Live streaming is quickly becoming not just the latest new trend but also the hottest new monetization source (read: ads). And while there are a lot of new live streaming platforms popping up, Twitch.tv is still considered to be the granddaddy of such services. It is only appropriate, then, that the now Amazon-owned company is initiating a new thrust that … Continue reading
“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert devoted part of his Tuesday night opening monologue to House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes’ (R-Calif.) conflicts of interest. And what better way to examine the information than with a diagram?
Nunes has been making headlines for announcing that he received information showing that intelligence agencies, while targeting suspected foreign spies, inadvertently collected incidental surveillance of President Donald Trump’s transition team officials. While Nunes briefed the president, he has refused to tell his colleagues, the press or American citizens how he obtained the information.
His behavior is concerning because the committee that he co-chairs is leading the investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the Trump administration’s ties to the Kremlin.
“No matter where this investigation leads, no matter what we find out, Nunes is not coming out of this smelling like a rose,” Colbert joked.
Watch the moment in the video above.
Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Mahershala Ali, Amy Poehler and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31, on Facebook Live.
You can support the ACLU right away. Text POWER to 20222 to give $10 to the ACLU. The ACLU will call you to explain other actions you can take to help. Visit www.hmgf.org/t for terms. #StandForRights2017
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DURHAM, N.C. ― North Carolina has been in an almost constant state of protest for the last year.
It started in March 2016, when former Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed HB 2, a measure preventing local governments from passing anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, into law. Thousands of protesters responded by storming the state Capitol. In late September, six consecutive nights of protest rocked Charlotte after a police officer fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott. In October, the state chapter of the NAACP sued several counties over an alleged voter suppression attempt. Protesters again swarmed the capital, Raleigh, in December to stand against GOP-backed measures to limit the powers of the newly elected Gov. Roy Cooper (D).
Now many activists are coalescing around another shared concern: President Donald Trump.
Progressives see North Carolina as a breeding ground of possibility, as recent liberal activism has begun to show what’s possible when organizers take aim at a common threat. This is especially true in the Triangle area of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, where more than 20 colleges and universities house plenty of aggravated liberals. Liberal Tar Heels want to use their energy to turn the state solidly blue by 2020, when a number of key political offices will be up for grabs.
Avid Trump supporter Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who has been very critical of the current wave of protests, will be up for re-election in 2020. So will Cooper. And Democrats are aiming to take control of the state legislature ― Republicans currently hold 74 state House seats, compared to Democrats’ 46, and 35 state Senate seats, compared to Democrats’ 15.
Although these activists will have to contend with the state’s racial gerrymandering ― the general assembly drew new district lines in 2014 and 2016 that put a high number of voters of color into certain districts in order to dilute their voting power ― North Carolina’s status as a purple state makes progressives optimistic.
Many people assume North Carolina is a Republican state, but the state Senate was under Democratic control from 1992 to 2011. Democrats also controlled the state House from 1992 to 1994, and again from 1999 to 2010. Only three Republican governors have led the state in the last 50 years, and North Carolina went blue for former President Barack Obama in 2008. But that was the first time since 1976 that the state had voted for a Democratic presidential nominee, and it went for Republicans Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016. Last year’s election was very close, however: Trump beat Hillary Clinton by just 3.6 percent.
Activists say they hope flipping North Carolina can cause a ripple effect across the 14 states that constitute the South. Republicans below the Mason-Dixon Line currently control 24 Senate seats, 110 House seats and 180 Electoral College votes (167 of which went to Trump in November).
“If you fundamentally shift any of those states ― and they begin to vote in more progressive ways ― then you fundamentally change the American democracy and the landscape,” Rev. William Barber, the president of North Carolina’s NAACP, told reporters last year.
North Carolina has a strong, influential history of political protest. On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University refused to move from a lunch counter in downtown Greensboro after being denied service. By Feb. 5, the Greensboro sit-ins had grown to include approximately 300 students.
