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smilystore · 5 years ago

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Two mass shootings in the US leave at least 29 dead as Trump faces criticism

20 killed in El Paso, Texas, and nine killed in Dayton, Ohio

US reels from killings as Trump faces a barrage of criticism

Donald Trump faced a barrage of criticism on Sunday as the US reeled from a brutal mass shooting in the border city of El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, – linked to white nationalism and anti-immigrant hate rhetoric. A total of 20 people were killed in the majority Latino city, nestled in western Texas on the US-Mexico border, as federal authorities investigated a potential hate crime and local prosecutors charged a 21-year-old white man with murder and said they would pursue the death penalty.

The suspect was from the town of Allen 650 miles from the site of the shooting, at a busy Walmart in the city. Less than 13 hours later another mass shooting took place in the city of Dayton, Ohio, leaving nine dead there and bringing the total injured from both shootings to at least 52. Authorities had not yet officially named the suspects in either shooting, but local law enforcement sources in El Paso named the shooter there as Patrick Crusius. Police were also examining a hate-riddled message on the website 8chan, posted around 20 minutes before Saturday’s attack, in which the author expressed sympathy for a white nationalist massacre at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, a few months ago, and which stated: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

By late Sunday morning, the US president, who is spending the weekend at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, had not addressed the nation in person, with a statement from the White House saying: “Our nation mourns with those whose loved ones were murdered in the tragic shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, and we share in the pain and suffering of all those who were injured in these two senseless attacks. We condemn these hateful and cowardly acts.” Trump, who was seen in social media posts posing with wedding guests at his resort on Saturday evening, directed flags to be flown at half-mast to mark the massacres. But leading Democrats in the field for the 2020 presidential nomination rounded on the president, linking the anti-immigrant rhetoric that characterized both his 2016 campaign and his tenure as president to the potential hate crime. The former Democratic congressman from El Paso, Beto O’Rourke, labeled Trump a white nationalist and accused the president of encouraging attacks like those in El Paso. “We have to acknowledge the hatred, the open racism that we’re seeing,” O’Rourke told CNN, adding: “There is an environment of it in the United States.” He also decried the wide availability of high-powered firearms.

Meanwhile, US senator from New Jersey and rival Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, Cory Booker, told the news channel: “He [Trump] is responsible for what is going on and is doing nothing to stop the carnage and chaos.” Booker added: “This is a moral moment and he is failing this nation.” Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio in Texas and another 2020 runner, said: “There is no question that this president is setting a tone of division and fanning the flames of bigotry and hate. It’s not making it any better. It’s making it worse.” Some state officials in Texas have been quick to link the attack in El Paso to acts of domestic terrorism. The state’s land commissioner, George P Bush, grandson of President George HW Bush, said in a statement: “There have now been multiple attacks from self-declared white terrorists here in the US in the last several months. This is a real and present threat that we must all denounce and defeat.” Officials from the US justice department on the ground in El Paso announced on late on Sunday morning they were investigating the shooting as a domestic terror and hate crime offense. Last month the FBI director, Christopher Wray, told Congress that the majority of domestic terror-related arrests since last October had been linked to white supremacist violence. While the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a non-profit group tracking hate organization in the US, reported a surge in white nationalist groups last year. The massacre in El Paso began on Saturday morning, at the Cielo Vista Mall, a sprawling shopping center close to the city’s airport. The gunman entered a Walmart in the center and opened fire with a military-style assault rifle. Authorities believed about 3,000 shoppers were present in the center, ahead of the start of the new school year.

An El Paso police spokesperson said the suspect was eventually apprehended after complying with officer’s demands. Prosecutors on Sunday said they would pursue the death penalty. At an emotional news conference on Sunday morning at the Del Sol medical center Dr. Stephen Flaherty, medical director of trauma, said the hospital was treating 11 of the 26 injured in the attack. The patients ranged from 35 to 82 years old, with eight in a stable condition, and that three remained critical. “It was a long night. It was a long day,” Flaherty said, adding, “It’s incredible how people came from a home on their days off, dropped whatever they were doing.” Outside the hospital mourners had erected bright signs that said, “No hate can ruin our great city” and “Our city is pure love.” A 21-year-old, Daisy Fuentes, told the Guardian that her grandparents went to the Walmart to shop for curtains and that both of them got shot during the massacre. Her 66-year-old grandmother, Nicolasa Velasquez, called the family right after she was shot, saying they needed help. “We were scared. We were crying. We didn’t know what to do,” said Fuentes. “My mom was trying to tell her to stay calm and breathe. My grandma ... was saying it hurt, and told my mom to call the ambulance, because they weren’t coming fast enough.” She said her grandmother’s face was injured, but she was stable and recovering. She said her 78-year-old grandfather was hit in the stomach and suffered a damaged kidney and was scheduled to go into a second surgery. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s possible they are going to keep doing more surgeries,” she said, adding that her grandfather, Juan Velasquez, had been unresponsive to them.

