With magnetic charging, superior airflow, and unique materials like walnut and black wood, you'll quickly discover that Vessel was built to be superior. For those who never settle, welcome to Vessel.
We're sure you love your dog. We're sure your dog, whatever sort of dog it may be, is a wonderful dog. Nevertheless, we're compelled to say that this dog is the best dog in the world.
That it's now mundane to have and meet internet friends suggests something deeper has changed in American life, something related to how we befriend people now in the first place.
Unicult is not your typical cult. Founded in 2012 by self proclaimed pop-spiritual leader Unicole the group studies everything from crystals to aliens and seeks to empower each other to seek joy on earth.
In 'The Castle on Sunset' — currently being adapted into an HBO series by John Krasinski and Aaron Sorkin — Hollywood historian Shawn Levy retraces the comedian's final days inside the legendary hotel where pal Robert De Niro stopped by to snort cocaine just hours before his death and the hotel's famed discretion was put to the ultimate test.
Plastic straws create unnecessary waste and can harm animals — skip them for this 8-pack of re-usable Stainless Steel Straws, which are corrosion-resistant and perfect for any beverage. They also come with two brushes for easy cleaning.
It feels intuitive to compare caffeine and nicotine, two drugs made by plants that can produce a bit of a buzz. But intuition isn't the only thing at the root of that association: a concerted public relations effort by Big Tobacco has helped make it stick.
It's an internet fight and only the funniest meme will emerge victorious. This week's challengers? Things That Don't Make You Ugly, Vitriol Joel, the "Go Hard" TikTok, and more.
Thousands have made the Vessel switch, opting for superior designs, materials, and customer service. The second you hold our vape pen battery in your hand, you'll understand why our customers become Vessel fanatics.
On top it didn't look much different than its predecessors — it still had a few buttons and a scroll wheel — but underneath it introduced a technology to the masses that brought an end to the prehistoric days of cleaning dirt and grime out of computer mice.
The legacy of contamination is hiding in plain sight here, from the shuttered operations rusting on polluted land to the nearly 200 lawsuits by former railroad workers filling boxes at the clerk of court's office. It's also hidden from view, permeating the dirt silently.
"The local government hires sheep to clear overgrowth in our city. When they were in the greenbelt behind our house one evening doing their job, I opened our back gate to give my four and five-year-old daughters a closer look of the animals," he explained.
It's easy to forget that baseball as we experience it is also a 19th-century game once played by and for people with a sense of decorum very different from ours.
While hardly as mainstream as walking the red carpet with kink-adjacent accouterments, dressing up doggy style has become more visible in San Francisco and beyond.
After three seasons, Netflix canceled the series on Friday. Starring Drew Barrymore as a zombie mom and Timothy Olyphant as her husband trying to cover her flesh-eating behavior from friends and family, Santa Clarita Diet mixed just enough weird and comedy to build a cult following.
So naturally, as soon as word got out Netflix killed the show, fans broke out their pitchforks and took to Twitter to vent.
With Avengers the talk of Hollywood, one Twitter user hilariously joked how the person who canceled the show should get "Thanos snapped." LOL. Read more...
Did you have a busy weekday and didn't have any time to browse for hot deals? Lucky for you, it's Saturday today, meaning it's time to stop working and start relaxing. With loads of great offers around, Best BuyApple sale event caught our eye the most. Saving you up to $500 off MacBook Pro or up to $200 off the latest iPhone.
Has your current luggage seen better days? If so, there's no need to fear Amazon is here. As they're offering up to 43% off select Delsey Paris luggage. Founded in 1946, Delsey Paris is famous for its extreme reliability and innovative design. Read more...
This isOne Good Thing, a weekly column where we tell you about one of the few nice things that happened this week.
The first weekend of Avengers: Endgame is finally upon us, and people are desperate to avoid any spoilers for the highly-anticipated film.
In a desperate attempt to keep the details of the plot at bay, fans have been blocking certain keywords on social media, avoiding some news sites, and taking other desperate measures. There's even a notable #Don'tSpoilTheEndgame hashtag on Twitter.
In this tweet from @kamiilious, her teacher made sure their students knew that there would be absolutely no discussion of the film in his classroom by posting a long and hilarious note of warning. Read more...
Warning: MAJOR spoilers for Avengers: Endgame below.
Time travel can save the fate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and make your brain throb worse than a hammer to the head all at thesame time!
Leading up to the epic release of Avengers: Endgame, plenty of folks (yours truly included) were worried that the inevitable addition of time travel to the MCU would undermine the series' fundamental structure and leave our favorite heroes in a pile of mind-numbing paradoxes, fallacies, and plot holes.
Lucky for us, Endgame managed to slay the time-travel behemoth. Or, at least, hide it — and its many confusing inconsistencies — out of sight. Read more...
With its 22nd film, the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally reached a certain historic first: Avengers: Endgame is the first MCU film to feature a canonically gay character.
You'll find him early in the movie, attending a support group with Captain America and casually discussing a recent date with another man.
Endgame director Joe Russo, who also portrayed the character onscreen, told Deadline the moment was "important" to him:
On the one hand, that this character exists at all is an encouraging sign of progress in a franchise that has, more often than not, stayed stubbornly behind the times, taking 18 films to get to its first non-white lead and 21 to get to its first female-led standalone. Read more...
In an industry where the spotlight is always focused on shiny new things, it's basically unprecedented that a two-decade-old programming language like JavaScript is still thriving. If JavaScript were a person, it could now buy alcohol, rent a car, and blow money on slot machines in Vegas.
The backbone of over 95% of ALL websites, it's considered to be the world's most popular programming language. But even with its ubiquity, JavaScript also remains the most misunderstood language, too. Novice coders usually mistake it for Java, or relegate it to a mere scripting language rather than a full-blown programming language. Little do they know that JavaScript is also used for databases, servers, animations, visual effects, and a whole lot more. Read more...
And while the company is still staying true to its commitment to "push the wireless experience forward," we have no choice but to settle for the flimsy, standard-issue chargers that come with Apple devices — at least for the time being.
You don't have to drop money on a bunch of those substandard cords, though. We know you're better than that. Instead of just accepting proprietary cables that don't even last a year, pick up the Tech2 MFI Metal Charge & Sync Lightning Cable — a cord that is built to last. Read more...
Serious gamers invest in the best accessories. They have no problem throwing money at premium headsets, keyboards, mice, joysticks, and more to elevate the gaming experience.
But a truly self-respecting gamer makes sure to invest in a top-of-the-line gaming chair, too. After all, you park yourself in front of the computer or console all day, so you might as well get a chair that delivers utmost comfort. Sitting on the floor cross-legged or settling for a wonky dining chair will only be detrimental to your health.
Below you'll find a selection of high-end premium gaming chairs that will further upgrade your gaming experience. Put your game face on and take your pick: Read more...
If you're in the market for a premium pair of noise-canceling headphones, your latest hobby has likely been hardcore comparing features of the Beats Studio3, Bose QuietComfort 35 II, and Sony WH1000XM3. All have above-average noise cancellation, customizable audio, and will arguably make you the fanciest person on public transportation. To make it even harder, the MSRP for all three is $349 (give or take a dollar).
Here's your deciding factor: You can now get the Sony WH1000XM3 for under $300. Through Sunday, April 28, this exclusive deal from PCMag gets you Sony's best headphones for $299.99. Read more...
