People can’t help but make jokes about the richest couple in the world splitting up.
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos announced their divorce on Wednesday, after 25 years of marriage and attaining a $137 billion net worth. And while ending a marriage is undoubtedly an unhappy experience for their family, Twitter users started making Amazon-themed jokes about the couple’s end.
Some poked fun at Amazon’s mildly terrifying targeted ads.
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos have decided to “consciously unsubscribe” from each other’s lives but are “committed to co-parenting their Alexa and Kindles.”
“I’m still thankful, and I thank God every day,” Mebane said. “We’re taking it one day at a time.”
Mebane took a two-week break in December following Makenna’s birth. He told Ricky Henne of the Chargers’ official site that Makenna was born a month premature.
He also said an ultrasound in July showed Makenna had trisomy 13, a heart defect. Mebane’s wife and two children had been living in Omaha, Nebraska, to be close to a heart specialist who could cater to Makenna’s needs.
When she was born, Mebane told Henne that Makenna developed necrotizing enterocolitis, a stomach infection.
The Chargers play the New England Patriots on Sunday in the AFC divisional round. Mebane said he plans on playing in that game, per Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times.
United States President Donald Trump is refusing to give up his signature campaign promise of building a wall along the country’s border with Mexico.
But Democrats won’t give him the more than $5bn he wants to build it.
The stalemate has led to the second-longest partial US government shutdown in history.
In response, Trump went on prime-time television on Tuesday to argue that the barrier is needed to stop what he calls a growing humanitarian and security crisis.
“If I am getting comments and contact from my constituents expressing concern that the Democrats are not prioritizing security, then I think we can do better,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger said. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
Some members in the new class of House Democrats are concerned with the party’s strategy.
Freshman House Democrats are ready to shut down the shutdown.
The new class of 60-plus members has been in Congress for less than week only to see the partial government shutdown consume the Capitol and grind nearly everything else to a halt — including action on their campaign promises to overhaul Washington and deliver for voters back home.
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Now, as the shutdown drags into Day 19, the frustration is starting to reach a tipping point for some who fear the prolonged stalemate could do real political damage in vulnerable Democratic districts.
“If I am getting comments and contact from my constituents expressing concern that the Democrats are not prioritizing security, then I think we can do better,” said freshman Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.).
Spanberger, who sits in a district won by President Donald Trump, spoke up at a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday morning to warn Democrats were losing the messaging war in her district and needed to be more clear about the kind of border security measures they support.
Democrats remain largely united behind their leadership’s shutdown strategy of refusing to negotiate with Trump on his border wall demand and pressuring Senate Republicans to take up House-passed bills to open up the government. But the first fissures are starting to show.
The freshmen arranged an impromptu 90-minute meeting over the weekend at a retreat in rural Virginia because several new members were “freaking out” about the ongoing shutdown and the party’s strategy, according to aDemocratic source who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
“I don’t think that it’s the Democrats in the House’s fault that we are in a shutdown,” said Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who attended the huddle in Williamsburg, Va., and is one of two freshman class presidents. “But I do think it’s setting us back in terms of those coalitions we’re trying to build.”
One senior Democratic lawmaker who talked to multiple freshmen after the meeting said there is “a lot of drama” within the class about how to handle the shutdown.
“Do they stay in Washington or do they leave? Does our leadership understand that they’re getting blamed? Do they take their pay or do they give it back?” said the senior Democrat, explaining conversations with freshmen in recent days. “You have a very active freshman class. [And] leadership itself doesn’t agree on how to proceed. …what bills to bring up, what order to bring them up.”
A senior Democratic aide tried to downplay the tension, saying part of the reason new members have anxiety is that their offices aren’t fully established. Many of them still haven’t fully set up their official House email so they’re not receiving caucus talking points that are regularly being distributed. The group even had to have a letter Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent last Tuesday on the shutdown read aloud during the meeting because several of them hadn’t seen it.
“That’s what’s going to happen with freshmen,” the aide said, citing typical “growing pains” that occur at the start of a new Congress. “They’re going to think the sky is falling. This isn’t for the faint of heart around here.”
Most Democrats argue they have the political advantage — pointing to polling that shows the public mostly blames Trump for the shutdown and that a number of Republican lawmakers are now publicly calling to reopen the government. Top Democrats predict as many as a dozen GOP lawmakers will cross the aisle and support their piecemeal government funding bills designed to ratchet up pressure on Senate leaders to act.