Extensive television media coverage of the sit-ins helped the anti-segregation movement circulate through southern and northern college towns; students began peacefully protesting segregated libraries, beaches, hotels and other businesses. By the end of March, protests were underway in at least 55 cities in 13 states. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a youth organization that played an integral role in the civil rights movement, was founded a month later at Shaw University.
Real policy change followed: Eateries throughout the South began integrating by the end of that summer.
That fight was similar to the current battle against Trump, said Marcus Bass, an organizing member of Charlotte-based activist group The Tribe.
“North Carolina’s civil rights history has been embedded in this political fight ― so much so that it makes sense for us to have a lot of this mobility around organizing,” he said.
In addition to fighting police violence, which has garnered a significant amount of media attention, black activities have been deeply involved in advocating for LGBTQ, immigrant and women’s rights in North Carolina. They are also key figures in the Moral Mondays protests, a movement launched in April 2013 to object against Republican legislative policies. Moral Monday protesters began meeting every Monday at the state Capitol to protest the actions McCrory and the Republican legislature had taken against voting and abortion rights, the environment and racial justice. Like the Greensboro sit-ins, the movement ignited activists in other states, including Georgia, South Carolina, New Mexico, Illinois and Massachusetts.
“It’s provided a catalyst on a state level and on a local level for folks to begin to get engaged,” Bass said of Moral Mondays.
An estimated 80,000 people participated in the 11th annual Forward Together Moral March on Feb. 11, which Barber led. This year’s march focused on the duty of participants to stand against the Trump administration and its policies ― such as repealing the Affordable Care Act ― as well as race-based gerrymandering and HB 2.
“We march not as a spontaneous action but as a movement that stands upon deep foundations of organizing that have gone on for years, setting the groundwork for times such as this,” Barber said to the crowd at the march. “Four years later we realize we have been preparing all along for such a time as this.”
Moral Mondays also laid the groundwork for other protests ― nearly 17,000 people participated in Raleigh’s Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration. And more than 1,500 protesters flooded the state’s airports after Trump issued the first version of his executive order banning immigrants from a group of predominantly Muslim countries on Jan. 27.
There was a strong protest movement in North Carolina before Trump, but his candidacy and election also worked to galvanize new activists. His election inspired Kelly Garvy, a 29-year-old graduate student at Duke University, to start the activist group Protecting Progress in Durham. Most of the group’s members weren’t involved in politics prior to the election.
“Many people feel a moral duty to get more involved,” Garvy said. “Trump has scared a lot of people.”
Many people feel a moral duty to get more involved. Trump has scared a lot of people.
Kelly Garvy, Protecting Progress in Durham founder
longChristopher Butler, 36, started out phone banking for the N.C. Democratic Party last fall and housing people who were working for Clinton’s campaign ― something he said he never would have done before Trump. Catherine Caprio, 50, became chair of Durham’s 25th Precinct after volunteering on Clinton’s campaign and registering voters in rural parts of the county. Cherry Foreman, a 42-year-old Democrat, said she started going door to door and helping people register to vote last fall.
These activists ― new and seasoned alike ― are laying groundwork they say can help elect more Democrats in 2018 and 2020.
Mandy Carter, a 69-year-old activist involved in several local and national organizations, is identifying rallying causes, such as education, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and the environment. She’s also paying attention to demographic changes and watching individual precincts for opportunities to elect progressives.
“All politics is local,” she said. “On Nov. 9, when I woke up that morning, besides being traumatized, nothing changed for me. My city council and my county commissioners have more control of my day-to-day life than what happens in D.C.”
Alyssa Canty, a member of the Raleigh Police Accountability Task Force, is working to institutionalize voting at North Carolina’s historically black colleges and universities and increase turnout among millennial voters, while also supporting and raising money for black candidates.
Protecting Progress in Durham is focusing its efforts on rectifying voting laws that disproportionately hurt black voters, like vague voter registration forms and limited early voting opportunities, and getting the state’s gerrymandered district lines redrawn more fairly. The group is also working to boost grassroots organizing in rural areas in order to win back the nine counties that voted for Obama in 2008 but went to Trump in November.
