Confusion and fury are reigning in France as citizens accuse their leaders of failure in the wake of the Nice attack, the motivation for which is still unclear.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls endured a humiliating chorus of boos and heckles at a ceremony of remembrance for the victims during a visit to the Riviera city overnight, with some in the crowd labelling him a murderer and demanding his resignation.

READ MORE: Nice attacker memorialised with spit-covered garbage shrine

Frustration with authorities, which have failed to stop the third major attack in the country in less than two years, is beginning to boil over. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is said to have a return to politics in mind, seemed to sum up the feelings of the crowd at Mr Valls' Nice appearance.

"Everything that should have been done in the past 18 months was not done," he said yesterday.

"We are at war, outright war. So I will use strong words: it will be us or them."

Meanwhile investigators are sifting through a hodgepodge of search histories, eyewitness accounts and criminal records to try and establish whether or not the Nice killer, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, has links to ISIL.

But every new shred of information about Bouhel appears to contradict the last.

Although Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said a search of his computer "showed a clear, recent interest for the radical jihadist movement," no evidence of a link to ISIL has been found, as Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve confirmed this morning.

About eight months ago ago, however, Bouhel snapped a picture of a news story headlined: "Man deliberately rams car into cafe terrace."

He had also searched the net for information about the Orlando massacre – a news story so big it was unavoidable – and allowed his beard to grow in the weeks leading up to the attack.

Which may be significant, or it may be a symptom of a violent depressive described by his acquaintances as "someone who did not practise the Muslim religion, ate pork, drank alcohol, took drugs and had unbridled sexual activity".

A defence lawyer who once represented Bouhel echoed those sentiments to CNN, but also conceded that Bouhel "wasn't very intelligent" and "could have been influenced by religion".

ISIL, as its wont, has claimed responsibility for the attack, but "lone wolf" atrocities are, by their very nature, easy to characterise as "ISIL-inspired".

Whatever Bouhel's motives were, perhaps the most worrying outcome of the Bastille Day killings is the massive hit to French resolve.

The strong public displays of solidarity the world has seen over the past 18 months – the light shows and hashtags and candlelight visuals – are being supplanted by hatred and fear.

Nicolas Sarkozy's tough talk is the centrist edge of right-wing hostility manifesting, as it is throughout the western world, in extreme anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen accused successive governments of the left and right of "grave mistakes" for "continuing to allow so many foreigners into France".

In response to the security threat, the state is angling for harsher terror laws and looking to beef up its armed forces.

“There is no zero risk. By saying this we are telling the truth to the French and tackling the threat with lucidity," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said, accusing the opposition of using the attack for "shameful" point-scoring.

On Tuesday, parliament is to vote on extending the state of emergency imposed after the November attacks.

The government has also put out a call for volunteer reservists to supplement the strained security forces.

© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2016

Summary: French citizens accuse their leaders of failure in the wake of the Nice attack, the motivation for which is still unclear.


09/04/2015 AT 11:00 PM EDT

They're officially one of the cutest – and longest running – couples in Hollywood.

celebrated their 27th wedding anniversary with an adorable throwback snap.

Taking to his official Instagram account, Bacon, 57, wrote: "Celebrating 9,855 days of marriage to @kyrasedgwick," alongside a picture of his wife.

The old romantic then followed the post up with a throwback from their wedding day, quipping: "Did I mention it's 1,404 weeks sine we tied the knot? #LikeFineWine."

Earlier this year the couple proved once again just how

by revealing how Bacon consults on his wife's haircuts.

In another funny Instagram post, the

star captioned a picture: "My wife wants to cut her hair. Me 'can I take a picture and let you see it before u cut?' Her 'But itâs so flat.'"

Summary: Kevin Bacon gushed about his wife of 27 years over Instagram on Friday


(Image Credit: Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

By MICHAEL FALCONE (@michaelpfalcone) and AMY WALTER (@amyewalter)

Just as the former Massachusetts governor is emerging from a bruising primary fight to become the presumptive Republican nominee, a new ABC News-Washington Post poll shows that 35 percent of Americans see Romney favorably compared to 47 percent who have an unfavorable opinion of him.

President Obama, on the other hand, gets a “favorable” rating from 56 percent of Americans and an “unfavorable” one from 40 percent.

The key point, according to ABC News pollster Gary Langer, is this: Romney is holding onto “the weakest favorability rating on record for a presumptive presidential nominee in ABC News/Washington Post polls since 1984. He’s the first likely nominee to be seen more unfavorably than favorably.” http://abcn.ws/J43omW

As the gender wars have raged over the last week, the new poll also underscores Romney’s problem with women voters, among whom his favorability is lowest — just 27 percent of women see him favorably. By contrast, Obama gets favorable marks from 58 percent of women.

“It’s been a long rut for Romney,” notes Langer. “His favorability rating among all adults has steadily remained between 31 and 39 percent since fall, never yet cracking 40 percent. Its average across this time is 35 percent, exactly where it is today.”

Romney has moved quickly to consolidate the GOP base as the competitive portion of the primary season winds down, but his bigger problems remains with independents and women. And that’s what’s largely dragging him down:

–Among independents, Romney is underwater by 34-47 percent, favorable-unfavorable.

–Obama has a 29-point advantage in favorability over Romney among Americans with household incomes less than $50,000 a year.

–Obama’s favorable score is 9 points higher than Romney’s among married adults, but this swells to a 37-point advantage among those who are not married.

But favorability and vote preference are not the same thing, and in the first general election Gallup tracking poll out yesterday, Romney finished ahead of the president. Romney enjoyed the support of 47 percent of registered voters compared to 45 percent for Obama.

It’s a statistical dead heat, and the race could stay that way all the way up until November.

EXCLUSIVE: MITT ROMNEY TELLS DIANE SAWYER OBAMA SHOULD ‘START PACKING.’ Acting very much like the GOP nominee, Mitt Romney sent a curt message to President Obama yesterday: “Start packing.” The message, delivered with a chuckle, came in an exclusive interview at Boston’s Fenway Park with “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer who asked the presumptive GOP nominee if he had something to say to the president. Romney said Obama’s “policies have not helped the American people. They have not helped get jobs, they have not helped raise incomes and they’ve added trillions of dollars of debt.” He was backed by his wife of 43 years, Ann Romney, who told Sawyer she also had a message for Obama. “I believe it’s… Mitt’s time… It’s our turn now,” she said. Last week, the Romney campaign was able to flip the Democrats’ so-called “war on women” strategy by highlighting a Democratic strategist’s attacks on Ann Romney for never holding a job. Ann Romney told a GOP fundraiser this weekend that the failed Democratic talking point had been a “birthday gift.” “That wasn’t how I meant it,” Ann Romney told Sawyer. “It was a birthday gift to me because I love the fact that we’re talking about this.” http://abcn.ws/J3alje (h/t ABC’s Emily Friedman and Russell Goldman)

On whether he can relate to working people:

“We don’t divide America based upon success and wealth and other dimensions of that nature. We’re one nation under God …. This is a time when people of different backgrounds and different experiences need to come together. I happen to believe that I’m by far the best qualified in this race between myself and President Obama,” Romney told Sawyer.

On Obama’s suggestion that Romney release 12 years of his tax returns:

“The president is going to try and do everything possible to divert from the attention being focused upon his record as president and the failure of his economic policies. So he’s going to try to make this campaign about the fact that I’ve been successful, that I’ve made a lot of money,” he said.

“I would love the Supreme Court to say, ‘Let’s send this back to the states.’ Rather than having a federal mandate through Roe v. Wade, let the states again consider this issue state by state,” he said, effectively ending legalized abortion nationwide.

LONG-TIME ROMNEY CONFIDANTE TO RUN VEEP SEARCH COMMITTEE. During his exclusive interview with Sawyer, Romney revealed for the first time that he has put longtime adviser Beth Myers in charge of his vice presidential vetting process. “I have selected someone who has been a counselor of mine for a number of years, Beth Myers. She was my chief of staff when I was governor,” the former Massachusetts governor said. “I’ve asked her to be the person who oversees the process of the vice presidential selection and vetting an analysis and so she’s begun that process and is putting together the kinds of things you need to do to vet potential candidates,” Romney added. Asked whether there is a deadline for choosing his running mate, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee said he does have a deadline in mind but would not reveal the specifics.”It would certainly be by the time of the convention,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve chosen the time we’d actually make an announcement,” Romney said. http://abcn.ws/HO0kw6

ANN ROMNEY ON SEAMUS: THE DOG ‘LOVED IT’ Seamus, Mitt Romney’s Irish setter who traveled with his young family strapped to the roof of their station wagon, “loved” those trips, despite once getting ill, Ann Romney told Sawyer in Boston yesterday. Seamus’ 1983 trip from Boston to a summer cottage in Ontario, Canada, inside a dog carrier lashed atop the family’s Chevrolet, has become a regular barb in Romney’s side and is routinely used by his critics to paint him as uncaring. Mitt Romney told Sawyer that the Seamus attacks were the most wounding of the campaign “so far,” but Anne Romney insisted the dog loved traveling that way and looked forward to trips. “The dog loved it,” Ann Romney said. “He would see that crate and, you know, he would, like, go crazy because he was going with us on vacation. It was to me a kinder thing to bring him along than to leave him in the kennel for two weeks.” http://abcn.ws/I0ETl0

Full transcript of Diane’s interview with the Romneys: http://abcn.ws/Is9s4Y

NOTABLE: ROMNEY ALREADY CHOSE A RUNNING MATE. ABC’s Jonathan Karl plays political historian: Lost in the frenzy of speculation about who Mitt Romney will pick as a vice presidential candidate is that this is not the first time he has chosen a running mate. When he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney tapped Kerry Murphy Healey as his pick for lieutenant governor, a decision that may provide some clues into how he’ll handle the search this time around. Beth Myers, who is running Romney’s VP search, was also advising the candidate back then. She tells ABC News that gender was a factor — Romney put a priority on having a woman as a running mate — but above all, he was looking for somebody he could work closely with, on the campaign trail and in the office. “They were absolutely running together,” Myers told ABC News. “She partnered with him on everything [and was] integrated completely into our operation.” http://abcn.ws/JuhLfd

