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Making Music Out of the Post-Inaugural Blues

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NewsHubJackson Browne and Tom Morello, musicians who have made social justice and public protest central to their artistic visions, played together during a 2013 tribute to Bruce Springsteen. (Photo: Mark Davis/WireImage.com)
It’s a beautiful thing, the refusal of big-name singers like Celine Dion, Elton John, and Garth Brooks to perform at Trump’s inauguration. Their absence has Trump’s spin doctors grasping at straws. Inaugural committee chair, Tom Barrack , said last week that instead of trying to surround Trump with A-list acts, “we are going to surround him with the soft sensuality of the place.” The inauguration, he claims, will have a “much more poetic cadence than having a circus-like celebration that’s a coronation.” Really? Isn’t such a circus Trump’s hallmark? As for poetic cadences – will they have the rhythm of Twitter feeds?
Trump’s inauguration will largely be remembered for the opposition it inspired, not just by the famous performers who refused to perform, but by the numerous protests that will take place in the streets. With an anticipated 200,000 participants, the Women’s March on Washington on January 21 is slated to be the biggest inauguration-related protest in U. S. history. That’s good news, but afterwards, when the inevitable blues of a Trump presidency set in, how do we stayed jazzed?
We need a musical score, or rather multiple ones, not just from the A-list performers but all the way down the alphabet, from the big concert stage to the smallest corner cafe.
„When I’m feeling optimistic, I imagine that future generations will look at this time as a major turning point, a sort of political and cultural renaissance when Americans joined together not just to take back their country back, but to take it forwards. “
I came of age in the sixties, at the height of the civil rights and anti-war movements. The powerful protest music of that time—from spirituals to folk to rock and beyond—was always playing in the background. The lyrics and guitar riffs expanded my universe and kept me and my friends energized for activism. The music had an appeal for many in the older generation too. I’ll never forget my mother playing Bob Dylan as she did the weekly ironing. Music broke down barriers. Impassioned chords of justice and solidarity drowned out, even if only temporarily, the discord and divisiveness of a fractured left. We might have had a hard time talking to each other, but at least we could march and dance together. Share a little joy.
Good politics doesn’t necessarily make for good music, or good music for good politics. You can have one without the other, but how powerful it is when they come together. Music, as well as the other creative arts, can awaken new senses of possibility. A tough challenge in the days ahead will be building a strong resistance to Trump while simultaneously constructing a hopeful, progressive vision of the future. We will have to straddle reactive and proactive ways of being and organizing. A radical flourishing of music and the arts could help by stretching the boundaries of our political imaginations so that we give ourselves the freedom to think outside the box. After all, this is a moment crying out for new ideas. And it could remind us that we not only need bread but roses to sustain us.
Such a flourishing of creativity would also help sideline Trump’s creepy and seductive Reality TV aesthetic. The comedians poking fun at him are necessary but not sufficient. Laugh all we want, but he’ll still occupy center stage unless his entertainment value and media ratings are forcefully and masterfully diminished by much better alternatives. Drown him out.
When I’m feeling optimistic, I imagine that future generations will look at this time as a major turning point, a sort of political and cultural renaissance when Americans joined together not just to take back their country back, but to take it forwards. And the music was fantastic, they’ll say with a hint of wistfulness, even better than the 1960s. Wish we’d been alive.
Why not leave such a legacy? And along the way, maybe share a little joy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Betsy Hartmann is the author of The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War and Our Call to Greatness , forthcoming in spring 2017 from Seven Stories Press. The third edition of her book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs has recently been published by Haymarket Books. See BetsyHartmann.com .
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Valencia, an Often Unsteady Club, Teeters Toward Disaster

