Chicago Bears defensive coordinator Vic Fangio has reportedly reached an agreement to become the new head coach of the Denver Broncos.
Adam Schefter of ESPN reported the hire Wednesday and said the sides agreed to a four-year contract with a team option for a fifth season. On Tuesday, 9News’ Mike Klis reported the Broncos were deciding between Fangio and Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line coach Mike Munchak.
Fangio is set to become a head coach for the first time after four decades as an assistant at the high school, college and pro levels. He’s served as defensive coordinator for the Bears, Carolina Panthers, Indianapolis Colts, Houston Texans and San Francisco 49ers during his time in the NFL.
The 60-year-old Pennsylvania native is coming off arguably his best year as a coordinator after guiding a Bears defense that ranked first in points allowed and third in yards allowed in 2018.
In November, Fangio told Brad Biggs of the Chicago Tribune he didn’t believe his coaching legacy rested solely on whether he became a head coach.
“It would be nice, but I am not going to burn the house down if it doesn’t happen or think anything less or be unhappy with my coaching career or whatever,” he said.
Now the longtime defensive wizard, who has coached in just about every corner of the United States, will get his chance to lead a staff at the sport’s highest level.
The Broncos went 11-21 during the two-year tenure of Vance Joseph, who was fired in December after the team lost its final four games of the 2018 campaign. Denver ranked 19th in total offense, not a total surprise given Case Keenum was the starting quarterback, but ranking 22nd in total defense was a disappointment.
While general manager John Elway and the front office continue to search for a long-term answer at QB, Fangio’s first task in Denver will be getting the Von Miller-led defense back on track. The unit ranked third in 2017 and could bounce back next season after the coaching change.
Netflix star and sweet tidy-upper Marie Kondo can do no wrong — or so we thought.
Kondo can be found on screens and bookshelves everywhere, making people decide whether or not their earthly possessions spark joy. She’s a consistently calming, harmonious presence. Only Twitter could find a way to corrupt Miss Kondo and turn her into a cleaning demon.
Eco-socialist Marie Kondo: Hold up the fossil fuel industry and see if it sparks joy Millennials: it does not Eco-socialist Marie Kondo: Nationalize it and rapidly liquidate its business model
I would totally watch a horror movie starring #MarieKondo where she breaks into a someone’s home and forces them to burn all their books and kill the family members that no longer spark joy.
Sure, we love Kondo’s calm demeanor and soft voice that puts us totally at ease. We’ll still never discard this Twitter format. It gives us too much joy.
Netflix star and sweet tidy-upper Marie Kondo can do no wrong — or so we thought.
Kondo can be found on screens and bookshelves everywhere, making people decide whether or not their earthly possessions spark joy. She’s a consistently calming, harmonious presence. Only Twitter could find a way to corrupt Miss Kondo and turn her into a cleaning demon.
Eco-socialist Marie Kondo: Hold up the fossil fuel industry and see if it sparks joy Millennials: it does not Eco-socialist Marie Kondo: Nationalize it and rapidly liquidate its business model
I would totally watch a horror movie starring #MarieKondo where she breaks into a someone’s home and forces them to burn all their books and kill the family members that no longer spark joy.
Sure, we love Kondo’s calm demeanor and soft voice that puts us totally at ease. We’ll still never discard this Twitter format. It gives us too much joy.
Game of Thrones fans of the show might have bittersweet feelings about the show’s final seasons, but actor Kit Harington revealed that the actors welcomed the end after a grueling experience on the last episodes.
“It was like it was designed to make you think, ‘Right, I’m f—ing sick of this,’ ” he told GQ Australia.
“The last season of Thrones seemed to be designed to break us,” said Harington, who throughout the show has had some of the most demanding work in terms of climate and battle sequences.
“Everyone was broken at the end,” he said. “I don’t know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending or if we were crying because it was so f—ing tiring. We were sleep deprived.”
GQ Australia describes the 32-year-old actor as harrowed by his near-decade on Thrones:
Like a prisoner who’s almost served a decade and has just been handed a civilian suit before his release at dawn, he’s so near the end now he can taste it.
“I remember everyone walking around towards the end going, ‘I’ve had enough now,’” Harington said. “‘I love this, it’s been the best thing in my life, I’ll miss it one day – but I’m done.’”
Free-agent infielder Manny Machado is reportedly expected to sign with a team “within a week,” according to Bruce Levine of 670 The Score in Chicago.
Levine noted that the Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies are the three teams known to be pursuing Machado.
While the White Sox, Yankees and Phillies have reportedly submitted offers, Levine said there may be an unidentified fourth team in on Machado as well.
It is unclear who the front-runner is for Machado, but Levine reported that “momentum is building” in favor of the White Sox.
The team traded for first baseman Yonder Alonso, who is Machado’s brother-in-law. They also signed outfielder Jon Jay, who is one of Machado’s closest friends and grew up with him in Miami.
