Black recently sent a strongly-worded letter to a high school teacher who had criticized his support for a law that would make it more difficult to assign students books with explicit content, such as Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning masterpiece Beloved. “I was surprised by your personal advocacy of the book Beloved,” Black wrote. “That book is so vile - - so profoundly filthy - - that when a Senator rose on the Senate Floor and began reading a single passage, several other Senators leapt to their feet to interrupt the reading.”
The state senator’s bad opinions aren’t limited to literature. He’s an arch-conservative who has argued that spousal rape should be legal and abortion, sodomy, and the morning-after pill should be outlawed. He’s also a longtime Assad supporter. In 2014, Black sent a letter to the Syrian president, praising “the Syrian Arab Army for its heroic rescue of Christians in the Qalamoun Mountain Range.”
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It’s not often that Amazon features a laptop as one of its deals of the day, so anyone who uses a desktop at home or work should definitely check out this $250 Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga for their portable computing needs.
Though this laptop runs Windows 10, its price is pretty similar to a lot of Chromebooks. That said, this model’s 4GB of RAM and 120GB SSD far exceed what you’d find in most of Google’s alternatives. The real highlight feature though is the touchscreen. Sure, at 11.6", and 1366x768 resolution, this probably won’t be your main computer. But since it’s a Yoga, you can flip it into all sorts of different poses. Need to carry it around? Turn it into a tablet. Finished working on a plane, and just want to watch a movie? Flip it into stand mode to get the keyboard out of the way.
Is it an amazing laptop? No. But it seems like a hell of a deal at $250. Just note that this price is only available today, and it could very well sell out early.
Today only, Amazon’s Gold Box features a pair of deals to keep your teeth healthy and white between visits to the dentist.
First off, you can pick up an Oral-B Pro 7000 SmartSeries toothbrush for $110, one of the best prices we’ve seen. In addition to six different cleaning modes (including one for your tongue), a travel kit, a pressure sensor, and a timer, the Pro 7000 also syncs to an iOS or Android app that tracks your brushing habits and offers personalized feedback.
I know a lot of people are reflexively against the Bluetoothification of everyday household items, and that’s fine. What I’m saying is that even if you never download that app, this is still a fantastic toothbrush at $110.
Like the popular plastic set, these containers nest nicely, and even though you get five different container sizes, you only have to keep up with two sizes of lids. Unlike the plastic version though, these are oven safe up to 425 degrees, plus they just feel more premium.
If you like the idea of keeping your credit cards and phone attached at the hip, but don’t want to saddle your beautiful phone with a bulky case, this $7 CardNinja can attach right onto the back with easily-removable 3M adhesive. Once it’s attached, the elastic pouch allows it to store up to 8 cards, plus some cash, meaning you really can ditch your wallet.
If you don’t already own a salad spinner to wash and dry your salad greens, fruits, and vegetables, you won’t find many for less than $17, let alone models with five year warranties.
I’m willing to bet that your toilet handle is one of the most germ-infested surfaces in your home, but this $33 Kohler kit can add touchless flushing to almost any standard toilet. We saw this same price last month for Prime members, but now, the deal is open to everyone.
Blacklight flashlights are great if you want to spot hidden stains on train seats, hotel sheets, or (gasp) even in your own house...if that’s something you want to do.
It may seem silly, but if you find even one stain in a hotel room and complain to management, I guarantee that this thing will pay for itself several times over.
iOttie makes your favorite suction cup-based smartphone dash mounts, but today, two of their newest products just got their first discounts. We’ve seen similar products from other manufacturers before, but I’ve found iOttie’s snap-to-close phone cradles to be incredibly secure and convenient.
The OXO On 9 Cup Coffee Maker is our new recommendation for those who want amazing coffee paired with intuitive operation. It’s down to $180 today, and has only been cheaper once before back in December.
Ninja’s Professional system took home the title of your favorite affordable blender, but if you only need one to make single-serve smoothies, the Nutri Ninja Pro is also a great option. Amazon’s marked it down to an all-time low $60 today, which gets you a 900 watt motor and three different sizes of blending cups.
Like the idea of a Belkin WeMo Switch, but not willing to spend $40-$50 to try one out? This TP-Link alternative has a nearly identical feature set for half the price.
Just like a WeMo switch, TP-Link’s Smart Plug will let you turn appliances on and off from your smartphone, and set schedules to toggle them automatically. The only major feature it’s lacking is IFTTT support, but it will integrate with an Amazon Echo for voice control.
While this Tesoro keyboard is marketed towards gamers, it looks basically like any other office-appropriate keyboard, and its clicky Blue mechanical switches are a dream for typists.
OXO makes some of the most popular kitchen accessories on the market, and Amazon’s knocked a couple of them down to all-time low prices today. The beakers are kind of whimsical and silly, but the mandoline slicer is legitimately useful if you don’t already own one; just don’t chop off your fingers.
This tiny lantern can fold down to the size of a coaster, recharge itself with a built-in solar panel, and even give your phone a (small) emergency charge. If you spend any amount of time outdoors, you can’t ask for much more at this price.
The Char-Griller Akorn Kamado Kooker features a 306 square inch cast iron cooking surface (which is most similar to the $829 large Big Green Egg), and traps heat inside a heavily-insulated stainless steel body. Our deal researcher, Corey, owns a BGE, and I asked him about it on Slack:
And I use my BGE for about 70% of meat meals.
Probably 90% during the warm months.
Best Father’s Day gift I’ll ever get.
Lana jokes that she’s the one who benefits most because I cook on it all the time.
Worth the price just for its ability to cook pizza, IMO.
But pork chops, lions, tenderloin are beyond incredible on it.
Obviously, this isn’t the “real thing,” but the consensus among Amazon reviewers is that it’s at least nearly as good, which sounds like a decent compromise considering it’s only about 1/3 of the price, and comes with a stable cart and folding shelves, both of which you’d need to buy separately with the Egg.
These skillets feature a durable stainless steel cooking surface, an even and rapid-heating aluminum core, and a beautiful stainless exterior, all sandwiched together to create the ultimate pan. And, like all All-Clad items, it comes with a lifetime warranty, though you probably won’t need it so long as you treat it well.
If you make a habit of shopping at Banana Republic, Gap, Old Navy, or Athleta, you can pick up a $100 e-gift card today on eBay for just $85. Since it’s just a gift card, your savings will stack with any other deals or promotions the retailers offer as well.
Note: Yes, I know it’s labeled as a Banana Republic gift card, but it’s valid at all of the stores listed above.
If you’ve ever thought about pulling out your blender to make a smoothie, sauce, or dip, and then held off because you didn’t want to clean 3,000 different parts, this deal is for you. The 4.5 star-rated Cuisinart Smart Stick Hand Blender is down to $29 today on Amazon, the best price they’ve listed all year.
