#has not yet released an official statement about his departure from the team. To become the best in MMA

[gme-news]

TEAM LAKAY KAWAWA NA! JOSHUA PACIO AT HONORIO BANARIO LUMAYAS NA!

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[newstfionline]

Sunday, December 27, 2020

Millions of Americans lose jobless benefits as Trump refuses to sign aid bill (Reuters) Millions of Americans saw their jobless benefits expire on Saturday after U.S. President Donald Trump refused to sign into law a $2.3 trillion pandemic aid and spending package, protesting that it did not do enough to help everyday people. Trump stunned Republicans and Democrats alike when he said this week he was unhappy with the massive bill, which provides $892 billion in badly needed coronavirus relief, including extending special unemployment benefits expiring on Dec. 26, and $1.4 trillion for normal government spending. Without Trump’s signature, about 14 million people could lose those extra benefits, according to Labor Department data. A partial government shutdown will begin on Tuesday unless Congress can agree a stop-gap government funding bill before then.

Downtown Nashville explosion knocks some communications offline (AP) A recreational vehicle parked in the deserted streets of downtown Nashville exploded early Christmas morning, causing widespread communications outages that took down police emergency systems and grounded holiday travel at the city’s airport. Police were responding to a report of shots fired Friday when they encountered the RV blaring a recorded warning that a bomb would detonate in 15 minutes, Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said. Police evacuated nearby buildings and called in the bomb squad. The RV exploded shortly afterward, Drake said. The blast sent black smoke and flames billowing from the heart of downtown Nashville’s tourist scene, an area packed with honky-tonks, restaurants and shops. Buildings shook and windows shattered streets away from the explosion near a building owned by AT&T that lies one block from the company’s office tower, a landmark in downtown. AT&T said the affected building is the central office of a telephone exchange, with network equipment in it. The blast interrupted service, but the company declined to say how widespread outages were.

Powerful mobile phone surveillance tool (The Intercept) UNTIL NOW, the Bartonville, Texas, company Hawk Analytics and its product CellHawk have largely escaped public scrutiny. CellHawk has been in wide use by law enforcement; the software is helping police departments, the FBI, and private investigators around the United States convert information collected by cellular providers into maps of people’s locations, movements, and relationships. Police records obtained by The Intercept reveal a troublingly powerful surveillance tool operated in obscurity, with scant oversight. CellHawk’s maker says it can process a year’s worth of cellphone records in 20 minutes, automating a process that used to require painstaking work by investigators, including hand-drawn paper plots. According to the company’s website, CellHawk uses GPS records in its “unique animation analysis tool,” which, according to company promotional materials, plots a target’s calls and locations over time. “Watch data come to life as it moves around town or the entire county,” the site states. The company has touted features that make CellHawk sound more like a tool for automated, continuous surveillance than for just processing the occasional spreadsheet from a cellular company. CellHawk’s website touts the ability to send email and text alerts “to surveillance teams” when a target moves, or enters or exits a particular “location or Geozone (e.g. your entire county border).”

In other white Christmas news, 74 pounds of cocaine found floating off the Florida Keys (Miami Herald) The Keys sheriff’s office came across some white stuff Christmas week. But it wasn’t the usual kind of snow. About 74 pounds of cocaine were spotted floating off the Lower Keys by a fisherman Wednesday afternoon. The packages were put in a Monroe County sheriff’s patrol boat and turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Lost shipments are trending in South Florida and the Keys. In August and September, almost 150 pounds of marijuana were found floating off the island chain or washed up on the shore. In July, more than 50 pounds of cocaine washed up near Grassy Key. Earlier that month, 29 bricks of cocaine came ashore in the Middle Keys city of Marathon, according to federal agents.

Brexit Deal Done, Britain Now Scrambles to See How It Will Work (NYT) For weary Brexit negotiators on both sides of the English Channel, a Christmas Eve trade agreement sealed 11 months of painstaking deliberations over Britain’s departure from the European Union, encompassing details as arcane as what species of fish could be caught by each side’s boats in British waters. But for many others—among them bankers, traders, truckers, architects and millions of migrants—Christmas was only the beginning, Day 1 of a high-stakes and unpredictable experiment in how to unstitch a tight web of commercial relations across Europe. The deal, far from closing the book on Britain’s tumultuous partnership with Europe, has opened a new one, beginning on its first pages with what analysts say will be the biggest overnight change in modern commercial relations. Britain’s services sector—encompassing not only London’s powerful financial industry, but also lawyers, architects, consultants and others—was largely left out of the 1,246-page deal, despite the sector accounting for 80 percent of British economic activity. Negotiators have not formally published the voluminous trade deal, though both sides have offered summaries, leaving analysts and ordinary citizens uncertain about some details even as lawmakers in Britain and Europe prepare to vote on it in a matter of days.

Virus besets Belarus prisons filled with president’s critics (AP) A wave of COVID-19 has engulfed prisons in Belarus that are packed with people in custody for demonstrating against the nation’s authoritarian president, and some of the protesters who contracted the coronavirus while incarcerated accuse authorities of neglecting or even encouraging infections. Activists who spoke to The Associated Press after their release described massively overcrowded cells without proper ventilation or basic amenities and a lack of medical treatment. Kastus Lisetsky, 35, a musician who received a 15-day sentence for attending a protest, said that before he entered prison, he and three bandmates were held in a Minsk jail and had to sleep on the floor of a cell intended for only two people. All four have contracted the virus. Lisetsky must return to prison to serve the remaining seven days of his sentence after he’s discharged from the hospital. He accused the government of allowing the virus to run wild among those jailed for political reasons. “The guards say openly that they do it deliberately on orders,” Lisetsky said. More than 30,000 people have been detained for taking part in protests against the August reelection of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in a vote that opposition activists and some election workers say was rigged to give Lukashenko a sixth term.

Japan bans new entries of foreigners after virus variant arrives (Reuters) Japan on Saturday said it would temporarily ban non-resident foreign nationals from entering the country as it tightens its borders following the detection of a new, highly infectious variant of the coronavirus. The ban will take effect from Dec. 28 and will run through January, the government said in an emailed statement. Japanese citizens and foreign residents will be allowed to enter but must show proof of a negative coronavirus test 72 hours before departing for Japan and must quarantine for two weeks after arrival, the statement said.

As Virus Resurges in Africa, Doctors Fear the Worst Is Yet to Come (NYT) When the pandemic began, global public health officials raised grave concerns about the vulnerabilities of Africa. But its countries overall appeared to fare far better than those in Europe or the Americas, upending scientists’ expectations. Now, the coronavirus is on the rise again in swaths of the continent, posing a new, possibly deadlier threat. In South Africa, a crush of new cases that spread from Port Elizabeth is growing exponentially across the nation, with deaths mounting. Eight countries, including Nigeria, Uganda and Mali, recently recorded their highest daily case counts all year. “The second wave is here,” John N. Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has declared. In South Africa, the continent’s leader by far in coronavirus cases and deaths, the growing devastation in its medical system has led to the rationing of care for older adults. Last week, officials announced that a new variant of the virus that may be associated with faster transmission has become dominant. With stricter control measures lifted and many people no longer seeing the virus as a threat, public health officials fear that Africa’s second wave could be far worse than its first.

Syria’s bread lines are so long that children have to skip school to wait in them (Washington Post) Every morning, Abu Mohammed and his two eldest sons wake up for dawn prayer in Damascus, then take turns heading to the bakery. They wait for at least three hours, barely making it to work or school on time, he said. Often, the boys miss their first few classes. Sometimes they miss the whole day. Abu Mohammed, who declined to give his full name for fear of harassment by the security services, is among a rapidly growing number of Syrians languishing in seemingly endless lines. The bread crisis is perhaps the most visible and painful manifestation of Syria’s economic meltdown. It has seen the amount of subsidized bread most families can buy reduced by half or even more. Subsidized prices have doubled since October. Outside major cities, the deprivation may be even worse. “The poor man living in the village no longer has gas; he has wood. He’s out of bread; he makes his own,” said a resident of the coastal city Tartous, interviewed over Facebook.

Our Digital Lives Drive a Brick-and-Mortar Boom in Data Centers (NYT) The shift to digital work and play from home, hastened by the pandemic, has wreaked havoc on commercial real estate. But experts say it has also generated one surprising bright spot for the industry: data centers. The growing reliance on cloud-based technology—and the big, blocky buildings that house its hardware—has created greater opportunities for developers and investors as businesses and consumers gobble up more data in a world that has become increasingly connected. “Our houses are connected, our cars are connected, our streetlights and parking meters are connected, and every single one of those connections is passing data back and forth,” said Sean O’Hara, president of the exchange-traded funds division at Pacer Financial, an investment advisory firm in Malvern, Pa. And companies that provide data storage are preparing for even greater demand as new technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence become more widely used.

The Secret to Longevity? 4-Minute Bursts of Intense Exercise May Help (NYT) If you increase your heart rate, will your life span follow? That possibility is at the heart of an ambitious new study of exercise and mortality. The study, one of the largest and longest-term experimental examinations to date of exercise and mortality, shows that older men and women who exercise in almost any fashion are relatively unlikely to die prematurely. But if some of that exercise is intense, the study also finds, the risk of early mortality declines even more, and the quality of people’s lives climbs. In essence, says Dorthe Stensvold, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who led the new study, intense training—which was part of the routines of both the interval and control groups—provided slightly better protection against premature death than moderate workouts alone.

[holdyourbreathuntilyouseelight]

The Bodyguard - Chapter 7

Summary: Magnus is a dancing popstar sensation whose popularity continues to climb. Alec, an ex-Secret Service agent, is hired on as a professional bodyguard in charge of Mr. Bane’s personal security by insistence of Magnus’ manager. Despite their initial differences, Magnus finds himself falling for Alec the more time they spend getting to know each other and relies on him for more than physical security as his safety gets threatened. Loosely based on the 1992 film The Bodyguard.

Rating: M

Genre: AU, Everyone is Human AU, Celebrity!Magnus, Bodyguard!Alec, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Fluff, Friendship, Romance, Eventual Smut, Mutual Pining

Author: holdyourbreathuntilyouseelight

A/N:You all are so kind and lovely - thank you so much for sticking with me and this story! I adore each of you and appreciate your support more than I can say. We are almost at the 'official' Malec, my friends! Hang in there! 

Click here to read on AO3.

Previous chapters on tumblr: Prologue // Chapter 1 // Chapter 2 // Chapter 3 // Chapter 4 // Chapter 5 // Chapter 6

Alec thought it was strange that, for all the anxious texts he got overnight from both of his siblings, they weren't so responsive once he got back to them.

He knew they lived busy lives, like any young adult trying to make it in the world, but he tried not to feel slighted that they weren't as eager to talk to him now that the drama had passed.

He probably wouldn't have noticed so much, if he wasn't holed up alone in his room trying to entertain himself. He didn't want to invade Magnus' time with Catarina, as he knew, if anyone, she would be the one he opened up to about his trauma the night before. They hadn't seen each other since before the tour started, and Alec knew himself how tough being away from family could be.

Still, crappy hotel TV could only amuse him for so long.

A rapid knock sounded on the door and Alec heaved himself out of his bed to go tell off yet another member of Magnus' team.

"I think that's for you." Magnus called from his spot on the couch, him and Cat having relocated to the main living space.

Alec's face screwed up in confusion. Who the hell would be asking for him specifically? And how would Magnus know?

Shaking his head, figuring he wouldn't know until he answered, he opened the door.

His jaw dropped at the sight before him.

"Surprise!" Izzy squealed, throwing her arms around his neck.

He squeezed her back on reflex, barely registering the motion as he stared in shock at the two people before him.

"Hey, man. Nice perks you get these days, huh?" Jace teased, pulling him into a hug once Izzy released him.

"What… how… what are you guys doing here?" Alec finally managed to ask, releasing Jace to look back and forth between them for answers.

"The 'how' would be my doing." Magnus' teasing voice came, and the siblings all turned to look at him as he made his way over to the trio. "After chatting with your sister so much lately, and the fact that we had a planned few days off between dates, I figured you could use some family time. And I had to meet the famous Isabelle."

Izzy went over and hugged him just as tightly as she had hugged her brother. "It's amazing to meet you, Magnus. Thank you for doing this."

"My pleasure." he promised, moving to greet Jace.

Alec was shaking his head in disbelief. "Magnus. You didn't have to do this."

