Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak has said Moscow will support Iran to counter US oil sanctions.
Washington on Friday restored sanctions on Tehran, which had previously been lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal.
The measures are due to come into effect on Monday.
In an interview with the British Financial Times newspaper, Novak said that Russia is looking to continue trading Iranian crude oil beyond the Monday cut-off.
“We believe we should look for mechanisms that would allow us to continue developing cooperation with our partners, with Iran,” Novak told the FT.
Under a 2014 oil-for-goods deal, Moscow sells Iranian oil to third parties while Tehran uses the revenues from those sales to pay for Russian goods and services.
The Russian energy ministry told the FT that the trade would continue next week, while Novak said that Moscow considered the US sanctions to be “illegal”.
“We already live in the condition of sanctions,” he said. “We do not recognise the sanctions introduced unilaterally without the United Nations, we consider those methods illegal per se.”
Covering Iran’s shipping, financial and energy sectors, the sanctions are the second set to be re-imposed by the Trump administration since it unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal in May.
The 2015 deal, which also included Britain, China, France, Russia, Germany and the European Union as signatories, gave Iran relief from sanctions in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear programme.
While Trump has taken the US out of the deal, the other parties have strongly defended it and pledged to try and protect the agreement.
Britain, Germany, France and the EU have announced plans to establish a “special purpose” financial vehicle that would allow trade between Europe and Iran to continue, although it will not be ready by Monday.
The Europeans said on Friday they “deeply regret” the re-imposition of sanctions and would work to ensure legitimate trade with Iran could continue.
“Our collective resolve to complete this work is unwavering,” they said in a joint statement.
The US on Friday said that eight countries would receive temporary waivers that would allow them to continue to import Iranian petroleum products for a limited time.
The waivers, which are valid for six months, were for countries that could not fully end their imports of Iranian oil before Monday’s deadline, the US said.
Want live TV over the internet? Today you have several options, including Hulu, YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, and more. It’s hard to remember, though, but there was a time when there were virtually no options for consumers who wanted to cut the cord. Sure, services like Netflix and Vudu provided plenty of titles on demand, but current content was scattered across myriad websites and services, and it didn’t do a good job of replicating the TV experience.
Then Sling TV came along. Launched by satellite powerhouse Dish Network in January 2015, Sling TV wasn’t the first over-the-top (OTT) video service, but it was the first to get it right, both in terms of user experience and offerings. It made deals to package several popular TV channels live over the internet, including — crucially — ESPN. Since then it’s expanded in terms of both content and features, now offering dozens of channels, a cloud DVR, and even its own streaming box, the AirTV Player.
Jimshade Chaudhari, Sling TV’s vice president, product marketing and management
Image: Dish Network
One of the key people behind the service is Jimshade Chaudhari, Sling TV’s vice president of product marketing and management. Chaudhari dropped by Mashable’s MashTalk podcast for a to dive deep into the state of internet TV, discussing how Sling differentiates from the now-crowded playing field, whether we’ll ever get rid of program guides, and why everything isn’t just on demand already?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Pete Pachal: How long have you been with Dish?
Jimshade Chaudhari: About eight years. I started on the Dish side of the business, and then moved over to Sling back in 2015 when we launched.
PP: Were you involved with the launch?
JC: I was involved with the launch. At that point, I was on the Dish side, I was working on our TV Everywhere services, which was how you were able to view your content online and mobile devices. That was one of the precursors [to Sling TV] along with another service we had called DishWorld which was actually a live streaming service that focused on international content. That’s what morphed into what people know today as Sling TV.
I didn’t know that. OK, so DishWorld, that was more targeted at people who wanted to see international content here in the States?
Correct. So you probably weren’t the target demographic.
I wasn’t looking for Russian soccer games or whatever they’re doing. Obviously [Sling TV and DishWorld] very different products. What translated?
A lot of it was the technology. This was a product that was available on Samsung TVs and on Roku devices. It was an app, like Sling TV is an app. We learned a little bit about consumer behavior there, but a lot of it was really kicking the tires on the technology. The internet was never designed for streaming live video content.
