Hasta La Gadget!

(Reuters) – Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders cranked up his fight with party leaders on Sunday, backing a challenger to the Democratic National Committee’s chairwoman and accusing the party’s establishment of trying to anoint Hillary Clinton as the nominee for president.

In a series of television interviews, Sanders remained defiant despite what he acknowledged was an uphill fight to overtake front-runner Clinton.

Clinton has said she already considers herself the de facto nominee and is increasingly turning her attention to Donald Trump, saying on Sunday that the rhetoric of the presumptive Republican nominee was dangerous.

Sanders told ABC’s “This Week” program that Americans should not have to choose between “the lesser of two evils” in the Nov. 8 election.

Sanders said that if he won the White House, he would not reappoint U.S. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chairwoman. He also endorsed law professor Tim Canova, who is challenging the Florida congresswoman in the August Democratic primary.

“Do I think she is the kind of chair that the Democratic Party needs? No, I don’t,” Sanders told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“Frankly, what the Democratic Party is about is running around to rich people’s homes and raising obscene sums of money from wealthy people. What we need to do is to say to working-class people – we are on your side,” he said.

The defiant tone by Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, has worried some Democrats anxious to see Clinton begin to unify the party and turn her attention to an election showdown with Trump.

Clinton painted Trump as a risk of the sort voters had not seen before in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired on Sunday.

“I do not want Americans, and, you know, good-thinking Republicans, as well as Democrats and independents, to start to believe that this is a normal candidacy,” she said. “It isn’t.”

Trump has gained ground in opinion polls as Republicans begin to rally around his candidacy. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Sunday showed Trump with a 2-point lead over Clinton, within the margin of error. In early March, Clinton led Trump by 9 points in the same poll.

But Sanders has ignored growing Democratic calls to step aside and repeated his vow to stay in the race until the party’s July 25-28 nominating convention in Philadelphia despite Clinton’s nearly insurmountable lead in pledged convention delegates who will choose the nominee.

He said he wanted to do away with superdelegates – party leaders who are free to support any candidate. Their rush to back Clinton even before votes had been cast amounted to “an anointment process,” Sanders said.

‘LESSER OF TWO EVILS’

He promised to influence the party platform and party rules even if he was not the nominee, but said if Clinton did not move toward his views on reining in Wall Street, reducing income equality and other issues, “she’s going to have her problems.”

“I don’t want to see the American people voting for the lesser of two evils. I want the American people to be voting for a vision of economic justice, of social justice, of environmental justice, of racial justice,” he said on ABC.

After Sanders’ endorsement of her opponent, Wasserman Schultz said in a statement that she would remain neutral in the Democratic presidential race.

Democratic worries about party unity were exacerbated by last weekend’s state party convention in Nevada, where unhappy Sanders supporters disrupted the proceedings in a dispute over rules.

That raised fears about possible chaos at the national convention in Philadelphia. But Sanders disputed media reports describing the Nevada incident as violent.

“What happened is people were rude, that’s not good, they were booing, that’s not good, they behaved in some ways that were a little bit boorish, not good, but let’s not talk about that as violence,” he said on ABC.

Sanders said he was not encouraging protests at the Philadelphia convention, “but of course people have the right to peacefully assemble and make their views heard.”

Clinton said in the NBC interview that she would talk to Sanders about his policy demands and take them into account “when he’s ready to talk.

(Additional reporting by David Morgan and Valerie Volcovici in Washington; Editing by Alan Crosby and Peter Cooney)

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When you think of “Dead Poets Society,” blood is probably the last thing that comes to mind. “Saturday Night Live” just changed that. 

In a sketch titled “Farewell, Mr. Bunting,” the comedy show gave the Robin Williams film “Dead Poets Society” an over-the-top bloody twist. The episode’s host, Fred Armisen, stars as a teacher named Mr. Bunting (the equivalent to Williams’ Mr. Keating in the original). In the scene, Mr. Bunting goes back to his classroom after being fired to pick up his personal belongings. As his former students watch him grab his things, they realize they don’t want him to go. In protest, they stand up on their desks one by one and declare, “I sing my song for all to hear.”

The whole scene is very moving, much like the 1989 film, but things take a turn for the gory when one student’s (Pete Davidson) head gets in the way of the ceiling fan. 

Once you watch the whole sketch, you’ll never be able to see “Dead Poets Society” the same way again — just like you can never watch the Season 2 finale of “The O.C.” without seeing Andy Samberg and Shia LaBeouf get shot while Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” plays with every pull of the trigger. 

Thanks, “SNL.”

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In 2009, malware called “Skimer” surfaced and security firms took notice. Skimer is essentially malware that gives hackers full access to an ATM without needing to install any physical hardware, like a card skimmer
. According to a new investigation by Kaspersky Lab, the malware is not only seems in use, but it’s also become more powerful.

Read more…

As news organizations face criticism for not challenging Donald Trump’s policy positions and offensive statements, the director of the Edward R. Murrow Center at Tufts University argued that the legendary CBS news anchor would have given the presumptive GOP presidential nominee highly critical coverage.

“He would have skewered him,” Edward Schumacher-Matos, a former journalist and media critic, told Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington.

Recounting the conversation in a speech to graduates at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on Saturday, Huffington urged reporters to sharpen their coverage of Trump and avoid giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“In the name of Edward R. Murrow, good journalism and the truth, can the media stop using euphemisms and stop trying to normalize Trump?” Huffington said.