VIDEO OF THE DAY: WHAT HAPPENED IN VEGAS…. At a congressional hearing yesterday, GSA commissioner Jeff Neely invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions on taxpayer money spent in Las Vegas. ABC’s Jake Tapper reported for “World News.” WATCH: http://abcn.ws/HOwrcU

RICK SANTORUM DECLINES TO ENDORSE (YET), TELLS SUPPORTERS: ‘STAY TUNED.’ Rick Santorum said last night there is “no question Barack Obama has to be defeated,” but did not say he would back presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, instead revealing he had only spoken to Newt Gingrich, not Romney yet, ABC’s Shushannah Walshe reports. “As far as going with a particular presidential candidate right now I mean had a chance to talk to Newt, I haven’t had a chance yet to talk to Gov. Romney,” Santorum said on a conference call. “But we’ll be talking to both of them and we are going to go out and deal with who we believe is in the best interest of our country and winning this election and make sure that we have a conservative platform, conservative message and they follow through with that conservative message after the election.” Although Santorum is expected to eventually back Romney — both longtime adviser John Brabender and top donor Foster Friess told ABC News last week they expect him to endorse Romney — he was specific tonight that he was not endorsing anyone in the presidential race. “I haven’t supported any candidate at this point,” Santorum said, when asked who his supporters should vote for in the Pennsylvania primary on April 24. He instead told them “the best thing” they can do is “stay tuned” and promised he would stay “active and engaged” in the campaign. http://abcn.ws/HOEY0t

SECRET SERVICE BRAGGED ABOUT PROTECTING OBAMA WHILE PARTYING. ABC News’ Reena Ninan, Christine Romo and Mary Bruce Report have learned exclusively that the Secret Service officials accused of misconduct in Colombia revealed their identities by boasting at a Cartagena brothel that they worked for President Obama. Partying at the “Pley Club” Wednesday night, eleven members of the president’s advance team allegedly bragged “we work for Obama” and “we’re here to protect him.” The officials spent the night throwing back expensive whiskey and enlisting the services of the club’s prostitutes, according to a bouncer at the club and a police source. Sources tell ABC News several of the men agreed to pay for, and received, services from the “highest category” prostitutes available at the club, who charge upwards of $200. The officials were in Cartagena on assignment ahead of the president’s visit for the Summit of the Americas last weekend. The controversy surrounding the officials’ misconduct, however, overshadowed the summit last week and local residents are questioning why the city put so many resources into the international event only to be left with a tarnished reputation. http://abcn.ws/HPIMvS

SENATOR’S NEW BOOK CARRIES DIRE ECONOMIC WARNING. The leading Republican budget hawk in the Senate, Senator Tom Coburn, R-OK., is coming out today with a new book that provides a harsh critique of Congress and a dire warning for the future economic situation of the nation, ABC’s Jonathan Karl and Sunlen Miller report. The picture Coburn paints in his new book, “The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan to Stop Washington from Bankrupting America,” is not a rosy one of the state of the U.S. Congress. He lambasts the upper chamber as a body that is “heavily sedated” and calls for 90% of the unproductive members to be fired. “Congress today is a stagnant pond that needs to be drained and refilled with a steady stream of new public servants,” he writes, according to excerpts provided to ABC News in advance of release.”I’m a fan of the Jack Welch principle in reverse for Congress … fire 90 percent of members every election and only keep the 10 percent who were productive.” Coburn says that the “root of almost all that ails Washington,” is careerism. “Careerism is the dark matter of the political universe. It is the unseen force that bends decisions, and character, in ways that defy common sense and obvious explanations,” he writes. ”If members of Congress knew their current term would be their last, I have no doubt we could defuse the debt bomb within a matter of days … Bridging the gap between conservatives and liberals is easy compared to bridging the gap between courage and cowardice. ” http://abcn.ws/HPJif0

HERMAN CAIN BACKS OFF GINGRICH ENDORSEMENT. Less than two months ago, Herman Cain, who was out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, stood on a stage in West Palm Beach, just three days before the Florida primary and told the crowd, “I hereby officially and enthusiastically endorse Newt Gingrich for the president of the United States.” Gingrich had just come off a sweeping win in South Carolina, had the fundraising dollars pouring in and a financial safety net in billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson. But ABC’s Elicia Dover notes that on Monday Cain walked back his endorsement of Gingrich saying, “With all due respect, let’s get on with this, OK?” “I even endorsed Newt Gingrich at one point because I thought that he had a shot. Well, not now. He doesn’t have a shot,” Cain said to Washington radio station WMAL. Cain refused to comment to ABC News Monday over this morning’s comments about Gingrich, but Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond said the party is trying is lock down the nomination. “The angle right now is for the party to get to a nominee as fast as possible,” Hammond said. “It’s up to Herman Cain whether or not he’s put in his application with the establishment.” http://abcn.ws/HLJ5dS

PRIMARY PRIMER: THE RACE FOR GABBY GIFFORDS’ SEAT. ABC’s Elizabeth Hartfield: The primary for the special election in Arizona’s 8th congressional district — the district formerly represented by Gabby Giffords — takes place today, with the special election to follow on June 12. The Democratic field is already set. Ron Barber, the former district director for Giffords, is running unopposed. He has Giffords’ endorsement. On the Republican side, there are currently four candidates in the race: State Senator Frank Antenori; Martha McSally, a retired air force pilot; sports broadcaster Dave Sitton; and Jesse Kelly, a former marine who ran unsuccessfully against Giffords in 2010. Kelly is seen as the favorite to win the nomination again this time around; polling has placed him in the lead. The National Republican Congressional Committee has remained neutral during the primary. Barber, who was injured during the shooting on Jan. 8, 2011, has so far been a strong fundraiser — taking in over $500,000 through March 28, according to his FEC disclosures, far more than any of his Republican competitors. He has not yet begun to advertise on television. http://abcn.ws/J3G0Ww

@MelanieDNC: Amazing that there still appears to be NO OUTRAGE over@MittRomney supporter Ted Nugent’s violent, despicable NRA rant. Will Romney condemn?

@Reince: Buffett Tax vote is just another rejection of Obama’s policies- enough gimmicks, Americans want real solutions.

@RBReich: It’s tax day — the day when the richest 1 percent pay a smaller % of their income than they have in 40 years… http://fb.me/1fq4oRXPQ

@washingtonpost: Space shuttle Discovery flies into Washington at 10 a.m. ET. Here’s where to watch it: http://wapo.st/ItCKQv

@politicoroger: Wait. My taxes are due when?

Check out The Note’s Futures Calendar: http://abcn.ws/ZI9gV

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* For breaking political news and analysis check out The Note blog: http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/and ABCNews.com/Politics: http://abcnews.com/politics

Summary: (Image Credit: Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) By MICHAEL FALCONE (@michaelpfalcone) and AMY WALTER (@amyewalter) Mitt Romney is “underwater.” Just as the former Massachusetts governor is emerging from a bruising primary fight to become the presumptive Republican nominee, a new ABC News-Washington Post poll shows that 35 percent of Americans see Romney favorably compared to 47 percent who have an unfavorable opinion of him. President Obama, on the other hand, gets a “favorable” rating from 56 percent of Americans and an “unfavorable” one from 40 percent. The key point, according to ABC News pollster Gary Langer, is…


Jorinde Voigt's drawings and collages have the visual appeal of sheet music or maps: a sense of order and the beauty of abstract forms. Working systematically over huge pieces of paper, she layers fine point pen lines – with feathery slanting script and topped with arrows – in intricate networks of fans, arcs and ripples. From a distance the results resemble spinning ribbons, dandelion clocks or whirring propellers. Up close they could be complex diagrams of sound waves or genetic code, albeit painstakingly hand-realised ones.

In fact, this rising German star does conceive her drawings like musical scores or algorithms. Her spiralling lines and arrows are always on the move, ebbing and flowing across the page. Africa, a series of drawings created during a trip to the isle of Lamu near Kenya, features annotations on red and blue graph paper from locally produced stationary. "Zions Systems Job Time Sheet" reads the print above one page on which Voigt has created a hectic constellation of black and red arrows.

The tension between the tick-tock of workaday order and apparent randomness recalls German art icon Hanne Darboven's repeating scribbles in calendars and diaries. Where Darboven's inscriptions are punishingly uniform and meaningless, the schema Voigt lays down allow her to freely respond to shifting phenomena.

The unique system that governs how Voigt creates her images can also seem like algebra. "The overall space is divided by three by means of three changes in counting," reads one cryptic line from a text accompanying Intercontinental II, a work that responds to airports. Yet all the drawings speak of something slippery and volatile.

Her series Horizon is a rainbow-coloured reminder that even the most apparently constant thing in the world changes depending on how we look at it. Here she takes the timeless guide for orienting ourselves, the horizon line, and draws it not as a stable horizontal, but as it might be experienced on the move: doing a somersault maybe, or a pirouette. Composed of stacked juddery crayon lines in pinks, oranges and blues, the results suggest a jumble of the sonic, sensory and solid, like vibrating harp-strings, mineral strata or a head-rush.

Why we like her: For Königliche Gartenakademie Berlin. These collages made with coloured paper and ink look like maps of newly discovered lands: blood red archipelagos or mauve and blue continents float against a sea of white. Each work records the artist's observations of different trees, from their outlines glimpsed at a distance to the colours of their leaves and branches.