Elon Musk really went for it this week at Tesla's Autonomy Day, ripping into widely used self-driving technology like laser sensors and (over)promising to put 1 million self-driving Tesla taxis on the streets next year. These bold claims certainly stirred up some feelings among autonomous vehicle experts and industry leaders.
On Friday, Velodyne president Marta Hall released a long statement — with a lot of ALL CAPS — defending her company's main product, LiDAR sensors for autonomous vehicles. While acknowledging Tesla's good work with electrification and car design, she shredded Musk's "claims" about deploying Teslas without a driver and without "lame" LiDAR sensors. Tesla only uses cameras, ultrasonic sensors, and a radar unit for its sensor suite. Read more...
If you're annoyed by Gmail's cluttered design, you're not alone. Its lead designer from 2008 to 2012, Michael Leggett, recently spoke to Fast Company about how much it bugs him — and how he built a Chrome extension to fix the problem.
Leggett created Simplify Gmail, a free Chrome extension that removes all icons from the left and right sides of the home screen. Every chat, folder, starred email, and add-on is gone. The Gmail logo at the top of the screen is also removed. In the end, you're left with a nice, clear view of your primary inbox — and not much else. Read more...
Apple has considered buying Intel's smartphone modem business in what would be one of the iPhone maker's biggest acquisitions ever.
That's according to a new story in the the Wall Street Journal, which reports that the two companies have held talks since last year, though those conversations recently "stalled."
From the report:
A multibillion dollar acquisition would be one of Apple's largest (the current record for the company is its $3 billion Beats acquisition) and would have significant ramifications for the iPhone. Apple has been working on its own chips for some time, but gaining Intel's patents and engineers could help them accelerate those plans. It could also help insulate Apple in the event of another legal dispute or other supply issue. Read more...
Average Uber driver hourly pay: Less than $19 per hour.
Based on an updated SEC filing, the company is worth up to $90 billion. And drivers are realizing they won't see much of it unless they've driven a lot for the ride-hailing company.
The official Uber IPO is expected by the second week of May and will trade on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol "UBER." While Uber outlined a $300 million payout plan for 1.1 million Uber drivers, some of the contract workers that literally drive the company's core service also want more transparency, better wages, and more benefits like health care and higher earning potential. Read more...
Arguably the best part about jamming out to some tunes is being able to scream the lyrics.
But some musicians really make you work for it. Chronic offenders of the Incomprehensible Lyrics Club include Patrick Stump, Elton John, and The 1975.
We shouldn't place all the blame on our favorite artists, though — sometimes it's our own shitty ears that mishear a word or phrase. Even when we learn the right lyrics, it's already wormed and lodged itself into our brains, and nothing can ever stop you from singing "All the lonely Starbucks lovers" to Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" again.
Some are Freudian slips. Some are just hilarious, distorted misunderstandings. Here are our favorites. Read more...
Slack knows a lot about you, and it realizes that could one day be a serious problem.
The company behind the messaging service used by media organizations, tech behemoths, and Fortune 500 companies around the world published its plan to go public on April 26, and the document paints a detailed picture of the company's hopes and fears. One fear, in particular, is of note: a Facebook-style privacy disaster.
Buried deep in the "risk factors" section of the prospectus — along concerns of hackers and market changes — lies the explicit worry that a severe privacy misstep by the company could result in grave harm to the business. No one, after all, wants to trust their personal data to a company that repeatedlybetraystheirtrust. Read more...
Warning: Heavy spoilers from throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe are present in this post, excluding Avengers: Endgame Proceed with caution.
So, you've got a ticket to see Avengers: Endgame. But the thing is... you've never seen a Marvel movie, have no idea what an Infinity Stone is, and are pretty sure Thanos is a brand of dish detergent.
Bad news: Endgame is out now, so you've only got a little time to get caught up before diving in to 2019's most anticipated premiere.
Good news: We're here to help you cram before you hit the theater!
Prioritizing efficiency over thoroughness, here are all of the Marvel basics you need to know for the Endgame. Feel free to scroll, skim, and CTRL+F throughout this article for all your last-minute tidbit needs. (Tip #1: This movie is about superheroes.) Read more...
Facebook is convinced that I am a young mother with a love of kraken-themed decor.
Unless you count my cat, who is 11-years-old and the animal equivalent of the grumpy old man from Up, I absolutely do not have a child. But for the last six months, my feed has been inundated with ads for baby products, from nasal suction devices to teething toys that look like plush versions of a bad acid trip.
Over the summer, my cat underwent a veterinary procedure that, to spare the nasty details for the faint of heart, required me to dab antibiotic ointment on his butt twice a day. Because he had a knack for getting out of his cone of shame and getting ointment everywhere, I put him in diapers for the day after the surgery. But diapers made specifically for pets are absurdly expensive, so I bought a pack of (human) infant diapers online and went on my cat owner way. I started seeing ads for baby products that night. Read more...
Netflix loves stories about crime and Adam Sandler, and it's doubling down on both in Murder Mystery. He stars opposite Jennifer Aniston in this whodunit-style thriller.
New York City cop Nick and his wife Audrey are framed as suspects while on their long-due honeymoon when a billionaire whose yacht they're on is killed.
The trailer promises shoot-outs, laughs, scenic Italian neighborhoods, all perfectly punctuated by Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Do."
Murder Mystery is available to stream on June 14. Read more...
Facebook announced a major change to combat foreign election interference ahead of the European Union (EU) elections in May.
At a press briefing on Friday, Facebook officials said that in order to protect "the integrity of elections," they would be cracking down on online advertising from being used for foreign interference. All political advertisers in the EU now need to gain authorisation in the country where ads are being delivered.
In order to gain that authorisation, political groups in Europe will be required to submit documents for identity checks, explained Richard Allan, Facebook's vice president of global policy solutions. "We ask them to submit documents and we use technical checks to confirm their identity and location," said Allan. Read more...
It’s finally here — The Battle of Winterfell is set to occur on Game of Thrones’ final season this weekend, and it’s supposedly slated to be one of the biggest TV events in history. It’s going to be epic.
Wait — what’s that? You haven’t caught up on all the other episodes? Big problem. You need to get on that as soon as possible.
Speed up the process and pick yourself up a brand new laptop or tablet that’ll allow you to stream your missing GoT episodes before the highly-anticipated episode airs this weekend. We’ve scoured the internet and found some of the best deals out there, including savings on the latest iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, Dell 2-in-1, and more. Read more...
But if you thought the weekend would give your wallet a breather, you were wrong: A ton of smart 4K TVs are on sale this weekend at Amazon, Walmart, and PCMag, including an extra hefty list of 50- and 55-inch TVs around the $400 mark — usually, they stay around $700 or more.
As the lawsuits and inquiries stack up against Facebook, the beset tech giant is taking some legal action of its own.
Facebook announced Thursday in a blog post that it's suing a New Zealand company that sells Instagram likes, followers, and views. The lawsuit, against a company colloquially known as a "likes farm," is part of Facebook's larger effort to combat what it calls "inauthentic behavior" on its platforms.
The decision is a show of strength by the company that it is taking the fight against fake activity on the platform — more notoriously associated with the likes of Russian bots — seriously. Read more...
With the 2020 presidential race heating up, candidates are driving as many people as they can to their websites for donations, events, and everything else. But behind the curtain, some of them hid a few Easter eggs on their campaign websites.
