Star Wars: Battlefront 2 Official Trailer Releases On Saturday


Star Wars: Battlefront fans were treated to a leaked trailer of the sequel yesterday so the cat is now out of the bag as far as a glimpse of the game in the trailer goes. EA has not yet officially unveiled the new title but the leaked trailer that surfaced online yesterday gave us an idea of what to expect from the new game. Battlefront fans will be happy to find out that the official Star Wars: Battlefront 2 trailer is going to be released on Saturday.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 is going to be officially unveiled during the Star Wars Celebration this weekend. EA has already opened up the game’s official website for everyone but there’s nothing on the website right now. It only contains a link to sign up for a newsletter.

The Star Wars: Battlefront 2 official trailer is going to be released on April 15th, Saturday, at 11:30am LA time. The official trailer may show off gameplay footage as well which is something that most fans will be interested in seeing.

It’s unclear right now whether the trailer EA is going to show off on the weekend is the same one that has already been leaked online or if that’s going to be an extended cut of the same trailer.

EA is yet to confirm a release date for Star Wars: Battlefront 2, the game is expected to arrive around the fall this year.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 Official Trailer Releases On Saturday , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

‘Prepare To Dine,’ Says Bandai Namco As it Teases A New Game

Bandai Namco, the publisher of some popular games like Dark Souls, is teasing a new game with the tagline “Prepare To Dine.” It hasn’t revealed much about this project right now so it remains a mystery. However, given the fact that it has now started teasing the new project, it’s only a matter of time before Bandai Namco officially confirms everything.

Bandai Namco today released a trailer which shows off hints about the upcoming game. The trailer itself doesn’t reveal much about the new game so we’re still clueless as to what it is and what it’s going to be called.

The trailer ends with the “PrepareToDine” tagline which might have been inspired from the “Prepare to die” tagline of the famous Dark Souls series. Bandai Namco has confirmed in a press release sent out today that it’s going to officially announce whatever it’s teasing with this trailer on April 20th so mark your calendars if this excites your imagination.

There’s speculation right now that this new game might be a spinoff of the Dark Souls series but it’s important to mention here that nothing has been confirmed as yet so nothing is set in stone right now.

Could it be a new Dark Souls game? It’s too early to say. The most recent game in the series is Dark Souls III which was released in 2016 and the final DLC for the game titled The Ringed City was released only last month. So it will certainly be interesting to wait and see what Bandai Namco has in store for all of us.

‘Prepare To Dine,’ Says Bandai Namco As it Teases A New Game , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Amazon Echo 7-Mic dev kit coming for 3rd-party manufacturers

Developers of apps and awesome next-level software will find that Amazon’s Echo technology (the microphone bit) is now available for use. This technology was previously a closely-held secret made by Amazon to make the most of their Amazon Echo hardware and Alexa. With this release, developers and OEMs will be able to get their hands on the “Amazon Alexa 7-Mic … Continue reading

Instagram Stories hits 200m users, celebrates with new camera features

Despite whatever controversy it may have caused when it first launched, Instagram Stories has certainly taken off in the time since then. Today Instagram revealed that Stories has attracted 200 million users, joining the recently announced milestone of 375 million users for Instagram Direct. As a result of these big numbers, both Stories and Direct are getting some new features … Continue reading

Muslim American Judge Remembered As A Defender Of Queer Rights

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Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam broke boundaries by becoming the first African-American woman on New York State’s highest court, and the first Muslim woman to serve as a judge in the United States.

Tributes to the “trailblazing” woman poured in on Thursday, after local media reported that she had been found dead the night before in the Hudson River. Investigators are treating her death as a suicide.

As the country mourned her sudden death, Abdus-Salaam was also remembered for the work she’d done to defend queer rights. 

Lambda Legal, a national LGBTQ advocacy organization, called Abdus-Salaam’s death “tragic loss for all of New York.” Susan Sommer, the group’s associate legal director, pointed to the judge’s decision on a case last summer that expanded New York’s definition of “parent.” It cleared the way for queer parents with no biological ties to their children to “to seek parenting rights to their children on equal footing with biological parents.”