A different beat: Voigt trained to be a cellist until the age of 18 and she cites the intense concentration demanded by her musical education as the basis of her art. Today, when it comes to making drawings, techno is her sound of choice.

Where can I see her? At Lisson Gallery, London to 28 April.

Summary: Skye Sherwin: This rising German star conceives her drawings like musical scores or algorithms with spiralling lines and arrows that ebb and flow across the page


Popping Tylenol to soothe an ache is second nature to many of us. But what do you take for heartache? A new pair of studies suggests that the painkiller might blunt responses to emotional pain, too.

In one study, researchers from the Ohio State University Medical Center gave 80 people either a placebo or 1,000 mg of acetaminophen —the active ingredient in Tylenol and the equivalent of two extra-strength Tylenol. After waiting an hour for it to kick in, the researchers showed them a series of emotional images on a computer screen and had them rate how much emotion they felt from each picture: from happy images like cute, cuddly kittens to negative images like gory car accidents and snakes, to neutral images like a filing cabinet. Study author Baldwin M. Way, PhD, assistant professor in the department of psychology and Institute for Behavioral medicine Research at the Ohio State University, says he was surprised by what he saw. “It turned out Tylenol blunted that or reduced that by about 20% compared to people who were on placebo rating the same images,” Way says.

The next step was to figure out if the drug was blunting responses to absolutely everything—or just emotional responses. They repeated the experiment testing reactions to color saturation. When they found no difference in how the two groups observed the intensity of color, they concluded that the drug was only interfering with emotionally charged information.

This isn’t the first study to show that the drug might be tinkering with our emotions. Previous research has shown that when people take acetaminophen for three weeks, their feelings get hurt less when they are socially rejected. That could be because pain is pain; whether it comes from a bump or a break-up, pain seems to travel through the same neurochemical pathways. In another study published in 2013, people who took acetaminophen thought about their own death less negatively than those who weren’t on anything. And a study this year found that when faced with a tough choice, acetaminophen helps dull the discomfort.

Acetaminophen works on several different levels in the body in ways scientists aren’t entirely sure about yet. But Way suspects it involved the insula, an area of the brain that responds to both positive and negative emotions and creates emotional significance. “When you have a pain response—when you put your hand on a hot stove for example—your brain needs to know which body part is getting hurt or wounded so you can react,” Way says. “But there’s also another part of your brain that needs to know the emotional response: the ‘ouch.’” That’s where the insula comes in, Way suspects. “It seems to register that this is painful, that this hurts and that this has an emotional element to it. What we think is going on is that the emotional component of pain—the ‘ouch’—is being blunted by acetaminophen.” Another way Tylenol may dull emotional pain is that it could be acting along the same anti-inflammatory pathway to the brain, he suspects.

Some brain scan studies show that acetaminophen reduces activity in that area of the brain, and other studies show that people with insula damage don’t respond to positive and negative stimuli. Way says he plans to repeat the experiment in an MRI scanner to see if acetaminophen reduces insula activity.

“What this all means and how it affects people in daily life is an unknown question, of course,” he says. Way and his colleagues are currently running a trial with psychiatric patients to see if acetaminophen may have a therapeutic benefit.

More research is needed. But Way thinks that all kinds of drugs besides acetaminophen may be having effects on our emotions. “When a drug goes through clinical trials, they test it for its safety on things like, ‘Does your liver work?’ or ‘Is it causing your blood vessels to explode?’” he says. “But what’s never assessed in those studies is behavior and psychological processes…so one has to wonder, are these drugs that people are taking for a variety of different reasons having brain effects? There might be more widespread psychological and behavioral effects than we currently appreciate.”

Summary: Acetaminophen might be having a bigger effect on the brain than we realize


Dan takarar shugabancin Amurka karkashin jam'iyyar Republican, Donald Trump, ya yi kakkausar suka kan abokiyar hamayyarsa ta jam'iyyar Democrat Hillary Clinton, yana mai cewa ba ta da yanayi da kuma nutsuwar zama shugabar kasa.

A wani jawabi da ya gabatar a birnin New York, Mista Trump ya soki Misis Clinton da cewa ''babbar makaryaci ce ta inna naha,'' wadda ta azurta kanta a lokacin da take rike da mukamin sakatariyar harkokin wajen Amurka.

Zuwa yanzu dai Misis Clinton bata mayar da martani kan wannan kalamai na Trump ba.

Sai dai a ranar Talata ne Misis Clinton ta soki Mista Trump inda ta ce, zabar hamshakin dan kasuwa mai harkar gidaje a matsayin shugaban kasar Amurka, zai zama wani babban bala'i ga tattalin arzikin kasar.

Masu aiko da rahotanni na cewa manyan abokan hamayyar suna kara zafafa sukar juna da kalaman batanci a kokarinsu na neman shugabancin Amurka.

Summary: Dan takarar shugabancin Amurka Donald Trump, ya ce abokiyar hamayyarsa Hillary Clinton ba ta da yanayi da kuma nutsuwar zama shugabar kasa.


Photo: Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle

Father Mesrop Ash of St. John Armenian Apostolic Church looks up at the Mount Davidson Cross before Easter sunrise service in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Father Mesrop Ash of St. John Armenian Apostolic Church looks up at the Mount Davidson Cross before Easter sunrise service in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

A few hundred worshippers celebrated Easter atop San Francisco’s Mt. Davidson on Sunday morning. A sunrise service has been held there for the past 94 years.

A few hundred worshippers celebrated Easter atop San Francisco’s Mt. Davidson on Sunday morning. A sunrise service has been held there for the past 94 years.

Lisa Hoff sings along during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Lisa Hoff sings along during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Lila Murphy, 3, sleeps in her father Colman's arms during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Lila Murphy, 3, sleeps in her father Colman's arms during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

The Rev. Hugo Tejada prays during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

The Rev. Hugo Tejada prays during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Kimberly Gallion gets a kiss from service dog Sophie as John Gallion sits beside them during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Kimberly Gallion gets a kiss from service dog Sophie as John Gallion sits beside them during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Jedahya Hidalgo (left), Pauline Cabansagan and Bobby Sablad sing during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Jedahya Hidalgo (left), Pauline Cabansagan and Bobby Sablad sing during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Rev. Jeff Mammen of New Life Church of the Nazarene speaks during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Rev. Jeff Mammen of New Life Church of the Nazarene speaks during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Lynne Miller plays Amazing Grace on a bagpipe while walking through the crowd during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Lynne Miller plays Amazing Grace on a bagpipe while walking through the crowd during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Heidi Burbage (left), Jack Murphy, 5, Colman Murphy and Lila Murphy, 3, listen during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Heidi Burbage (left), Jack Murphy, 5, Colman Murphy and Lila Murphy, 3, listen during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

A crowd listens to the Rev. Jeff Mammen of New Life Church of the Nazarene during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

A crowd listens to the Rev. Jeff Mammen of New Life Church of the Nazarene during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Jeremy Carroll holds his 7-month-old son Connor up over his head during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Jeremy Carroll holds his 7-month-old son Connor up over his head during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Trisha Mammen (right) looks after her daughters Cadence (left), 3, and Caroline, 22 months, as they sit on a car during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Trisha Mammen (right) looks after her daughters Cadence (left), 3, and Caroline, 22 months, as they sit on a car during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on

Lynne Miller plays Amazing Grace on a bagpipe during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Lynne Miller plays Amazing Grace on a bagpipe during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Lynne Miller plays Amazing Grace on a bagpipe during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Lynne Miller plays Amazing Grace on a bagpipe during Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

A crowd of people, some with chairs and blankets, wait Easter sunrise service to begin at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

A crowd of people, some with chairs and blankets, wait Easter sunrise service to begin at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

People gather before Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

People gather before Easter sunrise service at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

The Mount Davidson Cross before Easter sunrise service on the mountain in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

The Mount Davidson Cross before Easter sunrise service on the mountain in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

A crowd of people, some with chairs and blankets, wait Easter sunrise service to begin at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

A crowd of people, some with chairs and blankets, wait Easter sunrise service to begin at the Mount Davidson Cross in San Francisco, California, on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

Summary: A chilly mist and predawn darkness didn’t stop the Bay Area’s faithful from making the annual trek up Mount Davidson for an Easter sunrise service Sunday.  The hill’s landmark cross, illuminated with booming stage lights so that it could be seen through the morning fog, served as a beacon for hundreds who hiked the muddy trails to the city’s highest point for the 94th year of the holiday celebration atop the peak.  “It was worth getting up early,” said San Francisco resident Aracelis Gil, who made the half-mile or so walk with her husband — even with an injured knee.  The nondenominational service, which began at 7 a.m. with the large crowd huddled amid a grove of eucalyptus trees, started with a bagpipe rendition of “Amazing Grace” and continued with hymns, prayers and Bible readings.  Murti said the early morning hike was no big deal after a career working the graveyard shift loading planes for United Airlines.


Hillary Clinton made history Monday as she became the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination, ending a grueling primary that suggested that her return to the White House will be anything but easy.

Wins in Guam and Puerto Rico, along with superdelegates sliding her way, put the former Secretary of State, Senator from New York and First Lady of the United States and of Arkansas over the top, according to The Associated Press. The evening alert brought the long-awaited end to her fierce primary campaign against populist rival Bernie Sanders, who proved a more durable and formidable opponent than she had expected, and an American electorate that, even after decades in the public eye, still was not warm toward Clinton. The news also came just one day short of eight years since Clinton herself conceded to Barack Obama in 2008.

The Clinton campaign quickly responded to the AP call on Twitter, encouraging voters to turn out in the six states that vote Tuesday.

Now, her focus turns to her Republican rival, billionaire Donald Trump who has proved an unpredictable and unprecedented opponent. Trump vanquished 16 rivals—Governors, Senators and industry leaders alike—to prevail in the GOP race with a blend of populist anger, new voters and long-shot promises that would be near impossible to enact. Clinton’s victory over Sanders shows her campaign is capable of derailing the pie-in-the-sky rhetoric. But it isn’t easy, even with a sophisticated political apparatus behind her.

