Wireless headphones are rapidly becoming a necessity in our dongle-tangled gadget universe, but the options are endless. We set out to find a pair of high-quality, wireless on-ear headphones for the discerning listener who wants to cruise the streets in style.
Back in February, Apple excitedly told the world that its first original series, the Carpool Karaoke spin-off, would be launching in April. Now, according to Reuters, the premiere has been pushed back until “later this year.”
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Sideshow Collectibles is showing off a Baby Groot figure based on the character’s appearance in the coming Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. This particular Groot is life size, which is to say about 10 inches tall.
This collectible has three interchangeable faces, and is expertly painted to look just like the film character. The wood texture, moss, and sprouts are spot on.
He comes with a Ravagers outfit and two pairs of interchangeable hands. One set of hands has pointy attack roots flying out to get the bad guys. The hands have embedded wires to allow different poses.
He might be little and cute, but has a serious price tag of $189.99(USD). The collectible is estimated to be available by spring 2018.
If Alphabet managed to pique your interest by launching Waymo and you happen to live in the Phoenix area, good news: beginning today, you can apply to participate in Waymo’s early rider program. A trial for Alphabet’s self-driving fleet of cars, Waymo doesn’t just want to get you from point A to point B once and then call it good. … Continue reading
Charles and David Koch are the CEO and VP of Koch Industries, respectively. Joseph Acker is an incarcerated artist currently serving a 10-year sentence. Acker doesn’t know the Koch brothers personally, but he drew them as part of a project called “Captured.”
Started by Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider in 2016, “Captured” attempts to shine a spotlight on what its creators deem are “crimes masquerading as commerce.” By asking incarcerated artists to draw the CEOs, VPs and chairmans they believe should be behind bars, they hope to inspire other people to consider a world in which the highest levels of corporate leadership are held personally responsible for the illegal actions of their companies.
“If we put poison in a glass of your drinking water, and you got sick or your children had birth defects because of it, we would certainly be hauled off to prison,” Greenspan told HuffPost. “But when a corporation does it on a large scale, if anything, they’re given a fine. […] It’s kind of just the cost of doing business.”
“So we started thinking,” he added, “it’s interesting when you have the veil of a corporation around you, it’s almost like you’re exempt from […] behaving within the law.”
Greenspan and Tider recognized early on the power of juxtaposing the circumstances of incarcerated artists with the “rap sheets,” as they call them, of corporate leaders accused of various misdeeds.
In Acker’s case, he’s serving 10 years in prison for receiving stolen goods, possessing altered passports, and possessing body armor as a felon. The Koch brothers, “Captured” asserts on its website, have yet to see prison time for bribing their way into securing contracts in Africa, India and the Middle East; selling millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran; bribing judges and legislators; propagating mass deception by funding climate change denial groups; polluting American’s air, water and climate; and rigging Congress.
“What we thought would be interesting is to juxtapose the two: People who are in jail, who society has already deemed to be criminals, whether it be for murder or for theft or for burglary or manslaughter. And put them up against companies who are really committing the same kinds of crimes,” Greenspan said. “So we display each piece of artwork with a ‘rap sheet’ ― a ‘rap sheet’ for the incarcerated artist and a ‘rap sheet’ for the companies and the crimes they’ve committed over the past couple of decades.”
”Captured” wasn’t easy to get off the ground. In order to get in touch with the various incarcerated artists who took part in the project, Greenspan and Tider originally reached out to the prisons and prison wardens themselves, to no avail. Eventually, they got in touch with an art therapy program coordinator who couldn’t help them on the record, but agreed to bring a letter from the two men detailing the project to the prison she worked with.
“She couldn’t promise it wouldn’t be in her pocket the day she visited the prison and fall out of her pocket in the art room,” they explained.
Next, Greenspan and Tider turned to eBay, where they found a group of incarcerated artists selling portraiture ― images of Elvis or Madonna or other famous people. They contacted the eBay sellers, who tended to be family or friends of the incarcerated individual, who would facilitate contact with the actual artist.