Of course, we already explored some of those with a ranking of every 404 error page from each candidate's site, but there are a small number of fun things to discover once you dig a little deeper.
Developers will occasionally hide some fun little surprises in the source code of the websites they create, and 2020 candidates are no exception. After diving through mounds of html, we came across three examples of fun ASCII art in the sites of John Delaney, Eric Swalwell, and Amy Klobuchar. Read more...
Thinking of a secure password is hard, so demanding a user change it every 60 days fills many with dread and leads to weaker security. Microsoft has realized this and decided to remove default password expiry as a security baseline feature in Windows 10.
When organizations deploy Windows 10 to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of employees, default security out the box is very important. That's why Microsoft provides Windows security baselines, which consist of a group of Microsoft-recommended configuration settings that can be relied upon to provide a more secure operating system.
As part of the baseline, Microsoft in the past stipulated a 60-day password expiration policy, which meant every user was forced to change their password every couple of months (unless an organization changed the configuration). As Ars Technica reports, with the release of Windows 10 v1903, password expiration is being dropped from the baseline because it's actually detrimental to security. Read more...
Marvel may not have invented the end-credits scenes, but they're the ones who turned it into a superhero movie staple.
Nearly every single Marvel Cinematic Universe movie has at least one scene buried in the credits, with the sole exceptions of The Incredible Hulk (where we get a pre-credits scene) and, now, Avengers: Endgame.
It's in those credits scenes that we first met Thanos, and saw the shape of this universe begin to take shape. These sequences have offered peeks at coming attractions or glimpses of the Avengers' everyday lives, gifted us Easter eggs to turn over or gags to laugh about. Read more...
Want to hide from AI-powered surveillance systems? Researchers at KU Leuven generated an image which you can print and hold around your hip to make yourself invisible to a popular object detection algorithm.
The technique so far only works if the printout is held at a certain angle and position, but the Leuven researchers believe they could make t-shirts that would lead to higher success rates.
You can find the paper "Fooling automated surveillance cameras: adversarial patches to attack person detection" here. Read more...
Earlier this month, Intel suddenly announced it would stop work on mobile 5G modems in the immediate aftermath of Apple's settlement with Qualcomm. Intel had been working on 5G tech for Apple, so it wasn't hard to figure out why they decided to stop as soon as Apple and Qualcomm decided to work together again.
Still, at the time, Intel didn't explicitly name the legal settlement as a reason for getting out of the mobile 5G game. CEO Bob Swan gestured at a lack of "profitability" for the decision instead. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal this week, Swan took a slightly different course and flatly admitted the settlement influenced its exit from mobile 5G development. Read more...
* Kim Yong-chol, a senior trusted official, has been sacked as the negotiator for nuclear talks with the US * But he is likely to retain his high standing in the Workers' Party, analysts say, as the dismissal indicates diplomacy will be returned to the foreign ministry
North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un has fired his top envoy for nuclear talks with the United States, blaming him for the collapse of the second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, a South Korean lawmaker said on Wednesday, citing security briefings.
Kim Yong-chol, the senior official who delivered Kim's letters to Trump and has acted as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's counterpart, was dismissed as the chief of the United Front Department, said the head of the South Korean parliament's intelligence committee Lee Hye-hoon.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet for the first time on Thursday. They held meetings at the Far Eastern Federal University campus at Russky Island off Vladivostok, Russia. Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters
* Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met for the first time on Thursday. * They chiefly discussed North Korea's nuclear program. They met on an island off Vladivostok, in eastern Russia. * But one thing that stood out from the summit was how much Putin gave face to Kim by showing up half an hour early to their meeting. * Putin is notoriously late to meetings, and has kept people like US President Donald Trump, Pope Francis, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel waiting, sometimes for hours.
One thing that stood out from the summit was how much Putin appeared to show his respect for Kim, who not long ago was an international pariah.
The Russian leader, who has a long track record of making world leaders wait for him, arrived at the venue 30 minutes before Kim.
WNU editor: They were actually both late. The meeting was suppose to be at 1:00 PM, but Putin showed up at 1:35, and Kim showed up at 2:05. There are though two people that I know of where President Putin always shows up on time. There are also two of his closest friends .... Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, and Gerhard Schröder, former Chancellor of Germany.
KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's parliament approved a law on Thursday that grants special status to the Ukrainian language and makes it mandatory for public sector workers, a move Russia described as divisive and said discriminated against Russian-speakers.
The law, which obliges all citizens to know the Ukrainian language and makes it a mandatory requirement for civil servants, soldiers, doctors, and teachers, was championed by outgoing President Petro Poroshenko.
He is expected to sign it into law before he leaves office in coming weeks after losing re-election on Sunday to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, an actor who mainly speaks Russian in public.
Ukrainian is the predominant language in western Ukraine, while Russian is predominant in much of the east. Both languages are spoken widely in the capital Kiev, and a large proportion of the population speaks both fluently.
WNU Editor: This law is causing widespread anger and condemnation throughout much of Ukraine. The move to abolish Russian in schools is what is causing the most blow-back. Soon to be former ex-President Poroshenko pushed for this law when he was campaigning for the Presidency, and even though almost 75% of the electorate voted against him, he is still going to sign it into law. President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy has vowed to abolish this legislation, but to do so can only happen after parliamentary elections later this year, and if his party wins a majority of seats. As it stands right now, the current parliament's approval rating is around 7% - 10%, and almost all of them will be turfed out later this year replaced by Zelenskiy supporters. But in Ukraine nothing is guaranteed, and there is now talk among parliamentarians to delay the election till next year.And as for Russia .... this feeds into the Kremlin narrative that the Ukraine government is inherently anti-Russian (which in my opinion they are).
Sri Lankan authorities are searching for about 140 people suspected of links with the Islamic State (IS) group following the deadly Easter Sunday attacks, the country's President has said.
IS has claimed responsibility for the coordinated suicide bombings that targeted churches and hotels across Sri Lanka on Sunday killed at least 253 people and injured about 500. Authorities earlier revised down the death toll from 359.
* UK PM urged to investigate who leaked decision about Huawei's role in Britain's 5G network from confidential meeting of her National Security Council * Britain appears set to allow Huawei a restricted role in building parts of the network, as Chinese tech giant 'welcomes report'
Five Eyes cybersecurity chiefs have played down suggestions of a split in the alliance following a politically explosive leak that the UK government will ignore US pressure and give Chinese technology giant Huawei a role in building its 5G networks.
According to an article in The Daily Telegraph, the contents of which were not denied, the 10-member National Security Council (NSC) chaired by the embattled Prime Minister Theresa May agreed on Tuesday to allow Huawei access to noncore parts of the 5G system, but block it from all core parts where data is exchanged.
The route also covered a number of Army and Air Force bases, a major proving ground, and one of America's last chemical weapon storage sites.
One Russia's two Tu-214ON aircraft has conducted what appears to be its first-ever flight over the United States under the Open Skies Treaty. This agreement allows member states to conduct aerial surveillance missions, with certain limitations in hardware and in the presence of monitors from the surveilled country, over each other's territory. Today's sortie took the Russian plane over parts of West Texas, through New Mexico, and into Colorado, including overflights of Fort Bliss, White Sands Missile Range, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, and finally hitting up the Pueblo Chemical Depot.
