Hasta La Gadget!

With the launch of the Huawei Watch 2 at MWC 2017 a couple of months ago, it was revealed that the smartwatch came with NFC technology on it which in turn allowed users to take advantage of features like Android Pay. However it seems that if you’re still holding onto the first-gen Huawei Watch, Android Pay could be coming your way too.

According to the folks at Ausdroid, it seems that Huawei has confirmed to the publication that the device will be getting its Android Wear 2.0 update soon which not only will bring about new features we expect from the update, but it will also apparently enable the dormant NFC chip inside the watch that will enable Android Pay as well.

Huawei has told Ausdroid that Android Pay for the original Huawei Watch is currently undergoing testing by the Android team at Google. However Android Pay for the watch might not be launched together with the Android Wear 2.0 update, but it could arrive at a later date, with a Q3 2017 timeframe given as a possible release.

So until then we guess Huawei Watch owners will have to remain patient, but the good news is that maybe you won’t need to upgrade to a newer smartwatch just yet.

Android Pay For First-Gen Huawei Watch Currently Under Testing , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

WASHINGTON ― Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is planning a national tour to give a boost to progressive Democratic candidates and energize activists in areas of the country that the party has long neglected, sources familiar with the planning told The Huffington Post. He will be joined on the road by prominent Democratic Party officials. 

Details of the tour are still being worked out, but Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, would have no shortage of potential whistle stops. 

Special elections across the country that were initially presumed to be easy Republican wins are turning into fierce contests. In suburban Atlanta, Georgia, Democrat Jon Ossoff is competitive in a race to replace Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, with Republicans pouring millions of dollars into a race they thought was in the bag.

In Montana, Democrat Rob Quist, a populist bluegrass legend, is up against a tech mogul from New Jersey in what could wind up being a close race, even though national Democrats so far have been staying clear of it. The lack of involvement in the race suggests Washington Democrats don’t believe the Montana race is winnable, but a survey conducted in March by Global Strategy Group, obtained by The Huffington Post, finds that independents widely favor Quist. It also found that when voters learn positive information about both Quist and his opponent, the race becomes a tie. (Before that, Quist trails by roughly 10.)

Even in Wichita, Kansas, home of Koch Industries, the race to replace CIA Director Mike Pompeo is shaping up to be a real contest, with Republicans dropping a hefty amount of cash in a last-minute, panicked move to shore up the seat.

Democrats in South Carolina are also making a play for the vacated seat of Mick Mulvaney, though it hasn’t received national attention and is the longest shot of the bunch.

Democrats are likely to be able to widely expand the field of winnable seats in November 2018, if recent local special elections are an indication of enthusiasm among Democrats and a lack of it among Republicans. For Sanders, political organizing means more than coming out once every two or four years to vote. He has long talked about building enduring organizing networks that can be mobilized not just on behalf of party politics, but also for specific local, national or global issues.

Sanders, a democratic socialist, nearly won the Democratic primary in 2016. His favored candidate to run the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), finished second, and is deputy chair. 

Take a survey: should national Democrats jump into the Montana special election, or sit it out and conserve resources?

— 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.

With the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8, many comparisons are being drawn up to one of Samsung’s main competitors which is LG and the LG G6, which is the company’s flagship of 2017 for now. Now thanks to a video uploaded onto YouTube by XEETECHCARE, it puts both phones to the test in a speed comparison.

Now right off the bat it should be pointed out that both phones pack different specs. The LG G6 features the use of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 which was released last year, while the Galaxy S8 will use the Exynos 8895 (or the Snapdragon 835 depending on which market you are in).

In terms of speed, it appears that the Galaxy S8 is clearly the faster phone of the two. However it isn’t necessarily so much faster that you would or should disregard the LG G6 entirely. This is mainly because you wouldn’t walk around with two phones hand in hand, and like we said the difference in speed appears to be a couple of seconds so if you were to use the phones by themselves, it might not even be that perceivable.

Both phones do have their fair share of pros and cons, not to mention there is also a difference in pricing, so it really boils down to what you want and how much you are willing to pay for it. In the meantime if you have several minutes to spare, you can check out the video above to see the speed test in action.

Samsung Galaxy S8 VS LG G6 In Speed Test , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Yuan Zeng, City University of Hong Kong

April Fools’ Day is the best occasion for fake news. Even with the whole world haunted by the flood of “alternative facts,” the media still maintains its tradition of teasing readers with harmless prank stories, which are usually too unreal to be taken seriously.

