Been waiting for Sony to start dishing out the $15 million in restitution for the 2011 breach that took its PlayStation Network and Qriocity services down back in 2011? Well, thanks to the outfit putting a claim form online, now you can start the pay…
Apple Pay, Apple’s new wireless, NFC payment method, is a clear step towards a future where customers no longer have to deal with pulling a card out of their wallet, typing PIN numbers, or signing receipts when making payments. We just tap/swipe our phones and we’re done. But one lawmaker doesn’t like that idea and still wants us to continue … Continue reading
Bill Maher has addressed the recent controversy surrounding the Clint Eastwood film “American Sniper.”
The film — based on the autobiography of Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history — broke box office records when it raked in $90.2 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. But it has divided viewers and critics alike in its exploration of war and patriotism.
On “Real Time With Bill Maher” on Friday, the host criticized the picture for what he views as a lack of nuance.
“‘Hurt Locker’ made 17 million because it was a little ambiguous and thoughtful,” Maher said. “[‘American Sniper’] is just ‘American hero! He’s a psychopath patriot, and we love him.'”
The host then went on to criticize sections of Kyle’s autobiography, including a part in which Maher says he writes, “I hate the damn savages,” in reference to the Iraqis.
“Eisenhower once said I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can,” Maher said. “I just don’t see this guy in the same league as Eisenhower. If you’re a Christian, ‘I hate the damn savages’ doesn’t seem like a Christian thing to say.”
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Two women were shot to death and six people were wounded early Saturday at a house party in Omaha, authorities said.
The police department issued a news release about the shootings at the small tan house in the city’s northeast, but it didn’t say whether it had any suspects and didn’t identify any of those who were shot.
The department said the officers responded to a report of gunfire at the home shortly before 2 a.m. and found several people who were wounded and two women in their 20s who were dead at the scene.
Three of the wounded were taken by ambulance to Nebraska-Medicine-University of Nebraska Medical Center. One is in critical condition and the other two are in serious condition, police said. Three others were driven to the hospital in someone’s vehicle. Their conditions weren’t released.
Kristina Young, the mother of one of the slain women, was waiting outside of the home hours later while investigators continued to gather evidence. She said she wasn’t going to leave until the body of her daughter, 19-year-old Ja’Kela Foster, was taken away.
Young said her boyfriend got a call from an aunt shortly before 2 a.m. telling him there was a shooting that may have involved Foster, who leaves behind a 1-year-old son. She said a friend later called to say her daughter had been shot.
Young said her daughter knew the person throwing the party and that she asked her not to go, knowing there would be drinking and worried there could be violence.
“I’ve been in Omaha long enough to know generally what happens at these parties.”
She said her daughter agreed and told her she was going elsewhere Friday night, but that she apparently went to the party anyway.
“To the person who pulled the trigger, I want to say it’s just senseless. It just needs to stop. I now have a 1-year-old grandson that has no mother,” Young said while fighting back tears. She was comforted by her 29-year-old son, DeSean Young, who was Foster’s brother.
Dorothy Wayne, who lives across the street from the home, said she and her husband were asleep when a shot passed through the wall of their front bedroom and lodged in the far wall. Neither was hurt.
Although much of Omaha’s violent crime happens in the area, Wayne said she was surprised by the shootings because it’s always been a quiet street.
“There are mostly old people on our block,” she said.
Andrew McAfee of the MIT Sloan School of Management stopped by HuffPost Live at Davos on Saturday, where he spoke about the book he wrote with his colleague Erik Brynjolfsson called The Second Machine Age.
“We are in the early stages of an era of unbelievable technological progress, really that we haven’t seen since the first machine age, which was the Industrial Revolution,” McAfee said said. “And we should all be optimistic about that.”
McAfee did say he scratches his head wondering “as we get to a point where digital technologies acquire more and more abilities that used to belong to people alone, are we at a point where the destruction is going to outpace the creation, and if so, what should we do about that?”
See more of McAfee’s discussion above, and below, live updates from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting:
As many as 7 million people might cut the cord once HBO launches its new streaming service later this year. At least that’s how a market research firm read the numbers from its recent online survey.
