a sudden role model for transgender people everywhere. “I hope I get it right,” she says, twice.

It’s a sobering moment, one of many in the first episode of “I Am Cait,” which will make its debut on Sunday. The show chronicles Ms. Jenner’s new life as Caitlyn, a person the world previously knew as Bruce Jenner, the Olympic star and the patriarch of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” for 10 seasons.

But the new show also provides a challenge for Bunim/Murray Productions, the company best known for the freewheeling antics of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” not the sensitive and potentially explosive issues surrounding Ms. Jenner.

Her transition has been a major cultural moment, with a widely praised rollout â€" an interview with Diane Sawyer in April, the E! “About Bruce” special in May, a Vanity Fair cover story in June and a moving speech at the ESPYs last week.

But the reality show is a more complicated affair: It’s eight one-hour episodes of Ms. Jenner educating herself on transgender issues, along with a dash of Kim and Kanye, Kylie and Khloe.

In other words, it may be Ms. Jenner’s show, but the Kardashian DNA remains, for good and ill. Ms. Jenner’s children from her first two marriages have refused to participate because of Bunim/Murray’s involvement, according to the Vanity Fair profile. Brandon Jenner, who has appeared on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” described Bunim/Murray’s shows â€" “Total Divas,” “Bad Girls Club” and “Project Runway” â€" as “a circus” and said he felt that the producers would develop a show that would be the “the opposite of inspiration.” (Ms. Jenner declined to comment for this article.)

To answer this criticism, Bunim/Murray will have to prove it can deliver a show that doesn’t exploit or sensationalize its subject. And, if it passes that test, it must pass another: Can it have an effect without being a bore?

“I think our track record speaks for itself,” said Gil Goldschein, the chief executive of Bunim/Murray. “When you work with someone for that long, there are relationships and a trust factor, and if you’re dealing with what Caitlyn is dealing with, I think it’s very important to work with people you trust.”

In the premiere episode, there are lighthearted scenes, including Ms. Jenner taking Kim Kardashian on a tour of her closet (Kanye West, who is married to Kim, also makes an appearance), and lamenting that she needs a sports bra while playing tennis.

But it also features extensive talk about the suicide rate among transgender people, and Ms. Jenner visits the mother of a trans teenager who killed himself. Ms. Jenner also reveals her new look, post-transition, to her mother and sisters, and has them sit down with a counselor to help navigate thorny territory like how Ms. Jenner’s mother can reconcile her daughter’s decision with the Bible.

“I often joke on the set, ‘Oh my god, this is like for PBS,’ ” said Jeff Jenkins, an executive at Bunim/Murray and an executive producer for “I Am Cait” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” “There aren’t sisters screaming at each other, arguing over a blouse. It’s a pure documentary about a human being starting a major new chapter in their life.”

Bunim/Murray has been here before. It made television history in 1993, when it cast Pedro Zamora, an H.I.V.-positive Cuban immigrant for the third season of MTV’s “The Real World.” Mr. Zamora’s openness about his H.I.V. status and his relationships with his roommates (the understanding Rachel, the irritating Puck) made him a sensation and earned the show plaudits. He died just hours after the final episode of the season aired.

Jonathan Murray, a founder of Bunim/Murray, said that the former President Bill Clinton told him that the show did more for AIDS education than his administration could ever do.

Bunim/Murray Productions was founded in 1987 by Mr. Murray, a local TV news programmer, and Mary-Ellis Bunim, a soap opera producer. (She died in 2004.) The company is widely considered a pioneer in the reality TV show genre, and when Bunim and Murray developed “The Real World” for MTV in the early 1990s, they had lofty goals.

“We had this old-fashioned idea, this sort of liberal idea, that if you put people together who normally wouldn’t live together, yes there will be conflict, but out of that conflict will come growth,” Mr. Murray said.

But over the years, “The Real World” became less known for stories like Mr. Zamora’s and more for wild and mostly forgettable cast members splashing around in hot tubs. Other Bunim/Murray offerings have come along, including “Dr. Steve-O”; “One Ocean View”; the Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie show “The Simple Life”; and, in 2008, the company took over producing duties for “Project Runway.”

Mr. Murray defended Bunim/Murray’s credentials by pointing to productions like the warmly received documentaries “Valentine Road” and “Autism the Musical,” both of which appeared on HBO. In addition, he discussed Katelynn Cusanelli, a transgender woman who appeared as a cast member of “The Real World” in 2009.

(Mr. Murray must also suspect there’s a moment here: He said he was developing a show on mothers with children who are “expressing gender issues.”)

But there are also hints of repentance. Mr. Murray recently donated $6.7 million to the University of Missouri to start a documentary journalism program, and thanked the university for “taking some of my dirty reality money.”

The story of how Bunim/Murray became the producers of Ms. Jenner’s show began about a year ago. Mr. Jenkins said that one of his field producers on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” called him to say that Ms. Jenner needed to see him immediately. The rumors were true: She was going to transition.

“I thought that someone was punking me or playing an April Fool’s joke,” Mr. Jenkins said.

Mr. Murray added: “I felt a little silly at first because I kept saying, ‘Oh you can’t believe those tabloids.’ ”

Talk of a show did not happen until or a month or two later, Mr. Jenkins said, but once Ms. Jenner got to the core idea that she could help people, she wanted to do one.

“She would have been so hounded for the story,” Mr. Jenkins said, “and that’s why, in my understanding, she decided, I’ll tell the story: So I can hopefully tell all of it in the right way.”

But Mr. Jenkins had to change the way things were done: “I Am Cait” became more about “turning the camera on, and what happens, happens” and less concerned with “chasing down or trying to accentuate” dramatic moments as happened on the Kardashian show.

Ms. Jenner has a lot of editorial control, and the producers defer to her choices, almost to a fault. Mr. Jenkins said that Ms. Jenner probably had more control than his ex-wife, Kris Jenner, does with “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” (Kris Jenner does not have a producing credit on “I Am Cait.”)

“With ‘Keeping Up,’ if a cast member says, ‘No, I don’t want to shoot that,’ I say, ‘Well you need to shoot that, you need to share that, that’s what you signed up for, this is a reality show, that’s your job,’ ” Mr. Jenkins said. “With Caitlyn? No, she’s in the driver’s seat. I do not push back on things like that. It’s such a sensitive subject and I feel Caitlyn has an inner compass of what’s right and what’s wrong and we’re following her lead sincerely.”

The producers are aware that hourlong sermons about the hardships of transgender people may not be what E! viewers are craving. “We don’t want it just to be some kind of educational lecture,” Mr. Murray said. But they said they felt that they had struck the right balance here.

“We have a lot faith in our subject,” Mr. Murray said. “What Caitlyn is going through has enough inherent drama and enough inherent story that we don’t need to mess with it.”

[Microsoft Garage]

Microsoft launches lightweight email app Send for iPhone, coming soon to Android and Windows Phone
from Venture Beat

Microsoft has launched a new standalone email app today called Send, available only for iPhone users in the U.S. and Canada for now.

Rumors first emerged of such an app back in May, though it was originally believed it would be called Flow.

It’s clear that Microsoft doesn’t want to cannibalize its main Outlook email app with this latest offering â€" the company said it’s looking to target those situations when you just need to send snappy messages to coworkers.

With Send, Microsoft is doing away with subject lines and signatures â€" it’s all geared towards short-form conversations. So rather than using this for sending notes from meetings, it’s more about imparting key facts or asking quick questions such as “I’m running 10 minutes late” or “Where is the meeting being held?”

And while it does kind of resemble text messaging, it’s linked in with a user’s Outlook account, tapping email addresses rather than mobile phone numbers.

Only messages sent through this app will be visible within Send â€" but in Outlook, all messages will be visible from across both services.

Besides the initial geographic and platform restrictions, the Send app will also only work for those with Office 365 business and school email accounts, though once Microsoft has garnered feedback it does plan to open things up “in the coming months.” It will also be launching for Android and Windows Phone.