I think most people assume, because of the name “Sling,” that “Oh this grew out of the Slingbox.
As people in the industry, we’re all familiar with Slingbox. The masses really weren’t familiar with Slingbox. Sling was a new name for them. We’ve actually turned it into a verb, right? If you’ve seen our latest commercials we have a concept called “slinging” where how people are cutting the cord and adopting the slinging lifestyle right, getting the freedom and choice that comes with watching video on Sling TV versus their traditional paid TV provider.
Slingbox allowed you to have some freedom and control of your viewing experience even when you’re outside your home, which is a lot of what Sling TV allows people to do. Even though the technology is very different — there’s no hardware [with Sling TV] — but the concept of being able to take your content with you on the go was similar between Slingbox and Sling TV.
It was a revolutionary idea at the time. Everyone thought of it as the dream, but no one quite knew how to do it, ’cause it seemed dangerous. Basically nobody wanted to get sued, but [Slingbox] seemed to figure out how to thread that needle in a way and get at least people talking about this, influencers talking about this. Like, “Hey, why can’t we figure this out?” and they helped chart this path.
They were ahead of their time in terms of seeing where consumer engagement with video is going. Consumer needs and wants were evolving, people wanted to access content outside of their home, and even outside of their local territory. One of the big use cases back then for Slingbox was watching your local sports team when you weren’t in the same state or the same city
But that was a completely different hardware-based solution. Unless you were really a geeky early adopter, you didn’t know what Slingbox was. At a consumer electronics show, we would have a couple hardcore Slingbox fans come to us and say, “Oh is this the next evolution.” We’re like, “No, this is much better.”
How big is Sling TV now?
We were the first ones out the gate back in 2015. We basically defined a live OTT streaming space, and we’re still the leader. We have 2.344 million customers as of last quarter.
Do you measure that as active users, or subscribers?
Paying subscribers. A couple services are close to a million; a lot of services are much lower than a million. We have people using our app across all the popular platforms that are out there from Roku to Amazon to Xbox, etc. Obviously we were at zero back in 2015 — to get to over two million is pretty substantial growth for us.
This space is still really nascent. A lot of people, they’ve heard the term “cord cutting,” but don’t really know what that means or how to do it. A lot of our time has been educating people on, what is cord cutting? What is Sling TV? What are the options out there that aren’t traditional? And the competition actually helps from that standpoint.
What would you say are Sling TV’s main points of differentiation from major players like PlayStation Vue, Hulu, YouTube TV, and others?
What we’ve seen is a lot of [competitors] have replicated the model of traditional paid TV. There’s a big, bigger, biggest bundle, and you have to pay for a lot of channels that you’re not watching.
We’ve actually completely changed that paradigm. What we do is we offer people the opportunity to come in and buy a base pack. We have two base packs called Orange and Blue that are $25, but then if you’re a sports fan, you can add on a sports pack. If you’re a news junkie, you can add on the news pack. You don’t have to pay for channels that you’re not watching. It’s not the big, bigger, biggest bundle, which a lot of the other players in the space have taken.
We offer our cloud DVR to our customers, but we don’t include it with everyone because we don’t want to charge everyone and raise the price. For the people who really want that, they can pay for it. If you don’t want it, you don’t have to pay for it, and you can still pay that $25 price.
So you can customize the service so you’re not wasting money on something that you never use.
A lot of people, you hear, “Hey I’m paying for 100 channels, but I’m watching seven of them.” And people’s needs change based on seasonality. Football season right now is a huge season for us — you see a ton of people adding the sports pack. Once football goes away and maybe Game of Thrones comes on or Walking Dead is back, we see people shifting packages and different extras and add-ons based on the time of year. It’s that control: Don’t be locked into things that you don’t care about.
Is that how the slogan came about? I see it on the app it’s “À la carte TV.”
Letting you pick and choose what’s most important to you, and give you that control back — you don’t see that with other services. The tagline something we’ve used for a couple years, but it’s really based on the control and that choice.