“Our votes are going to grow — they wouldn’t be sending the vice president and the Homeland Security secretary up here if we had a problem,” said a senior Democratic aide.
But it’s not just freshmen who are questioning the strategy pursued by Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Some veteran Democrats are open to the idea of trying to broker a wide-ranging immigration deal that would include border wall money in exchange for Democratic priorities like securing protections for Dreamers.
Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) stood up in the closed-door meeting Wednesday to urge fellow Democrats to consider trading some amount of wall funding for legal protections for the thousands of young immigrants who stand to be deported.
“I think it’s something that should be in the discussion here, because things are obviously going so slowly,” Foster said. “I think this is ground that most Democrats should feel comfortable standing on.”
The Illinois Democrat said he’s talked to Dreamers in his own district who have told him to “hold my nose and vote” for a deal.
And several House freshmen are signaling they may be open to a compromise with Republicans to get government agencies running again.
“We are getting pressure from both sides of ‘don’t back down, don’t back down’ but also that these are real people who are hurting and my district is one of them with thousands of federal workers,” said Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.), one of two freshman representatives in House leadership.
“I’m not going to rule anything out, I really am not,” Allred added when asked if he would support some border wall funding in exchange for Democratic immigration priorities.
Moderate Democrats in the New Democrat Coalition pressed Pelosi later Wednesday to lay out a strategy for how to get out of the shutdown fight as well as her plans for House Democrats in the coming months. Spanberger and another freshman lawmaker, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), stood up at the meeting to voice concerns about the direction of the party.
Liberal lawmakers, however, are not eager to make a deal with Trump on the wall.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, spoke after Foster in the morning caucus meeting and shot down his Dreamers-for-wall trade. “I think one person got up and said something about it but I think there was a pretty immediate response from others,” she said.
Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) said that in her district, “[Dreamers] are saying, ‘We don’t want to be used as a pawn in this whole discussion.’”
Meanwhile, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.), who attended the weekend freshman session, said several lawmakers couldn’t attend in person because they were back in their districts to deal with the shutdown fallout.
“A lot of new members have spent a lot of time already staying in their districts, trying to make sure the people they represent are giving some sense of comfort during all of this,” McBath said, adding that she’s returning this weekend to assess the impact in her district.
McBath, who narrowly won her seat last November, wouldn’t comment on whether Democrats should put more money on the table for a border barrier, but urged party leaders to deal.
“I hope that we can all come to a compromise because that’s the way things get done,” the Georgia Democrat said. “If we don’t compromise, the American people are the ones who get hurt. Right now, they are hanging in the balance.”
Rachael Bade and Laura Barron-Lopez contributed to this report.
When the 2019 Grammy nominations were announced last month, one of the biggest takeaways was that H.E.R. is here to stay. Only a couple years into her career, the breakout R&B star racked up a whopping five nominations, including Best New Artist and the prestigious Album of the Year for her self-titled debut. Now, with the awards show only a month away, H.E.R. is making the celebratory rounds, stopping by The Late Late Show on Tuesday night (January 8) for a performance that proves why all those nods are so very deserved.
Taking the stage with her trusty band, H.E.R. launched into “Carried Away,” a hypnotic standout from her 2018 EP I Used to Know Her: Part 2. She was flanked by two backing singers who supplied plenty of energy as the latter half of the performance shifted into a funked-out jam session. They also hyped H.E.R. up as she effortlessly bounced between instruments — the 21-year-old played no less than three of them, showing off her dexterity on the acoustic guitar, bass, and keyboard.
Prior to the performance, H.E.R. did a short interview with host James Corden, telling him all about the meaning behind her stage name.
“It stands for Having Everything Revealed,” she said. “It represented this time of becoming a young woman and going through heartbreak, and all these things that happen… I call it the evolution of woman.”
The name is also, she said, a way to ensure that the focus of her career is on her music and not her image.
“The best way for me to release my music was to be honest, and in order for me to do that, I felt like, let me not put my face on my music. Let me not put a name on my music, and just give my music the way that it is; its pure message,” she explained. “That’s all you can see: H.E.R.”
Twitter is preparing to run a new experiment with the National Basketball Association, and it could impact the way some of the biggest basketball fans watch games in the future.
