Hasta La Gadget!

You might recall that a couple of months ago, we reported that Sony was planning on opening an underwater retail store to showcase the protection that its Xperia phones offer. Well for those who are interested in seeing what the store might look like, Sony has announced via its Twitter that its underwater pop-up store in Dubai has officially opened!

However if you think that you can simply stroll into it, you’d be out of luck. The pop-up store will exist only for 3 days and will only be open to those who won Sony’s competition, the media, and VIPs. Visitors will be required to undergo mandatory scuba diving training in a swimming pool prior to being transported to the store, which we guess makes sense as the store itself is located 4m under water.

Each visitor will also be accompanied by a professional diving instructor. Sony will also be providing special cases for Sony Xperia Z2 and Xperia Z3 owners as the depth of 4m is beyond the 1.5m protection advertised by Sony, but once they reach the store, there will be a number of Sony devices that will be demonstrated by a Sony rep.

It’s probably not the most convenient store to get to, but it does a good job of marketing Sony’s products. Previously Sony marketed one of its MP3 players by selling it inside a water bottle to prove its water resistance, and it wasn’t too long ago that the Sony Xperia Z3 was given an underwater unboxing treatment.

Sony’s Underwater Pop-Up Store Officially Launches In Dubai

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WASHINGTON — Wall Street lobbyists are trying to secure taxpayer backing for many derivatives trades as part of budget talks to avert a government shutdown.

According to multiple Democratic sources, banks are pushing hard to include the controversial provision in funding legislation that would keep the government operating after Dec. 11. Top negotiators in the House are taking the derivatives provision seriously, and may include it in the final bill, the sources said.

The bank perks are not a traditional budget item. They would allow financial institutions to trade certain financial derivatives from subsidiaries that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. — potentially putting taxpayers on the hook for losses caused by the risky contracts. Big Wall Street banks had typically traded derivatives from these FDIC-backed units, but the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law required them to move many of the transactions to other subsidiaries that are not insured by taxpayers.

Taxpayer insurance helps banks secure higher credit ratings for their derivatives, since taxpayers assume some of the risk, which in turn makes the banks more profitable.

Last year, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) introduced the same provision under debate in the current budget talks. The legislative text waswritten by a Citigroup lobbyist, according to The New York Times. The bill passed the House by a vote of 292 to 122 in October 2013, 122 Democrats opposed, and 70 in favor. All but three House Republicans supported the bill.

Himes was passed over for leadership positions after the 2014 midterm elections, which he said he interpreted as unrest within the Democratic Party over his strong ties to financial elites.

“My guess is, it was a factor, which is disappointing because I think the criticism is way off base,” said Himes, who previously worked at Goldman Sachs.

It wasn’t clear whether the derivatives perk will survive negotiations in the House, or if the Senate will include it in its version of the bill. With Democrats voting nearly 2-to-1 against the bill in the House, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) never brought the bill up for a vote in the Senate. President Barack Obama opposed the bill ahead of the House vote, as did former FDIC Chair Shiela Bair, former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), currently the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee.

Welcome to this week’s ALL TOGETHER, the podcast dedicated to exploring how religion and spiritual practice is informing our personal lives, our communities and our world. ALL TOGETHER is hosted by Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, the executive editor of HuffPost Religion.

That was the voice of Eric Garner last summer telling the police officer who had him in a choke hold that he couldn’t breath shortly before he died.

On Wednesday, December 3rd a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict the officer Daniel Pantaleo who put Eric Garner in a choke hold last summer and would not release as Garner repeated the phrase ‘I can’t breath’. Pantaleo is white, Garner was black.

The announcement came just a week after a grand jury in Ferguson refused to indict a white offer named Darren Wilson who shot and killed Michael Brown, unarmed black teenager, and Tamir Rice, a 12 year old African American boy was shot by police in Cleveland.

The news about the Garner case came like a slap across the face, causing tears of outrage and deep sorrow. But it has also provided a much needed wake up call to the horrors of racism in our country and hopefully provide a rallying cry of Enough! – this kind of bias in our policing and justice system must end today.