Do you get nitpickers going, “Well it’s not really ‘à la carte’ because I can’t actually go down to the channel level and pick this and that?
There’s a minority of people who say, “True à la carte would be I would pay for every single channel I wanted.” From a consumer perspective, people fail to realize sometimes that by going on a channel-by-channel basis, your aggregate amount that you would pay might be more than what you get as a discount with a bundle. Honestly, where we are from an industry perspective, we are the closest thing to à la carte TV.
Do you think we’ll ever get to true à la carte as a thing at least as an option?
I wouldn’t say never, but I don’t see it in the near future.
When you do an over-the-top live service, how do you think [about apps] differently? What are some fundamental first principles that you come in with?
One thing I want to clarify: Sling is definitely a live OTT streaming service, but we also have 80,000 on-demand assets. There’s a paradigm for on-demand streaming services like Netflix, but we are the first one that was combining live and on-demand into the same application, and so one of the trickiest parts was how do you do that?
There’s, if you think about Netflix or on-demand applications, you just see carousels of content and you browse through thumbnails. So when we first launched, we were focused on cord-nevers — people who had never paid for traditional paid TV — and we thought they would skew younger were used to the browsing experience of on-demand content. So, we created a home screen called MyTV and we made everything kind of thumbnail based.
Then what we realized was those people found value in our service but we were getting a lot of people that were cord-cutters. They were used to traditional paid TV, and what we kept hearing was, “I just want a guide.” Even though the grid guide has been around for a really long time, that habit is so strong in people that that’s where they gravitated towards.
So about a year later we launched a grid guide. And honestly, I was shocked at the fanfare we got on social media. But that’s how traditional paid TV customers find content.
Is there like a killer feature that you hold up for reluctant cord-cutters?
Well, it’s usually not a feature that begins that conversation. It’s cost. When they realize the amount of money that they’ll save and that they’ll have the same content that they had before, but they have the flexibility of choosing what device they want to watch it on and not having to pay a device fee every month, that’s usually the thing that gets them really interested.
What are the average cost savings for someone cutting the cord? Because the thing is with all this cord-cutting, you’re still paying for your broadband internet.
It’s a tricky number to throw out there because it really depends on the situation. The way I would think about broadband is you’re going to have broadband regardless if you had an OTT streaming service or not.
True, but you also got to factor in the triple-play packages. If you do traditional cable, it’s only whatever, $50, $60 more to get everything.
You’re right — the triple play, the quadruple play for a lot of people, they discount video very heavily because they make all their money on broadband. But at the end of the day for a consumer, the video component of it like with Sling, we make it easy to drop in and out based on seasonality. So you’re probably not paying the same fixed cost.
If you think of how people are cobbling together like their OTT solution, they’ll take a service like Sling and then they’ll complement it with a service like Netflix, or they might sign up for a service that’s more seasonal. When Game of Thrones comes around, they might just sign up for HBO and then they might drop it. So their bill isn’t fixed.
So in terms of a savings, like I said, coming up with a accurate number is tough because it depends on what your needs are, or if you have a household that has different interests. But from a typical cable and satellite bill that’s north of $100, $120 to coming down to $25, that’s a pretty big savings. But like you said, the internet has to be factored into that.
One of the big selling points of Sling TV is it’s cross-platform. It’s on everything. I’ve got to think like to make sure the user experience is good on all those platforms is a nightmare.
It’s not an easy problem to solve. To your point, there’s a lot of fragmentation. We’re on 15 different platforms. We try to reuse common code wherever possible and try to put more of the logic into the back-end of the systems so that clients are a little bit lighter on the different devices, but it’s definitely a challenge.
From a customer experience standpoint, what we’ve seen is a lot of our customers that watch on a Roku device, they’ll also watch on mobile, but they’re not going to watch on a Roku and another 10-foot device like an Amazon. So consistency for the sake of the consistency is not that important to us. It’s really more important that people should always know that they’re in a Sling experience.
