Monday 14 December 2015

MLB commissioner upholds Pete Rose's ban from baseball

Pete Rose's stay in baseball purgatory continues, and it appears he has himself to blame.Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred issued a statement Monday denying Rose's request for reinstatement, issuing a four-page decision that showed Rose continues to bet on baseball and failed to disclose that to the commissioner in September until pressed.The denial means the lifetime ban that began in 1989 after Rose was caught gambling while managing his hometown Cincinnati Reds stays in place. As a practical matter, the decision keeps Rose from being eligible for the Hall of Fame."I've heard from (Commissioner) Manfred directly, and he has denied our application to reinstate Pete, which is very disappointing," Rose's lawyer Raymond Genco told The Enquirer.

In a statement, Genco said that "Pete's fall from grace is without parallel. He also recognizes it was also of his own making.""While we may have failed at our task of presenting all the facts to the Commissioner demonstrating how Pete has grown and changed over the past three decades, Pete indeed has meaningfully reconfigured his life – the standard laid out by as Commissioner Giamatti," Genco said in the statement. "As such, Pete seeks to be judged not simply by the mistakes of his past but also by the the work he has done over the last three decades in taking responsibility for his actions, constantly working to remain disciplined, compassionate and grateful."The "Hit King" has now spent 26 years in baseball exile. He was banned from working in the game and attending official activities as anything but a paying customer after he was found to have bet on baseball – including on his own team – as the manager of the Reds.Manfred cited several reasons for his decision, including the original evidence from the 1989 report by John Dowd that listed proof that Rose bet on baseball as a manager, as well as new evidence that was discovered earlier this year that Rose may have bet while a player-manager.In addition, Manfred wrote that he believed Rose has not "reconfigured his life" because he still gambles occasionally, including on baseball, and that Rose took a lie detector test in August that was inconclusive due to "technical reasons" that were not Rose's fault.In short, the statement points out several inconsistencies in Rose's testimony and statements to the commissioner's office that exist even now, and not just for the nearly 20 years that Rose denied ever betting on baseball."Here, what has been presented to me for consideration falls well short of these requirements" for reinstatement, Manfred wrote. "It is not at all clear to me that Mr. Rose has a grasp of the scope of his violations of Rule 21 (the rule outlawing betting on baseball)."Even more troubling, in our (September) interview, Rose initially denied betting on baseball currently and only later in the interview did he 'clarify' his response to admit such betting," Manfred wrote in a footnote of his statement.The continued ban means Rose is ineligible for the Hall of Fame, even though he holds the game's all-time hits mark as well as several other records. Manfred wrote that Rose could still take part in on-field ceremonies with his permission on a case-by-case basis, but could not be affiliated with any specific team. The statement also left open the possibility of Rose returning to national TV work much like that he did last season for Fox Sports, but again, only with Manfred's permission.Dowd, who led baseball's investigation into Rose's gambling in the late 1980s and issued the damning report that led to the ban, said Monday that he "is very proud of the commissioner.""It's a great vindication of the integrity of the game by a very good commissioner," Dowd told The Enquirer. "I hope this is the final nail and the end of it, but I don't think it will ever end. The most important thing is that the commissioner protected the game."Reds president and chief operating officer Bob Castellini, who worked behind the scenes to try and get Rose reinstated, said in a statement that he respected the decision."We also appreciate that the Commissioner stating that Hall of Fame consideration is a separate issue and we and the fans think he deserves that opportunity," Castellini said. "We are pleased that we have had and will continue to have opportunities to commemorate Pete's remarkable on-field accomplishments."

Kylie Jenner’s Lip Kits Sell Out Again After Restock

Kylie Jenner‘s initially Lip Kit launch, on Nov. 30, was such a massive success that the kits sold out in minutes and then appeared on eBay for hundreds of dollars later in the day. Kylie promised to re-stock on Dec. 14, but when the lip kits became available, they almost immediately sold out again!Kylie counted down to the re-stock, with lip kits becoming available for the second time on Dec. 14 at Noon EST. But by 12:02pm, all three colors were totally sold out!

One girl in my office managed to snag a Dolce, but other girls who tried were completely shut out!Lip Kits Restock — Kylie Jenner’s Makeup Completely Sells Out Agai.This is disappointing for fans, who took to Kylie’s Instagram to voice their frustration.At the initial launch, on Nov. 30, Kylie wrote on her Instagram: “Wow. Been dreaming of this day for 2 years now. This was a long process but an amazing one! Visiting the factories and sitting with the amazing chemists creating the perfect colors and formulas for you guys! This is all me and I put my everything into these lip kits. I hope you guys love them as much as I do. Definitely more to come. I only hope for it to get better. Enjoy.”