The social media company announced at CES 2019 that it will begin streaming parts of NBA games this year — but with a strange twist.
Twitter will broadcast only the second half of select games, beginning next month with the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday, Feb. 17.
The NBA will let fans vote on the @NBAonTNT Twitter account for who they want a camera to focus on during the second half of the game.
Fans will be asked to watch the first half of the game on TV, then vote on a player for the “iso-cam” to focus on during the second half, which will be streamed on Twitter for free.
The goal of the experiment is to create a more interactive experience for basketball fans. The league is already regarded as one of the most engaged in professional sports, and surely, this will encourage the most diehard fans to keep posting their thoughts while watching games.
If you’re wondering what happens if a player leaves the game: Twitter says in the rare occasion where a player is ejected or fouls out, the camera will switch to one of the cameras that sit behind the backboards — which are often the cameras used for game highlights shown on TV.
First, some updates on Twitter’s video business: -81+ million live broadcasts last year -950 content partners -Video accounts for more than half of Twitters ad revenue
For Twitter, this experiment marks part of a much broader push into streaming video. The company has continually emphasized its increasing focus on video, and it’s beating the same drum at CES. Twitter announced at the tech show that video accounts for more than half of the company’s ad revenue — a critical reason for why Twitter is now profitable.
Whether people actually like watching an “iso-cam” during the second half of the game remains to be seen. But one thing is already clear: For people like me who don’t have a cable subscription, this provides a great way of being able to watch all the best NBA action for free. And that is pretty hard to argue with.
You might want to hop on the Iceman spin-off train. Marvel’s making good choices, thanks in large part to writer Sina Grace.
The fourth issue of the recently launched series introduced a new mutant. She possesses teleportation powers, and she can create and enter a pocket dimension inside her handheld folding fan.
Oh yeah, she’s also Marvel’s first drag queen superhero. And her name is Shade.
Here’s her first appearance, in a page from the comic that Grace helpfully re-tweeted.
It’s a fitting entry point for the new mutant. Iceman is the only running Marvel series to feature a queer lead character. Bobby Drake, Iceman’s alter-ego, is an openly gay man who wrestles with his multiple, overlapping identities in the pages of the spin-off series.
The spin-off marks a return to Iceman for Grace, who was also the writer on a 2017 series featuring the character (and wrestling with his identity). It was cancelled after only 11 issues, despite critical acclaim and a GLAAD Media Award nomination. The sales just weren’t there.
The trade paperback releases were a different story. The two larger books containing all 11 issues of the original spin-off series sold much better than the individual issues, and so Marvel brought Grace back for another Iceman series in 2018. Shade made her debut in the new spin-off’s fourth issue.
“I really wanted this series to push readers to new and better stories about the whole queer experience and how it applies to being both a mutant and a superhero,” Grace said in a recent interview with The Advocate. “There’s a million different queer perspectives and we’re only scratching the surface.”
Shade’s story is only at its very beginning. She pops up again in Iceman #5, and she’ll also make an appearance in X-Men: Winter’s End, a special “annual” issue that should be out in February. There’s presumably more to come than that, but that’s all we know for now.
President Trump’s quest to build a wall on the southern border has escalated to considering declaring a national emergency. It’s being reported the administration is looking to declare the emergency, then move around money already appropriated to the Pentagon by cancelling some other construction projects so that construction at the border can start.
The emergency declaration threat would most assuredly be challenged in the courts for things like abuse of power, but does it matter?
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“One question is what is he going to declare an emergency to do we’re all assuming it’s to build some sort of barrier whether it’s his steel slats or his concrete wall or some combination of the two. I’m not sure that simply declaring the emergency is something that you’re ever gonna be able to successfully challenged in court,” POLITICO’s Josh Gerstein said.
Whatever possible legal recourse that Congress or another group might pursue, this kind of declaration would surely have some serious political impacts later on.
ANYbotics and Continental have partnered up for CES 2019 to demonstrate a holistic concept of autonomous delivery. In “cascaded robot delivery,” a driverless shuttle deploys robot dogs that can get the parcels to the recipients’ doorsteps or drop them off inside their parcel lockers.
Obviously not — but this video shows that at times virtual reality can get a little too real.
Watch what happens when a group attempts to teach their friend how to use VR controls for the first time. She accidentally drops a virtual grenade in-game, and let’s just say it causes her some real-world panic.
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By Morgan Sung
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