“North Carolina goes blue, it changes the game in a lot of different ways,” Garvy said. “The work that we’re doing here can’t be understated.”
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From the nation’s capital to the global capital of gambling, advocates for the legalization of sports betting celebrated the NFL’s decision this week to allow the Oakland Raiders to relocate to Las Vegas.
“We congratulate the Raiders and the National Football League on today’s historic decision to place a team in Las Vegas,” Geoff Freeman, the president and chief executive officer of the American Gaming Association, which supports the legalization of sports gambling, said in a statement Monday.
The Raiders’ relocation, Freeman said, “demonstrates how far gaming has come.”
Sports gambling has been effectively outlawed in the United States since 1992, when Congress enacted the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA, a federal law that allows sports betting in just four states, including Nevada, the only one permitted to operate full sports books.
For that reason, it seemed impossible that Las Vegas could ever be home to a professional sports franchise as recently as a decade ago, as the NBA, the NFL, the NHL and Major League Baseball ― which combined to provide the force PASPA needed to become law ― remained staunchly opposed to gambling and viewed the idea of holding sporting events next door to sports books as a threat to the integrity of their games.
That unified opposition began to crack in recent years. In 2014, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called for the legalization and regulation of sports wagering nationwide. Last month, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said his league is re-evaluating its position on legal gambling.
Now, Sin City will be home to franchises in the other two major leagues, as the Raiders will join the National Hockey League’s Vegas Golden Knights, an expansion franchise that will begin play next season.
Gambling advocates and gaming law experts see the NFL’s decision to join the NHL in Vegas as a potentially significant moment for sports gambling ― one that highlights the broader acceptance of the practice and could provide momentum for the growing movement to legalize and regulate it.
“It’s a pretty big symbolic breakthrough,” said I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School and gaming law expert who has advised governments and the industry. “The sports leagues used to be unified against anything that could conceivably lead to betting on sports.”
The question is whether that symbolism is powerful enough to help pave the way for legalization.
In Washington, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) hopes it will. Pallone, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees regulatory issues in sports, introduced legislation last year to roll back PASPA and called on the NFL to join him in the effort after Monday’s vote.
“This move is a clear sign that the league owners’ attitudes toward sports betting has changed,” Pallone said in a statement. “I hope that following today’s vote, I can count on the support of the NFL and the NFL team owners for my efforts to legalize and regulate sports betting.”
He may have to wait awhile for a friendly response.
Even before NFL owners voted on the move, Commissioner Roger Goodell attempted to quash the idea that the Raiders’ relocation plans marked a change in how his league sees gambling.
“We are not changing our position as it relates to legalized sports gambling,” Goodell told The MMQB. “We still don’t think it is a positive thing.”
New Jersey state Sen. Ray Lesniak (D), though, doesn’t need the NFL’s help advancing legislation in Congress.
In 2012, Lesniak led the push to legalize sports gambling at New Jersey’s casinos and racetracks. All four major leagues and the NCAA immediately challenged the law that he sponsored and that Republican Gov. Chris Christie signed. The leagues argued it violated PASPA, and the law was defeated in federal court.
When New Jersey took another crack at it in 2014, the leagues won in court again. The state is now appealing its case to the Supreme Court, and in January the court asked the U.S. solicitor general to weigh in on the fight, an unexpected development considering most legal observers thought justices would decline to hear the case (which they may still do).
It’s very, very, very difficult now to argue that legalized sports betting undermines the integrity of the game.
New Jersey state Sen. Ray Lesniak
Lesniak, who is now seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, sees the Raiders’ move to Las Vegas as a boost for the state’s case. The government has traditionally supported the four sports leagues’ position on PASPA, but Lesniak said Monday that he was preparing a letter to the solicitor general’s office to argue that having a team in Las Vegas helps invalidate its core opposition to legal gambling.