The big advantage here is that unlike a traditional blender, you can dip the Smart Stick into whatever container you were already using to hold your ingredients; be it a single-serve cup or a huge mixing bowl. That saves you time, and means fewer dishes to clean up once you’re done. Reviewers also say it chops through everything from fruit to ice cubes with no trouble, so it really can be a full blender replacement for most use cases.
As always, we don’t know how long this deal will be available, so be sure to grab one before the price shoots back up.
Waterpik is an easier (and they would argue more effective) way to “floss” between your teeth, and Amazon is once again taking $10 off the Aquarius model, in case you missed out last month. Discount shown at checkout.
If you aren’t familiar, these genius little gadgets use lasers to project red and green lights onto the front of your house, giving the appearance of holiday spirit without the hassle of actually hanging up outdoor lights. Last year was the first time they were widely available, but they were almost impossible to find, and consistently cost $40-$50. So yes, this deal is about half a year ahead of schedule, but it never hurts to plan ahead.
Obviously, this isn’t a cable you’ll want to travel everywhere with, but if you want to be able to charge your phone or tablet while sitting on the couch, or if your nightstand is are away from the nearest outlet, an extra-long cable like this should get the job done.
Packing cubes can make organizing clothes and toiletries for your next trip a little less hellish, and this highly-rated set of four from AmazonBasics is only $20 today. That’s $5 less than usual, and an all-time low. I actually just bought a set of these, and I absolutely love them.
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Reporter Julia Ioffe recently wrote a deeply reported profile of Melania Trump for GQ, one that revealed the existence of her secret half-brother and also her dad’s strong similarities to the Donald. Now Ioffe’s getting deluged with sexist, anti-Semitic abuse. It’s almost like there’s a pattern here?
Back in September, I wrote about Donald Trump’s Nazi and white supremacist fans. Many of them then joined me on Twitter to share cartoons of people with big hooked noses and Holocaust jokes and sophisticated media theories:
It was odd! Now Ioffe is getting the same red carpet welcome, as the Guardian notes:
On Thursday, Ioffe answered a phone call from an anonymous caller who played a Hitler speech. She received another call from “Overnight Caskets”. On Twitter, users posted photos of her face superimposed on a mug shot from Auschwitz. The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist site, attacked Ioffe in a blog post titled: “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!”
It’s particularly fun, Ioffe told the paper, given that her family came to the United States from Russia fleeing anti-Semitism.
The Daily Stormer’s founder, Andrew Anglin, has been kicked off Twitter, but many of his fans continue to hang out there to share their special feelings about journalists. They get particularly enthused by anybody who mentions that Trump’s campaign has Nazi overtones—like Eli Lake, who recently pointed out that Trump’s new slogan “America First” is literally a holdover from World War II. Lake is a particular favorite of a specific breed of Trump voter. I wonder why.
There’s probably a way for a Jewish or female reporter to write critically about Donald Trump and not get hit with this tidal wave of diarrhea. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sure it’s possible.
In an ostensibly noble attempt to tease out the logic behind North Carolina’s discriminatory H2 law, Megyn Kelly interviewed Governor Pat McCrory last night. And for a moment, her practical perspective (made more powerful coming from someone who’s been experiencing women’s bathrooms for her entire life) cut through the bigoted bullshit.
Kelly asked McCrory what fears led to his passing of this bill. “I do not want government to be able to tell private businesses what their bathroom policies should be,” he said, regarding a Charlotte anti-discrimination ordinance that H2 overturned. “I have no desire to be the bathroom police for private business.” He elaborated:
It was a respect for privacy. It was an expectation for privacy that individuals have, especially our youths have, when they go into a locker room or shower or a restroom, they expect only people their gender to be there in that shower, locker room or rest room. It’s a tradition we’ve had for many years.
(Tellingly, McCrory frequently used “gender” during this interview when he seemed to mean “biological sex,” because he does not care about or understand the notions of gender identity that we’ve also had for many, many years.)
Kelly then pointed out the fundamental misunderstanding of how things go down in the women’s room that’s a the heart of this bill:
I want to ask you about bathrooms, ‘cause I’ve been in women’s bathrooms my whole life, and we don’t have the urinal situation. We got, like, the stalls. And we get to go in, we go do our business, and, like…we don’t see each other. So why are you concerned about young girls exposing themselves or seeing someone else exposed in a woman’s bathroom?
“Well, first of all, I can’t believe we’re talking about this,” said McCrory. “This is not an issue that I started. This is an issue that the left started, not the right.”
Governor Pat McCrory can’t believe that anyone would attempt to engage him in a practical discussion regarding how his law will affect actual human lives, as opposed to upholding the right’s age-old straw man argument about protecting women, children, and tradition from the queer monsters.
Kelly specifically called him out on his seeming perpetuation of stereotypes. “What is your fear? ‘Cause you know there is a misconception that transgendered are somehow molesters, and they’re not. That’s not true,” she said.
“I don’t use that term,” said McCrory. I think he means “molesters,” though it’s doubtful he’s used the term “transgender” much, for that would mean having to consider other ways of life. Whether he uses it or not, he surely implies it.
“Typically male molesters are heterosexual and if they want to sneak into a bathroom, they’ll do it. But in 90 percent of the cases, molestation happens with someone you know. So what is the fear about the transgender situation in bathrooms?” countered Kelly.
“Mine is not a fear, and I don’t like the rhetoric that’s often used on the right saying what the fear is,” said McCrory. “It’s a basic expectation of privacy that I hear from mom and dads, that, when their daughter or son goes into a facility, a restroom, they expect people of that gender, of that biological sex or gender to be the only other ones in that. That’s the expectations that we’ve had for many, many years, as both you and I have grown up on.”
McCrory did concede that H2 creates untenable situations for trans people. “For those people who have these unique gender identification issues, which I emphasize with, we ought to allow the schools to make special arrangements for those people,” he said.
After calling out PayPal for pulling out of North Carolina, while continuing to do business in places like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where homosexuality is illegal, Kelly called McCrory a “stand-up guy” for appearing on her show and the illusion of justice faded from sight.
You may have heard about the latest dustup between Jeff Jarvis, a media futurist and journalism professor, and his satirical online alter-ego, @ProfJeffJarvis, who was created several years ago by a software developer named Rurik Bradbury to mock the jargon-laden prognostications for which Jarvis and his ilk are known. The two Jarvises have butted heads in the past, but the most recent incident—in which the real Jarvis, after airing legal threats on Twitter, successfully forced Esquire to delete a satirical essay carrying @ProfJeffJarvis’s byline—shows that, for all of his bluster about the power of free speech, Jeff Jarvis is a cringing hypocrite when it comes to the offensive but entirely legal speech of others.