Microsoft Garage

Send is the latest in a long line of apps to emerge from Microsoft Garage, the software giant’s lab for experimental tinkering.

Today’s launch comes less than three weeks after Microsoft launched Tossup, an app designed to help you create impromptu polls around events. Other Microsoft Garage projects include Snipp3t, which launched in August of last year, the Next Lock Screen app for Android, and Journeys & Notes.

Given that Send is a Microsoft Garage project, it may never actually become an official Microsoft product. But it does actually seem like quite a good idea for mobile-centric workplaces â€" and despite losing market share elsewhere in the consumer realm, Microsoft still holds significant mindshare in the enterprise.

Apple has $203 billion in cash. Why?
from CNN

Bad news for Apple. The company is worth about $40 billion less than it was yesterday.

Good news for Apple. The company has $203 billion in cash on its balance sheet, becoming the first corporation ever to cross the $200 billion mark.

Apple's stock sank 5% Wednesday morning. The company had a solid quarter. But solid is not good enough when you're Apple. Investors were disappointed that iPhone sales were a little lower than expected.

But make no mistake. Apple is not in financial trouble. It continues to mint money. The company reported cash flow from operations of $15 billion in its latest quarter.

That helped add to Apple's record cash hoard. The company had $193.5 billion at the end of April and $164.5 billion in cash at this time a year ago.

If Apple keeps piling up cash at this rate, it's likely to have a quarter of a trillion dollars on its balance sheet at some point in the next year!

CNNMoney tech editor David Goldman and I have joked about all the things Apple could afford to buy with its cash. Every professional sports team in the U.S. Disney. Coke. Both Tesla and Uber.

But what's truly iStonishing about Apple's growing cash pile is the fact that it isn't exactly stingy with its money.

Apple chief financial officer Luca Maestri pointed out during the company's conference call with analysts on Tuesday that the company spent $4 billion during the quarter on stock buybacks and another $3.1 billion on dividends.

That's part of a broader plan to return $200 billion in capital to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. That's something which helps keep investor Carl Icahn happy.

Still, it's fair to wonder why Apple needs all this cash. It's one thing to save for a rainy day. But Apple seems to be acting like Noah and preparing for a 40-day flood.

Apple probably doesn't have to worry about an antitrust battle like the one Microsoft faced with the U.S. government in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nobody is calling for Apple to be broken up.

It also would be a huge shock if Apple was adding to its cash reserves in order to pay for a massive acquisition.

While Apple has been more apt to do deals under Tim Cook's watch than when Steve Jobs was CEO, its biggest purchase so far was Beats Electronics last year. And that cost a mere $3 billion.

Apple may be waiting for tax changes in the United States before it puts more of its cash to use though. Maestri noted that $181 billion of its cash â€" nearly 90% of the entire iMountain â€" is held offshore.

Apple is one of several big American tech companies that have been criticized for keeping much of their cash in foreign subsidiaries. Google, Microsoft and Cisco have also come under fire for this.

But if Apple moved this cash back to the U.S., it would face a massive tax bill.

So Apple has actually been going into hock to help fund some of its stock buybacks and dividends. The company raised $10 billion in debt last quarter and now has about $47 billion in long-term debt overall.

At some point though, Apple may face even more pressure to do something productive with its $200 billion war chest instead of letting it collect dust in Ireland and other tax havens.

[An Islamic manuscript discovered in the University of Birmingham library has been identified as one of the world's oldest fragments of the Koran.]

World's oldest Koran discovered in Birmingham
from Independent

An Islamic manuscript discovered in the University of Birmingham library has been identified as one of the world's oldest fragments of the Koran.

Radiocarbon analysis has dated the now "globally significant" parchment bearing the text to a period between AD 568 and 645 with 95.4pc accuracy.

The results of the test, conducted at the University of Oxford, strongly suggest the manuscript was written less than 20 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed.

Professor David Thomas, professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham, said: "The radiocarbon dating of the Birmingham Koran folios has yielded a startling result and reveals one of the most surprising secrets of the university's collections. They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam."

He added: "This means that the parts of the Koran that are written on this parchment can, with a degree of confidence, be dated to less than two decades after Mohammed's death.

"These portions must have been in a form that is very close to the form of the Koran read today."

Katy Perry Jumps Into Twitter Debate Between Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj
from People Magazine

It looks like a little more "Bad Blood" may have just been spilled.

Katy Perry jumped into the tense Twitter debate between Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj on Wednesday.

In her own Twitter post, quickly retweeted by tens of thousands, Perry, 30 â€" without naming names â€" seemed to suggest it was "ironic" that Swift had criticized Minaj for starting a feud between two women, when Swift herself seemed to be fanning such flames.

Perry's words followed Swift's Tweet from Tuesday in which she responded to Minaj's Tweet about not getting an MTV Video Music Awards nomination for Video of the Year. Minaj, 32, said she'd have to put "women with very slim bodies" in a video to get a nod, which Swift, 25, took as a reference to her. (Minaj later said it wasn't, and they seemed to half-patch things up.)

After a conciliatory Tweet, Swift left the topic alone, though Minaj linked to a number of articles about the dustup on Wednesday.

Perry's Tweet on Wednesday fanned the flames of a rumored long-running feud with Swift, and many believe Swift's hit song "Bad Blood" is about Perry.

Will Swift fire back at Perry? Don't count on it. Swift has already vowed not to talk about her in public.

Dispute Over Sandra Bland’s Mental State Follows Death in a Texas Jail
from New York Times

A 28-year-old woman whose arrest this month during a traffic stop ended with her hanging death in a county jail cell told officials that she tried last year to kill herself, the Texas sheriff who oversees the jail said on Wednesday. But the jailers did not put her on suicide watch, and her family’s lawyer said that relatives had no evidence that she had ever tried to commit suicide or struggled with depression.

The back-and-forth over the mental state of the woman, Sandra Bland, came a day after Texas authorities released a dashboard camera video showing how a stop for changing lanes without signaling escalated into a shouting match and struggle between Ms. Bland, who was African-American, and a white state trooper, Brian T. Encinia.

Some legal experts who reviewed the video raised questions about whether Ms. Bland, who was moving to Hempstead from the Chicago area to take a job at a local college, should have ever been arrested.

“This whole thing could have been avoided,” said Christopher C. Cooper, a civil rights lawyer, former Washington police officer and a recognized expert in police conflict resolution. He said that the video showed that the trooper’s decision to stop Ms. Bland for a minor infraction was legal but questionable, and that the officer’s angry, forceful response to Ms. Bland’s refusal to put out a cigarette seemed excessive.Ms. Bland’s journey from arrest to death in the cell where she was found hanging on July 13 has brought demands from friends, family members and supporters nationwide, fueled by social media, for answers to how she died, with many insisting that she was not suicidal.

Her death was the latest in a string of fatal encounters between unarmed African-Americans and the police that have spurred protests in many cities.

Trooper Encinia, who worked for a fire department and a dairy before joining the Texas troopers about a year ago, has been placed on administrative duty; the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety said that he had violated department arrest procedures.

The Waller County sheriff, R. Glenn Smith, said in an interview that Ms. Bland had mentioned a suicide attempt during interviews with two officials who processed her entry into the jail on July 10. Sheriff Smith said that jailers had elected not to place a suicide watch on her cell after she told them that she was not depressed at the time, but was just angry about her detention.

In addition, the authorities late on Wednesday released the 15-page jail-booking screening form, which included questions about Ms. Bland’s mental health. On the form, the “yes” box was checked in response to the question, “Have you ever been depressed?” On whether she had ever attempted suicide, the form noted “yes,” in 2014, by using “pills” because of a “lost baby.”

But speaking at a news conference outside Chicago, Ms. Bland’s family and their lawyer categorically rejected suggestions that she had been depressed, describing instead a woman who had taken a job in Texas, stocked her new home with groceries and was “ecstatic” about starting a new chapter in her life.

“That just does not jibe with someone who would take her own life,” the lawyer, Cannon Lambert, said, adding that the family had “no evidence” of her ever attempting to kill herself.

