Hasta La Gadget!

While mobile payment solutions have been around for a while, it is safe to say that not many of them have seen the same fervent adoption compared to Apple Pay. Many banks and financial institutions have rushed to support the new service and according to a retailer, Apple Pay’s use is currently outpacing that of the competition.

This is why it doesn’t come as a complete surprise to learn that it is possible that Apple’s competitors are scrambling to launch their own payment services in a bid to compete with the company and get in on the action. A report from the Financial Times (via AppleInsider) has recently suggested that companies are looking to acquire payment services.

One of those payment services is PayPal which eBay will be spinning off later this year. eBay had announced their plans to spin off PayPal into a separate entity which the Financial Times speculates would make it ripe for an acquisition, especially when you consider how many people rely on PayPal’s services to make payments and money transfers.

There have also been talks about Google looking to acquire Softcard, which is currently one of the competitors of Apple Pay along with Google Wallet, and banks have also indicated to the publication that smaller services such as Dwolla and Paydiant are primed for acquisition as well. Of course it remains to be seen if any of these rumors are true, but what do you guys think? Do you think Apple Pay is competitive enough to send everyone into a frenzy?

Apple Pay Has Competition Scrambling To Make Acquisitions Of Similar Services [Rumor] , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

“Are there any thespians in the house?” asked Simon Doonan at City Winery for the second annual House of SpeakEasy gala on Wednesday night, looking for sympathy. The writer and window dresser long associated with Barney’s (he’s now the store’s creative ambassador at large), had launched into his story about having been tapped for the part of Nigel in the movie of The Devil Wears Prada, a good choice in everyone’s estimation, but he had reservations. “It’s the role of the helpful homosexual,” he quipped, “and I’m not that helpful.” Concluding they were merely picking his brain, “Nigel” did in fact go to a thespian, Stanley Tucci, and yes, there were at least three thespians present in a roomful of writers and other book lovers: Uma Thurman, Jim Dale and Dan Stevens.

Riffing on the theme of Runnin’ Wild, Doonan was one of three featured performers for the event celebrating an organization dedicated to supporting writers, building new literary audiences, and connecting the two in entertaining ways. Another speaker was Susan Fales-Hill, a memoirist and writer for television who began her career as an apprentice on The Cosby Show. A mixed salad of genetic material, she revealed that though she is married for 18 years to the same man, and therefore not wild in the least, she secretly yearns for Downton Abbey’s Mr. Bates. Only Dan Stevens from that cast, a heartthrob to many as the ill-fated Matthew Crawley, attended with his wife Susie Hariet. A sometime writer, known to tweet, he’s editor-at-large of a literary magazine, The Junket.

Humorist P. J. O’Rourke went wild on the subject of baby boomers’ absorption in the self. This entertainment was leavened by Jim Dale’s skillful recitation of familiar quotes from Shakespeare, two of John Dewar and Son’s Last Great Malts, Aberfeldy and Craigellachie single malt whiskies, and a literary quiz masterminded by the evening’s M. C. Amanda Foreman. A mother of five who goes by the name of Bill, Foreman’s latest credit is with BBC2. She will present a show called The World Made by Women, based on a book of the same title that will be published by Random House in 2016.

Thank goodness! The word is alive and well!

A version of this post also appears on Gossip Central.

America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.
—Martin Luther King Jr.

They have become great and rich
they have grown fat and sleek. …
they judge not with justice
the cause of their fatherless …
and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
—Jeremiah 5:27–28  

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood for the good or evil side;
Some great Cause, God’s New Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.
—James Russell Lowell

It is a national moral disgrace that there are 14.7 million poor children and 6.5 million extremely poor children in the United States of America – the world’s largest economy. It is also unnecessary, costly and the greatest threat to our future national, economic and military security.

There are more poor children in America than the combined residents in six of our largest U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and San Antonio with a combined total population of 14.6 million residents. There are more children living in extreme poverty in the United States (6.5 million) than there are total residents in 33 states and the District of Columbia.

The younger children are the poorer they are during their years of greatest brain development. Every other American baby is non-White and 1 in 2 Black babies is poor, 150 years after slavery was legally abolished.