The decision centered around two combined cases. One of them involved a couple from Chautauqua County, identified in court as Brooke S.B. and Elizabeth A. C.C. The couple agreed to have a child through artificial insemination in 2008. Although Elizabeth was the one who became pregnant with their son. Brooke did not formally adopt her son, but the child took on her last name.

The relationship ended in 2010, one year before same-sex marriage was legalized in New York. Three years later, Elizabeth tried to prevent Brooke from contacting the child. Brooke sued for custody and visitation privileges. A lower court denied that request because a previous 1991 decision in New York didn’t define “non-adoptive, non-biological” caretakers as parents, according to the New York Times reported.

In a similar case that was considered along with Brooke’s, Matter of Estrellita A. v. Jennifer L.D., the biological mom attempted to force her ex-partner to pay child support and at the same time, block the ex-partner’s visitation rights. 

The New York State Court of Appeals decided in August that non-biological, non-adoptive parents could ask for custody and visitation rights, given that they showed that the couple had agreed to conceive and raise the child together.

Giving voice to the majority decision in the case, Abdus-Salaam wrote last year that the definition of “parent” established by the previous decision “has become unworkable when applied to increasingly varied familial relationships.”

Sommer, who was Brooke’s lawyer, told The Huffington Post that while Lambda Legal has not seen many cases over Abdus-Salaam’s career addressing LGBTQ issues, the judge “led the way” when it came to reversing a “devastating precedent tearing children from their parents. “

Sommer said that Abdus-Salaam’s 2016 opinion “finally recognized the full legitimacy of LGBT families and the trauma inflicted on their children, who too long had been allowed to fall through the cracks in New York law.”

“She changed the lives of many children, who now are reunited with their loving parents.  This was huge. She has earned the gratitude of Lambda Legal and of many New Yorkers,” Sommer told HuffPost in an email.

The National Center for Lesbian Rights, which filed an amicus brief for that case, said that Abdus-Salaam had “authored one of the most important LGBTQ rights decisions in New York’s history.”

“We need more judges who care about the real-world impact of their decisions and who strive to ensure that the law treats all people fairly and equally,” NCLR Legal Director Shannon Price Minter told The Huffington Post. “Judge Abdus-Salaam was a true champion for all people, and her leadership on the New York Court of Appeals will be sorely missed.” 

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Looks Like Kendall Jenner Is Going To Ignore That Whole Pepsi Debacle

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It’s been nine days since Pepsi unleashed that incredibly tone-deaf ad starring Kendall Jenner.

The company went on to issue an apology, saying they “missed the mark” and regret putting the reality TV star at the center of their dumpster fire of a commercial. 

Jenner, however, has remained silent on all social media platforms, while her sisters tweet, Snapchat and Instagram away. That is until now. 

On Thursday, Jenner tweeted for the first time since the debacle. No, it wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t an appeal to those who might be offended by the ad. It wasn’t a genuine engagement in the issues, like police brutality, at play here. 

It was a photo of herself on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar’s 150th anniversary issue.

”Stay tuned,” she wrote alongside the photo announcing herself as the cover star. 

If ignoring her responsibility in this mess is how Kendall is going to play this, then we’d prefer to tune out. 

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93 Female Marines Write Letter Urging Service To Address Rampant Misogyny

“We have allowed to thrive and in some instances, even encouraged a culture where women are devalued, demeaned, and their contributions diminished.” 

That’s one of the most powerful lines from an open letter co-signed by nearly 100 current and veteran female Marines urging the service to address its rampant culture of misogyny and sexism. The letter is signed by Marines of all ranking including colonel, lieutenant colonel and major. 

“In a culture that prizes masculinity, it is easy to mistake barbarism for strength.” the letter reads. “Yet we respectfully disagree with the notion that to fight and win our country’s battles, we must preserve an institution where men are permitted or even expected to behave like animals, and women trespass at their peril.”

In a culture that prizes masculinity, it is easy to mistake barbarism for strength.

The letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post on Tuesday, was written in response to the nude photo scandal that rocked the Marine Corps March. Hundreds of veteran and active-duty Marines were sharing nude photos of female Marines without their consent in a private Facebook group called “Marines United.” It was later revealed that nude photos of female Marines had been shared on a site called AnonIB dating back to May 2016. 

The open letter is broken up into three parts, one directed to the Marine Corps service, one to fellow Marines and the last to their “sisters-in-arms.”

To their fellow Marines who are men, the co-signers explained the letter was about the sexism and violence female Marines face in the wake of its misogynistic culture: 

This is about the time you said, “We don’t need any more females in this section,” as if there were a quote. It’s about the time you made the joke about the female Marine and her face, her hair, her voice, her private life, or her sexual orientation. This is about pretending you don’t hear women when they speak. And about looking only at men when you speak. Or treating sexual assault training as a burden. but above all, this is about leadership.

And to their sisters-in-arms, the Marines wrote that, through solidarity they can protect one another. 

“We will not allow fear of being professionally ostracized or retaliated against,” the letter reads, “keep us from acting or speaking truth to power, or reaching out to mentor you and protect you.”

Alongside the open letter, over 400 female Marines have created their own Facebook group to lobby for a change in the service’s sexist culture, according to the Post. The group, titled Actionable Change, was created by Lt. Col. Ann Bernard. 

“We love the Marine Corps, and this is about making it better,” Bernard told the Post. “We fought the fight and thought we got the job done, and now we’re realizing we’re not quite there yet. We’re not going to allow another generation of junior Marines that has this mentality that does not serve the Marine Corps at all.”

Head over to The Washington Post to read the full letter from Actionable Change. 

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The Accidental Nominee: Ousted From EPA, A Trump Loyalist Lands Atop The Draft Board

Late Monday night, when many Americans were in bed, President Donald Trump quietly announced his intention to nominate former Washington state senator Don Benton (R) to be director of the Selective Service System, which operates the nation’s military draft.

This was also when the problems first came to light.

They started with a White House statement that lauded Benton’s environmental record, and the three years he spent leading the Environmental Services Department in Clark County, Washington.

From the White House:

During his tenure [Benton], reduced the cost of removing hazardous waste from the waste stream while doubling citizen participation and tripling the tonnage of hazardous waste removed. Mr. Benton was also responsible for Clark County certifying more Green Schools than in any other county in Washington State.

Wait, what? Had somebody copied and pasted wrong? 

Of the 204 words in the announcement, there wasn’t one mention of the military, the draft, or anything related to what the Selective Service System actually does. Nor were there any references to qualifications or experiences that prepare Benton to manage the millions of records in the draft system, or the agency’s roughly $25 million budget.

It was as if the White House had written the statement for a completely different job than the one Benton was being nominated for. Turns out, that’s exactly what happened.

The Accidental Nominee

Benton had originally been expected to fill a top position at the Environmental Protection Agency, where he was part of the Trump “landing team” during the presidential transition.

This was before Benton began to infuriate his boss, the newly confirmed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

Benton’s habit of interrupting policy discussions to make bizarre comments drove a wedge between him and Pruitt, according to The Washington Post. Senior staff responded by gradually pushing Benton out of policy meetings. 

All of which posed a dilemma for the president: On one hand, Benton was an early Trump supporter and the chair of Trump’s Washington state campaign. Given how few Republican legislators were early Trump supporters, there was a real desire to reward each one. On the other hand, the agency where Benton was actually qualified to work, the EPA, did not want to hire him.

So Trump’s solution was to give Benton oversight of the military draft.

If he is confirmed by the Senate, Benton, who is a sales consultant by trade, will become the first director in the history of the Selective Service who has not served in any branch of the military.

“This is a completely inappropriate appointment for that position,” said Richard Painter, who the chief ethics lawyer for former Republican President George W. Bush.  

“We need to convince young men to register for the draft, and to step up if they’re needed to fight. And who is it who’s asking them to do that? Someone who’s never served, and for whom this is a throwaway political patronage job.”

Benton did not respond to detailed questions from The Huffington Post about his background and qualifications, nor did a White House spokeswoman.