“Once we got there, the project sort of went viral in the prison system,” Tider added. “An inmate would tell another inmate, even in other prisons, and we were able to get a lot of artists that way.”
To arrange for the actual portraits in “Captured,” Greenspan and Tider began by offering artists a selection of five to 10 corporate leaders they could draw. But because of the limited means of communication, and the delays that come along with using traditional snail mail, they felt it became more feasible if they just chose a subject for each of their participating artists.
So Greenspan and Tider would create a dossier on the proposed subject, with images to draw from, background on the associated company, and information and case materials on the “crimes” committed, and send it to the artist. If the artist agreed to draw the person, the project moved forward. If they didn’t, they could offer them a different person.
“All the incarcerated artists knew the aspects of the project and the context of the project,” Greenspan added.
He and Tider warned them about the attention the project could draw and the subsequent blowback that could affect an inmate’s chances at parole; some of the individuals involved were on death row and felt little regard for those potential consequences. Moreover, each artist was compensated fairly for their work. “Captured” paid the artists $100 (based on an estimation that the average rate for a prison portrait was $30), covering any fees associated with services like JPay.
Online, “Captured” includes links to contact information for the incarcerated artists, allowing fans of their work to reach out if they so choose.
“Corporations maintain that they have the same rights and freedoms as individuals. That’s kind of a reframing of a corporate entity that has no conscience ― it’s now being considered a person,” Greenspan noted. “Yet we’ve got actual people in prison who are treated like subhumans. By putting contact information there, by showing their artistry ― we’ve seen people go, ‘Wow, there’s a person behind this.’”
“Captured” also takes physical form. Last year, Greenspan and Tider sold 1,000 “Captured” books, donating all proceeds to the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. The timing couldn’t have been more ideal ― they’d included a portrait of Rex Tillerson, currently the secretary of state in President Donald Trump’s administration, in the series. This year, they have plans to release 1,000 more copies, and although they don’t know yet where the proceeds will go, they’ve been thinking about groups like the Brooklyn Bail Fund or organizations working on prison reform policies and lowering prison populations.
“When you see something like Rex Tillerson become secretary of state, a man who’s worked for a company with decades-long abuses of the law ― what it’s done to our environment. It’s troubling,” Greenspan said. “But we’re not telling you that it should be troubling, we’re asking you to at least consider it.”
“One of the big goals was to redefine things in people’s minds,” Tider concluded. “If you consider corporations anew, and you consider the things that they’ve done, you might come out with a different perspective on them. Likewise, it’s the same for the inmates. If you thought of inmates as people who were very different from you, you might see the beautiful artistry they do and think differently.”
Welcome to Battleground, where art and activism meet.
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WASHINGTON ― Human rights advocates spent years fighting for even small improvements to the system that detains men, women and children waiting to be either deported or released back into the U.S. Now they fear the progress they have made could disappear under President Donald Trump, who has promised harsher treatment of undocumented immigrants.
“This administration is prepared to make conditions at immigrant detention even worse than they already are, which, given that for some people they’re already fatal, is terrifying,” said Mary Small, policy director of the advocacy group Detention Watch Network.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is considering looser regulations for new contracts with jails to hold immigrants in deportation proceedings, The New York Times reported earlier this month. That agreement would allow jails to treat immigrants detained for civil offenses the same way they treat people charged with crimes.
The department also plans to eliminate an office at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that focuses on improving the detention system and to ramp up detention and deportation efforts.
Trump’s boosters consider these to be good things ― earlier this month, hosts on “Fox & Friends” gleefully remarked that the “party’s over” at immigrant detention centers, grumbling about detainees being given clean sheets and outdoor recreation time.
In reality, immigrant detention centers ― some of which are inside jails facilities or former prisons ― are bleak places. Inmates report being denied medical care, held in solitary confinement, given inedible food and other mistreatment. This is all on top of the struggle of being locked up, often far from family and legal help.