Such a mass exodus, if it were to occur, would be a huge blow to pay TV companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and DirecTV. About 100 million households in the U.S. subscribe to TV.
But don’t set your timers to mass cable exodus just yet. The report from Dallas-based market researcher Parks Associates is based on an online survey of 10,000 people in U.S. homes with broadband access from late last year. And even Parks Associates suggests this drastic scenario might not actually happen.
“Just because somebody says on a survey that they’re going to do something doesn’t mean they actually are,” Glenn Hower, a research analyst at Parks Associates, told The Huffington Post. “We have some doubts that 7 million households are going to say, ‘Well, I can get HBO so [I’m going to cut my cable] service.”‘
For one, the network hasn’t released many details about HBO GO — including the critical detail of how much it will cost. For the survey, Parks Associates put the price at $14.99 per month, roughly the amount you pay if you add HBO onto your current TV package.
Also, most people probably aren’t subscribing to a full TV package of hundreds of channels just to get HBO. They’re watching other programming like sports and on-demand programming they’d lose if they cut the cord.
And, of course, the company that you pay for TV is likely the same company that you pay for Internet access. Many people may find it’s a greater value to subscribe to TV and Internet together — the “double play” — than to pay separately for Internet and a handful of streaming services.
“It’s easy to say that you’re going to cancel your TV service, but then when consumers go and realize just how much they’ll be losing, I imagine they would balk at the loss of content,” Hower said.
ReCode’s Peter Kafka put it a bit more bluntly. “It’s also possible that people who participate in Parks surveys have literally no idea what they’re talking about, are drunk, or believe they’re in an alternate universe,” he wrote.
So 7 million cord cutters inspired by HBO alone might be a little high. But pay TV companies should still be concerned, Hower said. The cable bundle does appear to be loosening, and this year will be a banner year for streaming video. Online services from Netflix and Amazon continue to improve their programming and win awards. Netflix just reported another increase in subscribers, bringing its U.S. membership to over 37 million. Dish, the satellite TV company, recently announced that it will launch a $20-per-month online TV service with a slimmed-down package of channels that includes ESPN. And Showtime is expected to launch its own standalone streaming service later this year.
Although subscriptions to pay TV aren’t in free fall, an increasing number of people, especially millennials, are cutting the cord, choosing to get their entertainment from a mix of online services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and iTunes.
The number of households in the U.S. that don’t subscribe to TV but pay for broadband Internet grew to more than 10.5 million in the third quarter of last year, up 16 percent over the same period in 2012, according to research firm SNL Kagan.
HBO, which declined to comment on the Parks Associates survey, has to find a tricky balance with its new service. The network makes a lot of money from people paying their cable company extra for HBO’s content. In 2013, it pulled in $1.68 billion in profit on $4.9 billion in revenue globally. The network also depends on the Comcasts and Time Warner Cables to market its channels to customers.
When HBO announced the new service at an investor conference last fall, executives emphasized that it was going after the growing number of broadband-only homes, not existing pay TV subscribers, and that the standalone service shouldn’t threaten TV subscriptions.
“I don’t think we’re going to cannibalize anything,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler said at the conference. “I think we have a tremendous opportunity to go after [new subscribers].”
It’s sad to pass along the news that Ernie Banks passed away last night at the age of 83. I’ve written about “Mr. Cub” quite a lot on these pages, including when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, and it’s incredibly hard to get across to people outside of Chicago what he meant to Cubs fans, unlike what other great players meant to their cities and fans. Being a great player is one thing. Being an Ernie Banks… well, that’s something else, and I’ll at least try to explain.
Baseball is filled with legendary players. And Ernie Banks was a Hall of Famer with statistics to stand in the same category as the best of the best. He had 512 home runs, was a 14-time All Star, still has the most base hits (2,583) and RBIs (1,636) in Chicago Cubs history (and would have the most home runs, except for being topped during the steroid era), and yet was a great defensive player, for decades having the highest fielding percentage by a shortstop during a single season.