Raushenbush spoke with three pastors who restored some of his faith and hope. Rev. Anthony Lee, Rev. Dr. Jacqueline Lewis, and Rev. Dr. Jennifer Harvey don’t paint a rosy picture but by their fierce spiritual convictions and the powerful actions they are taking in response to the scourge of racism in America will be like a balm to listeners

As The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King taught us “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Let’s all get loud today about ending racism in this world. This won’t be the end of the struggle, but if all American raise our voices it could be the beginning of the end of racism.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A day after her nomination ran into trouble in the Senate, President Barack Obama’s pick to head the Social Security Administration passionately defended her integrity, her long career in government and her handling of a troubled computer project she inherited from a predecessor.

“I’ve always met the highest ethical standards,” Carolyn W. Colvin told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday. “I’ve worked in government my entire life. There’s never been a suggestion, personal or professional, of any wrongdoing.” “I’m certainly not ending my career with that,” Colvin continued. “I came out of retirement to help this organization, not hurt it.”

Obama nominated Colvin to a six-year term as commissioner of the agency in June. She has been acting commissioner since February 2013. Before that, she was the agency’s deputy commissioner since 2010.

A group of Republican senators plans to try to block Colvin’s nomination while investigators look into a $300 million computer project that doesn’t work. In a letter to Colvin, all 11 Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee said there is evidence that Social Security officials have misled Congress and investigators about problems with the project.

The senators wrote that they can’t let a nomination proceed to a vote “as long as the specter of a potential criminal investigation surrounds the nominee,” that person’s inner circle, or both. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, top Republican on the Finance Committee, leads the group.

The White House said Thursday that the president believed Colvin deserved a confirmation vote by the full Senate.

Six years ago, Social Security embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a flood of disability claims. But the project has been racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an assessment commissioned by the agency over the summer.

The project is still in the testing phase and the agency can’t say when it will be operational or how much it will cost.

Social Security’s inspector general started investigating the project in the summer. The IG said in a report that investigators attended numerous briefings on the computer project, including two this year, but the Social Security Administration “never indicated it was experiencing significant problems with the project.”

The investigation has since been turned over to the inspector general for the Small Business Administration to avoid a potential conflict of interest.

Colvin noted that the project was launched “way before I got here,” under former Commissioner Michael Astrue. Colvin said she has been working to salvage it since she took over the agency last year.

“That’s what I do, I’m a problem-fixer,” Colvin said. “Every organization I’ve gone into I try to identify what the vulnerabilities are and try to fix them.”

Colvin, however, said Thursday she does not know whether the computer project can be saved, even though the agency has spent nearly $300 million on it.

During an interview in her Washington office, Colvin said she was reluctant to talk about the project because of the ongoing investigation. The interview had been scheduled to discuss the agency’s efforts to fight fraud, but Colvin answered a few questions about her nomination.

Colvin was adamant that she did not know of anyone in the agency misleading Congress or investigators.

“Certainly I don’t know of anyone,” Colvin said. “I haven’t been interviewed or given specifics, and I think that it would be inappropriate for me to say a whole lot more.”

Colvin said she first learned about problems with the project after she took over as acting commissioner. She said overseeing the project was not part of her duties as deputy commissioner.

Colvin, 72, first worked as a deputy commissioner at Social Security in the 1990s. She left the agency in 2001 to become director of human services for the District of Columbia. She later had a similar job in Montgomery County, Maryland.

The Associated Press first reported about problems with the computer system in July.

The Senate Finance Committee advanced Colvin’s nomination as Social Security commissioner to the full Senate in September. The vote was 22-2, and her nomination seemed to be assured.

“Sen. Hatch was aware of this when I had my confirmation hearing,” Colvin said of the project. “He alluded to it but he didn’t ask questions, so I assumed that everything was resolved.”

This week, Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said a vote on Colvin’s nomination should be delayed until she answers questions about the project, increasing the likelihood that a vote will be pushed into next year, when Republicans take control of the Senate.

