Microsoft is releasing the source code for its original Windows File Manager from nearly 28 years ago. Originally released for Windows 3.0, the File Manager was a replacement for managing files through MS-DOS, and allowed Windows users to copy, move, delete, and search for files. While it’s a relic from the past, you can still compile the source code Microsoft has released and run the app on Windows 10 today.
The source code is available on GitHub, and is maintained by Microsoft veteran Craig Wittenberg under the MIT license. Wittenberg copied the File Manager code from Windows NT 4 back in 2007, and has been maintaining it before open sourcing it recently. It’s a testament to the backward compatibility of Windows itself, especially that...
by Gwen Ihnat on The Takeout, shared by Virginia K. Smith to Lifehacker
I’m a pretty pro-bacon person: I make BLTs on the reg, and would never kick it out of any salad, sandwich, or pasta. Using the beloved cured meat slab as dessert, though, I may have an issue with: Candied bacon? What the hell is that about? It’s like putting bacon with ice cream and/or chocolate: Maybe some wonderful…
Verizon may launch a new Palm device in the second half of this year, an anonymous source told Android Police. The rumor backs up what a TCL executive said last August, when he confirmed to Dutch publication Android Planet that the company would launch a Palm phone this year. TCL did not respond to comments when we reached out at the time, despite previous reports that the company had no plans for the Palm.
There are little details beyond a supposed release date for this new device. According to Android Police’sreport, the phone is expected to run on Android OS, and TCL has reportedly returned to Palm’s erstwhile partner, Verizon, for the impending release. The carrier sold most of the brand’s phones, including the Palm Pre 2.
I've just started playing around with WSL (with Ubuntu) and it's pretty fun. I don't really do much with Linux anyway, but it's a much better way of ssh'ing into my NAS than using PuTTY, cygwin, etc.
After starting with Ubuntu, Microsoft has added a number of Linux distributions to its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Linux runtime environment. A Windows machine can simultaneously offer an Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian, and Kali "personality," providing users with a choice of the different distributions' preferences and package management.
But if your distribution isn't yet available or if you want a Linux installation that's customized just the way you like it, there's now an answer: Microsoft has an open source tool for building your own Linux package. The tool is aimed at two groups: distribution owners (so they can produce a bundle to ship through the Microsoft Store) and developers (so they can create custom distributions and sideload them onto their development systems).
Microsoft's tool provides the basic glue between Windows and the Linux distribution. It handles telling the system about the distribution and performing initial setup such as user creation, and it can be customized to—for example—print a message of the day when the distribution is started.
Why it’s confusing that Mitt Romney is arguing he’s more conservative than Trump on immigration.
Mitt Romney is making the case that he’s more conservative than President Donald Trump on immigration.
“I’m also more of a hawk on immigration than even the president,” Romney, who announced his bid for Senate in Utah in February, said at a Republican event Monday when asked to defend his conservative credentials. “My view was these DACA kids shouldn’t all be allowed to stay in the country legally.”
It’s somewhat of an odd position for Romney to take, not because of his own immigration record (his 2012 presidential platform called for undocumented immigrants to self-deport) but because of the state he’s running in. Utah is a unique red state on immigration, with a big Mormon voter base that is traditionally more dovish than the hardliner Republicans who shaped the immigration debate in Washington.
Romney pushed back against giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship — which many of Congress’s bipartisan proposals would have done — and argued that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipients should have to “do more” to get legal permanent residency, like get a college degree or serve in the military, according to the Daily Herald, a Utah newspaper.
“I will accept the president’s view on this, but for me, I draw the line and say, those who’ve come illegally should not be given a special path to citizenship,” Romney said.
Trump’s White House pledged to sunset the DACA program, which protected undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children from deportation, last September, and has since proposed a legislative approach that would provide a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants, fund the southern border wall, eliminate the diversity visa lottery system and ultimately gut legal immigration by half.
Romney is by far the favorite to win the Republican Utah Senate primary, and the seat in November, to take retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch’s seat. As of a February poll, Romney pulled 60 percent of the support.
And in fact, when Romney announced his Senate bid he actually emphasized this difference between Trump’s White House and Utah on the issue.
“Utah welcomes legal immigrants from around the world, Washington sends immigrants a message of exclusion,” Romney said in his announcement video in February. “And on Utah’s Capitol Hill, people treat one another with respect.”
