Hasta La Gadget!

Earlier we reported that thanks to a sighting at the FCC, it seems that a pair of Google branded headphones were uncovered. This led to speculation that we could soon see Google launch their own pair of headphones, although admittedly these aren’t exactly the most stylish of headphones we’ve seen.

However it turns out maybe it’s not worth getting excited over. According to the folks at Android Police, they have learnt from a source that the headphones are actually for employees only. It turns out that Google has been distributing Google-branded headphones to its employees for a while now, and that the model you see above is the current one that Google is using.

However it seems that the current model is getting a bit long in the tooth which is why Google decided to update it. The new ANC Bluetooth version spotted at the FCC is just a new design that they are planning to introduce and to phase out the current model, and since they are employees-only, don’t expect to see them sold outside of Google anytime soon.

We did hear rumors about Google planning some kind of audio-based wearable, but if those rumors are true it definitely isn’t talking about this.

Earlier Leaked Google Headphones Are For Employees Only , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Rockstar Games has announced the availability of GTA Online Tiny Racers, a game in which players race tiny cars around various maps while avoiding a fiery explosion. Rockstar says Tiny Racers is a retro-styled game for GTA Online, putting gamers above the roads and cars with a bird’s-eye view. This is similar to the Dead Ops Arcade game — in … Continue reading

CARACAS, April 26 (Reuters) – Venezuelan security forces fired scores of tear gas volleys and turned water cannons on rock-throwing protesters on a bridge in Caracas on Wednesday as the death toll from this month’s anti-government unrest hit at least 29.

A 20-year-old male demonstrator died in those latest clashes in the capital after being hit by a gas canister, said officials of the city’s eastern Chacao district.

Authorities also announced two new fatalities from clashes earlier this week: a 22-year-old who received various gunshot wounds at a protest in the city of Valencia, and a 28-year-old government supporter shot in the stomach in Tachira state.

The wave of protests since early April against socialist President Nicolas Maduro have sparkedVenezuela’s worst violence since 2014. Demonstrators want elections to end the socialists’ two-decade rule, but the South American nation’s brutal economic crisis is also fueling anger.

“I want everything to end: the hunger, the murders, the corruption, all the ills we are suffering. We have to stay in the street until there is change. We are the majority,” said student Ricardo Ropero, 20, at a march in Caracas.

Red-shirted supporters of Maduro, the 54-year-old former bus driver who succeeded Hugo Chavez in 2013, also rallied on the streets of the capital, punching their fists in the air and denouncing opposition “terrorists.”

Maduro says his foes are seeking a violent coup, with U.S. connivance, like a short-lived 2002 putsch against Chavez.

BATTLE ON BRIDGE

Amid another day of nationwide opposition rallies, the worst trouble in Caracas on Wednesday occurred when National Guard troops and police blocked off a highway where several thousand demonstrators were marching downtown.

On a bridge in east Caracas, masked youths picked up tear gas canisters fired at them to hurl back at security forces or into a nearby trash-strewn river.

Traffic once again ground to a standstill as the zone resounded to the familiar sounds of the near-daily clashes. When water cannons were turned on the marchers, they fell back and skirmishes spread to surrounding streets through the afternoon.

Opposition leaders accuse Maduro of seizing dictatorial powers and unleashing repression on peaceful protesters, but the opposition’s ranks also include groups of youths who hunt for trouble, hurling Molotov cocktails or burning property.

As well as wanting a general election, Maduro’s opponents are demanding the release of jailed activists, humanitarian aid to help offset shortages of food and medicine, and autonomy for the opposition-led legislature.

International pressure on Maduro has grown too, with 19 members of the 34-nation Organization of American States (OAS) bloc voting on Wednesday to hold a special meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the Venezuelan crisis.

Venezuela had threatened to walk from the group if that meeting went ahead. Venezuela’s foreign minister said in televised comments later on Wednesday aht the country will withdraw from the bloc. 

Maduro narrowly won election in 2013 against opposition leader Henrique Capriles, but the economic crisis has battered his public approval ratings since then.

The latest data from pollster Datanalisis, cited by a client, showed Maduro’s popularity edged up a couple of points to 24.1 percent in March, possibly due to the impact of subsidized food distribution bags known as CLAPs.

He has called for local state elections, postponed from 2016, to be held soon, but has shown no sign of supporting an early presidential election. The opposition now has majority support and the ruling Socialists would likely lose any vote.

During this month’s protests, more than 1,500 people have been arrested, with 800 still detained, according to rights group Penal Forum.

(Additional reporting by Diego Ore and Girish Gupta; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Tom Brown and Andrew Hay)

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President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Wednesday that seeks to reduce federal intervention in education. It builds on vows he made during the campaign to dismantle the Common Core State Standards and hand greater control of schools back to states and localities.