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NewsHubThe players sensed the coming crisis last summer. When Valencia returned to preseason training, many of its members did so with one thought on their minds: Get out, as soon as possible.
Some grumbled among themselves, going through the motions on the field as they waited for the calls from their agents that escape routes had been found. Others were more proactive. Half a dozen or so approached Pako Ayestarán, the third manager they had played for in a year, to ask to be allowed to leave.
What concerned Ayestarán was not that the players wanted to go but that they did not seem to mind where they went. Some, like Shkodran Mustafi, craved bigger, better things: He went on to sign with Arsenal , an English Premier League team. Others were less choosy; they just wanted out.
Ayestarán, picking up on the mood, passed the message on through the club’s hierarchy. His superiors maintained that only rats want to leave a ship in distress. In hindsight, with Valencia drifting toward relegation and possibly ruin, it looks increasingly as if those players, scrambling for safety, saw the iceberg coming.
To many observers, there is no tougher job in world soccer than coaching Valencia, even in the best of times. The club’s crumbling, iconic Mestalla Stadium is a place where the manager’s task has long been to deliver champagne success on a lemonade budget, where the directors are impatient and the fans implacable. For decades, it has been a draining trial for even the most decorated coaches.
Many of the managers on the club’s illustrious list of recent alumni — Claudio Ranieri, Rafael Benítez, Ronald Koeman and Quique Sánchez Flores, to name a few — privately recall their time at the club, historically Spain’s third largest, as the most arduous of their careers. They describe a toxic blend of internecine politics, financial strife and supporter unrest that made everything that followed seem blissfully straightforward in comparison.
The managers who decide that the scale and fame of the club are worth the risk do so with their eyes open. Cesare Prandelli, the most recent permanent occupant of the post, called Ranieri, a fellow Italian, before accepting the job. Ranieri counseled him to take it but reminded him that Valencia was a “great challenge.” Prandelli took it as an invitation, not a warning. He lasted 10 games.
Valencia is no stranger to chaos; to some extent, that is its natural resting state. But while it has been in crisis before, it has never experienced a crisis quite as deep as its current one, never endured something that feels so urgent, so perilous.
“There have always been tensions at Valencia,” said Jesús García Pitarch, the club’s sporting director until this month. “But previously those tensions have always been compatible with success on the field.”
Not, it is safe to say, anymore. Valencia, which has the fourth-highest budget in Spain’s top division, known as La Liga, is fourth from the bottom in the standings, having gone through four managers in less than two seasons. Relegation is a genuine possibility. Some of the club’s hard-core fans, its ultras, have taken out their frustration on the players, accusing them of lacking the requisite commitment and desire. To others, though, the blame lies much higher up.
“The players are victims more than perpetrators,” García Pitarch said. “Valencia does not have a focal point: There is no owner, no president, no long-term coach, no sporting director who they can look to as a reference. There has been a breakdown between the club, the players and the fans. The problem is in the structure.”
At the head of that structure is Peter Lim, the Singaporean entrepreneur who bought Valencia in 2014. At the time, his arrival seemed a blessing: a wealthy owner who could bankroll the club back to where it feels it belongs, challenging the triumvirate of Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid and Barcelona for Spanish supremacy.
The early signs were promising. Lim turned to Jorge Mendes, the most powerful agent in soccer, for assistance. A slew of players, including the gifted Portuguese midfielder André Gomes, arrived, and so did a coach, Nuno Espírito Santo. Valencia returned to the Champions League and seemed to be going places.
What has happened since shows this was an illusion. Espírito Santo was fired a few months into his second season and was replaced by Gary Neville, a former Manchester United defender and a business associate of Lim’s. Neville did not finish the season.
Ayestarán, previously Neville’s assistant, replaced him. When Ayestarán was fired after opening the season with four straight defeats , in came Prandelli, who did not make it to New Year’s Eve. Salvador González, a longtime servant of the club known as Voro, is now in charge until the end of the season — theoretically, at least.
That rapid turnover is part of the problem. Mustafi said in an interview last week that “changing the manager every 12 months creates doubts.” One of the most appealing things about signing with Arsenal, he said, was that he could be sure who the manager would be.
Continuity on the sideline is not the only problem at Valencia. Layhoon Chan, Lim’s appointed president, has criticized players publicly, breaking what García Pitarch sees as a crucial public bond among club, players and fans.
“The lack of support has demoralized the players,” García Pitarch said. “They do not feel protected, and they feel separated from the club.”
There is stasis at the executive level, too: Lim has not set foot in Valencia for a year, leaving a power vacuum.
“It is impossible to deal with all the small problems that appear every day,” García Pitarch said. “And in football, small problems can become big ones if you do not deal with them.”
Six hundred miles northwest, on Spain’s Atlantic coast, observers may be tempted to point out another factor. To followers of another fallen Spanish champion, Deportivo La Coruña, what is happening at Valencia is eerily familiar, and the common ingredient is not Lim but Mendes.
Long before he represented the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho, Mendes was an ambitious agent with one client: Espírito Santo, a little-known journeyman goalkeeper. Mendes arranged for his transfer to Deportivo through the club’s president, Augusto César Lendoiro. It was the first deal Mendes, then a nightclub owner, ever did.
“From then on, Mendes always felt he owed Lendoiro a debt of gratitude,” said Juan Yordi, a journalist who covers Deportivo for the Spanish newspaper Marca. The relationship is so close that Lendoiro calls Mendes his godson.
In 2012, with Deportivo in severe financial trouble, Mendes helped Lendoiro acquire, mostly on loan, a number of his many clients at favorable rates: not the superstars but the more unremarkable likes of Silvio, Roderick Miranda and Nélson Oliveira. Deportivo might have struggled to build a squad otherwise, so desperate was the club’s situation.
“He was doing Lendoiro a favor,” Yordi said. “He was repaying the debt and using players who needed a stage to build their careers to do it.”
Yordi acknowledged, though, that everything was business for Mendes. His intentions might have been good, but the effect was not. Deportivo was relegated, and few among his cadre of players made much of an impression. Yordi said that he did not assign Mendes the blame for Deportivo’s relegation but that the club’s fans “do not remember that period happily.”
Mendes moved those players on, for the most part, replacing them on the club with other clients who helped Deportivo win promotion the following year. That is his business, of course, and he is very good at it.
But as Deportivo — and now Valencia — might attest, that business is not always good for the clubs that seek to benefit from a connection to him. André Gomes, Valencia’s star, left for Barcelona last summer; so did Paco Alcácer, the club’s top striker. Both deals were reportedly overseen by Mendes, who also orchestrated Valencia’s signings of defenders Eliaquim Mangala and Ezequiel Garay.
Valencia appears to be what Deportivo was just a few years ago: a carousel for Mendes players, with the squad’s stability and growth sacrificed for business — Mendes’s business.
Its appeal is obvious: Nobody boasts the client list Mendes does. But the risk is also apparent. If the arrangement does not work out, Mendes can always move on; others are not so lucky. Lim is stuck with Valencia, an investment he has allowed to enter a sort of managed decline. His executives do not seem to know how to solve the problems.
García Pitarch, like Prandelli, has departed. “Neither us received a payoff,” he said. “We resigned because we just could not work there any more.”
That leaves the players, the people who saw it coming, still unable to escape.