But those are just numbers. And all the Greats have spectacular numbers. But Ernie Banks is known as Mr. Cub because for years and years, he not only put up those great numbers but did so with no other top-notch players around him. For all those years, he was pretty much the only reason to watch the Cubs.
Let me put this into perspective.
At the end of every year, when baseball analysts discuss who should win a league’s Most Valuable Player Award, the starting point of the discussion is which teams did the best, and many people argue that the winner of the MVP shouldn’t just be on one of the best teams, but on the team that actually won its division. The argument being how valuable could someone be if their team didn’t finish in first place. (The success of a team being a requirement for MVP is not an argument I agree with, but I’m in the minority on that.)
Ernie Banks won the National League MVP Award, but not with a team that finished in first place — or even close to first place (this is the Cubs, after all…) — but with a team that actually had a losing record, finishing in “second division,” the lower half of the National League.
But that’s not the point, it’s more than just that. Because Ernie Banks, in fact, won the National League MVP Award twice — with a team that also had a losing record, finishing in second division, too.
Yet even that’s not the point.
You see, only 13 players in the history of baseball have won the MVP Award two years in a row. And one of them is Ernie Banks. Who did it on teams that not only weren’t winners, but stunk. Who had losing records. He beat out future legendary Hall of Famers like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente and Warren Spahn — who were on good teams. (Aaron and Spahn’s Braves even won the National League pennant one of those years, and finished second the other season. Mays’s Giants finished third both years.) But Ernie Banks won the National League Most Valuable Player Award two years in a row on terrible teams that had a combined record of 146-162.
That’s how great his seasons were. That’s how great Ernie Banks was. It’s easy to drive in runs when you have teammates who are getting on base ahead of you. It’s easy to get good pitches to hit when opposing pitchers know they have to pitch to you because there are good teammates batting behind you. But when you’re on really bad, losing teams and still put up amazing, Hall of Fame numbers like that, it’s remarkable.
There’s a typical sports comment about a winning team and its best player that runs along the lines of, “Without so-and-so, the team would have finished in fourth place.” One of the famous baseball quotes attributed to legendary manager Jimmie Dykes is, “Without Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs would have finished in Albuquerque.”
Forget how great his statistics were. That’s what Ernie Banks meant to the Chicago Cubs and their fans. Without Ernie Banks, the team would have finished in Albuquerque.
In his later years, the Cubs did finally surround Banks with some great players. But alas, the team still (as you may have heard…) still never won. And so, though Ernie Banks played for 19 years on the same team, the Chicago Cubs, he not only never won a World Series, he never made it into the post-season.
Yet he remained a sunny, joyous personality, whose most-famous quote was, “Let’s play two!”
Happily, I got to meet Ernie once, and have an autographed baseball from him. It’s sat on my desk for years. But Ernie Banks has sat in my heart much longer.
*
To read more from Robert J. Elisberg about this or many other matters both large and tidbit small, see Elisberg Industries.
PATH President and CEO Steve Davis stopped by HuffPost Live at Davos on Saturday to share how he and others are working to help the fight against the Ebola virus.
Davis said PATH is working on two cool things: creating a chlorinator to help chlorinate water to scale, and running diagnostics and waste management.
Davis also expressed some frustration over the public panic that arises when a virus like Ebola makes headlines.
“I sometimes think, with all due respect, the press, and frankly, policy makers and leaders even at Davos, sometimes it’s a bit like the sixth grade soccer game — following the ball wherever it’s going, and certainly that’s been true with Ebola,” he said.
Below, more updates from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting:
Every week, The WorldPost asks an expert to shed light on a topic driving headlines around the world. Today, we speak with Dr. Sarah Nouwen on what Palestinian membership means for the International Criminal Court, and the nature of international law.
Founded in 1998 and situated in The Hague, the ICC is held to be the international community’s last resort for bringing to justice those who commit crimes against humanity. On New Year’s Eve 2014, President Mahmoud Abbas signed the papers officially allowing Palestinians to join the court, with the intent to bring claims against Israel.
The move was met with harsh criticism from the U.S. and Israel, which would only grow more intense when the ICC announced on Jan. 16 that it was launching an examination into possible war crimes in Palestinian territories.