But initially, at least, the order doesn’t do much.

The order directs Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to identify examples of federal overreach in her bailiwick, senior Education Department official Rob Goad said on a call with reporters. For the next 300 days, DeVos and a team of department staffers will analyze regulations and guidance to determine whether they legally overstep the department’s authority. 

“For too long the federal government has imposed its will on state and local governments. The result has been education that spends more and achieves far, far, far less. My administration has been working to reverse this federal power grab,” Trump said on Wednesday. 

It’s not clear what policies Education Department officials will actually finger, and a federal law passed in late 2015 already returns a degree of education power to the states. But some of Trump’s supporters are hoping the administration acts quickly to roll back the federal government’s support of Common Core, as well as Obama-era guidance related to students’ civil rights. 

The Common Core standards are a set of education benchmarks that the Obama administration incentivized states to adopt. They were designed to make sure that kids received similar schooling across state lines. Conservatives, however, have rallied against them as an example of federal interference in local schools. During his campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would work to erase them.

Jane Robbins, a senior fellow with the conservative American Principles Project, has long advocated an end to Common Core. Although she has recently been critical of Trump’s seeming abandonment of the issue, she is optimistic about the new executive order. 

“I think it’s a very good first step. It indicates to me that all of the encouragement the grassroots have given to President Trump not to abandon his campaign promises on education have had some effect,” Robbins said. 

Because Common Core was adopted at the state level, the federal government can’t simply dismantle the system. Many states have been teaching kids under these learning benchmarks for several years now. 

As for students’ civil rights, some conservative- and libertarian-leaning lawyers have been pushing DeVos to rescind Obama-era guidance on the matter. The Trump administration has already rescinded guidance that provided protections for transgender students.

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, has been pressuring the Trump administration to re-examine guidance related to student punishments. In 2014, the Education Department warned that it would initiate investigations into school districts with severe racial disparities in student discipline. Those disparities need not be the result of direct discrimination to warrant examination, the guidance states. 

Studies have shown that black students are suspended more frequently than white students, even for the same offenses. 

In late March, Clegg wrote to the administration calling for withdrawal of that directive. 

“It is bad policy because it means that perfectly legitimate school discipline polices can be struck down or abandoned because they have politically incorrect statistical results,” said Clegg on Tuesday, before the new executive order had been announced. 

Clegg said he has “reason to believe” the administration is taking his concerns seriously.

“I think in the long term, a reason we have these disparities is because of the fact that unfortunately there are a higher percentage of discipline problems in some racial and ethnic groups than other racial and ethnic groups. It’s not anything genetic; it’s cultural,” said Clegg, pointing to the disparities in out-of-wedlock birth rates between black and white families. 

However, Catherine Brown of the progressive Center for American Progress thinks the executive order may not result in any significant changes. 

“I think it’s kind of silly. I feel like it’s purely symbolic,” said Brown. “I think he’s just trying to get as many executive orders before the first 100 days so he could claim it as credit.”

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Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is discovering that his insults don’t translate well in anybody’s language.

Constituents from King’s district came to Washington for a scheduled 2 p.m. Tuesday meeting with his legislative director. Twenty-five minutes later, the staffer hadn’t arrived, so Vanessa Marcano-Kelly, a board member of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, left the meeting site, but not before sending out this tweet in frustration.

King did get in touch with Marcano-Kelly, who works as an interpreter and translator, but she was taken aback by his response ― even for a guy for whom racist and xenophobic comments seem as natural as breathing.

King was apparently referring to Marcano-Kelly’s Twitter feed, which has many tweets in Spanish from the time the 32-year-old interpreter and translator live-tweeted a conference.

“It was shocking to see that,” Marcano-Kelly, an immigrant from Venezuela, told the New York Daily News. “I had that gut feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt targeted, attacked and offended that you have this person who’s supposed to be representing Iowa, who has power, belittling you like that.”

Yet, she wasn’t really surprised.

“It was precisely the kind of thing that he usually does and that we wanted to talk to him about,” Marcano-Kelly said in an interview with The Des Moines Register on Wednesday.

Marcano-Kelly and the members of her group high-tailed it back to King’s office to confront the congressman’s staff, an encounter posted on Facebook Live.

The video shows one of King’s staffers taking blame for the missed meeting and staffers explaining that the controversial congressman writes his own tweets.

A short time later, King sent another tweet to Marcano-Kelly.

However, he didn’t remove the insulting earlier tweet from his page.

King has not made a secret of his distaste for immigrants.

Last week, he tweeted this photo after the first undocumented immigrant with active Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protections was deported under President Donald Trump.

Last month, he told a radio interviewer he’d like America to be “so homogenous that we look a lot the same.”

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