America’s poor children did not ask to be born; did not choose their parents, country, state, neighborhood, race, color, or faith. In fact if they had been born in 33 other industrialized countries they would be less likely to be poor. Among these 35 countries, America ranks 34^th in relative child poverty – ahead only of Romania whose economy is 99 percent smaller than ours.

The United Kingdom, whose economy, if it were an American state, would rank just above Mississippi according to the Washington Post, committed to and succeeded in cutting its child poverty rate by half in 10 years.  It is about values and political will. Sadly, politics in our nation too often trumps good policy and moral decency and responsibility to the next generation and the nation’s future. It is way past time for a critical mass of Americans to confront the hypocrisy of America’s pretension to be a fair playing field while almost 15 million children languish in poverty.

The Children’s Defense Fund just released a groundbreaking new report, Ending Child Poverty Now, that calls for an end to child poverty in the richest nation on earth with a 60 percent reduction immediately.  And it shows that solutions to ending child poverty in our nation already exist and for the first time how, by combining expanded investments in existing policies and programs that work, we can shrink overall child poverty 60 percent, Black child poverty 72 percent, and improve economic circumstances for 97 percent of poor children at a cost of $77.2 billion a year. These policies could be and should be pursued immediately, improving the lives and futures of millions of children and eventually saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Child poverty is way too expensive to continue. Every year we keep 14.7 million children in poverty costs our nation $500 billion – six times more than the $77 billion investment we propose to reduce child poverty by 60 percent. MIT Nobel Laureate economist and 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Dr. Robert Solow in his foreword to a 1994 CDF report Wasting America’s Future presciently wrote: “For many years Americans have allowed child poverty levels to remain astonishingly high … far higher than one would think a rich and ethical society would tolerate. The justification, when one is offered at all, has often been that action is expensive: ‘We have more will than wallet.’ I suspect that in fact our wallets exceed our will, but in any event this concern for the drain on our resources completely misses the other side of the equation: Inaction has its costs too … As an economist I believe that good things are worth paying for; and that even if curing children’s poverty were expensive, it would be hard to think of a better use in the world for money. If society cares about children, it should be willing to spend money on them.”

It makes no economic sense to continue to spend on average three times more per prisoner than per public school pupil and continue to build a massive prison industrial complex that has become the new American apartheid. And it is profoundly unjust to continue making budget cuts in safety net programs to feed and house the poor and not provide an opportunity and decent wages for parents who work while increasing wealth and income inequality fueled by hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks for the top one percent from many tax loopholes described in the report.

Not only does child poverty cost far more than eliminating it would, we have so many better choices that reflect more just values as well as economic savings. We believe that food, shelter, quality early childhood investments to get every child ready for school and an equitable  education for all children should take precedence over massive welfare for the rich and blatantly excessive spending for military weapons that often do not work. If we built 485 fewer of the planned 2,500 F-35s that still don’t work reliably and are over budget we could fund the $77 billion required to lift 60 percent of our children from poverty now as their minds and bodies are developing.

President Eisenhower, a former five star general, reminded us that: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hope of its children.” Yet we are spending $48.2 billion a month; $11.1 billion a week; $1.6 billion a day; $66 million an hour; $1.1 million a minute; and $18,323 a second on the military.

If we love America and love our children we must all stand against the excessive greed and militarism that tramples millions of our children entrusted to our care. America’s Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” After more than two centuries, it is time to make those truths evident in the lives of all poor children and to close our intolerable national hypocrisy gap and show the world whether democratic capitalism is an oxymoron or can work in a majority non-White world desperate for moral example. Please download a copy of Ending Child Poverty Now, share it widely with your networks and then take action. Together, acting with urgency and persistence, we can end preventable and devastating child poverty across our country. A nation that does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand tall in the 21^st century world or before God.

Sign up for actions you can take for a real plan to end child poverty now.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The state on Friday rescheduled executions for seven death row inmates as it tries to find new lethal drugs, meaning no inmate will be put to death in Ohio in 2015.