To understand why this is such an important event, as well as how the wheels of justice turn at the ICC, The WorldPost spoke with international legal expert Dr. Sarah Nouwen. A lecturer in law at the University of Cambridge, Nouwen is the author of the book Complementarity in the Line of Fire: The Catalysing Effect of the International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan.
What would you say is the likelihood that Israelis or Palestinians would actually be prosecuted?
That question requires looking far into the future. Right now the ICC has only opened a preliminary examination; it has not opened an investigation yet. What the court does during a preliminary examination is first look at whether there is reason to believe that crimes have been committed that fall within its jurisdiction: substantive, temporal, personal and territorial.
The court also needs to consider if these crimes have not been, or are not being, genuinely investigated and prosecuted in a domestic court. Then it also has to look at the gravity of the crimes, whether they are grave enough. Finally, it has to look at any reasons that an investigation would not be in the interests of justice, which is a concept that so far has never obstructed the opening of an investigation.
If you look at other cases in the world, these preliminary examinations can take very long. In Colombia the preliminary examination has been going on for more than 10 years and the ICC has still not opened a formal investigation. The ICC is still giving Colombia a chance to address impunity domestically. You also see that the ICC is particularly slow in opening a formal investigation if it is politically risky to open one, and this could apply to Israel-Palestine.
Is there a potential for a legal backlash against Palestinians because of their membership in the court?
The risk of a backlash from the perspective of the Palestinians is there, and I would say particularly so for Palestinian non-state actors. So far we’ve seen the court be more successful in going after non-state actors than in going after government officials.
How might this move affect the way Israel and Palestine wage war?
The Palestinian accession to the Rome Statute [to the treaty that established the International Criminal Court] illustrates that the involvement of international criminal law is not a replacement of politics; it is a continuation of politics by other means. It’s an example of “lawfare,” where you continue your war on legal grounds, or in the language of international law. This observation does not denounce the ICC as a political institution, but the ICC cannot escape being implicated in the political conflict.
By issuing arrest warrants, the ICC is seen to brand people as enemies of mankind. This is of course a very powerful weapon to parties in a conflict, even though they do not control the weapon. They can say “you are not just my enemy but an enemy of mankind, because you have committed crimes against humanity.”
Do you see the use of the ICC as something of a political weapon as a potentially dangerous development, or is that inescapable?
I think it’s inescapable, so what we should evaluate is not whether it’s political in this sense or not; it will always be used to pursue political goals. What we should ask is, does the court reach the outcome we want to achieve? Of course, the question is who the “we” are: What people will want to achieve will be different depending on which side you’re on.
What capabilities does the ICC have in terms of enforcement?
The ICC doesn’t have its own army, it can’t go in to enforce an arrest warrant. That said, it has now 123 state parties that are legally obliged to cooperate with the court. If a person for whom an arrest warrant has been issued travels to a state party, then that state party is obliged to execute that. Now, whether they comply is a different question. We have seen in the case of Sudan that President Bashir has traveled even to states parties, and that these states did not execute the arrest warrant, mostly for political reasons.
The ICC, in terms of enforcement, is as strong as states want it to be. To give an example, the U.S. is sometimes in favor of the court and sometimes against. It is in favor of the court when it suits its foreign policy — for instance, with respect to [Joseph Kony’s] Lord’s Resistance Army, it helped in the transfer of [LRA Commander] Dominic Ongwen to the ICC this week. Yet at the same time it has objected to the role of the ICC in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
What implications does the Palestinians’ move to join the court have on the Israeli and Palestinian legal systems?
I think the assumption of many is that it will have an impact on the Israeli and Palestinian systems, and that’s mostly because the court is governed by what is called the principle of complementarity. This means that the ICC is not allowed to exercise its jurisdiction if a case is being, or has been, genuinely investigated and prosecuted at a domestic level.
In other words, if Israel or Palestine investigate themselves each and every alleged crime within the court’s jurisdiction committed in Palestine, the ICC may not exercise its jurisdiction. Complementarity could be, in that sense, an incentive for both sides to investigate and prosecute crimes domestically.
What makes the court say “this is a legitimate domestic investigation”?