Ms. Bland’s sister Sharon Cooper denounced speculation about Ms. Bland’s mental state as a distraction from what she called the real issue: the actions by the authorities that led to her arrest and imprisonment. She asserted that her sister had been stopped solely because she was from another state.

Mr. Lambert said that the family wanted to know everything that happened in the jail, including what the arresting officer told the people who booked Ms. Bland and whether she had been moved in the jail and how frequently, and he suggested the possibility of a wrongful-death lawsuit.

The Waller County district attorney, Elton Mathis, said in an interview, “Once the entire investigation comes in, it will be reviewed for potential criminal liability on behalf of the trooper, if any. He added, “I don’t want to leave the impression that there is.” He said he planned to bring the case before a grand jury, a process that could take months.

An autopsy concluded that Ms. Bland asphyxiated herself in her cell on July 13 by fashioning a noose from a plastic garbage bag. Family members have demanded an independent autopsy, and both Mr. Lambert and Mr. Mathis said on Wednesday that only a more thorough inquiry could determine why she had died.

Sheriff’s Department officials allowed members of the news media on Wednesday into the cell where Ms. Bland was found. The cell is one of two women’s cells down a narrow hallway from an open booking area. It is divided by a metal partition that separates the toilet and shower from a part of the cell closer to the door. The plastic bag with which Ms. Bland was found hanging was attached to a Y-shaped stanchion that runs from the floor to the ceiling and supports the partition, investigators have said.

Authorities have said that Ms. Bland was hanged by a plastic liner from a trash container. A circular 32-gallon trash bin was in the cell on Wednesday.

A bag of potato chips and four pieces of bread wrapped in cellophane were on a night stand by the bed where Ms. Bland slept. On the bed was a book titled “101 Ways to Find God’s Purpose in Your Life.” Four other bunks are in the cell â€" including two double-deckers â€" but Ms. Bland was the cell’s only occupant.

The video, released on Tuesday, showed Trooper Encinia pulling her over and then getting angry after she refused to put out her cigarette as he was talking. When he ordered her from the car and she refused, he started shouting, “I’m going to yank you out.” After that threat, he appeared to pull out a stun gun. “Get out of the car,” he shouted. “I will light you up. Get out. Now.”

Before long, Ms. Bland was out of the car shouting insults and obscenities, and the trooper put her in handcuffs. In a part of the encounter out of the camera’s view, a scuffle could be heard with her complaining that her head had been knocked into the ground.

At one point, Ms. Bland is heard telling Trooper Encinia that she had epilepsy, to which Mr. Encinia replies, “Good.”

Mr. Mathis said on CNN that the trooper’s comment was “inappropriate,” adding that he was “disappointed in what I saw from the trooper.” He also said he was asking the F.B.I. to verify the integrity of the video.

Charis Kubrin, University of California, Irvine, a professor who studies issues of race and justice, called Trooper Encinia’s actions “out of step and disproportionate” to Ms. Bland’s irritation and to the seriousness of her traffic infraction. And Ms. Bland, she said, had both a reason and the right to question being stopped for a violation that most officers routinely ignore.

“At every step,” she said, “he is participating in this escalation.”

Two inquiries into Ms. Bland’s death are already underway, by the F.B.I. and the state Department of Public Safety, and they will unfold amid deep suspicion about the circumstances.

Mr. Smith, the Waller County sheriff, was suspended from his job as Hempstead police chief in 2007 after being accused of racism on the job, a charge he has strongly denied.

On Wednesday, the state public safety department was forced to publicly deny that the dashboard video of Ms. Bland’s detention had been edited, a belief embraced by some after a YouTube posting of the nearly hourlong video contained footage that appeared to be missing or repeated. The department later posted a cleaned-up version of the video, explaining that the aberrations were the result of technical problems during uploading, but experts said that was unlikely to satisfy some.

The rerelease of the video points to “a whole other layer of problems” with putting cameras on dashboards and on police officers to monitor police behavior because the videos can be layered, edited and cut, said Professor Kubrin.

Ms. Bland was described by her sister as a fighter for social justice who had posted a video statement on police brutality on Facebook in April. She had moved to Hempstead, about 50 miles outside Houston, for a job at Prairie View A&M University, a historically black institution and her alma mater. The July 10 traffic stop that led to her arrest occurred only a few hundred yards from the university’s main entrance.

In another video she posted to Facebook on March 1, Ms. Bland told her friends that she suffered from both depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, but had found comfort in her Christian faith.

“I gotta be honest with you guys. I am suffering from something that some of you all might be dealing with right now,” she says on the video, which has been viewed over 18,000 times. “It’s a little bit of depression as well as PTSD. I’ve been real stressed out over the past couple of weeks.”

To viewers who may be suffering from similar mental illnesses, Ms. Bland said, “You have to know that it is O.K. It is O.K. because you have someone who loves you. His name is God.”

Friends in Lisle, Ill., remembered Ms. Bland as determined and devout. For much of her life, people said, she had a second home at DuPage African Methodist Episcopal Church, tucked just off the interstate in the quiet suburb.

Ms. Bland, the second-youngest of five daughters, was about 10 when her mother joined the church. Described as outgoing and self-assured, young Ms. Bland quickly became involved in Sunday school, youth choir and the Girl Scout troop the church sponsored, said the Rev. Dr. James F. Miller, the senior pastor.

“She was energetic and easy to make friends,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Miller said Ms. Bland’s skills on the trombone helped her earn a scholarship to Prairie View. When she earned a degree and moved home, she was again a regular at his church.

“When you consider that her mother was a single parent with five girls and she went on to graduate from college, on a scholarship, that was a very great victory,” Mr. Miller said.

Less than a month ago, Ms. Bland worshiped at DuPage A.M.E. for the last time. She was preparing for a new life in Texas, people say, and was excited about what the future held. A few weeks before leaving, Mr. Miller said Ms. Bland approached him after a service.

“She wanted me to know that she was growing spiritually, and that was very wonderful,” Mr. Miller said.

No Colorful Characters Allowed on the Green Courts of Wimbledon
From The Wall Street Journal

Nick Kyrgios, the young Australian tennis star, received some bad news from Wimbledon officials during a match last week: The headband he was wearing had too much color for the tournament’s strict all-white clothing policy.

Mr. Kyrgios turned the headband inside-out and continued the match, but onlookers were a bit perplexed. This wasn’t some neon bauble a sponsor had asked him to wear. It was an official Wimbledon headband that sells for £6, or about $9.25, at the Wimbledon store. “They told me to turn it around, so I turned it around,” he said.

It’s no secret that the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, where Wimbledon is held, is persnickety about player clothing. Just two years ago, Roger Federer, a seven-time-champion at Wimbledon, was ordered to change his shoes because they had orange soles.

But if the talk among players is any indication, this fortnight’s color cops are working harder than ever. Some players aren’t just thinking about their opponents before matches, but also the hues of their various hats, headbands, wristbands and underwear. “I find that a bit of a pity because you can’t do anything,” Mr. Federer said. “No cream color, no this, no that.”

Mike Bryan, the American doubles star, said he and his twin brother, Bob, learned a new rule this year: They have to make sure the black spandex they wear doesn’t stick out below their shorts.

“We’ve had to pull up our tights,” Mike Bryan said. “They’re a little more strict now, we’ve never had that problem in the past.”

That rule, in fact, was implemented last year: “Any undergarments that either are or can be visible during play (including due to perspiration) must also be completely white except for a single trim of color no wider than one centimeter.” Also noted: “Common standards of decency are required at all times.”

Last year, the Bryans had to ditch the hat of their clothing sponsor, K-Swiss, because the underside of the bill was black (they wore Wimbledon hats instead). “We had to turn our wristbands inside out too,” Mr. Bryan said.

Mr. Kyrgios, a 20-year-old who beat Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon last year, donned a headband in a match last week. The headband had the tournament’s logo and a stripe with the tournament’s colors, green and purple. But the stripe was wider than the one-centimeter trim of color the tournament allows on accessories, according to All England Club spokesman Johnny Perkins.