Magnus moved to his side. "Alexander, I rarely do things I don't want to do." he said, patting his chest affectionately while smiling up at him.

Alec couldn't help but return it warmly, his heart swelling in appreciation and a little something else.

"And they're only here for 24 hours… so let's go make them count, shall we?" Magnus headed back towards the living area. "Cat? You coming?"

Jace turned to Alec and mouthed 'Alexander?'.

Alec pointedly ignored him.

Magnus took the group to an intimate restaurant with an extensive bar where they all shared a booth.

They ordered drinks and appetizers to share and fell into easy conversation.

Magnus and Izzy were chatting animatedly about the outfit she was sporting, to no one's surprise. Catarina excused herself to the ladies' room after the food was cleared away, so Jace took the distractions as an opportunity to turn to Alec, a sly smirk forming on his face.

"Don't start." Alec said before he could even open his mouth, and Jace laughed.

"Don't start what, Alexander?" Jace teased.

Alec rolled his eyes. "Trust me, I tried to convince him otherwise, but the argument got old. The more I corrected him, the more he did it, so I finally gave up."

"Fair enough. How did your talk about last night go?"

"Well, we really didn't delve into too much. Ended up doing other stuff."

"Other stuff?" Jace said, eyebrows in his hairline, and Alec glanced at Magnus and Izzy, who were entirely unaware there was anyone else at the table.

"Not that. Get your mind out of the gutter. We just watched ridiculous YouTube videos and talked about lighter stuff." Alec explained.

Jace let his eyes flicker over to Magnus before settling back on his brother. "So, are you planning on telling him you're in love with him?"

"Jace!" Alec hissed, kicking him under the table, eyes wild as he checked to make sure the other two hadn't overheard even though they were speaking quietly and the other two were very clearly invested in discussion about Izzy's accessories.

"What? It's a valid question. I'm your best friend and brother, Alec. I know you. I see the way you look at him."

"Look, it's not… Just, drop it, please?"

Before Jace could argue, Catarina returned to the table.

She took a long drink from her glass and grimaced. "Ugh. Anyone else's drink weak as hell?"

"Now, Catarina, we don't want to get sloppy this early in the night, do we?" Magnus said, finally pulling himself out of his conversation with Izzy.

"Speak for yourself." she replied with a grin.

He chuckled. "Our drunken adventures are always something to remember… or not remember."

"I'm up for hearing about the ones you do remember." Jace interjected, taking a swig of his beer.

"I second that." Izzy said.

"Don't you two go getting ideas." Alec groaned. "I am too old to be your chaperone anymore."

"You literally get paid to be a chaperone for a living!" Jace teased.

"Touché." he grumbled in return. "Does that mean you two will finally pay me for my services?"

"Not if it means I have to give you up. I'm not very good at sharing." Magnus said, locking eyes with Alec as he smirked slyly.

Alec chewed his tongue, trying to contain the smile threatening to cover his face. He didn't want to give Magnus the satisfaction of seeing his amusement.

"I'm sure there's enough of me to go around."

"Oh I don't doubt it. You certainly appear sizeable to me."

Alec rubbed his forehead. "Magnus…"

"Don't worry, Alec. I'm used to him." Catarina said supportively, patting his hand.

"Well these two aren't." Alec said, jerking his head to indicate his siblings.

Magnus laughed. "I'll admit – I'm an acquired taste."

"Alec seems to like the taste of you just fine." Izzy piped up with a devilish grin, and Alec nearly slammed his head on the table.

"Isabelle."

"You should've known getting the two of them together would be dangerous." Jace added helpfully.

"But oh so much fun for us." Magnus teased, clinking his glass with Izzy's as Alec silently begged the floor to swallow him whole.

Magnus managed to convince Catarina to go dance with him by the stereo system, despite no one else getting up or there being an actual designated dance floor. It was an attest to Magnus' power of persuasion that she followed his lead and danced alongside him.

Alec was happy to see him enjoying himself with his best friend, but the immediate mischievous look in his sister's big eyes made him regret their departure.

"So Alec…"

Alec sighed. "Not you too, Iz."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "I should be automatically given a pass to tease when you kept it under wraps that you had feelings for him. I asked you before if you did and you said no!"

"No, you asked me if there was anything going on and I said no, because there wasn't. Isn't." he corrected quickly.

"But you want there to be?" Jace prodded.

"I… Look, he's my client. No matter what I feel, I can't go there. Plus he's a famous celebrity – I doubt he wants to slum it with me."

"Alec."

"No, I mean it. He can have anybody he wants. People throw themselves at his feet on a regular basis. He has much better options, trust me. We may be becoming friends but he's not going to see me that way."

Izzy reached across the table to squeeze his hand. "Alec, I think he already does. He talks to me about you all the time, and I don't think it's just because you're common ground between us. You don't see the way he looks at you when you're not paying attention."

"You're seeing things."

Before the pair of siblings could continue trying to convince his denial away, the other two came back over.

Magnus slid into the seat next to Alec. "I just ordered a double round of shots, so get ready. Time to make some new memories."

"What happened to not wanting to get sloppy?" Jace asked amusedly.

"I have to catch the red eye tonight and I don't want to be anywhere near sober for that. I hate flying. I wish I could teleport." Catarina said.

"Our flight isn't until morning but I'm good with sleeping a hangover off on the plane." Izzy said, accepting the shot glass from the tray as the server came around.

"Alec, don't be shy." Magnus said, passing him one when he didn't immediately reach for the drink.

Alec took it from him and knocked back the liquid in one gulp. It didn't burn like he expected it to – it was actually quite smooth.

"I love a man who swallows." Magnus flirted without missing a beat.

Alec flushed, wishing it was warmer in the restaurant so he could blame it on that, while Magnus laughed and rubbed his back comfortingly.

"I'd say I'm only teasing, but, to be fair, it was a true statement. But I do promise I'm not trying to embarrass you." Magnus told him quietly.

Alec unconsciously leaned into his touch, and Magnus left his hand rubbing circles at the bottom of his spine.

"If it wasn't you, it'd be Izzy. I'm fine." he promised.

"Good. Are you having a good time?" Magnus asked while the others got lost in their own conversation about terrible flight stories.

"Definitely. What about you? After everything last night—"

Magnus put a hand up to stop him. "It's just what I need. A positive distraction. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. I had planned this with Izzy weeks ago, knowing this would be a proper day off after the benefit was done, but I hadn't had any clue then that last night would turn out the way it did."

"And you kept your plans from me all that time?"

Magnus smiled smugly, obviously pleased with himself for his power of secret keeping. "Well, I figured I owed you. About time I did something for you."

"Magnus, you do not owe me for doing my job. I'm only doing what I was hired to do." Alec reminded him.

"You know you've gone above and beyond for me, especially the last few days alone. I know I put up a fuss at first, but I do feel much safer knowing I have you."

Alec smiled, reaching over to squeeze Magnus' hand. "I was so reluctant to take this job in the beginning but now, well, there's nowhere I'd rather be."

Magnus' brilliant returning smile made his stomach flip.

Magnus looked away for a moment to grab another two shots off the table, and he passed one to Alec.

"To overcoming adversities?" Alec prompted, holding his glass out.

Magnus clinked his against it. "To us." he corrected before tossing it back.

Alec could barely contain a smile as he followed suit and swallowed the drink in full.

Magnus' eyes scanned the room and widened in excitement.

"Alexander. Fancy a game of pool?"

Alec glanced at his siblings but they were engrossed in Catarina's retelling of ridiculous horror stories from the ER, so he felt they wouldn't be missed.

"Let's do it."

Magnus led the way, passing Alec a pool cue then racking up the balls in the center of the table.

"Do you want to break?"

Alec chalked up the end of his cue.

"Nah, you go ahead."

Magnus clacked the balls together with a good level of strength, sending them apart in various directions.

He lined up his cue and knocked two solids into holes before getting one just shy of a corner pocket. He nodded to Alec to indicate it was his turn.

Alec stepped up to the table and proceeded to pocket four balls in succession without batting an eye.

Magnus' jaw dropped. "Alec, are you hustling me?"

Alec grinned, shrugging innocently.

Jace walked by at that point, heading to the bar for a refill, and snickered at the incredulous look on Magnus' face.

"I see Alec failed to mention he used to make money playing pool."

"Oddly, yes." Magnus said, shooting daggers at Alec while he laughed and lined up another shot.

Jace chuckled. "A way of making extra cash in college. He's always been good at angles and precision. He probably never told you he's a national champion at archery. Started in boarding school. Got first in every competition then took it further until he was winning trophies left and right."

"Okay, Jace, that's enough of a history lesson." Alec told him.

Jace grinned at him. "Gotta share my brotherly pride with anyone who will listen."

Alec shoved him playfully on his way, grinning at him in return, before turning back to their game.

Magnus sunk two more balls during his turn and grumbled when he missed the third.

"You're good, you know. Not as good as me but…" Alec said teasingly, knowing full well how competitive Magnus was.

Sure enough, he took the bait immediately.

"If you're so talented, why don't you come over here and show me how it's done?" Magnus asked, fire in his eyes.

Alec swallowed and came around to his side of the table. He was competitive too—he wasn't going to back down from a direct challenge.

"Line up your shot. Try to think ahead of what exact path you want the ball to follow, keeping in mind that where the second set of balls hit together should be equal in strength to if you were hitting it with your cue alone." Alec told him, his voice huskier than he planned.

Magnus seemed to notice, if the darkening of his eyes was any indicator.

Alec moved behind him, draping his body over his in order to mirror Magnus' position. He placed a hand on Magnus' hip and his other arm slid to cover his up to his wrist. He adjusted the angle of his arm slightly, slipping back to change the cue's position, and pressed his front flat against Magnus' back in order to see his line of sight to the best of his ability.

"Now. Not too hard. You want to pull back but pour your strength into the jab at the end, not the full motion." Alec instructed, breath hitting the back of his ear as he whispered. He imitated the motion, always stopping right before the cue made contact, and it forced him to press even closer to see the stretched position through.

Magnus shivered in his hold, and Alec tried not to feel triumphant.

He finally moved Magnus' cue with him, cracking the ball against the stick with measured strength and it bounced off one and then another, both rolling into their designated holes.

"Perfect." Alec murmured, finally releasing him and stepping back.

Magnus turned to look at him, licking his lips. "You're a good teacher."

Alec noted his voice was lower too.

His eyes watched Magnus' tongue's movement, wishing it was his own getting to explore the softness.

"We should… we should get back to the others." Alec finally said, knowing if they didn't get themselves around witnesses soon, he was going to do something stupid like pin Magnus to the table and kiss the breath from his mouth.

"Good idea." Magnus said, his playful gaze indicating he knew exactly where Alec's mind went.

Alec followed him back to the table, hoping his indecent thoughts were at least hidden from their company.

The rest of the night went well, ending much later than Alec had originally anticipated.

He was definitely the soberest of the four as they walked through downtown LA. Catarina had to leave earlier than the rest to catch her flight, and all of them had been sad to see her go.

Naturally, Magnus was the drunkest even when Catarina was in the running, so Alec had his arm around his waist to keep him walking in as straight of a line as an attached duo could move.

"Alexander, will you carry me like you did the other night? I'm so tired." Magnus whined.

Alec pointedly ignored his siblings' gazes as he scooped Magnus up bridal-style without a word.

Magnus immediately clung to him, snuggling into his chest. "You smell so good."

Alec could hear Jace and Izzy giggling to themselves a few paces back, and he knew from many years of experience that it was at his expense. He wasn't helping dispute their delusions about Magnus' feelings for him by having the drunk man in his arms in such a traditionally romantic way.

"Boys, I have an idea. Rather than waste money on an extra room when we get back to the hotel… you two have a double bedroom in your suite, right? There's no reason we can't all take advantage of the beautiful suite you have."

"But Iz, how would we divide up the beds? All three of us can't fit in one." Jace asked in painfully fake curiosity, and if Magnus wasn't super drunk, Alec knew he would've been able to read the extremely poor acting on his brother's part for pretending like that thought had just occurred to him.

"Well, I figure you and I can share… and Alec and Magnus! After all, the closer Alec is to Magnus, the better. For safety." Izzy said mischievously.

Alec glared at her over his shoulder.

"Sounds perfect to me." Magnus mumbled. "I like sleeping in your arms."

Alec felt his skin redden for the second time that night, and he tried not to panic at how Magnus would know that. Was the reason he was instinctively searching for Magnus in bed that morning because they somehow ended up spooning? Did his heart rule his body when he was sleeping?

