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Barack Obama Vs. Stephen Colbert - INTERVIEW 2014 - The Colbert Report. ‘You Have the Nuclear Launch Codes, Right?’ Colbert Faces Off with Obama President Obama: ‘I, Stephen Colbert, Have Never Cared for Our President’
New photos of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson were released Monday, shortly after St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced a grand jury had chosen not to indict Wilson for the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The photos show injuries Wilson sustained in the exchange he had with Brown before he shot and killed the teenager. The photos were presented as evidence to the grand jury.
All photos from the St. Louis County Prosecutor Office.
More than46 millionAmericans will travel further than 50 miles for this week's turkey-based festivities, and many of us will do it via air. And while very few airports deal well with holidays swarms, some of them excel at misery.
Last month, we set out to find America's worst airport. We asked you to name yourleast favorite terminals, and amassed over 600 comments. The debate was contentious and there was no clear victor.So weasked you to voteon the eight most-mentioned airports. Keep in mind, this is in no way Empirical, since these were based on your informal suggestions and, of course, aren't adjusted for the size of the airport and other influencing factors.
Still, it's been a fun way to channel our collective rage, and now, many thousands of votes later, we have some winners (losers?).
8) Kansas City International Airport
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In our original post, Kansas City featured prominently in the comments—your horror stories were rich and vivid. Yet it seems like KCI wasn't able to harness the support it needed in the final, with only 431 votes. Sorry, Kansas City. Or, congrats, I guess.
I almost forgot about that little slice of hell. You're packed into your gate like sardines. I have terrible memories of literally pushing my way through the crowd to reach the men's restroom at which there was a line because there were only three stalls.-JuanDimensional
It's the smallest, strangest, possibly least secure international airport I've ever been to in the states.-out0mind
Dulles was another crowd favorite that managed to dredge up just 468 votes in the final. What happened? Maybe some last-minute sprucing of the terminals? Or perhaps fliers finally looked around and noticed the lovely Eero Saarinen-designed architecture?
The entire place should be bulldozed and the MWA should finance a new, modern facility and charge carriers to lease the space.-Flyingbuff
I vote for Dulles, solely based on two separate incidences of over-90-minute TSA lines.-mike5k
6) Philadelphia International Airport
By now you're noticing a trend here: The smaller airports, Philly included with only 677 votes, just don't have the manpower to get this thing done. Not enough people pass through them to gain a foothold in this contentious race.
I was waiting for a flight one time in a largely empty area, looking for a plug for my laptop. A flight attendant was sitting nearby. I said, "Amazing - not a single wall plug around". She said, "It's Philly, what did you expect?"-emeryl
Philly is where dreams go to die while you sit in a wormhole of constantly cancelled or delayed flights.-The Messs
5) Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport
Hundreds of commenters condemned Atlanta in our first post, but nearly as many of them defended it. That helps to explain why the biggest airport in the world only managed 688 votes—a vocal minority, meanwhile, were very angry about it.
On your way to hell there's a layover in Atlanta.-thob86
Sprawling, crowded, not enough seating, not enough toilets, takes an eternity even with the stupid train(s) to get from gate to rental car.-Kevin Rhodes
4) Newark Liberty International Airport
You might hate Newark, but you probably hategettingto Newark more than the airport itself. Or so out poll suggested: The hatred for EWR was lukewarm at best, amassing only 770 votes.
It's dirty, smells bad, has the worst food options, the pay-only wifi is actually still horrifically slow, and there was a single, four plug charging station for the entire terminal that I saw.-Syngine
I once bought a one-way ticket on the spot to Orlando since that was the closest I could get to my destination that night instead of having to spend one more evening there.-driftwhatever
3) O'Hare International Airport
Now we're getting into the real competitors. O'Hare, though it has fantastic public transit and generally good food options, was condemned with 981 votes for everything from the distance from terminal to terminal to the frequency of its weather delays.
I HATE O'Hare with a fiery passion that will endure through countless generations of my progeny.-incompl
If you do some sort of Orbitz wizardry and have to connect between carriers, forget about it.-Dake
United is dead to me anyway, but I suppose I will have to deal with American through there once the merger completes, at least occasionally. Sprawling and crowded. -Kevin Rhodes
2) Los Angeles International Airport
The scorn demonstrated by our commenters for LAX was fiery and bitter. From the design to the food options, there was nothing but rage for this airport. One commenter even uploadeda picture of his name written in the dust at one restaurant. Still, 1,185 votes weren't enough to take the crown.
This list starts and ends with LAX. The absolute, bar none, worse terminal I've ever been in. -jaysna
I'd rather wake up in a bathtub full of ice than go to LGA's B terminal.-d4st
Last time there the bathroom in my terminal area overflowed drenching the waiting area carpet, so they had big noisy fans to more efficiently disperse the smell throughout the terminal. There was no escape, including via my twice delayed flight.-Zippitydont
I think whoever designed La Guardia actually liked the whole "urine-soaked subway experience" and tried to replicate it as closely as possible. -Trike
What can you say about LGA other than it was built for DC-3's and used to be a garbage dump before that.-mark
La Guardia will always be under construction until we finally kill it with fire.-golfball
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch laid out this scenario for the sequence of events in the shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, assembled from physical evidence and testimony of dozens of witnesses. The narrative begins at 11:45 a.m., when Wilson was dispatched to another call. Minutes later, he heard two radio dispatches describing a person who stole cigarillos from a nearby market, a black male wearing a red hat, khaki shorts and yellow socks and accompanied by another male.