An unarmed Trident II D5 missile launches from the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Nebraska (SSBN-739) off the coast of California in 2008. US Navy Photo
WASHINGTON, D.C. – China and Russia had their money on winning asymmetric advantages in conventional and nuclear forces in the last decade, and now the United States is playing catch-up in modernizing its sea, air and land nuclear forces, the Pentagon's top policy official said Wednesday.
David Trachtenberg, the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary for policy, said the United States put off modernizing the three legs of its nuclear deterrent for almost 20 years, he told USNI News following a presentation at the Brookings Institution.
"In the 2000s, we skipped a generation" in modernizing the triad – ballistic missile submarines, bombers and ballistic missiles. He added that the United Kingdom and France, both nuclear powers and NATO allies, reduced their weapons stockpiles while continuing to modernize their nuclear forces during that same time. The United Kingdom has sea-based ballistic missile submarines; France has both submarines and aircraft capable of delivery of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. Air Force in early March 2019 deployed five B-52 bombers from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to the United Kingdom. Some of the eight-engine, long-range planes flew mock nuclear attacks on Russian soil.
A crazy story.
The U.S. Air Force in early March 2019 deployed five B-52 bombers from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to the United Kingdom. Some of the eight-engine, long-range planes flew mock nuclear attacks on Russian soil.
The American operation mirrors Russia's own simulated aerial raids. In recent years Russian bombers have stepped up their probes of NATO and allied air space, occasionally following flight profiles matching atomic bombing runs.
Six B-52s arrived at the Royal Air Force base at Fairford starting March 14, 2019. "The deployment of strategic bombers to the U.K. helps exercise RAF Fairford as United States Air Forces in Europe's forward operating location for bombers," the Air Force stated.
A UH-60 takes off in Afghanistan in preparation for transporting troops and supplies across the country on April 18, 2019. (Capt. Roxana Thompson/Army)
Veterans and military families overwhelmingly support plans to fully withdraw troops from Afghanistan and similarly favor a complete U.S. military pullout from Syria, according to a new poll from a conservative activist group released Wednesday.
Concerned Veterans for America, which has close ties to the conservative Koch brothers' network and the Trump administration, said the results indicate that President Donald Trump should follow through with his public comments to bring those troops home.
"Veterans and military families have borne the brunt of America's endless wars, and after nearly two decades of fighting there is clear support among both groups for a new approach to American foreign policy," said Dan Caldwell, executive director at Concerned Veterans for America.
Fort Bragg in North Carolina says the Army base had a "blackout" for more than 12 hours overnight Wednesday as part of a cyber-attack military exercise that came as a complete surprise to its tens of thousands of residents.
The fort, which the Army says is the world's largest military base, says it cut off the electricity "to identify shortcomings in our infrastructure, operations and security."
"Fort Bragg has to train for any possible threats to the installation in order to remain mission capable," said a post on Fort Bragg's Facebook page just after 11 a.m.
"This exercise was not announced in order to replicate likely real-world reactions by everyone directly associated with the installation. In today's world, cyber-attacks are very likely. This exercise is exactly what we needed to do to identify our vulnerabilities and work to improve our security and deployment posture."
WNU Editor: I am sure the U.S. Army .... for critical systems .... has backups in the event that the grid goes down. As for everyone else .... learn to adjust
In the event of a conflict, U.S. Navy admirals and the U.S. president may grow so concerned about the vulnerability of carriers that they don't use them assertively and effectively.
Aircraft carriers have been the primary capital ship of naval combat since the 1940s, and remain the currency of modern naval power. But for nearly as long as carriers have existed, navies have developed plans to defeat them. The details of these plans have changed over time, but the principles remain the same. And some have argued that the balance of military technology is shifting irrevocably away from the carrier, driven primarily by Chinese and Russian innovation.
So let's say you want to kill an aircraft carrier. How would you go about it?
Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan speaks with CNN's Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr during the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Dec. 2, 2017. (DOD/U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley)
Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told investigators from the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General that he called the F-35 fighter jet program "f----d up," but made clear that he wasn't referring to the aircraft itself, which he said was "awesome," according to a Department of Defense report released Thursday.
Shanahan's comments were detailed as part of an ethics investigation by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General into allegations he was promoting the interests of his former employer, Boeing, and repeatedly disparaging the company's competitor, Lockheed Martin, which is the primary contractor for the F-35 fighter jet.
Ultimately, Shanahan was cleared of any wrongdoing as investigators determined his "comments about the F-35 program were substantive, related to the program's performance, and were consistent with comments about the F-35 program made by other senior Government officials."
US-CHINA tensions erupted again over the disputed South China Sea after the Philippines' security was put at risk, potentially triggering "mutual defence obligations", it has emerged.
EUROPEAN elections mean a fresh batch of MEPs are set to be elected to help run the EU once again – but Brussels isn't looking forward to some of the most eurosceptic candidates ever winning seats.
INDIA is ready to pump more than £170 million into the EU's Galileo satellite system, which Britain is likely to locked out of despite having invested more than £1 billion, as well as developing much of its technology.
EMMANUEL MACRON has been warned to prepare for the European parliamentary elections to turn into a referendum on his europhile leadership as dissent for the European Union continues to grow across the bloc.
A GERMAN economist has urged the UK to be "far, far away" when the EU's economic "bomb explodes" as he warned the eurozone is heading for financial catastrophe.
Spain goes to the polls Sunday for its third general election in four years, as socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez tries to break the political deadlock that has gripped his country and left him unable to govern.
Over the last five years, the rise of new political forces – including the far-right – and a constitutional crisis over Catalan leaders‘ attempt to secede unilaterally from Spain, have transformed the political landscape, upending the two-party system in which the leftwing Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) and rightwing Popular Party (PP) have ruled since the 1980s. With some 30% of voters still undecided, Spain’s political future has rarely been so uncertain.
Here’s what to know about the Spanish elections:
Why is Spain having so many elections?
Since 2014, several newly relevant parties –leftist Podemos (We Can), centre-right Ciudadanos (Citizens) and, most recently, far-right Vox – have surged in support by capitalizing on voter dissatisfaction over slow economic recovery, corruption scandals and the Catalan secessionist movement. Their rise has fragmented the vote, making it increasingly difficult for any one party to win enough seats in congress to govern effectively.
The current Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, got the job partly as a result of this unstable situation. In May 2018, his PSOE filed a no-confidence motion in then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, after a court found Rajoy’s party had benefited from an illegal kickbacks-for-contracts scheme. The socialists passed the no-confidence motion – the first in the democratic era – with the help of Podemos and small regional parties, ousting Rajoy and allowing Sanchez to take over.
But Sánchez was forced to call fresh elections in February, when his minority socialist government failed to get enough votes from the other parties to pass a budget for 2019.
“Since the party system broke down, Spain has been in a political deadlock,” Ilke Toygur, an analyst at Spanish think tank the Elcano Royal Institute, tells TIME. “We’re again seeing really fierce battles between parties for ground on the right and on the left. And we might still end up in a deadlock.”
Who are the main candidates and parties?
Pedro Sánchez – Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE)
Polls suggest Sánchez’s PSOE will be the largest party in congress and their support currently stands at around 29%, according to an aggregated poll. Sánchez is avowedly liberal, and has emphasized his commitment to feminism since taking office, when he appointed the world’s most female cabinet, with 10 of 16 positions going to women. He has centered his campaign on economic justice, promising to raise the minimum wage and overhaul the way pensions are allocated. Alluding to his unusual entry into office, he has called on Spaniards to make the election “an enormous no-confidence motion against inequality, corruption and exasperation [with] the current way of doing politics.”