Mr. Kyrgios won the match with the headband turned white-side out.

The Wimbledon clothing rules come in 10 clauses that address, among other topics, off-white and cream (not allowed); neckline and sleeve trim (color acceptable but no wider than one centimeter); logos (no variations of materials or patterns allowed); caps (the underbill must be completely white except a single trim of one centimeter); headbands, bandannas, wristbands and socks (same as caps); shoes (almost entirely white); soles and shoelaces (completely white, and “large manufacturers’ logos are not encouraged”); and medical equipment like athletic tape (white unless absolutely necessary).

Players can wear colors at Wimbledon’s practice courts, but if they practice on match courts, the all-white rule applies. That goes for coaches, too. American pro Bethanie Mattek-Sands said her coach was watching her practice the Saturday before the tournament started when an official inquired about his off-white shirt. “It was only off-white because it had been washed, it started out white,” she said. She said the tournament official accepted the explanation and relented.

Wimbledon officials didn’t have a record of the incident, but confirmed that its rules require all-white clothing for anyone on a court in the main area of the club.

Wimbledon is fussy about more than clothing. The courts at the All England Club are so finely manicured that the finishing touches around the net posts are done with scissors. The grounds are carefully decorated with flowers and commemorative plaques. Players who win the tournament become members and can change in the members’ locker room. Players who have reached at least the quarterfinals can relax in an exclusive hospitality suite.

“At other tournaments there’s no clothing rule, there’s no, ‘Where you can go, where you can’t go,’ ” said 22-year-old American tennis pro Sloane Stephens. “That’s their thing.”

Sometimes, even all-white clothing won’t do. In 1985, American Anne White showed up for her match in a skintight, all-white, one-piece body suit. Photographers flocked to her. The match was called for darkness after two sets and Ms. White was told to return the next day in more traditional attire (she did).

Wimbledon wasn’t always so washed out. John McEnroe used to wear red headbands and shirts with red shoulder patches. Bjorn Borg’s headbands and wristbands had lots of color. Martina Navratilova wore tops and skirts with blue swirly stripes. Tatiana Golovin once caused a tabloid frenzy by wearing red knickers under her white skirt. Serena Williams won Wimbledon in 2012 with bright purple undergarments, headbands and wristbands.

“There were iconic T-shirts, iconic moments,” Mr. Federer said. “I would still be in favor [of] loosening it up a little bit.”

In 1995, the club decided to squelch the color rebellion. It changed the clothing regulation from predominantly white to “almost entirely white.” Last year, officials went further and whited out a loophole to the policy by applying the rule to accessories, like headbands and wristbands, and underwear.

The rules are now so strict that chair umpires are sometimes too cautious. Before Eugenie Bouchard, last year’s finalist, lost in the first round this year, the chair umpire on her court radioed a tournament official about her black bra. Word of an investigation circulated the grounds and people assumed Ms. Bouchard would be asked to change her undergarment. Mr. Perkins, the Wimbledon spokesman, said the strap was deemed legal because it was less than a centimeter wide. Ms. Bouchard had no idea she had come under scrutiny.

“I was not aware of that at all,” she said. “No one told me anything about my bra.”

For all the trouble, players say Wimbledon’s totalitarian traditions have their charms. Bob Bryan, the doubles star, respects one in particular: Centre Court’s walls are almost entirely green, with a few spots of white lettering from a corporate sponsor.

“My buddy was here and we went out and watched Andy Murray in the first round,” Mr. Bryan said. “It just looks so clean, it’s a great look.”

Scott Disick MIA as Kourtney Kardashian takes birthday-girl daughter to Disneyland
From LA Times

Scott Disick was apparently a no-show at Disneyland for his daughter Penelope's third birthday â€" though, given his recent rumored split from Kourtney Kardashian, an invitation might not have been extended.

Kourtney Kardashian, the couple's three kids â€" 5-year-old Mason, 6-month-old Reign and of course the birthday girl â€" aunt Kim Kardashian and 2-year-old cousin North West were spotted at the Anaheim theme park on Wednesday. Grandma Kris Jenner and her boyfriend, Corey Gamble, tagged along as well, Us Weekly reported.

Kourtney reportedly cut Scott loose over the holiday weekend in the wake of his alleged monthlong party bender.

Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed Lord appeared more concerned with gifts for himself than for his daughter, posting a shot of a vintage roadster on Instagram and captioning it, "Need this asap." Us Weekly said he's in Boca Raton, Fla.

"Happy 3rd Birthday to my little angel girl Penelope!!!!!!," Jenner said on Instagram. "You are my ray of sunshine, who gives the best hugs and the sweetest kisses... I love you so much and thank God he has blessed us with YOU!!!! #loveofmylife #dollbaby #exactlylikeyourmother #couldyougetanycuter?!"

Is it just us, or did one of those hashtags just take a shot at P's father?

"She's good. Kourtney's good," Kris Jenner told "Entertaiment Tonight" on Tuesday night, adding that her eldest daughter was "hanging in there."

Disick has refused to return home since he was spotted canoodling with ex-girlfriend Chloe Bartoli in Monte Carlo, a source told People.

"He wouldn't go home, even though people told him to go home to [Kourtney] and his family," the source reportedly said.

Bartoli's Instagram has been flooded with abusive comments and name-calling â€" nice names like "home wrecker."

Another People source â€" one reportedly close to Kanye West â€" let it be known that Yeezus was extremely unhappy with the way things have gone down.

"Kanye is furious, maybe the most furious of everyone," that source said. "He's saying that a real man doesn't abandon his family like Scott is doing."

According to a RadarOnline source, Disick is "terrified" of the mother of his children right now, "and he should be."

No matter his mental state, he is slated to appear Friday at 1OAK in Las Vegas, hosting the evening with DJ Shift spinning the music. Fun fact: Tickets for that event are $30 for ladies â€" and $40 for the guys.

New Logitech Logo: ‘Hey, We Don’t Just Make Mice Anymore!’
From Wired!

Logitech doesn’t do mice alone anymore. The Swiss company has in recent years expanded beyond peripherals into speakers, mobile accessories, tablet keyboards, and more.

The company long known for making the best mouse on the market, not to mention the best iPad keyboard and the best TV remote, is ditching the “tech” and calling itself simply Logi (pronounced “lodge-ee”). Gone too is the dated logoâ€"teal, with something that may or may not have been a boomerangâ€"in favor of a sleek, clean design that better reflects its diverse product line.

“If we look out five or ten years, it’s going to seem odd for a company to call itself “something-tech,” says CEO Bracken Darrell. “There will be tech in your clothing, in your shoes, in your tires. To be Logitech at that point will seem awfully 1980s.”

Darrell’s been pushing the company into the future since taking the helm in 2012 and turning around its declining profits. “Even then, we knew we needed to reinvent the brand,” he says. First, though, he had to reinvent the products. Within two years, he shook up the product portfolio, shifting millions away from mice and investing heavily in new categories like speakers and tablet accessories. The rebrand is the culmination of his efforts.

“They needed to get rid of the old logo,” says Tal Leming of Type Supply, a Baltimore typography studio. “It looked like something carved on the side of the Flintstones’ house.”

When Darrell arrived, he was stunned by Logitech’s lack of a design ethos. He’d come from Braun, where he met frequently with Dieter Rams, the German visionary who pioneered the idea of a design-driven company. Like Braun, Logitech had great engineering. But it had no designers. It’s products were wonderful to use, but meh to behold. That would not do, so Darrell hired Alastair Curtis, the head of design chief at Nokia. Build a team, he told Curtis, and make our stuff look as good as it works. ad the design efforts at Logitech.

“My goal was to create a design company,” Darrell says.