Machado has spent extensive time at shortstop and third base throughout his MLB career, but he will likely play short if the Yankees sign him since Didi Gregorius is expected to miss much of 2019 after undergoing Tommy John surgery.
New York signed veteran shortstop Troy Tulowitzki this offseason, but only for the league minimum, so it doesn’t preclude the Yanks from adding Machado.
As for the Phillies, Levine believes they will have to offer Machado more than his other suitors in order to land him.
The White Sox reportedly offered Machado around $200 million over six or seven years, which may be the baseline the Yankees and Phillies will be forced to contend with.
Machado, 26, had a career year in 2018 split between the Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Dodgers.
He was named an All-Star for the fourth time and finished with a .297 batting average, 37 home runs and 107 RBI, all of which were career highs. Machado also helped lead the Dodgers to the World Series, where they lost to the Boston Red Sox.
For the rebuilding White Sox (62-100 last season), Machado would be the face of the franchise and a sign that the timeline to contend is moving up significantly.
As far as the Yankees, Machado would add another big bat to their already potent lineup and potentially help them close the gap with the AL East rival Red Sox, the defending World Series champions.
Philadelphia has had a strong offseason in adding shortstop Jean Segura and outfielder Andrew McCutchen, and Machado would be the lineup centerpiece it needs.
Due to the reported overlap in interest when it comes to the teams that are pursuing Machado and outfielder Bryce Harper, Machado’s signing within a week could go a long way toward determining where Harper ends up as well.
Riot police deployed at the electoral commission headquarters in Kinshasa on Wednesday amid fears of a disputed result in Democratic Republic of Congo‘s presidential election marked by accusations of vote fraud.
The tally could be announced later in the day after the commission (CENI) met all night and into the morning.
Police also took up positions along the city’s main boulevard, as Congolese feared about possible violence amid suspicions that President Joseph Kabila‘s government was negotiating a power-sharing deal with one opposition candidate.
The December 30 poll was meant to lead to the vast central African country’s first democratic transfer of power in its 59 years of independence, but a disputed result could trigger the kind of violence that erupted after the 2006 and 2011 elections and destabilise Congo’s volatile eastern borderlands.
In Pretoria, South African President Cyril Ramaphosate and his Zambian counterpart Edgar Lungu met on Wednesday and urged CENI to speedily release the results to maintain stability.
Last week, South Africa, long a Kabila ally, joined with Russia and China at the UN Security Council to block the release of a statement proposed by France that would have welcomed the holding of the vote but criticised the government’s decision to cut access to the internet and some media outlets.
The election commission announced on Tuesday evening it had initiated “a series of evaluation meetings and deliberations, at the end of which it will proceed to the publication of provisional results from the presidential election”.
A CENI source and a diplomat said they expected results to be announced later on Wednesday. Another diplomat, however, said that not all the vote tallying had been completed and that the announcement might have to wait until Thursday.
Kabila is due to leave office this month after 18 years in power – and two years after the official end of his mandate. He backed his former interior minister, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, in the election.
Shadary was competing against two main opposition candidates, businessman Martin Fayulu and Felix Tshisekedi, the president of Congo’s largest opposition party.
Tshisekedi’s camp, which says it expects to win, said on Tuesday that it had met with Kabila’s representatives to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, although Kabila’s camp denied any such meetings had occurred.
Supporters of Fayulu, who had a healthy pre-election poll lead, have voiced suspicions that Kabila may be looking to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with Tshisekedi if Shadary loses.
On Tuesday, Fayulu and six other presidential candidates issued a statement saying that the results “cannot be negotiated”.
Domestic election observers say they witnessed serious irregularities on election day and during vote tallying, although a regional observer mission said the election went “relatively well”.
Billie Eilish, 17-year-old downbeat sad-pop wunderkind, is primed to be one of 2019’s biggest breakout stars. Alfonso Cuarón, 57-year-old Oscar-winning director of Gravity, Children of Men, and the highly celebrated new Netflix film Roma, is already having a great year, having won two Golden Globes on Sunday night.
What do these two seemingly disparate culture creators have in common? Allow Eilish’s new song, “When I Was Older” (released on Tuesday) to answer that question.
The gloomy, blippy track somehow recalls both Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO TOUR Llif3” and Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song,” and it’s billed as “from music inspired by the movie Roma,” though it did not appear on that film’s soundtrack. It doesn’t have much to do with the plot either, from what I can tell.
But Eilish, bathing her voice in a digital tone, does sing about “watching movies back to back in black and white,” seemingly as she mentally exorcises someone from her system. I pictured someone distraught, immobile in a dark room, letting the crisp bright whites of Roma‘s beach and city scenes shine as the algorithm takes control. The opening and closing lines, too, are taken directly from the film.