Pablo Casado – People’s Party (PP)
Casado took over leadership of the PP in the wake of Rajoy’s ouster. “He has tried to highlight the PP’s image as a safe pair of hands for the economy”, says Lluís Orriols, a politics professor at Madrid’s Carlos III University. Casado is also veering to the right on social issues such as proposing restrictions on abortion access and increases to border security after a record-breaking number of asylum seekers arrived in Spain last year. The PP is struggling to overcome competition from Ciudadanos and Vox – its new contenders for the right-wing vote – and is currently polling at around 20%.
Alberto Rivera – Ciudadanos
Ciudadanos has leeched votes from the PP since becoming a national party in the 2015 elections (earlier it had only operated in Catalonia as an anti-independence party). At first, the party emphasized itself as progressive and centrist, a Spanish version of French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist La République En Marche movement. But over the last two years it has moved to the right, directly into the PP’s territory. Ciudadanos presents itself as the option for those on the right who are fed up with the PP. This time last year they were ahead in polls, but have now fallen to around 15% of voting intention.
Pablo Iglesias – Unidas Podemos
Unidas Podemos (Together We Can) is a coalition of small leftwing parties and Podemos, a far-left party which formed in 2014 out of a protest movement against inequality. Unidas Podemos’ leader, Pablo Iglesias, has been open about his desire to enter coalitions with the PSOE, highlighting the importance of dialogue during the TV debate, while Casado and Rivera appeared to fight over control of the rightwing, Toygur says. “Iglesias tells says if voters want a left-wing government they should vote Podemos, because it would be a driving progressive force in a coalition,” Toygur says. Unidas Podemos is currently polling at 13% of the vote.
Santiago Abascal – Vox
Spain’s far-right party, Vox, won just 0.2% of the vote in the 2016 elections, but since then has surged to become the country’s fifth party, with 11% of voting intentions according to most recent polls. In December, the party made big gains in local elections in the region of Andalucía, becoming the first far-right party to enter government in Spain since the death of the country’s rightwing dictator, Francisco Franco, in 1975. Abascal, the party’s provocative leader, has made “the unity of Spain Vox’s core issue,” Toygur says. That means he appeals to voters who want the hardest of lines on Catalan independence. Abascal also highlights more typical concerns of the far-right, railing against progressive ideology, including what he describes to be “supremacist feminism and gender totalitarianism” and evoking President Donald Trump’s signature policy with his plan to prevent illegal immigration by building a wall around Spain’s territories in North Africa.
What is the Catalan crisis and how does it affect the elections?
In October 2017, political leaders in Catalonia, a semi-autonomous region of western Spain, held what the central government in Madrid called an illegal referendum on independence from Spain. 90% of voters in the referendum called for Catalonia, which has its own language and culture, to become an independent state (though only 43% of Catalans participated). The pro-independence party that controls Catalonia’s regional parliament then declared independence from Spain. The European Commission said the referendum was “not legal” and no U.N.-recognized country recognized Catalonia as independent, which is a prerequisite for becoming a state, according to international legal experts interviewed by the BBC.
Spain’s government and political parties have struggled over how to respond. Rajoy, the PP prime minister who was in power at the time, took a hardline, dissolving Catalonia’s parliament and imposing direct rule from Madrid until June 2018, when nationalists regained control of the Catalan parliament in fresh elections. After Sanchez came to power, he took a slightly more conciliatory approach, opening talks with Catalan leaders and allowing Catalan politicians who were jailed after the referendum to be transferred to prisons in their region. But he stopped short of agreeing to hold a binding independence referendum.
Like political parties, the Spanish public are divided over whether or not to hold a referendum on Catalan independence. According to a YouGov poll published in Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia in October 2018, 38% of Spaniards outside of Catalonia support a referendum, compared to 77% of Catalans.
The Catalan parties’ anger at Sánchez’s lack of support for a referendum was, in part, what forced him to call these elections, as they refused to vote in favor of his budget. The bad blood may hurt his chances of forming a new government, too. Thanks to the fragmented political landscape, the small nationalist parties will likely end up as kingmakers in the congress of deputies, deciding whether or not to approve the largest party’s candidate as president. “What the Catalans want is the big unknown in this election,” Orriols says.
Sánchez’s softer line with the Catalans may also hurt him with voters. Casado, who has suggested it may be time to reimpose direct rule on Catalonia, has labelled him an opportunist for negotiating with Catalan politicians, calling him “the biggest villain in Spain’s democratic history.”
“The territorial issue is the biggest risk for the PSOE,” Orriols says, “Because territorial issues divide the left.”
Why is the far-right surging and will it enter government?
One key impact of the Catalan crisis was to spur the success of Vox, which capitalized on the renewed focus on national identities to create a Spanish nationalist movement. Vox’s Abascal has promised to “suffocate” the secessionist movement and suspend autonomous rule in Catalonia.
Unlike in other European countries, the far-right’s surge appears to have little to do with immigration – according to public pollster CIS, only 8.9% of voters list immigration as a concern, and it’s only a priority issue for 1.6%. Some analysts, though, say Vox could help to stoke anti-immigration sentiment once they enter congress.
Orriols says that, paradoxically, Vox’s rise may be a boon for the PSOE. “The fear of the far-right has reactivated leftwing voters,” he says. “Crucially, it has eclipsed slightly the [Catalan] issue.”
What are the other big issues in the campaign?
Toygur says that, despite the political attention paid to the Catalan crisis and fear of the far right, the major cleavage in the electorate is still over traditional left and right economic policies. “The government is going to be either left or right, so clearcut issues like pensions, the minimum wage, taxes, are still absolutely key.”
According to CIS, unemployment is a concern for 61.9% of voters. Spain was hit hard by the financial crash of 2008, and while unemployment is now at its lowest in over a decade, at 14.1%, it has never recovered to pre-crisis employment levels. The country has dipped in and out of recession for the last decade, but its GDP grew by 2.5% in 2018, outdoing the eurozone average.
Will Spain end up with another unstable minority government?
It’s possible.
In the fragmented political landscape, it’s pretty much impossible for any one party to secure the absolute majority of deputies in congress needed in order to approve their prime ministerial candidate (Spain elects its leaders indirectly, meaning people vote for a representative in their local district into the lower house of congress, who in turn elect the president of the government or prime minister of Spain). And the latest polls suggest that even a pact between the PSOE and Podemos, or between the PP and Ciudadanos, would not be enough to make it over the line. The small nationalist parties – from Catalonia and the northern Basque Country region – have refused to promise anything to any of the bigger parties.
While Sánchez’s PSOE is likely to increase its number of deputies, it would need support from Podemos and the small nationalist parties to govern. “Pedro Sánchez will try his best to establish a coalition as quickly as possible,” says Toygur. But, she adds, it may not happen. “No one wants to have to hold another election – but no one’s ruling it out.”
A California woman who was kidnapped and held captive for almost five days while on safari in Uganda is speaking out about her experience for the first time.
In an interview with Gayle King CBS This Morning on Friday, Kimberly Endicott told the story of how she was kidnapped alongside her tour guide, Jean-Paul Mirenge, in Queen Elizabeth National Park in southwestern Uganda on April 2. The pair were rescued by Ugandan authorities on April 7, according to the Associated Press.