Some of the best ones this year include Trump buying the iconic Liberty Hall of Dublin and the UK, following Brexit, withdrawing from Eurovision.

But one prank by a Pakistani newspaper blurred the boundary between the light tone intended for an April Fools’ Day prank and the more serious one for discussion of geopolitics in Asia. On April 1, Pakistan’s Express Tribune published a prank piece on naming the new capital airport after Xi Jinping, China’s president “as a token of appreciation for the multi-billion dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.”

They fell for it

The article concludes with an animated GIF picture of Xi and First Lady Peng Liyuan waving to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over a banner saying April Fools’ Day, apparently a spoofed version of a video taken during Xi’s state visit to Pakistan in 2015.

But many Pakistanis, including an opposition party leader, nevertheless fell for the joke, harshly criticising this ridiculous decision and “expressing serious reservations”. The Pakistani opposition leader even issued a formal statement in a strong condemnatory tone.

Meanwhile, Indians had a good laugh, with media cheerily reporting how the prank even fooled a high-level official of Pakistan, and others joining in the hilarity on Twitter.

screenshot from Twitter

screenshot from Twitter

screenshot from Twitter

The light-hearted criticism and laughs about this prank, coming from both Pakistanis and Indians, perfectly reflect the complicated relationship between China, Pakistan and India.

Pakistan, China’s best friend?

As China’s only “all-weather friend” and “China’s Israel”, Pakistan remains China’s biggest arm importer. It also plays a key role in China’s counter-terrorism efforts and is a strategic route for China’s ambitions in the Middle East and Africa. China, meanwhile, is Pakistan’s biggest trade partner.

The China-Pakistan friendship has reached a new height since 2015, when Xi announced the US$46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project (CPEC). The project is part of the massive One Belt, One Road Initiative, which aims to increase China’s prominence in Eurasian countries and is considered a geopolitical game changer for Asia and beyond.

The close embrace between China and Pakistan is an eternal topic in Indian media coverage. As the traditional rival shared by the two buddies, India has long been vigilantly watching for threats emerging from the friendship between China and Pakistan.

Most recently, opposition to the CPEC project is a common narrative of Indian media, with the Hindustan Times on March 23 citing foreign secretary S Jaishankar as saying that India has “sovereignty” issues with the corridor.

A worried neighbor

India has good reasons to be worried. As economics scholar Panos Mourdoukoutas argues in Forbes magazine, in this triangle relationship, “Pakistan’s gain is India’s loss”. In the case of CPEC, the construction will go through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the key source of conflicts between Pakistan and India.

Both as major powers in the region and developing countries with the fastest economic growth in the world, China and India share their own unsettled territorial disputes along the Himalayan-Tibetan area. The two countries are also competing in economy, military, diplomacy and many other strategic fields.

The tension between the two was most recently seen in China’s repeated opposition to India’s bid to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and India’s alignment with the US and Japan against China on its controversial moves in the South China Sea. If there is an all-weather friendship between China and Pakistan, with India, China has what could be called an all-weather rivalry.

In this ongoing tug-of-war, notes Andrew Small, author of The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics, Pakistan is China’ pawn against India. So India has been willing to seek more leverage by serving as the pawn of the US against China.

But as Trump’s America puts everything into uncertainty, the changing balance of power between the three Asian countries worries more than just India. Behind the prank stories of Trump buying Dublin’s iconic building, the UK withdrawing Eurovision and Pakistan’s airport being named after Xi is the same fear: a changing world order.

Any of these prank stories may be a harmless teaser that the world can simply laugh off, but the context within which these pranks are born – and thus their intent – is serious indeed.

For now, both Pakistan and India can be assured that the Islamabad airport will not be renamed after Xi or any other Chinese leader. But a more assertive China that upends not just the regional order but also global politics is not out of question, and it is unclear how prepared the world is for this geopolitical game changer.

Even an April Fools’ Day prank can have a chilling back story.

Yuan Zeng, PhD candidate in journalism studies, City University of Hong Kong

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

— 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.

One of the few issues uniting the loose coalition of meme obsessed right-wingers, ethno-national, white supremacists, and other fringe political camps we’ve come to know as the alt-right has been the sentiment that our protracted wars in the Middle East were a grave misstep. Many Trump supporters I’ve spoken to went…

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