To catch you up: The essay under debate, which was published by Esquire on Tuesday and republished by Gawker on Wednesday, is a humorous piece about a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that soberly argued for the creation of a technocratic political party known as the Innovation Party. In one passage, @ProfJeffJarvis wrote: “Netizens will be co-opted to both fly drones over Pakistan, East Africa, and other trouble spots, and also to make the difficult call: Does this house really look like it is harboring terrorists? And should we deploy a Hellfire missile at the house or not? Cast your votes!”
Though the byline on Esquire.com read “Prof. Jeff Jarvis,” the accompanying biography explicitly stated that “Prof. Jeff Jarvis” was not, in fact, Jeff Jarvis. The author’s photo was, as it is on Twitter, a picture of an obese man wearing a Santa hat and a beer helmet. As the First Amendment lawyer Ken White explained on Wednesday, “the satirical nature [of the essay] is quite clear.”
In response, Jarvis took to Twitter, where he 1) Demanded Esquire immediately remove the entire article:
2) Claimed the essay—or, at least, the use of his name for satirical purposes—was so upsetting that he feared it would cause his heart to go into atrial fibrillation (a.k.a. an irregular heartbeat):
3) Began issuing barely-veiled legal threats against the magazine:
4) Contacted executives at Hearst Magazines, which owns Esquire, after one of the magazine’s editors refused to retract the piece. As Jarvis explained in a post on Medium:
After emailing the Esquire editor — at his request — and getting no response, I emailed other Hearst executives I happen know. I’m lucky enough to have the connections to make that possible; pity the poor shmuck who doesn’t have such media emails. ... In the end, I asked them to take my name off the piece entirely. If they wanted to publish it under the name of the author, that was their business and his. Then another executive entered the exchange and said: “I have asked them to take it down and I apologize for it. No excuses, it was handled poorly on our end.” And down it went.
@ProfJeffJarvis has indeed caused several personal and professional headaches for Jeff Jarvis and his social circle, the members of which have apparently mistaken the satirical version for the real one on more than one occasion. It’s true, of course, that every public figure risks inviting this kind of treatment in the course of seeking, and gaining, the public’s attention. Still, it’s obviously not fun, and it’s probably even quite painful, to be the butt of a long-running joke in your own industry, a joke that depends on the use of your own name to make any sense.
Jarvis has argued, somewhat diplomatically, that Bradbury is free to satirize him and his work—just as long as he keeps his name out of it. “The issue was not satire but acquisition of my name [and] fooling readers of an allegedly journalistic enterprise,” he tweeted yesterday. What Jarvis misunderstands is that a satire of Jeff Jarvis inherently requires using the name of Jeff Jarvis, just as a coherent satire of Donald Trump, such as this Onion column by “Donald Trump,” requires the use of Trump’s name to have any comic effect. This tradition of humor-by-impersonation-and-exaggeration stretches back centuries, to the playwrights of Ancient Greece. And the ever-present possibility that certain people might mistake a satire for reality is the very thing that makes satire funny. As Ken White, the aforementioned First Amendment lawyer, observed, “The joke is not only at the expense of Jeff Jarvis. The joke is, in part, at the expense of people who read carelessly.”
Esquire, of all magazines, should know this. It frequently traffics in satirical articles, and was even sued a few years ago over a piece mocking the notorious birther Joseph Farah. (The magazine fought the lawsuit, and won.) So it is particularly remarkable that the magazine’s executives, in complying with Jarvis’s demands, have effectively endorsed his misunderstanding of satire. It is far more hypocritical and troubling, however, that a person of Jarvis’s position and influence would ever demand the piece’s removal in the first place.
Jarvis is a public figure who has built his reputation in part on his aggressive advocacy for journalists’ First Amendment rights, as well as his strong belief that a culture of free speech is a necessary component of any functioning political system. You can read his work on these issues on his personal blog, in various essays for The Nation and The Guardian,and in his foreword to the journalist Craig Silverman’s book, Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech.*
He has explicitly argued in the past that satirical impersonation is fair game for media outlets. When a man pretending to be Arnold Schwarzenegger called into The Howard Stern Show in 2005 to discuss his plans to detonate the Moon—which fooled, among others, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough—he criticized the Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam for describing the gambit as a lie. “Lying? How about joking, Alex? Nobody was trying to lie. They were trying to tell a joke. But big, old media just didn’t get it. Maybe we need to add courses in remedial humor to journalism schools.”
When he writes about the larger issue of free speech, Jarvis’s tone often veers into the militant. Last year, after masked gunmen associated with Al-Qaeda murdered eleven staffers of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, Jarvis upbraided the New York Times and other news outlets that either censored, or chose not to run at all, the cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammad that apparently inspired the attack:
I don’t buy that journalism should not offend. I don’t buy that describing [the cartoons] is sufficient. ... [I]f you’re the paper of record, if you’re the highest exemplar of American journalism, if you expect others to stand by your journalists when they are threatened, if you respect your audience to make up its own mind, then damnit stand by Charlie Hebdo and inform your public. Run the cartoons.
Later on in the same piece, Jarvis added, “First, they came for the satirists. Then they came for the journalists. Who will be left to speak for you?” And later still: “The idea that speech should be controlled to limit offense is itself offensive to the principles of a free, open, and modern society.”
The satirical cartoons to which Jarvis refers were deliberately designed to offend practicing Muslims in France, and had likely motivated the cold-blooded murder of working journalists, yet Jarvis still insisted that American news outlets, like their European counterparts, publish them anyway. Boiled down, the calculation is simple: To protect a culture of free speech, you need to actually practice free speech, even when doing so places human lives at risk. This is, to some eyes, an extremist position, but hardly an uncommon one among First Amendment fundamentalists such as Jarvis.
Which is why Jarvis’s meltdown and subsequent success in removing Bradbury’s essay is so cowardly. He is a tenured professor of journalism, a self-professed disciple of free speech, who on one hand castigates the Times for declining to publish the Charlie Hebdo Mohammad cartoons, and on the other hand refuses to tolerate the use of his own name in a work of satire aimed at his own ideas and public persona. He believes journalists should accept the risk of violence as a matter of solidarity with their own profession, but blames a satirical essay for nearly hospitalizing him. He has built a career by defending the freedom of speech when it costs him nothing to do so, but immediately denigrates the very same freedom when someone else exercises it to his disliking.
“This is not about free speech,” Jarvis told Gawker in an email he later published on Medium. “The First Amendment protects against government intrusion on speech.”
This is wrong in two ways. By his own standards, an outlet’s willingness to publish certain content in the face of outside opposition is a matter of free speech—no government was pressuring the Times not to run the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And by lobbing statements that clearly suggested a personal willingness to litigate the matter, he made this incident about the First Amendment, too. When asked to explain his announcement seeking a lawyer and his subsequent use of legal terms such as “actionable” and “defamation,” Jarvis told Gawker, “I can use many words to describe what was done, some of them also used by lawyers—words including unethical, unjournalistic, defamatory, damaging. Describing is different from suing.”