The announcement affects six executions this year, including one set for Feb. 11 for condemned child killer Ronald Phillips, and one previously scheduled for 2016 that was pushed farther back. The move, which was expected, follows a federal judge’s previous order delaying executions while the state puts a new execution policy in place, the state said.

The delays also allow the state time to find supplies of new drugs, according to the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

The new execution policy calls for Ohio to use drugs it doesn’t have and has had difficulty obtaining in the past.

The delays mean that for the first time Ohio won’t execute anyone in a calendar year since the state resumed putting inmates to death in 1999. The state put one inmate to death last year and three in 2013. A total of 11 executions are scheduled for 2016.

Under the revised schedule, the next execution is Jan. 21, 2016, when Phillips is scheduled to die for the 1993 rape and killing of his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter in Akron.

Tim Young, the state public defender, applauded the move, saying there was no need for executions “until we have answers to the numerous legal and medical questions posed by lethal injection.”

Earlier this month, the state ditched its two-drug method after problematic executions in Ohio a year ago and Arizona in July. Ohio’s supplies of those drugs, midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a painkiller, were already set to expire this year.

Underscoring concerns about midazolam, the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week ordered Oklahoma to postpone lethal injections executions using the drug until the court rules in a challenge involving midazolam.

Ohio’s execution policy now calls for it to use versions of thiopental sodium or compounded pentobarbital, neither of which it has.

Death penalty experts question where Ohio would find supplies of thiopental sodium, saying it’s no longer available in the U.S. and overseas imports would run afoul of importing bans.

The state also can’t obtain compounded pentobarbital. A law that was enacted last month shielding the names of companies providing drugs was aimed at finding drug makers willing to provide pentobarbital.

___

Online:

Ohio execution schedule: http://www.drc.ohio.gov/Public/executionschedule.htm

Many students at the University of Virginia think banning sorority members from attending parties celebrating the end of fraternity recruitment this weekend could backfire on the national sorority organizations that issued the restriction.

In fact, some students suggest that the ban could even put students at risk, because sorority women trained in sexual assault prevention won’t be able to go to the bid night events. Fraternities could also host unregistered — and therefore largely unregulated — events at a later date instead.

“Every sorority woman is trained in bystander intervention,” said sophomore Abraham Axler, who is on the executive board of UVA’s student council. He is referring to the sexual assault prevention strategy of stepping in to stop a potentially risky situation. To remove sorority women from fraternity events, Axler said, “seems dangerous.”

The presidents of the national sorority organizations reaffirmed Thursday that they would not budge on a controversial directive banning undergraduate members from fraternity parties during bid night this weekend. They say the rule is meant to protect female students’ “safety and well-being.”

If caught at one of the events, sorority members would likely face a fine from their organization, or the entire chapter could be banned from hosting its own social events.

Sororities contend that they have always restricted members from fraternity recruitment events, said Timothy M. Burke, an attorney with Fraternal Law Partners, which counts the National Panhellenic Conference, an umbrella group for all 26 sororities nationally, among its clients.

However, UVA senior Story Hinckley said that the bid night parties celebrate the end of recruitment and aren’t recruitment events.

“They’re deciding that all of a sudden on Sunday, the fraternities are safe and men are not rapists, but throughout the day and night Saturday it’s unsafe,” she said. “It’s really confusing and strange.”

Burke sided with students who argued that frat parties may be even safer than other campus gatherings because of the rules and education programs put in place for members.

“[Fraternity parties are] no more dangerous than the rugby team’s parties, for example, and frankly, the national men’s groups and the national women’s groups are both conducting a great deal of educational programming for their chapters, designed to help them conduct parties safely,” Burke said. “Those kinds of safety measures are not being done for other student groups, generally.”

The national sororities have all declined this week to respond to the criticism from students.

Tracey Vitters, chair of the nonprofit Students Active For Ending Rape, an advocacy organization against sexual violence and rape culture, criticized the message being sent by the ban.

“Really, the conversation should be less about telling women ‘Don’t go to this party,’ and more about the NPC reaching across the aisle to the fraternities and saying ‘You need to do better.'”