He was grateful that Magnus spoke softly enough that the other two hadn't overheard that last bit.

Once they got to the hotel, Alec shifted Magnus in his arms to hit the elevator button.

"Is he asleep?" Jace asked amusedly.

Alec looked down and saw that Magnus' eyes were closed and his chest was rising and falling in even breaths.

A tender smile slipped out without him meaning to.

"So it seems. He's never this quiet otherwise."

Izzy was smiling knowingly at him when he looked up, and he rolled his eyes at her in response. He was not going to bite at her teasing for her satisfaction.

They got back to their hotel suite and separated so Jace and Izzy could grab their luggage from the living room and Alec could place Magnus on the bed.

He came back out to make sure the other two didn't need anything further.

"Smart – taking the bigger bed. You might need that extra space." Izzy teased, ruffling Alec's hair before slipping into the bedroom that usually would be Alec's. "Jace, I know I signed up for this, but you better have cut your toenails this time!"

"Hey! You better keep your kicks to yourself or you're sleeping on the floor!" Jace argued back.

He chanced a glance at Alec and then moved to close the door until it was just about shut.

"Hey. If this is too much, I can sleep on the couch and you can share with Izzy."

Alec forced a smile. "Thanks, Jace. It's all right. We're just going to sleep."

"All right. You know where I am if you change your mind." Jace said, clapping him on the shoulder before heading into his assigned room.

Alec slipped into the bathroom to wash his face and brush his teeth. Seeing Magnus' makeup wipes, he sighed and gathered what he needed before returning to his now-shared room with Magnus.

Magnus was still sleeping, hugging a pillow to his chest now, and Alec felt bad waking him. But he knew that Magnus would regret not taking his makeup off in the morning.

He nudged Magnus gently, pulling the pillow away, and Magnus grumbled.

"I'm sleepy." he pouted.

"I know. But I need to get your makeup off. Can you just tilt your face up for me? Please?"

Magnus acquiesced, blinking up at him, eyebrows furrowing. Alec got to work wiping away the colours, Magnus closing his eyes so he could take off his eyeliner and shadow. Thankfully, it only took a couple minutes and then he was clean.

"I know you're tired, but do you want to go to the bathroom or anything before sleeping?"

"Mm… maybe."

Alec chuckled. "All right. Come on. Let's go."

He guided Magnus to the bathroom, arm wound around his waist, and left him to do his thing. The bathroom was en-suite so if Magnus needed him, all he had to do was shout.

Alec undressed until he was in just his boxers and a t-shirt and he jumped in surprise when he turned around to find Magnus standing there staring at him.

"You're so hot."

Alec's usual porcelain skin flushed a bright red once again, and he cursed his reactive blood vessels.

"Uh, are-are you ready for bed?"

"Mm, yeah. Just gotta change."

"Okay, should I—"

Before he could finish his sentence, Magnus had started unbuttoning his pants and kicked them off his legs. He tried to undo his dress shirt but the buttons were too numerous and complicated for his uncoordinated fingers so Alec crossed the room to help him.

Magnus' eyes never left Alec's deft fingers as they unlooped the buttons from their fabric prisons.

Once unbuttoned, Alec pushed the fabric off of his shoulders and let it drop to the floor.

He had to swallow. Magnus was currently wearing very little clothing and was standing very close to him.

Magnus reached up to stroke a hand down Alec's chest, watching its movement. "Thank you for your help, Alexander."

Alec nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He took Magnus' wandering hand and led him to bed, helping him climb under the covers on his side before moving to his own and climbing in.

Magnus immediately scooted over and cuddled up to his side, tucking his head into Alec's shoulder and throwing a leg over Alec's thigh to slip between his.

"Uh, what are you… is this comfortable for you?" Alec asked instead.

Magnus sighed happily, nuzzling his cheek against Alec's pec. "Very. This okay?"

"Uh, yeah, yes. All good."

Alec felt Magnus' smile against his skin, and his hand automatically moved to stroke through his hair. He expected to be met with a lot of product but it was actually quite soft and flitted through his fingers easily.

Magnus fell back to sleep quickly, but Alec lay awake, wondering if he wasn't wrong to hope his siblings were right about the two of them. Because one thing was for sure—Alec was falling hard and fast for Magnus Bane.

* * * * *

Continue to Chapter 8

[phroyd]

WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as “red team, blue team” debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.

At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kelly’s departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happer’s proposed panel as a forum for it.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka made a well-publicized effort to talk him out of leaving the Paris accord in 2017. But after being vanquished by officials including Mr. Bannon, Mr. Pruitt, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, there is little evidence she has resisted his approach since then.

The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.

“That is one of the most crude messages one could deliver,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as the NATO ambassador under George W. Bush.

At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.

Mr. Reilly, the head of the Geological Survey, who does not have a background in climate change science, characterized the changes as an attempt to prepare more careful, accurate reports. “We’re looking for answers with our partners and to get statistical significance from what we understand,” he said.

Yet scientists said that by eliminating the projected effects of increased carbon dioxide pollution after 2040, the Geological Survey reports would present an incomplete and falsely optimistic picture of the impact of continuing to burn unlimited amounts of coal, oil and gasoline.

“The scenarios in these reports that show different outcomes are like going to the doctor, who tells you, ‘If you don’t change your bad eating habits, and you don’t start to exercise, you’ll need a quadruple bypass, but if you do change your lifestyle, you’ll have a different outcome,’” said Katharine Hayhoe, the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and an author of the National Climate Assessment.

Not all government science agencies are planning such changes. A spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, asked if its scientists would limit the use of climate models, wrote in an email, “No changes are being considered at this time.”

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The push to alter the results of at least some climate science reports, several officials said, came after November’s release of the second volume of the National Climate Assessment.

While the Trump administration did not try to rewrite the scientific conclusions of the report, officials sought to play it down — releasing it the day after Thanksgiving — and discredit it, with a White House statement calling it “largely based on the most extreme scenario.”

This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to finalize the legal rollback of two of President Barack Obama’s most consequential policies: regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from vehicles and power plants.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times

Still, the report could create legal problems for Mr. Trump’s agenda of abolishing regulations. This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to finalize the legal rollback of two of President Barack Obama’s most consequential policies: federal regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks.

Opponents say that when they challenge the moves in court, they intend to point to the climate assessment, asking how the government can justify the reversals when its own agencies have concluded that the pollution will be so harmful.

That is why officials are now discussing how to influence the conclusions of the next National Climate Assessment.

“They’ve started talking about how they can produce a report that doesn’t lead to some silly alarmist predictions about the future,” said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded research organization, and who led the administration’s transition at the E.P.A.

A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.

Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

Outside the United States, climate scientists had long given up on the White House being anything but on outlier in policy. But they worry about the loss of the government as a source for reliable climate research.

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

Phroyd

[wbwest]

New Post has been published on WilliamBruceWest.com

New Post has been published on http://www.williambrucewest.com/2017/06/09/west-week-ever-pop-culture-review-6917/

West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review - 6/9/17

  In an interesting shake-up over at CBS, Erinn Hayes has been let go from her role as wife to Kevin James in Kevin Can Wait. They say that the show is going in a new direction, which necessitated the firing. But here’s where it gets interesting. Leah Remini, who played James’s wife on King of Queens, popped up in the season finale as James’ former cop partner. Well, just before announcing Hayes’s departure, CBS announced that Remini would be joining the show next season as a series regular. Now, if you’ve never seen Kevin Can Wait, Kevin James plays a former NYC cop who tries to figure out how to adjust to his recent retirement. Based on the season finale, though, it seems like James’s character might be coming out of retirement. It’s just a strange move, seeing as how the show ended the season as the #1 new comedy on network TV – hardly a situation that necessitated a retooling of the show. Part of what critics praised was Hayes’s portrayal of James’s wife of 20 years. How do you just gloss over that relationship? I mean, they’ve gotta kill her off, but unless you do a time jump, you’ve gotta slog through all the grief stuff, which doesn’t lend itself well to a multicam comedy. And if they’re gonna fast track a relationship between James and Remini, will the audience accept it? It really feels like they blew a sure thing and, if they wanted to recreate The King of Queens, thy should’ve just revived The King of Queens! I’ve said that online since Kevin was announced!

Speaking of Remini, I’m starting to think she’s a Scientology double agent. Bear with me here: Scientology is a well-connected organization in Hollywood that allegedly has the power to ruin your career with the information that they have on their members. If you ever leave the church, you’re pretty much done. Just look at the list of former Scientologists. On that list, Remini and Jeffrey Tambor are the one ones who even have a semblance of a steady career right now, and Tambor kinda skirted the issue by saying he never really joined the church. Remini, however, joined up as a child, and was a HUGE booster of the church. Then, in 2013, she turned on the church – not for its negative views on homosexuality (which is why Crash director Paul Haggis left) or its alleged illegal activities. No, she left because she got her feelings hurt after leadership clapped back at her. At Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes, Remini asked why church leader David Miscavige’s wife wasn’t in attendance, and they basically told her she didn’t have clearance for that info (formal speak for “Nunyo Biznazz”). She didn’t trust that answer, and went further to file a missing persons report on Mrs. Miscavige. Then, she made it her mission to publicly discredit Miscavige, criticizing his leadership, citing reports of abuse in the Sea Org, and more. She went straight to the TOP with her blame game, yet NOTHING has happened to her. In fact, it’s probably rejuvenated her career. She got a successful show on A&E called Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath, where she’s basically telling all their secrets. When the show debuted, the church issued a statement attacking her. Yet, she’s working more now than she was before. So, there’s two things happening here: either Scientology isn’t as powerful and litigious as we’ve been led to believe OR they’re in on it. It’s yin and yang. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. While Scientology has its critics, it never really had an enemy before. Why not create one where they could control the narrative? It’s like learning that Captain America has secretly been Hydra the whole time. Long story short, I’m not entirely convinced she’s left the church, especially over something as trivial as what’s reported to have started the whole thing. And she’s laughing all the way to the bank.

In other TV news, Tia and Tamera Mowry (yeah, they got married and have new hyphenated last names, but I ain’t got time for all that) are trying to get a Sister, Sister revival off the ground. And I don’t know anyone who wants this. If you were cool back in the 90s you probably never watched Sister, Sister, where a set of adopted twins didn’t realize they were twins until a chance meeting in a department store, a la The Parent Trap. Then they all move in together. It was the definition of “mediocre”, yet once ABC canceled it, it gained a new life over on The WB. The most memorable thing about it was that Marques “Batman” Houston, of the R&B group Immature/IMx, played their annoying neighbor Roger (kinda like a watered down Steve Urkel), and they’d constantly yell “Go home, Roger!” at him. Other than that, it was just a bunch of zany, mistaken identity twin shit – stuff that I’d hope adult Tia and Tamera had outgrown by now. What’s the story to tell? They both get divorced, and move in together with their kids? Sorry, Kate & Allie, Getting By, and the upcoming Raven’s Home have already covered that old chestnut. Are they single in the city, doing the same twin shit? Not interested. I don’t have a lot of faith in this one getting picked up, though, because they’re far behind where they need to be. Right now, they say they’re looking for a show runner to guide the project, but then they’d have to find a network. Sister, Sister was NO Full House, so I doubt Netflix would be interested. If anything, the only place I’d put it right now would probably be Freeform, even though the twins are slightly older than the target demo of that channel. Let this just be a lesson that not everything needs to be revived.

In other television news, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow has cast Tala Ashe as Muslim “hacktivist” Zari Adrianna Tomaz for season 3. She’s a computer whiz from 2030, so basically the team’s got their own Oracle/Felicity now – not that they really need it, with Gideon and all. Anyway, in comics Tomaz is actually an Egyptian who uses the Amulet of Isis to transform into the hero Isis. Before the New 52 reboot of the DC Universe, Isis was an important character in the weekly series 52, as she was in a relationship with Black Adam, and her brother, Osiris, was eaten by Sobek. Oh, and she had a cheesy TV show in the 70s. None of that’s gonna be in the Legends, I’m sure. Given the current political climate, and how loaded the name “Isis” is right now, I doubt they’ll actually ever call her that onscreen, either.

Song of the Week

Today I give you “Vampires”, by The Midnight. My pal and thrifting partner, “Special Forces”, and I decided that this is the official theme song for Thrift Justice should it ever become a real show. Synthwave AND saxophone?! I wanna direct Skinemax movies just so I can score them with this entire album. So sexy. Right now, Thrift Justice is a USA drama circa 1990, and I ain’t got no problems with that!