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© Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/sports/soccer/valencia-la-liga-spain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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Jee’s slay alarms South Koreans

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NewsHubANGELES CITY—The South Korean community here expressed alarm on Wednesday when authorities confirmed that South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo was killed shortly after his abduction in October last year allegedly by rogue policemen.
“We are all very sad,” said Lee Sheng-kae, vice president of the Angeles Korean Community Association. He said some Koreans joined Jee’s family in prayer on Wednesday night.
He described Jee as helpful and kind, hiring many Filipinos for his manpower business after he resigned from South Korean firm Hanjin.
His abduction sent shock waves in the tightly knit Korean community here. Security measures in their business establishments and residences were heightened after news of Jee’s abduction spread.
Policemen behind Jee’s death reportedly took advantage of “Tokhang,” President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-illegal drugs campaign, to undertake kidnap-for-ransom operations.
The abduction and killing of Jee was the first of a Korean in the city, it was learned.
The Angeles police said they were not aware of the “Tokhang” operation led by the main suspect, SPO3 Ricky Sta. Isabel, who had surrendered to the National Bureau of Investigation.
Supt. Sydney Villafor, Angeles police director, said kidnapping-for-ransom charges had been filed against Sta. Isabel, who had resigned from the Philippine National Police’s Anti-Illegal Drugs Group based in Camp Crame.
An Inquirer source said one of the suspects was Ramon Yalung, a resident of Mabalacat City in Pampanga province, who reportedly owned the car used in the abduction. He remains at large.
Angeles City Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan said he learned about the kidnapping in November when a top official of a Korean firm went to see him and asked for help to find Jee.
On Nov. 20, the Korean official asked for updates and Pamintuan mentioned the recovery of the bodies of three Koreans from the FVR Megadike in Bacolor town, south of Angeles City, on Oct. 11.
The Korean clarified that these victims were not associated with Jee.
Chief Supt. Aaron Aquino, Central Luzon police director, said a court in Angeles City, where the kidnapping case was filed, had not yet issued an arrest warrant for Sta. Isabel and the other suspects. — TONETTE OREJAS

