Hasta La Gadget!

Counterfeit jewelry is a big business. Sometimes the fakes are so convincing that it can be nearly impossible to tell if that Rolex you’re eying is the real deal unless you have special equipment or an extremely trained eye. That’s something the folk…

During E3, Bethesda’s director Todd Howard revealed that the Elder Scrolls 6 is being worked on, although he also added that they are a long way off from actually announcing anything. However recently it seems that there are some contradicting statements from the company as Bethesda’s marketing exec Pete Hines revealed on Twitter that they aren’t working on the game at the moment.

However Hines later followed up with a tweet that said that the game was still years and years away. Howard had also backtracked on his earlier statement in an interview which had quoted him as saying, “I should have never said a number because we have so many things. You could add it up in different ways. You could say it’s bigger or smaller. They’re a long way off. I think the larger point was, no one should expect to hear about those [games] anytime soon. We always overlap projects. We just have more going on now than we had before.”

So what can we take away from all of this? While it does sound contradictory, basically what we can take away from this entire thing is that the Elder Scrolls franchise is still here to stay and that the studio has not given up on it yet. While we suppose it is obvious that eventually there will be an Elder Scrolls 6, it won’t be out anytime soon as Bethesda is focusing on other titles at the moment, which we think is ultimately the message they are trying to get across.

That being said, Bethesda did recently state that they plan to make Skyrim: Special Edition as next-gen as possible, which hopefully will be able to tide gamers and keep the interest alive and well until the next Elder Scrolls game is released.

Bethesda Reiterates That Elder Scrolls 6 Is Still Years & Years Away , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

 New mobile games and robot butlers are all well and good, but there are also many applications for the latest technology in poverty-stricken school districts and in the service of the disabled. A Carnegie Mellon project that targets both of those things is described by its leaders as an exercise in what they call “compassionate engineering.” Read More

This article was posted in Ms Magazine on June 14, 2016 by Achie Gezahegne, Rise Up Girl Leader (Let Girls Lead is an initiative of Rise Up, which advances health, education and equity for girls, youth and women everywhere).

I still have a vivid memory of a room filled with over 35 girls, each with her own powerful ideas, strong presence, and remarkable depth. We all came together for a Let Girls Lead training with the aim of solving the problems facing girls in Ethiopia. But little did we know that the event would come to redefine our perceptions of the power of girls.

The strength of our voices together was contagious. I felt amazed not only at what I observed before me, but also imagining what was possible. The power to question, speak, refuse and fight was innate, though buried in social and ethical barriers. Our power had been covered by fear, struggle and abuse. My own power was obscured in a web of economic and social burden, traditional barriers, expectations and stereotypical misrepresentations.

From the girls’ training to the Ethiopia National Girl Summit to the World Government Summit in Dubai, Rise Up enabled me to go on the journey of a lifetime to represent Ethiopian girls. I held discussions in schools to get the perspective of others like me, I traveled to New York for the Commission on the Status of Women, and I returned to Ethiopia to participate in the global Financing for Development (FFD) meeting, all to advocate for girls’ rights and potential. The FFD meeting offered a hands on experience in the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as I and other Rise Up girl leaders spoke with delegates, ambassadors, local and international ministers and policy makers, UN officials, all of whom had a say in the negotiation, development and approval of the SDGs.

We, as girl leaders fighting for other girls in Ethiopia and around the world, set out to contribute to the process of putting girls at the center of these global goals for 2030. I believe we have succeeded.

After the after the adoption of the SDGs in September of 2015 with girls at the center, the next steps are integration and implementation. The coming fourteen years will delineate a new outline for the world if these ambitious goals are strengthened by potent implementers and joint contribution from governments, civil societies and the people of the world.

In my own way of being a part of this and continuing with what has been a very rewarding experience, I am going to finish my undergraduate degree in either Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering or Civil and Environmental Engineering – fields not usually encouraged for women. Then I want to join in my country’s journey of eradicating poverty. Hand in hand with others, I would like to start up an institution to help girls defeat their challenges by peer counseling, mentorship, guidance, and training.