So, the content is the same across devices. The way you access your Cloud DVR is the same. The tabs that we have or the sections of the app are the same. So if customers, there’s no learning curve from going from one device to another.
How do you think about voice?
Voice is going to be important, but it hasn’t been optimized for a video experience. We’ve seen some experiences launch and if you’re watching video you can say “Pause” or “Fast Forward.” Or if you’re thinking about a carousel of content, picking up your remote and hitting the D-pad two or three times to get to the right versus saying “Next Item, next item, next item.” So, we think, look, voice is catching on, but it still needs to be optimized for that video experience.
I think Search is probably the best use case for it. Typing with the remote in a virtual keyboard is painful. Voice is a much easier input. Voice is going to be important for us; we just don’t think it’s at a point right now where it’s one of our top priorities.
I want to get your perspective on cloud DVRs. They’re great, but if you think about it for a couple of minutes, you think, “Why isn’t everything just on the DVR?” Why is it, once something’s broadcast, it’s not just on a cloud DVR as an on-demand asset to everybody?
The way a cloud DVR legally has to work isn’t the most efficient because we have to keep a single copy for every user that’s recorded it. And that’s not a technological issue, that’s just a legal copyright issue.There’s definitely more efficient ways to do it. On-demand rights are very different than getting live rights and so. In an ideal world, everything’s on demand, and you wouldn’t have to record things.
The fact that if you watch something on demand you can’t fast forward through commercials and on a DVR you can. It’s less about the technology limitations and it’s more about the content rights and legal implications around a cloud DVR. So, do I think it’s gonna change? Maybe, but a cloud DVR’s still a relatively new concept, and people have implemented it in different ways. So, we’ll have to see how it kinda shakes out.
Have there been any other surprising insights you’ve gotten from your customers?
One of the things that was, I think, a little bit shocking to us was there’s so much talk in the industry about “mobile first.” Everything’s mobile first, everybody wants to be mobile first.
We realized, is people still watch a lot of their TV at home. They gravitate towards the biggest screen that’s available to them. So, if they’re on the go and they have their mobile device, they wanna watch on mobile because they don’t have another option, but when they get home, they gravitate towards the largest device.
So even though we see a ton of “snacking” on mobile — watching snippets of the end of the news or the end of the game — a majority of our viewership is still on a big 10-foot device. And that was a little bit contrary to what we thought originally.
When you’re on a phone, I think the whole idea of what you’re competing with completely changes. You’re not just competing with Hulu and YouTube anymore; you’re competing with Candy Crush and your email app and all of the attention you’re giving this device and whatever notifications are popping down from your top bar. How do you think about the mobile platform today?
For us, it’s table stakes. You can’t be a service right now and not have a mobile application, we see a lot of our acquisition come from the mobile device. Completely agree with you that there’s a 100 different things you could be doing on your phone and you’re competing for someone’s free time at that point, but to us, the mobile’s just another screen. We wanna be wherever people are watching video.
So what happens when Apple gets into this space?
We’re on Amazon devices and Amazon’s dabbling in video. Roku has a free, ad-supported thing. Almost every device partner that’s a partner of ours is also trying something out in video. Obviously Apple has huge scale, they’re making deals, they’re doing original content, they’ve brought a lot of key personnel over there.
We still have a very unique service because the set of content rights that we got in order to create the smaller packages and those add-on packages; it’s something no one’s been able to replicate. Whether that’s YouTube TV or Hulu or DirecTV, the differentiator is how we’ve been able to creatively package the content. So it’d be really interesting to see how Apple comes out. They obviously have a huge install base, and they make great products. I don’t see them as a direct competitor of what Sling TV’s doing.
What does the future hold for Sling TV?
We’re seeing more and more people wanna watch video in spaces that we didn’t naturally think of, a lot of talk around AR and VR right now, right, with the Magic Leaps and Oculus and things of that sort. It’ll be really interesting to see how that kind of plays out and if that becomes a primary consumption habit, you can expect Sling to have a great experience there.