In Dayton, Ohio, a majority-white city at the heart of America’s rustbelt and 1,500 miles from El Paso authorities were also delivering details of a mass shooting that occurred in the early hours of Sunday morning at a busy downtown bar. The shooter in Ohio was dressed in body armour and opened fire with an assault style rifle using high-calibre ammunition. The gunman has not been named by authorities and was shot dead by police within a minute of the attack taking place. The shooting also left 26 injured. Local law enforcement sources told CBS News the shooter was 24-year-old Connor Betts from the nearby town of Bellbrook. There has not yet been a motive ascribed to the shooter. The city’s mayor, Nan Whaley, described the shooting as “a terribly sad day for our city”. On Sunday morning she confirmed to CNN that she had not received a phone call from the president. The shooting in Ohio marked the 31st deadly mass shooting in America this year, defined as those where at least three people are killed by gun violence in a single episode.

Sam Levin in El Paso, Texas, and Oliver Laughland in New York

The post Two mass shootings in the US leave at least 29 dead as Trump faces criticism appeared first on Smile store.

source https://smilystore.com/2019/08/04/two-mass-shootings-in-the-us-leave-at-least-29-dead-as-trump-faces-criticism/

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bharatiyamedia-blog · 5 years ago

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5 Feminine Candidates Take into account the Singular Glass Ceiling: Broadsheet