AP Releases Video Of MH17 Crash Aftermath, A new video shows the aftermath of the Malaysian Airlines crash after it was shot down in rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine.
WhatsApp rolls out end-to-end encryption using TextSecure code
The most recent update to WhatsApp's Android app includes a surprising feature: strong end-to-end encryption, enabled by default. It's the strongest security any major texting app has offered, even compared with similar tools from giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple. WhatsApp partnered with Open Whisper Systems for the launch, using open source code to build in the new features. It's unclear when the features will come to iOS, but just reaching WhatsApp's Android users represents a huge step forward for everyday encryption use.
WHATSAPP IS BY FAR THE LARGEST PLATFORM TO ADOPT THE SYSTEM
"End-to-end" means that, unlike messages encrypted by Gmail or Facebook Chat, WhatsApp won't be able to decrypt the messages itself, even if the company is compelled by law enforcement. The company will set up the key exchange between users, but only the two users will have access to the conversation itself. There are other end-to-end encryption apps on the market — most notably Cryptocat, Silent Text and Telegram — but with over 600 million users across the world, WhatsApp is by far the largest platform to adopt the system.
Open Whisper Systems is best known as the developer of theSignal, Redphone, and TextSecure apps. WhatsApp looked to TextSecure in particular, which keeps messages encrypted even if an attacker cracks the key at some point in the future, a feature known as forward secrecy. TextSecure has also published its source code and withstood numerous public code audits, earning the app a lot of credibility in security circles. Open Whisper has said the team will continue improving its in-house apps, but the company also expects to take on more integrations like this one in the future.
Still, it took a lot of work to get TextSecure's protocols ready for WhatsApps hundreds of millions of users. Open Whisper CTO Moxie Marlinspike says it took six months to get the code ready for such a large deployment, beginning shortly after WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook. "Most of our efforts have been focused on making our code easier to consume," Marlinspike toldThe Verge. "I've been really impressed with the dedication and commitment WhatsApp has to the project."
McDonald’s Refuses To Buy GM Potatoes For Its Fries
McDonald's may not have a stellar reputation for being picky about its ingredients, but the company has put its foot down on GMOs. McDonald's' largest potato supplier has a hot new GM potato, but the House That Ronald Built has no interest in using them.
McDonald’s isn’t known for being principled about its ingredients; just this year, the company had to issue a major public relations onslaught just to convince people that its Chicken McNuggets arenot made from pink slurry. Despite that effort, when you think about fast food chains that are selective about raw ingredients, you think Chipotle, or maybe something like Panera — chains that continuously harp on their bonafides as ethical consumers.
A company called Simplot, an agribusiness conglomerate in the same league as Monsanto, is the main potato supplier for McDonald’s, which in turn is the largest purchaser of potatoes in the country. Simplot has recently come up with a new variety of genetically modified potato, which in the badly-named tradition of theSweeTangoapple is called the Innate potato. That said, it’s a pretty interesting spud: most GMO foods are made by splicing genes from other plants in to make them resistant to pesticides, but that isn’t what Simplot’s doing at all.
The Innate potato is engineered to bruise less, keep for longer, resist browning when exposed to oxygen, and contain less of an amino acid called acrylamide (which was speculatedback in 2002 to be carcinogenic). None of those qualities are flavor- or texture- or vitamin-related, but still, that quest would seem to be not so awful for GMO protestors. The issue many anti-GMO activists have with genetically modified plants is that they encourage the use of pesticides, which can in turn lead to mutated bugs resistant to bacteria — not the Innate potato.
But that hasn’t stopped McDonald’s from rejecting it.A spokesperson told Capital Pressthat the company will not use the Innate potato, nor any other GMO potato. Simplot, for its part, says it’ll market the non-browning Innate potato in pre-sliced packaging like apples, which sounds a little weird to us, but who knows? Maybe the market is crying out for pre-sliced genetically modified potatoes.
Facebookis trying to be your go-to source for tech news, rather than just a way to see baby pics and find out which friends are engaged.
Seven months afterintroducingFB Newswire, the social networking giant on launchedFB Techwireon Tuesday, a brand extension that will focus on industry happenings.
Like FB Newswire, Techwire is powered by Storyful, which will sharee newsworthy content from tech influencers on Facebook — including embeddable photos, videos and status updates that journalists can use for their own content.
Storyful, which News Corp. purchased for $25 million in December, verifies such posts for accuracy.
As with Newswire, the mission of Techwire is to raise Facebook's profile as a news dissemination vehicle. SinceTwitteris better known for breaking news than Facebook, the latter is missing out on opportunities to sell advertising against real-time events. Facebook began trying to narrow the gap with Twitter with theintroduction of hashtagsin June 2013 andTrending Topicsin January.
With 1.35 billion monthly active users, Facebook has about four times the user base of Twitter, so it actually disseminates more news.A recent Pew Research studyfoundthat more people get their political news from Facebook than any other source, except for local TV news.
With its monopoly on social media-based news, tech is a logical coverage area. In a chat with analysts last week, Twitter disclosed that it receives 554 million tech-related tweets per month. The next most-tweeted topic was food, with 66 million monthly tweets.
With 1.35 billion monthly active users, Facebook has about four times the user base of Twitter, so it actually disseminates more news.
IMAGE: TWITTER
With Techwire, Facebook can also cast a wider net for media coverage. Newswire has gotten pickup from the BBC,The Washington Post, theNew York Timesand other top-tier publications and has offered timely breaking news alerts about last summer's Gaza conflict, the World Cup and the riots in Ferguson, Missouri.