Endicott said that she was able to realize a dream during the trip -– seeing gorillas. On her first day of in Uganda, two of the apes even came up to and touched her.
“All of the guides said, ‘You are very lucky,'” Endicott said.
"All of a sudden four men come out of a perfectly square bush… They make us get out of the vehicle. They make us sit on the ground. And that's where things go very, I don't know how to describe it. There's really not a word to describe what that felt like." — Endicott pic.twitter.com/vx8VFw7pGY
What are you thinking is going to happen? Where is he taking you?
"That's what I don't know… And then the sun is setting and we keep walking. And it gets to complete, like, pitch darkness… I look up in the sky and I see the most beautiful sky I've ever seen in my life." pic.twitter.com/EkNf5agd3X
On the third day of her trip, however, Endicott’s vacation took a dark turn. Endicott was driving through the park with Mierenge and an elderly Canadian couple when four men walked out of the bushes.
Endicott said that because they were carrying guns, she initially believed that the men were park rangers. However, she quickly realized that they were “ragtag” and not wearing uniforms.
“They make us get out of the vehicle. They make us sit on the ground. And that’s where things go very, I don’t know how to describe it. There’s really not a word to describe what that felt like,” she said. “Pure fear? But that almost doesn’t do it justice.”
So you thought, "If something bad is going to happen," you're thinking, "please let it happen quickly." — @GayleKing
"Yes. I have no idea what they're capable of. I have no idea." — Kimberly Endicott pic.twitter.com/cAhSGTh54j
The men forced Mirenge and Endicott to run out into the park with them, leaving behind the Canadian couple and the vehicle. Endicott said that she became more afraid when she noticed that her captor was shaking, and wondered if he was on drugs. She later decided that she needed to “humanize” herself to her captors. Although she was never assaulted during the ordeal, she said she was in fear the entire time.
“That became my mission for myself was to be human with them. Not only for them to see me that way, but for me to see them that way,” said Endicott.
At one point, she began contemplating the worst-case scenarios. “How do I get them to shoot me? Just shoot me, instead of raping me or dismembering me?” she said. “If I ran, oh I think that would just make them angry. And I think I would get treated pretty badly if I tried to run.”
When King asked where Endicott might have run if she had tried to escaped, she responded, “There’s no place to run.”
A $500,000 ransom was ultimately paid for Mirenge and Endicott’s return, CBS News reported.
Ugandan police said earlier this month that they have arrested several people in connection to the kidnapping, and that they are continuing to investigate the case, according to the Associated Press.
(LONDON) — The leader of Britain’s main left-wing opposition party criticized the government Friday for “rolling out the red carpet” for U.S. President Donald Trump’s June visit and said he declined an invitation to attend the state dinner in protest.
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said he would be happy to meet with Trump but thinks “maintaining an important relationship with the United States does not require the pomp and ceremony of a state visit.”
The Conservative government of Prime Minister Theresa May “should not be rolling out the red carpet for a state visit to honor a president who rips up vital international treaties, backs climate change denial and uses racist and misogynist rhetoric,” Corbyn said.
Vince Cable, leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, also turned down a seat at the dinner with Trump.
May was the first foreign leader to meet with Trump after he took office. They met at the White House a week after his Jan. 20. 2017 inauguration. That’s when May first extended an invitation for Trump to make a state visit to Britain.
May’s hospitality generated outage at home. The trip was repeatedly put off amid concerns about anti-Trump protests and Britain’s extended Brexit crisis.
When he visits on June 3-5, he will be only the third American president, after George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to receive the full honors that come with a state visit to the U.K.
Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, traveled to England and Scotland after a NATO meeting last July. The trip included a formal dinner hosted by May – followed by a newspaper quoting Trump insulting May on Brexit – and an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, but it didn’t have the pomp Corbyn is objecting to now.
Typical features of state visits include ceremonial greetings, a horse-drawn carriage ride and a banquet with the queen at Buckingham Palace.
In June, Trump also is scheduled to attend a ceremony in the southern England naval city of Portsmouth to mark the 75th anniversary of the Allies D-Day landings in France during World War II.
Last week, Russia’s parliament approved a law that might allow the country to cordon off its internet from the rest of the world, creating an unprecedented “sovereign” internet. Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to sign it in short order.
Why It Matters:
It matters because if Russia is able to pull this off (a very big if), it will be the most tangible step yet towards fracturing the web. It could also be a harbinger of things to come in other countries.
This law will regulate how internet traffic moves through critical infrastructure for the internet. By November internet service providers will have to adopt new routing and filtering technology and grant regulators the authority to directly monitor and censor content it deems objectionable. But the real groundbreaker is the intent to create a national domain name system (DNS) by 2021, probably as a back-up to the existing global system that translates domain names into numerical addresses. If Russia builds a workable version and switches it on, traffic would not enter or leave Russia’s borders. In effect, it means turning on a standalone Russian internet, disconnected from the rest of the world.
No country has ever tried to build its own internet architecture before. Even China, the world leader when it comes to internet censorship, has built its “Great Firewall” on the existing global DNS—it filters traffic, but is still part of the same worldwide addressing system. The authors of Russia’s law say it will make the internet in Russia more resilient against outside attacks, but its main effect is to vastly expand the government’s control of the internet and its underlying infrastructure. The national DNS probably isn’t meant for daily use but instead for government-defined emergencies. Of course, an emergency for the Kremlin could be widespread protests against the government like the country experienced in 2011-2012, which prompted the first online censorship laws.
What Happens Next:
That’s the trillion-dollar question. Putin will sign the legislation into law, but it’s far from clear that creating a standalone internet is technologically possible or financially wise. Russia attempted to disconnect from the global internet in 2015 in a test case, but foreign data still managed to trickle in. And successfully pulling this off will require billions of rubles in investments by Moscow or the telecom industry, not counting any losses to the economy if testing the system causes service outages. Regardless, plenty of emerging markets will be watching the Russian test case closely. If Moscow pulls this off, other governments could be tempted to follow suit.
The Key Number That Explains It:
Russia’s internet penetration rate is 78% and steadily growing, according to Pew Research Center. This makes it among the largest online populations in the world, in part because of state support to expand internet access over the past decades. With more Russians online, and with more conflict in cyber-space, the Russian government feels greater need to assert what it calls “digital sovereignty”—loosely defined, the right to control data and online content within its borders.
The Key Quote That Sums It All Up:
“What are rights? They’re the biggest lack of freedom. I can tell you that the more rights you have, the less free we are… A ban is when the person is free because it says ‘this is impossible, but with everything else — [you can] do what you want.’” Russian Senator Elena Mizulina, in defense of the country’s new internet laws.
The One Thing to Read About It:
Not all countries are in a position to even attempt to build their own internet—via high-tech filtering, data localization, or tinkering with network architecture— and opt for simply shutting down sites and social media platforms in times of crisis. We saw this just this week in Sri Lanka. Read this excellent piece by GZERO Media’s Alex Kliment on the pros and cons of shutting down the internet in times of emergency. Folks in the Kremlin should read it, too.
The One Major Misconception About It:
That Russians should brace for an internet that will soon be as restrictive as China’s. The reality is that the Chinese people have not really known any internet beyond the heavily censored one that has been in place since the 1990s. Russians, on the other hand, had a virtually uncensored internet up until 2012 or so. That makes the Kremlin wary of overplaying its hand… especially as internet privacy/freedom has been one of the few things that Russians have shown a willingness to protest over.