It’s true that Jarvis didn’t sue Esquire. He didn’t have to. But legal threats like his launch a decision-chain in the minds of publishers and writers, a gaming out of costs and benefits that the First Amendment is designed, in certain cases, to short-circuit. Satire, including satire that invokes the identity of a non-consenting public figure, is protected by the First Amendment precisely so that publishers can make use of the form without fear of retribution. Unfortunately, some publishers view the costs of defending against quixotic nuisance actions from the likes of Jarvis as greater than the benefits of eventually winning them. And sometimes the likes of Jarvis have friends in high places.
Jarvis claims to be as concerned about the legal protection of free speech as he is about cultivating a culture hospitable to its existence. It is the job of the courts to uphold that freedom. But it is the job of journalists—and, yes, journalism professors, including Jeff Jarvis—to preserve a culture in which people are encouraged to practice it.
That Jarvis failed to do so, despite his history of posturing as a free speech warrior, is saddening but perhaps not surprising. It is far easier to defend free speech in theory, when it involves someone else, than it is to defend it in practice, when it involves you.
In July 2014, cell phone footage circulated the internet showing Edouard and several other officers in Bed Stuy arresting a man named Jahmi-El Cuffee, who was allegedly smoking weed in public. At one point in the video, while Cuffee is restrained on the ground, Edouard can be seen swiftly kicking the side of his head. The video surfaced less than a month after the NYPD killing of Eric Garner, and the conspicuous timing meant the incident faced more scrutiny than it otherwise might have. Edouard was immediately placed on modified duty and later charged criminally.
Edouard’s attorneys, the New York Post reports, took the unusual tactic of arguing that photos of Cuffee taken after the incident had been photoshopped to to show injuries that didn’t actually exist. The judge in the officer’s bench trial was unconvinced. “He let down his fellow officers by losing his composure. He gratuitously stomped on the head of Jahmi-El Cuffee...Prosecutors proved there was physical injury,” Judge Alan Marrus said when delivering the verdict.
Edouard’s assault charge carries a minimum sentence of probation and a maximum sentence of one year in prison. He will be sentenced in June.
This week, Latvian-based website Meduza reported on a string of violent robberies and blackmail schemes in St. Petersburg targeting gay men who use dating sites and hookup apps. Gay victims of crimes rarely go to the Russian police for fear of being outed or humiliated, and according to the report, this allows the culprits continue to act with impunity.
“Alexey” [not his real name] told Meduza about how he was lured into a high-rise apartment in a central part of the city by a man whose profile he saw on the gay social app Hornet. He was jumped by two other men hiding behind a sliding door of a closet. They beat him, videotaped him, shouted “We will break all your ribs and bury you!” and threatened to upload the video online. They then suggested they should “resolve the situation financially” and one of the robbers escorted Alexey home to get his bank card and transfer all the money out of his account. “Really, I’m not a homophobe,” the robber told Alexey as they waited for a cab. “I just heard this was a good way to get money.”
Meduza traced several almost identical incidents to an organized group of about 20 who would sometimes introduce themselves to the victims as an “NGO” called “Kindness,” telling them “We fight against people like you.” Though the verbal abuse and threats were always homophobic, their motivations appear to be financial. By the end of the fake “dates,” they would extort hundreds or thousands of dollars, whatever the victim could pay and borrow. The owner of the high-rise apartment at 224 Moskovskiy Prospekt where some of these robberies took place rents it at a day rate on Bookings.com. He refused to cooperate with Meduza at first, then suggested that if “a gay got beat up” then “he should be grateful he’s alive.” Recently, several victims have very hesitantly decided to go to the police.
Because it hasn’t been investigated until now, it’s difficult to tell how long the ring has been operating in St. Petersburg. Two years ago, three men were arrested for running a similar scheme in Moscow for several years. By the time of their arrest, they had committed at least 30 robberies and three murders.
Between 2012 and 2014, the neo-Nazi Maxim “The Hatchet” Martsinkevich and his vigilante movement of violent creeps used social media to lure, kidnap, torture, and humiliate gay men and minors. After he was imprisoned (for making racist comments in a video), international media attention to gay victims targeted over the internet has died down.
Even if it wasn’t homophobic hatred that directly motivated the St. Petersburg robberies, it certainly provided the opportunity and the cover—fear of being outed in Russia’s anti-gay socioeconomic climate means cooperative, scared, silent victims and investigations muddled with crucial omissions.
Last month, journalist and prominent Russian cultural critic Dmitry Tsilikin was fatally stabbed in his apartment. Sergei Kosyrev, a 21-year-old student at St. Petersburg’s Hydrometeorological University confessed to the murder. Fontanka.ru reported that he asked the cops to call him “the Cleanser,” and told them that he considered his life “a holy crusade against a particular social group.” He reportedly idolized Bård Guldvik “Faust” Eithun, the drummer of Norwegian death metal band Emperor, who fatally stabbed a gay man in 1992. According to The Moscow Times, Kosyrev had reportedly been attempting to extort Tsilikin, a well-known member of St. Petersburg’s cultural elite who had never publically commented on his identity. The victim’s friends hesitated to discuss his sexual orientation, even after his death. Tsilikin and Kosyrev reportedly met on a dating website two years ago.
It is unlikely that Dmitry Tsilikin’s allegedmurderer will be tried with a hate crime because, as the Moscow Timespoints out, the law doesn’t recognize sexual orientation as aggravating factors in violent assaults. It would have added a six years to his murderer’s sentencing.
The Defense Department released today the findings of a investigation into the deadly U.S. airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that left 42 dead—including 30 civilians—this past October. The investigation concluded that the bombing was the result of the “fog of war.”
According to Central Command, the aircrew manning the AC-130U Gunship, in support of U.S. Special Forces that were partnered with Afghan military on the ground, mistakenly identified the Médecins Sans Frontières trauma hospital for a Taliban-controlled site 400 meters away. “A combination of human errors, compounded by process and equipment failures” as well as “fatigue and high operational tempo” brought about the fatal mistake, a summary of the investigation reads.
The MSF hospital was fully functioning at the time of the attack, and while Taliban combatants were being treated there, the investigation acknowledges that neither U.S. nor Afghan forces were taking fire from the hospital compound. “They were absolutely trying to do the right thing. They were trying to support our Afghan partners,” Army General Joseph Votel said at a press conference this morning. “Unfortunately, they made the wrong judgement in this case.”
“This was an extraordinarily intense combat situation,” Votel told reporters. The special operations forces “were doing a variety of actions at the same time: they were trying to support their Afghan partners, they were trying to execute resupply operations, and they were trying to protect themselves.”