Adele Announces North American Tour Dates

One of the hottest musical acts in the world is coming to America with a tour that’s sure to rake in a ton of money.Adele, who smashed sales records with her latest album, announced a slate of upcoming U.S. appearances not long after her European tour dates sold out their initial tickets in rapid fashion. The British singer of hits such as “Hello” and “Rolling in the Deep” revealed on Monday that she’ll tour North America for the first time since 2011 starting in July with more than 50 performances across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Tickets go on sale Dec. 17.

Adele’s new album, 25, broke U.S. sales records by selling 3.38 million copies here in its first full week on sale last month. The feat was made all the more impressive by the fact that Adele’s album needed only four days to break a 15 year-old first-week sales record held by NSync’s 2000 album No Strings Attached.Her impressive record sales also come at a time when even popular artists are selling fewer and fewer albums due to their fans’ increased streaming practices. Adele famously declined to allow streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music stream her new album, though Pandora  P -1.27%  did get that right and saw its stock price surge as a result.Adele is one of the rare modern artists who can drum up plenty of publicity without streaming her music extensively online, thanks in part to her powerful marketing support, and her unparalleled popularity is likely to result in more sold out shows (and major revenue) once tickets go on sale in North America. There are even some reports that Adele’s tour could be sponsored—her agents reportedly talked with Apple  AAPL -0.67% —in a deal worth as much as $30 million.

Star Trek Beyond: A Return to Fun?

As a new J.J. Abrams sci-fi reboot steers into theaters this week, another franchise he once tried to salvage is soldiering on without him. The trailer for Star Trek Beyond, which dropped online Monday, looks like a simultaneous embrace and rejection of Abrams’s legacy with the property. It’s scored to the Beastie Boys’ blaring “Sabotage” (which featured in Abrams’s first Trek movie), and is advertising itself as a freewheeling action-adventure, as if trying to avoid the moody tone of the previous entry, Star Trek Into Darkness.There will always be a contingent of Trek fans who tear their hair out at Abrams’s “re-imagined” series starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and Zoe Saldana as Kirk, Spock, and Uhura. His 2009 reboot was largely embraced by critics and was a huge success at the box office. But it leaned hard on action and humor,distressing fans who preferred the more cerebral tone of shows like The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. The sequel Into Darkness was more widely derided, serving as a bizarre remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but not advertising the identity of its villain (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and inserting a ham-fisted PATRIOT Act allegory.
 It was recently voted the worst Trek of all time by fans.Abrams eventually abandoned Star Trek to make Star Wars: The Force Awakens,probably the most-hyped sci-fi film of the millennium. But Star Trek Beyond lives on with the sterling cast he assembled (which also includes Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin, and John Cho), and with the director’s reins now in the hands of Justin Lin, who helmed the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Fast & Furiousmovies. The trailer also wants you to know this isn’t your dad’s Star Trek: There’s Idris Elba in crazy villain makeup, sexy aliens, and plenty of clever quips.Nothing about that is new: The trailer for Abrams’s 2009 Trek reboot started with the same Beastie Boys song and featured the same bombastic CGI action beats to try and draw in a new blockbuster audience. (Before then, the Star Trek films had been fairly moderate box-office players and were made with smaller budgets.) One factor in Star Trek Beyond’s plot appears to be the destruction of the U.S.S. Enterprise early on in the film, but that’s something the franchise has played too many times at this point (as the critic Devin Faraci pointed out on Twitter)Still, it’s worth noting that Star Trek started out pretty silly. In the famed original series of the 1960s, Captain Kirk bedded a new alien ingénue almost every week. The crew traveled back in time with impunity and regularly fought rubber-suited monsters on rocky landscapes. It’s the tone so cleverly mocked in the brilliant 1999 spoof film Galaxy QuestBeyond seems to be aiming for that looser territory again, perhaps in an effort to get as far away as possible from the chilly drama ofInto Darkness. Fans will find out July 22 whether that move paid off.

Justin Bieber and Kourtney Kardashian 'Inseparable,' 'Touchy Feely' While Partying in West Hollywood, Says Source


Justin Bieber was seen cozying up to a Kardashian Friday night in Los Angeles. The singer and Kourtney Kardashian were spotted spending some quality time together at The Nice Guy in West Hollywood, where Bieber performed two songs. "He and Kourtney were nearly inseparable – smoking on the patio together and were super touchy feely," a source tells PEOPLE. They kept the party going, leaving The Nice Guy together to hit up another West Hollywood hotspot. 
"They went to Blind Dragon afterwards," the source says. "Kourtney left around 12:45 a.m. and Justin left around 1:30 a.m."  RELATED VIDEO: Kourtney Kardashian and Scott Disick Are Working on Their Relationship.Bieber posted a photo with a mystery women, captioning it "Lord knows," which fans speculated was a reference Disick's nickname The Lord. However, paparazzi photos later revealed that the mystery woman in the Instagram post was not Kardashian. Bieber has palled around with the Kardashian family in the past. In May, Bieber posted a photo of himself horsing around in a pool with Disick and Kardashian's son Mason. 

