Not in the Cold War, Vietnam, or Watergate did I ever fear more for my country
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Kim Jong-un: fragile and under pressure but he won’t give up
The Observer The North Korean leader’s surprise freeze of his nuclear programme is less a genuine move than a diplomatic manoeuvre,...
Tuesday, 29 October 2019
New top story on Hacker News: Google Announces .new Domain Availability
Google Announces .new Domain Availability
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Vox Sentences: Gerrymandering loses in North Carolina
Sarah L. Voisin/Washington Post via Getty Images
North Carolina has to redraw districts before presidential primaries; Lebanon prime minister steps down as protests continue.
Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what’s happening in the world. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.
North Carolina court orders new map
- A North Carolina state court has thrown out the state’s Republican-drawn map of congressional districts — ordering the state to draw a new map, even if that means postponing the 2020 primary elections. [The New York Times / Michael Wines]
- This isn’t the first time this year that North Carolina’s legislative maps have lost in court: A state legislative map was ruled unconstitutional in September. [Vox / Ella Nilsen and Tara Golshan]
- Under the current map, Republicans hold 10 out of 13 congressional districts, a far greater share than votes for the GOP in the state. [Politico / Steve Shepard and Ally Mutnick]
- North Carolina legislators now must redraw congressional districts without drawing on racial or political affiliation data. [Slate / Elliot Hannon]
- While the decision said that the freeze could impact presidential primary voting in March, “those consequences pale in comparison to voters of our state proceeding to vote, yet again, in congressional elections administered pursuant to maps drawn in violation of our North Carolina Constitution.” [NBC News / Pete Williams]
- The Supreme Court ruled earlier this year it could not take part in deciding on state gerrymandering cases. [The Columbus Dispatch / Jessica Wehrman]
- How did North Carolina get so gerrymandered to begin with? One man drew out districts to elect Republicans. [Vox / Alvin Chang]
WhatsApp tax is Lebanon leader’s undoing
- Tuesday, Lebanon Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned from his post in response to protester demands. [The Guardian / Martin Chulov]
- A proposed WhatsApp tax was the final straw two weeks ago, sparking fury about government corruption and poor living conditions for the vast majority of Lebanese. [Reuters]
- Members from Lebanon’s nearly 20 sects came together in the streets for peaceful demonstrations that featured singing and dancing. [NPR / Daniel Estrin and Lama al-Arian]
- Solidarity demonstrations were held in cities across America last week, bringing out many members of the Lebanese diaspora under red, white, and green flags. [The 961 / Nour Abdul Reda]
Miscellaneous
- Why Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s immigrant background is a strength in his testimony about an “America-first” president. [The Atlantic / David A. Graham]
- How the FAA kept Boeing’s defective planes in the air long after they should have been grounded. [Wall Street Journal / Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel]
- California household workers brave fires while their employers flee without a second thought. [Los Angeles Times / Brittny Mejia]
- A prison journalist looks to atone for the crimes that once put him behind bars, and attempt to apologize to the family of his murder victim. [Washington Post / John J. Lennon]
- The scandal surrounding Rep. Katie Hill is more complex than it initially appears. [Vox / Anna North]
Verbatim
“They are suffering from harsh humanitarian conditions and are in need of shelter. Let them go and do not threaten their safety.” [Coordinator of General Authority for Syrian Refugees Affairs Hala Hassan Darwish on the status of Syrian refugees in Egypt]
Listen to this: California’s blackouts
California is on fire, having rolling blackouts again. The Today, Explained team explores why the two are connected, and why blackouts might be a good thing in the long run for the country. [Spotify]
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from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/vox-sentences/2019/10/29/20938948/north-carolina-gerrymandering-lebanon
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The New HBO Max is competing with Netflix by giving you ‘Friends’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ for $15 a month
HBOMax, WarnerMedia’s new streaming service, will feature all of HBO’s shows, like Game of Thrones, plus new programing. | HBO
HBO Max will have plenty of competitors, including Netflix and Apple and Disney’s new streaming services.
WarnerMedia’s new HBO Max streaming service, which will feature all of HBO’s programming plus new shows, and repeats of old ones like Friends, will launch in May, and cost $15 a month — the same price that the existing HBO service costs.
It’s an expensive and potentially impressive marketing move. And one which WarnerMedia needs to make, as it competes with Netflix, which already has tens of millions of subscribers in the U.S., and new competitors like Apple and Disney, who have aggressively priced their soon-to-be launched services.
Executives from AT&T and WarnerMedia unveiled the price and launch date of the service at an investor event on Tuesday.
At first, millions of people won’t pay anything at all for the new service: AT&T plans to give away one-year subscriptions of HBO Max to 10 million of its phone customers who already pay for HBO; the company says it will offer the service as part of some of its phone and broadband bundles for free. And it also says it would like HBO subscribers who have signed up through traditional pay TV distributors to get it for free, as well — but that it doesn’t have deals to do that, yet.
When it does go on sale, HBO Max will have many competitors who are also trying to attract consumers’ time and money. In addition to Netflix, that will include Apple and Disney’s new services, which are launching next month, and will be priced at $5 a month and $7 month, respectively. And next spring, Comcast’s NBCUniversal will launch its own Peacock streaming service.
WarnerMedia hopes to bring in HBO Max subscribers by promoting the stuff they can already get on HBO, plus a combination of old shows like Friends, Big Bang Theory, and South Park. It will also have exclusive original shows like Strange Adventures, based on the DC superhero franchise WarnerMedia owns, and Raised by Wolves, a science fiction series from Ridley Scott, the director of films including Alien, Blade Runner and The Martian.