Roma will likely continue its awards-season buzz next month at the Oscars. Eilish, meanwhile, was just announced as a 2019 Coachella performer. In the meantime, you can stream “When I Was Older” above (and watch Roma on Netflix).
Nothing brings joy like a grotesquely distorted face filter.
According to a Snap-commissioned survey focused on how social media makes people feel, 95 percent of Snapchat users said using the app makes them feel “happy.”
Commissioning studies is common amongst the social media and tech industries. And while all commissioned surveys should be taken with a grain of salt — for example, the survey did not give “happiness” percentages for any other apps — Snap’s results do actually mirror some recent independent studies about how social media positively affects mood.
The survey results also have a business upside: They serve to differentiate Snapchat from social media competitors that are increasingly getting a bad rap as the public becomes more critical and wary of the industry as a whole.
Snapchat has also had problems gaining and retaining users, and is trying to maintain its attractiveness to advertisers even while its stock falters. This marketing push, by way of a survey, could help distinguish them as a beloved platform to advertisers.
But maybe Snap has a point as it tries to differentiate itself. Facebook has been blurring the line between Facebook (the platform) and Instagram with its push toward stories that never really expire; the ephemeralityFacebook stole from Snapchat in the first place is increasingly going by the wayside. Meanwhile, Twitter and YouTube are struggling to make themselves less of a cesspool. So perhaps Snapchat, as an app that does focus on one-to-one messaging, without robust user profiles, and without “likes” is right to call itself different.
Connected and lonely at the same time? Yep, social media in a nutshell.
Image: Snap
To understand how people use Snapchat and its competitors, the research surveyed 1,005 people between 13 and 44. In addition to feeling “happy,” Snapchat users also said the app made them feel “silly,” “spontaneous,” and used other positive attributes to describe the app. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter left users feeling both “informed” and “overwhelmed”; “connected” and “lonely.”
The survey also looked specifically at how and when people use different social media apps. The results confirmed what a Snapchat representative said the company already suspected about its users: that Snapchat is more about chatting with friends than posting status updates, like some of the other apps.
For example, the survey says Snapchat is an app people turn to when they’re on the go, to talk to their friends and play with lenses and filters. Notably, the survey says users turn to Snapchat while they’re shopping — an accolade that seems like catnip for advertisers as Snapchat tries to make headway in the shopping category.
On the other end of the spectrum, people reportedly use YouTube when they’re more sedentary, to learn about new things, and consume more content.
The survey’s results look similar to some recent independent studies on the topic. Several studies have shown that people turn to Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp for news above Snapchat or Instagram.
Additionally, a 2018 Pew survey found that Snapchat is the most-used app amongst its teenage users. A second 2018 Pew study, as well as a report from Common Sense Media (an organization that advises on parenting in the digital age), found that social media makes teens feel more confident, supported, and connected. Of Pew’s 743 teen respondents, 31 percent said social media had a “mostly positive effect” on their lives, although 45 percent of the Pew respondents were ambivalent.
Given the fact that Snapchat’s most loyal users are teens according to Pew, and many teens report these positive emotions, Snapchat survey’s results of “happiness” could make sense.
So too do they mirror the other side of the coin: recent independent studies also confirm the overwhelmed or self-conscious feelings that occur when using Facebook especially.
Snap has not attributed a cause for these emotions. But a Snapchat representative said that Snapchat’s intentional design choices to emphasize friend-to-friend communication, play, reflection, and of course, ephemerality — over their competitors’ emphasis on profiles and ‘likes’ — may impact how people feel about their time on Snapchat.
Still, Snapchat is one part of a whole social media ecosystem that experts still don’t fully understand. Some studies have shown the troubling effects social media can have on mental health, others report more conservative “not that bad” findings, or like the Snap survey, even positive effects. Mashable has previously explored how it’s possible for social media to make us feel great and terrible all at once.
Snapchat is also just the latest social media company to throw its hat into the research ring. Facebook undertook a study of how social media affects people’s emotions and well-being, and determined that the problem wasn’t the app itself — but how people used it. Were they communicating and participating or just scrolling? The latter led to negative feelings, Facebook’s study found (although we should note that the former is better for Facebook’s bottom line).
What commissioned or in-house studies have in common is that the social media companies themselves choose how to present the data; Mashable was not able to view Snap’s underlying data. It’s possible that commissioned studies have more nuanced results than their sponsored companies suggest in their presentation.
Taken all together, surveys and studies — both commissioned and independent — show one thing for sure: We all started using social media without the slightest understanding of how it would impact us as a society or as individuals. That’s something we’re just starting to maybe, sort of, figure out now.
Michael Kinney shared Wiggins’ comments from the Timberwolves’ locker room.
