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Yet Another American Football League: The Alliance of American Football

Another New Football League Says It Will Start Play in 2019

The N.F.L. is under pressure from falling television ratings, lawsuits over its handling of concussions, and fan opposition to player protests during the national anthem.

Yet investors keep lining up to help start new football leagues. On Tuesday, the longtime N.F.L. executive Bill Polian and the television and movie producer Charlie Ebersol became the latest entrepreneurs to join the fray when they unveiled plans for the Alliance of American Football.

There have been several short-lived football leagues before, including the United Football League, United States Football League and XFL. Like others before them, Polian and Ebersol say they have a formula for success. They have acquired investments from Silicon Valley firms that will allow their eight-team league to start playing a week after the Super Bowl in February 2019. Their partners include CBS, which will show a few games on its main channel and some on its cable network. They will also launch a smartphone app on which fans will be able to stream games and play fantasy football.

The league will also aim for two-and-a-half hour games (N.F.L. games generally last at least three hours). To achieve that, there will be no kickoffs or extra points — only 2-point plays — and a 30-second play clock, as opposed to the N.F.L.'s 45-second clock. There will also be no television timeouts, which will lead to about 60 percent fewer commercials.

Also at Variety.

Previously: As National Football League Ratings Fall, Could the "XFL" Make a Return?

NASA to Discuss Upcoming Launch of Next Planet Hunter

Join NASA at 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday, March 28, as astrophysics experts discuss the upcoming launch of NASA’s next planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Reporters can attend the event in person at the James Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington or participate by phone.

The briefing will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

Scheduled to launch April 16, TESS is expected to find thousands of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, orbiting the nearest and brightest stars in our cosmic neighborhood. Powerful telescopes like NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope can then further study these exoplanets to search for important characteristics, like their atmospheric composition and whether they could support life.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

John Oliver’s Gay-Bunny Book Is Outselling the Mike Pence Book It’s Trolling

John Oliver’s Marlon Bundo Book Sells Out In A Day; Another Printing In Works

A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo

Worst Pence bashing since Trump:

“Trump thinks Pence is great,” Bannon told me. But, according to a longtime associate, Trump also likes to “let Pence know who’s boss.” A staff member from Trump’s campaign recalls him mocking Pence’s religiosity. He said that, when people met with Trump after stopping by Pence’s office, Trump would ask them, “Did Mike make you pray?” Two sources also recalled Trump needling Pence about his views on abortion and homosexuality. During a meeting with a legal scholar, Trump belittled Pence’s determination to overturn Roe v. Wade. The legal scholar had said that, if the Supreme Court did so, many states would likely legalize abortion on their own. “You see?” Trump asked Pence. “You’ve wasted all this time and energy on it, and it’s not going to end abortion anyway.” When the conversation turned to gay rights, Trump motioned toward Pence and joked, “Don’t ask that guy—he wants to hang them all!”

That's all, folks.

I just changed out my old fan dipole with a new terminated folded dipole. I instantly dropped 4 S units of noise on 40 meters and I can now work every amateur band from 10 meters down. New states opened up that I couldn't communicate with before and the states that I could communicate with before are now even stronger. This has been a great improvement!

Any other hams out there?

73

Word of the day: Ableist.

How I saw Stephen Hawking's death as a disabled person

• https://twitter.com/MitchellToy/status/973774076803248128
• https://twitter.com/afiqhusyairi1/status/974195115739701249
• https://twitter.com/ayfchang9021/status/974446485113729024
• https://twitter.com/DEADCLOWN45ACP/status/974368607948935168
• https://twitter.com/DJSicFanny/status/974286742571319301
• http://iignatz.tumblr.com/image/171932503530

Snapchat pulls 'awful' Chris Brown and Rihanna advert
Rihanna's Criticism Sinks Snapchat's Value by $800M

Related: Reality TV Star Wipes Out $1 Billion+ of Snap's "Value"

Just in case we were wondering if arming teachers is a good idea:

As thousands of students walked out of their schools on Wednesday to pressure Congress to approve gun control legislation, three other students were healing from wounds inflicted when a teacher’s firearm accidentally discharged in a California classroom.

The teacher, Dennis Alexander, who is also a city councilman in Seaside, Calif., was showing the students a gun on Tuesday during his advanced public safety class at Seaside High School when the gun accidentally went off, Marci McFadden, a spokeswoman for the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Across the country, another school was also investigating a weapon that discharged accidentally this week. The Alexandria Police Department in Virginia said that a school resource officer accidentally fired his gun inside his office at George Washington Middle School on Tuesday morning. Nobody was hurt, the police said.

Teacher’s Gun Is Accidentally Fired During Public Safety Class, Injuring 3

First on CNN: Emails show Ben, Candy Carson selected $31,000 dining set

"I Hope We Have No Crackers Here": EBF Staff Sanction Racial Slur

Queen Elsa came to Boston and pushed a police wagon out of the snow

An Unwanted Kiss on ‘American Idol’

Fitbit just unveiled its $200 answer to the Apple Watch — here's what it can do

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Rex Tillerson has been fired as Secretary of State; CIA director Mike Pompeo has been nominated to replace him. Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Pompeo at the CIA is Gina Haspel, who had been the agency’s deputy director.

In 2002, Haspel was present, in a supervising role, at a “black site” in Thailand where an individual named Abu Zubaydah—believed to be a top al-Qaida official—was tortured. Zubaydah was waterboarded, slammed against a wall, and confined in a “coffin-like” box. As ProPublica reported in 2017, though, “CIA analysts were wrong when they had identified Zubaydah as the number three or four in al-Qaida after Osama bin Laden. The waterboarding failed to elicit valuable intelligence not because he was holding back, but because he was not a member of al-Qaida, and had no knowledge of any plots against the United States.”

He remains imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay and, as the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins has noted, lost his left eye at some point after being captured under circumstances that remain unclear.

When questions began to swirl about the Bush administration’s use of the “black sites,” and program of “enhanced interrogation,” [Haspel] began pushing to have the tapes destroyed. She accomplished her mission years later when she rose to a senior position at CIA headquarters and drafted an order to destroy the evidence, which was still locked in a CIA safe at the American embassy in Thailand. Her boss, the head of the agency’s counterterrorism center, signed the order to feed the 92 tapes into a giant shredder.

Trump’s Nominee to Lead CIA Supervised Torture of Mistakenly Identified Subject, Then Destroyed Evidence