I am optimistic that by 2030, girls will take a step forward in transforming communities at the national and international level. In Ethiopia by 2030, I want to see girls dressed in their traditional wear going to school safe and filled with hope, never having to choose between being an Ethiopian girl and being successful. I want to see an Ethiopia where girls’ education is not hindered by harmful traditional practices or cultural beliefs that force girls to follow in the footsteps of their mothers. I want to see the eradication of female genital mutilation and child marriage.

I believe with strong implementation and government dedication, with the inclusion of girls in policy making, 2030 will be the start of a new era in Ethiopia in the consolidation of democracy and realization of national goals. It will mean taking one more step forward in the journey of transformation from a world of male domination to a world dominated by good ideas, and by women and men working together to implement them.

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Achie Gezahegne Gebre is a graduating high school honor student from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia who has volunteered for the Young Women’s Christian Association of Ethiopia for two years, in coordinator and leadership positions for diverse programs. She is an award-winning essayist dedicated to advancing the rights of women and girls in education and health.

Rise Up advances the education health and equity of girls, youth and women everywhere. Rise Up unifies the power of Let Girls Lead, Champions for Change and the Youth Champions Initiative, to benefit 115 million girls, youth, and women globally.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

On Monday, Politico published a lengthy profile of Stephen Miller, the 30-year-old Senate staffer turned Donald Trump adviser who now revs up crowds for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee by railing against trade, immigration and political correctness.

It’s a comprehensive look at Miller, from his early conservative rabble-rousing to his time as a top staffer for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the first senator to endorse Trump, to his role today — which involves everything from warming up crowds to attending policy meetings to ordering Ubers. The piece, written by Julia Ioffe, is well worth the read to understand the mindset of a person who could very well be a top policy adviser to the next president of the United States.

What’s striking about Miller is how far back his animus toward multiculturalism and political correctness — particularly with regard to race and ethnicity — actually goes. Miller has been pushing back against a multiculturalist society since he was 16, an age when most kids are more worried about passing their driver’s test than about changing cultural norms.

The first target of Miller’s political ire, at least in print, was Santa Monica High School, from which he graduated in 2003. The area, then as now, was liberal and had a large Latino community. Miller didn’t like the school’s leadership — they said the Pledge of Allegiance too infrequently, praised the U.S. too little and allowed too much Spanish to be spoken, according to various columns he later wrote.

He didn’t drop the issue even after he graduated. In 2005, when Miller was in college, he devoted most of a 1,600-word column at the conservative site FrontPage Magazine to attacking Oscar de la Torre, a member of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District’s board. It’s a broadside that de la Torre, a Democrat, hasn’t forgotten.

“He was biased toward people of color. Anything that was about multiculturalism, he was against,” de la Torre told The Huffington Post. “Anything that was about ethnic studies or promoting people of color in any positive way, this guy was against. So it’s no surprise to me that he’s working for Donald Trump.”

Miller did not respond to a request for comment.

One of Miller’s biggest complaints when writing and talking about his high school back then was its approach to ethnicity, race and class. At age 16, he lamented in a letter to the editor of a local news site that the school did “nothing for American holidays but everything for Mexican holidays.” He also claimed that there were “very few, if any, Hispanic students” in his honors classes and that many students at the school lacked basic English skills (he did not specify a race). The school’s policy of making announcements in both English and Spanish exacerbated the problem, he argued.

“As politically correct as this may be, it demeans the immigrant population as incompetent, and makes a mockery of the American ideal of personal accomplishment,” Miller wrote then.

As a teen, Miller appeared repeatedly on the radio show of Larry Elder, a conservative commentator, and denounced what he called his high school’s liberal culture run amok. He told Elder that liberal students punished classmates who took positions they deemed politically incorrect, and that teachers were biased against conservative students.

The school was “an institution not of learning, but of indoctrination,” where one teacher had referred to the Mexican-American War as the “Northern-American invasion,” Miller wrote after graduating.

A couple of years later, Miller weighed in again in his column focused on de la Torre. He accused de la Torre of bringing gang members to campus and nearly inciting a riot — an allegation that the police made as well. (De la Torre, for his part, has said that he brought the men to speak out against gangs and that police had falsely accused one of them of ordering assaults.)

In that 2005 column, Miller also returned to his favorite theme, the ills of multiculturalism, which he said led to students thinking of themselves as “Mexican, or Honduran, or Guatemalan first, and American second.”