News outlets, particularly cable news networks — which have often devoted wall-to-wall coverage to Trump — have faced backlash for going soft on him during his frequent interviews. They often fail to ask critical follow-up questions, leaving his extreme policy proposals unchallenged. And even when they do challenge his views, such as his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., they give him hours of free airtime.

Media critics and observers have warned against normalizing Trump’s statements and opinions, particularly his racism and sexism. Earlier this month, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote a piece titled, “Please Don’t Mainstream Trump,” urging politicians and the media to avoid “strong temptations to go along” with Trump.

Commenting on the plethora of television interviews with Trump, Bob Garfield, host of WNYC’s “On the Media,” argued last week that every interviewer should “hold [Trump] accountable for bigotry, incitement, juvenile conduct and blithe contempt for the Constitution.”

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

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CAIRO, May 22 (Reuters) – Egypt has sent a robot submarine to join the hunt for an EgyptAir plane which crashed in some of the deepest waters of the Mediterranean Sea with 66 people on board, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Sunday.

Ships and planes scouring the sea north of Alexandria have found body parts, personal belongings and debris from the Airbus 320, but are still trying to locate the black box recorders that could shed light on the cause of Thursday’s crash.

Sisi said that underwater equipment from Egypt’s offshore oil industry was being brought in to help the search.

“They have a submarine that can reach 3,000 meters under water,” he said in a televised speech. “It moved today in the direction of the plane crash site because we are working hard to salvage the black boxes.”

An oil ministry source said Sisi was referring to a robot submarine used mostly to maintain offshore oil rigs. It was not clear whether the vessel would be able to help locate the black boxes, or would be used in later stages of the operation.

Air crash investigation experts say the search teams have around 30 days to listen for pings sent out once every second from beacons attached to the two black boxes. At this stage of the search they would typically use acoustic hydrophones, bringing in more advanced robots later to scan the seabed and retrieve any objects once they have been found.

Separately, the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet said one of its patrol aircraft supporting the search had spotted more than 100 pieces of debris positively identified as having come from an aircraft, and passed the data to the Egyptian Navy.

EgyptAir flight 804 from Paris to Cairo vanished off radar screens early on Thursday as it entered Egyptian airspace over the Mediterranean. The 10 crew and 56 passengers included 30 Egyptian and 15 French nationals.

French investigators say that the plane sent a series of warnings indicating that smoke had been detected on board shortly before it disappeared.

The signals did not indicate what caused the smoke or fire, and aviation experts have not ruled out either deliberate sabotage or a technical fault, but they offered early clues as to what unfolded in the moments before the crash.

“Until now all scenarios are possible,” Sisi said in his first public remarks on the crash. “So please, it is very important that we do not talk and say there is a specific scenario.”

The crash was the third blow since October to hit Egypt’s travel industry, still reeling from political unrest following the 2011 uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak.

A suspected Islamic State bombing brought down a Russian airliner after it took off from Sharm al-Sheikh airport in late October, killing all 224 people on board, and an EgyptAir plane was hijacked in March by a man wearing a fake suicide belt.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Sharm al-Sheikh bombing within hours but a purported statement from the group’s spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, distributed on Saturday, made no mention of the crash.

ANGUISH OF RELATIVES

EgyptAir has told relatives of the victims that recovering and identifying bodies from the sea could take weeks, adding to the pain and uncertainty of grieving families.

Samar Ezzedine, 27 years old and newly wed, was one of the cabin crew on flight 804. Her mother Amal has sat in the lobby of a hotel overlooking Cairo Airport, still waiting for her daughter to come back.

“She is missing, who hosts a funeral for a missing person?” she murmured.

Samar’s aunt, Mona, said Amal was reluctant to go home or even move away from the hotel door. “She doesn’t want to believe it … I told her to switch off her phone, but she said: What if Samar calls?”

An EgyptAir union appealed to Sisi to allow death certificates to be issued for the victims, to avoid the usual five-year delay in the case of missing people which leaves relatives in a legal limbo, including over pensions.

In his speech on Sunday, Sisi said the investigation would not be over quickly, but promised it would be transparent.

“This could take a long time but no one can hide these things. As soon as the results are out, people will be informed,” he told ministers and parliamentarians in the port city of Damietta.

The October crash devastated Egyptian tourism, a main source of foreign exchange for a country of 80 million people.

Tourism revenue in the first three months of the year plunged by two thirds to $500 million from a year earlier, and the latest incident could crush hopes for a swift recovery.

Tourism Minister Yehia Rashed said Egypt faced a huge challenge winning back visitors. “The efforts that we need to put are maybe 10 times what we planned to put in place but we need to focus on our ability to drive business back to Egypt to change the image of Egypt,” he told Reuters.

“What we need to understand is this is an incident that could have taken place anywhere. Aviation incidents happen, unfortunately.”

READ MORE:

— Here’s What We Know So Far About EgyptAir Flight MS804

— Egypt Releases First Images Of Recovered EgyptAir Plane Debris

— French Investigators: Smoke Reported On EgyptAir Jet Before Crash

— These Are The People Missing In The EgyptAir Plane Crash

— 3 Important Things To Know About The Missing EgyptAir Flight

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