The Clinton campaign is perhaps the most advanced ever, with teams of data scientists, message analysts, new media mavens and traditional get-out-the-vote engineers packed into two stories of a Brooklyn headquarters and around the country. The campaign is building on President Barack Obama’s two technically groundbreaking campaign techniques, and Clinton has invested millions in a political machine that, if it works, could make history and elect the nation’s first female President.

But that machine is fighting a lopsided opponent. Trump has bragged that he doesn’t put much stock in the nuts-and-bolts of traditional campaigns or data. He suggests his gut will guide him more than polling, that focus groups are for losers and that Trump is the best strategist in the game. He might be right. Or he might just be naïve. In a year when the entire political rulebook has been shredded, it’s impossible to know.

Clinton’s team is bracing for an ugly campaign. Already, Trump has invoked the scandals—and the faux-scandals—of the 1990s and has cast the current incarnation of Clinton as a “crooked” politician who deserves to be in jail for using a private email address. He has shown little regard for her lifetime in the public eye—or that the Clintons attended the reception for his third marriage—and has been devastating in his criticism. All which goads his massive audiences into rage against Clinton. Independent vendors at some of his stops sell T-shirts declaring “Hillary sucks, but not like Monica,” a nod to Bill Clinton’s intern scandal. “Trump that bitch” is another popular slogan. No one said this campaign would be appropriate for all ages, or that it would treat Hillary Clinton any gentler because of her gender.

Clinton’s top aides know that the tone is going to be worse in a one-on-one race against Trump, whose anti-PC crusade propelled him to lead the GOP. But those aides have been coaching her to throw some of her own elbows. On Thursday, she delivered perhaps the best speech of this campaign, tearing apart Trump’s foreign policy views and tweets. Aides were buoyed by the showing and the reaction and, for the first time in weeks, were less worried about how their candidate would fare against Trump. And Clinton seemed to genuinely enjoy herself launching barbs against the bombastic Trump. She repeatedly called him simply “Donald” in a dismissive tone.

The coming five months will seem like a lifetime, and Clinton’s outside advisers are hoping her campaign can use her Trump tone on foreign policy as a model for other remarks. There is plenty for Clinton, a proud policy wonk, to plow through now that she can largely ignore Sanders. Immigration, energy, the economy, housing and education are all areas ripe for a Clinton schooling of Trump.

Sanders, meanwhile, seems unwilling to acknowledge it is closing time for his campaign. He told the AP that he disagreed with its math and said Clinton doesn’t have the pledged delegates. He says he would fight on right into the Democrats’ nominating convention in Philadelphia. He recently told TIME that it’s far too soon to consider ending the campaign because the superdelegates—the party insiders who made Clinton’s nomination possible—don’t really cast ballots until Philadelphia, and he wanted to sway them to his side.

Which means Clinton will still have to weather Sanders’ unyielding criticism, and the amplified version coming from his supporters. Just last week, Sanders backer Susan Sarandon insisted during an MSNBC interview that a Clinton indictment over her email practices was inevitable. In some ways, she and Trump were operating from the same space along the anti-Clinton spectrum.

Such constant grinding will grate on Clinton’s already high unfavorable ratings, which are rivaled only by Trump’s numbers. More Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump than a favorable one, by a 27 percentage point margin. Clinton is also underwater, but her gap is a narrower 14 percentage point deficit, according to Gallup. That’s little consolation for Clinton, who for years has faced some version of the question: Why don’t voters like you?

That question might simply not matter. She is now the de facto nominee for the Democratic Party. The base of her party is growing more quickly than Republicans’ core supporters. She has the better campaign machinery. She has the donor network that Trump never will. Her team is remarkably unified, while Trump’s inner-circle feuds publicly in the New York tabloids and on cable shows. And, as Clinton’s team bets, Trump’s nomination will be sufficiently horrifying to unify Democrats who didn’t vote for her in the primary. They don’t have to like Clinton. They just need to defeat Trump.

Summary: Like everything about her campaign, it was harder than expected


Pernambuco State,Â Brazil - At around 1:30am on a Saturday morning, 26-year-old Jaqueline Vieira de Souza bundled her four-month-old son, Daniel, into the car. They drove from her working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city of Olinda to the National Institute of Social Security (INSS) office in Recife,Â roughly 40 minutes away at that time of the morning.

The office was opening specifically to process disability pension applications for babies, like Daniel, who have microcephaly.Ten hours later, Vieira de Souza was exhausted. "I need to put my head down. I went to bed around midnight and managed to sleep about half an hour," she said.

The area around Recife, the capital of Pernambuco State, has been the epicentre of the microcephaly epidemic. It seems linked to the Zika virus, but this has not yet been confirmed.

As of April 2, Brazil's Ministry of Health has reported 6,906 suspected cases of microcephaly since 2015. Of these nearly 27 percent came from Pernambuco, which is located in the impoverished northeastern region of Brazil that accounts for nearly 80 percent of the country's microcephaly cases.Zika and microcephaly have grabbed international headlines, but they are also highlighting some of the faultlines in Brazilian society around gender, race and class.

Some of the biggest issues underlying the epidemic reflect the inequality within the country.

Low-income communities frequently have no sewage systems or a regular water supply, conditions that facilitate mosquito breeding. Questions related to the

and a lack of sex education have also bubbled up in relation to the crisis.Â

"You don't know what the limitations are going to be, and that really makes you anxious," Vieira de Souza said, remembering when, during her pregnancy, she learned that Daniel wasn't developing normally.

A two-time cancer survivor and a single mother of two, Vieira de Souza is no stranger to challenges.

In November, she registered with the INSS for an appointment for Daniel. Four months later, thanks to this day focused on mothers with microcephalic babies, the paperwork is done.

But the long wait for the appointment and the pressure needed to convince the government to open its offices, illustrate some of the day-to-day struggles facing women in a region coping with dengue, chikungunya, and Zika.

For about a month, Vieira de Souza has been participating in a support group through AMAR, the Alliance for Rare Mothers and Families. The group helps mothers of children with rare diseases and special needs, but it also presses for policy changes. It was the group's open letter that helped convince the INSS to open offices across northern Brazil on Saturday.

Along with the Recife INSS office, those in Fortaleza, Salvador and Sao Luis de Maranhao opened as well.In 30 days Vieira de Souza will learn whether her son will receive a pension of 880 reals (roughly $250) that the government provides to people with disabilities.

"It's resolved, but it's not going to come through because of my income. I receive an illness pension because I had cancer and support my [older] son. When the paper comes, I'll go to court. It's [Daniel's] right," she said.

Since separating from her partner, Vieira de Souza has spent all of her income on rent. She has fed her children thanks to donations, including some from AMAR.According to Silvia Camurca, a community educator with the women's rights organisation SOS Corpo, this situation is typical of what happens with many low-income women when faced with a family health crisis.

"In Brazil, the majority of the people who work for themselves with no social protection are women. If you've got Zika, and you don't work for three days, you won't have the money to buy groceries at the end of the week," Camurca said.

Although the Pernambuco State Health Department said no analysis had been done to determine the demographics of those with Zika, Dr Adriana Scavuzzi of Recife's pediatric teaching hospital, IMIP, said that almost 99 percent of the microcephaly cases come from people who use Brazil's public health system.

This suggests that they are low-income and lack the money to pay for a private health insurance plan.

While financial issues pose one obstacle for mothers like Vieira de Souza, abandonment presents another. Roughly 40 percent of AMAR's 400 members, some 69 of whom have babies with microcephaly, have been abandoned by their partners, says Debora Rorato, vice president of the organisation.

Rorato argues that the microcephaly phenomenon has simply exposed existing failures in Brazil's system for dealing with disabilities and rare diseases.

"[Mothers] don't have a creche. This is a right that the government has denied. And when we talk about disabled children, there's a whole generation here. Where are the special schools? Where are the therapy centres? They don't exist," Rorato said.

For Andreia Vieira da Silva, a community representative for Coelhos, one of Recife's poorest neighborhoods, the reason behind these shortcomings may lie in gender bias. "The government is very machista. Even if Brazil has a woman president."

For Vieira da Silva this machismo plays out in lack of access to reproductive health education.

"It's not clear yet if microcephaly is linked to mosquitoes or not, but even so, I don't see a massive effort to educate people here in the community [about reproductive health]," Vieira da SilvaÂ said.Â

In early March, Amnesty International charged Latin American countries with endangering women's lives with their reproductive health policies. Their report argues that policy decisions prioritise religious doctrine and stereotypes instead of women and girls' real needs.

In Brazil, abortion is illegal except in cases of rape or risk to the mother's life.

"If my life had been at risk, if it had been an issue of death, I would have wanted to [terminate]," Vieira de Souza told Al Jazeera, stressing that she was happy that her son came to term.Many women's advocates support legalising abortion to allow women to choose whether they wish to keep or terminate the pregnancy.But, said Camurca: "We can't take on the issue of abortion just to avoid a generation of disabled people."

Camurca believes that society needs to include the full range of able and disabled people.Â

"If there are people who can't be productive for companies, they also need to be included, and they can contribute with other kinds of meaning in life."Â

Read more:Â Zika virus facts you need to know

Summary: Microcephaly epidemic highlights the inequality experienced by low income communities and women.


Before you go, we thought you'd like these...

The first daughter ignited a bit of controversy this weekend when she chose to skip the Democratic National Convention in order to attend a concert in her hometown of Chicago, but that wasn't the only scandal that erupted.

Now it appears the teenager has fallen prey to the dangers of ubiquitous smart phones and social media.