http://tinyurl.com/y46rwt6h Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Wimbledon has its youngest star ever, extra mothers are flying solo, and 5 feminine Democratic candidates for president take into account the glass ceiling. Have a terrific Tuesday! EVERYONE’S TALKING – 5 candidates; one glass ceiling. Vogue yesterday revealed a must-read that includes interviews with 5 ladies working for the Democratic presidential nomination. The story by Chasing Hillary creator Amy Chozick is chock-full of fascinating tidbits concerning the White Home hopefuls: Amy Klobuchar received into politics by calling for mandated postpartum hospital stays; Elizabeth Warren credit her skilled rise, partially, to her daughter’s potty-training proficiency years in the past; Kamala Harris rightfully spins questions on ‘ladies’s points’ into conversations concerning the economic system and nationwide safety. Chozick writes that the ladies’s historic presence on the debates final week signaled “that the period of a dozen males—and possibly a lone girl—arguing the problems is over.” However that doesn’t imply they’re not dogged by the identical drained questions on electability. The candidates themselves skirt issues of gender, wanting to speak coverage as an alternative. “I’ve heard from women eight, 9, ten years previous, and for them that is what an election ought to appear like. It’s not a shocker,” Consultant Tulsi Gabbard says. In making an attempt to reply the query posed by the story headline—What is going to it take to shatter essentially the most cussed glass ceiling?—Chozick herself gives this tackle the present cycle: “One of many upsides to working in 2020 is that nothing a lot is a shocker anymore. Porn stars and Russian hackers? The president of america, in a span of a few days, selecting fights with Meghan Markle and Bette Midler? Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, however I see one thing liberating—notably for feminine candidates—in Trump’s subverting of conventional political norms . . . as a result of ladies presidents aren’t the norm both.” Apparently, analysis revealed final week in Harvard Business Review cites the query on the coronary heart of the Vogue story—whether or not a girl is ever going to be elected president—and deems it in and of itself “baffling.” Authors Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman write that their company analysis—evaluation of 360-degree opinions—finds that “ladies in management positions have been perceived as being each bit as efficient as males.” “The truth is,” they write, “whereas the variations weren’t enormous, ladies scored at a statistically considerably greater stage than males on the overwhelming majority of management competencies we measured.” However we all know that electability is not only about management expertise. Zenger and Folkman know this too and flag “incorrect and unwarranted” bias as a prohibitive power. “[W]omen make extremely competent leaders, in line with those that work most intently with them,” they write. “[W]hat’s holding them again is just not lack of functionality however a dearth of alternative. When given these alternatives, ladies are simply as probably to reach greater stage positions as males.” Claire Zillman [email protected] @clairezillman ALSO IN THE HEADLINES – Loopy for Coco. Tennis phenom Cori ‘Coco’ Gauff took Wimbledon by storm yesterday in her victory over five-time champ Venus Williams. The 15-year-old American is the youngest girl to qualify for Wimbledon within the trendy period and has credited the Williams sisters with inspiring her to pursue the game. NPR – Flying solo. Single motherhood is pricey, however extra ladies than ever have an interest. Ladies selecting to have children on their very own was once rich and have just one baby; now a rising portion are higher middle- and middle-class and have a couple of baby. Ladies’s larger illustration in higher-paying jobs is one issue within the shift. Wall Street Journal – Doing variety proper. A reminder and a few sensible ideas right here for the way to verify variety initiatives particularly tackle the wants of girls of shade: analyze alternatives for ladies of shade to progress at your group, guarantee any implicit bias coaching takes an intersectional method, and extra. Harvard Business Review – She’s the captain now. Carola Rakete is captain of the help boat Sea Watch 3, and he or she’s a brand new face of the migrant disaster in Europe. The 31-year-old was arrested at a port on the island of Lampedusa for bringing to shore 40 migrants who have been stranded at sea for a lot of June. Doing so was in violation of Italy’s zero-tolerance closed ports coverage. Fortune MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Joanne Bradford joined the board of administrators at OneLogin. Principal Monetary Group named Guardian Life Insurance coverage’s Beth Wooden SVP and CMO. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT – IMT within the DMZ. Ivanka Trump appeared to be all over the place this weekend, from her memed involvement in a dialog with Christine Lagarde and Justin Trudeau to her appearances alongside her father at G20. By accompanying the president into North Korea, her function as First Daughter-cum-diplomat turned particularly historic. Washington Post – Questionable steerage. The U.Okay.’s House Workplace has an official coverage notice on trafficking of girls from Nigeria—however the doc stated that ladies who had been trafficked may return to Nigeria “rich from prostitution” and “held in excessive regard.” One of many many issues with that language is that it might damage ladies’s makes an attempt to hunt asylum within the U.Okay.; it’s provoked outrage from politicians and activists. Guardian – Hong Kong protests. On the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from the U.Okay. to China, there are often demonstrations. However protests morphed into mayhem yesterday following the current controversy over the proposed regulation that might have allowed extradition to mainland China and unhappiness with Chief Govt Carrie Lam’s management. Fortune – (Scooter) Did One thing Unhealthy. Are you updated in your area of interest drama this week? Supervisor to the celebrities Scooter Braun purchased Large Machine Information—aka Taylor Swift’s whole again catalogue. Swift accused Braun of bullying—his shoppers embody Kanye West and Justin Bieber, each concerned within the Swift-Kim Kardashian drama of 2016—and stated she wasn’t given the chance to buy her personal music. It continued to escalate from there: Fortune Right this moment’s Broadsheet was produced by Emma Hinchliffe. Share it with a pal. Searching for earlier Broadsheets? Click here. ON MY RADAR Girlboss pivots to offer a LinkedIn for skilled ladies TechCrunch Kim Kardashian agrees to vary the identify of her Kimono model Fast Company Hearst chief content material officer Kate Lewis recommends throwing out your to-do record The Cut QUOTE I’m a woman who’s really into her career, so I’m obsessed with the craft of my work. … There’s a romance in that for me. —Musician Mitski in a ‘New Yorker’ profile Source link

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

If you’re a longtime reader of FiveThirtyEight, you’ll know that the early stage of the presidential primary process is a tricky one for us to cover. It’s tempting to put a lot of emphasis on shiny objects with numbers attached — polls, endorsement counts, fundraising totals — especially given our reputation as a data-driven news site, but those numbers aren’t always so predictive. It’s perhaps equally tempting to lapse into punditry or theater criticism, on the theory that if the objective metrics aren’t especially reliable, you might as well go with your gut — but that can be equally if not more dangerous.

But on balance, I suspect that smart observers of the political process don’t give enough consideration to early polls, such as the CNN/Des Moines Register poll of Iowa caucus-goers (conducted by top-rated polling firm Selzer & Co.) that came out last weekend. As we documented in a three-part series back in 2011 1 the notion that early polling is meaningless or solely reflects name recognition — a popular view even among people we usually agree with — is wrong, full stop.