This is something I see way too often: some guy uses the toilet, walks up to the sink, trickles some water onto his fingers, shakes them off, then walks out of the restroom. Yuck. That does almost nothing, you impatient, gross monster.
The heart rate monitors built into the Apple Watch and other wearable devices can detect abnormal heart rhythms with 97 percent accuracy, according to a new study conducted by the team behind the Cardiogram app for Apple Watch in conjunction with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.
More than 139 million heart rate and step count measurements were collected from 9,750 users of the Cardiogram app who also enrolled in the UC San Francisco Health eHeart Study, with the data used to train DeepHeart, Cardiogram's deep neural network.
Once trained, DeepHeart was able to read heart rate data collected by wearables, distinguishing between normal heart rhythm and atrial fibrillation with a 97 percent accuracy rate, both when testing UCSF patients with known heart issues and Cardiogram participants.
At a 97 percent accuracy rate, Cardiogram's study suggests the Apple Watch alone does a better job of detecting abnormal heart rhythms than FDA-approved accessory KardiaBand. From Cardiogram co-founder Johnson Hsieh:
97% accuracy refers to the c-statistic, or area under the sensitivity-specificity curve. Surprisingly, both the sensitivity and specificity of DeepHeart were even higher than an FDA-cleared Apple Watch ECG attachment -- 98% (vs 93%) sensitivity and 90% (vs 84%) specificity.
Published in JAMA Cardiology this morning, the study confirms the results from a similar preliminary study done in May of 2017. According to Cardiogram, today's study marks the first peer-reviewed study in a medical journal that demonstrates popular wearables from companies like Apple, Garmin, Polar, LG, and others can detect a major health condition.
Atrial fibrillation, or an abnormal heart rhythm, is a condition that can be indicative of major health problems and it can lead to heart failure and stroke. Atrial fibrillation often goes undiagnosed, which is where the Apple Watch and other wearables can help. The Apple Watch won't replace a traditional EKG, but it can alert people to a problem much earlier than it might otherwise be detected. From the study's conclusion:
This proof-of-concept study found that smartwatch photoplethysmography coupled with a deep neural network can passively detect AF but with some loss of sensitivity and specificity against a criterion-standard ECG. Further studies will help identify the optimal role for smartwatch-guided rhythm assessment.
In addition to studies on the Apple Watch's ability to detect atrial fibrillation, Cardiogram and UCSF have also been working to determine if the Apple Watch heart rate monitor can also detect conditions like hypertension, sleep apnea, and early signs of diabetes. Preliminary studies have suggested all of these conditions could be spotted in data collected by Apple Watch and other common wearable devices.
Apple has been working with researchers at Stanford on its own study to determine whether the heart rate sensor in the Apple Watch can be used to detect abnormal heart rhythms and common heart conditions. While in the study, if an abnormal heart rhythm is detected, participants will be contacted by researchers and asked to wear an ePath monitor to test heart health.
Apple Watch owners can sign up to participate in the Apple Heart Study by downloading and installing the Apple Heart Study app. Those who want to join Cardiogram's studies can install the Cardiogram app and sign up to join the mRhythm study.
You’re likely familiar with Pi Day, perhaps the most popular of geeky holidays. Hooray. But I’m here to tell you that Pi Day is wrong — or rather, the entire idea of pi as a mathematical concept is wrong, and why you should be celebrating Tau Day, instead (which happens to be today!)
It’s easy enough to see why people like Pi Day: the whole thing starts with a mathematical pun of sorts (The date is written as 3/14 in American notation. Pi starts with the digits 3.14. You get it.) It’s an easy, fun ritual to see how many digits you can pointlessly memorize of the famously never-ending, never-repeating number (even though 39 digits is more than sufficient for almost any calculations you’ll ever need). Plus pi sounds like pie, and who...
Sorry - I try and keep TOR mostly politics free, but this story is too big to pass up.
It’s tawdry. It’s funny. But it’s also about corruption and national security.
The Stormy Daniels scandal feels like the kind of salacious yet pointless story that distracts the public from the truly important issues of the Trump era.
But it is important. At its core, the Daniels story isn’t about tawdry details of infidelity. It’s about the corruptibility of Donald Trump — a president whose personal life and finances are shrouded in unprecedented opacity. Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen paid Daniels, an adult film actress, $130,000 in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement in the final days of the 2016 election that kept her from saying anything about an alleged affair with Trump.