Things You Might Have Missed This Week

Modern Family‘s Sarah Hyland will guest star on Freeform’s Shadowhunters, which kinda sounds like a step back…

Speaking of Freeform, they’ve ordered a pilot for an American adaptation of UK hit Misfits. The network is a good home for something like this, but I’m still pissed over the American adaptation of Skins, so…

Rudy Huxtable herself, Keshia Knight Pulliam, escorted TV dad Bill Cosby to the first day of his rape trial. Whatever. Call me when Lisa Bonet shows up.

In next level pettiness, Taylor Swift put her entire catalog back on Spotify at midnight – at the very moment Katy Perry released her album “Witness”

According to Dan Aykroyd, Paul Feig blew his chance at a Ghostbusters sequel because he overran his budget on unnecessary reshoots. Sony refuted the figures Aykroyd presented, saying the estimates were off by about NINETY percent. Woo!

Jennifer Connelly will join Daveed Diggs in TNT’s Snowpiercer pilot, playing the person who makes the daily announcements on the train. Exciting!

Tom Cruise revealed that the title of the Top Gun sequel will be Top Gun: Maverick. I wonder if John McCain has any feelings about that. Coherent feelings, not ramblings about the Diamondbacks…

Speaking of Cruise, his The Mummy reboot opens today, and reviewers have called it “the worst Tom Cruise movie ever”. Wow.

Singer/actress/sister of Ray J Brandy was found unconscious on a Delta flight, and the doctor who came to her rescue was reportedly Kim Kardashian’s uncle! Considering Ray J put that family on the map, I figure it’s time the Kardashians did something to return the favor.

Gotham stars Morena Baccarin and Ben McKenzie got married. Knowing that show, it’ll probably revealed that they’re Bruce’s real parents or some shit. It’s not like it pays attention to any of the rest of the lore, so why not?

Fox canceled 24 Legacy after a low-rated single season, but they’re still committed to the 24 brand. They’re reportedly developing an anthology series to take the show back to its real-time roots

Like Peter denied Jesus, Jerry Seinfeld denied THREE requests for a hug from Kesha. I don’t blame him!

In one of the strangest deals I’ve ever heard of, Epix has inked a deal to stream its content directly to 2018 Honda Odyssey  minivans

Sony will begin selling clean versions of some of their hit movies. If you’ve ever accidentally bought a clean version of an album from Walmart, you can see why this decision might anger some folks

Hank Williams Jr is back singing the opening to Monday Night Football for the first time since 2011. I guess all his rowdy friends will be over after they finish burning a few more crosses…

George and Amal Clooney welcomed twins Ella and Alexander

Former Power Rangers director/producer/fight coordinator Koichi Sakamoto will direct the upcoming Ultraman Geed series, focusing on the son of the evil Ultraman Belial. Yeah, those words mean something to someone out there.

Newcomer Blu Hunt has been cast as Danielle Moonstar in the upcoming New Mutants spinoff of the X-Men films.

A live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop is being developed, and my heart weeps. As one of the few anime series I’ve watched, and loved, I kinda hope this dies in development hell

Hackers released 8 stolen episodes of ABC’s upcoming game show, Funderdome, and nobody cared.

Donald Glover will be retiring her Childish Gambino hip hop persona after his next album.

We got our first poster for the Black Panther film.

Last week I gave my opinions and feelings on the movie. This week, I’m just gonna stick to the facts:

92% on Rotten Tomatoes

$103 million opening weekend domestic box office

$220 million opening weekend global box office

Third highest opening for a DC film

Most successful female-directed film

Mot expensive female-directed film, with a budget of $150 million

Most tweeted about movie of 2017, with 2.19 million tweets

Won Best In Show and Best Fantasy/Adventure at the Golden Trailer Awards

Last Saturday, Wonder Woman Day was celebrated at comic shops around the world

You’ve seen it by now, right? RIGHT?! Then, what are you waiting for? For these reasons, and more, Wonder Woman once again had the West Week Ever.

[smoothserg]

Nora Dannehy, top prosecutor on John Durham team, resigns

By Kara Scannell, Evan Perez and Caroline Kelly, CNN

Updated 7:20 PM ET, Fri September 11, 2020

The Hartford Courant, which first reported Dannehy's departure, cited colleagues who told the newspaper that Dannehy was stepping down in part due to concerns of political pressure to deliver a report before the presidential election.CNN has not confirmed the reason for her decision, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed she was working on the Russia probe.Dannehy rejoined the office in March 2019. She had previously worked for nearly two decades for the office before leaving to become deputy attorney general for the state of Connecticut. One lawyer familiar with Dannehy's work for Durham said her departure was puzzling. She had appeared committed to the investigation and "just worked like a dog on this."

Trump hopes that Durham will discredit the origins of the FBI's

Russia investigation into his 2016 campaign, and allies, including Barr, have questioned whether the Russians showed a preference for Trump in 2016. But the US intelligence assessment released last month

threatens to undercut those goals, making clear the Russians are doubling down on their pro-Trump efforts to undermine Democratic nominee Joe Biden's 2020 campaign.

Bill Barr responds to what Trump said about him on Fox News 02:20While Durham has brought charges against former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith

for falsifying an email used to prepare a surveillance warrant against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, there's skepticism among Justice officials that Durham will find sufficient evidence to bring additional charges against any other major figures involved.More likely, some officials believe, is a harshly critical report on the conduct and decisions of top intelligence and law enforcement officials who oversaw the investigation of the Trump campaign's ties to Russians.The timing of such a report's release is another potential source of contention, especially in the last 60 days of the 2020 campaign.Barr told CNN's Wolf Blitzer this week that he didn't believe the Durham probe would impact the election."I do not think anything that we do in the Durham investigation ... is going to be affecting the election," Barr added.When asked whether charges in the Durham investigation would come 60 days before the election, Barr replied, "Well, the 60 days is not part of the rule. But I said that I don't think anything we're going to do would violate our policy."Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a statement Friday that Dannehy's "resignation waves a huge red flag about political pressure by Attorney General Barr.""She would not have resigned without good reason," Blumenthal added. "John Durham and Bill Barr should be on notice: issuing a report before the election would violate policies and norms well-established and long-standing at the Department of Justice."

Durham has gathered information from a series of high-profile officials in the probe. Former CIA Director John Brennan sat for an eight-hour interview late last month for the investigation, Brennan's spokesman Nick Shapiro said on Twitter.

Barr's response to Trump's claim stuns CNN reporter 02:21 Shapiro added that the interview occurred at CIA headquarters and Durham had told Brennan he is a witness and isn't a target of the probe, meaning they are not pursuing charges alleging wrongdoing by Brennan. Brennan told Durham that Barr has politicized Durham's investigation, and the former CIA chief asked why the agency's intelligence work on Russian election interference in 2016 is being scrutinized when it's been validated by the Senate Intelligence Committee and former special counsel Robert Mueller.

CNN's Marshall Cohen and Sara Murray contributed to this report.

Yet Another Reason To Rise Up and Vote These Mutha Fucka’s Out

[brandonfullers]

ECB Overview

As expected, European central banks from the ECB to Norges Bank and Riksbank all kept their policy setting on hold this week.

Draghi confirmed that the ECB still has an easing bias at his last policy meeting, although clearly nothing further is in the pipeline for the foreseeable future, with Lagarde likely focusing on a revamp of the central bank,s policy framework and on healing the very apparent rifts at the council when she takes over next month.

The Swedish Riksbank, meanwhile, remained on course to hike rates in December. “The forecast for the repo rate has therefore been revised downwards and indicates that the interest rate will be unchanged for a prolonged period after the expected rise in December”.

It was a relaxed home run for Draghi, who seemed to enjoy his last press conference and didn’t look as though he would regret his departure. After Draghi pushed through another extensive easing package last month, which included an open ended asset purchase program, nobody expected any additional easing steps for October.

The overall message from the central bank remained dovish leaning, with the statement keeping the door open to additional rate cuts if necessary, while making it clear that it will take a while before the ECB will think about removing some of the current stimulus.

The measures will remain in place until inflation has lastingly moved back to target, so it won’t be enough for HICP to hit the 2% limit for just one month. At the same time, Draghi used the last opportunity to once again call for fiscal measures to deal with the economic slowdown, and with data releases today highlighting again that the manufacturing sector remains in recession and that the weakness is spreading, the chances that politicians are finally readying to boost investment spending is rising even in Germany.

Overall, Draghi leaves the central bank with a dovish bias, and we don’t expect a sudden shift when Christine Lagarde takes over next month.

Lagarde will most likely get help from Germany’s new executive board member. Nothing has officially been decided yet, but officials in Berlin this week nominated university economic professor Isabel Schnabel and she has already got an approving nod from Draghi. Lagarde, not an economist herself, will need support from specialists and in fact these two women may become a strong team.

A more high profile role for Schnabel and Lagarde’s political skill could help to boost support for the central bank and help reconcile the German public with a central bank policy that is hitting German savers – especially those nearing retirement – very hard.

At the same time, the central bank needs to keep a very close eye on:

The side effects of its very accommodative policy.

The risk of bubbles in commercial real estate markets, but also in some major cities.

The background of ongoing geopolitical trade tensions and Brexit risks, which have not disappeared. Indeed, as Draghi highlighted, the risk of an immediate cliff-edge scenario and a no-deal Brexit next week may have diminished, but the medium term risks still remain very much on the table.

  Click here to access the Economic Calendar

Andria Pichidi

Market Analyst

Disclaimer: This material is provided as a general marketing communication for information purposes only and does not constitute an independent investment research. Nothing in this communication contains, or should be considered as containing, an investment advice or an investment recommendation or a solicitation for the purpose of buying or selling of any financial instrument. All information provided is gathered from reputable sources and any information containing an indication of past performance is not a guarantee or reliable indicator of future performance. Users acknowledge that any investment in Leveraged Products is characterized by a certain degree of uncertainty and that any investment of this nature involves a high level of risk for which the users are solely responsible and liable. We assume no liability for any loss arising from any investment made based on the information provided in this communication. This communication must not be reproduced or further distributed without our prior written permission.

ECB Overview published first on https://alphaex-capital.blogspot.com/

[biofunmy]

Antonio Brown Is Released by the New England Patriots

The New England Patriots released Antonio Brown on Friday afternoon, ending his brief but turbulent tenure with the team as the N.F.L. was investigating him for multiple accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior, including rape.

“The New England Patriots are releasing Antonio Brown,” the team said in a statement. “We appreciate the hard work of many people over the past 11 days, but we feel that it is best to move in a different direction at this time.”

Cathy Lanier, the N.F.L.’s chief of security, met on Friday with an unnamed woman who said she endured unwelcome sexual advances from Brown two years ago. This week, the woman accused the wide receiver of sending her texts she found intimidating.

The meeting, according to Debra S. Katz, one of the woman’s lawyers, was arranged “to ensure that my client’s safety concerns are being addressed and to preserve electronic evidence.” N.F.L. officials also spoke with Katz and Lisa J. Banks, another lawyer for the woman, on Friday morning.

Katz called Brown’s departure from the Patriots “swift justice” and said her client’s accusations about Brown were “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The release capped a stormy period for one of the N.F.L.’s marquee franchises and for Brown. He was also accused of rape in a federal lawsuit filed last week by Britney Taylor, a former gymnast who met Brown while they attended Central Michigan and whom he later hired as a trainer. Taylor’s lawyers spoke with the N.F.L. after the suit was filed, and she met with the league this week.

Brown, who has denied the accusations from both women through his lawyer, Darren Heitner, posted about his release several times on social media, saying “Thank you for the opportunity” to the Patriots on Twitter.

Brown’s agent, Drew Rosenhaus, wrote on Twitter that it was “unfortunate things didn’t work out with the Patriots” but that “Antonio is healthy and is looking forward to his next opportunity in the N.F.L.”

Whether or not Brown gets another opportunity remains to be seen. In a statement Friday night, the N.F.L. said Brown would not be placed on the commissioner’s exempt list — which is effectively paid leave — as long as he remains a free agent.

The league said it would continue “vigorously and expeditiously” investigating the accusations against Brown. If he is signed by a team, the statement said, placement on the exempt list “may become appropriate at any time depending on the status of the investigation.”

Ahead of Brown’s release, Patriots Coach Bill Belichick abruptly ended his Friday news conference as reporters repeatedly asked questions about the receiver that the coach declined to answer. Belichick said he would answer only football questions and walked out of the room when asked again about Brown.