Other things held equal, for instance, a candidate polling at 25 percent in early polls is five or six times more likely to win the primary than one polling at 5 percent. It would be equally if not more wrong to say whoever leads in early polls is certain to win the nomination. (A candidate at 25 percent is still a sizable underdog relative to the field, for instance.) But I don’t hear anyone saying that. At least, I haven’t heard anyone saying it about the Democrats leading in the polls — Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders — so far this year.

It certainly is worthwhile to account for name recognition and to go beyond the topline numbers when looking at these polls, however. In particular, favorability ratings are useful indicators: few voters have a firm first choice yet, so it’s helpful to know which candidates they’re considering, which ones they’ve ruled out, and which ones they don’t know enough about to have decided either way. When you look at those things, Biden’s numbers still look quite decent, even if he isn’t the sort of prohibitive frontrunner that, say, Hillary Clinton was in 2016. Sanders’s numbers look a little weaker than Biden’s, but nonetheless pretty good. Both candidates have plenty of genuine support.

Let’s start with a simple exercise. In that 2011 series, I found that a decent heuristic for adjusting for name recognition is to divide the number of voters who have the candidate as their first choice by the number who recognize his or her name. For instance, a candidate with 20 percent first-choice support and 100 percent name recognition is roughly as likely to win the nomination as one with 10 percent first-choice support but just 50 percent name recognition.

When you do that with the Iowa poll, it … doesn’t really change much at all. The order of the candidates is exactly the same whether or not you account for name recognition, in fact. Candidates such as Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke do gain a little bit of ground relative to Biden and Sanders, but not much:

Accounting for name recognition doesn’t change much

Name recognition and first-choice support among 401 likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, according to a March 3-6, 2019, Selzer & Co. poll

Candidate First-choice support Name recognition Adjusted support* Joe Biden 27% 96% 28% Bernie Sanders 25 96 26 Elizabeth Warren 9 83 11 Kamala Harris 7 67 10 Beto O’Rourke 5 64 8 Amy Klobuchar 3 58 5 Cory Booker 3 66 5 Michael Bennet 1 25 4 Steve Bullock 1 26 4 Jay Inslee 1 26 4 Pete Buttigieg 1 28 4 Julian Castro 1 37 3 John Delaney 1 40 3

* First-choice support percentage divided by percent of respondents who had heard of the candidate.

Candidates who got 0 percent support in the poll are not listed.

Source: Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll

Look at favorability ratings instead, and the story gets a bit more complicated. The Selzer & Co. poll asked voters to rate each candidate on a scale from “very favorable” to “very unfavorable”; voters were also allowed to say they didn’t know enough about the candidate to rate them. We can translate the candidate ratings into a favorability score from 0 (very unfavorable) to 100 (very favorable) by calculating the average rating, throwing out voters who didn’t know or didn’t rate the candidate. To get a sense for which candidates are wearing well with the electorate, we can also compare favorability scores and name recognition against the previous version of the Iowa poll in December.

Biden and Harris have the best favorability ratings in Iowa

Favorability ratings and name recognition in the December and March Selzer & Co. Iowa polls

Name recognition Favorability score* Candidate December March December March Biden 97% 96% 76.4 75.4 Harris 58 67 69.7 71.3 O’Rourke 64 64 73.5 68.4 Sanders 96 96 70.6 67.8 Warren 85 83 67.9 65.6 Booker 61 66 66.8 63.8 Castro 37 42 60.5 63.7 Brown 31 32 61.4 62.6 Klobuchar 46 58 70.4 62.2 Bennet 25 58.8 Swalwell 28 29 56.1 58.7 Inslee 18 26 55.6 57.8 Hickenlooper 33 36 60.7 56.6 Delaney 36 40 58.4 56 Gillibrand 44 50 62.3 55.5 Buttigieg 28 54.8 Gabbard 37 52.3 Bullock 19 21 50.9 47.6 de Blasio 50 43.3 Bloomberg 71 65 50.8 43.1 Yang 17 19 33.3 40.3 Schultz 58 24

* Favorability score = 100 points per “very favorable”, 67 points per “mostly favorable”, 33 points per “mostly unfavorable” and 0 points per “very unfavorable”, ignoring don’t knows and no opinions.

Source: Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Polls

Biden has easily the best favorability score in the March Iowa poll, at 75.4. Remember, we’re not counting voters who didn’t rate the candidate, so he’s not advantaged by his high name recognition. The second-best favorability score belongs to Harris, however, at 71.3, and both her favorability score and her name recognition are improved from December — more evidence she’s had a strong rollout period. The third-best favorability score belongs to O’Rourke — although his numbers are down from December — with Sanders in fourth.