Michael Kinney @EyeAmTruth
Andrew Wiggins said he was not worried about Dennis Schröder trying to step to the Timberwolves. “He was acting crazy for no reason.” #thunder https://t.co/gjkEcugVSi
Wiggins later took to social media to clarify what he said and to offer support for the LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual) community:
andrew wiggins @22wiggins
Id like to clarify what I said tonight during my post game media session. I said: “I don’t know what’s wrong with him he was just getting… acting crazy for no reason”.
andrew wiggins @22wiggins
I have the utmost love and respect for the LGBTQIA community and I would never use any term to disrespect them in anyway.
Schroder got into a shoving match with Timberwolves guard Jeff Teague in the third quarter and the two had to be separated. Schroder received a technical foul, while Teague was ejected after being assessed two technical fouls.
NBA Official @NBAOfficial
Replay Review (Game Crew): player altercation in Q3 of #MINatOKC. Ruling: Schroder assessed one technical foul, Teague assessed two technical fouls for two separate hostile acts during the altercation, Teague ejected. https://t.co/nSKlk9XCxL
According to The Athletic’s Jon Krawczynski, Schroder appeared to take exception with Wiggins as well after Wiggins inadvertently knocked Nerlens Noel out of the game.
While Wiggins was going up for a dunk in the third quarter, he elbowed Noel in the head with his lead arm. Noel fell to the court and hit his head against the hardwood as he landed. Medical personnel stretchered Noel back to the locker room.
Bleacher Report @BleacherReport
Prayers up for Nerlens Noel. The Thunder big man caught an elbow, hit his head and had to be stretchered off https://t.co/22qPKtz1l6
Wiggins elaborated on his thoughts regarding Schroder.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” he said, per Krawczynski. “He was acting crazy for no reason. I look right through him. He’s not someone I look at as a problem. Not at all.”
Should the NBA decide to look into Wiggins’ postgame comments, he could face a fine.
The league dockedDenver Nuggets big man Nikola Jokic $25,000 in November when he used the phrase “no homo” when referencing the physical attributes of Chicago Bulls rookie Wendell Carter Jr.
The United States faces difficulties in its withdrawal from Syria, particularly in parting ways with the Kurdish fighters it allied with to battle the armed group ISIL, Turkey’s foreign minister said.
“It is hard to break up with a terrorist organisation after being involved with it at this level,” Mevlut Cavusoglu told a parliamentary foreign affairs committee on Wednesday.
His remarks came a day after US National Security Adviser John Bolton held talks with officials in Turkey during an apparently tense visit.
Ankara has been infuriated by Bolton’s demand for assurances that Turkey will not attack US-allied Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria before American troops pull out of the complex region.
“There are different voices coming from different institutions in the US” over the withdrawal process, Cavusoglu said, echoing remarks by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday.
He suggested closer cooperation with US adversaries was likely on the horizon.
“We want to be in coordination with Western countries – but especially with Russia and Iran during the US withdrawal process. We do not want to create a vacuum for terrorist organisations to use after the withdrawal,” said Cavusoglu.
During his visit to Israel on Sunday, Bolton set pre-conditions for the US pullout from Syria that included Turkey guaranteeing the safety of the Washington-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which spearheaded the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).
US President Donald Trump announced last month the withdrawal of some 2,000 US troops from Syria in a statement that shocked many politicians in Washington as well as Western and Kurdish allies who fought alongside the US in the war-torn country.
Turkey’s criticism
Turkey has long condemned Washington for its military relationship with the YPG. Ankara considers the militia and its political wing – the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) – to be “terrorist groups” with ties to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey.
Trump’s decision to withdraw troops was initially expected to be carried out swiftly, but the timetable became vague in the weeks following his announcement.
Matthew Bryza, a former senior US diplomat, said the United States is looking for a replacement to the Kurdish armed group in the fight against ISIL.
“The YPG has provided up to 50,000 troops – boots on the ground to take the fight directly to ISIS. They fought valiantly and quite successfully. As a result, many American lives were saved,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The alternative to the YPG from Washington’s perspective is someone else has to come in,” Bryza added.
Threat from ISIL
France, Britain and local armed groups have warned ISIL has not totally been defeated yet.
Subsequently, US officials made clear the withdrawal would not happen quickly and would take place in an orderly manner, as the White House faced a backlash from members of the US Congress, and even its own staff.
The US president’s withdrawal decision coincided with the resignation of American defence chief James Mattis.
Bryza said Trump’s unorthodox ways were likely responsible for the chaos enveloping his Syria plans.
“Donald Trump flip-flops every day on some policy … and he has now allowed his policy to be completely reserved by the statement of National Security Adviser Bolton in Israel,” he said.
“My guess is President Trump took his decision on December 14 to pull US troops out of Syria impulsively. He heard something he liked from President Erdogan – that Turkey could take over stabilising Syria and finish the job against ISIS.”
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