Or as cars get smarter and more autonomous, I mean what are the drivers gonna do, right? They’re either gonna be doing something productive or they’re gonna entertain themselves and just what’s that video experience look like in a smart car or autonomous car?
So really for us, it’s chasing the evolving customer trends around video consumption. As connectivity gets better, as screens get more pervasive and things, you can expect we will follow the consumer needs and wants to create a great experience for those verticals.
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Toronto Raptors small forward Kawhi Leonard left Friday’s 107-98 win over the Phoenix Suns at Talking Stick Resort Arena late in the fourth quarter because of a jammed foot.
According to The Athletic’s Blake Murphy, head coach Nick Nurse downplayed the severity of the injury.
However minor, this is yet another injury concern for the 6’7″, 230-pound forward. He has averaged just 57 regular-season games through the last six years, topping out at 74 in 2016-17. Of course, he was limited to just nine games last season because of a quad injury.
When healthy, Leonard is one of the best two-way players in the world. He’s a two-time All-Star, a two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year and the 2014 Finals MVP. Not only that, but he was only getting better with each passing season.
Prior to an injury-plagued 2017-18, Leonard’s scoring average steadily increased all the way to a career-high 25.5 points per game in 2016-17. He also has career averages of 6.2 rebounds, 2.3 assists and 1.8 steals per game entering this season. And to top it all off, he has shot 49.5 percent from the floor and 38.6 percent from three-point range in his career.
Entering Friday night, Leonard was averaging 27.3 points, 7.8 rebounds, 3.2 assists and 2.0 steals over his first six games in Toronto.
The Raptors will be off Saturday before they return to the floor Sunday at Staples Center against LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers. But considering Leonard still isn’t playing in back-to-backs, it wouldn’t be a major stunner to see him sit out that game with a showdown against the Utah Jazz on tap Monday evening.
Defence minister Hatami said the aircraft programme was motivated by memories of air strikes by Iraq in the 1980s [Iranian Presidency/AFP]
Iran has started mass-producing its locally designed Kowsar fighter plane, state television reported.
“Soon the needed number of this plane will be produced and put at the service of the Air Force,” Defence Minister Amir Hatami said on Saturday at a ceremony launching the plane’s production, which was shown on television.
Iran unveiled the Kowsar domestic fighter jet in August with President Hassan Rouhani saying Tehran’s military strength was only designed to deter enemies and aimed at creating “lasting peace”.
State media said the new jet had “advanced avionics” and multi-purpose radar, and it was “100-percent indigenously made” for the first time.
Footage of the Kowsar’s test flights was circulated by various official media. But live footage of the plane taxiing along a runway at the defence show was cut before it took off.
Iran unveiled the jet at a defence show in the capital Tehran in August [Iranian Presidency/AFP]
At its inauguration in August, Hatami said the aircraft programme was motivated by memories of air strikes Iran suffered during its eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, and by repeated threats from Israel and the United States that “all options are on the table” in dealing with Iran.
“We have learned in the [Iran-Iraq] war that we cannot rely on anyone but ourselves. Our resources are limited and we are committed to establishing security at a minimum cost,” he said in a televised interview.
The US has sold hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to Iran’s regional rivals, but has demanded that Tehran curb its defence programmes, and is in the process of reimposing crippling sanctions in a bid to force its capitulation.
Rouhani said Iran must show restraint as well as deterrence, in an apparent swipe at his hardline opponents who seek to provoke the US with aggressive slogans.
“With a couple of sentences one can start a fight. With a couple of military moves one can enter confrontation. But then it will be costly,” he said. “The skill is to protect the country with minimum cost.”
Following the withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal in May, Iran has avoided an aggressive response and sought to maintain its good will with other international partners who oppose Washington’s move.
Rouhani said US pressure was also a spur to action.
“Why does America impose economic sanctions on us? … Why does it drag China into an economic war? Because it feels each one of them has a weak point. We must fix our weak points.”