Video that appears the show the first daughter dancing with her friends -- perhaps even twerking, depending on who you ask -- popped up on Instagram over the weekend.

Immediately, some began criticizing her on Twitter.

RELATED: Malia Obama through the years

Malia Obama through the years

US President Barack Obama and daughter Malia make their way to board Air Force One before departing from Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles on April 8, 2016. Obama is heading to San Francisco to take part in a Democratic National Committee roundtable discussion and to attend a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 07: U.S. President Barack Obama walks with his daughter Malia toward Marine One while departing the White House April 7, 2016 in Washington, DC. President Obama was scheduled to speak at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was expected to urge senate Republicans to hold hearings on his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

U.S. President Barack Obama congratulates his daughter Malia on her birthday during the Independence Day celebration at the White House in Washington U.S., July 4, 2016. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

US President Barack Obama and daughter Malia make their way to board Air Force One before departing from Chicago OHare International Airport in Chicago on April 7, 2016. Obama is heading to Los Angeles to attend fundraisers. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

U.S. President Barack Obama's daughters Sasha (L) and Malia listen to their father during the pardoning of the National Thanksgiving Turkey "Cheese" at the White House in Washington November 26, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS SOCIETY)

U.S. President Barack Obama and his daughter Malia walk in the rain from Marine One to board Air Force One upon their departure from Los Angeles, California April 8, 2016. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

FILE - This Nov. 27, 2013 file photo shows President Barack Obama's daughter Malia at the White House in Washington. A teenage rite of passage has come through the White House, with President Barack Obama revealing daughter Malia recently attended her first prom. Obama wouldnât say whether his older daughter had a date or went with friends. He joked itâs âclassified informationâ during an interview airing Friday on television talk show "Live! With Kelly and Michael.â (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

US President Barack Obama (R) and daughter Malia make their way across the South Lawn upon return to the White House on January 4, 2015 in Washington, DC. Obama and his family returned to Washington after spending the holidays in Hawaii. AFP PHOTO/Mandel NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Malia Obama serves ice cream to children during a visit to soldiers and their families at the U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza, northern Italy, Friday, June 19, 2015. Michelle Obama, who is visiting Italy on the second leg of a European trip, thanked the U.S. soldiers and their families for their service. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Malia Obama, left, and sister Sasha Obama laugh together as they leave a speech by their father President Barack Obama at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on the 50th anniversary of âBloody Sunday," a landmark event of the civil rights movement, Saturday, March 7, 2015. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Malia Obama, center, accompanies her father, President Barack Obama, and her friends, through Central Park in New York, Saturday, July 18, 2015. Obama is spending a mainly personal weekend with his daughters in New York City. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Malia, the daughter of U.S. first lady Michelle Obama, leaves after joining her mum and sister Natasha to visit British Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha at 10 Downing Street, in London, Tuesday, June 16, 2015. Schoolgirls in east London greeted U.S. first lady Michelle Obama with song, interpretive dance and squeals of joy Tuesday as she traveled to the British capital to promote education for girls. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

President Barack Obama, right, watches his daughter Malia, left, wear her ballcap backwards as they watch Princeton vs Wisconsin-Green Bay women's college basketball game in the first round of the NCAA tournament in College Park, Md., Saturday, March 21, 2015. Sitting between them his Obama's nephew Avery Robinson. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Malia Obama, left, waves to her cousin Princeton forward Leslie Robinson as she walks to her seats behind President Barack Obama before an NCAA college basketball game between Princeton and Wisconsin-Green Bay in the first round of the NCAA tournament, Saturday, March 21, 2015, in College Park, Md. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 19: Malia Obama (R) participates in a literacy service project at the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington, DC to mark Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, January 19, 2015 in Washington, DC. The Obama family visited the Boys and Girls Club and helped paint murals and put together literacy kits. (Photo by Pool/Getty Images)

US First Lady Michelle Obama (C) and her daughter Malia joke with children during a lunch at the United States and Nato military base in Vicenza , northern Italy, on June 19, 2015. AFP PHOTO / ANDREAS SOLARO (Photo credit should read ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP/Getty Images)

President Barack Obama, with daughters Sasha, center, and Malia, pays for his purchase the the local bookstore Politics and Prose in northwest Washington, Saturday, Nov. 30, 2013. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

President Barack Obama, second from left, with first lady Michelle Obama, right, and their daughters Malia, left, and Sasha, walk from the White House in Washington to attend a church service Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013, (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

US President Barack Obama walks with daughter Malia (L) across Lafayette Park to Saint John's Episcopal Chuch for Sunday services on October 27, 2013 in Washington, DC. AFP PHOTO/Mandel NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

First Lady Michelle Obama points something out to daughter Malia during the 57th Presidential Inauguration ceremonial swearing-in of US President Barack Obama at the US Capitol on January 21, 2013 in Washington, DC. The oath is to be administered by US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. AFP PHOTO/Jewel Samad (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

US President Barack Obama greets his daughter Malia as his wife Michelle(R) and duaghter Sasha(L) look on as he arrives to take the oath of office during the 57th Presidential Inauguration ceremonial swearing-in at the US Capitol on January 21, 2013 in Washington, DC. The oath is to be administered by Chief Justice John Roberts. Looking on at left hi Malia Obama. AFP PHOTO / Stan HONDA (Photo credit should read STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images)

Malia and Sasha Obama arrive prior to their father US President Barack Obama at the Edmund Pettus Bridge March 7, 2015 in Selma, Alabama.US President Barack Obama and the first family joined others to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday where voting rights marchers attempting to walk to the Alabama capitol clashed with police at the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Dallas County. AFP PHOTO/BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

US President Barack Obama laughs with his daughter Malia as they leave Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on June 16, 2013 after attending the Obama's youngest daughter Sasha's dance recital. AFP PHOTO/Nicholas KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

BERLIN, GERMANY - JUNE 19: Malia Obama visits the Berlin Wall memorial at Bernauer Strasse on June 19, 2013 in Berlin, Germany. U.S. President Barack Obama is visiting Berlin for the first time during his presidency and his speech at the Brandenburg Gate is to be the highlight. Obama will be speaking close to the 50th anniversary of the historic speech by then U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Berlin in 1963, during which he proclaimed the famous sentence: Ich bin ein Berliner. (Photo by Miriam May - Pool /Getty Images)

Host Hugh Jackman, left, looks at the first family, from second left, Marian Robinson, Malia Obama, Sasha Obama, President Barack Obama, and first lady Michelle Obama, join performers on the stage singing the Christmas carol during the annual 2013 Christmas in Washington presentation at the National Building Museum in Washington, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2013. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 27: U.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks with his daughter Malia Obama, 15, before pardoning the 2013 National Thanksgiving Turkey, 'Popcorn' on the North Portico of the White House November 27, 2013 in Washington, DC. A 38-pound, full-grown Broad Breasted White domesticated turkey, 'Popcorn' and its alternate 'Caramel' will be sent to live at Mount Vernon, the estate and home of George Washington. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

U.S. President Barack Obama waves to the media as he returns from his Hawaiian vacation to the White House with first lady Michelle (2nd L) and daughters Malia (L) and Sasha (R) in Washington, January 4, 2011. REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS)

U.S. President Barack Obama (2nd L) and First Lady Michelle Obama (R) hold hands with daughters Malia (L) and Sasha as they walk from the White House to St. John's Church for Sunday services, in Washington, October 27, 2013. REUTERS/Mike Theiler (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS RELIGION)

U.S. President Barack Obama, who won a second term in office by defeating Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, waves with his daughters Malia (R) and Sasha and wife Michelle (L) before addressing supporters during his election night victory rally in Chicago, November 7, 2012. REUTERS/Jeff Haynes (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS ELECTIONS USA PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)

U.S. President Barack Obama with his family sing at the "Christmas in Washington" celebration at the National Building Museum in Washington December 11, 2011. (L-R) First lady Michelle Obama, their daughters Sasha and Malia, President Obama, singers Jennifer Hudson and Victoria Justice. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS ENTERTAINMENT)

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks next to first lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Malia (R) and Sasha (besides Michelle Obama) at the Christmas in Washington Celebration at the National Building Museum in Washington December 12, 2010. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS)

U.S. President Barack Obama walks with first lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Malia (R) and Sasha from the White House to attend Sunday service at St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington December 11, 2011. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS RELIGION)

U.S. President Barack Obama sits with his daughters Malia (L) and Sasha as they wait to collect an order of takeout food at Nancy's Restaurant in Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, August 26, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES POLITICS)

U.S. President Barack Obama (L), with daughters Sasha (C) and Malia (R), join volunteers singing Happy Birthday to first lady Michelle Obama (TOP C) as they arrive to volunteer in honor of Martin Luther King Jr Day at Stuart-Hobson Middle School on Capitol Hill in Washington, January 17, 2011. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS IMAGES OF THE DAY)

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks alongside his daughters Sasha (L) and Malia, during a turkey pardoning ceremony for "Courage", the National Thanksgiving Turkey, on the North Portico of the White House in Washington, November 25, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES SOCIETY POLITICS)

U.S. President Barack Obama (2nd L) presents the first family's new Portuguese Water Dog puppy, Bo, on the South Lawn with his family at the White House in Washington April 14, 2009. With Obama are first lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Malia and Sasha (R). REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES POLITICS ANIMALS SOCIETY)

U.S. President Barack Obama jokes with his daughter Malia during a Fourth of July celebration with military families on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington July 4, 2009. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas (UNITED STATES POLITICS)

Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) walks with his (L-R) daughter Sasha, daughter Malia, and wife Michelle after his speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado August 28, 2008. REUTERS/Mike Segar (UNITED STATES) US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN 2008 (USA)

Illinois U.S. Senate candidate Democrat Barack Obama (2nd R), wife Michelle and their daughters Malia (R), 3, and Sasha (L), 6, spend time in their Chicago hotel room, November 2, 2004. Obama faces Republican candidate Alan Keys in the first Senate race with two African American candidates. REUTERS/John Gress JG (UNITED STATES) BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE

U.S. President-elect Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) embraces his daughters Sasha (C) and Malia (R) during his election night rally in Chicago November 4, 2008. REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES)

Michelle Obama and her daughters Sasha and Malia (R) listen as her husband Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) speaks during a campaign stop in Oskaloosa, Iowa, July 4, 2007. REUTERS/Keith Bedford (UNITED STATES)

But the protective backlash swung back in, with many defending the 18-year-old college-bound young woman for having fun like any other person her age might.

