Month: January 2018

Seems like everyone has an opinion about Sunday’s Super Bowl ― even Alexa, the human-like bot on the Amazon Echo device.

People who’ve asked the device who is going to win have been surprised by the rather heated response:

“The team favorite to win is the, cough, the, cough, excuse me, is the Patriots. That was tough to get out,” the device says. “But I’m flying with the Eagles on this one because of their relentless defense and the momentum they’ve been riding on their underdog status. E-A-G-L-E-S ― EAGLES!”

New Yorker Amber Jacquot discovered that Alexa is an Eagles fan Tuesday night, asking the bot numerous times before filming the video above.

HuffPost employees with the Amazon Echo confirm they’ve heard similar responses as well.

An Amazon rep told HuffPost that Alexa often roots for the underdog.

“She had a friendly rivalry with the Patriots last year, and that sentiment continues this year,” the spokesperson told HuffPost by email.

Meanwhile, other digital assistants aren’t nearly as passionate or anti-Pats.

The Google Assistant says, “I’m still deciding who to root for,” when pressed for an answer.

Apple’s Siri just goes with the current point spread: 

“Apparently the odds favorite the Patriots over the Eagles by 4 1/2 points,” it says. 

UPDATE: This story has been updated to include Amazon’s response.

A second person of interest related to last year’s mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival was identified as an ammunition dealer who sold to gunman Stephen Paddock, according to newly unsealed court documents.

The dealer, Douglas Haig, was named alongside Paddock’s wife, Marilou Danley, as a possible conspirer in the October massacre that left 58 people dead and hundreds more injured, The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Haig, who is also an engineer, admitted to selling the ammunition, but denied knowing who Paddock was or that he planned anything nefarious.

The documents, unsealed by a judge on Tuesday, were prepared by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in October. They state that both Haig and Danley remain persons of interest “until the investigation can rule otherwise.”

It’s not clear whether Haig remains under investigation. Danley, who was in the Philippines at the time of the attack, is not expected to be charged, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said this month.

According to CBS News, authorities contacted Haig after investigators found an Amazon box in Paddock’s Las Vegas hotel room that had Haig’s address on it.

Haig has told media that he met with Paddock a few weeks before the shooting but that it was only to sell him ammo ― 720 rounds of tracer ammunition, to be exact.

“I couldn’t detect anything wrong with this guy,” Haig told CBS News. “He told me exactly what he wanted, I handed him a box with the ammunition in it, he paid me and he left.”

Haig said Paddock, who authorities said died of an apparent self-inflicted wound after the shooting, told him that he planned to put on a “light show” with the tracer ammunition, which leaves behind a visible trail when fired.

Records show that Haig owns the store, Specialized Military Ammunition LLC, The Associated Press reported. The store’s website, which lists it as closed “indefinitely,” boasts a variety of projectiles.

Haig’s LinkedIn profile also lists him as a senior engineer for Honeywell Aerospace in Arizona. The company confirmed his position there to the Review-Journal. 

Haig, speaking to reporters on Tuesday outside his Mesa, Arizona, home, said he planned to hold a press conference on Friday.

This isn’t the first time that Haig has denied having known Paddock.

In October, he gave an interview with Newsweek, during which he said federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives interviewed him shortly after the Oct. 1 shooting. That interview was published on Tuesday for the first time.

“After about 20 minutes they left. Haven’t heard from them since,” he said. “I have to think that if it was really, really serious or there was something that they thought I did that was wrong, (the agents) would have been kicking my door down.”

Tell us how you really feel!

Donald Trump’s supporters may have enjoyed the president’s first State of the Union address, but the highlight for many people was the way House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) introduced it.

“I have the high privilege and the distinct honor of preventing, uh, presenting to you the president of the United States,” Ryan said.

Here’s a clip from C-SPAN.

Whether it was a just a verbal slip of the tongue or an inadvertent expression of Ryan’s true feelings may never be known ― it’s not like Ryan would admit it.

Still, the gaffe provided amusement to many people on Twitter ― and that’s what really matters, right?

Of course, a lot of people drew on the lessons learned from their Intro to Psychology class.

Others suspected Ryan’s intro was really a cry for help.

Others let GIFs express how they felt.

One man lamented the decline of verbal facility in politicians.

But Ryan was no one-trick pony when it came to meme-able moments, as his reaction when Trump said “In God We Trust” amply demonstrates.

As you might expect, the action inspired many comments on Twitter.