The One Thing to Say About It at a Party:
The EU treats data privacy as a fundamental human right: GDPR allows users to see what data from them has been collected and to manage that data, and Europeans led the way on legislating the “right to be forgotten.” The US treats data privacy as the responsibility of tech companies, and only moves to act once a significant breach has happened. Russia and China on the other hand see data privacy and state surveillance as inherently intertwined—the state is the basic actor online, and its users are subjects. As the internet continues to develop and become integrated into more and more aspects of our daily lives, these fundamentally differing views will clash more frequently. Brace yourselves.
(WASHINGTON) — In a quivering voice, Maria Butina begged for leniency, casting herself as a comparative innocent caught up in a massive geopolitical power game.
Prosecutors held a dimmer view, saying the 30-year-old Russian deliberately obscured her true purposes while developing backdoor contacts inside the American conservative movement to advance the interests of Russia.
On Friday a U.S. District Court judge sided with the government version, sentencing Butina to 18 months in prison, followed by deportation. The judgment, which Butina can appeal, is a turning point in the high-profile case that garnered intense media coverage amid speculation over the extent of Russian interference in American politics.
Butina has been jailed since her July 2018 arrest, and admitted last year to covertly gathering intelligence on the National Rifle Association and other groups at the direction of a former Russian lawmaker. Her guilty plea to a single charge of conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent came as part of a deal with federal prosecutors.
At Friday’s sentencing hearing, Butina appealed to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to release her with nine months of time served.
“My reputation is ruined, both here in the United States and abroad,” she said, asking for “a chance to go home and restart my life.”
Chutkan, however, fully complied with the government’s recommendation and sentenced Butina to spend an additional nine months behind bars, before being deported.
The judge said the sentence was meant “to reflect the seriousness of (Butina’s actions) and to promote deterrence.”
Butina’s lawyers decried the judgment as overly harsh; they had characterized Butina as a naive but ambitious international affairs student who simply didn’t realize her actions required her to register as an agent of a foreign government.
“I feel terrible for Maria’s family…I wish we could have done more to get her out sooner,” said attorney Robert Driscoll. “I do not believe an additional nine months in jail serves any purpose.”
The Russian Embassy in Washington said in a Facebook post that Butina “is a political prisoner, a victim of provocations by special services and the arbitrary use of repressive US legislation. We insist on the innocence of our compatriot. We demand her immediate release. We will continue to provide her with comprehensive consular and legal assistance.”
Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament, said the case was “political and fabricated from air poisoned with Russophobia.”
“It is necessary to continue the fight, to file an appeal and to do everything in our power for Maria Butina to return to Russia as soon as possible,” Slutsky was quoted as saying by state news agency Tass.
According to her plea agreement, Butina worked with former Russian lawmaker Alexander Torshin to use their contacts in the NRA to pursue back channels to American conservatives during the 2016 presidential campaign. All the while, she did not report her activities to the U.S. government as required by law.
Butina had faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Her case is unrelated to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which concluded last month.
A statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office stated that Butina was guilty of acting as an unregistered “agent of a foreign government.”
“There is no doubt she was not simply a grad student at American University,” said prosecutor Erik Kenerson.
However defense attorneys repeatedly disputed the use of the word “agent,” saying it brought a sinister connotation that Butina’s true actions do not merit.
“Maria was not a spy,” said defense attorney Afred Carry. “Her agenda was better relations between Russia and the United States… Maria never stole any documents or bribed any officials.”
Judge Chutkan, in her sentencing comments, read extensively from a declaration by Robert Anderson Jr., former assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism office.
“She was not simply seeking to learn about the U.S. political system,” Chutkan quoted Anderson as writing. Instead, she worked specifically to obscure her true agenda and “to gather information and develop relationships that could be used to Russia’s advantage.”
However Chutkan, at the end, seemed to sympathize with Butina — noting that the defendant did appear to be a diligent student who earned high marks at American University and who supplied dozens of letters vouching for her character from friends, family and professors.
“You are not the worst things you’ve ever done,” Chutkan told Butina. “You are a young woman. You are smart, you’re hard-working and you have a future ahead of you.”
(COLOMBO, Sri Lanka) — A military spokesman says soldiers have exchanged gunfire with suspects after attempting to raid a building in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province as part of the ongoing investigation into the Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks.
Brigadier Sumith Atapattu said a gunbattle was underway in the coastal town of Sammanthurai, 325 kilometers (200 miles) from the capital, Colombo.
Officials say local militants with ties to the Islamic State group conducted a series of suicide bombings on Easter Sunday at churches and luxury hotels in and around Colombo and in the distant seaside village of Batticaloa. The health ministry says about 250 people were killed.
Sri Lanka has remained on edge as authorities have pursued suspects with possible access to explosives.
When the Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev came to Paris to tour with the Kirov ballet company in 1961, he was “like a wild animal out of a cage,” says Oleg Ivenko, the 26-year-old Ukrainian dancer and actor who plays Nureyev in the new movie The White Crow, out April 26 in the United States. “He got a taste of freedom and another world.”
And once he got that taste, there was no going back — literally.
Nureyev defected to the West in June of 1961, at the height of the Cold War, an act considered treason in the Soviet Union. The defection made international news and thrust the Russian dancer, whose talent drew millions of new fans to the theater, into the public eye for the next 30 years. In April 1965, a TIME cover story profiled Nureyev, noting that he “stands out as one of the most electrifying male dancers of all time.” He was ballet’s first pop icon and transformed the role of men in the art form, says Tamara Rojo, the Director and Principal Dancer at the English National Ballet (ENB).
TIME / Painted by Sidney NolanThe Apr. 16, 1965, cover of TIME
The White Crow — which was a childhood nickname for Nureyev, because he was unusual — charts Nureyev’s story from his life of poverty in the Russian city of Ufa to his historic escape to France. It’s based on Julie Kavanagh’s 2007 biography of the dancer, with a script by British playwright David Hare and directed by Ralph Fiennes. Kavanagh, a journalist who also trained as a dancer, researched the dancer’s life for over a decade, prising open USSR records and interviewing dozens of those who were close to him.
As TIME wrote in 1965 of his entry into the West, Nureyev’s story “could not have been more compelling if it had been choreographed by Alfred Hitchcock.” But how much of the movie version matches the real research? Here’s more on the man widely regarded as the best male dancer of his generation.
Did the KGB really follow Nureyev before he defected?
In the movie, even before the defection, officers from Russia’s state security service, the KGB, follow Nureyev around Paris and repeatedly warn him against staying out late, as well as spending time with Clara Saint — the 21-year-old daughter of a wealthy Chilean artist — and other French creatives.
As Kavanaugh writes in her book, Nureyev was in fact unpopular with Soviet authorities even before he decided to leave. His overt admiration for the West, coming at the height of the Cold War, alarmed them and was seen as a betrayal to the motherland’s communist ideals. He drew particular attention because ballet was a key propaganda tool used by the Soviet authorities to display its cultural supremacy to the West. Soviet dancers could be dropped from foreign excursions at any time for the “wrong” behavior, writes Kavanagh, and the KGB did have officers in Paris minding the ballet dancers on that 1961 trip — though it’s hard to say whether the level of surveillance in the movie matches exactly the real-life version of events.