Brown’s tenure was just the latest trouble for the reigning Super Bowl champions. The club’s initial silence and resistance to sidelining Brown during the N.F.L. investigation drew immediate criticism from fans, who said the team had ignored serious accusations in pursuit of wins. That followed an off-season during which the team’s owner, Robert K. Kraft, faced charges of paying for sexual acts.

The Patriots’ success on the field is unmatched this century. They are a mainstay of the postseason and have won the Super Bowl six times. But the team has become almost as well-known for a series of unusual — and sometimes disturbing — issues and events of the past decade.

Whether it was a star tight end’s murder conviction followed by his suicide in prison, conspiracies to steal plays from opponents and to underinflate footballs to allow quarterback Tom Brady to throw better or Kraft’s entanglement in a sting investigation of a Florida salon, the Patriots have maintained a kind of dual existence as a model franchise for winning and a never-ending soap opera off the field.

Then came the decision to sign Brown.

The text messages, first reported by Sports Illustrated, were sent Wednesday night by a cellphone belonging to Brown, according to Katz. They went to a group of people that included Heitner, Brown’s lawyer, and the woman who has accused Brown of making inappropriate advances. The texts seemed to encourage a third party to research the woman’s history, and they included a photograph of her children.

Brown was instructed by the league and the Patriots to stop communicating with the woman, according to Katz and Banks.

“I can’t connect the dots,” Katz said in an interview, referring to the Patriots’ cutting Brown a day after her client’s complaint had been presented in a letter to the N.F.L. “But the N.F.L. this morning said they immediately contacted the Patriots after we talked last night and told us that neither Antonio Brown nor his associates would be contacting our client anymore.”

The woman, an artist, told Sports Illustrated this week that as she was working on a mural at Brown’s house in 2017, he approached her from behind while naked, holding a hand towel over his genitals. She was later fired, she said.

In the letter sent to the N.F.L. Thursday evening by Katz and Banks, the artist also said Brown had sex with another woman while she was in the same room, working on the mural.

Brown’s tumult has spanned three franchises and included problems large and small — but until now nothing as serious as accusations of rape and other sexual misconduct.

Brown, 31, was traded in the off-season to the Oakland Raiders from the Pittsburgh Steelers, where he spent nine years, seven of them as a Pro Bowler.

He then missed much of training camp with blistered feet, apparently caused by a cryogenic therapy chamber. Next came a dispute over his helmet, with Brown preferring a decade-old model that is no longer approved for use. He lost a grievance about the matter.

Unhappy, Brown was very active on social media throughout the Raiders’ preseason, posting a letter from the team about his fines for missing practice as well as a recording of a phone conversation with his coach.

An altercation with the Raiders’ general manager, Mike Mayock, and a plea from Brown for his release, helped end his brief time with Oakland. The Patriots swooped in to acquire him as a free agent within hours.

He reportedly signed a one-year, $15 million contract that had a $9 million signing bonus. Brown has not yet received the signing bonus and will not get it because of a clause in his contract, according to ESPN.

In his debut for New England last Sunday, Brown caught four passes, including one for a touchdown, in a 43-0 win over the Dolphins.

On Thursday, Nike said it had terminated its contract with Brown. He also lost a contract with Xenith, the helmet manufacturer.

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[thisdaynews]

Trump looks to squash Amash

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Trump looks to squash Amash

Rep. Justin Amash is so far the only Republican in the House to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment. | Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

congress

The president has discussed with aides backing a primary challenge against the lone Republican impeachment supporter.

Donald Trump and his top allies are moving to make Justin Amash pay for becoming the sole Republican congressman to call for the president’s impeachment.

Trump and his top advisers have discussed the prospect of backing a primary challenge to the Michigan lawmaker — a highly unusual move for a president against a member of his own party that would effectively amount to a warning shot to other Republicans thinking of crossing him. The conversations come as the billionaire DeVos family, which has deep ties to the administration and remains one of Michigan’s most powerful families, has announced it will cut off the congressman. That move could send a signal to other conservative donors deciding whether to invest in Amash.

Story Continued Below

Trump has raised the primary challenge idea with Vice President Mike Pence and North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a close Trump ally who co-founded the conservative House Freedom Caucus with Amash. Trump has also addressed the subject with Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a former Michigan GOP leader who remains influential in the state.

Those who’ve spoken with the president say he’s made no firm decision about taking on Amash, who’s accused the president of engaging in “impeachable conduct” and left the door open to a third-party campaign for president. Trump, they point out, is mostly focused on his own reelection and often cools down after he has time to process a slight. There are also potential risks: Trying to unseat Amash could elevate him or turn him into a martyr.

Others in the president’s inner circle are skeptical that Amash, whose office did not respond to a request for comment, will even seek reelection.

Yet in some of the conversations, the president has been adamant that the White House take a forceful stand against the congressman. The deliberations underscore Trump’s penchant for exacting political retribution against those who’ve wronged him — something he executed with devastating precision against former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford.

White House spokespersons declined to comment, as did spokespersons for Pence and Meadows. McDaniel, who under party rules is prohibited from supporting primary candidates, declined to address her conversations with Trump but said in a statement that it’s “sad to see Congressman Amash parroting the Democrats’ talking points on Russia.”

“The only people still fixated on the Russia collusion hoax are political foes of President Trump hoping to defeat him in 2020 by any desperate means possible,” she said. “Voters in Amash’s district strongly support this president and would rather their congressman work to support the president’s policies that have brought jobs, increased wages and made life better for Americans.”

Amash is not the only sitting Republican incumbent that the Trump team has its eye on. Trump advisers are growing increasingly annoyed by Texas Rep. Will Hurd, a frequent critic of the president’s immigration policies. Last week, Trump’s reelection campaign took the rare step of sending a tweet taking the swing-district congressman to task over one of his cable news appearances.

The president also met recently with Rep. Mark Walker, a North Carolina Republican who is weighing a primary challenge to Sen. Thom Tillis. Last year, Tillis co-sponsored legislation to protect then-special counsel Robert Mueller, and he initially opposed the president’s emergency declaration to build a border wall before ultimately voting for it.

The discussions about Amash come as primary opponents have begun to circle. Jim Lower, a 30-year-old state legislator who’s aligned himself with the president, recently announced his candidacy for the Grand Rapids-area seat. A poll released on Tuesday by MIRS News, a political news service in the state, showed Amash trailing Lower by 16 points.

Lower, who is set to travel to Washington next week to meet with senior Republicans, said he was hopeful the president would endorse him. Doing so, he said, would deter other primary candidates from running — which could dilute the anti-Amash vote and potentially pave the way for the congressman’s re-nomination.

“If they were to get involved early I think it would help make sure that it was just me versus Amash in the August primary — and if that’s the case we’re definitely going to win,” Lower said.

“Obviously Trump is a huge component of our campaign, so it will probably go without saying that we’d love to have his endorsement,” he added.

Focus on the president’s potential involvement in the contest is likely to intensify over the summer. In September, national and state GOP leaders are slated to gather on Mackinac Island for the Republican Leadership Conference, a biennial confab that’s expected to draw administration officials and where Amash is certain to come up.

There is growing speculation in Michigan political circles, meanwhile, that the west Michigan-based DeVos family may engage in the primary. Lower has been in touch with representatives for the family. And last week Jase Bolger, a DeVos confidant and former state House speaker, traveled to Washington for meetings with senior Republican officials where Amash was discussed.

A DeVos spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. The mega-donor family, which has bankrolled a host of prominent Republicans including Pence, has broad influence in GOP money circles and their decision could resonate with other donors.

The Amash team has remained tight-lipped about the congressman’s 2020 plans. Yet there are indications the 39-year-old congressman, who was first elected in 2010, recognizes the political toll his support for impeachment has taken.

On Monday evening, Amash announced his departure from the Freedom Caucus, telling CNN that he “didn’t want to be a further distraction for the group.”

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[crashingthenet]

1/6-1/12

Weekly Recap:

Last Man In voting has concluded, and the winners are forward Jeff Skinner (Atlantic), forward Gabriel Landeskog (Central), defenceman Kris Letang (Metropolitan), and forward Leon Draisaitl (Pacific).

The IIHF World Junior Championship ended with a 3-2 regulation gold medal victory for Team Finland. Team USA was awarded silver; Team Russia took home bronze.

On Saturday, the Los Angeles Kings hosted “90’s Night,” during which they used glowing pucks. The glowing pucks originally debuted in 1996, but were later discontinued at the end of the 1997-98 season.

The Montreal Canadiens announced on Monday that goalie Carey Price would be opting out of All-Star Weekend. Price is currently recovering from a lower-body injury and the organization felt he should take the time to rest instead. He will be replaced by goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy of the Tampa Bay Lightning.

All-Star Weekend will be hosted by the San Jose Sharks January 25-26. The NHL has partnered with Adidas to produce eco-friendly jerseys made from marine plastic waste materials. The jerseys will feature team logos for the first time.  

On Tuesday, Mike McKenna became the seventh goaltender to start for the Philadelphia Flyers this season. McKenna was claimed from waivers last week from the Ottawa Senators, after being previously acquired (by Ottawa) in a trade with the Vancouver Canucks.

The Blue Jackets have issued a statement as to why they opted to sit goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky; Bobrovsky apparently acted in a way that the organization did not agree with that is unrelated to his upcoming free agent status and they will not be saying anymore about the incident. Bobrovsky and the organization have since ‘cleared the air,’ and Bobrovsky may start against the Capitals on Saturday.

Rick Nash will be retiring from professional hockey after 15 seasons. Nash’s agent released a statement on Friday that cited lingering concussion symptoms and post-concussion syndrome as the reason for his sudden departure.  

Play of the Week:

On Sunday, forward Jesse Puljujarvi of the Edmonton Oilers beat out goaltender John Gibson of the Anaheim Ducks with an absolutely astounding no-look backhand pass. It was by no means a pretty play, but it was impressive in its execution. The Oilers went on to shutout the Ducks 4-0 in their own arena.

Players to Watch:

Goalie Jonathan Quick of the Los Angeles Kings recently became the 5th American born goalie to tally his 300th career win. Quick has 300 wins and 58 overtime (OT) losses in 576 games played so far in his career. He has started in 30 games this season, winning 7.

Defenceman Robert Bortuzzo of the St. Louis Blues has tallied 1 goal and 5 points in 24 games played this season. He has a career total of 13 goals and 47 points in 300 games played. Bortuzzo recently signed a three-year contract extension with the Blues.

Forward Travis Konecny of the Philadelphia Flyers has 11 goals and 24 points in 44 games played this season. He has a career total of 46 goals and 99 points in 195 games played. He was selected in the first round of the 2015 NHL Draft (24th overall). In his rookie season (2015-16) Konecny was awarded the E.J. McGuire Award of excellence by the NHL; this award goes to the prospect who “best exemplifies the commitment to excellence.” He is the first recipient of this award.

Prospect Watch:

Forward Alexandre Fortin, who went undrafted in 2015, has 2 goals and 5 points in 14 games played this season with the Rockford IceHogs of the American Hockey League; he has 3 goals and 6 points in 24 games played this season with the Chicago Blackhawks of the NHL. Fortin played for the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League from 2014-17, during which he accumulated 52 goals and 135 points in 173 games played.

Defenceman Philippe Myers, who went undrafted in 2015, has 7 goals and 24 points in 36 games played this season with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms of the American Hockey League. Myers played for the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League from 2013-17, during which he accumulated 29 goals and 92 points in 203 games played. Myers was also a part of Team Canada during the 2016-17 World Junior Championship, though he was taken out early due to a concussion; the team went on to place second and bring home silver.

Defenceman Jeremy Lauzon, drafted 52nd overall by the Boston Bruins, has 1 goal and 6 points in 18 games played with the Providence Bruins of the American Hockey League this season; he has 1 goal in 15 games with the Boston Bruins of the NHL. Lauzon played for the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League from 2013-17, during which he accumulated 35 goals and 130 points in 200 games played. Lauzon was also a member of Team Canada during the 2016-17 World Junior Championship; he tallied 2 goals and 1 assist in 7 games played.