It’s true that this is just one poll — and not one with a huge sample size (401 Democrats) — but it generally squares with other polls that also measure favorability. If you look at the ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings in those polls, Biden generally rates first, and then Harris, Sanders and O’Rourke appear in some order behind them, occasionally also joined by Cory Booker.

So it probably helps to distinguish the cases of Biden and Sanders. Biden leads the field by every polling-based metric: first-choice support, whether adjusted for name recognition or not, as well as in favorability ratings. He may not survive scrutiny if and when he officially declares for the race — he wasn’t a very good candidate when he ran for president in 1988 and 2008 — but he starts out with deep loyalty from a fairly broad spectrum of the Democratic base.

Sanders, conversely, has a high floor of support and a lot of enthusiasm behind him, but that’s tempered by having some Democrats — 22 percent in the Iowa poll — who have an unfavorable view of him. If that number holds at 22 percent — and the other 78 percent of Democrats would consider voting for Sanders — he shouldn’t have a lot of problems. Still, 22 percent is high as compared with the scores for candidates such as Biden, Booker and Harris, and Sanders will face a new type of scrutiny for him as one of the frontrunners who is taking fire from all sides, instead of being in a two-candidate race as the underdog against Clinton.

It will also be important to track whether Sanders can hold onto or further improve upon the bounce in first-choice support he’s received since officially entering the race last month. Before then, Sanders was generally polling in the high teens or low 20s, but he’s since bounced into the mid-to-high 20s in first-choice support.

That happens to be near an inflection point where a candidate goes from a weak frontrunner to a more formidable one. As you can see from our 2011 analysis — with a chart that is decidedly not up to current FiveThirtyEight design standards — candidates who are only polling at 20 percent despite high name recognition in the early stage of the race are often paper tigers. But get up to 30 percent, and your chances of winning the nomination improve quite a bit. That’s the point at which you may be able to win causes and primaries with a plurality; Trump won lots of states in the early going in 2016 with a vote share in the low-to-mid 30s, for example.

Biden is also fairly close to this inflection point. In general, he’s been on the happy side of it, with first-choice support in the high 20s or low 30s. But it’s possible to imagine him either gaining support (as he generates more excitement) or losing support (as he gets more scrutiny) if and when he declares for the race. There’s also a relative lack of comparatively moderate candidates in the field so far; if O’Rourke has a strong debut, it could come at Biden’s expense, for instance.

To be clear, I don’t think you should be going solely or necessarily even mostly by the polls at this stage of the primary. There are lots of other quantitative and qualitative ways to evaluate the candidates; we think a multifaceted approach is best. There’s still a lot to be said for tracking measures of insider support such as endorsements, for instance, which despite having been a useless indicator in the 2016 Republican primary still have a strong track record overall. Those insider metrics are middling for both Sanders and Biden. In Sanders’s case, he’s off to a much better start in endorsements than four years ago, but is nonetheless behind Harris, Booker and Amy Klobuchar. It’s harder to evaluate Biden because he hasn’t entered the race yet; he does have some endorsements, but the sheer number of candidates running suggests he doesn’t have the field-clearing power that Clinton did in 2016.

But at the very least, the polls aren’t reason to be dismissive of Sanders and Biden. If you think of a mental scale that spans the categories “bad,” “meh,” “pretty good,” “good,” and “great,” Biden’s polling qualifies as good2 even if you do count for name recognition, and Sanders’s as pretty good (inching toward good in the most recent polls). Harris also belongs in the pretty good category on the basis of her strong favorability ratings, even though she doesn’t have as much first-choice support. Otherwise, the candidates’ polling is pretty underwhelming — O’Rourke is probably on the border of meh and pretty good, but the rest of the candidates are solidly into meh territory, or worse. Biden’s and Sanders’s positions aren’t spectacular, but most candidates would gladly give up their own path to the nomination for one of theirs.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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thegloober · 6 years ago

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The Yankees have kept Mookie Betts in check so far, and they will have to keep doing so to win the ALDS

Last postseason Dellin Betances was unusable, now he’s an indispensable part of the bullpen

(Elsa/Getty)

In all likelihood, Red Sox right fielder Mookie Betts will be named AL MVP this year. He is the proverbial “best player on the best team,” which always leads to MVP love, and it wouldn’t be undeserved. Betts hit .346/.438/.640 (185 wRC+) with 32 homers and 30 steals during the regular season, and he led MLB with +10.4 fWAR and +10.8 bWAR. It was the first Trout-like season by someone other than Mike Trout since Bryce Harper’s MVP year in 2015.