That meant cutting back on mice. Logitech was selling more of them than any other company in the worldâ€"it sold its one billionth mouse in 2008â€" but PC peripheral sales were tumbling. Retail sales fell 8 percent in 2013. Darrell surveyed the landscape to see what markets were growing, cut investment in mice by two-thirds and plowed a good chunk of the companies $100 million R&D budget into tablet accessories, teleconferencing systems, and Bluetooth speakers. Soon after Curtis came onboard, Logitech released the UE Boomâ€"a streamlined cylindrical portable speaker that features bright, bold colors and stellar soundâ€"and a wafer-thin iPad keyboard, also done up in youthful hues. The three new categories generated $380 million in sales during the last two years. “We tripled our profits,” Darrell says, and the stock price doubled to $14 per share.

The reborn company needed to be rebranded. Darrell hired Design Studio, the agency behind Airbnb’s controversial logo that critics duly noted looks like any number of body parts. Logi’s new logo is plump, geometric, and, according to Darrell, “youthful.” The curve on the “g” hangs detached, suspended like a grin beneath its round. By all accounts, it’s radical departure from earlier sigils, many of which featured a radiating eyeball and a organically shaped splash of teal. “There were people in our company who thought that we owned the color teal,” Darrell says. “Teal looks like a very old color now.” The new insignia will change color based on which product it’s placed.

“It looks like a friendly company now,” Leming says. The symmetryâ€"the “l” and “i” mirror each other, as do the two circlesâ€"creates a pleasing balance, he says. But the designer has a quibble: the flourish on the top right corner of the of the “g.” “It would have been cleaner without it,” he says.

Logi will stay true to its roots and continue branding its mice with “Logitech” to capitalize on its excellent rep for PC peripherals. “The brand can go a long, long way,” Curtis says, “because it still means a lot to many people.” But Darrell says it’s just a matter of time, before “tech” disappears from mice, too.

“We are moving out of the computer era,” he says. “And we want to make sure consumers understand that.”

[What's the latest?]

Key Moments in the Confederate Flag Debate in South Carolina
From The New York Times

What's the latest?
The House began debate Wednesday just after 11 a.m.. Wednesday, July 8.

The South Carolina Senate voted quickly to approve the measure to remove the flag, but in the House, discussion lagged.

Lawmakers considered and then soundly rejected a slew of amendments meant to scuttle or slow the bill to remove the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds.

If the House approves the measure, the flag would be removed within 24 hours of the bill being signed into law by the governor.

What have lawmakers been saying?

The discussion in the Senate favored removing the flag. "This is one small step that reduces that culture of division," said Senator Vincent A. Sheheen, a Democrat and sponsor of the flag removal bill. "It is not about history."

The discussion in the House began with a speech from Representative Wendell G. Gilliard, a Democrat and African-American from Charleston, who read the names of the victims of the Charleston church shooting, and said their families had “shocked the world” when they forgave the suspect, Dylann Roof â€" an act, he said, that averted “a calamity on top of a tragedy.”

Much of the day, though, was dominated by Representative Michael A. Pitts, a Republican and retired police officer, who had declared his intention to upend the bill. Mr. Pitts introduced several amendments, from displaying various Confederate flags in a display case near the State House’s Confederate Soldier Monument to a proposal to plant yellow jessamine, the state flower, where the flagpole now sits. They were all rejected.

How did South Carolina get to this point?

The history of the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina goes back to the Civil War. There were several key moments leading up to the debate now taking place in the Legislature.

1962:
The Confederate flag is raised over the State House to commemorate the Civil War centennial. The resolution calling for this doesn’t specify when the flag will come down.

2000:
After a series of competing protests for and against the flag, a compromise establishes that it will continue to be be flown from a flagpole near the Capitol -- and that it can be lowered only with approval of the Legislature.

June 17, 2015:
Nine people are killed in a massacre at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. The police charge Dylann Roof, who is white. Photographs of Mr. Roof with the Confederate flag later emerge, on a web page that also includes a racist manifesto.

June 18, 2015:
Gov. Nikki R, Haley of South Carolina orders the state and the American . flags at the State House lowered to half-staff for nine days to honor the dead in Charleston. The Confederate flag doesn’t move because of the 2000 compromise, which requires Legislature approval to alter or lower it.

June 22, 2015:
Governor Haley reverses her position and says the Confederate flag should be removed from the State House grounds. “One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, the time has come,” she says.

June 27, 2015:
Bree Newsome, a 30-year-old youth organizer from Charlotte, climbs the flagpole with the Confederate battle flag and removes it. Her act of protest came a day after President Obama gave the eulogy for a black pastor who was killed in the Charleston shooting.

July 6, 2015:
After five hours of debate, the state Senate votes 37-3 to remove the flag from the State House grounds.

July 8, 2015:
Debate in the House begins.

Reddit mods explain why they shut the site down
From Engadget

It turns out that if you suddenly fire a valuable member of the community, that community will get very angry at you. Reddit CEO Ellen Pao learned that the hard way late last week when it abruptly dismissed Victoria Taylor, the company's former director of talent who was instrumental in popularizing the site's "AMA" (Ask Me Anything) feature. A slew of subreddits, mostly run by volunteer moderators, went private in protest of the firing over the weekend as a result. Pao eventually posted an apology for the lack of communication and promised to improve things going forward. But in an op-ed posted today in the New York Times, those same volunteer moderators said that the apology was not enough.

The primary reason for taking those sites down temporarily, according to the subreddit moderators, was to protest how Reddit's management changes are seemingly done without consideration for the community. When Taylor was terminated, for example, apparently a scheduled AMA had to be abruptly cancelled, causing the team of moderators to panic and shut down that particular subreddit to figure things out. That, however, caused other subreddits to shut down as a show of support. This, they say, was just an example of how valuable Taylor was as a communicator and how disruptive it was to dismiss her. As for the "miscommunication" apology, the op-ed authors responded thusly:

"Miscommunication implies there was any communication at all or any kind of real planning in place to compensate for the loss, when in reality the moderators and AMA guests were left stranded. Though company leaders have apologized publicly, they still have not fully explained the decision."

Further, they said that Taylor's termination is just a recent example of how Reddit is disregarding not only the site's business but also the community at large. The two op-ed authors, Brian Lynch and Courtnie Swearingen, work full-time as attorneys but also commit hours of their free time to moderating Reddit forums. In closing, they said:

"Pay attention to the user base. Users are not simply a screaming mob. They are actually asking for reasonable support, and as moderators, we are trying very hard to do what we can to make those changes happen."

Boko Haram offers to swap over 200 abducted girls for detained militants
From The Oregonian

Nigeria's Boko Haram extremists are offering to free more than 200 young women and girls kidnapped from a boarding school in the town of Chibok in exchange for the release of militant leaders held by the government, a human rights activist has told The Associated Press.

The activist said Boko Haram's current offer is limited to the girls from the school in northeastern Nigeria whose mass abduction in April 2014 ignited worldwide outrage and a campaign to "Bring Back Our Girls" that stretched to the White House.

The new initiative reopens an offer made last year to the government of former President Goodluck Jonathan to release the 219 students in exchange for 16 Boko Haram detainees, the activist said. The man, who was involved in negotiations with Boko Haram last year and is close to current negotiators, spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters on this sensitive issue.

Fred Eno, an apolitical Nigerian who has been negotiating with Boko Haram for more than a year, told the AP that "another window of opportunity opened" in the last few days, though he could not discuss details.

He said the recent slew of Boko Haram bloodletting â€" some 350 people killed in the past nine days â€" is consistent with past ratcheting up of violence as the militants seek a stronger negotiating position.

Presidential adviser Femi Adesina said Saturday that Nigeria's government "will not be averse" to talks with Boko Haram. "Most wars, however furious or vicious, often end around the negotiation table," he said.

Eno said the 5-week-old administration of President Muhammadu Buhari offers "a clean slate" to bring the militants back to negotiations that had become poisoned by the different security agencies and their advice to Jonathan.

Two months of talks last year led government representatives and Eno to travel in September to a northeastern town where the prisoner exchange was to take place, only to be stymied by the Department for State Service intelligence agency, the activist said.

At the last minute, the agency said it was holding only four of the militants sought by Boko Haram, the activist said.