The payoff raises two big ethical and legal problems. First, it is an attack on America’s threadbare system of campaign finance regulation; one of the few remaining laws on the books bans corporations from giving gifts to a candidate. (Cohen used his Trump Organization email to arrange the deal.) If we turn away from this drama on the grounds that it features too many uses of the phrase “porn star,” we’ll have blown another enormous hole in the web of rules that are supposed to separate our democracy from a plutocracy.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Michael Cohen (left), President Trump's personal attorney, stands with his attorney Stephen M. Ryan in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee chambers in Washington, DC, on September 19, 2017.
There’s also the fact that secrets worth paying north of a hundred grand to keep are secrets that could be powerful tools in the hands of foreign governments or domestic special interests. Is Daniels the only woman Trump has paid off? Have his other secrets been successfully kept from other interested parties? Who has leverage over the president, and what are they using it for?
Daniels has filed suit to try to invalidate the nondisclosure agreement she signed, freeing her to speak about her relationship with Trump. From the public’s standpoint, however, the key issue isn’t Daniels’s story — it’s the circumstances surrounding the payoff and how many similar deals are out there.
Congress should look into these matters, and the press should be unashamed to call on press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and other administration figures for answers. Just because a story is, on one level, profoundly silly doesn’t mean it can’t also be profoundly serious.
There’s a serious campaign finance issue here
Cohen, the veteran Trump consigliere, claims he cut Daniels a $130,000 check out of his own pocket with no thought of repayment or discussion or coordination with anyone else in Trump world. Even if that’s true (a big if), it doesn’t matter.
There’s cut-and-dried evidence that Cohen negotiated the deal while using his Trump Organization email account. Corporations are banned from contributing to federal election campaigns, and the use of official Trump Organization corporate resources would constitute a violation of that rule.
As Philip Bump explained for the Washington Post, “those two things together — that a Trump Organization email address was used to facilitate the payment and that the payment was linked to the campaign — would constitute a legal violation.”
Of course, one could argue that a payoff made weeks before Election Day to prevent the dissemination of damaging information about a presidential candidate had nothing to do with the campaign. But that — like the true origins of the money and the extent of other Trump figures’ involvement in the payoff — is a matter worthy of serious investigation.
Two 21st-century Supreme Court cases, the famous Citizens United ruling and the less famous but probably more significant Bush-era McConnell v. FEC, have left American campaign finance law in a weak state. But there still are rules on the books. If we as a society turn away from enforcing the rules about coordination, corporate contributions, and disclosure simply because the particular facts of the Stormy Daniels case are tawdry, we will come to regret it.
Figuring out exactly which laws were broken and how seriously requires an inquiry into the details of what happened rather than an armchair assessment, but that simply underscores that an investigation is needed.
Secrets worth paying for are dangerous
Trump is a notorious philanderer, and the Trump Organization was a notorious deployer of aggressive nondisclosure agreements for years before he became a candidate. Trump himself is the subject of an array of sexual assault and other misconduct allegations, none of which has been properly investigated by congressional Republicans, who prefer to stay in the dark.
Taking all this into account, it’s hard to conclude that Daniels is likely the only person whose silence Trump has purchased.
Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury quotes Steve Bannon as saying that another longtime Trump attorney, Marc Kasowitz, “has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign — what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them.”
While a cynic might wonder how, exactly, Trump’s reputation could possibly be damaged by revelations of extramarital affairs, the free market has spoken here. That he and his allies are willing to cut large checks to buy a woman’s silence indicates that they think these secrets are valuable.
The problem with a powerful public official having valuable secrets is they can be exploited for more than just financial gain. Nobody with this kind of exposure to blackmail or manipulation by special interests or foreign intelligence agencies would be able to get a high-end security clearance, and, traditionally, at least, that would have made someone ineligible for a high-level White House position.
The president, of course, is exempt from the normal security procedure rules on the sensible grounds that the voters rather than the security bureaucrats should be able to decide. But that simply underscores the fact that the voters deserve to know the truth about the scope of Trump’s secrets and the lengths he’s willing to go to keep them.