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Ученые назвали главную угрозу для планеты в 2017 году

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NewsHubЭкстремальные погодные условия являются главной угрозой для человечества в 2017 году. Об этом сказано в исследовании, проведенном экспертами Всемирного экономического форума. Потерю жизни на земле могут спровоцировать внезапные наводнения, аномальная жара, землетрясения, ураганы, цунами. В список основных угроз для человечества также вошли миграция, терроризм и кража данных, передает The Independent.
В докладе сказано, что глобальные события в течение ближайших 10 лет будут формировать три фактора – экономическое неравенство, социальная поляризация и экологическая опасность.
– Экологические проблемы являются важнейшим компонентом для создания стабильных и устойчивых обществ и экономик – мы больше не можем их игнорировать, – сказано в докладе.
Ученые подчеркивают, что в ближайшее время человечеству стоит опасаться глобального потепления больше, чем применения ядерного оружия.
КСТАТИ
Экологические катастрофы, которые грозят Украине: лысые горы и токсичный смог
Белую мглу пропитывал стойкий запах гари. Экологи и медики подтвердили: это смог – смесь застоявшегося влажного воздуха с продуктами горения. Такие явления будут повторяться. Ядом пропитывается не только воздух, но и земля, насыщаются отравой реки. „КП“ в Украине“ обозначила экологические катастрофы, которые нам грозят уже в ближайшем будущем.

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Up to 30 Missing After Italy Avalanche

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NewsHubROME — An avalanche has buried a mountainside hotel in central Italy, and civil protection officials said on Thursday that up to 30 people were missing, citing local officials.
The avalanche came after four earthquakes struck the region on Wednesday, prompting officials to close schools and the subway system in Rome, about 100 miles to the southwest, as a precaution.
News channels in Italy showed images of the roof collapsed on the main hall of the hotel, the Rigopiano, although it was not clear if the structural damage had been caused by the earthquakes or by the avalanche. Other images showed corridors piled high with snow, leaves and branches.
The epicenters of the four strong earthquakes were in central Italy, which has been hit by deadly quakes with increasing frequency in recent years. Officials registered more than 100 aftershocks on Wednesday.
Sky TG24 television said at least one person was reported to have died at the Rigopiano, which is described on its website as a “posh mountainside hotel resort with spa” in the town of Farindola, nestled in the mountains.
Emergency vehicles tried to assist Alpine rescue teams in the region, part of the Gran Sasso National Park, but rescue efforts were hampered by heavy snow on roads, the civil protection agency said.
Francesco Provolo, the prefect of Pescara, the province that includes Farindola, told RAI News that rescuers had to travel more than five miles on skis and snowshoes to reach the hotel, as billowing snow continued throughout the night.
A spokesman for the civil protection department in Pescara had estimated that up to 30 people were in the hotel at the time of the avalanche.
The four-star hotel has 43 rooms, but it was not clear how many guests were staying there at the time of the avalanche.
Three quakes in central Italy last year killed nearly 300 people in and around the medieval town of Amatrice ; on Wednesday, the tower of one of the town’s churches was destroyed by temblors.
L’Aquila was devastated in 2009 by an earthquake that killed more than 300 people.