As the Trump administration struggles to fill more than 450 senior government positions, its combination of inexperience and political patronage risks creating a government where patently under-qualified people are given oversight of critical federal functions. Benton’s case is a prime example.

The White House insists the chief reason Benton is qualified to run the Selective Service is his experience in business. “Benton started his first company when he was 17 years old, and has built and sold several companies since,” according to his White House biography.

But HuffPost was unable to find any evidence that Benton started a company at 17, or that he has ever sold any companies. That doesn’t mean he didn’t, but if he did, he did it awfully quietly.

Moreover, a wide-ranging HuffPost review of public records, past interviews, marketing materials, biographies and corporate disclosures reveals that Benton’s career has been marked by lawsuits, ethics problems, public feuds and allegations of cronyism.

As a member of the Washington state senate for two decades, Benton was known for getting into vicious arguments with his fellow senators, some of which resulted in formal complaints.

A brief stint as state GOP chairman in 2000 lasted only eight months, during which Benton, who was already under pressure for allegedly mishandling party funds, fired the committee staff and changed the locks at party headquarters. Benton’s fellow Republicans ultimately voted to replace him.

In 2012, he threatened to file a $1 million libel suit against a challenger who pointed out that Benton had missed nearly 300 Senate votes in his four-year term.

In 2014, he accused a fellow senator of behaving like “a trashy, trampy-mouthed little girl.” The senator also said that Benton followed her around the Senate floor yelling, “You are weird and … weird! Weird, weird, weird. Just so weird!”   

At the time of the incident, Benton had a job as director of the Clark County Environmental Services Department. But this position, too, was mired in controversy.

Political allies had given Benton the job, despite his having no background in environmental policy. After three tumultuous years, the department was dissolved in May of 2016. Six months later, Benton sued Clark County for $2 million.

Through it all, his marketing firm, The Benton Group, continued to peddle motivational seminars to sales teams at local TV stations.

Luckily for Benton, by the time his job for the county environmental services department was eliminated last year, he’d already found a new patron: Trump.

The president had first met Benton that spring, during Trump’s only campaign stop in deep blue Washington state. The two men reportedly bonded over a meal of McDonald’s. “I had Filet-O-Fish and he had a Big Mac,” Benton later said.

Soon after, Trump hired Benton to be his campaign director in Washington state, a doomed mission (Trump lost by 15 points).

Over the next few months, Benton charged the Trump campaign more than $135,000 in fees and reimbursements, according to a review of Federal Election Commission records. This included rent paid for by the Trump campaign, along with money paid to Benton’s son, his wife, Mary, and his sales training company, The Benton Group.

Benton’s company also goes by the name National Advertising Consultants as well as National Consulting Services Inc. Over the years, Benton has frequently used these entities as brokers for his own campaign ads in Washington state. In these cases, Benton pays himself the standard 15 percent commission. 

Here Is Where It Stops Being Funny

The last time the draft was used was toward the end of the Vietnam War in 1973, and today, the U.S. armed forces are staffed entirely with volunteers. But in an interview with HuffPost, Painter warned against taking the nation’s current all-volunteer army for granted.

“If we’re going to abolish the draft, let’s abolish it,” he said. “But if we’re not, we need to assume that it could still be used, and that men’s lives are going to be at stake here.”

This is why, for Painter, Benton’s record is particularly worrisome. “We cannot have someone at the top who is not of the utmost integrity,” he said. “Because you effectively get to decide who gets drafted and who doesn’t.”

Painter also dismissed the notion that, given the agency’s relatively small size, the job of directing it was less important than other jobs, and thus easier for Trump to give to one of his cronies.

“There are plenty of jobs in the Pentagon that would only be activated in the event of a nuclear attack, but those jobs would never be considered less important than others,” he said.

In addition to questions about Benton’s ethics and his temperament, experts noted that there are also more basic concerns about his ability to run the agency, which employs 400 full and part-time workers with a budget of roughly $25 million.