Team of the Week:

The Detroit Red Wings, an Original Six team founded in 1926, who are currently 8th overall in the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference and play out of Little Caesars Arena. The team was originally known as the Detroit Cougars form 1926-30; they were the Detroit Falcons from 1930-32. In 1932, they changed their name to the Red Wings. The Red Wings have won the most Stanley Cups (11) of any NHL franchise in the United States, most recently in 2008. The Wings previously played in the historic Joe Louis Arena from 1979-2017. They have the very distinct and recognizable tradition of throwing an octopus on the ice for luck during playoff games. The NHL has yet to successfully prevent this from occurring. Notable alumni include Brett Hull, Steve Yzerman, Ted Lindsay, Sergei Fedorov, Gordie Howe, and Nicklas Lidstrom.

Outside the NHL:

The National Women’s Hockey League All-Star Weekend will take place at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville February 9-10.

The Canadian Women’s Hockey League All-Star Game will take place at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on January 20.

The American Hockey League All-Star Classic will be hosted by the Springfield Thunderbirds January 27-28.

Weekly Thoughts:

From fistfights between teammates, to frankly dangerous slashes aimed at opposing players, to players yelling at coaching staff during games, to CEOs taking cheap shots at top performers, frustrations are piling up this season. Perhaps after All-Star Weekend teams will be rested and ready to go.

The St. Louis Blues can’t seem to catch a break this season. The Blues are currently 6th in the Central Division of the Western Conference and it’s taken its toll on the team. On December 10, defenceman Robert Bortuzzo and forward Zach Sanford exchanged blows at practice.

On January 11, Florida’s Keith Yandle delivered a horrifying slash to the stick of Calgary’s Sean Monahan, barely missing his arm/hand. Monahan had just released the puck for what became the game winning empty net goal.

On January 9, forward Nathan MacKinnon of the Colorado Avalanche took his frustration out on coach Jared Bednar on the bench. MacKinnon later apologized and Bednar said that it hadn’t bothered him at all.

In December, Dallas Stars CEO Jim Lites had some choice words about the Stars top scorers Tyler Seguin and captain Jamie Benn. Lites called their performance ‘f-cking horsesh-t.’ When asked Benn responded “I don’t play for him. I play for every player in this room, the coaching staff.”

It’s clear that struggling teams are becoming increasingly frustrated as the season continues. Every team wants to compete for the Stanley Cup, but not every team has had the season they hoped for. With the trade deadline fast approaching, we might see some big moves from the teams at the bottom of the league. There have already been some big names appearing in trade rumors this season, and it’s going to be interesting to see how accurate those rumors are. It’s also going to be fun watching teams start to prepare for next year with new acquisitions.

Hopefully these teams will hit their stride and start performing better this season, but if they don’t there’s always next year.

Weekly Vocabulary:

Man-Advantage: When one team is penalized, and one of its players is sent to the penalty box, the second team maintains a man advantage for the duration of the penalty (major penalty) or until a goal is scored (minor penalty). If two penalties are called on one team there will be a two-man advantage. If more than two penalties are called on one team the man advantage is limited to two men. If both teams are penalized, there is no man advantage; it becomes a four-on-four.

Empty Net: When a team pulls their goalie in order to have six skaters (a man advantage).

Extra Attacker: A player who has been substituted for the team’s goaltender on the ice.

Too Many Men: When one team has too many men on the ice during a shift change.

Own Goal: The act of a team unintentionally shooting the puck into their own net instead of their opponent’s. For statistical purposes, the last player on the opposing team to touch the puck is awarded the goal.

Scrum: When players from both teams are piled up against the boards/goal posts, shoving and hitting at each other.

Delay of Game: Deliberately causing a stoppage of play; player is penalized with a minor penalty.

Coach’s Challenge: If a coach disagrees with a call on ice, he is able to challenge the call. This results in a video review of the play; if the coach was right and the call on ice was wrong, the goal is overturned, if the coach is wrong and the goal stands, that coach loses the ability to call a time-out.

Turnover: When the team in possession of the puck gives it up to the opponent; alternatively, the team who does not control the puck can force a turnover by ‘stealing’ the puck mid pass, or by taking it directly from the opposing player’s stick.

Face-Off: The two teams line up in opposition to each other. One player from each team attempts to gain control of the puck after it is dropped by an official between their sticks onto a face-off spot on the ice. A face-off starts every game and occurs throughout the game after every stoppage of play.

Weekly Trivia:

The Calder Memorial Trophy (not to be confused with Calder Cup of the American Hockey League) is awarded annually to “the player selected as the most proficient in his first year of competition in the National Hockey League.” The winner is selected by the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association at the end of the regular season. Players are eligible for the Calder only if they are no more than 26 years old by September 15 of their rookie (first) season. The Calder Memorial is dedicated in memory of former NHL President Frank Calder, who bought a trophy every year to present permanently to the outstanding rookie of the season. The award is now kept in perpetuity. The Toronto Maple Leafs lead all teams with 10 players who have won the Calder.

Weekly Standings:

Eastern Conference

Metropolitan Division

Washington Capitals – 58 points

Pittsburgh Penguins – 56 points

Columbus Blue Jackets – 53 points

Atlantic Division

Tampa Bay Lightning – 70 points

Toronto Maple Leafs – 58 points

Boston Bruins – 54 points

Western Conference

Central Division

Winnipeg Jets – 58 points

Nashville Predators – 58 points

Dallas Stars – 50 points

Pacific Division

Calgary Flames – 62 points

San Jose Sharks – 59 points

Las Vegas Golden Knights – 58 points

*Note: Information was obtained prior to 12pm on Saturday January 12. Information occurring after the 12pm deadline will feature next week.

[newstfionline]

Headlines: Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Trump Leaves Walter Reed Hospital, Returning to the White House (AP) President Donald Trump on Monday evening left Walter Reed hospital in Maryland. Photos showed Trump’s motorcade leaving the facility at around 6:30 p.m. ET. The departure came several hours after Trump announced he would be leaving, while his doctors told a news conference that his condition has improved enough to allow him to return back to the White House. Before his departure, the president wrote he “will be back on the campaign trail soon.” About 30 minutes later, Trump was seen at the White House, taking off his mask. Trump will need to continue treatment as he is still undergoing a five-day course of the intravenous antiviral drug, remdesivir, and will have to isolate himself for a certain period of time.

Poll: Many Americans blame virus crisis on US government (AP) More Americans blame the U.S. government instead of foreign nations for the coronavirus crisis in the United States, a rebuke to the Trump administration’s contention that China or other countries are most at fault, a new poll shows. The poll by The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research was conducted before President Donald Trump tested positive for the virus Friday and was hospitalized. Although many see plenty of blame to go around and there’s a wide bipartisan divide over who is responsible, 56% of Americans say the U.S. government has substantial responsibility for the situation. That compares with 47% who place that much blame on the governments of other countries and only 39% who say the same about the World Health Organization. “It reflects a general lack of confidence in the way the government has handled the situation,” said Austin Wright of the Harris School for Public Policy.

Record-breaking California wildfires surpass 4 million acres (AP) In a year that has already brought apocalyptic skies and smothering smoke to the West Coast, California set a grim new record Sunday when officials announced that the wildfires of 2020 have now scorched a record 4 million acres—in a fire season that is far from over. The unprecedented figure—an area larger than the state of Connecticut—is more than double the previous record for the most land burned in a single year in California. “The 4 million mark is unfathomable. It boggles the mind, and it takes your breath away,” said Scott McLean, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire. “And that number will grow.” So far, in this year’s historic fire season, more than 8,200 California wildfires have killed 31 people and scorched “well over 4 million acres in California” or 6,250 square miles, Cal Fire said Sunday in a statement. The blazes have destroyed more than 8,400 buildings.

U.S. Allies Worry the White House Wants to End New START Treaty (Foreign Policy) The United States and Russia are due to meet in Helsinki, Finland, today in their ongoing effort to renegotiate and replace the New START nuclear arms treaty which is set to expire in February 2021. New START is the only remaining agreement limiting nuclear arms between the two countries. Much of the delay in renegotiating the treaty was due to Washington’s insistence that China be included in any new agreement. But the White House has since backed off that condition as Trump has become embroiled in his reelection campaign, and now the hope among many U.S. allies is that Washington will seek a standalone deal with Russia before the deadline and pursue another agreement with China at a later time. The United States has so far only proposed new conditions for Russia, a move that some officials worry is little more than a thinly-veiled attempt by the White House to scuttle the deal entirely. As Foreign Policy’s Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer recently reported, “former officials and arms control experts worry the administration may be seeking to slow-walk the accord to death by making impossible demands of Russia just months before the treaty is slated to end.”

Cinema-going collapse (Reuters) Cineworld brings down the curtain. Cineworld will close all of its UK and U.S. movie theatres this week, leaving as many as 45,000 workers unemployed for the foreseeable future as it strives to survive a coronavirus collapse in film-making and cinema-going. The world’s second-biggest cinema chain said the reluctance of studios to push ahead with major releases such as the new James Bond film had left it no choice but to close all 536 Regal theatres in the U.S. and its 127 Cineworld and Picturehouse theatres in the UK from Oct. 8.

Ebooks (Wired) Checkouts of ebooks from libraries are up 52 percent compared to the same period last year according to OverDrive, the tech partner of 50,000 libraries worldwide for ebook services. Hoopla, a rival service, said another 439 library systems joined their network since March, increasing their customers by 20 percent. Digital offerings are nothing new—libraries pay an average of $40 per ebook compared to the $15 an individual pays for an ebook, and can lend that one ebook out for a certain number of uses or over a certain period. The system is tense: publishers are worried that a switch to library digital books will cause the bottom to fall out of their print business, while libraries don’t like that pricing model, especially because surges (like the one seen in pandemic times) can get very expensive very quickly.

Venezuela Planning New 100,000-Bolivar Bills Worth Just $0.23 (Bloomberg) Venezuela has begun to import banknote paper and is mulling plans to print bills with larger denominations as hyperinflation causes shortages of cash, according to six people with knowledge of the matter. The central bank is considering new bills starting with 100,000 bolivars, the people said. It would be the highest denomination yet, but still worth only $0.23. The need for larger bills in Venezuela is a direct result of an ever weakening currency and inflation that ran at an estimated 2,400% in the past year, meaning that paying for a cart full of groceries now requires a bag of cash. Venezuela has been suffering from hyperinflation since 2017, decimating the ability of most Venezuelans to purchase even the most essential goods—much less save. The average family requires more than 100 times the official minimum wage to meet its basic needs. Authorities have turned a blind eye to a greater number of transactions being carried out in U.S. dollars, with Ecoanalitica estimating that some 60% of all purchases are now done using greenbacks.

‘Nuclear’ lockdown recommendation for Ireland (Reuters) Ireland’s government faced political and business resistance to a surprise recommendation by health chiefs for Europe’s first major second wave national lockdown to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed as coronavirus cases rise. The National Public Health Emergency Team called for a leap to the highest level of COVID-19 restrictions, Level 5, late on Sunday, just three days after telling government the current Level 2 status for most of the country was appropriate.

Four dead in southern France flooding, up to 18 missing (Reuters) Four people have died and up to 18 more are missing in floods and heavy rain in southern France, a spokeswoman for Alpes Maritimes prefecture said on Monday. Southern France has been lashed by torrential rain over the weekend and swollen rivers have swept away houses, bridges and parts of roads.

Armenia’s Leader Makes Plea to U.S. as Conflict Rages With Azerbaijan (NYT) When Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, spoke by telephone on Thursday with President Trump’s national security adviser, he raised a delicate issue: Why is nothing being done to stop a longtime United States ally, Turkey, from using American-made F-16 jets against ethnic Armenians in a disputed mountain region? Mr. Pashinyan’s call to the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, followed an eruption of heavy fighting in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, a remote territory at the center of the most enduring and venomous of the “frozen conflicts” left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The breakaway enclave, legally part of Azerbaijan but controlled by Armenians for the past three decades, has seen many military flare-ups over the years. But the current fighting, Mr. Pashinyan said in a telephone interview, has taken on a far more dangerous dimension because of Turkey’s direct military intervention in support of Azerbaijan, its ethnic Turkic ally. In a statement Sunday, the International Committee of the Red Cross denounced “a surge in attacks using heavy explosive weaponry on populated areas,” which it said “is taking a deadly toll on civilians.” It said that hundreds of homes, as well as schools and hospitals, had been destroyed or damaged, forcing families to flee or retreat “underground to unheated basements, sheltering day and night from the violence.” The conflict has set off alarms about the risks of a wider war and put the United States, with its large and politically influential Armenian diaspora, in the uncomfortable position of watching Turkey, a vital NATO ally, deploying F-16 jets in support of Armenia’s enemies.