Nureyev’s defection was doubly humiliating because it came just two months after the Soviet Union outshone the West by sending the first person into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. In losing Nureyev, the Soviet Union also lost some of the international prestige it had just worked so hard to acquire. Much of the Western media seized on the defection as an ideological blow to the Soviets, a Cold War humiliation and a triumph for democracy.
But Hare, the screenwriter, has said Nureyev’s choice to defect was more practical than political. And according to Ivenko, Nureyev’s worst nightmare was “not being seen” as a dancer, which “would have happened if he stayed in the Soviet Union.”
Did Nureyev really choose to defect at the airport?
In the movie, Nureyev makes the decision to defect at the Le Bourget airport in Paris, after KGB officers tell him he is being sent back to Moscow to perform at a Kremlin gala. Nureyev was convinced he was being punished for his unruliness in Paris, and that, once he was back on Soviet soil, he would never be allowed back out. The film shows how Clara Saint, whom he befriended in Paris, helped him.
Saint, now 78, confirmed this sequence of events in a 2015 interview with The Australian. After getting a panicked call from Nureyev, she sped to the airport, where she told Nureyev to approach the French police and assured him the KGB could not force him to return to Moscow. Saint was essential in helping him to defect.
Was Nureyev as volatile as The White Crow suggests?
In the movie portrayal, Nureyev comes across as occasionally insensitive and rude. By some accounts, he was far worse. Kavanagh writes that he once threw a ballet dancer on the floor and stormed off, frustrated he could not perform a shoulder lift. “He never apologized for being himself. I think he was a little boy trapped in a man’s body,” Ivenko tells TIME.
Those close to Nureyev have described him as a wild perfectionist, charming and stubbornly rude. He demanded the maximum from himself. “The only critic is a full house,” he would say.
“But we must not forget how generous he was,” says Tamara Rojo. Dancers whom he trained spoke about how he nutured their skills, she says. Long after achieving world fame, Nureyev mentored and trained young ballet dancers, who continue to inspire the next generation today. “He enabled them to be free on the stage,” Rojo adds. “It is very rare for someone who has achieved so much to recognize that each dancer has to become their own artist.”
Was Nureyev one of the greatest ballet dancers of the 20th century?
White Crow showcases Nureyev’s distinct talent, his grand stage presence and his ability to jump higher and leap farther than other male dancers. And his impact on the art form was in fact ”immense,” says Rojo. He “transformed the perception” of what a male classical ballet dancer can do, helping to make the male role in ballet more equal with the female. He’s also seen as the first male ballet dancer to break into other art forms and attract wider audiences, making his acting debut in a film, Les Sylphides, in 1962.
As Director of the Paris Opera Ballet from 1983 until 1989, Nureyev gave the company an international repertoire and reached new audiences. Rojo says he achieved this by bringing in young choreographers who had never been invited to a ballet environment. “He widened the scope of people who created ballet. That’s the best way to reach more people. You can only bluff your way to a new audience for so long,” says Rojo, who has herself worked to make the English National Ballet more diverse and has made a point to commission more female choreographers, a role traditionally carried out by men.
And despite being diagnosed with AIDS in 1984, Nureyev continued working until 1991, just two years before his death in 1993.
But what made him special was not that he was “technically perfect” Ivenko says. Rather, his legacy is the “energy, personality and grandness he brought to the stage and fed to his audience.” As Nureyev himself famously said, “Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.” One moment he could appear to be in perfect control, and the next, on the edge of spinning out of control. His fans said his unpredictability only added to his magnetism. In ballet, he performed more than 90 different roles with 30 companies and created his own versions of several ballets including Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet.
Nureyev forged his art on on both sides of the Iron Curtain, says Rojo, and forced people to look at what is “sacrosanct, to question it, to challenge traditions.”
(COPENHAGEN, Denmark) — Pilots for Scandinavian Airlines on Friday launched an open-ended strike following the collapse of pay negotiations, forcing the company to cancel virtually all its flights — 673 of them, affecting 72,000 passengers.
The Stockholm-based carrier said talks on a new collective bargaining agreement with the SAS Pilot Group, which represents 95% of the company’s pilots in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, collapsed early Friday.
In airports throughout the region, SAS staff in yellow vests were assisting stranded passengers to rebook or obtain refunds.
Mina Kvam Tveteraas and her friend Bettina Svendsen were stranded at Stavanger Airport in Norway after their flight to Copenhagen was canceled.
“We have booked a hotel for three nights and the rooms are not refunded,” Kvam Tveteraas told Norway’s TV2 channel. “I have no idea what to do and I’m mad.”
The pilots’ negotiations that started in March mainly centered on salary increases and working hours.
Details have not been released but the pan-Scandinavian union says it wants salaries to be in line with the market rate, while SAS negotiators have called the requests “unreasonable and extreme.” SAS spokeswoman Karin Nyman said the pilots’ demands “would have very negative consequences for the company.”
Wilhelm Tersmeden, chairman of the Swedish pilots association, said SAS employees are facing “deteriorated working conditions, unpredictability in planning work hours and insecurity for their own job.”
“Almost one in four SAS flights is flown by subcontractors and we want to know what our future looks like,” he told Sweden’s TT news agency.
Jacob Pedersen, an analyst with Denmark’s Sydbank, estimated the strike in average would cost between 60 million and 80 million Swedish kronor ($6.3-8.4 million) a day.
The strike “makes it clear that SAS is more vulnerable than we previously expected,” he said. “Competition is tough, and with a European economy moving at a slower pace, SAS may also fight harder for profits this year.”
The company said the strike doesn’t include flights operated by SAS partner airlines, making up approximately 30% of its departures, and is not expected to affect other airlines’ departures and arrivals.
North Korean officials billed the U.S. $2 million for the medical care of comatose American Otto Warmbier before allowing him to be flown home from Pyongyang, the WashingtonPost reports.
President Donald Trump said the U.S. never paid North Korea for Warmbier’s return in a tweet Friday morning. “No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else,” he said.
According to the Post, State Department envoy Joseph Yun, who was in Pyongyang to take Warmbier home in June 2017 following news of his poor health condition, was instructed by North Korean officials to sign the agreement. Yun reportedly did so upon direction from Trump via then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
The bill then went to the Treasury Department, the Post says, citing two unnamed people familiar with the situation. It is unclear whether the bill was ever paid.
University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier, at the time 21, arrived in North Korea in late December 2015 on an organized tour of the state. After spending five days there, he was arrested at Pyongyang airport for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster from the hotel he and his group were staying at. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for what authorities considered a “hostile act.”
North Korean officials said Warmbier suffered a brain injury after contracting botulism, a form of poisoning, while in detention. Upon news that the American had been in a coma for more than a year, Yu and a U.S. delegation arrived in Pyongyang to take him home. Warmbier died six days later in a Ohio hospital on June 19, 2017, after having suffered what doctors said was “severe injury to all regions of the brain.”
Fred Warmbier, Otto’s father, said he was never told about the hospital bill, according to the Post, and that it sounded like a “ransom” for his son.
Warmbier’s parents filed a lawsuit against North Korea over the student’s death last year on grounds that their son was “brutally tortured and murdered.” North Korea was ordered by a U.S. court to pay $501 million in damages.
News of the issued bill prompted condemnation in the U.S.
“They killed a perfectly healthy and happy college student and then had the audacity to expect the U.S. government to pay for his care,” Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the D.C.-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told the Post.
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