The Daniels situation warrants serious investigation
There are a lot of serious issues in the United States, and the inclination to try to stay serious and talk about guns, trade, Medicaid, or drug overdoses rather than reports of the president’s alleged past affairs with porn actresses and Playboy playmates is understandable and, on some level, laudable.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that the American people have a right to know whether the president, his associates, and the businesses he controls violated campaign finance law. We also have a right to know whether he is habitually in the business of cutting large checks to buy ex-lovers’ silence and, thus, how broadly susceptible to blackmail or other forms of exploitation he may be.
A responsible United States Congress would investigate these matters, and it speaks volumes about how invested the current Republican majority is in turning a blind eye to such a broad range of Trumpian misconduct that it doesn’t even occur to anyone to wonder whether investigations will happen.
But midterm elections will be held in a few months, and they may bring new blood to Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, a special counsel is already investigating Trump’s team, albeit on different grounds.
There is some overlap between the two issues, both in terms of personnel (Cohen is an important figure in both the Daniels and Russia stories) and subject matter (yes, I am politely alluding to the alleged “pee tape”), and it would be eminently reasonable for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to formally expand Robert Mueller’s mandate to include the campaign finance questions in the Daniels reports.
Either way, it’s time for Washington to stop tittering in embarrassment and recognize that there is a serious scandal here.
This week, the Florida Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act, a proposal for the state to stay in daylight saving time all year round. That’s not happening because the federal government controls time, but the people of Florida have the right idea. Daylight saving time begins this Sunday, but it should last in perpetuity, allowing us to live in a world of evening light.
It can be hard to imagine your life without Amazon. The company offers everything from online shopping to grocery delivery to audiobooks to streaming video, all at the tips of your fingers and at cutthroat prices. It’s an especially convenient place to get almost everything you could ever need delivered to your door…
I saw a meme on reddit about this... I almost didn't want to believe it.
I used this feature tons; I am not pleased.
Enlarge / Google Image search will no longer offer the "view image" button, which directly linked to an image. (credit: Google)
This week, Google Image Search is getting a lot less useful, with the removal of the "View Image" button. Before, users could search for an image and click the "View Image" button to download it directly without leaving Google or visiting the website. Now, Google Images is removing that button, hoping to encourage users to click through to the hosting website if they want to download an image.
Google's Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, announced the change on Twitter yesterday, saying it would "help connect users and useful websites." Later Sullivan admitted that "these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week" and that "they are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value."
Almost two years ago, Getty Images filed antitrust charges against Google in the EU, taking issue with the company's image scraping techniques to display image search results. Earlier this week, Google and Getty Images announced a partnership and Getty withdrew its charges against Google. Changes like the removal of direct image links were apparently part of the agreement.
Most times, technology fails and we get frustrated. Sometimes, technology fails in a spectacularly adorable way. Such is the case with this Google Photos panorama image that the software automatically stitched together for Reddit user MalletsDarker, which placed a photo of his friend majestically behind two different photos of snow and trees.
Screaming Cowboy, but colder
MalletsDarker shared the source images that Google Photos had combined together as a panorama, a feature that the software will automatically offer to you if it notices the images were taken near one another. He took three pictures: one with two friends, one of the snowy landscape, and one of the trees in a distance. In the photo of his friend, Google Photos managed to...
The Federal Communications Commission is making its latest determination of whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans quickly enough, and there are a few notable tidbits from what we know about the report so far.
The FCC today released a fact sheet on the draft Broadband Progress Report and a statement by Chairman Ajit Pai, but not the actual draft report.
Pai's FCC has determined that mobile broadband is not a full substitute for home Internet services. The FCC says this even after previously suggesting that mobile Internet might be all Americans need. The FCC also won't be lowering the speed standard that it uses to judge whether broadband deployment is happening quickly enough.
This photo shoot just won the Internet… for how bad the Photoshop job was. Pam Dave Zaring says she got back her family photos from the professional photographer they hired… and nearly died laughing. She then posted the photos on Facebook, where they’ve been going absolutely viral.
Just take a look at the photos for yourself.
“Ok. This is NOT a joke,” Zaring writes. She says she paid the “professional” photographer $250 for the family photo shoot and received this photos in return.
“She said the shadows were really bad on the beautiful, clear, sunny day and that her professor never taught her to retouch photos,” Zaring writes. “I literally have not laughed this hard in YEARS!”
Within 8 hours of being shared online, the photos had already attracted over 150,000 likes and 200,000 shares.
We’ve reached out to the photographer for comment and will share an update if/when we hear back.