It is not known how many Boko Haram suspects are detained by Nigeria's intelligence agency, whose chief Buhari fired last week.

The activist said the agency continues to hold suspects illegally because it does not have enough evidence for a conviction, and any court would free them. Nigerian law requires charges be brought after 48 hours.

Thousands of suspects have died in custody, and some detainees wanted by Boko Haram may be among them. Amnesty International alleges that 8,000 detainees have died in military custody â€" some have been shot, some have died from untreated injuries due to torture, and some have died from starvation and other harsh treatment.

In May, about 300 women, girls and children being held captive by Boko Haram were rescued by Nigeria's military, but none were from Chibok. It is believed that the militants view the Chibok girls as a last-resort bargaining chip.

In that infamous abduction, 274 mostly Christian girls preparing to write science exams were seized from the school by Islamic militants in the early hours of April 15, 2014. Dozens escaped on their own in the first few days, but 219 remain missing.

Boko Haram has not shown them since a May 2014 video in which its leader, Abubakar Shekau warned: "You won't see the girls again unless you release our brothers you have captured."

In the video, nearly 100 of the girls, who have been identified by their parents, were shown wearing Islamic hijab and reciting the Quran. One of them said they had converted to Islam.

International indignation at Nigeria's failure to rescue the girls was joined by U.S. first lady Michelle Obama. In a radio address in May 2014, she said she and President Barack Obama are "outraged and heartbroken" over the abduction.

Jonathan's government initially denied there had been any mass abduction and delays of a rescue that might have brought the girls home became a hallmark of his other failures. He steadfastly refused to meet with the Bring Back Our Girls campaigners, charging they were politicizing the issue.

On Wednesday, President Buhari welcomed those campaigners at the presidential villa in Abuja and pleaded "We only ask for your patience." He said "The delay and conflicting reaction by the former government and its agencies is very unfortunate."

Campaign leader Oby Ezekwesili said, "The rescue of our Chibok girls is the strongest statement that this government could make to showg respect for the sanctity and dignity of every Nigerian life."

There have been unconfirmed reports that some of the girls have been taken to neighboring countries, and that some have been radicalized and trained as fighters. At least three were reported to have died â€" one from dysentery, one from malaria and one from a snake bite.

Last year, Shekau said the girls were an "old story," and that he had married them off to his fighters.

Lawan Zanna, whose daughter is among the captives, said this week that 14 Chibok parents have died since the mass kidnapping, many from stress-related illnesses blamed on the ordeal.

Some of the Chibok girls who managed to escape have been rejected by their community and now live with family friends, tired of hearing taunts like "Boko Haram wives."

The assumption that all girls and women held by the group have been raped is a difficult stigma to overcome in Nigeria's highly religious and conservative society.

Shekau had threatened in 2013 to kidnap women and girls if Nigeria's military did not release detained Boko Haram wives and children. The government freed them in May of that year as a goodwill gesture ahead of failed peace talks.

Boko Haram has kidnapped hundreds more â€" girls, boys, women and young men. Some have become sex slaves, while others are used as fighters, according to former captives.

Nigerian opinion on negotiating with the extremists is mixed. Some say the group's crimes are too heinous to be forgiven: The 6-year-old Islamic uprising has killed more than 13,000 people and forced about 1.5 million from their homes.

"A lot of people take a hard-line stance that you must never negotiate with a terrorist," said Sen. Chris Anyanwu. She called it a "very complex" issue, balancing the lives of more than 200 girls against the dangers of freeing extremists.

The militants last year seized a large swath of northeast Nigeria and declared an Islamic caliphate. Nigeria and its neighbors deployed a multinational army that forced them out of towns and villages this year, but the bloodshed has risen at a fierce rate since Buhari's May 29 inauguration amid pledges to crush the insurgency.

As Microsoft writes off $7.6 bn in Nokia deal, mobile future hinges on Windows 10
From The Indian Express

Microsoft Inc’s future in mobile devices likely hinges on the software maker’s ability to convince developers to create apps for the phone version of Windows 10 after its ill-fated Nokia acquisition helped trigger 7,800 layoffs.

The job cuts announcement is an acknowledgement that its 2013 $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia was never going to help paltry sales of its Windows Phone, and that it needed a new approach. Microsoft said it would also write down about $7.6 billion related to its Nokia business.

The cuts indicate that Microsoft will likely focus its mobile efforts on its high-stakes Windows 10 software release, due in late July, rather than on developing smartphones, analysts said. The software’s apps are supposed to work across desktops, tablets and phones with little tweaking.

The company is betting that the popularity of Windows on desktop PCs will lead to more apps for the mobile version of Windows and entice more consumers to buy its phones.

“This mobile strategy going forward is the best they could possibly do,” said Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder. Wednesday’s announcement is the second round of job cuts since Satya Nadella became chief executive in February 2014. Microsoft said last July it would slash up to 18,000 jobs.

Last month, the company struck deals to hand over much of its advertising business to AOL and sell mapping assets to Uber.

Narrowing its focus in mobile will allow Microsoft to devote resources to the areas where it is strongest, such as software and cloud development, said Ben Bajarin, an analyst at research firm Creative Strategies, noting that its mobile phones served customers “from the low end to the premium tier.”

Microsoft has struggled to break into the mobile market, which is dominated by Apple Inc and Google Inc’s Android. Its Nokia acquisition was an attempt to control both phone software and hardware as Apple does.

Some analysts say the job cuts may mean the beginning of Microsoft’s exit from mobile. Yet because consumers have shifted more of their time to mobile, it is imperative for Microsoft to remain in the market through a successful Windows 10 launch, said Daniel Ives, analyst at FBR Capital Markets.

“They’re going to continue to be a tertiary player in mobile unless something dramatically changes,” Ives said. “Nokia was that Hail Mary acquisition that was clearly a failure.”

Baltimore Fires Police Chief in Wake of Unrest and Crime Surge
From The New York Times

The Baltimore police commissioner, Anthony W. Batts, who arrived in that city three years ago pledging change but lost the confidence of many in his rank and file in the wake of riots in April, was ousted Wednesday by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who said he had become “a distraction” that hindered efforts to fight a recent surge in violent crime.

The mayor acted just hours after the police union issued a report critical of the department’s response to the unrest set off by the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody. But Ms. Rawlings-Blake insisted she was responding to a “crime surge,” and not acting to placate the union, whose report said the riots were preventable.

“Recent events have placed an intense focus on our police leadership, distracting many from what needs to be our main focus: the fight against crime. So we need a change,” the mayor said at a City Hall news conference. She added: “This was not an easy decision. But it’s one that is in the best interest of the people of Baltimore.”

Mr. Batts’s firing comes at a time of increasing tensions between the police union and department leadership â€" and a sharp rise in crime. In the weeks since May 1, when six officers were charged in Mr. Gray’s death, murders have risen to a level not seen in decades. There have been 155 homicides this year, 50 more than in the same period last year, and nonfatal shootings have nearly doubled, the police said. Almost half of the killings occurred after May 1.

Just Tuesday night, three people were killed and a fourth injured when two gunmen jumped out of vans and started shooting in West Baltimore, the blighted neighborhood where Mr. Gray came of age and was arrested.

For Ms. Rawlings-Blake, an African-American leading a majority black city, those competing forces created a political problem: She has staked her reputation on making Baltimore safer while overhauling and reining in a police department that has been accused of corrupt, often brutal behavior. Until Wednesday, she had expressed unqualified support for Mr. Batts, though her allies said they sensed weeks ago she would ultimately get rid of him.

Mr. Batts, who is also black, similarly found himself caught between competing constituencies: black residents angry with the police, and a union that complained commanders did not support the rank and file, and had bungled the response to the April unrest. And while the police say that turf wars among drug gangs are behind the surge in crime, there have been questions in the city about whether officers are standing down, fearing they might be prosecuted for aggressive policing.