Miller criticized the school for providing funding to Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, or MEChA — a Chicano group that, according to its own summary, was “founded on the principles of self-determination for the liberation of our people.” Miller called it a “radical national Hispanic group that believes in racial superiority and returning the southwestern United States to Mexico to create a ‘bronze nation,'” and told Elder the group advocated for a violent overthrow of the U.S.

Miller wasn’t a fan of the Black Student Union either, or its plans to, as he put it, combat “black and Hispanic underachievement, violence, and racial tension.”

“It is just more of the same, a declaration of institutional racism followed by extreme plans for re-education and multiculturalism,” he wrote. “Its leftist illusions and destructiveness are self-evident, yet both the superintendent and the principal have agreed to work with the coalition and incorporate their ideas.”

At Duke University, his profile grew. Another student active in conservative politics at the time said Miller was already connected among conservatives by the time he came to campus, but “sort of did his own thing” there at first. (The Duke alumnus, who asked not to be named, laughed when he heard that Miller is now working for the Trump campaign. “All I can say is I’m not surprised,” he said.)

“He was sort of a conservative wunderkind in that respect,” the Duke alumnus said. “Usually you don’t come on campus already sort of guns blazing. But he was sort of like that.”

Miller became a columnist for the Duke Chronicle, which in turn made him into something of a campus name. He criticized the “condescension” of being asked to write a birthday note for the school janitor. He accused writer Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia,” and again warned of the evils of multiculturalism.

“The administration is so obsessed with multiculturalism (a.k.a. segregation) that they deem it necessary to include in freshman orientation a separate luncheon for black students,” he wrote in September 2005, when he was a junior. “Call me a sentimental fool, but I agree with Martin Luther King Jr. and don’t think that we should divide people based on the color of their skin. But then again, social engineering is just so much fun — ask any leftist.”

Miller became president of Students for Academic Freedom, where he called for diversity in the faculty — of the political kind, not the racial, religious or socioeconomic kind.

“All we’re trying to do is to hold hiring practices to a certain standard and to hold the teaching to a certain standard, which would, by its very nature, lead to diversity, because diversity is a natural state of affairs,” he told Duke Magazine at the time.

His highest-profile columns addressed the 2006 Duke lacrosse scandal, when a black woman working as an exotic dancer accused three white student-athletes of rape. Many students and faculty were quick to condemn the athletes, but Miller argued that potentially innocent people had been presumed guilty and unfairly treated as a result. He even went on CNN to discuss the issue with Nancy Grace.

Miller was eventually vindicated: Charges against the lacrosse players were dropped and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper (D) said there had been a “tragic rush to accuse.”

It took guts for Miller to speak up like he did ahead of the charges being dropped, said KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College who wrote a blog post at the time praising Miller for standing up for due process. Johnson, a Democrat who is no fan of Trump, said Miller deserves credit for that.

“The one thing that I always had a sense of with Stephen is that he was someone who was fearless, I guess in a good way, and who would be willing to make moves if he believed in it,” Johnson told HuffPost. “Even if you could make a case [that] there was some career risk in doing it.”

Miller’s lacrosse columns were intensely focused on race. He wrote that the allegations had “provided a fantastic opportunity to advance a social agenda and to keep the distance between the paranoid delusions of widespread racism upon which so many of the careers and the lives of the activists have been built and the rather obvious reality that the overwhelming majority of whites in America are not racist.”

He wrote another column about a fellow student calling him racist — an accusation he called “grotesquely false and baseless” — and said he told her that she was actually the one obsessed with race. He also argued that adopting “the outrageous assumption that conservatives, or wealthy white people or successful white people have it in for blacks and other minorities” did a great disservice to people of color.

After graduating from Duke, Miller went on to work for then-Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and John Shadegg (R-Ariz.). He joined Sessions’ team in 2009, where, the senator told HuffPost, “extraordinary was an understatement” for the work he did.

Some of that work involved long emails and phone calls to reporters about immigration and trade — particularly regarding potential job losses, criminal undocumented immigrants and an increase in the number of Muslims in the country.

One Democratic aide who worked with him occasionally said Miller was always perfectly nice and friendly until the subject of immigration came up. Then the tone would shift and become more tense. Immigration, it seems, never stopped being a touchy subject for him.

“It was like one of his trigger words,” the aide said.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.