“If you have a job that’s relevant to the military, like this one, it’s important to ask, ‘what kind of experience does the nominee have to do this kind of work?” said Alex Howard, deputy director of the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation. “And what kind of experience does this nominee have managing a system with tens of millions of individual records?”

HuffPost put this question to both Benton and a White House spokeswoman, but neither responded to it.

For Howard, what’s troubling about this nomination isn’t simply Benton. It’s the entire administration’s attitude towards ethics, hiring, and experience.

“The lack of certain qualifications, which would have been prohibitive to job seekers in previous administrations, are not prohibitive in this one,” he said.  

As for the White House’s bizarre announcement about Benton’s experience cleaning up hazardous waste, Howard chalked it up to mismanagement in the White House press office. Still, he said, “these are taxpayer funded positions, so it’s not unreasonable to expect them to be up to the standards of public disclosure. This is nuts and bolts stuff.”

Painter was less forgiving. “If this administration doesn’t understand the difference between disposing of hazardous waste and determining the fate of young men’s lives, then they’ve got bigger problems to deal with that this one nominee,” he said.

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GOP Candidate Loses Party's Support After Telling Woman 'You Should F**k Me'

A Republican running for a seat in the New Jersey General Assembly has lost GOP support after a video surfaced of him hitting on a woman, according to Politico.

Brian McDowell, a former contestant on NBC’s “The Apprentice” who just filed a petition to run for office last month, was caught on tape asking a woman to sleep with him, slurring his words as he spoke.

“Let me tell you right now. You should fuck me. It would really be good,” McDowell says in the video. “Listen, you never know.”

The footage prompted Cape May County Republicans to pull their support of his campaign, Politico reported. McDowell told the outlet he won’t end his campaign because of the video.

“There are human errors and even Jesus dropped the cross three times,” McDowell said. “I’m not running to be the pope. I’m running to make New Jersey more affordable.”

There are human errors, and even Jesus dropped the cross three times. I’m not running to be the pope.
GOP candidate Brian McDowell

President Donald Trump has shown that you can make questionable comments and still get elected to office. Many thought Trump’s campaign suffered a setback in October 2016, when a tape leaked of him claiming he could grab women “by the pussy.” Trump issued an apology, and many Republicans denounced his remarks.

But Trump went on to win the presidential election, thanks in part to the support of 53 percent of white women voters.

While volunteering for Trump’s campaign, McDowell told a local NBC affiliate he thought of Trump’s reality show, which he competed on in 2005, “as a fraternity.”

“A lot of my friends say, you know, ‘How could you actually support Donald Trump after being fired on the Apprentice?’” McDowell said. “I’m all about being involved in a campaign where I feel it matters. And I think that this campaign with Donald Trump matters. I look at Donald Trump and I compare him to Dwight Eisenhower. I compare him to Roosevelt. I compare him to people who built this country.”

Read more on McDowell at Politico.

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'Craft-Loving Weirdos' Pay Tribute To Pop Culture With Peeps Sculptures

When word spread that The Washington Post’s annual Peeps diorama contest would be canceled after 10 years, the nation needed a hero. Who, in these trying times, would stand up for elaborately constructed scenes of garish colors and marshmallow confection?

Washington City Paper would, it turns out.

“The Grim Peeper tried to slay the Peeps diorama contest beloved by newspaper readers across the country,” the paper said in a post outlining the rules of its own diorama contest, published in March. “At City Paper, we couldn’t fathom a spring without Peeps dioramas. Many of our readers are craft-loving weirdos. We are unabashed promoters of puns, a fixture of past Peeps dioramas.”

Only residents of nearby D.C., Maryland and Virginia could win — part of the final round involved appearing with your masterpiece (master-Peeps?) in person — but anyone was welcome to submit.

The paper shared the winner of its contest, an elaborate staging of “The Peeple v. O.J. Simpson,” on Twitter.

There were several artistic submissions, including one miming Annie Leibovitz’s iconic photo of Keith Haring and several interpretations of Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors,” on display at the Hirschorn Museum in D.C. until May 14. 

The paper shared the full list of winners on its site. The takeaway here? That craft-loving weirdos will always find a way.

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