In an “after-action review” of the response to the riots released Wednesday, the city’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, said its members reported that they “lacked basic riot equipment, training and, as events unfolded, direction from leadership.” The report also complained that “the passive response to the civil unrest had allowed the disorder to grow into full-scale rioting,” and that officers had followed direct orders from their commanders “not to intervene or engage the rioters.”

Ms. Rawlings-Blake strongly disputed the report; in a statement her office released at 12:45 p.m., her spokesman called it “baseless and false information.” He added, “This is not a time for finger-pointing and politics.”

Mr. Batts, who before learning of his firing had scheduled a 4 p.m. news conference that was then canceled, had himself announced an outside, independent review of the department’s handling of the riots just one day earlier. On Wednesday, he said in a statement to The Baltimore Sun that he had been “honored to serve the citizens and residents of Baltimore.”

In a statement, Lt. Gene Ryan, the president of the union, did not specifically address Mr. Batts’s performance or firing, but simply noted the union report that had been issued hour earlier. But Sgt. Louis Hopson, the board chairman of the Vanguard Justice Society, which represents black officers and has complained that they face discrimination in the department, said the ouster of Mr. Batts was “good news.”

The mayor installed Kevin Davis, the deputy police commissioner, to run the department on an interim basis. At the news conference, Mr. Davis said, “My message to the rank and file is that I will walk with them, I will serve with them and I will be with them every step of the way.”

In City Hall, several members of the City Council said Mr. Batts’s firing did not come as a surprise. “I thank the commissioner for his service; he did some great things, but I also hold him accountable for some not-so-great things,” said Councilman Brandon M. Scott, an ally of the mayor. He described the mayor’s move as a response to “a culmination of things.” He added, “What we need is a new commissioner, someone who understands Baltimore, someone who has the respect of the citizens, respect of the business community, the religious community and the officers, and who can bring everybody together.”

Councilman Nick J. Mosby, whose district includes areas hardest hit by the riot and by the sharp rise in murders and shootings that followed â€" and who is married to Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney who charged the officers in Mr. Gray’s death â€" said he hoped that “this change will be a complete reset of a cooperative relationship between the mayor, the City Council, rank-and-file officers, commissioner’s office and the community.”

Even before Mr. Gray’s death, Mr. Batts, who had been the police chief in Oakland and Long Beach, Calif., before coming to Baltimore three years ago, had been pushing to tighten internal disciplinary procedures and to make it easier to punish or fire officers for wrongdoing. But tensions escalated after more than 150 officers were injured in the April unrest, and Mr. Batts went so far as to apologize to members in late May for not preparing for disturbances of that magnitude.

“I got my guys hurt, and I got to own that, and I stand tall behind that,” Mr. Batts told the union members. “That won’t happen again in this organization.”

[EMERGENCY FINANCE]

Greece seeks new EU loan deal in race to avert collapse
From Reuters

A race to save Greece from bankruptcy and keep it in the euro gathered pace on Wednesday when Athens formally applied for a three-year loan and European authorities launched an accelerated review of the request.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called in a speech to the European Parliament for a fair deal, acknowledging Greece's historic responsibility for its plight, after EU leaders gave him five days to come up with convincing reforms.

The government submitted a request to the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund to lend an unspecified amount "to meet Greece's debt obligations and to ensure stability of the financial system". It promised to begin implementing tax and pension measures sought by creditors as early as Monday.

With its banks closed, cash withdrawals rationed and the economy in freefall, Greece has never been closer to a state bankruptcy that would probably force it to leave the euro and print an alternative currency.

European officials told Reuters that some Greek banks may have to be shut and taken over by stronger rivals, regardless of whether the country bailout funds or not.

Yet leftist premier Tsipras seemed almost nonchalant, albeit with a note of humility, when he appeared before EU lawmakers in Strasbourg to cheers and scattered boos.

Speaking hours after euro zone leaders, at another emergency summit in Brussels, set Greece a deadline of the end of the week to come up with far-reaching reform proposals, Tsipras said Greeks had no choice but to demand a way out of "this impasse".

"We are determined not to have a clash with Europe but to tackle head-on the establishment in our own country and to change the mindset which will take us and the euro zone down," he said to applause from the left. But he gave scant details of his reform plans, frustrating many lawmakers.

The head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers of the 19-nation currency area, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, asked the European Commission and the European Central Bank to evaluate the loan request, assess Greek debt sustainability and study whether Greece poses a risk to the financial stability of the euro zone.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde reiterated that Greece's massive debt would need restructuring, something Germany is resisting. "Greece is in a situation of acute crisis, which needs to be addressed seriously and promptly," she said at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington.

EMERGENCY FINANCE

The aim is for Eurogroup ministers meeting on Saturday to be in a position to recommend a loan, and some emergency bridging finance, which a full summit of the 28 EU leaders would approve on Sunday if they are satisfied with Greek reform commitments.

That is a big 'if', both due to Athens' chequered record and because many of the liberalization measures required run counter to the leftist ideology of Tsipras' Syriza party.

The prime minister promised to deliver detailed reform plans on Thursday and avoided the angry rhetoric that has alienated many European partners. He did however criticize attempts to "terrorize" Greeks into voting for "never-ending austerity".

The European Central Bank kept Greece's banks on a tight leash, holding a freeze on emergency funding that means they could soon run out of cash. The Greek government said banks would remain closed until July 13, with an ATM withdrawal limit unchanged at 60 euros per day.

European Council President Donald Tusk reiterated that the final deadline for Greece to submit convincing reform plans and start implementing them was this week.

"Our inability to find an agreement may lead to the bankruptcy of Greece and the insolvency of its banking system," Tusk told EU lawmakers.

In the turbulent chamber, some lawmakers held up "Oxi" (No) signs to back Greek voters' rejection of more austerity, while far-right speakers praised the radical leftist government for standing up to what several called the European "oligarchy".

Euro zone officials want Greece to rush a first wave of measures through parliament before Sunday to prove its serious intent. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she would ask parliament in Berlin to authorize the opening of loan negotiations if the Greek measures are deemed satisfactory.

Merkel made clear earlier that she was "not exaggeratedly optimistic" that a deal could be found to save Greece by Sunday.

Euro zone sources said one key question was whether the package will be more ambitious than the spending cuts, tax increases and modest reforms that Greek voters rejected on Sunday in a referendum on a previous bailout plan.

"The numbers have to add up, and the numbers have become vastly more unfavorable since the banks were shut and the economy seized up in the last 10 days," one euro zone finance official said.

"ADMISSION OF IMPOTENCE"

France, which has tried to mediate between Athens and Berlin, nailed its colors to the mast on Wednesday, warning of the perils of a "Grexit".

Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament in Paris: "Keeping Greece in the euro and therefore in the heart of Europe and the EU is something of the utmost geostrategic and geopolitical importance." To let Greece go would be "an admission of impotence", he added.

Despite the last-minute efforts to conjure up a deal, a Reuters poll of economists found the probability of Greece leaving the euro zone had risen to 55 percent from 45 percent last week, the first time it was deemed more likely than not.

Tsipras admitted that after winning power on a promise to end austerity, his government had "spent more time negotiating than governing" but he disappointed those who had hoped to hear concrete immediate measures to transform the shattered economy.

Having secured a referendum victory and the unprecedented support of the five main parties in parliament, Tsipras also made clear he wanted to act fast to pre-empt any possible revolt against the painful concessions he will need to make.

He was strongly critical of Greece's failings as a society, citing a history of clientelism, corruption, tax evasion that had "run riot", inequality and "the nexus of political and economic power".

While Athens has made strides since 2010 in turning around its public finances to post a budget surplus before debt service, it has lagged on implementing structural reforms.

In particular, it has fallen far short of targets on privatizing state assets and struggled to improve tax collection and reform labor laws and a costly pension system.

Centrist EU lawmaker Sylvie Goulard told Tsipras: "In the words of a well known advertising slogan, 'Just do it!'"

Upcoming Xbox update brings new user interface, Cortana integration
From PC World

There’s a new user interface coming to the Xbox One that’s supposed to make navigating the console faster and easier for users.