As the industry continues to grapple with the Meltdown and Spectre attacks, operating system and browser developers in particular are continuing to develop and test schemes to protect against the problems. Simultaneously, microcode updates to alter processor behavior are also starting to ship.
Since news of these attacks first broke, it has been clear that resolving them is going to have some performance impact. Meltdown was presumed to have a substantial impact, at least for some workloads, but Spectre was more of an unknown due to its greater complexity. With patches and microcode now available (at least for some systems), that impact is now starting to become clearer. The situation is, as we should expect with these twin attacks, complex.
To recap: modern high-performance processors perform what is called speculative execution. They will make assumptions about which way branches in the code are taken and speculatively compute results accordingly. If they guess correctly, they win some extra performance; if they guess wrong, they throw away their speculatively calculated results. This is meant to be transparent to programs, but it turns out that this speculation slightly changes the state of the processor. These small changes can be measured, disclosing information about the data and instructions that were used speculatively.
If you see a monkey in Florida, don’t touch it. It seems like pretty basic advice, especially now that scientists have found that more than a quarter of these adorable, feral invaders carry the deadly herpes B virus.
Though at least 25 percent of the population carries the virus — which causes mild disease in macaques, but can be deadly to humans — fewer were actually infectious. The virus lies dormant in nerves in between flare-ups, similar to cold sores in humans. Between 4 and 14 percent of the monkeys released the virus in their spit during their fall breeding season, researchers report in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. And the wild monkeys’ poop turned out to be pristine — at least, as far as herpes B was concerned.
Earlier this year, I was back at my childhood home in Southern California, digging through some old boxes. Amidst assorted baseball cards, long-forgotten school projects, sports trophies, and more, I located a small, slender white cardboard box.
The box is unmarked, except for a small sticker in the top left-hand corner with my name on it. But I knew what it was the instant I saw it: my entire collection of Star Trek Customizable Card Game (STCCG), probably a couple hundred cards in total.
President Trump has gotten the US locked in a military standoff with North Korea, thrown the future of the Iran nuclear deal into doubt, weakened NATO, emboldened Russia, and triggered a diplomatic crisis over Jerusalem.
And he’s done that all in under 12 months.
Trump’s first year as commander in chief has been full of so much drama — most, though not all, generated by the president himself — that it’s easy to lose sight of the other weird, inappropriate, or just plain bizarre things Trump did on the world stage in 2017.
So, without further ado, here’s a reminder:
1) Gave Russia classified intel that compromised an undercover Israeli spy inside ISIS
On May 10, Trump met in the Oval Office with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Kislyak’s presence at the meeting raised eyebrows, as he was (and still is) a key figure in the FBI’s investigation of the Trump administration's ties to Russia.
Perhaps even stranger, though, was the presence of a photographer from Russia's state news agency. He was the only journalist allowed in the room — all US journalists were barred from attending.
Then things got even weirder.
At one point in the meeting, Trump revealed highly sensitive information about an ISIS plot to bomb airplanes using laptops that endangered the life of an Israeli spy living under deep cover in ISIS territory.
The disclosure seems to have been the result of Trump bragging to the Russians about the quality of his intelligence. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” the president said, according to the Washington Post.
After Trump’s meeting, the Post reports, senior White House officials immediately called the CIA and the National Security Agency to try to contain the damage.
Israeli intelligence officials, meanwhile, warned that Trump’s careless disclosure could jeopardize the tight US-Israel intelligence-sharing partnership.
“The fact that the American president is revealing information to other countries, to Russia, for Israel it will lead us to stop giving any intelligence to the Americans,” a former senior Israeli intelligence official who worked for Israel’s Shin Bet security service told Newsweek. “I can’t see how the Israeli intelligence can keep giving sensitive intelligence to the Americans.”
2) Told the president of France’s wife “you're in such good shape!”
In July, the president and the first lady traveled to Paris for Trump’s first-ever meeting with the newly-elected president of France, Emmanuel Macron.
Surrounded by reporters, Macron, Trump, and their wives smiled and embraced.
Trump then took a step back and appraised Brigitte Macron, looking her up and down. “You’re in such good shape,” he said to her. He then turned to her husband and repeated his appraisal of her: “She’s in such good physical shape. Beautiful.”