And some noted that Malia is far from the first president's daughter to be criticized for "adult" behavior.

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Summary: Video that appears the show the first daughter dancing with her friends popped up on Instagram over the weekend. Now everyone's got an opinion.


We’ve all been there: Stranded on a sun-drenched island, needing to dry your wet clothes as quickly as humanly possible, with nary a branch or flat surface to be found.

Luckily, you do have plenty of dental floss. And it makes a perfect clothesline. You saved the day, MacGyver.

If you’re saying to yourself right now, ‘of course that’s a thoroughly reasonable scenario,’ you are probably the sort of person who walks around with plenty of dental floss at all times, just in case.

And that means you might have been upset to see widespread reports that the science is still inconclusive on whether it actually improves your health.

Sorry scout, but rest easy: According to a collection of survivalists, crafters, do-it-yourselfers and convicted felons, there are dozens of alternative ways to use your cache of tooth-rope.

Here are a few we found.

Cutting a cake. We haven’t tried it, but this video looks pretty legit. Using a knife is also a pretty satisfactory option, though. Usefulness score: 7/10.

Hanging a picture. One way of hanging pictures is to use the wire that’s designed to hang pictures. Seems preferable, but apparently picture wire can damage your walls, so soft, waxy floss could be an alternative, sure. 5/10.

Murder. We’re not saying you should, but apparently you could. 0/10.

Making music. This guy restrung his guitar with dental floss. It worked, but c’mon, guitar strings aren’t that expensive. 5/10.

Silencing a dripping faucet. It seems you can tie floss to the bottom of a leaky faucet and let it hang to the sink so the water will slide inaudibly down the string rather than drip-drip-dripping and keeping you awake. We don’t know if it actually works, but if so there’s some high upside. 8/10.

Escaping prison. Accumulate enough floss at the commissary and you could use it to fashion a rope as thick as a telephone cord, as one man did in 1994. Or you could combine it with toothpaste to saw through wire, as one man did in 2002. Your prison has probably banned floss, but if you can get your hands on it, this seems pretty useful. 10/10.

Fishing line. Why are you in a boat with a fishing rod and dental floss but no actual fishing reel? How did you end up in this situation? What is wrong with you? 2/10.

Shoelaces. You’re on a hike, your left shoe catches a thorn just right, and suddenly your lace is shredded and your shoe is flopping everywhere. It’s not completely impossible. 4/10.

Sewing up your gunshot wounds. The Associated Press reported in 2012 that a group of escaped prisoners used floss to patch themselves up. Very resourceful, and they presumably had no better options. 9/10.

Pulling loose baby teeth. O.K., this is dental in nature, but not the purpose for which floss was intended. While it works in a pinch, the blogger behind “1,001 Uses for Dental Floss” warns against it. And he’s a dentist. 2/10.

Removing a ring. Take it from this man, who sounds like he’s in a great deal of pain — it works. 10/10.

Summary: It can help with many ordinary tasks, such as cutting cakes, and not-so-ordinary ones, like escaping from prison. So says the internet.


The reaction of economists to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has been swift and brutal as they slash forecasts for growth across the world, triggering a round of follow-on market downgrades from banks’ analysts.

The U.K.’s decision to exit the EU in a June 23 referendum rattled currency, bond and equity markets, pushing the pound to a 31-year low earlier this week. While markets have since stabilized, analysts are now looking at the longer-term consequences of prolonged turmoil in the world’s fifth-largest economy.

“Brexit could potentially derail a still fragile recovery and push us toward a downturn,” economists at Morgan Stanley MS 0.38 % said in a report this week. The bank raised its estimate for the probability of a global recession in the next year from 30% to 40%.

While analysts say the direct effect beyond Europe’s shores is smaller, reduced growth on the continent is bound to affect global trade as well as multinational companies, many of which count Europe as one of their key markets. The stronger U.S. dollar is also expected to reverberate across the globe, hitting profits of U.S. companies and emerging markets.

The Brexit jitters come as global trade has already been weakening in recent years, rising by just 2.8% in 2015, according to the World Trade Organization, the fourth consecutive year below 3% growth.

Brexit is “the most significant pull back to-date from the post-World War II consensus of closer integration and open trade,” analysts at Credit Suisse CS 0.44 % wrote in a report titled “The End of Globalization.” “Such a significant secular shift has the potential to have substantial negative implications for growth, corporate profits and asset prices in the medium term.”

The U.K. bears the brunt of the forecast cuts, with some banks forecasting that political uncertainty and a fall in investment herald a recession later this year. With Britain’s political situation in flux and its exit negotiations with the EU likely to drag on for years, analysts see a long period of weakness for the pound. That, in turn would boost inflation and further curb consumer spending, economists say.

“The U.K. will quickly fall into a recession and the longer we have this political uncertainty, the worse it is going to get,” said Rob Wood, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The bank expects a recession from the third quarter until the beginning of next year and has cut its forecast for U.K. economic growth in 2017 to 0.2% from 2.3%.

Across the English Channel, the most immediate Brexit-related disruption could come in the form of lower U.K. demand. Britain is the largest source of demand for eurozone goods and services, accounting for 13% of total exports, according to HSBC. HSBC 0.80 % After the Brexit vote, the bank cut its forecast for the eurozone’s gross domestic product growth in 2017 to 1.0% from 1.5%.

Citigroup C 0.52 % expects countries with the largest U.K. trade exposure like Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands to be the most affected.

“Brexit is a material economic shock to Europe,” said Joseph Lupton, senior global economist at J.P. Morgan. JPM -0.30 % “This will delay the economic recovery there and might lead to socio-economic and political problems.”

Looking ahead, the prospect of additional votes on EU membership are increasing uncertainties about the future of the world’s biggest trading bloc. Analysts say this would hit the investment climate and consumer confidence on the continent, which is still reeling from a debt crisis and last year’s Greek turmoil.

“For Europe, there is going to be a small impact from U.K. trade but the bigger issue is the uncertainty over the future of the single market,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Mr. Wood said. “If the U.K. can do this, who’s next?”

The effects beyond Europe are expected to be more muted, as trade with the U.K. represents a minuscule portion of the economic activity in the U.S. or China. But as investors piled into assets they saw as safe in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, the U.S. dollar rose, feeding concerns about U.S. companies’ profits and investments.

“In the U.S., the concerns focus on whether the dollar could appreciate sharply and remain high, which, alongside the uncertainty that Brexit creates, could reinforce weakness in U.S. business capital expenditure,” said analysts at Citigroup.

The bank said Brexit could shave off 0.1 percentage point from U.S. GDP growth this year and next and warned that the vulnerability of the internationally exposed U.S. banking sector to Brexit risk could further dampen U.S. growth.

For emerging markets, a stronger greenback makes their dollar-denominated debt and the commodities they sell more expensive. Still, these nations could benefit from prolonged ultraloose monetary policy in developed countries. Analysts expect the Brexit vote to derail the U.S. Federal Reserve’s plans to raise interest rates this year, with the market assigning only a 5% chance for a rate cut by December, according to CME Group. CME -0.35 %

The cuts to growth forecasts have also led strategists to revise their equity-market targets downward. UBS Group AG has cut its target for FTSE 100 year-end to 5,500. On Thursday, it was trading at 6373.8. The bank sees the Stoxx Europe 600 ending the year at 340, down from 400. The index was trading at 326.6 on Thursday.

Write to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com


We consulted with closet-design pros from across the country to learn the secrets to creating the ultimate storage unit, no power tools required.

You need to dedicate only two-thirds of your closet to hanging rods. To maximize that space, mount two of them—one well above eye level for longer garments and one a little more than 3 feet off the ground for shorter (or foldable) ones. Position both at least 1 foot from the back wall.

Designate a container (a bowl or bin on a shelf, or a pouch that hangs on the inside of the door) to serve as a catchall for loose change, receipts, or other items that accumulate in your pockets.

Closets should be wired for lighting. If yours isn’t, use battery-powered stick-up LED pucks, such as Sylvania’s Dot-its along the top and under shelves so that you can find what you’re looking for.

About $12 for three; lowes.com

Avoid jumbled piles of folded clothes by limiting shelf stacks to a height of 10 inches and partitioning them with thin bookends, like Highsmith’s steel versions.

Only things that can be easily lifted or rolled away, such as suitcases, should be stored directly on the floor; everything else should sit at least 1 inch off the ground to allow for regular vacuuming.

This article originally appeared on This Old House.

More from This Old House:

Summary: Here are the secrets to creating the ultimate storage unit, no power tools required


Health insurance companies are hectic places these days — they’re preparing for key pieces of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to go into effect next year. Given the frenzy, certain parts of the act could have unintended consequences. Specifically, a new report suggests, Americans without bank accounts could get left behind, unable to pay their insurance premiums.

Here’s why: Health care companies face many pressures before the ACA kicks in, but perhaps one of the most universal is to cut costs. The ACA will force many insurers to change their operations. After the act is fully in effect, insurers will need to allocate a set portion of insurance premiums toward the cost of care instead of overhead costs such as marketing and profits. Part of that overhead cost, for many insurance companies, pays for credit and debit card transaction fees.