CENTCOM’s investigation, which has been made available for public review, is one of at least two conducted by the American military into the incident. (The AP obtained the other report last year.) One email to investigators contained in the CENTCOM report indicates that personnel involved in the attack were not made aware of their mistake until weeks later:
Given that the strike was unintentional, Votel said, the incident cannot be considered a war crime. The American military has made condolence payments to more than 170 people affected by the incident, the general continued, including $3,000 to those injured in the attack and $6,000 to families of those killed. Sixteen military personnel have been subject to “administrative actions” as punishment for their involvement in the attack. The DOD has also approved $5.7 million to rebuild the destroyed facility.
“Today’s briefing amounts to an admission of an uncontrolled military operation in a densely populated urban area, during which U.S. forces failed to follow the basic laws of war,” MSF President Meinie Nicolai said in a statement. “It is incomprehensible that, under the circumstances described by the U.S., the attack was not called off.”
“The threshold that must be crossed for this deadly incident to amount to a grave breach of international humanitarian law is not whether it was intentional or not,” Nicolai’s statement read. “With multinational coalitions fighting with different rules of engagement across a wide spectrum of wars today, whether in Afghanistan, Syria, or Yemen, armed groups cannot escape their responsibilities on the battlefield simply by ruling out the intent to attack a protected structure such as a hospital.”
According to the report, the hospital “did not have an internationally- recognized symbol to identify it as a medical facility, such as a Red Cross or Red Crescent that was readily visible to the aircrew at night.” However, a New York Times reporter wrote on Twitter, “It was brightly lit.Spread on the hospital roof was a large white & red flag reading ‘Médecins Sans Frontiers,’the group’s French name.” In a number of places, the investigation references video footage of the attack pulled from the gunship’s cameras for review; a Defense Department spokesman did not respond to an inquiry from Gawker about whether that footage would be made public.
John Sifton, the Asia policy director for Human Rights Watch, also disputed Votel’s understanding of the law. “The most notable point in today’s briefing was that the report found that U.S. personnel violated the laws of armed conflict,” he told the Times. “And yet we are also told that the U.S. military has failed to charge even one person criminally. This is, simply put, inexplicable.”
“General Joseph Votel’s assertion that a war crime must be deliberate, or intentional, is flatly wrong,” Sifton said. In its statement, MSF reiterated its request for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact Finding Commission.
Sitting in a harshly lit anteroom, you watch a doomsday prophet don a pair of dark goggles. He leads three sycophants in some vulgar ceremony, dipping his face into a vessel of synthetic orange powder and instructing the servants to do the same. Is that Cheeto dust? You pinch yourself and flail, desperate to wake up, but this is no nightmare. This is yesterday’s episode of The Glenn Beck Program, hosted by Glenn Beck.
As far as I can tell, there are four main problems with this segment. The first one is dermatological: Aren’t these guys worried about clogging their pores? Don’t they know anything about exfoliating?
The third is that people who mock Donald Trump usually do it because of his outlandish views, his blustery personality, his support for right-wing policies. Glenn Beck recently cried in front of a live audience about secular footsoldiers “coming for” religious people, comparing the times we’re living in now to the eve of the Holocaust. If Donald Trump is a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto®, Glenn Beck is a Fiery Doritos® Locos Taco Supreme.
Finally, a certain glowing beverage was noticeably absent from the proceedings. As Glenn Beck should certainly know, you can’t have Cheetos without Mountain Dew.
A proposed change to the ‘Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure’ issued yesterday by the United States Supreme Court will allow federal judges to allow the FBI to hack multiple computers at once, including machines of people who haven’t been suspected of a crime. It can even hack people the FBI knows to be innocent.
Under the old rules, the FBI had to know the location of the computer they were trying to hack, and thus had to get a warrant from a judge in that jurisdiction in order to deploy what’s ambiguously termed a ‘Network Investigative Tool’ (NIT) or hacking tool. Now, under the new rule issued by the highest court in the land, the FBI can go to a federal judge to hack computers they don’t even know the location of.
“So let’s say [the FBI] is trying to track a botnet or whatever, some type of cybercrime. [The FBI] can get a search warrant to go after let’s say 10 or 20, or 50 computers,” Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU Legislative Counsel told Gizmodo. “This new rule allows one judge to say ‘yeah, here’s a search warrant, go after those 50 computers and those computers can belong to victims [of cybercrime].’”
The new rule would allow the FBI to infect innocent people computer with malware in order to investigate cybercrime—even if their only connection to the crime is that they’re the victims. What could go wrong? Even better, there’s a legitimate fear that the judges who end up authorizing these hacking warrants don’t even fully grasp what they’re authorizing.
“I think a significant concern is within that rule there is no requirement that the FBI disclose to a judge exactly what hacking technique they’re using, what the unintended consequences are what the implications are,” Guliani said. “So you may have a situation where a judge is authorizing something without fully understanding what the questions are. And this has come up in other technologies like stingrays where judges say ‘well, I didn’t really know what I was authorizing.’”
This rule has six months to be changed or outright banned by Congress before it automatically goes into law. Senator Ron Wyden is already trying to ring alarm bells about these new powers, saying “These amendments will have significant consequences for Americans’ privacy and the scope of the government’s powers to conduct remote surveillance and searches of electronic devices.”
The FBI, of course, has failed to even pretend to be transparent about how it’s using our tax dollars to hack people. We know virtually nothing about what the current hacking procedures are, what protections exist, how often it’s hacking people, and what tools it’s using. “You can pretty much name the question and we probably don’t have an answer,” Guliani said.
“Criminals now have ready access to sophisticated anonymizing technologies to conceal their identity while they engage in crime over the Internet, and the use of remote searches is often the only mechanism available to law enforcement to identify and apprehend them,” Department of Justice Spokesperson Peter Carr told Gizmodo. “This amendment ensures that courts can be asked to review warrant applications in situations where is it currently unclear what judge has that authority. The amendment makes explicit that it does not change the traditional rules governing probable cause and notice. The amendment would not authorize the government to undertake any search or seizure or use any remote search technique not already permitted under current law. Rather, the amendment would merely ensure that some court is available to consider whether a particular warrant application comports with the Fourth Amendment. This rule change would not grant any additional authority to conduct searches outside the U.S.”
There’s another problem with mass FBI hacking. It’s unclear that evidence gathered via malware laden hacking tools will actually end up being admissible in court. In addition, these warrants are sketchy when it comes to fulfilling some basic requirements of the fourth amendment, which bans unreasonable search and seizure.
The FBI learned this the hard way recently when evidence from a massive child porn operation was suppressed in court because the FBI didn’t have the legal authority to hack thousands of computer’s it didn’t know the location of.
“What we’ve seen with the NITs in the Tor hidden services cases is that the government has gotten a single warrant authorizing it to use an exploit and install a NIT on thousands of unknown individuals’ computers,” Andrew Crocker, Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Gizmodo. “That warrant doesn’t (and in fact can’t) satisfy the particularity requirement in the warrant clause of the Fourth Amendment, meaning that the evidence derived from the NIT should be suppressed.”