There’s always a tension between ‘Do we get rid of the cage or do we make a better cage?’
Ruthie Epstein, formerly of Human Rights First
The facilities are supposed to be for civil detention, not criminal detention like a prison ― being in the country without authorization is not in itself a crime. Advocates are concerned that the Trump administration’s discussion of new contracts for jails to detain immigrants is more proof that officials will disregard standards meant to make immigrant detention less punitive.
Chris Daley, an attorney with Just Detention International, said his group is “very afraid” those standards aren’t going to be enforced and that “we’re just going to lose any sense that folks are not there under criminal charges.”
None of these issues were resolved under former President Barack Obama, who oversaw record deportations during his first term and vastly expanded the use of family immigrant detention. But advocates also achieved some gains during his time in office, including increased oversight; policies that limited solitary confinement and transferring detainees; and a new Office of Detention Policy and Planning to oversee reforms.
In 2009, Obama’s first year in office, ICE made detention expert Dora Schriro the first director of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning and tasked her with overhauling the immigrant detention system. She laid out recommendations for improvements on oversight and conditions, and ICE officials met with nongovernmental organizations regularly to discuss detention matters. Most of the advocates wanted to reduce immigrant detention rather than simply reform it, said Ruthie Epstein, who at the time worked on detention policy with the advocacy group Human Rights First.
“There’s always a tension between ‘Do we get rid of the cage or do we make a better cage?’” said Epstein, who now works for the New York Civil Liberties Union. “In the detention reform movement and prison reform movement there’s always that tension. I now see in retrospect even more clearly that the administration officials that we were communicating with were doing their best to figure out how to make the cage better.”
ICE made small but significant changes during the Obama administration. In 2009, it issued a new policy on reporting detainee deaths. In 2010, it created an online detainee locator system so immigrants’ families and legal help could find out where they were. In 2011, the agency released an extensive new set of standards for immigrant detention, including improved medical services, more recreation and increased language assistance. In 2012, it issued a directive on transferring detainees meant to counter reports of abusive transfers that shifted people away from their legal help. In 2013, after reports that immigrants were being held in solitary confinement for weeks at a time, ICE issued a new directive on use of segregated housing. In 2014, as part of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, ICE finalized standards for preventing sexual abuse in detention.
Rolling back any of these improvements could have disastrous consequences, advocates say.
“If ICE is no longer tracking the use of solitary confinement or no longer requiring that people who are in mental health crisis are checked on every 15 minutes, that can kill,” said Carl Takei, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.
It would be difficult for ICE to dismiss the standards set forth in the Prison Rape Elimination Act because they are regulations. But weakening other standards would hurt PREA’s effectiveness, Daley said.
“You can’t have effective sexual abuse prevention programs if you have folks who don’t have access to appropriate materials in the right language; who can’t communicate concerns they have about threats or violence; who are just held in solitary confinement as a matter of course or who otherwise are just being treated in a demeaning way that compromises their dignity,” he said.
ICE hasn’t made any major changes yet, other than eliminating its Office of Detention Policy and Planning. The office’s staff and mission will be absorbed into other parts of the agency, according to ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez.
Officials are “examining a variety of detention models to determine which models would best meet anticipated detention needs” as part of one of Trump’s executive orders on immigration, Rodriguez said. “As new options are explored, ICE’s commitment to maintaining excellent facilities and providing first class medical care to those in our custody remains unchanged.”
The new contracts could be evaluated based on a checklist from the U.S. Marshals Service, The New York Times reported last week. That checklist is “ridiculous in its lack of detail,” Takei said. The contracts wouldn’t specify what policies jails holding immigrants must maintain for medical health, suicide prevention or solitary confinement, other than that they need to have some sort of policy, according to the Times.
Advocates are bracing for the worst.