The Kowsar domestic fighter jet is a fourth-generation fighter, featuring “advanced avionics” and multi-purpose radar [Iranian Defence Ministry/AFP]
After spending two games in the starting lineup, Melo moved back to the bench and erupted for a season-high 28 points on 9-of-12 shooting in the Houston Rockets‘ 119-111 win over the Brooklyn Nets at Barclays Center.
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Anthony also drained six of his nine attempts from beyond the arc as the Rockets snapped a four-game losing streak to improve to 2-5.
When Diablo Immortal was revealed at BlizzCon on Friday, I thought it looked cool.
A lot of people disagreed, and immediately began complaining both online and in-person about this apparent slight, this bastardization of “their” franchise, this complete abandonment of rational thought by a company that routinely creates some of the best and most successful games to ever exist.
Well guess what, you entitled crybabies. I played Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon shortly after it was revealed, and it’s a lot of fun.
Take a look at the gameplay trailer, which shows off some classic bloody Diablo action set against the gothic world of Sanctuary that fans have hacked and slashed through countless times.
The boss fights look interesting, the levels look more dynamic than ever before, and, to be frank, I like the Diablo Immortal aesthetic more than I like Diablo 3‘s aesthetic.
I got my hands on the demo of it and blasted through the levels with a Barbarian, and then I did it again with a Wizard. It was a blast — the controls are simple and laid out very well, the action feels like classic Diablo, and the level design had a great foreboding feel to it. And this is coming from someone who is generally not a fan of touch controls.
Some of the beauty of the Diablo franchise is that it’s pretty easy to navigate, and that simple movement system translates very well to mobile with Diablo Immortal.
You move around by using a digital analog “stick” on the left side of the screen, while all your abilities are arranged on the right side of the screen. It’s pretty similar to how the game works with a console controller. And it feels just as intuitive and easy.
The Wizard fighting against a big ol’ demon.
Image: blizzard entertainment
And yet, without even giving the game a shot, tons of people are pissed at Blizzard for daring to make a new Diablo game. Just look at the replies to any recent tweets from the Diablo Twitter account.
I am a hugeDiablo fan. A lot of people who are Mad Online about Diablo Immortal claim to be fans of the franchise too.
Grow up.
So why are they mad that there’s a new Diablo game?
Because it’s on mobile.
People immediately lashed out, calling the announcement a joke because they think the game is inherently bad and will surely be full of micro-transactions that chip away at the integrity of the series.
People are also mad that Blizzard didn’t announce new content for Diablo 3 and didn’t announce Diablo 4, the latter of which the company expressly said it wasn’t going to reveal.
So I just have one thing to say to people who are mad that Blizzard, employing a team that wasn’t even working on the main Diablo franchise, made a new Diablo game: Grow up.
You are entitled to nothing. Game companies owe you nothing. You don’t just get to have whatever you want and then throw a tantrum when your own personal dreams don’t come true. Blizzard hasn’t abandoned the core Diablo franchise just because it created a mobile game.
Do you get mad when Blizzard announces a World of Warcraft update when you were hoping for a Warcraft 4? No, because you understand that those two things would be made by two different teams and Blizzard isn’t obligated to make you a new real-time strategy Warcraft game.
From what I saw and played, Diablo Immortal is a fun, quality Diablo game that retains that special something that makes the franchise so special. You don’t have to play it, but whining online makes you sound like a literal infant.
With the summer acquisition of LeBron James, Walton and the Lakers clearly face higher expectations than last year’s 35-win squad. The early results have been mixed, as the Lakers have competed in every game but fallen short more often than not.
But blaming Walton is premature. After losing on opening night in Portland to the Trail Blazers, the team fell at home to the Houston Rockets in a game that saw Brandon Ingram and Rajon Rondo throw punches with Chris Paul. All three were suspended, throwing Walton’s rotation into turmoil without Ingram for four games and Rondo for three.
The rotation remains a bit of a mess, but understandably so. The team wasn’t initially ready to start Lonzo Ball as he worked his way back from knee surgery. Rondo’s days off hastened that inevitable switch.