This is yet another confusing and secretive way the FBI is going about solving crimes in the digital age, and it’s only going to get worse.
Updated 4/29/16 11:51 am:
We have updated this story with comment from the Department of Justice.
On Tuesday night, Donald Trump said, of Hillary Clinton, “The only thing she’s got going for her is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”
Hillary’s campaign fired back about twenty-four hours later with some Tracy-Flick approved meme action, offering an official “Woman Card” to she (or he—it’s 2016, or didn’t you know?) who donates to the Hillary campaign.
Shortly after the tweet went out, the sound of innumerable 29-year-old Clinton campaign social media deputies who love to say they “survive on Diet Dr. Pepper and adrenaline” and would, later that night, go on to Instagram images of their empty refrigerators (#CampaignLife, #ImWithHer) congratulating each other could be heard from Gawker Media’s Chelsea office, if faintly.
The card, which seems to be some kind of visual metonymy or “joke,” and not an actual card, appears to contain a magnetic strip, similar to the ones found on the bottom of New York City’s MTA Metro Cards. It’s a funny little gag, you see, because Hillary knows what Metro Cards are, and she can laugh at herself, because she is a relatable New Yorker.
“Deal me in,” entreats the card, just under its magnetic strip, implying that all of us ladies are at a table, about to enter a game that is, perhaps, not for us. “Is this a poker game or a turnstile?” America’s sticklers, upon seeing this tweet, demanded to know. “For god’s sake, this is a mixed metaphor,” cried your most annoying coworker, who is probably named either Meghan or Olivia.
I know she’s ruining your office’s well-earned Friday vibe, but Meghan is right.
The popular Wall Street blog Zero Hedge, whose motto is a quote from Fight Club and whose editorial output is entertainingly proneto populist conspiracytheorizing, is unique among financial news outlets in that its contributors publish under a single alias, “Tyler Durden,” the name of one of Fight Club’s main characters. The real world identities behind the blog have inspired speculation for years, but today Bloomberg News seems to have finally nailed them down:
Colin Lokey, also known as “Tyler Durden,” is breaking the first rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. ... Following an acrimonious departure this month, in which two-thirds of [ZeroHedge’s three writers] traded allegations of hypocrisy and mental instability, Lokey, 32, decided to unmask himself and his fellow Durdens. Lokey said the other two men are Daniel Ivandjiiski, 37, the Bulgarian-born former analyst long reputed to be behind the site, and Tim Backshall, 45, a well-known credit derivatives strategist.
The “allegations of hypocrisy” apparently stemmed from the fact that, although each of these men wrote for a website that purports to speak for voiceless individuals struggling under the domination of global capitalism, all three men’s Zero Hedge salaries were in fact pretty sweet, and maintaining the cash flow required chasing web traffic:
Lokey said he joined Zero Hedge for $6,000 a month and received an annual bonus of $50,000, earning more than $100,000 last year. His salary helped pay the rent on a “very nice” condominium on South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island, he said. Despite the compensation, he contends that he left because he disagreed with the site’s editorial vision. “Reality checks are great. But Zero Hedge ceased to serve that public service years ago,” Lokey wrote. “They care what generates page views. Clicks. Money.”
Zero Hedge hired Colin when he approached us over a year ago begging for a job after he was fired with cause from Seeking Alpha [a stock market insights site] following a fight with a coworker. This should have set off alarm flags but we ignored it. ... Colin had no qualms with capitalism when he accepted the money he was paid: as Bloomberg wrote, “his salary helped pay the rent on a “very nice” condominium on South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island.” Perhaps he should have refused any compensation to demonstrate his allegiance to some “anticapitalist” cause? More importantly, and unfortunately, Colin also was revealed to be an emotionally unstable, psychologically troubled alcoholic with a drug dealer past, as per his own disclosures.
The rest of the breathtakingly long post features screenshots of increasingly contentious iMessage conversations (including one that appears to be a death threat), a chart illustrating the blog’s web traffic, and sentences like, “We wanted to help Colin, but not even he had any idea how to help himself.” Blog drama is the best drama because it is the messiest drama in the world.
In a couple of weeks, Orlando will play host to the 2016 Invictus Games, an international athletic competition for injured vets founded by Prince Harry and with which he is very involved. To drum up enthusiasm, Harry is publicly beefing with the Obamas on Twitter.
This feud is great and should continue through the remainder of the Obama administration and into perpetuity.
The Obamas fired the first shots with some good old American trash-talk.
Harry promptly responded—with a little assist from his grandmother. First came a message via the Kensington Palace Twitter account: “Wow @FLOTUS and @POTUS, some @weareinvictus fighting talk there! You can dish it out, but can you take it? - H.” Then came this video.
“Boom—really, please,” says the 90-year-old queen, who can barely keep from giggling and appears to be having a genuinely good time squaring off with the President and First Lady of the United States for the entertainment of the social media masses.
I love this fake feud. This fake feud is wonderful.
If for some reason you haven’t been closely following this extremely important story, allow me to quickly get you up to speed. Earlier this month, the MBTA transit police, which patrols the T, Boston’s public transit system, announced a call for names for its new police dog on social media. The name “Mr. Spaghetti,” proposed by a local comedian named Dicky Stock, appeared to win in a landslide, aided by a campaign of surreal flyers that Stock and his friends and fans posted around the city.
However, the MBTA police announced that the dog’s new name would be “Hunter,” not Mr. Spaghetti. In a tweet, the department claimed that Hunter had been the most popular suggestion.
When a Bostonian who prefers to remain anonymous called them out on the discrepancy on Twitter, the department’s official account sent him a private message claiming that there was nothing to be concerned about. Hunter had received a number of votes via text message and Twitter DM, according to the message, which outnumbered Mr. Spaghetti’s publicly available votes. A plausible, if unlikely explanation.
Which brings us to today. J. Patrick Brown, the editor of the Freedom of Information Act-focused website MuckRock, submitted a public records request to the MBTA for all submissions, public and private, to the call for dog names. In response, the department told him that all of the submissions were already online.
Subject: FOIA -MBTA K9 names
Please be advised, to the best of our knowledge NO correspondence exist. All correspondence as it relates to the naming of a K9 can be easily obtained publicly on the internet via our FaceBook and/or Twitter Account. We consider the request closed. Thanks you
Richard Sullivan
Superintendent
Transit Police Department
Boston, MA. 02118
Which is it? First the department claimed to have received votes for Hunter by text message and DM—there would have to have been dozens of them for Mr. Spaghetti to have lost the popular vote—then it claimed that all of the submissions were publicly available on Facebook and Twitter. The department also responded to a previous request from Gawker for all records and communications about Mr. Spaghetti by claiming that no responsive documents were available.
I asked Richard Sullivan, the superintendent of the MBTA police, to clear up the confusion. He told me that submissions to the text message number were not stored, and thus were not available to release. He was also a little rude about it, quite frankly.