Here’s a video of the encounter:
WATCH: POTUS to Mrs. Macron: "You're in such good shape. She's in such good physical shape. Beautiful." pic.twitter.com/DvJPF6aT5l
As Vox’s Sarah Wildman wrote at the time, “It seems no woman, no matter her station, no matter how official, no matter how much she might be, you know, married to the president of France, is safe from Trump’s inappropriate appraisals.”
3) Shoved the prime minister of Montenegro
In May, Trump attended his very first NATO summit in Brussels, where he delivered a tense speech lecturing the assembled leaders of America’s NATO allies for not spending enough on their militaries.
After the speech, the heads of state gathered to take a group photo. As they began taking their places, Trump found himself in the middle of the pack, obscured by several other world leaders — including Prime Minister Dusko Markovic of Montenegro.
But instead of politely saying “Excuse me” and maneuvering around Markovic, Trump decided to grab the prime minister by the arm and physically shove him out of the way. Trump then adjusted his suit jacket.
Just one week into his presidency, Trump used a January 28 phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to alienate the leader of one of America’s closest and most loyal allies.
Trump bragged about the size of his electoral college win and ranted at Turnbull abouta deal the Obama administration had struck with the Australian government to take in a small number of refugees who were trying to enter Turnbull’s country.
Trump was angry that he had to honor this deal his predecessor had made — a deal he didn’t seem to fully understand but hated nonetheless. Turnbull calmly and respectfully tried to correct Trump’s misunderstandings, but it didn’t go well.
"I have had it. I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call all day. Putin was a pleasant call. This is ridiculous," Trump said. He then ended the conversation, just 25 minutes into what was supposed to be an hour-long call.
Put even more simply, Trump said he had a better time talking on the phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin — whose country has been one of America’s most prominent adversaries for decades — than the leader of one of America’s all-time best friends.
Turnbull publicly downplayed the tensions, but in June, video of Turnbull mocking Trump on stage at the Australian Parliament’s annual midwinter ball leaked (remember, when it’s summer here, it’s winter in Australia).
In the video, Turnbull mimics Trump’s exaggerated hand gestures and steals his lines — “The Donald and I, we are winning and winning in the polls. We are winning so much! We are winning like we have never won before.”
It was a stunning admission, even though the program was a well-known secret. The CIA rarely, if ever, confirms or denies stories about its operations, even if they're reported in the media.
And while the president has the authority to declassify information as he sees fit, particularly if he feels it’s in the nation’s interest to do so, his casual disclosure of a highly classified operation — on Twitter, no less — only exacerbated the ever-growing rift between him and the nation’s intelligence agencies.
6) Used his chief of staff’s dead son to make a false claim about Obama
On October 4, four US Special Forces members died in an ambush in Niger. Two weeks later, a reporter at a Rose Garden press conference asked Trump why he hadn’t yet reached out to the families.
“If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls,” Trump responded, inaccurately. “A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate.”
Trump doubled down on that accusation the next day — and decided to use the death of the son of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in Afghanistan in 2010 to substantiate his unfounded claim.
“Now, as far as other representatives, I don’t know,” Trump said in a radio interview with a Fox News host. “I mean, you could ask Gen. Kelly, did he get a call from Obama. You could ask other people. I don’t know what Obama’s policy was. I write letters, and I also call.”
A White House official later told Politico that Kelly didn’t receive a call from Obama after his son was killed.
That’s misleading, though: The White House hosted a breakfast for the families of fallen troops in May 2011, and Kelly — then a serving general — and his wife sat at the same table as First Lady Michelle Obama.
7) Thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for kicking US diplomats out of Russia
In late July, Putin orderedthe United States reduce its diplomatic staff in Russia by 755 employees in retaliation against new US sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for meddling in the 2016 election. The New York Times called it the “harshest such diplomatic move since a similar rupture in 1986, in the waning days of the Soviet Union.”
But instead of sticking up for America against Putin, Trump thanked him.
“I want to thank him because we’re trying to cut down our payroll, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll,” Trump told reporters a little over a week later. “There’s no real reason for them to go back. I greatly appreciate the fact that we’ve been able to cut our payroll of the United States. We’re going to save a lot of money.”
This may not come as an enormous surprise, but Trump’s analysis was way off. The Daily Beast’s Spencer Ackerman pointed out on Twitter that while the diplomats were formally “kicked out” of Russia, the State Department still had to continue to pay them. It’s not as though they were fired from their jobs.