The domestic investigation would have to cover the same case that the ICC would want to do. So you would have to investigate the same persons as the ICC would be interested in, and the same types of conduct that the ICC would charge. In that sense, it has been very strict with respect to the scope of the domestic investigation.
However, it has not been — and statutorily need not be — strict in requiring that the procedure is similar to the international procedure, for instance when it comes to fair trial standards. The domestic legal system of states may deviate from the ICC system.
What impact could an ICC investigation of potential Palestinian complaints have on the court itself?
The Palestinian membership and its declaration of acceptance of jurisdiction have focused all eyes around the world on the ICC. For a long time the ICC has been criticized for focusing exclusively on Africa, and while it has opened preliminary investigations elsewhere in the world, it hasn’t moved on them.
In a lot of situations where the ICC would obviously be relevant, such as Syria and Palestine, it did not have jurisdiction. Now it does have jurisdiction with respect to Palestine and no excuse for an exclusive focus on Africa. And indeed, the court has immediately opened a preliminary examination into Palestine.
But the court is on very dangerous territory. First of all politically, because there is so much opposition from some great powers in the world against the ICC’s potential action in Palestine. Secondly, because the chances for cooperation from the Israelis are of course zero, and we’ve seen in other countries where the ICC has not had cooperation that it’s had difficulties in its proceedings.
Is that a threat to the legitimacy of the court and the rule of international law when these issues arise?
I don’t think that it is a threat to the legitimacy of the court. There’s a lot of unfairness when it comes to how the court is assessed internationally. Whenever the ICC fails to get people in custody, it is often considered “a fatal blow to the court,” and the court is said to be weak. However, the ICC itself is not responsible for the execution of arrest warrants.
The ICC is responsible for thorough investigations of prosecutions. If people are acquitted or charges are not confirmed due to a lack of evidence, then people can say the ICC has not done its work, but when people aren’t arrested that is the responsibility of states.
How do you assess the court’s ability to promote peace building in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Does this differ from how it has attempted promote peace building in Africa?
It’s a fascinating question. Here you clearly see the double standards that the West has applied with respect to the role of the ICC in political conflicts. In that sense, the Palestinian membership of the ICC is a fundamental moment for a reevaluation for the role of international criminal law in political conflict. In respect to Africa, the West and particularly Europe has taken the view that there can be no peace without justice. They hold that international criminal justice must be done, even if the consequence is that a peace process may fall apart. With respect to Israel-Palestine, however, they argue that a political solution is required and that the ICC will not help.
Similarly, African states have been denied development aid by the EU if they did not support the ICC. With respect to Palestine, you see the opposite. The U.S. has said that they would withhold funding from Palestine if it accedes to the Rome Statute.
So with respect to some countries it was argued that international criminal justice must be applied irrespective of the consequences, whereas with respect to Israel-Palestine it was argued a political solution is required, not international criminal law. This is the moment for a thorough and empirical reevaluation of the role of international criminal law in the resolution of political conflicts.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Despite the latest successes of the Iraqi Army and the forces of the Kurdish regional government, known as the peshmerga, hundreds of thousands of refugees in Iraq are facing a harrowing winter in makeshift camps across the country.
Numbers of the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), published in January indicated that there were 2,047,700 refugees in Iraq alone. More than 300,000 of them are Syrians who have fled the brutal civil war in their home country. A majority, however, are Iraqis that have been internally displaced. Most refugees are now living in the Kurdistan Region, in the northeastern part of the country.
A group of young Yazidi refugees.
In 2014, when fighters of the Islamic State group crossed the Syrian border and conquered Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, ethnic and religious persecutions flared up across the country. The extremists mainly targeted Kurds, Shiites and other minorities, but thousands of Sunnis also decided to flee their homes in occupied cities rather than face the zero-tolerance doctrines of the Islamic State.
Now, more than two million refugees are confronting winter with few or no resources. International humanitarian assistance can’t cope with the refugees’ most basic needs.
At the Barika Refugee Camp near Sulaymaniyah, nearly 1,200 families pile up around muddied streets. The mere act of walking is difficult. Sanitary conditions are awful. Many of the refugees feel the government has abandoned them. They say the camps are poorly managed and that the relief efforts have not been enough.