“Suggestions received via our Text Line, which is set up to receive anonymous tips, do not get stored,” Sullivan wrote in an email. “I think you are expending an incredible amount time and energy on a non event. Mr. Spaghetti is a fictitious animal, he/she simply does NOT exist. The FB page which started the Mr. Spaghetti issue is also fictitious. The TPD has more important matters at hand like protecting our riding public and maintaining as safe a system as possible then responding to a completely made up issue. Have a good day. The TPD considers your request closed.”
The Washington Post’s slide into the ludicrous continues with its laughable write-up of a new study out of Washington State that boldly suggests that unarmed black people are much safer from police shootings than white people. Indeed, the paper trumpets the study with the headline: “This study found race matters in police shootings, but the results may surprise you.” You have to appreciate the now passé “knowledge gap” clickbait headline purloined from all those websites that ate the print media’s lunch five years ago. It serves as a metamarker of how out of touch the accompanying Washington Post article will be.
The crux of the article is a study — to be published in Criminology & Public Policy — that took 80 officers of the Spokane police department and placed them in a “realistic” simulator and tested their reaction times against video of actors playing white and black suspects either armed or unarmed. Over the course of the study, officers were less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than white suspects and the reaction time of the firing officer was noticeably slower when evaluating a black suspect.
What’s the Han Solo line? “Look, good against remotes is one thing. Good against the living? That’s something else.”
To wit, empirical statistics of police shootings from 2015 via The Guardian’s database found a different story: “Police killed almost five black people per every million black residents of the U.S., compared with about 2 per million for both white and hispanic victims.” This does not take into account the “armed v. unarmed” distinction, but casts considerable doubt on drawing any conclusions from police reactions against simulators when officers feel no — real or imagined — subjective threat. Let alone gleaning anything from a study where police officers know someone is monitoring them. There’s observation bias and then there’s observation bias.
Indeed, the best line in the article notes and passively dismisses this glaring problem:
[Research Assistant Professor Lois James] considered whether the fact the officers knew they were being observed played into their actions, but she said the police did not know that race was a factor in the project.
Yeah, I’m sure a bunch of officers in SPOKANE asked to shoot at white and black people (the latter as common as unicorns in Spokane — or, more precisely, around 2 percent) would never have imagined the test could be about race. It must have seemed highly improbable that in America circa 2015-16 anyone asking you to shoot at possibly unarmed black people would ever be studying racial bias in police shootings.
Most bizarre of all, the study prides itself on the fact that independent testing revealed a good deal of racial bias among the test sample... and treats this as a positive finding for their conclusion:
Perhaps stunningly, 96 percent of the nearly all white officers demonstrated implicit racial bias, with 78 percent strongly or moderately associating blacks with weapons, and zero percent associating whites with weapons. So that’s the baseline test group for the study.
No, that’s not stunning. It’s compelling evidence that the obviously artificial test was itself a variable disrupting the results and that we can’t determine how many officers would — despite their bias — do their duty and place those biases in check to make the right call as opposed to how many would let those biases run wild in the harsh light of the real world.
Perhaps basic critical reasoning skills are a lost art these days, but when research professionals gloss over basic methodology problems to back up their chosen political outcome we’ve got real problems.
Image: Press image rendering for Maurizio Cattelan: America
Top-tier Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan came out of self-imposed retirement to bring you a unique chance to experience his newest sculpture in a personal and tactile manner, with your butt. Starting May 4th, the Guggenheim will have a fully functional replica of the museum’s standard Kohler toilet in solid 18-karat-gold that you can use.
Now, Donald Trump, that we know of, does not own a solid-gold toilet. He has alleged solid-gold sinks and gold-plated faucets, but no solid-gold toilet. Perhaps Trump would like to purchase this one. The Guggenheim has yet to answer Gawker’s inquiry if the toilet is for sale and for how much, but since Cattelan’s sculpture of a kneeling, child-sized Hitler is expected to bring between $10,000,000 and $15,000,000 at Christie’s auction next month, we’re looking at a lot.
The rendering appears to show a standard Kohler toilet, but in solid gold. According to Amazon, that toilet, with a seat, weighs 62 pounds, around 28kg. At around $40,000/kg, that prices out to around a million dollars right now. [When Chris Burden tried to show a stack of 100 1-kg gold bars at Gagosian in LA in 2009, it cost around $3 million, $30k/kg. But their gold dealer Allen Stanford got arrested for multi-billion-dollar fraud before he could deliver. I don’t know how that ended up, but there are worse economic fates than being stuck holding gold for a few months at the beginning of 2009.]
Anyway, the thing is, porcelain and gold have different densities. Porcelain is 2.5g/cm^3, and gold is 19.29g/cm^3. So if the entire volume of porcelain in a porcelain toilet is swapped out with gold, that thing is not going to weigh 28kg, but nearly 8x more, say 210kg, which is like $8.2 million. The seat alone will weigh like 12kg, so be careful lifting it - and putting it down.
Now anyone knows you don’t need that much solid gold to make a solid toilet, though. A stainless steel toilet weighs around 20kg, and steel has a density of 7.82 g/cm^3, so an identically made gold toilet would require just 50kg of gold, around $2 million.
Materially speaking, that’s an expensive toilet even if it wasn’t an interactive sculpture by a blue-chip artist. And it only gets more expensive with your participation.
As the Indiana Republican primary looms, the New York Times reports, Ted Cruz has sought to galvanize conservatives by raising the issue of transgender women’s right to use women’s bathrooms, arguing that Republicans should reject Donald Trump’s support for such purportedly deviant behavior.
“Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree that grown men should be allowed to use the little girls’ restroom,” Mr. Cruz said on Tuesday night as a crowd in Knightstown, Ind., booed heartily. He made the remarks after coming before the crowd with his two daughters, 7 and 5, who wore matching pink dresses.
And elsewhere:
“If Donald Trump dresses as Hillary Clinton, he still can’t use the little girls’ restroom,” he said in South Bend, Ind. “And I apologize for putting that image in your mind.”
Earlier, Mr. Cruz said, “If the law says that any man, if he chooses, can enter a women’s restroom, a little girls’ restroom, and stay there, and he cannot be removed because he simply says at that moment he feels like a woman, you’re opening the door for predators.”
However, taken on their own terms, the implicit inverse of Cruz’s remarks is that grown men should be allowed to use the “little boys’ restroom.” If such a restroom were to exist (which it doesn’t), and if our primary concern is for the children (which it should be), surely we would want to restrict grown men’s access to it, irrespective of gender.
Cruz is far from the first person to describe “the women’s restroom” as “the little girls’ restroom,” but this construction is creepy and infantilizing in any context. At best, it betrays a pathological discomfort with the human body; at worst, it assumes a shared interest between grown, adult humans in contemplating the bodily functions of children.