Betts wrecked the Yankees during the regular season like he wrecked pretty much every team, hitting .415/.506/.738 with ten doubles and three homers in 17 games. In those 17 games against the Yankees, he reached base 40 times and had 48 total bases. Betts failed to reach base only twice in his 17 regular season games against the Yankees this year. He’s great player and he was especially great against the Yankees this year.

That all said, through two games in the ALDS, the Yankees have largely kept Betts in check. He is 1-for-7 at the plate with a walk. The walk was intentional and the base hit was a third inning leadoff double against J.A. Happ in Game One. Betts was ahead in the count 3-1, home plate umpire Cory Blaser gave Happ a gift strike two call, then Betts golfed the next pitch off the Green Monster.

Betts did not reach base in Game Two — he went 0-for-4 with a hard line out and three otherwise harmless batted balls — and, partly because of that, J.D. Martinez batted with only one runner on base in his four at-bats. When you’re trying to hold down the Red Sox offense, that’s a great way to do it. Limiting traffic in front of Martinez is a must.

The Yankees have, to some degree, changed up their approach against Betts in the ALDS, though it is only eight plate appearances against five different pitchers (Masahiro Tanaka three times, Happ twice, Zach Britton once, Chad Green once, Lance Lynn once). Here’s the quick breakdown:

Regular season: 50.3% fastballs, 34.1% breaking balls, 15.6% offspeed

ALDS: 60.0% fastballs, 22.9% breaking balls, 17.1% offspeed

Three at-bats against the fastball heavy Happ and Lynn are balanced out by three at-bats against the anti-fastball Tanaka. Then again, it’s eight at-bats, so it’s possible if not likely this is all sample size noise. This much I do know: Not counting the intentional walk, Betts has seen a hitter friendly 2-0 or 3-1 count only twice in his seven ALDS at-bats. That’s a good way to limit a hitter’s production. Stop him from seeing favorable counts.

Betts is so good that holding him down for an entire postseason series feels impossible. I swear, every time the guy makes an out, it feels like luck. His hands are lightning fast and he rarely swings and misses. I’m not sure there’s a hole anywhere in his swing. He can beat you in so many ways too. With his power, with his patience, with his speed. Plus he does stuff like this defensively. Give credit where it’s due. Betts is a hell of a ballplayer.

The Yankees have done a good job keeping Betts in check so far in the ALDS. Holding him to a double and an intentional walk through two games is a pretty great outcome. Better than I would’ve expected. I’m not sure limiting him a .143 AVG and a .250 OBP for an entire best-of-five series is possible, but the longer the Yankees can prevent him from having an impact, the greater their chances of advancing.

Last postseason Dellin Betances was unusable, now he’s an indispensable part of the bullpen

Source: https://bloghyped.com/the-yankees-have-kept-mookie-betts-in-check-so-far-and-they-will-have-to-keep-doing-so-to-win-the-alds/

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njawaidofficial · 7 years ago

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DC TV Watch: Refresher on Finale Reveals

http://styleveryday.com/2017/07/14/dc-tv-watch-refresher-on-finale-reveals/

DC TV Watch: Refresher on Finale Reveals

Welcome to The Hollywood Reporter‘s weekly DC TV Watch, a rundown of all things DC Comics on TV. Every Friday, we round up the major twists, epic fights, new mysteries and anything else that goes down on The CW’s Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl and Fox’s Gotham and what it all means. Note: Gotham, Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow are on hiatus until the new seasons return in the fall. This week, we offer a crash course refresher on all the season finales as a primer for when all the new seasons are previewed at Comic-Con next week.

Gotham

Batman is officially here … maybe? | Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) is ready to take on his iconic DC Comics mantle on the Fox drama, even though he’s still a young teen. In his final scene in the season three ender, he stopped a mugging in an alley dressed in all black before taking to the roof in a cowl-neck sweater and looking down on the city of Gotham in a very Batman-esque way. He became a proto-Batman. After Bruce adopted the first rule of his moral code (no killing) earlier in the season, it was the logical next step. But did it come too soon in the Batman prequel series? Oh, and let’s not forget that Ra’s al Ghul (Alexander Siddig) mind-controlled Bruce to kill Alfred (Sean Pertwee), only to then guide the young boy into using a Lazarus Pit to revive him. Because that should totally end well and without any consequences moving forward, right?