“It’s very, very, very difficult now to argue that legalized sports betting undermines the integrity of the game,” Lesniak told The Huffington Post.
To Lesniak, the NFL’s actions on gambling render its words on the subject almost meaningless. He points to other embraces of gambling that, at this point, make the NFL’s public opposition border on hypocrisy. The NFL has benefited from gambling, it knows it has benefited from gambling and everyone else knows it has benefited from gambling.
The league eagerly embraced fantasy football as a way to help drive interest in its sport ― and while fantasy sports aren’t considered gambling under federal law, that’s because of the NFL, which lobbied Congress for a “carve out” in gaming laws that kept them separate from traditional gambling, and thus legal.
The NFL has a similarly symbiotic relationship with daily fantasy sports, which have further blurred the lines between fantasy games and actual sports gambling. At least 28 NFL teams have partnered with daily fantasy companies, and the league didn’t back away from the industry even as its murky legal status came under scrutiny in states and in Congress last year (the league claims it does not view daily fantasy games as gambling).
In 2012, the NFL lifted its ban on casino advertisements in stadiums. Five years prior, it began playing annual games in London, where sports gambling is legal. It expanded its London schedule to four games last season and has invested in a stadium there to host future games. NFL owners publicly share their desires to have a franchise in London sooner rather than later.
A team in Vegas “is the final straw” in the NFL’s argument that gambling poses a threat to its game, Lesniak said.
Rose believes it’s “too late” to save the New Jersey case. But, the law professor said, New Jersey’s fight could embolden efforts to legalize sports wagering at the state level: Pennsylvania, Maryland and Michigan are already considering such legislation.
If those become law, they will likely run into challenges under PASPA, too. But added to its past moves toward gambling, the NFL’s entrance into Las Vegas could make it hard for the league to clearly articulate to a court why exactly it opposes legalized sports betting, said Daniel Wallach, a Florida-based attorney and gaming law expert, especially given its earlier embraces of gaming.
“It’s going to be more difficult for the leagues to continue to argue in court that sports betting undermines their games,” Wallach said. “They can no longer claim that they would be irreparably harmed by betting on sporting events when they are participating in that activity and are directly involved in supporting it.”
“The next time a state tries to legalize sports betting,” Wallach said, it will have “an even more powerful argument concerning the leagues’ hypocrisy than New Jersey ever possessed.”
Aside from legal fights and legislative battles, the presence of major professional sports in Las Vegas for the first time should go a long way toward showing leagues like the NFL that legalized and regulated gambling serves them better than the alternative, said Jennifer Roberts, the associate director of the International Center for Gaming Regulation at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“It will highlight how highly regulated our environment for sports wagering is, that it’s able to maintain the integrity of the sport, and provide for responsible gaming and consumer protections,” Roberts told HuffPost. “Sports wagering is going to happen. So it’s better to happen in a regulated environment.”
Goodell hinted at that in a Tuesday press conference, saying that the league likely won’t try to keep Vegas sports books from taking bets on Raiders games, “in large part because you have the regulatory environment there, which actually could be beneficial in this case.”
The federal prohibition on sports gambling, Roberts noted, hasn’t stopped the practice from flourishing. Though exact figures are impossible to come by, Americans illegally wager an estimated $80 billion to $380 billion a year on sporting events.
That’s a huge potential market ― one the league will now see up close every Sunday ― and nothing changes the NFL’s opinion on any given subject like cash. The allure of money is how the NFL got in bed with daily fantasy sports companies and what ultimately landed the Raiders in Vegas. And in the end, it might be what finally convinces Goodell to complete the NFL’s shift on gambling, too.
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The United Nations just published its Human Development Report, which ranks the nations with people who live the longest, healthiest lives. We took a look at the top 10 nations and decided to investigate how each of them generally take their coffee. Since we’re going to be drinking coffee regardless, we may as well take notes on the coffee culture of the healthiest people.
So, get settled with your cup of joe, and read on …
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The board governing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences says it will retain the services of the accounting firm responsible for the embarrassing Oscars Best Picture snafu at this year’s ceremony.