8) Picked a Twitter fight with London’s mayor after a terror attack
On the evening of June 3, three ISIS-inspired terrorists rammed their van into pedestrians on London Bridge before getting out and stabbing people in bars in London’s nearby Borough Market neighborhood, killing seven people and wounding 48.
The next morning, the city’s popular Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, went on television to encourage Londoners to stand strong in the face of terror and not to be frightened by the increased police presence in the coming days.
“We will never let them win, nor cower in fear,” Khan said. "Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. There's no reason to be alarmed.”
Khan’s comments enraged Trump, who promptly took to Twitter to blast the mayor.
At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is "no reason to be alarmed!"
As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained, Trump took Khan’s comments completely out of context: The mayor was saying there was no reason to be alarmed by the increased police presence in the area, not by terrorism in general.
At first, Khan didn’t respond to Trump directly, choosing instead to have a spokesperson slam Trump in a statement to the press. “[The mayor] has more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump's ill-informed tweet that deliberately takes out of context his remarks,” the spokesperson said.
This seemed to only incense Trump further. The next day, the president again attacked the mayor on Twitter:
Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his "no reason to be alarmed" statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!
Khan finally weighed in later that day on television, telling the BBC: “Some people thrive on feud and division. We are not going to let Donald Trump divide our communities.”
Remember: This is a man whose city had suffered a devastating terror attack just two days before and who was trying to help the people of London recover. And the president of the United States was picking a fight with him on Twitter for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
9) Complimented a brutal military dictator’s shoes
During a whirlwind tour of the Middle East in May, Trump met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who overthrew his country's democratically elected president in a 2013 coup, killed more than 800 protesters in a single day, and has imprisoned tens of thousands of dissidents since he took power.
Sitting on red velvet chairs in a lavishly appointed room in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, Sisi complimented Trump on his "unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible." As Sisi and the translator spoke, Trump's eyes kept darting down toward the floor by Sisi's feet.
A few minutes later, as reporters began exiting the room, Trump decided to compliment Sisi back: not on his personality — on his shoes.
"Love your shoes. Boy, those shoes. Man..." Trump said.
As CNN's Noah Gray noted at the time, "It's unclear the exact shoe the Egyptian President was wearing, but [they] appeared to be black boots, similar to those Trump was wearing, but shinier."
So it seems that while the Egyptian dictator was praising Trump, Trump himself was literally distracted by shiny objects.
Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
To be fair, those are some pretty shiny shoes.
Enlarge / This row of iced tea bottles kind of looks like a blockchain. (credit: Long Island Iced Tea Corp.)
The Long Island Iced Tea Corporation is exactly what it sounds like: a company that sells people bottled iced tea and lemonade. But today the company announced a significant change of strategy that would start with changing its name to "Long Blockchain Corporation."
The company was "shifting its primary corporate focus towards the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology," the company said in a Thursday morning press release. "Emerging blockchain technologies are creating a fundamental paradigm shift across the global marketplace," the company said.
The stock market loved the announcement. Trading opened Thursday morning more than 200 percent higher than Wednesday night's closing price.
If your first reaction to porgs, the big-eyed animals that recently debuted in The Last Jedi, was that you want to eat their adorable little faces, you’re not alone—and not just because Chewbecca tries to have one for dinner in the new film.
Star Wars fans have been talking about cooking and eating these puffin-seal-pug creatures since their appearance in the first trailer for The Last Jedi, and the movie’s release has only heightened this terrible hunger. Even the film’s stars have weighed in on the issue: Laura Dern came out against porg-eating, while Oscar Isaac is vocally in favor. Various websites have pondered not just the ethics of porg consumption, but exactly what a porg would taste like; some have even created menus of “all the...
Young children will pay to watch a puppet being beaten, but only six-year-olds pay more to watch punishment inflicted on a puppet that personally offended them, according to scientists trying to figure out when our sense of fairness first develops.
In a beautifully macabre study published today in Nature Human Behaviour, 72 children aged four to six individually interacted with puppets in a miniature theater. One of the puppets gave the child a toy, while the other offered the toy and then withheld it. Next, a third puppet appeared onstage with a large stick and proceeded to beat whichever puppet was still onstage (this alternated based on the child) while it made crying sounds.
After a little while, the curtain fell and it was time to...