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© Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/world/europe/italy-avalanche.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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U. S. Bombs ISIS Camps in Libya

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NewsHubWASHINGTON — Two United States Air Force B-2 bombers attacked Islamic State training camps outside of Surt, Libya, overnight, the Pentagon said on Thursday.
Military analysts were assessing the impact of the strikes, but officials said it was possible that dozens of Islamic State fighters may have been killed.
The Pentagon’s Africa Command announced on Dec. 19 the official end of air operations against the Islamic State, also known by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, in Surt, the group’s coastal stronghold, after conducting 495 strikes against truck bombs, heavy guns, tanks and command bunkers there.
But the need to carry out additional strikes reflected the resilience of the Islamic State in Libya. While the group was driven out of Surt last month, the Islamic State still has several hundred fighters who have dispersed across Libya and pose a threat to the country, its neighbors and potentially Europe, according to American officials and the Africa Command.
Jonathan Winer, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Libya, told Congress in November that the Islamic State, as it suffered defeats in Surt at the hands of Libyan fighters and American warplanes, was most likely forming cells around the country. He called on Libyans to unite behind the country’s fledgling Government of National Accord to combat the terrorists.
A recent analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a policy organization in Washington, found that Islamic State militants operating as “desert brigades” south of Surt had ambushed Libyan military positions, disrupted supply lines with explosives and established checkpoints on key roads. The Islamic State is recruiting foreign fighters into southern Libya and is most likely relying on the same havens used by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, according to the analysis.
The two B-2 bombers flew a round-trip mission of about 34 hours from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and dropped satellite-guided bombs on the training camps, military officials said.

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Samsung Galaxy S8 price, specs, release date & features: Galaxy S8 launch set for 15 April