Colvin said the project “is something that I am very concerned about. It’s something that we’re certainly going to be very forthright and forthcoming in answering the questions of Congress and we’re going to let the investigation take its due process.”

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Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenatap

It’s America and Mother Earth that cannot breathe, not only Eric Garner.

Listen to the truth:

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons

That’s a song that Bernice Johnson Reagon composed. It’s called “Ella’s Song,” and it honors Ella Baker, one of the key teachers and leaders within the black freedom movement of the 1960s. You can hear it sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock, the musical ensemble that Reagon founded. (Please do listen to it!)

And listen with a truth-tuned ear to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on March 14, 1968, three weeks before he was murdered:

it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

Or listen to President Abraham Lincoln, speaking on March 4, 1865, at his second inaugural address (and quoting Psalm 19:9):

[I]f God wills that [this mighty scourge of war] continue until … every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

President Lincoln was sadly affirming what President Thomas Jefferson, theorist of liberty and practitioner of slavery, had said about slavery two generations before: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just….”

Almost certainly, the grand jury in New York acted as they did because a district attorney beholden to a white majority’s chokehold on Staten Island did not encourage them to do their job, did not even make clear that they needed to find only probable cause to believe a crime may have occurred so that a real trial could be held in open court, did not even point out that they could charge the policeman for a lesser offense like “reckless endangerment” if they could not bear to charge a white policeman with murder of a black man.

What was and is at stake on Staten Island is not just a numerical white majority but one afflicted with “domination disease.” This disease afflicts us not only in the guise of racism but when the military allows superior officers to rape women and men under their command; when a university allows football players to gang-rape a woman at a party; when a corporation convinces the Supreme Court that its corporate “religious beliefs” trump the real-life religious beliefs of real-life human beings, its women employees. (You mean women can come to their own moral and religious decisions?) It afflicts us when an American president chooses on his own which American citizens he can execute — that is, kill — without judge or jury (as if he were a policeman using a high-tech flying chokehold). It afflicts us when the American Jewish Committee demands that President Obama approve the Keystone XL pipeline, ignoring the warning of the Sioux Nation that a decision to build the pipeline through their land would be a declaration of war against them — literally ignoring this urgent outcry of the Sioux, let alone the effects that burning this filthy, carbon-loaded tar-sands oil would have on Americans, Africans, Filipinos, Israelis….

What’s the effect? We can’t breathe! Mother Earth is in a chokehold!

What will cure us of domination disease? Surely not a techie solution like cameras on police lapels. What will those cameras matter when a video clearly showing a police officer strangling a black man — using a chokehold banned by his own police force — while he, and we, can hear the black man gasping, “I can’t breathe,” fails to convince a district attorney and a grand jury that there was probable cause to believe a crime may have occurred?

What will cure us? Despite President Lincoln’s invocation of bloodshed by the sword as righteous “judgments of the Lord,” the cure won’t come that way. Despite Dr. King’s honest observation that “a riot is the language of the unheard,” those whose shouts and cries fall on willfully deafened ears, the cure won’t come through riots.

It will come when we turn away from domination and toward community; when white, black, and brown citizens join in haunting police departments until every police officer who kills an unarmed civilian is fired; when neighbors gather at local coal-burning plants wearing gas masks and sit in the gateways to force an end to the epidemic of asthma that afflicts our poorer, blacker, disempowered neighborhoods; when all across our country, neighborhood co-ops are producing solar energy; when churches, synagogues, mosques, and their congregants are choosing to “move our money,” placing our savings and checking accounts with credit unions and neighborhood banks, not megabanks that invest in destroying mountains to burn coal, killing the oceans to drill for oil, poisoning our ground water to profit from unnatural gas. When these kinds of communities start growing and sprouting at the grassroots and pavement tops of our country, we will see new laws sprouting through new cracks in the rigid concrete of our top-down governments.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

Blessings toward shalom, salaam, peace — the healing of our people and our planet.