Ingram’s suspension stifled Walton’s ability to use the Lakers’ version of the “death lineup” with Kyle Kuzma, Josh Hart, James, Ball and Ingram. That group has played all of four minutes together all season.
A lack of production from the team’s initial starting shooting guard, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, hasn’t helped matters. The veteran guard is shooting just 22.2 percent from three-point range while averaging 5.9 points a game.
Walton quickly benched him for Hart, and with Ingram back from suspension and Kuzma thriving as a starter, Caldwell-Pope is behind both Ingram and Hart in the rotation.
But these are normal issues for a coach who is working in new players. Walton needs to settle into a primary rotation while remaining flexible enough to adjust to matchups, foul trouble and injuries. Lack of cohesion has contributed to the team’s slow start defensively, but some of the issues are above Walton’s pay grade.
Johnson, along with general manager Rob Pelinka, didn’t bring back last year’s starting center, Brook Lopez. They had the restricted rights to Julius Randle but released him to sign with the New Orleans Pelicans, where he’s averaging 18.3 points and 7.6 rebounds a game.
The Lakers are missing exactly what Randle brought last year: a big who scores, rebounds, switches and can contest smaller guards defensively.
Johnson and Pelinka prioritized star-chasing with cap room next summer over a better roster this season. That may be the right decision if they land another superstar, but in the short term that doesn’t help Walton.
Instead, he’s relying on an undrafted rookie on a two-way contract in Johnathan Williams to fill valuable minutes. Under the circumstances, Williams has performed well, but Randle, Lopez or a true veteran backup center would help the Lakers tremendously.
Imagine the Lakers with Minnesota’s Taj Gibson off the bench or Phoenix Suns center Tyson Chandler to back up JaVale McGee.
Walton doesn’t have anyone like that, so he’s asking McGee to carry the team as the defensive anchor for 27.1 minutes a game (almost triple the time from his stint last year with the Golden State Warriors) and then playing small ball with Kuzma or James at center (if not Williams).
None of this is to suggest Walton is blameless or beyond reproach. Johnson needs to carefully evaluate every aspect of the franchise to get it back on a winning course. But it’s also important he doesn’t react emotionally to a situation he helped create while implementing his long-term vision for the Lakers.
According to Tania Ganguli of the Los Angeles Times, Walton’s position is secure:
Tania Ganguli @taniaganguli
Magic Johnson was angry in the meeting he had with Luke Walton (first reported by @wojespn and @mcten) but he doesn’t make rash decisions. Several sources told me and @BA_Turner that Luke Walton’s job is not in danger. Further, ownership still very much believes in him.
Brad Turner, also of the Los Angeles Times, tweeted more detailed criticism of Walton and the team’s offense:
Brad Turner @BA_Turner
Sources close to Magic said he was stern with Luke Walton during the meeting more about not having a system in place than the wins and losses. Magic wants to see Luke have the Lakers run an offense that he has yet to see. Sources said that maybe the meeting opened Luke’s eyes.
To that end, Johnson would have a point. The Lakers seem to be treating James like Kobe Bryant in end-game situations, giving him the ball and getting out of the way.
It’s not ideal for a team to play with ball movement and pace for most of the game only to revert to isolation ball in the closing minutes.
This is an area Walton needs to improve. Against the Mavericks, the team went to Ingram for late-game scores. While they were unsuccessful on those possessions (the Lakers held on to win), getting the ball out of James’ hands is an important step toward making the team’s offense less predictable.
So far, James has been publicly supportive of Walton, but he’s been known to speak up when he doesn’t trust his coach (Erik Spoelstra, David Blatt, etc.). Should the All-Star forward lose faith in Walton, that would certainly impact the front office’s view on the coach.
Regardless, don’t expect opponents to go easy on the Lakers while they learn how to play together. The Western Conference is extremely competitive. A handful of losses in November could have significant implications in April.