Major villain twist | Another character taking on a classic DC Comics identity is Butch (Drew Powell). After taking a gunshot to the head, Gotham didn’t kill him off as expected. Instead, a nurse reading his health records was overheard saying he changed his name as he lay in a coma in the hospital: Cyrus Gold. Comic book fans immediately recognized that name as the pre-death identity of zombie supervillain Solomon Grundy, a character who frequently dies and gets resurrected in Slaughter Swamp. Is this potentially the season four big bad? As for the other two future Batman villains Catwoman (Camren Bicondova) and Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor), they each took a step forward in the finale. Selina picked up a whip for the first time and proved to be a natural at it (no surprise there), while Penguin froze his former love the Riddler (Cory Michael Smith) in a block of ice to portray prominently in his new club, the Iceberg Lounge (a staple in the comics). Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) is going to have his hands full when Gotham returns … and he’ll have to do it without his love Lee (Morena Baccarin) who fled the city yet again.

No Harley Quinn … yet | Despite rumors circulating that a proto-Harley Quinn would be introduced last season, she never actually showed up in the finale. Or did she? Babs (Erin Richards) ended up getting electrocuted, possibly to death, but could that be her origin story to become Harley Quinn instead of her swan song? Stay tuned to find out, potentially this season.

Supergirl

Meet the new big bad | Supergirl‘s stinger scene in the finale was explained a lot sooner than viewers expected when the series announced Odette Annable’s casting just a week after the episode aired. The House alum will play Reign, an “exciting interpretation of the infamous World Killer storyline from the pages of the DC Comics.” There is so little known about Reign and the Worldkillers in the DC Comics lore, so without much to go off of in source material, there is no telling where Supergirl will be taking this villain arc. Executive producer Andrew Kreisberg called their version of Reign “scary, powerful and heartbreaking,” and it’s already been revealed that Reign’s costume will be different than her comic book counterpart. According to the comic books, the bloodthirsty Worldkillers were uncontrollable biological weapons created on Krypton, but once the Kryptonian Science Council outlawed them, all but five were destroyed. Zor-El (Robert Gant), aka Kara’s (Melissa Benoist) father, felt guilt over his part in their creation so he didn’t destroy the ones he made. After Krypton’s destruction, the Worldkillers who survived only remembered their names, Kryptonian origin and purpose of conquering worlds. With the same physical powers, Reign will be a perfect match for Supergirl in a fight, and their personal connection/shared “parent” will give their battle a powerful, emotional note as well.

Good news/bad news for Sanvers | While Sanvers fans were delighted by Alex (Chyler Leigh) and Maggie’s (Floriana Lima) romantic engagement in the finale, the surprise news that Lima would be demoted from series regular to recurring character in season three is not a good omen for their future moving forward. While it’s not confirmed that her decreased capacity means trouble for Sanvers, it does mean their relationship will be shown less onscreen as Lima will be featured in fewer episodes, and that’s a true shame as it is one of the few LGBTQ relationships represented responsibly on TV right now.

Kara’s heartbreak | Faced with a tough decision, Kara had to sacrifice her happiness in the finale when she banished the attacking Daxamites by infecting Earth’s atmosphere with lead. That meant her Daxamite boyfriend Mon-El (Chris Wood) had to flee as well, and his escape pod got sucked into a black hole in space. There’s no telling where he’ll end up or when we (and Kara) will see him again. This marks the second breakup for Kara in as many seasons. Will she continue to search for love or will she focus on staying single moving forward?

The Flash

Bait-and-switch death | All season long, The Flash threatened to kill off Iris (Candice Patton). In the finale, it did just that … before revealing the murdered STAR Labs team member was actually H.R. (Tom Cavanagh) using a transmogrifier to fool Savitar aka future/time remnant Barry Allen (Grant Gustin). So Iris was saved, and it seemed as if she and the real Barry would finally get their happy wedding day after she shot and killed Savitar. But alas, there’s no happy endings for Barry, as he needed to take the place of Jay Garrick (John Wesley Shipp) in the Speed Force prison to keep it from tearing reality apart in a massive electrical storm. With a smile (which was so weird) and a goodbye to Iris and his team, Barry filled that void and entered the Speed Force willingly. How will Central City fare without the Flash? Will Wally (Keiynon Lonsdale) be able to step up to the plate as Kid Flash? Barry will obviously return in season four, but how long will it take and how will his time in the Speed Force have changed him?