Although many people seemed to enjoy making fun of Ryan, one man had a simple solution to help the speaker prevent himself from becoming a meme in the future.

Last September, the Los Angeles Times published a blockbuster report detailing Disney’s questionable business ties with the city of Anaheim. In response, Disney barred Times writers from advance screenings of its movies and, according to a former Times employee, froze them out of interview availabilities. When Disney finally ended its blockade on Nov. 7, the company said in a statement that it “had productive discussions with the newly installed leadership at the Los Angeles Times regarding our specific concerns, and as a result, we’ve agreed to restore access to advance screenings for their film critics.”

From those facts alone, it might have seemed as if the Times had won. The Mouse had blinked first, and honest journalism had carried the day.

In a recording of a meeting obtained by The New York Times, however, the then-newly installed and now former editor-in-chief Lewis D’Vorkin can be heard shooting down suggestions that the paper re-promote its original investigative report. Staffers were even warned “against retweeting any praise” of LA Times stories, according to The New York Times. Some employees, The New York Times said, “questioned whether the social media edict was part of a deal Mr. D’Vorkin had struck with Disney.”

D’Vorkin, now chief content officer for Tronc, corporate parent of the LA Times, denied any such arrangement to The New York Times.

But it turns out the Mouse and the LA Times really did have an undisclosed connection after all.

According to real estate documents filed with Los Angeles County, then-LA Times president Miyuki “Mickie” Rosen had been sharing an address in Brentwood with Sean Shoptaw, a Disney vice president for business development, since at least 2014. That year Rosen filed to give Shoptaw ownership of a third of the property where she had previously lived with her husband.

Public filings show that Rosen and Shoptaw still shared ownership of the address as recently as this past October.

Rosen had been announced in her new role as LA Times president a month prior to Disney’s decision to end the blockade against the paper. The fact that she apparently owned a home with a Disney vice president was never disclosed publicly nor was it revealed to the staff. Multiple current and former LA Times employees with varying degrees of seniority told HuffPost that they had never heard anything about Rosen’s connection to the Disney vice president.

This raises the question of how much of a role Rosen played in what Disney referred to as “productive discussions with the newly installed leadership.” Based on his LinkedIn profile, Shoptaw appears to work with consumer products, meaning that he likely wouldn’t have had an active role in any negotiations with the paper.

Rosen was brought on at the same time as D’Vorkin, two months after Ross Levinsohn came aboard as publisher and chief executive officer. Levinsohn is now on leave following accusations of sexual harassment. 

In announcing her and D’Vorkin’s hirings, Variety wrote that she would “lead day-to-day operations and have oversight of product development, design, engineering, digital marketing, and data analytics across Tronc.” As president, Rosen would have been a business-side executive. Traditionally, newspapers maintain a firewall between business and editorial employees, to keep the interests of advertisers separate from the journalism. But Tronc’s history in this regard hasn’t exactly been stellar.

Nearly all the employees HuffPost spoke to were unsure of what exactly Rosen’s role was supposed to be. “They replaced one editor and publisher with three people ― D’Vorkin, Ross and Rosen,” said one current employee. “Ross was CEO and publisher; she was president. How those duties differ we don’t know, but D’Vorkin, of course, answered to them.”

“Ross was the face and Rosen was the brains,” another employee said, citing an office refrain.

Levinsohn and Rosen have worked together at several previous stops. According to their LinkedIn pages, they overlapped at Whisper Advisors, The Boston Consulting Group, Yahoo, Fuse Capital and Fox Interactive Media. Rosen also worked as Disney’s director of corporate alliances from 1998 to 2000. 

Although Rosen has since left her role as Times president, she received an ostensible promotion within Tronc, the details of which are, once again, vague. Nieman Lab noted on Sunday that she will “move into a wider leadership role with Tronc, with explanation of that new position expected later this week.”

A spokesperson for Tronc declined to comment.

Last Friday, an employee filed an anonymous internal ethics complaint with Tronc, citing both Rosen’s lack of disclosure regarding her Disney connection and the fact that the details of the Times-Disney détente had never been made clear.

Update 1/31: Tronc’s vice president for communications  and public relations, Marisa Kollias, provided the following statement:

Mickie Rosen has never had any involvement in the newsroom or on editorial decisions. Offensive that her private life had to be aired out.  She has never had anything to do with the Disney matter. There is no obligation or reason to disclose.

You can see the real estate filings below:

This post has been updated to note the internal Tronc ethics complaint filed last week.