Sunday 13 December 2015

Frank Sinatra's Family Shares Personal Memories in Honor of His 100th Birthday


Dean Martin once famously observed of his friend Frank Sinatra: "It's Frank's world – we just live in it." And as of Dec. 12, we're also living in Sinatra's Century as his family, friends and legions of fans celebrate the 100th anniversary of late singer's birth. "He wanted to live to be a hundred more than life," Sinatra's youngest daughter Tina Sinatra tells PEOPLE of her famous father, who was born on Dec. 12, 1915, and rose to become largely considered the greatest pop vocalist of the twentieth century, an Oscar-winning actor, a presidential confidant and one of the most larger-than-life entertainment figure of his or any era before his passing in 1998 at age 82. 

"His ambition was to live as long as he could, as close to a hundred as he could. He thought that would be swell," says Tina. During the past celebratory year – with significant exhibits of personal artifacts at the New York Public Library and Los Angeles' Grammy Museum; a throng of new books, including the $1500 limited edition luxury volume Sinatra by his granddaughter Amanda Erlinger; all-star musical tribute galas at locales like the Hollywood Bowl, Lincoln Center, the Wynn resort in Las Vegas and more – the Sinatra family received amble evidence that Ol' Blue Eyes' spirit was still going strong a century after his birth. "That we got him to a hundred, and that he is as significant to the music that he was singing 80 years ago, means a lot," says Tina, who today oversees the creative product of her father's six-decade career in show business. "It means a great deal because I think it signifies that he will be here in another hundred years. I don't believe the music is going to disappear. And if the music lives, he will live with it in memory, in history. He will stay with it because of the music…I'm not surprised that he is where he is at 100. " 

Hoboken, New Jersey-born Sinatra's very birth was marked with struggle – he had to be pulled from his mother with forceps, which permanently marked his face, and have air breathed into him – and his many career and personal ups and downs (including an epic fall from grace early in his career, a tempestuous second marriage to actress Ava Gardner and an ill-fated third union to much-younger Mia Farrow) have become the stuff of Hollywood legend. But through it all, "Dad loved life – he came in the hard way, but he was going to go out his way, I guess," laughs Tina, remembering her father's particular love of birthday celebrations – both his own and those of his family and friends. Sinatra's granddaughter Amanda Erlinger – the youngest of two daughters to Sinatra's eldest, '60s pop singer Nancy Sinatra – has often been overwhelmed by the outpouring of affection for her grandfather in the centennial year. "It's really emotional," says Erlinger. "Everywhere you go, you're reminded of him in some way – and I'm even a generation removed, and I get emotional. I started tearing up when I was walking in on the streets outside the Grammy Museum, and I saw the banners lining the street, and I saw his face looking down and smiling. I was like, 'This is amazing that this is happening.'" "It's unbelievable, his reach and the fact that we're doing this almost 20 years after he passed away," Erlinger admits. "He wouldn't believe it. He wouldn't. If I could talk to him, and I said that this was happening, and all of these tributes would go on, he would just be like, 'No. Not possible.'"  But she says, humility aside, Sinatra would have been thrilled that his legacy remains in full flourish at the century mark: "He had an inkling that he really wanted that to happen, and it came true. That dream came true for him! I'm so happy for him. I'm so blessed to be in this family. But also, just that like, 'That's my grandpa.' He's Frank Sinatra, but he also was my grandfather. So yeah, it's emotional, for sure, that connection. I know my mom feels it because she's really present on the website and on the family forum, and she talks to so many people around the world. So it's wonderful. We're truly blessed." 
Celebrating in Starry Style :-Tina Sinatra was especially delighted by the devotion and dedication shown by the many A-list artists who have performed tributes over the year. At Sinatra 100 – An All-Star Grammy Concert alone, which was held at Las Vegas' Wynn Resort and Casino and aired on CBS on Dec. 6, the lineup a diverse array of performers including Lady Gaga, Adam Levine, Carrie Underwood, Alicia Keys, Tony Bennett, Sam Smith, Nick Jonas, Seth McFarlane, Katherine McPhee, Celine Dion, John Legend, Harry Connick, Jr., Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Juanes and Zac Brown. "The ones that we were grateful to get could not have said yes faster," says Tina. "And were so devoted to the notion of paying tribute and so excited to do it. And really studied for many, many weeks what songs they were either interested in singing. Not one of them was less than what they are in their own particular musical niche. They were just so committed to paying tribute to him, that everything else went by the wayside." "It was just wonderful, wonderful. It was satisfying, is what it was. And it was the perfect icing, if you will, to Dad's birthday cake." Singer Michael Buble, one of the current caretakers of the classic American Songbook that Sinatra helped make famous, admits he was nervous to perform in front of his vocal idol's family at the Grammy Museum gala. (The event marked the debut of an elaborate exhibit of Sinatra's personal effects and memorabilia in October.) "It’s a very difficult thing to think about and sing songs that are obviously Frank Sinatra’s, and in front of his family," he admits. "You want to pay tribute, but not sing karaoke." To help honor Sinatra on his centennial, Buble teamed with Jack Daniels – Sinatra's "gasoline" of preference and a brand he helped popularize beginning in the 1950s – for the whiskey maker's Toastmasters campaign, raising a glass on Instagram. "I think it’s good class paying tribute to Frank and what he’s done for music," says the singer. In turn, the company has released Jack Daniels' Sinatra Century, a limited edition whiskey specially created for the 100th birthday, complete with unreleased music tracks from a live Las Vegas performance by Sinatra in 1966. "The truth is I celebrate that man every day," he says. "I really do. You know what, at some point in every day, I’ll probably listen to a Frank, or have something surrounding me that has Frank written on it. So I celebrate in my own way every day. I don’t know that I need a special occasion to celebrate a person that meant so much to me. His voice just was unlike anyone else's. He was an inventor. He was no pretender."