Last month, PricewaterhouseCoopers took full responsibility for giving actor Warren Beatty the wrong envelope to announce the final and most prestigious award of the night.
The mix-up led to massive confusion with Beatty’s co-presenter Faye Dunaway incorrectly awarding “La La Land” as the Best Picture winner, instead of “Moonlight.” Pictures surfaced showing PwC accountant Brian Cullinan, who was responsible for giving Beatty the wrong envelope, breaching protocol minutes before handing over the results to post a photo of actress Emma Stone to Twitter.
Since the debacle, the firm removed Cullinan and colleague Martha Ruiz from all Oscars-related dealings. PwC has been the official Oscar ballot counter for the past 83 years.
After a board meeting Tuesday night, the first in-person gathering since the blunder, the group decided to keep PwC as its accounting firm with necessary changes, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Going forward, a third person will be added to the team of accountants that manage the ballot counting and results. This additional person will sit in the control room during the production to rapidly respond to any errors. PwC added that accountants will have to give up their mobile devices for the entirety of the show. The accountant who managed the Oscar ballot counting process from 2002 to 2013 will return to the role.
Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Mahershala Ali, Amy Poehler and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31, on Facebook Live.
You can support the ACLU right away. Text POWER to 20222 to give $10 to the ACLU. The ACLU will call you to explain other actions you can take to help. Visit www.hmgf.org/t for terms. #StandForRights2017
— 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.
Conan O’Brien on Wednesday gleefully spoofed how President Donald Trump has hogged credit for stuff “he had nothing to do with.”
As a jumping-off point, the talk show host used Trump’s real tweet on Tuesday suggesting he laid the groundwork for Ford’s $1.2 billion investment in three Michigan plants, even though Ford had the plan in the works since 2015.
But that was small potatoes. The commander-in-chief has apparently been behind some other truly huge moments, like the start of spring. Don’t try to tell him otherwise.
Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Mahershala Ali, Amy Poehler and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31 on Facebook Live.
You can support the ACLU right away. Text POWER to 20222 to give $10 to the ACLU. The ACLU will call you to explain other actions you can take to help. Visit www.hmgf.org/t for terms. #StandForRights2017
— 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.
Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.
Yesterday we focused on Samsung’s big Galaxy S8 reveal, and it didn’t disappoint. If you need to get up to speed in a hurry, we boiled the entire event down into one nine-minute video that you can watch here.
Dr. Peggy Whitson, the first woman to command the ISS, might soon also hold the record for the most spacewalks by a female astronaut. She’s scheduled to step out of the ISS today (March 30th), and once she does, she’ll have eclipsed the number of tim…
After much rumor and speculation, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ have been officially revealed, and we’re sure that there are quite a few of you guys who are eager to get their hands on the handset. So the question is how much will the phone cost and when will it be available for purchase?
For those planning to get it unlocked, the phones are priced at $750 and $850 respectively, which is a hefty amount of change to part with. However if you are planning on getting it from a carrier, the pricing and availability and bundles of the carriers have been revealed. Starting with AT&T, the carrier will be holding a buy-one, get-one deal for the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Customers can choose to make monthly repayments from as low as $28 to $36 a month.
Next up will be T-Mobile where the S8 will be priced at $30 a month over the next 24 months, but for those who want the larger S8+, it will cost the same but you will have to put down a $130 down payment first. Sprint will be offering a leasing plan at $31.25 a month for 18 months, while the S8+ is priced at $35.42 a month for 18 months. Customers can choose to upgrade to a newer Samsung phone, like the Note 8, after a minimum of 12 repayments.
Last but not least is Verizon where the repayments are set as low as $15 a month with an eligible trade-in. Without a trade-in, the S8 is priced at $30 a month, while the S8+ is priced at $35 a month over a 24 month period. The phones are expected to be available for pre-order come 30th of March and will be released on the 21st of April.
Galaxy S8 Pricing And Carrier Availability Revealed , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
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