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NewsHubSamsung’s smartphone launches are always highly anticipated events, but this year’s Galaxy S8 launch is set to be even more interesting. The company has a lot to prove with its newest product, as it’s the first device to be launched since the exploding Galaxy Note 7 grabbed headlines last year.
Still, we’re expecting big things from the Korean giant. Its last few phones have been best-in-class devices – in fact, until it started exploding, the Note 7 was one of the best phones ever made. The company looks set to continue this trend and recent leaks look very promising indeed.
The next Galaxy device will be unveiled by Samsung on 15 April, according to recent leaks coming out of the hardware firm’s home country, South Korea.
First reported by ET News , the leaks claim the Samsung Galaxy S8 will be revealed at a special event in New York. This tallies with most other rumours, which also put the event’s date at mid-April.
If accurate, the news marks something of a departure from Samsung’s usual pattern. The company has traditionally its announcements to coincide with Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress – although it hasn’t launched a phone at the convention itself for some time.
The rumours also suggest that Samsung will be putting substantial focus on the front-facing camera for the S7’s successor. Adoption of a dual-lens rear camera – a configuration used by manufacturers like Huawei and Apple – was also mooted for the new device, but the idea was supposedly dropped during production.
It has also been suggested that the Galaxy S8 will be the first model to do away with the physical home button, allowing Samsung to fit it with a virtually edgeless display.
This would require the company to relocate the fingerprint sensor to the back of the device, as it’s currently housed in the home button. However, as the S8 is also set to adopt the iris-scanning tech first debuted in the ill-fated Galaxy Note 7, the company may opt to jettison the fingerprint scanner altogether in favour of the newer biometric tech.
Similarly, the Korean OEM may follow in the footsteps of other manufacturers, ditching the headphone jack in favour of a slimmer profile.
None of this is yet confirmed, but further leaks are expected in the run-up to the device’s reveal.
Samsung is slated to reveal the latest iteration of its flagship Galaxy S line on 15 April, according to rumours. The company has announced previous devices at the same time as Mobile World Congress in February, but it’s possible that Samsung wants to announce its new device during a quieter period, rather than competing with other manufacturers for attention.
As for when the device will actually hit shelves, it’s likely to show up around the end of April or early in May. That’s based on previous launches like the Galaxy S7 and Note 7 , which took about two weeks to go from announcement to retail release.
Samsung generally prices its flagship Galaxy phones at around £550 inc VAT, with the fancier ‚Edge‘ variants costing a little bit more. Ordinarily, we’d use this as a basis for predicting the Galaxy S8’s launch price, but rumours that Samsung may be ditching the vanilla, non-Edge versions of its devices altogether complicates this slightly.
If Samsung chooses to make the Galaxy S8 Edge the default option for its new device, we could see the entry-level price rise to between £600 and £650. If the company continues its current trend of releasing both curved and non-curved models, however, expect pricing to be broadly in line with previous years.
Unsurprisingly, Samsung looks set to continue using its own Exynos CPUs in its smartphones, and reports indicate that the Galaxy S8’s processor will be the Exynos 8895 – octa-core chips built with the company’s 10nm FinFET architecture.
Elsewhere, it’s likely to have a minimum of 6GB of RAM, a figure that’s rapidly becoming the standard for this year’s crop of flagship devices. There’s also been talk of the Galaxy S8 having an 8GB memory chip; we’d dismiss this, were it not for the fact that the company manufactures 8GB mobile DRAM modules itself. Still, we’re putting our money on 6GB for now.
Rumours suggest that Samsung will return to a release strategy previously seen with the Galaxy S6, releasing both a Galaxy S8 and a larger Galaxy S8 Plus. The two models are rumoured to have 5.7in and 6.2in screens respectively, but Samsung has supposedly managed to achieve this without making the device footprint any larger than the S7’s.
It’s apparently done this by abandoning the physical home button, opting instead to slash the S8’s screen bezels down to the bone and use software buttons instead. Judging by the extensive leaks that have come courtesy of various case manufacturers, the S8 will be seriously eye-catching, with a front panel that’s virtually all screen.
As with every new phone, there have also been suggestions that the Galaxy S8 will see Samsung make the jump to a 4K display. However, there’s no practical reason to move beyond the current QHD standard.
Not only is a 4K panel excessively power-hungry, there’s very little practical difference in terms of visual fidelity on a screen that size. Considering that Samsung already opted not to make that jump when developing the Note 7, we’d be surprised to see the company do it now.
Speaking of which, all eyes will be on the Galaxy S8’s battery, following the unfortunate debacle which saw Samsung’s last device explode in people’s hands. Power management and safety are certain to be highlighted by Samsung, which will surely be eager to shake the stigma of having had to do a full product recall of all Note 7 units.
This could well result in the Galaxy S8 having a smaller and less powerful battery than previous Samsung devices in the name of safety. While that may disappoint consumers, the company could compensate with more power-efficient internal components, so how much battery life suffers – if at all – remains to be seen.
If Samsung really has ditched the physical home button, the fingerprint sensor will have to be moved, as it currently lives in the home button as well. It will likely be moved to the rear of the device – the spot it occupies on most other phones.
In addition to the now-standard fingerprint scanner, Samsung will could also incorporate iris-scanning biometric authentication technology into its new device. It was first introduced in the ill-fated Note 7, where it worked well, so we’d be surprised if it wasn’t brought over into the company’s main flagship range.
Another feature that looks set to return from the Note 7 is the use of a USB Type-C charging port, rather than MicroUSB. The improved connector standard is rapidly becoming the norm among the industry’s big hitters, and it brings proven advantages over its predecessor.
There are rumblings that Samsung might use the inclusion of a USB C port as an opportunity to do away with the headphone jack, too. Other manufacturers – most recently Apple – have used this tactic in the past, and it could allow Samsung to shave a few precious millimeters off the phone’s profile.
Samsung is jumping on the AI bandwagon this year, and will be including its own Alexa-style digital assistant – named Bixby – into the Galaxy S8. How sophisticated Bixby is remains to be seen – machine learning is the cornerstone of a good AI helper, and we doubt Samsung has enough cloud power or raw data to get Bixby up to the standard of Alexa or the Google Assistant.

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© Source: http://www.itpro.co.uk/smartphones/27416/samsung-galaxy-s8-price-specs-release-date-features-galaxy-s8-launch-set-for-15
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Japan makes it easier to use its high-tech toilets