Saturday 12 December 2015

CyberDay 2015 Recap: A Day of Ideas and Insights

When CSO and Check Point partnered to create a security thought leadership event for C-level executives, we had high hopes. Yesterday, November 18, those hopes were exceeded as about 200 people gathered in New York City. The purpose: to help today’s security leaders share the most current thinking and learnings to stay one step ahead of cyber attackers.  We heard from Joel Brenner, former head of US Counterintelligence, who set the stage for what the threat landscape looks like.  Check Point President Amnon Bar-Lev shined a light on how the common practice of investing in reactive threat solutions over proactive solutions actually costs us more in the long run. Today, the market spends $12B for reactive and only $0.6B for proactive. What’s more, only 0.1 percent of enterprises are consuming threat intelligence services; and only 1 percent of them are using technologies to prevent zero-day attacks. Meanwhile, the mean number of days to resolve cyberattacks is 46, with an average cost of $21,155 per day. That adds up to $973,130 over that 46-day period. If that doesn’t underscore the need to stay one step ahead, I don’t know what does.  
In addition, Chris Tarbell, a former FBI agent, captivated everyone with stories about his experiences tracking down Anonymous and the man who was responsible for the dark web site Silk Road, known as Dread Pirate Roberts.   We also heard from other cyber leaders and incident response experts who walked through the forensics of actual cases. Julia King, contributing editor for CSO, moderated the event and wrapped up the day with a fabulous Top 10 list that captured all of the day’s highlights.  
The Julia King, Contributing Editor, CSO Top 10 List of Takeaways from CyberDay 2015
10. If he's wearing cargo pants and he has a haircut like mine, you can be pretty sure he's a federal agent. (Chris Tarbell)
9. Audit your network logs. Look back. Learn from your mistakes.
8. Don't be the low-hanging fruit. Remember the visual of the car thief going down the row of vehicles, checking each door handle for the one that was left unlocked.
7. CFOs are walking bulls' eyes. They're the biggest target in the enterprise.
6. Have a plan and practice your plan. Learn from your mistakes and adapt your plan continuously.
5. Security must be built to the way business is done. Educate your employees, your executives and your boards of directors.
4. We've lost control of our perimeter. With mobile, cloud and IoT, there really is no defined perimeter. Network segmentation is absolutely necessary. So is data segmentation. Everybody doesn't need to know everything.
3. Cyber crime is an equal opportunity phenomenon. No company and no industry is immune, especially with the rise of industrial espionage. Don't kid yourself -- someone wants your data.
2. Operational technology runs on IT. The problem goes deeper than PII. The Internet of Things will only exacerbate this issue. Beware the IP-enabled toaster syndrome.
1. Encryption is absolutely, no question, without a doubt mandatory.
CyberDay attendees came from far and wide, including South America, Israel and throughout the United States. All major vertical industries were represented, including finance, law, hospitality, retail, advertising and media, healthcare, transportation and government—including the United Nations. It’s clear that the increasing intensity and presence of threats is giving rise to a community of security practitioners who truly are seeking ways to stay one step ahead.