To reduce overhead costs, some companies are looking to cut those credit and debit card transaction fees by forbidding patients to pay their premiums with their cards. BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, for example, no longer accepts premium payments via credit or debit card. Health insurance company Health Net implemented similar measures last year. At press time, Health Net did not offer comment.

MORE: What tummy tucks can teach us about health care reform

More and more insurance companies are scrapping debit and credit card payment options, says Ryan McCostlin, team member at Nashville-based health care consulting firm Bernard Health: “Since I’ve been thinking about how to help individuals and families figure out what to do about health insurance, more than half the carriers, while they may allow you to pay the first month’s premium with a debit or credit card, quite often, the only options after that are to get direct-billed with a paper statement or to set up an electronic funds transfer (EFT).”

The change doesn’t affect his clients much, he says, because the majority of Bernard Health customers have bank accounts and can switch to alternative premium payment methods.

But the real problem, argues a new report out of tax services firm Jackson Hewitt, is that a significant number of Americans don’t have bank accounts and will be left without a method to pay for insurance. One out of every 12 households in America are unbanked, according to a 2011 study by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, meaning that they don’t participate in the banking system at all. The Jackson Hewitt report focuses those numbers further: “Among the uninsured, non-elderly population with household incomes in the tax credit eligible range, 27% are effectively ‘unbanked,’” it says.

Those “unbanked” Americans could use prepaid debit cards to pay for premiums if companies let them, the report says, but as of now, there’s no language that would require health insurance companies to accept those types of payments. To be clear, “Jackson Hewitt does have a limited commercial interest with prepaid debit cards,” the report disclosed, because the firm allows certain customers to receive tax refunds on prepaid debit cards.

As of now, the issue of unbanked Americans paying premiums is not on the government’s radar. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners told Fortune that, so far, “this issue hasn’t been raised. Also, [there] is not anything in the federal register or in the state implementation efforts that would address insured’s being required to use EFTs for payments.”

MORE: Watch out. The mortgage securities market is at it again.

This issue should be raised, the report argues along with suggesting that government officials press insurance companies to accept debit and credit card payments from patients without bank accounts before the Health Insurance Marketplace opens in October 2013.

“Since we’re still working through the regulations, it is too early to know what payment methods will be required for products purchased on the new Health Insurance Marketplace,” says Mary Danielson, a spokesperson for Blue Cross Blue Shield in Tennessee.

Coincidentally, the population that could benefit most from universal health care tends to overlap with the population that doesn’t have a formal bank account. It’s a group that could get stuck, thanks to a glitch in the system, unable to pay premiums for the health care that the White House, via the Affordable Care Act, so desperately wants to make available to all.

Summary: A new study suggests that American insurers may start prohibiting premium payments via debit or credit card, a move that will put Americans without bank accounts in a major bind.


Every morning Tamara Yurovsky takes her wire fox terrier, Oliver, for a walk in Vinegar Hill, an enclave of Greek Revival homes built in the 1830s along the Brooklyn waterfront. Along the way he preens for photographs posted by Ms. Yurovsky on the Instagram account @oliver_thewirefox.

“He totally owns it,” Ms. Yurovsky said, adding, “If Oliver feels like directing, then you have to go with the flow.”

Oliver is certainly a cute little guy, but the real stars of many of Ms. Yurovsky’s photographs are the neighborhood’s doors, windows and facades.

“Doors say a lot about a place,” she said. “But they also conceal many possible realities.”

Such photographs belong to a genre all their own (“doortraits,” as they are called on Instagram), and they are surging in popularity.

While much of the internet these days seems like a dysfunctional family split along social and political lines, the door-crazed Instagram users belong to a harmonious community.

You can find accounts focused on doors from Iran, Italy, Nicaragua, Stockholm and Stockton, Calif.

We asked readers to submit their photos of a place they once overlooked – but now treasure.

Martha Reyes, who lives in Florida, and Katie Smith, from London, teamed up recently to start @ihaveathingforwalls, an account that brings together photos of mostly doors and windows from Instagram accounts around the world.

The two women have never met in person, but after seeing each other’s photographs, they decided to collaborate. They communicate mostly using WhatsApp and split weekly oversight of the Instagram account, which has roughly 40,000 followers.

For Ms. Reyes, who said that she suffers from kidney disease, Instagram is a welcome distraction. “I was getting depressed and the only thing to take me out of that was a picture,” she said. “It took my thoughts away from the pain.”

Present-day doortraits are rooted in painting’s past. Seventeenth-century Dutch painters portrayed doors and windows as a bridge between worlds: home and street life, worldliness and spirituality. In the 1800s, the first photographers harkened back to those themes, among them the British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot, whose “The Open Door,” was a conscious mirroring of the Dutch masters.

“It evokes a kind of voyeurism, wondering what is going on behind a door or window,” said Erin Barnett, the director of exhibitions and collections for the International Center of Photography in Downtown Manhattan.

A photo posted by Julie Gebhardt (@juliegeb) on Feb 18, 2016 at 8:16am PST

In the mid-1970s, the photographer Roy Colmer captured more than 3,000 doors in Manhattan, and the pictures are now part of the collection at the New York Public Library. Mr. Colmer’s inspiration, according to Elizabeth Cronin, the library’s assistant curator of photography, was Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception.”

Ms. Cronin said that Mr. Colmer was interested in street life, and photographing doors gave him a certain cover. “No one was noticing these doors, and it gave him a sense of freedom,” she said.

Andrew Howell, a graphic designer who lives in suburban London, said attending church services as a young boy sparked his interest in urban portals; for one, he wondered what mystery lurked behind the church tower’s closed door. (Bells, he later found out.)

Now he can be found, camera in hand, wandering East London for his @doors_of_england Instagram account, which has more than 5,800 followers.

“You could be in 18th-century London,” he said of the neighborhood he is chronicling. “I want to document it while it is still there.”

Julie Gebhardt, a hairdresser who works in San Francisco and has 47,000 Instagram followers for her door-centric account, has started leading a neighborhood door tour for her new Instagram friends. “We go into a neighborhood they normally wouldn’t go to,” she said. “There is beauty in the ordinary. Maybe it is not super picturesque. But you can show the beauty of decay.”

Some of the doortrait takers find their friends and family puzzled by their obsession with something so far from the usual Instagram fare of rainbows, cute animals and Sunday brunch.

Soraya Ben Hadj, a digital marketing consultant who grew up in Tunisia but now lives in Paris, said a friend chided her once because of the subject matter of her Instagram account, @doorseverywhere.

“He said: ‘Look, you are taking pictures of closed doors. That means you are not open-minded,’” she said. “For some people, that is something negative. For me, it’s not at all negative. I use my imagination. I confess, sometimes I see someone going in. That gives humanity to the place. A door is a path to somewhere else.”

Abdullah Alriyami, a writer from Oman who lives in Rabat, Morocco, began taking doortraits in Morocco and Oman a few years ago when he got his first smartphone.

He is concerned that globalization will obliterate local culture and with it, the doors and windows that make each place unique. In Morocco, for instance, many of the wooden doors he photographs are hand-carved with elaborate decorations. Others are brightly painted or forged in metal and hammered into shape.

Mr. Alriyami was interviewed by email, with translations by his daughter, Maryam Al Tubi, a student at the University of South Carolina. “Doors and windows in architecture are just like the eyes in people,” Mr. Alriyami wrote. “It is through your eyes that I know about you and we communicate better. A door is not just a tool for security and protection, it is a cultural symbol of a human being.”

The one thing that distinguishes one door from another is the person behind it. Oliver, Ms. Yurovsky’s terrier, has more than 11,400 followers and a canine buddy in Scotland with whom he swaps scarves. Ms. Yurovsky too helped create a hashtag for dog owners to share photos of dogs and doors; it already has nearly 1,000 posts.

A worry shared by many of those who take part in this Instagram genre is that the people on the other side of the doors may not appreciate the intrusion of a stranger with a camera. “I do get worried in certain neighborhoods that people might get upset,” said Ms. Yurovsky, who photographs her terrier in Brooklyn. Luckily, her dog is a polite New Yorker.

“For the record,” she said, “Oliver has never gone to the bathroom on anyone’s door.”

Summary: From Iran to California, hobby photographers share a common interest. And it’s not rainbows, cute animals or Sunday brunch.


The end is nigh for Adobe Flash.

Google goog Chrome plans to kick the software, known for its bugginess and perennial security flaws, to the curb this year. The team behind the popular web browser reiterated its commitment to ditching Adobe’s adbe multimedia-friendly tool by 2017 in a blog post on Tuesday.

The Chrome browser will begin blocking the majority of the web’s Flash—more than 90%—next month, the company said. By December, the browser will make Flash’s replacement, HTML5, a markup language for displaying media on web pages, its default. (Sites that support only Flash will require a person’s permission to run.)

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Anthony LaForge, the Chrome team’s point person for Flash and author of the blog post, credited Adobe’s software for helping to make the Internet a livelier place. “Adobe Flash Player played a pivotal role in the adoption of video, gaming and animation on the Web,” he said. But the time has come for a new technology to shine, he added.

LaForge said that HTML5 offers “improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times.” Aside from having to click the occasional checkbox on Flash-only sites, “the only change you’ll notice is a safer and more power-efficient browsing experience,” he wrote.

For more on Google Chrome killing Adobe Flash, watch:

The deprecation of Adobe Flash has been a long time coming. Google googl began the process of banning Flash-based ads last fall, got serious about it intentions to eliminate them earlier this year, and already published roadmaps for the ultimate phase out.

Google is not alone. Other browsers, like Mozilla’s Firefox, followed suit. Even Adobe has recognized the writing on the wall.

High-profile technologists have bashed the buggy software, too. Facebook’s fb chief security officer Alex Stamos got vocal about the need to dump Flash last year. He echoed complaints once voiced by the late Apple aapl founder Steve Jobs, who famously denied enabling it on products like the iPhone.