A refugee washing his hands in the middle of the muddied streets of the Barika Refugee Camp. The houses were paid for by the refugees out of their own pockets. The government only funded a small part.
“People send us money. We know that there is help, but we are not receiving it,” says Munir, a refugee who decided to build his own modest concrete house after two years of displacement. “The government subsidized a room where we could barely fit a kitchen. We had to pay for the rest with our own savings.”
Thousands of families have done the same thing, and now Barika has become an improvised city of 8,000 refugees. Some small shops business have recently sprouted between the mud-flooded streets and the gray buildings.
In Arbat, ten minutes by car from Barika, Hussein Ali’s family has two tents for ten people. “We only have one heater,” he says. The Ali family are Yazidis from Sinjar, who fled from the Iraqi city months ago fearing the advance of the Islamic State. Hussein says he lives with bitter memories and claims that the peshmerga escaped from Mount Sinjar and left his religious minority to fend for themselves. Last August, the Islamic State group executed at least 500 Yazidis. They also sold hundreds of captured women as slaves in Mosul.
The conditions in Arbat are the same or worse than those in Barika. A small covered building serves both as the school and as the center for food distribution. Dozens of families line up in front of it every day to claim their daily rations.
The inside of Munir’s house. He is a Kurdish refugee from Syria who now lives at Barika.
The refugees are pessimistic about their future. Some say they have lost all trust in their government and refuse to return to their homes. The atrocities of the Islamic State are still too fresh in their minds.
One of the refugees shows his body, full of scars and burns. He refuses to give his name or to appear in front of the camera. He says he’s a former Iraqi Army soldier. When the jihadists reached his village, he says, they set his house on fire while he was inside with the rest of his family.
The refugee camp at Arbat.
The situation is becoming desperate. Few refugees in the camps can find jobs. Even in large cities like Sulaymaniyah or Erbil, it’s hard to find employment.
Muhammed Kamil, a young man who is studying to become a doctor, says that there is growing racism among the Kurds.
“Many see them as terrorists or as bad people, even though they are refugees. The fact is that many Sunnis supported Saddam Hussein in the past and now support the Islamic State. This has worsened an already bad situation,” Kamil says.
Kamil and his sister are Kurds and they both work with an association called IFMSA-Kurdistan, a group that collects food and medicines for the refugees. “We are all people and human beings. I have Arab friends in Baghdad and they’ve always treated me like an equal.”
A line of refugees waiting for basic foods.
Abdul al-Baqi, another refugee, says his family is trying to find something positive in their current situation by comparing it to their lives in Damascus.
“In Syria, my shop was destroyed during the protests, the government was after us,” he says. “The only thing that we have here is peace, but at least that is something.”
Inside of a tent at Camp Arbat.
Statement from an Islamic State Commander
According to the Kurdish newspaper Rudaw, Muhanad Muhammad Ibrahim, also known as “Abu Aisha”, was recently captured after grueling combats between peshmerga Kurds and Islamic State jihadists. Kurdish security forces say that Abu Aisha has been a field commander of the Islamic State in the province of Nineveh.
His statements can help us understand the success of the jihadists in the Sunni provinces of Iraq. He says that this minority, who used to lead well-off lives in the times of Saddam Hussein, has been completely marginalized from power in the transitional government set up by the United States. The appointment of Al Maliki as Iraq’s Prime Minister in 2006 meant the dominion of the Shiite majority. His sectarian measures worsened the relations between his government and the Sunnis, who accused the new administration of corruption and of being under Iranian control.
He also says that the joint strikes between Kurdish security forces and the international coalition have wreaked havoc in his men. “The planes have destroyed us. They bomb vehicles, people, homes… We knew that the bombings would be followed by the peshmerga.”
Since mid-December, the Kurdish Army has recovered more than 2,500 km2 from the Islamic State in northern Iraq, blocking the main road that connects Mosul from Ar-Raqqa, the two main cities under jihadi control.
This post originally appeared on HuffPost Spain and was translated into English.
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