Microsoft offered a glimpse of the new interface, which will be “coming soon” to users of its console, during its Xbox Daily briefing stream Monday afternoon. The centerpiece of the update is a menu that shows recently played games and recently used applications, which will allow users to pick up where they left off. The menu will also include information about the game, like announcements from its developers about things like updates.

There’s a new “Trending on Xbox Live” section on the right-hand side of the screen that shows what’s popular on Microsoft’s gaming platform, including new videos, popular content creators and games that are being played by a large number of people.

The new UI also features a slide-out menu that opens from the left-hand side of the screen when someone double-taps the Xbox button on a controller. It provides quick access to information like users’ notifications, messages and friends list.

That slide-out drawer will work both within the Xbox One’s menu system, as well as inside one of the console’s games. When opened inside a game, the menu will block out part of the screen, but won’t interrupt gameplay, so people can keep moving through a virtual world while checking for new information.

In addition, Cortana will play a larger role with the new console and let users run complex commands without taking their attention away from the game. For example, users will be able to tell Microsoft’s virtual assistant to record the past minute of gameplay and share it with their Xbox Live activity feed while continuing to hack and slash their way through enemies. Another command makes it possible to start a voice chat party and invite people from a user’s friends list without fiddling with menus.

It’s not clear if the Cortana integration will only work with the Kinect or if it will also function with an Xbox One-compatible headset. The deeper integration is a part of Microsoft’s increasing use of its virtual assistant alongside the launch of Windows 10. Cortana was first released on Windows Phone last year, and will be coming to desktops and tablets on July 29 when Windows 10 is made available to consumers.

Microsoft hasn’t given a definitive release date for the new interface other than to say that it will be coming “later this year.”

'Shenmue III' will come to PC and PS4 with your help
From EnGadget

Apparently, the running theme of Sony's E3 event is "long-sought follow-ups to classic games." Famed developer Yu Suzuki has revealed that he's crowdfunding Shenmue III, the sequel to a much-admired action role-playing series that many thought had ended back in 2001 -- or 2002, if you got the Xbox version of Shenmue II. The open-world title will pick up Ryo's adventure where it left off, with a visit to China to hunt down his father's murderer. It'll be available on both the PC and PlayStation 4 if all goes well, and there are promises of new fighting mechanics in addition to familiar elements.

Shenmue III isn't expected to ship until December 2017 if it makes its funding target, but the good news is that it won't take much to get a copy of your own. A $29 pledge is enough to land a digital edition for your platform of choice, while $60 will net you a physical version. From there, it's all about the perks: Higher pledges include signed art, the original Ryo press event jacket and even dinner with Suzuki himself. If you were a fan of the franchise's groundbreaking gameplay, there's a good chance that you'll want to pitch in.

[Angler: Many sharks in water]

After shark attacks, N.C. beachgoers stay ashore
From Miami Herald

The phones rang steadily at Oak Island’s largest house-rental company Monday, a day after two youths were mauled in separate shark attacks just off the beach.

“We’ve had a few people try to cancel their reservations,” said Melaney Robbins, vice president of Oak Island Accommodations, which manages about 700 rental properties on the island. “But we’ve had more calling to make new reservations. We have bookings coming in today for this weekend.”

Across the Brunswick County island â€" on the fishing pier, at local restaurants and in shops that have just opened for the season â€" tourists and business owners were anxious for updates on the victims’ conditions and speculation was rife over whether there had been more than one shark involved.

News of the attacks had traveled quickly among local residents, who share information through a private Facebook page.

In the first attack, a 12-year-old girl from Asheboro lost part of her left arm and received a serious leg injury. In the second, a 16-year-old Colorado boy lost most of his left arm. Both were in good condition Monday at the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, hospital spokeswoman Martha Harlan told The Associated Press. Neither child’s name was released.

Officials said both youths were swimming in water about waist-deep. Town Manager Tim Holloman said that after the second attack, officials went up and down the beaches asking people to get out of the water.

Holloman called that a “voluntary evacuation” and said the town is researching whether it could legally require people to get out of the water in the event of another such emergency.

Oak Island Mayor Betty Wallace told the AP that information was too spotty after the first attack to justify immediately clearing the water.

Throughout the day Monday, the Brunswick County Sheriff's Office conducted patrols of the coast line using boats, helicopters and all terrain vehicles. Holloman said he would meet with local leaders Monday night to decide whether to continue the patrols Tuesday.

Marine biologists say a single shark bite is a rare event, and to have two so close together is extraordinary.

Angler: Many sharks in water

The first attack happened next to the Ocean Crest Pier, a popular spot with anglers. Fishermen hoping to snare game fish such as Spanish mackerel off the end of the pier had pulled in a couple of sharks Monday.

One man who said he was from Hope Mills, N.C., and wore a shirt that said, “Quit wishin,’ Go Fishin,’” said he began to notice sharks off the end of the pier about two weeks ago and said it wasn’t that unusual.

“People have no idea how many sharks are in these waters,” he said.

Holloman said the town tries to discourage fishermen on the island’s two piers from chumming for sharks.

The second attack was not adjacent to a pier.

The attacks came at the start of the first full week after most traditional school systems across North Carolina had released students for the summer. Shopkeepers said the crowds were about normal for the start of vacation season, when Oak Island’s population goes from fewer than 10,000 people to more than 30,000.

Mom: ‘Just not worth it’ yet

Along the island’s 12 miles of beaches, vacationers planted umbrellas and chairs in the sand Monday, but most swimmers remained close to the water’s edge. A few mothers sat in water just a few inches deep with their small children.

“We’re out here having a great time,” said Tom Egan of Charlotte, N.C., who is spending the week at Oak Island with his wife and their three children, all younger than 10. “But we’re only going into the water as far as our knees today. Until we know more about what’s going on, it’s just not worth it.”

Shirley Mason came to the island Monday with her daughter, Stephany Pace, and two grandchildren, ages 4 and 6. The four, from Harnett County, N.C., were visiting family at Carolina Beach, N.C., but decided to come to Oak Island for the day because they like the wide beach and the thinner crowds, Mason said.

“We know not to let the babies go in the water,” she said. When asked how far she let them get in, she marked a spot about 4 inches up her ankle and said, “About right here. That’s it.”

Mason and her daughter said people should not be completely surprised by occasional shark bites and always should be cautious when playing in the ocean. Riptides can cause drownings and Portugese men-of-war, such as those that have washed up on some North Carolina beaches recently, can cause serious injuries.

With vacationers approaching the water so tentatively, the greater danger Monday might have been heat-related illnesses; at 3 p.m., it was 91 degrees but with the heat index, felt like 106, according to the National Weather Service.

After Sunday’s attacks, town leaders sent an email to local rental companies packed with information about how to spot and avoid sharks and whom to call if one was spotted close to shore. It included a color flier produced by North Carolina Sea Grant, featuring a chart to help identify seven common types of sharks found in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

“Am I going to print this out and give it to all our guests when they check in on Saturday and freak them out?” Robbins asked at the rental office. “No. But I have kids, and I know it’s scary. It’ll be a while before they want to go back in the water.”

Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson to return for 'Pitch Perfect 3'
From UT San Diego

The Bellas will be back again. Universal Pictures says another "Pitch Perfect" sequel is in the works.

The studio said Monday that Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson will star in "Pitch Perfect 3," set for release in July 2017. Elizabeth Banks and her husband, Max Handelman, will return as producers.

"Pitch Perfect 2" has taken in more than $171 million domestically since it opened last month. The original film, released in 2012, was a sleeper hit that went onto collect more than $115 million worldwide.

The franchise follows the adventures of a competitive a capella singing group.

American Airlines, Qantas to launch U.S.-Australia flights
From Reuters

American Airlines Group Inc said on Tuesday it would begin operating a direct daily flight to Sydney, Australia, from Los Angeles this year, a first in more than two decades, and expand its cooperation with Qantas Airways Ltd.

Qantas will begin service between Sydney and San Francisco this year, American said. The airlines said they will ask the U.S. government for antitrust immunity for the new service.