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NewsHubPlease tell me you understand all these.
Pressing the wrong button on a piece of technology is a rite of passage .
Pressing the wrong button and having streams of water pour hell-for-leather toward your nether regions is, sadly, a rite of passage in some of Japan’s most high-tech restrooms.
It’s not been easy for foreigners to decide which button does what in toilets that go far beyond the standard flush .
The nation’s sanitation industry has, therefore, pulled together to get foreigners out of the mess they’ve been creating.
The Japanese Restroom Industry Association has just emitted a press release in which it announced a standardization of the often complex and contradictory signs that have adorned its toilets.
The toilets we’re talking about aren’t the usual basic things. They’re known as „washlets“ and they’re full of exciting options. Sadly, some of those options made foreign users appear overly excited when they emerged. The signs, you see, didn’t seem to make obvious sense.
Should you have never enjoyed a washlet, here are just some of the high-tech options they offer: lift the seat, put it down, long flush, short flush, heated seats, front and rear bidet and, naturally, hot-air drying.
Japan is deeply motivated to please foreigners because it will host the Rugby World Cup in 2019 and the Olympics in 2020.
It’s bad enough hosting foreigners who have no idea how to hold chopsticks and ask for french fries with their teriyaki. The standardized icons might keep them from also coming back from the restroom looking like they’ve had an accident with a very large bottle of soy sauce.
As the press release puts it, Japan is keen on „communicating the ‚clean toilet culture‘ to people all over the world. “
I’m sure you know of several restrooms that could use Japan’s clean toilet culture. Several people, too.

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© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/japan-high-tech-toilets-standardized-signage-icons/
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Judge rejects arrest warrant for Samsung heir

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NewsHubLee Jae-yong, Samsung’s de facto leader, remains a suspect in the investigation into a huge political corruption scandal that has rocked South Korea.
Prosecutors are accusing him of bribery, embezzlement and perjury. They say Lee, who’s also known as Jay Y. Lee, paid tens of millions of dollars to win government support for a controversial merger that helped tighten his grip on the country’s biggest conglomerate.
After hearing arguments from both sides on Wednesday, Seoul Central District Court Judge Cho Eui-yeon said early Thursday he was turning down the request to have Lee detained, citing a lack of evidence.
Prosecutors said they were were disappointed with the judge’s decision, but will „steadily“ pursue their investigation into the widening corruption scandal.
Related: South Korea’s long history of light sentences for business leaders
Lee, who was questioned for 22 hours last week, has denied any wrongdoing. Samsung also disputes the bribery allegations. It said in a statement Thursday that the case against Lee „can now be determined without the need for detention. “
Many South Koreans slammed the decision on social media, accusing the judge of giving Lee lenient treatment. Within hours of the decision, the top two trending terms on Twitter in South Korea were „rejection of warrant“ and „Judge Cho Eui-yeon. “
Prosecutors accuse Lee and Samsung of providing 43 billion won ($36.3 million) to organizations linked to a confidante of President Park Geun-hye in return for government backing of a contentious merger of two Samsung affiliates in 2015.
South Korea’s National Pension Service provided vital support for the deal, which enabled Lee to increase control over Samsung Electronics ( SSNLF ) and helped pave the way for him to potentially succeed his ailing father as chairman of Samsung Group.
Related: South Korean prosecutors seek to arrest Samsung heir
Earlier this week, National Pension Service chief Moon Hyung-pyo was indicted on charges of perjury and abuse of power. He’s accused of pressuring the fund to support the Samsung merger when he was minister of health and welfare.
Lee and Moon’s cases are part of the far-reaching scandal that has driven hundreds of thousands of South Korean protestors to the streets and prompted lawmakers to vote to impeach Park. Other top South Korean companies are also under investigation.
Samsung’s links to the corruption investigation have done further damage to the company’s image after the humiliating fiasco over its fire-prone Galaxy Note 7 smartphone last year. Results of an investigation into what caused the smartphones to catch fire are expected to be announced this month.
Lee, who’s 48 years old, isn’t the first South Korean business leader to face accusations of corruption, and he probably won’t be the last. His father, Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee, was convicted twice — and pardoned twice. Prosecutors have raided the offices of other big conglomerates in the country as part of the investigation.
Top business leaders are so frequently accused of corruption in South Korea that „it’s almost a rite of passage,“ said David Kang, director of the University of California’s Korean Studies Institute.
— Stella Ko contributed to this report.

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Trump's presidency makes banning nuclear weapons more urgent

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NewsHubDr. Ira Helfand is a past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and currently serves as the co-president of PSR’s global federation, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1985. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN) Shortly before noon on Friday a military aide will enter the Capitol with President Obama carrying a leather-covered aluminum briefcase with the information and equipment needed to launch nuclear war. Precisely at noon, control of that briefcase will pass to a man who has been described by scores of security experts in his own party as lacking the judgment, temperament and knowledge to command nuclear weapons.
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