Here, though, the only reason for Cruz to use this language is to invoke in the listener the image of child rape; and he did so while referring implicitly to his own daughters. It is no wonder they reject his performative affection.
Tonight in the first round of the NBA playoffs, the Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade made several remarkable shots to force a Game 7 against the Charlotte Hornets. Jeb Bush, who has nothing better to do than tweet about basketball like the rest of us, celebrated the heroic performance by mangling the spelling of Wade’s first name in the exact way a small child might.
He then almost kind of corrected himself—Wade’s first name is spelled unconventionally, with the “y” before the “a,” as you see above.
But in the context of the Jeb! campaign let’s consider this a happy ending.
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The Logitech Harmony Ultimate has just about every feature you could ever ask for in a universal remote, and then some. It can control 15 of your favorite devices (from a database of 270,000), including ones hiding behind cabinet doors. Its touchscreen gives you quick access to your favorite settings, and its smartphone companion app brings the same options to your iOS or Android device. Plus, it can even control smart home devices like your Philips Hue lights, meaning you can create a “Movie” mode that turns on your TV and Blu-ray player, switches to the right input, and dims the lights, all with one push of a button. As long as you don’t mind a refurb, today’s price is the best we’ve seen.
Or, for $54, you can opt for a refurbished Logitech Harmony Smart Control. This model can only control eight devices, and it doesn’t include a built-in touchscreen, but it does allow you to use your smartphone to enable advanced features.
If you’ve come home after work to one too many destroyed pillows or overturned trashcans, this ingenious little gadget can help you keep an eye on your pets from anywhere.
Petcube is a Wi-Fi camera, intercom system, and laser toy all wrapped into one sleek package, and Amazon is selling it today for $150, or $50 off its usual price. The video above does a better job of explaining this thing than I ever could, and if you own a pet and spend a lot of time away from home, it certainly seems like it could be a great investment.
Summer’s nearly here, and this $19 Takeya can brew four servings of iced coffee stuff in your refrigerator overnight, and boasts a solid 4.4 star review average on Amazon.
Life’s too short to vacuum every other day, but luckily, you can pawn that tedious chore off to your very own robot, and one of the best is on sale today.
The Roomba 880 features guided multi-room cleaning, a more powerful cleaning motor than the 600 and 700 series Roombas, and tons of other bells and whistles, and Amazon’s taking $105 off its usual price today. I got a Roomba 770 a couple months ago, and I haven’t manually vacuumed since.
You voted Contigo’s Autoseal West Loop as your favorite travel mug, and the supersized 24 ounce model is down to an all-time low $21 today. Granted, that’s not much less than its usual price, but it’s worth every penny.
Keeping an eye on your blood pressure? This highly rated Omron monitor includes Bluetooth to sync your readings to your phone, and it’s never been cheaper. If you own an iPhone, it’ll even sync with Apple HealthKit. Just note that this is a Gold Box deal, meaning this price is only available today, or until sold out.
Today only, Amazon’s discounting several Asics Gel Excite 3 running shoes for men and women down to $40, or about $25 less than elsewhere. The Gold Box page shows three styles, but each of those are available in multiple colors, so be sure to click through to see all of your options.
Sphero’s remote-controlled BB-8 droid was one of the coolest toys ever made when it first came out, and it’s stillimproving to this day. Today on Amazon, you can buy your own for 123 portions dollars, the best price they’ve ever listed.
If you like the idea of keeping your credit cards and phone attached at the hip, but don’t want to saddle your beautiful phone with a bulky case, this $7 CardNinja can attach right onto the back with easily-removable 3M adhesive. Once it’s attached, the elastic pouch allows it to store up to 8 cards, plus some cash, meaning you really can ditch your wallet.
You probably won’t use a Dremel all that often, but it’s one of those things that you really should keep tucked away in your toolbox, and this compact battery-operated model is marked down to $79 today on Amazon. There are cheaper corded models out there, but this thing is small enough for one-handed use, and it even comes with a docking station to keep the battery topped off.
If you don’t already own a salad spinner to wash and dry your salad greens, fruits, and vegetables, you won’t find many for less than $17, let alone models with five year warranties.
Blacklight flashlights are great if you want to spot hidden stains on train seats, hotel sheets, or (gasp) even in your own house...if that’s something you want to do.
It may seem silly, but if you find even one stain in a hotel room and complain to management, I guarantee that this thing will pay for itself several times over.
iOttie makes your favorite suction cup-based smartphone dash mounts, but today, two of their newest products just got their first discounts. We’ve seen similar products from other manufacturers before, but I’ve found iOttie’s snap-to-close phone cradles to be incredibly secure and convenient.
Ninja’s Professional system took home the title of your favorite affordable blender, but if you only need one to make single-serve smoothies, the Nutri Ninja Pro is also a great option. Amazon’s marked it down to an all-time low $60 today, which gets you a 900 watt motor and three different sizes of blending cups.
Like the idea of a Belkin WeMo Switch, but not willing to spend $40-$50 to try one out? This TP-Link alternative has a nearly identical feature set for half the price.
Just like a WeMo switch, TP-Link’s Smart Plug will let you turn appliances on and off from your smartphone, and set schedules to toggle them automatically. The only major feature it’s lacking is IFTTT support, but it will integrate with an Amazon Echo for voice control.
OXO makes some of the most popular kitchen accessories on the market, and Amazon’s knocked a couple of them down to all-time low prices today. The beakers are kind of whimsical and silly, but the mandoline slicer is legitimately useful if you don’t already own one; just don’t chop off your fingers.
If you’ve ever thought about pulling out your blender to make a smoothie, sauce, or dip, and then held off because you didn’t want to clean 3,000 different parts, this deal is for you. The 4.5 star-rated Cuisinart Smart Stick Hand Blender is down to $29 today on Amazon, the best price they’ve listed all year.
The big advantage here is that unlike a traditional blender, you can dip the Smart Stick into whatever container you were already using to hold your ingredients; be it a single-serve cup or a huge mixing bowl. That saves you time, and means fewer dishes to clean up once you’re done. Reviewers also say it chops through everything from fruit to ice cubes with no trouble, so it really can be a full blender replacement for most use cases.
As always, we don’t know how long this deal will be available, so be sure to grab one before the price shoots back up.
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A Puerto Rican man in his 70s who died from complications of the Zika virus was the first case of his kind in the U.S., The New York Times first reported on Friday.
The man’s case was one of 683 confirmed Zika infections in Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The outbreak includes 89 pregnant women.
Deaths are not particularly common when it comes to Zika—the main worry about the virus is its potential link to birth fetal malformations and neurological disorders in newborns. Transmitted primarily by Aedes mosquitoes, there is no vaccine for Zika; the best form of prevention is avoiding mosquito bites.
In U.S. states excluding Puerto Rico, there have been 426 travel-related cases of Zika reported. With the coming of climate change, that number could go up.