According to data from the Irvine, Calif.-based analytics firm Net Applications, Google Chrome boasts roughly half of the browser market share on desktops as well as tablets and phones. The runner-up, Microsoft’s msft Internet Explorer claims about 30% on both.

Summary: Steve Jobs would be proud.


Greatest road racing cyclist of all-time has finally won the Olympic medal he has been craving

MARK CAVENDISH has finally completed his medal haul by winning silver in the Men’s Omnium at the Rio Olympics.

In a tense final event, Cavendish duelled for 160 laps with Italian’s Elia Viviani and Lasse Norman Hanssen before finally pipping the Danish rider to second to win Britain’s 17th silver and 41st medal in total.

As the most successful road man sprinter of all-time, Cavendish had already earned the Yellow Jersey in the Tour de France, had 30 Tour de France stage victories, won gold in the Commonwealth Games and has now completed his dream of becoming an all-round cyclist by winning silver in the Olympics.

Despite crashing, Italian Elia Viviani claimed gold with a faultless race with Dane Lasse Norman Hansen winning bronze.

Unlike Viviani, there was no big celebration from Cavendish and even a sense of disappointment from the man himself that he didn’t claim gold but it was a magnificent achievement in a gruelling race from the 31-year-old.

Viviani ended the race with a total of 207 points with Cavendish finishing on 194.

But the race wasn't without controversy and injury. South Korean rider Park-Sang hoon collided into the back of Cavendish half way through the race and tumbled off his bike at high speeds.

His bike flew across the track which sent Viviani crashing to the ground along with Australian rider Glenn O'Shea.

Unbelievably Viviani was able to continue with a ripped jersey but it wasn't such good news for Sang hoon who took a heavy fall and was taken away on a stretcher to a standing ovation.

Cavendish's medal adds the Team GB's remarkable success in cycling to go alongside Bradley Wiggins' gold in the men's team pursuit and Jason Kenny's achievements in Rio.

Summary: MARK CAVENDISH has finally completed his medal haul by winning silver in the Men’s Omnium at the Rio Olympics. In a tense final event, Cavendish duelled for 160 laps with Italian’s Elia…


Gold Coast sugarcane farmers are preparing to truck some of their crop to NSW in an attempt to salvage something from this year's harvest.

Growers on the northern end of the Gold Coast have been scrambling to get this summer's crop crushed after a fire shut down the region's only mill late last month.

Already delayed after repairs to the Rocky Point Sugar Mill, local growers were facing a disastrous harvest when the 130-year-old facility was damaged in the blaze on November 29.

An agreement has been reached to truck approximately 40,000 tonnes of cane south of the border to the Condong Mill in Murwillumbah.

But Rocky Point District Cane Growers Organisation chairman Richard Skopp says the plan will still result in 160,000 tonnes of cane being left unharvested this summer.

"It only helps mitigate some of the losses," Mr Skopp told AAP.

The fire at the Rocky Point mill has been viewed as a potentially decisive point in local growers' desire to see the area rezoned for urban development however Mr Skopp said no contact had been made with local or state authorities about that proposal.

Rocky Point's output of 200,000 tonnes per year makes it the smallest of Queensland's cane-producing districts.

Summary: Gold Coast sugarcane farmers are preparing to truck some of their crop to NSW for crushing after a fire shut down the region's only mill.


Sex, politics, Mexico and the enigmas of identity are the themes that have preoccupied  even, at times, obsessed  Carlos Fuentes for his entire writing life, and he brings them together once again, in full regalia, in his smashing new novel, "The Eagle's Throne." Here, though, they feel less like obsessions than like old friends, the trusted longtime companions of the novelist's working days. By now, they're so familiar to Fuentes, and to one another, that they mingle freely, casually, almost flirtatiously. Fuentes has gathered them all in one place many times before, usually for grave, summit-level meetings in ambitious novels like "The Death of Artemio Cruz," "The Old Gringo" and "The Years With Laura Díaz." This is the first time he's thrown them a party.

Which is not to say that "The Eagle's Throne" is unambitious. Fuentes doesn't put finger to keyboard without having at least one fairly large idea to get off his chest, and over the years he has managed to store up more than a couple of big ones about the subject he addresses here: the exercise of practical politics.

The "throne" of the title is, in fact, a popular metaphor for the presidency of Mexico; that office (or, at least, privileged access to it) is the prize everybody at Fuentes's soirée is angling for. And while he's concerned, as always, about the destiny of his native country, his story focuses more on down-and-dirty political means than serious political ends, leaving us to draw our own conclusions about what sort of good can possibly come of his characters' byzantine strategies and counterstrategies  their opportunistic alliances, their calculated secret-keeping and secret-leaking, their posturing, their watchful waiting, their sly brutalities.

What results is the most wickedly entertaining novel of Fuentes's career, now well into its fifth decade. The action takes place in 2020. It is two years into the term of President Lorenzo Terán, a decent man with an unfortunate (and deserved) "reputation for inaction," and just about every politician in Mexico  including most of Terán's nest-of-vipers cabinet  is already planning for the next election, in 2024. The race is wide open because the country's constitution limits the president to a single term; or, as one particularly reptilian character puts it, "when it comes to Mexican politics, we shed our skin every six years."

Although court intrigue can be fun, the twists and turns of presidential succession in Mexico (or anywhere else) aren't necessarily the stuff of great fiction. Fuentes is far too shrewd to think that an electoral horse race, no matter how hotly contested, is enough to make a novel  unless, that is, he can eroticize his story's politics and somehow persuade us to see every move in this complex presidential game as a tactic of courtship, a bit of foreplay, a whispered intimacy.

There's no better model for that kind of story than "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 masterpiece of erotic treachery. Like Laclos's novel  and also like those other 18th-century seduction epics, Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" and "Clarissa"  "The Eagle's Throne" is told in letters. In order to cast this very up-to-date fiction in that old-fashioned form, Fuentes contrives a total shutdown of Mexico's telecommunications systems: no phones, no faxes, no e-mail. The trick he uses is elegant and funny. In response to President Terán's call "for the withdrawal of the United States' occupation forces in Colombia and . . . a ban on the export of Mexican oil to the United States," President Condoleezza Rice has cut off the country's access to the relevant satellite.

So when you begin to read "The Eagle's Throne," you may experience a peculiar sense of disorientation, a temporal vertigo: you're in an imaginary future that's disturbingly similar to the present and also, in some fundamental way, rather like the distant past of Laclos's scheming Marquise de Merteuil.

Fuentes's Merteuil-like heroine, María del Rosario Galván, writes the book's first letter, to her younger protégé, Nicolás Valdivia. In it, she promises every sort of earthly delight  access to her bed and perhaps (who knows?) to the eagle's throne itself  if he will agree to follow her as yet unspecified instructions.

Her language is, in the best 18th-century epistolary style, both coolly analytic and discomfitingly ardent. "With me," she confesses, "everything is political, even sex," an admission she promptly turns into an aphorism: "I consider politics to be the public expression of private passions." And in case that philosophical bon mot hasn't succeeded in getting Nicolás sufficiently wound up, she adds something more explicit: "Political fortune . . . is one very long orgasm, my darling. Success must be gradual and slow in coming if it is to endure." This is talking dirty of an extremely rarefied order.

That striking first letter lets us know we're not in a focus group in Kansas anymore. This isn't the hardball politics of glib spinners and data-crunching operatives; instead, it's politics as the expression of the most basic, doggedly immutable human impulses. As the narrative proceeds, in its serpentine fashion, it accumulates an impressive number of historical and literary references. (Maybe a few too many for Fuentes's generally skillful translator, Kristina Cordero: she fails to recognize a quotation from "Julius Caesar" and mistakes the adjective vidriera in the title of Cervantes's "Glass Graduate" for a proper name.) There are characters called Tácito, Cícero, Seneca and, inevitably, César; plot devices suggestive of "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Man in the Iron Mask"; and allusions throughout to the classic library of power and its discontents, from Plato to Shakespeare to Conrad.

And hovering, eaglelike, above all the convoluted action of the book is, of course, the capo di tutti capi of political manipulation, Niccolo Machiavelli, of whom Nicolás Valdivia is proud to be the namesake. Nicolás is unique in actually sharing the name of the master, but practically everybody in "The Eagle's Throne" fancies himself or herself "a Mexican Machiavelli." Their success rates vary drastically  six major characters end up dead, another two in exile  but every one of these people is, at least, adept at concocting cynical aphorisms. And that, for some of them, seems to constitute their true raison d'être. The level of verbal hubris in this book is staggering, and cumulatively hilarious. As one character says: "The politician who goes around thinking he's more than he is will never know who he is."

That's the great joke of this brilliant political novel: Fuentes's sententious movers and shakers are so busy positioning themselves and trying to figure out where everyone else is in this hall of mirrors that they never quite see themselves. María del Rosario has a brief glimpse, near the end  "Do you realize that we've lived through this story in confinement, as if we've been acting on the stage of a prison? A story completely divested of nature"  but she quickly catches herself and turns away.

The near-absolute absence of self-knowledge exhibited by the otherwise exceptionally smart people in "The Eagle's Throne" is what makes it both terrifically sad and oddly festive, in a desperate, end-of-the-party way, with everyone drunk (on power or merely the illusion of it) and dancing crazily and saying things that aren't quite as witty as they were meant to be and laughing their heads off anyway  and with all of them looking for partners so they don't have to go home alone.

Fuentes, no mean aphorist himself, wrote not long ago: "Politics can be dogmatic. The novel can only be enigmatic." The enigma of "The Eagle's Throne," this 18th-century science fiction novel about the present, is its tragic exuberance.

Terrence Rafferty is the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies."

Summary: In Carlos Fuentes's near-future farce, everybody wants to be the next president.