Not another speedster | When he does eventually return, Barry will have to deal with a new kind of villain as season four will introduce the first big bad that is not a speedster. Name-dropped several times throughout season three, Clifford DeVoe aka the Thinker is a genius inventor who created technology to make his infamous “thinking cap,” which gave him extremely powerful mental powers. Introduced in 1943, DeVoe was a member of the Injustice Society, but he fought against Jay Garrick, not Barry Allen, so expect the show to put their own spin on the source material.

Arrow

Ending with a bang | Arrow ended season five with a literally explosive cliffhanger, as Adrian Chase aka Prometheus (Josh Segarra) killed himself to trigger the explosives he planted all over Lian Yu while presumably all of Team Arrow was still stuck on the island. Oliver (Stephen Amell) could only watch in disbelief as he feared he lost everyone he cared about in just fell swoop. Obviously the show won’t kill off the whole team but the fallout of that explosion could be game-changing. Did anyone suffer major, permanent injuries? Did everyone make it off the island?

At least one death | In addition to the island explosion, Arrow said goodbye to a major original cast member in the finale when Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman) stepped on a land mine to save his daughter Thea’s (Willa Holland) life. Though his death occurred offscreen, Barrowman took to social media to confirm his exit from the series.

Surprise return | As the series concluded its island flashback storyline after five seasons, the surprise return of Moira (Susanna Thompson) ended the flashbacks on an extremely high and emotional note. Viewers got to witness the phone call Oliver made to his now-dead mother after his rescue from Lian Yu all those years ago. Seeing that mother/son dynamic again in such a pivotal and never-before-seen moment tugged at the heartstrings in a way that reminded fans of why they fell in love with this show in the first place.

The return of Olicity | If Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) does indeed survive that island explosion, she’s got a newly-rekindled relationship to look forward to. She and Oliver shared a kiss on the island before separating, and while some viewers may be tired of their relationship, they have finally gotten over their trust issues and can explore their new dynamic in a much more mature way. And based on how small but powerful their kiss moment was in the finale, hopefully Arrow won’t overplay their relationship again. A little goes a long way.

Legends of Tomorrow

Major oops | After the Legends time traveled back to a time they already meddled in, they came in contact with their past selves, a big no-no in the time travel guidebook laid out by Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill). And for good reason: even though they saved the day and destroyed the Spear of Destiny, they essentially “broke time.” The Waverider arrived to the “present” for a vacation in Aruba only to find dinosaurs roaming the streets with an entirely new timeline all out of wack. And with Rip no longer with the team as he officially passed the captain mantle over to Sara (Caity Lotz), these Legends will have to figure out how to fix time on their own. This should go well, huh?

New team member | At least they’ll have another team member aboard the Waverider to help them figure out this mess. Tala Ashe (American Odyssey, Smash) has been cast as a series regular for season three. She will be playing Zari Adrianna Tomaz, a Muslim-American woman from the year 2030. According to the character description, “Zari lives in a world of contradictions. Technology has brought about incredible change in her future — too bad human nature hasn’t kept pace. Fear, prejudice and a lack of care for the planet have forced Zari to become a ‘grey hat hacktivist.'” Described as a computer nerd with a wry, combative attitude, she lives a double life … but doesn’t realize that she has secret, latent powers derived from an ancient, mystical source. Although the character description veers from the source material, comic book fans will recognize her name as the superheroine Isis, a normal woman who uses an Egyptian amulet to summon the powers of the goddess Isis. Sounds like Zari will become fast friends with Vixen (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), the other team member with mystical powers derived from an ancient amulet. Either that, or they’ll butt heads and become enemies pretty quickly, which would also be pretty compelling to see.

A more historical season | After news broke of Billy Zane’s casting as P.T. Barnum, viewers now know some surprising new details about what Legends will be tackling in season three. “The thing about history books is that they turn famous people into 2-D characters,” executive producer Phil Klemmer said. “This season on Legends, we want to meet other famous figures from history, people like Barnum, people we think we know, so that we can find the aspects of them, the parts of their story, that the history books left out — we want to bring history to life by infusing it with heart, humor and total absurdity (often at the same time).”

What do you think of all the shocking twists and reveals from the DC Comics finales? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Gotham returns for season four on Fox in the fall; Supergirl will return for season three on The CW in the fall; The Flash will return for season four on The CW in the fall; Arrow will return for season six on The CW in the fall; and Legends of Tomorrow will return for season three on The CW in the fall.

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