Remote learning begins in virus-hit Philippines (AP) Grade school and high school students in the Philippines began classes at home Monday after the coronavirus pandemic forced remote-learning onto an educational system already struggling to fund schools. The shift to distance learning has been a logistical nightmare for the poverty-stricken Southeast Asian country that has long lacked enough classrooms, teachers and educational equipment. Nearly 25 million students enrolled this year, mostly in 47,000 public schools nationwide that would have to be replicated in homes and enlist the help of parents and guardians as co-teachers. A majority of families, especially from poor and rural communities, opted to use government-provided digital or printed learning materials or “modules,” which students will read at home with the guidance of their elders before carrying out specified activities. Most lack computers and reliable internet connections. Teachers can answer questions by telephone. Other families preferred for their children to get lessons online or through regional radio and TV educational broadcasts.

Pilgrims return to Mecca as Saudi eases virus restrictions (AP) A very small, limited number of people on Sunday donned the white terrycloth garment symbolic of the Muslim pilgrimage and circled Islam’s holiest site in Mecca, after Saudi Arabia lifted coronavirus restrictions that had been in place for months. The kingdom had taken the rare step in early March of suspending the smaller “umrah” pilgrimage, which can be taken at any time of the year and draws millions from across the world, as the coronavirus morphed into a global pandemic and prompted countries to impose lockdowns and curfews to slow down transmission. But as nations begin to ease those restrictions, the Saudi government on Sunday started allowing a maximum of 6,000 pilgrims a day to enter the sprawling Grand Mosque in Mecca. Only Saudi citizens and residents will be permitted to enter the mosque during this first phase of reopening, and each person has up to three hours to complete the pilgrimage.

[investmart007]

JERUSALEM | The Latest: US official defends embassy move to Jerusalem

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JERUSALEM | The Latest: US official defends embassy move to Jerusalem

JERUSALEM — The Latest on the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and Palestinian protests (all times local):

11:15 a.m.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says it’s a U.S. “national security priority” to relocate the Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Mnuchin was speaking Monday at an event in Jerusalem ahead of the opening ceremony for the new U.S. Embassy.

Trump’s decision in December to go forward with a campaign promise to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem was welcomed by Israel and condemned by the Palestinians. Previous presidents had signed a waiver postponing the move, citing national security.

Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it in a move not recognized by the international community. The Palestinians seek the city’s eastern half as capital of a future state and say the move shows the U.S. is not an impartial peace negotiator.

___

11 a.m.

Israeli troops firing from across a border fence have shot and wounded two Palestinians as a protest near the Gaza border gets underway.

Gaza residents streamed to the border area Monday for what is intended to be the largest protest yet against a decade-old blockade of the territory. Israel’s military says it will stop a possible border breach at all costs, warning protesters that they are endangering their lives.

Near Gaza City, hundreds gathered about 150 meters (yards) from the fence. A reporter witnessed two people being shot in the legs.

Protester Mohammed Hamami, 40, says the march is a “message to Israel and its allies that we will never give up on our land.” Most Gaza residents are descendants of refugees from the Mideast war over Israel’s 1948 creation.

___

10:50 a.m.

Turkey’s president has once again condemned the U.S. decision to move its Israel embassy to Jerusalem.

In a statement published late Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the U.S. disregarded “rights and justice,” ignoring the international community. The new embassy is to be officially inaugurated on Monday.

Erdogan says the move serves to “reward” the Israeli government despite it undermining efforts to resolve the decades-long conflict, while it “punished” Palestinians. Erdogan says: “History and humanity will never forgive the injustices done to our Palestinian brothers.”

Erdogan has been vehemently critical of the U.S. decision and hosted an extraordinary summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in December to condemn the move.

The Turkish president called on Israel to act “responsibly and with moderation” during possible protests on Monday to ensure no one’s killed.

___

10:40 a.m.

Two prominent newspapers in the United Arab Emirates are criticizing America’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The English-language, government-aligned Gulf News called Monday “a sad day” in a front-page headline over a cartoon by the slain Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali of a crying Palestinian woman behind barbed wire. Al-Ali, a critic of both Israeli and Arab governments, was fatally shot in London in 1987.

In an editorial, the Dubai-based Gulf News said: “This is a day when the United States and the administration of President Donald Trump should hang its head in shame.” It called Trump’s decision “a purely political move to appease his friends on the Manhattan party circuit” and said “Jerusalem’s status is non-negotiable.”

The Gulf News regularly datelines news reports as being from “Occupied Jerusalem.”

In The National, an English-language, government-aligned newspaper in Abu Dhabi, editor-in-chief Mina al-Oraibi wrote: “Rather than ignoring history and historic rights, courage and immediate intervention is needed to save the heart of the Arab world.'”

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10:30 a.m.

The speaker of Iran’s parliament is reportedly warning that moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem will inflame tensions in the Middle East.

Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency on Monday quoted Ali Larijani as saying: “Definitely their measures on moving their embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and Iran’s nuclear issue will not go unchallenged. These sorts of actions will increase tension in the region and the world.”

Larijani urged Muslim countries to take more serious measures in response to President Donald Trump’s “wrong and unwise decision” to move the embassy to Jerusalem. The city’s future status is one of the most divisive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Larijani’s comments come nearly a week after Trump pulled America out of the nuclear deal Iran struck with world powers in 2015.

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10:20 a.m.

Witnesses say Israeli drones have dropped incendiary materials, setting ablaze tires that had been collected for use in a planned Gaza border protest.

They say the drones set tires ablaze in two locations early Monday, releasing large clouds of black smoke.

In weekly protests since March, Gaza activists have been using the thick smoke from burning tires as a cover against Israeli snipers on the other side of the fence.

On Monday, the largest turnout yet is expected in a campaign, led by Gaza’s Hamas rulers, to break the decade-old blockade of the territory.

Mosques called on people to head for the border. A general strike was observed, with shops and markets closed. Buses deployed outside mosques to pick up protesters.

Israel’s military says it will stop any border breach.

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9:50 a.m.

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has denounced the choice of a “religious bigot” to deliver the blessing at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.

Pastor Robert Jeffress, leader of a Dallas-area Baptist church and a spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump, is slated to deliver a blessing on Monday at the opening of the relocated embassy.

Jeffress has drawn criticism for calling Islam and Mormonism “a heresy from the pit of hell” and saying Jews “can’t be saved.”

Romney writes on Twitter that “Such a religious bigot should not be giving the prayer that opens the United States Embassy in Jerusalem.”

___

9:15 a.m.

A senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has sharply criticized President Donald Trump over his decision to open a U.S. Embassy in contested Jerusalem, saying the American administration is “based on lies.”

Saeb Erekat told the Voice of Palestine radio Monday that Trump violated a promise to hold off on moving the embassy to give peace talks a chance. Erekat says Washington “is no longer a partner.”

In December, Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, infuriating Palestinians who seek the Israeli-annexed eastern sector as a capital. The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem opens Monday.

Erekat says the Trump administration has “become part of the problem.” He suggested Trump’s Mideast team is unqualified, saying “the world needs real leaders, and those (White House officials) are real estate dealers, not leaders.”

___

9:05 a.m.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary has expressed concern that the relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel could escalate tensions in the Middle East.

Yoshihide Suga said Monday that “Japan is concerned that the move could make peace process in the Middle East even more difficult or escalate tension in all of the Middle East.” He says Japan will watch the development with great interest.

Suga stopped short of criticizing the U.S., and said that Japan takes note of Washington’s pledge that the issue of Jerusalem’s status should be resolved between the concerned parties.

He stressed that Japan’s position is that the disputes and Jerusalem’s status should be resolved via negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. Suga added that Japan hopes to contribute in its own way to the region’s peace by promoting trust and dialogue between the two parties through various projects.

The relocation of the embassy from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem has been welcomed by Israel but condemned by the Palestinians, who want their capital to be in east Jerusalem and view the decision as a blatantly one-sided move on one of the thorniest disputes in the conflict.

___

9 a.m.

President Donald Trump’s Mideast peace negotiator says moving the American embassy to Jerusalem is a “necessary condition” to a lasting peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

American officials are in Jerusalem for Monday’s relocation of the embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested city, a move the Israeli government has embraced but the Palestinians have condemned.

Jason Greenblatt writes on Twitter that “the long-overdue step of moving our Embassy is not a departure from our strong commitment to facilitate a lasting peace deal.”

Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it in a move not recognized internationally. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. They view the relocation as a blatant, one-sided move that invalidates America’s role as an impartial peace broker.

___

8:30 a.m.

Israel has warned Gaza residents they will be risking their lives if they approach the border during a planned mass protest.

The army says in the leaflets dropped by jets Monday that it will “act against every attempt to damage the security fence or harm IDF soldiers or Israeli civilians.”

Gaza’s ruling Hamas says it expects tens of thousands to join Monday’s march, suggesting a possible border breach. The march is part of a campaign to break Gaza’s decade-old border blockade. It’s also a protest against the inauguration Monday of a U.S. Embassy in contested Jerusalem.

Since March, 42 Palestinian protesters have been killed and more than 1,800 wounded by Israeli army fire.

With Israel and Hamas digging in, there has been concern about large numbers of casualties Monday.

__

By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (A.S)

___

[lindyhunt]

Unriddled: Facebook's Big Executive Shake-Up, Microsoft Build, and More Tech News You Need

We all have a favorite time a year. For some, it's the winter holidays. For others, it's the entire duration of summer. And for tech nerds (including yours truly), it's developer conference season.

This week, the season for developer conferences forged ahead, with news and product announcements coming from Microsoft, Google, and several more. But settle in: that's far from the only tech news that emerged over the past week, as the entire sector has been quite busy lately.

It's our Wednesday tech news roundup, and we're breaking it down.

Unriddled: The Tech News You Need

1. Big Changes to Facebook's Executive Org Chart

As first reported by Recode yesterday, Facebook is bringing a major shuffle to its executive org chart, with changes being made among the leadership at WhatsApp, Messenger, and the core Facebook app. Here's a rundown of the overall changes.

First, Chris Daniels, VP of Product at Internet.org, will be coming in to lead WhatsApp, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app owned by Facebook. Right before F8 (Facebook's developer conference) kicked off, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced his departure, and Daniels will be taking his place. 

Koum also left an open vacancy on Facebook's board of directors, which will be filled by Cranemere CEO Jeff Zients. 

David Marcus will transition from head of Messenger to the lead of a new, internal division dedicated to the blockchain. He will be joined by Instagram VP of product Kevin Weil. Marcus's responsibilities will be assumed by Messenger VP of Product Stan Chudnovsky.

Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri will be taking over for Weil at Instagram. Facebook of VP of Product Management John Hegeman will assume Mosseri's responsibilities.

Facebook's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, who previously oversaw only Facebook's core app, will now be in charge of every one of the company's portfolio apps: Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Cox's previous Product responsibilities will be assumed by VP of Product Management Will Cathcart.

Taking over product for Facebook's core app is longtime Cox lieutenant, Will Cathcart. He's been there almost 8 years, and was recently running the profiles team (the same team responsible for Facebook's new dating service...)

— Kurt Wagner (@KurtWagner8) May 8, 2018

Among all of these changes, Facebook has also created a team dedicated solely to privacy products, such as the Clear History feature announced at F8. According to Recode, that team will be led by Director of Product Management David Baser.

Here's a look at the new org chart. As for its composition, we'll let this tweet from Bloomberg's Sarah Frier speak for itself ... 

Same faces, new jobs. Many dudes. pic.twitter.com/PXaZAwK4Z0

— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) May 8, 2018

... as well as this one from Cecilia Kang of The New York Times.

For the This Can't Go Wrong File: the creators of the most popular and powerful social and tech tools online do not reflect the ethnic, gender, global diversity of its users... https://t.co/GWQM72NYQN

— CeciliaKang (@ceciliakang) May 8, 2018

2. Tech Ethics Take Center Stage at 2018 Developer Conferences, Including Microsoft Build

This week, we're seeing many of the higher-profile annual developer conferences wrap up, with the exception of Apple's WWDC scheduled to take place in June. While last week we saw F8, Monday featured the opening keynote of Microsoft Build, and Google I/O kicked off yesterday with the event's opening keynote (see our full coverage here).