Poor guy... haha (the DJ, not that scumbag FCC chair)
If you care about net neutrality, it’s understandable that you’d be upset with Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai today. In a 3-2 vote, the FCC delivered a killing blow to remove the net neutrality rules put in place two years ago. It is your American-given right to voice your dissatisfaction with this decision! Let your social media channels be your metaphorical megaphone to the higher powers! Also make sure you’re sending your comments to the right Ajit Pai.
This Ajit Pai is a DJ from Goa, India, who unfortunately shares a name with the controversial FCC figurehead. Shockingly, some online commenters have failed to draw the distinction and have flocked to Pai’s social accounts to yell about net neutrality. On his most...
It's been five years since a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. To mark the tragedy's anniversary, CNN anchor Jake Tapper in 2015 memorialized the victims on Twitter, posting the names and pictures of those killed on December 14, 2012:
The tweets are heartbreaking, but they also offer a reminder that Sandy Hook was supposed to be the mass shooting so horrifying that it finally convinced America to do something about its extraordinary levels of gun violence. Yet even though the research has pretty definitively linked America's easy access to guns and abundance of firearms to more gun violence, nothing was done on the federal level. And since Sandy Hook, there have been more than 1,500 shootings in which four or more people were injured or killed.
Watch: America's gun problem, explained in 18 charts
California doctors came together and brought the state maternal death rate way down.
When Yvette Cornejo went in into labor last August, she had already given birth to two sons. Their deliveries had been relatively short and easy, and she was hoping her third would be similar.
But this time was more complicated. The baby had flipped in the womb. He was coming out face down. There was a possibility that his shoulders would be crushed.
Nurses were eventually able to reach in and turn the baby around, and Matthew Cornejo was born healthy, with shoulders intact. But the labor had been long and very painful. Hours later, in the recovery ward, Yvette was still feeling that pain. She was curled up into a ball and grimacing.
A nurse checked her padding and noticed a clot of blood on it, roughly the size of a ping pong ball. She weighed it and swapped in fresh padding. Then Yvette passed more blood clots.
The nurse realized Yvette was hemorrhaging.
On this episode of The Impact, we look at how Yvette’s nurses and doctors dealt with that hemorrhage and saved her life — and how these procedures connect to a bigger effort to save mothers lives all across the state of California.
Compared to its peer countries, the United States has a surprisingly high maternal death rate. Mothers are three times more likely to die of childbirth here than in the UK, and eight time more likely to die of childbirth here than in Norway or Sweden.
But in California, a group of doctors came together just over a decade ago to build “toolkits” that would help doctors manage the most prevalent causes of maternal death, including preeclampsia, blood clots, and hemorrhage.
These toolkits involve physical tools, like a “hemorrhage cart” full of implements to treat a mother’s bleeding, as well as step-by-step instructions to guide doctors through caring for mothers.
This effort cut California’s maternal death rate by more than half in five years. And it helped save mothers like Yvette.
For more reporting on maternal health, read Vox reporter Julia Belluz’s piece on the California project.
For more stories about policy and real people, subscribe to The Impacton Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a rating and a review, and send us your thoughts. We’re at impact@vox.com.
Intel and AMD in a partnership... What the frak kind of alternate reality did I get myself into?!
Today Intel (and AMD) are announcing a partnership to create processors using Intel's high-performance x86 cores, AMD Radeon Graphics, and HBM2 within a single processor package using Intel's latest EMIB technology for multi-die designs.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy altered the South’s memory of the Civil War.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, a women’s group that was formed in 1894, led the effort to revise Confederate history at the turn of the 20th century. That effort has a name: the Lost Cause. It was a campaign to portray Confederate leaders and soldiers as heroic, and it targeted the minds and identities of children growing up in the South so they would develop a personal attachment to the Confederate cause.
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UDC members.
Even without the right to vote, the group was extremely influential. They lobbied local governments to erect memorials to the Confederacy all over the South, including in prominent public spaces like courthouses and state capitols. They formed textbook committees and pressured school boards to ban books that the UDC deemed “unjust to the South,” which was anything that shed negative light on the Confederacy.
Their work with children went beyond the classroom as well. They formed an auxiliary group called the Children of the Confederacy, a program that sought to get kids actively involved in “Southern” history. They would recite UDC-sponsored rhetoric, visit veterans, participate in monument unveilings, and more.
Watch the video above to learn more about the UDC’s efforts to present their distorted version of history as “real history.”
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The Children of the Confederacy visiting a Confederate grave.
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