In the aftermath of his 50-point outing Wednesday against the Utah Jazz, Rose told ESPN.com’s Nick Friedell he’s keeping his sights set on continued on-court excellence:
“I’m making history right now. Like every time I touch the court is history. That’s how I feel about it right. And I feel like my fans and the people that watch, they can relate in some way. I mean the people that really care about me. You have people that talk s–t here and there but they’re the ones that that’s following my story and the ones that’s writing about my story. So who cares what they say. They just got to keep watching and keep writing.”
Rose also reiterated his main individual goal this season is to win the Sixth Man of the Year award while evolving into a veteran leader who can “help the young guys mature and grow and see how far this team can go” amid the club’s ongoing Jimmy Butler saga.
The 2011 NBA MVP also addressed his ongoing legal proceedings.
In October 2016, he and two friends were found not liable in a civil suit filed by a woman who said they gang-raped her in 2013. She filed an appeal that isscheduled to be heard on Nov. 16.
Rose said:
“I have a team. I don’t have to appear in court. I have a team set up where my best friends are going on my behalf. And I’m able to focus on the season, so I don’t have to worry about that. I wish her nothing but the best. I hope that she’s happy. But other than that I’m focusing on basketball and where I’m at. I’m being mindful of where I’m at right now and my career.”
Twitter has reportedly purged more than 10,000 bot accounts for attempts at discouraging voting.
According to a new report in Reuters, Twitter removed the accounts, which were automatically posting “misleading” messages about voting, in September and October.
The accounts made it appear as if the misleading information was coming from Democrats, which it was not. The accounts were reported to Twitter by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which is one of many organizations that has partnered with Twitter on election integrity efforts.
In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson said some accounts had been removed, but declined to say how many:
“For the election this year we have established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, DHS, and campaign organizations from both major parties,” the spokesperson said. “Our singular goal is to enforce our policies vigorously and protect conversational health on our service. We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion — a violation of our policies. We stopped this quickly and at its source.”
Even so, a removal of 10,000 accounts isn’t huge by Twitter standards. The company, which has undertaken a concerted effort to crack down on bots and spam, has removed as many as 1 million accounts per day, according to reports. But it does show that Twitter is taking the spread of misinformation in the run-up to the U.S. midterm elections more seriously than it has previously.
I regret to inform you that a living, breathing human being really went out and paid money to get Gritty tattooed on his ass.
25-year-old James Kirn has been a Flyers fan his whole life, but he took his dedication to the demonic NHL mascot to a whole new level by getting the bright orange horror permanently inked onto his left cheek. Gritty’s terrifying grin, fiery fur, and unfocused eyeballs will grace Kirn’s body forever — or until he gets it lasered off.
Here’s a slightly NSFW/not safe for life itself picture of the tattoo that will probably make you reconsider where we are in human history.
Kirn told Vice Sports that he was originally supposed to get Gritty tattoos with a friend after “quite a few” beers — weird display of friendship, but OK — but the friend backed out.
“And the next thing I know I’m face down getting my ass tattooed,” he said in the interview.
Apparently his brother and sister loved the idea so much, it inspired them to get the Phillie Phanatic and Sixers mascot tatted on their respective butts. His 13-year-old brother wants to get the Eagles mascot inked on his behind when he’s of age, and the siblings have plans to take a twisted group photo.
It sets the standard for family Christmas cards.
The impulse ink cost him a whopping $300. Kirn could have had 30 Chipotle burrito bowls, before taxes, and instead he spent it getting Gritty immortalized on his flesh.
When asked if he thinks he’ll regret it, Kirn insisted he would be fine with the tattoo.
“No, no. I’ve already committed to the fact that it’s on there forever,” he said. “So no, I don’t care.”
![Defence minister Hatami said the aircraft programme was motivated by memories of air strikes by Iraq in the 1980s [Iranian Presidency/AFP]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/8/21/aacf1411f0e640f6ad490bdbb9c16dc5_18.jpg "Iran starts mass-producing locally designed Kowsar fighter jet")
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about Diablo Immortal claim to be fans of the franchise too. 
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Daily Trends Hunter 