But throughout these events, there seems to be an undercurrent of transparency, ethics, and the responsibility of tech companies. And although the F8 keynotes touched on these topics a bit at F8 during a discussion of AI ethics, the themes were particularly strong during the opening keynote of Microsoft Build.

"Privacy is a human right," CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed early on, setting the tone for the remarks to follow.

Nadella went on to challenge his peers to "ask ourselves not only what computers can do, but what computers should do," which was echoed throughout many of the product and feature reveals.

Many of these potential abilities fell under the umbrella of AI, and how related tools like transcription, translation, and dictation can be of significant service to people with disabilities.

"I'm deaf, and I work with a sign language interpreter," said engineer Katie Sullivan from the stage. "The transcript doesn't eliminate the need for my interpreter, but it lets me give my full attention, without having to worry about note-taking." 

But there were many other announcements made throughout the keynote, such as a new integration between Microsoft's voice assistant, Cortana, and Amazon's, Alexa.

Users who have one company's hardware can now seamlessly use the voice assistant of the other -- so that if, for example, someone owns an Amazon Echo but manages her calendar with Cortana, she can use the two without switching platforms.

Check out the full Day 1 keynote here.

3. Instagram Is Likely to Add a Music Sticker to Stories

Anyone with a vivid imagination has almost certainly thought at some point, "My life should have its own theme music."

Well, now it can -- by way of what you share on Instagram stories, at least. According to a scoop from TechCrunch, developer Ishan Agarwal discovered music icons and related code within the Android version of the app. This code points to the eventual reveal of a music sticker, which would allow users to add a soundtrack to any visual content they share on stories.

Source: TechCrunch

Stickers currently allow users to add things like their current location, the day of the week, or the temperature where they are to their Story photos and videos.

But musical integration is something that Instagram seems to have been working on for some time.

At F8 last week, for example, company leaders allowed an integration with Spotify that lets users share a sticker of what they're listening to on the music streaming service.

Source: Instagram

As the TechCrunch report points out, there hasn't quite been a seamless way to add a soundtrack to videos shared on Instagram, or most other social networks. It usually required third-party apps or editing programs, and even then, if the music had rights protecting it from being reproduced, the videos were often removed.

With licensed music streaming service integration, that problem is largely remedied. Not only that, according to the story, but it also introduces a new competitive edge.

Currently, the app musical.ly is particularly popular among those who enjoy using it to post lip-syncing videos, as it already has a music integration built in. It also offers some of the same features as Instagram, like stickers and filters.

But compare musical.ly's 60 million monthly active users (as of November 2017) to Instagram's 800 million -- as well as its longer existence and Facebook ownership -- and the imbalance becomes evident. The feature has yet to come to fruition, but when it does, its impact (if any) on musical.ly will be interesting to observe.

4. Twitter Is Testing Encrypted DMs

Encrypted messaging is a much-talked-about topic recently. Just this week, Facebook released a statement and explanation on why and how its end-to-end encryption on the WhatsApp messaging app works, pointing to its value the work of professionals like journalists (for protected conversations with sources), and use cases like a private dialogue between doctors and patients.

Messenger offers an encrypted messaging option as well, with its Secret Conversations feature, allowing participants to have an end-to-end encrypted conversation that can't be seen by anyone else, including Facebook, the company alleges.

And while Twitter does allow things like open direct messages (DM) -- in which users can send someone a private note even if that person doesn't follow them back -- it's never offered any level of encryption for them, leaving them vulnerable to surveillance.

But now, reports TechCrunch, that could be changing. The possibility of such a feature launch came to light when another developer, Jane Manchun Wong, discovered code inside the Twitter Android application package that revealed options to start a secret conversation, as well as encryption keys.

Source: TechCrunch

In the realm of journalism, at least, the potential addition of encrypted messaging within Twitter is significant, as that's often the first point of contact or discoverability for many reporters. What the exact nature of the feature remains to be seen, and it's possible that Twitter will have to come to the defense of its own encrypted messaging, much like Facebook has felt compelled to do.

For instance, WhatsApp has been questioned about the use of its encrypted messaging "by bad people to do bad things," writes Facebook Global Public Policy Lead on Security Gail Kent -- especially by law enforcement officials who feel a sense of urgency to access secret conversations when a related threat might be imminent.

Part of her job, she says, is working with such officials with "valid legal requests."

As of writing this post, there is no official release date or confirmation of an encryption feature within Twitter DMs.

What Else Is Going Down in Tech Town?

More of the Latest From Facebook

If you missed our F8 coverage last week, check out our recaps of the Day 1 and Day 2 keynotes.

During the Facebook developer conference, virtual reality -- particularly Facebook's Oculus Go headset, which was gifted to every person in attendance -- was given particular attention. This indicates that the company plans to make significant investments in this technology.

Now, it's even changed the name of its Oculus Research Lab, which will now be known as "Facebook Reality Labs," according to a statement from the company's Chief Scientist, Michael Abrash.

These moves all point to a desire within Facebook to more broadly associate and integrate this virtual technology -- perhaps strongly affiliated with the Oculus name -- with its own brand. At Oculus Connect in October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated a goal of having one billion people eventually using VR, but by when, exactly, remains unknown.

Payments and Appointments by Instagram

Earlier this week, some Instagram users began seeing an option to add payment methods -- like a credit card -- and make purchases from certain vendors within the app. Other users claimed to be able to book appointments at spas and restaurants.

The app later confirmed to The Verge that users will be able to "book services from a limited number of businesses," through the app, citing the development as an extension of a feature first announced last spring.

(Have you come across or used this feature? If so, let us know on Twitter.)

No More Bail Bond Ads

Both Google and Facebook announced this week that they would be banning any ads for bail bonds from their respective sites, with the forming citing the exploitation of disadvantaged communities that often results from such content.

"We made this decision based on our commitment to protect our users from deceptive or harmful products," wrote Google's Director of Global Product Policy David Graff in a statement.

Facebook later issued its own intention to bar such ads from its own platform, with Vice President of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert telling Axios, "Advertising that is predatory doesn't have a place on Facebook."

That’s all for today. Until next week, feel free to weigh in on Twitter with your tech news questions or thoughts on what kind of events and topics you'd like covered here.

[biofunmy]

Jony Ive, The Iconic Apple Designer, Leaves The Company After Nearly 30 Years

SAN FRANCISCO — Jony Ive, the Apple design chief behind the iconic industrial design of products like the iPhone and iMac, announced Thursday he is departing after decades at the company, continuing the reshuffle at the top ranks of one of the world’s most valuable technology giants.

The Cupertino, California–based company said Ive would leave at the end of the year to start his own design firm, LoveFrom. Apple will be the firm’s first client, and the company said it would work with Ive’s new venture on a range of products.

“Jony is a singular figure in the design world and his role in Apple’s revival cannot be overstated, from 1998’s groundbreaking iMac to the iPhone and the unprecedented ambition of Apple Park, where recently he has been putting so much of his energy and care,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement.

The exit of the famed designer marks the most significant change to Apple’s leadership since the death of its founder and CEO Steve Jobs in 2011. Revered inside the company for his design aesthetics, Ive is credited with developing products including the iPhone, iMac, and iPod and creating the elegant packaging and presentations that made them some of the most desired electronics in the world.

With Ive’s exit, Apple must now contend with another high-profile executive departure this year after Angela Ahrendts, the company’s senior vice president of retail, left in April. In a press release, the company said design team leaders Evans Hankey, vice president of industrial design, and Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, will report to COO Jeff Williams.

In an internal email to employees obtained by BuzzFeed News announcing Ive’s departure, Cook said, “We will all benefit — as individuals who value great design, and as a company — as he pursues his passions and continues his dedicated work with Apple.”

In an interview with the Financial Times, Ive said he will no longer be an Apple employee but will “still be very involved.”

“There were some significant projects that I feel like I’ve completed,” he said when asked by the FT on why he was leaving. “For example Apple Park — this was a project that started in 2004. … A couple of weeks ago we had our official opening of the Park. That was a really significant project, that was unlike many of our others, because it was for us.”

While Ive offered little detail about his new firm, LoveFrom, he noted that Apple designer Marc Newson would be joining him there. Ive also hinted at a future focus on wearable technology design.

“There are some areas that are personal natural passions for me,” he told the FT. “The work that we’ve been doing with wearable technology — with technology becoming more personal, there is an inevitability that it becomes worn.”

Read CEO Tim Cook’s full email to Apple employees about Jony Ive’s departure below.

Team,I’m writing to let you know about some changes to the ET involving two people who embody Apple’s values and whose work will help define Apple’s future.I’m happy to announce that Sabih Khan has been named to the executive team as senior vice president of Operations reporting to Jeff Williams. Sabih has worked on every Apple product since the late 90s, always committed to delighting our customers while advancing quality, sustainability and responsibility in manufacturing. His team makes possible some of the most beloved — and most complex — products in the world, and Sabih leads them with heart. I am thrilled to have him overseeing our supply chain.Today, we also mark another important evolution for our company. After nearly 30 years at Apple, Jony Ive is starting an independent design firm which will count Apple among its primary clients and will depart the company as an employee later this year. Jony’s contributions are legendary, from the central role he played in Apple’s revival beginning in the late 90s, through the iPhone and perhaps his most ambitious project, Apple Park, where he has put so much of his energy and care in the past few years. I am proud to call Jony a friend, and those who know him know his ideas and curiosities are boundless. We will all benefit — as individuals who value great design, and as a company — as he pursues his passions and continues his dedicated work with Apple.Of all his accomplishments, Jony cites the team he helped to build as one of his proudest. His longtime collaborators, Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, are strong stewards of Apple’s design ethic and creative culture. Collaboration and teamwork are defining features of Apple’s success across the company.Evans and Alan will report to Jeff Williams. As many of you know, Jony and Jeff have been close collaborators and partners for many years. In particular, Jeff’s leadership in developing Apple Watch brought together a cross-organizational team, unprecedented in scope, to produce Apple’s most personal device ever. This is what Apple does at its best: elevating a category beyond its imagined limits, and revealing how a single device can be so much more than the sum of its parts. I’m incredibly excited about the design team’s work, both underway and yet to come.Tim

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[biofunmy]

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

[Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.]

Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as “red team, blue team” debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.

At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kelly’s departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happer’s proposed panel as a forum for it.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka made a well-publicized effort to talk him out of leaving the Paris accord in 2017. But after being vanquished by officials including Mr. Bannon, Mr. Pruitt, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, there is little evidence she has resisted his approach since then.

The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.

“That is one of the most crude messages one could deliver,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as the NATO ambassador under George W. Bush.

At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.

Mr. Reilly, the head of the Geological Survey, who does not have a background in climate change science, characterized the changes as an attempt to prepare more careful, accurate reports. “We’re looking for answers with our partners and to get statistical significance from what we understand,” he said.

Yet scientists said that by eliminating the projected effects of increased carbon dioxide pollution after 2040, the Geological Survey reports would present an incomplete and falsely optimistic picture of the impact of continuing to burn unlimited amounts of coal, oil and gasoline.

“The scenarios in these reports that show different outcomes are like going to the doctor, who tells you, ‘If you don’t change your bad eating habits, and you don’t start to exercise, you’ll need a quadruple bypass, but if you do change your lifestyle, you’ll have a different outcome,’” said Katharine Hayhoe, the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and an author of the National Climate Assessment.

Not all government science agencies are planning such changes. A spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, asked if its scientists would limit the use of climate models, wrote in an email, “No changes are being considered at this time.”

The push to alter the results of at least some climate science reports, several officials said, came after November’s release of the second volume of the National Climate Assessment.

While the Trump administration did not try to rewrite the scientific conclusions of the report, officials sought to play it down — releasing it the day after Thanksgiving — and discredit it, with a White House statement calling it “largely based on the most extreme scenario.”

Still, the report could create legal problems for Mr. Trump’s agenda of abolishing regulations. This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to finalize the legal rollback of two of President Barack Obama’s most consequential policies: federal regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks.

Opponents say that when they challenge the moves in court, they intend to point to the climate assessment, asking how the government can justify the reversals when its own agencies have concluded that the pollution will be so harmful.

That is why officials are now discussing how to influence the conclusions of the next National Climate Assessment.

“They’ve started talking about how they can produce a report that doesn’t lead to some silly alarmist predictions about the future,” said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded research organization, and who led the administration’s transition at the E.P.A.

A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.

Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

Outside the United States, climate scientists had long given up on the White House being anything but on outlier in policy. But they worry about the loss of the government as a source for reliable climate research.

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

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