By pricing HBO Max at the same price as HBO, AT&T makes it an easy decision for existing HBO subscribers to upgrade, and it also makes the service an easier sell for new subscribers. It is also likely to cause problems with traditional pay TV distributors like Comcast (which is an investor in Vox Media, which owns this site), who have traditionally been HBO’s primary retailers.
HBO executives already saw a version of this conflict when they rolled out HBO Now, its broadband-only service, and got pushback from cable companies who saw the new service as competition for the one they were already selling.
Meanwhile, all of that programming and marketing will cost AT&T an enormous amount of money. It says it will sink more than $4 billion into HBO Max. But it says the service should turn a profit in 2025, when it expects to have 50 million subscribers and will be able to generate a profit of $1 billion.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/29/20939039/hbo-max-price-streaming-warner-att
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HBO has reportedly canceled the first prequel to Game of Thrones
HBO
The first of HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoffs is DOA — and it’s hard to tell how many are left.
One fell down and broke its crown: A Game of Thrones prequel project previously greenlit by HBO in 2018 and set to star Naomi Watts has reportedly been axed, leaving the fate of the franchise’s four other planned spinoffs uncertain.
Deadline is reporting that showrunner Jane Goldman, a producer and writer best known for writing Kingsman (2014) and The Woman in Black (2012), has announced to the show’s cast and crew that the series, which was rumored to have been called Bloodmoon or The Long Night, is dead.
Although HBO has not confirmed the series’ status, a page promoting the prequel on the HBO website, which was online until October 29, now returns a 404. Vox has reached out to HBO for details about the reported cancelation of the series and will update with more when we receive it.
The creative team had wrapped a pilot shoot in Northern Ireland earlier this year that had, according to rumor per Deadline, run into unspecified production issues:
Word of the Watts-led pilot, penned by Goldman and directed by S.J. Clarkson, not going forward comes after a lengthy post-production, which included re-editing of the initial cut after it was not well received, and rumors about issues during filming in Northern Ireland.
Still, in late July, HBO’s president of programming, Casey Bloys, called the prequel pilot “amazing” — while acknowledging he hadn’t seen it yet — and said that the infamous backlash to Game of Thrones’ eighth and final season wouldn’t affect the prequel’s chances of success.
So what happened? In addition to any pricy production hangups, the recent announcement that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had signed a lucrative, five-year exclusivity deal with Netflix might have cooled HBO’s enthusiasm for nurturing another Game of Thrones project so soon after season eight, as it seeks to compete in the much-vaunted streaming wars.
Fans were also among the first to point out that Benioff and Weiss, who had virtually no experience when they were hired for the project, shot a notoriously bad Game of Thrones pilot — but unlike Goldman’s pilot, HBO gave them the chance and the budget to complete a massive reshoot.
Little was known about Goldman’s prequel project. The idea for the untitled show came from Goldman and author George R.R. Martin, upon whose Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series Game of Thrones is based. Directed by S.J. Clarkson (Jessica Jones), the TV series was set 5,000 years before the events of Game of Thrones. HBO billed it as promising to show Westeros’s “descent from the golden Age of Heroes into its darkest hour.” Such a historical setting might have meant an up-close look at legendary Westerosi characters like Bran the Builder, and the war between humans and the Children of the Forest that led to the creation of the White Walkers. Now, it could be up to the other potential prequel series to fill in those gaps.
A number of other Game of Thrones spinoff projects are reportedly still in the works, though exactly how many isn’t quite clear. Originally, HBO was considering up to five spinoff projects. Bloys announced in 2018 that only one of the original five was actively moving forward — the purportedly canceled Goldman project — but that some of the other projects still had life in them.
HBO axed one of the original five pitched series, from longtime Thrones writer Bryan Cogman, in April. Another of the remaining series in development hails from longtime writer and director Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale); another comes from Carly Wray (Mad Men). Details on both projects are very sketchy, and it’s unclear whether a series pilot is close for either show; in May of 2019, Martin wrote on his blog that two of the remaining series “remain in the script stage, but are edging closer” to production, however.
Four months later, in September, rumors surfaced that HBO was close to ordering a pilot for an additional prequel series about House Targaryen from Colony co-creator Ryan Condal and Martin. This project will undoubtedly hew closer to Martin’s considerable established world-building — he’s announced that it’s based on events chronicled in his historical Westeros companion book Fire & Blood — to explore the reign of the tempestuous Targaryen clan over Westeros, and the events surrounding a civil war which split the country.
The Condal/Martin series was rumored to have been a recycled version of Cogman’s pitch — but it also sounds very close to another previously pitched prequel series, rumored to have been titled Empire of Ash. That series, developed by Max Borenstein (Kong: Skull Island), focused on the Westerosi historical period known as the Doom of Valyria. It’s unclear whether HBO is now developing two different prequels focused on the Targaryens, whether one has superseded the other, or whether these two projects have merged.
What does seem clear is that the future of a beloved universe which once seemed destined to continue churning out spinoffs indefinitely is nowhere near as secure as it appears. Hopefully for Game of Thrones fans, one of these pilots will finally take flight.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/29/20938914/hbo-cancels-goldman-game-of-thrones-prequel
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50 of the best stocking stuffers in the UK
Gift guides are taking over again. Gift ideas for couples, gift ideas for her, and suggestions for every hyper-specific type of person in between have been all over the internet since September. However, the one thing that's often left until the last minute? The humble stocking stuffer.
We feel like the stocking is usually thought to be a mere decoration to hold the "let's just get this out of the way" items, but let's be clear on something: Just because stocking stuffers are small in size doesn't mean they have to be cheap or lame.
SEE ALSO: Best gifts for teenage girls in the UK: Stuff she'll actually want to show off on Instagram Read more...
from Mashable https://mashable.com/uk/gifts/best-stocking-stuffers-uk/
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