“We’ve seen important but very incremental change, so to see change that’s taken so long to come about ― and that still had gaps but that was at least a step toward greater accountability and toward better conditions in these facilities ― to see that now be threatened to be reversed is troubling,” said Katharina Obser, senior program officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
They will be watching closely for human rights violations, from detainees being denied due process to poor conditions and even increased deaths in detention.
“These policies are a recipe for a human rights catastrophe in immigrant detention,” Takei said, “and we are prepared to sue as soon as that human rights catastrophe comes to pass.”
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Dustin Hoffman and filmmaker Noah Baumbach met up at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival Monday to discuss the latter’s career and throw in some tidbits about their upcoming film, “The Meyerowitz Stories.” But, inevitably, some flashbacks to the actor’s time on camera snuck in.
During a Q&A session at the end of their conversation, an audience member told Hoffman that he was a big fan of the actor’s iconic “I’m walkin’ here!” scene alongside Jon Voight in 1969’s “Midnight Cowboy.” A quick refresher: Voight and Hoffman are crossing a New York City street when a cab nearly hits the actors. Hoffman delivers his famous line and serves up a few choice knocks on the cab’s hood.
The best part? It was all a result of Hoffman’s quick thinking.
During the Tribeca Talk, Hoffman explained that he and Voight were doing many takes of the scene, trying to time it just right so they wouldn’t have to wait for a light at the crosswalk.
“We finally get it at the — whatever it is — 50th take, and we’re so happy, we can feel it, at this point in the dialogue, Jon and I. We’re at the corner, and it turns green, and we’re able to keep walking, and a fucking cab has hit us,” Hoffman explained, pausing for the crowd’s laughter.
“The truth is, this is the way the brain works: What was in my head was, ‘We’re makin’ a movie here!’ And then just as I’m about to say that, I realize, ‘Oh, you can’t do that,’ the brain changes it to, ‘I’m walkin’ here!’ What was really being said, for me, was, ‘We’re shooting here!’”
And thus movie history — and the enduring indifference of New York taxicabs — was solidified.
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A socialist mayor whose town voted for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the first round of France’s presidential election says he’s considering resigning because he doesn’t want to “dedicate” his life to “assholes.”
Daniel Delomez, who has served as mayor of Annezin, northern France, since 2008, used the derogatory term “connards” to describe his fellow citizens to a journalist from L’Avenir de L’Artois on Sunday.
Delomez later said he regretted using the offensive word, which he insisted is “not part of my vocabulary.” He said he was reacting in shock and anger when authorities announced the outcome of first-round ballots.
The mayor said it was a “catastrophe” and a vote of “hatred and rejection” that more than 38 percent of the population of Annezin voted for Le Pen, who announced Tuesday that she’s stepping down as leader of the far-right, populist National Front party.
The second choice of his town was the far-left candidate Daniel Delomez, who won over 19 percent of the vote.
Delomez’s straight-talk tweeted on the L’Avenir site won plenty of praise from people calling him the “hero of the day,” a genius and “my idol.” One Twitter user declared, “send that man some flowers.” Others tweeted, “Au revoir!”
The mayor said he was seriously considering quitting and would decide what to do after meeting with his associates.
Le Pen, and independent candidate Emmanuel Macron, who won the most votes in the first round, will face each other in the final race on May 7.
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The internet, like high school, never lets you forget.
Austin Cooper was descending stairs with girlfriend Jordyn McManus for a dramatic debut before the prom Saturday when his feet slid out from under him. He tumbled on his butt, falling into the clutches of the viral gods.
That’s because on Sunday, McManus, from Palm Beach, Florida, tweeted the embarrassing moment.
“Austin and I were trying to make a grand entrance for our family and friends for prom,” McManus told Mashable. “Obviously it didn’t go as planned.”
Cooper wasn’t seriously injured. “My back was hurting during the whole night of prom but I stuck with it and manned up,” he said to the website.
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