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Google is getting get into gaming in a big way with its new streaming project, but the move appears to be as much about fighting Amazon’s massive cloud as it is about Google becoming a player in the world of gaming.

The effort, announced on Monday, is being led by the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) group, which will provide the fundamental infrastructure for a new cloud-based videogame platform.

Beginning on Friday, GCP will enable a limited number of US gamers to play Ubisoft’s popular “Assassin’s Creed” game via their Chrome browser. Users will play directly through their Chrome browser via streaming, and Google says that very little computing power is required on the user’s end.

This as an opportunity for Google to “drive traction for GCP,” Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote in a research note on Tuesday.

“In addition to its efforts to build a Twitch competitor at YouTube and its partnership with game engine Unity, launching a cloud gaming platform could allow GOOGL to form a more direct relationship with gamers, which it could leverage to expand further into the video game value chain,” Nowak wrote.

The foray into gaming by GCP has long been rumored and comes as Google is searching for new sources of income. Investors see Google as a growth company and to keep that narrative going, managers need new revenue sources ready for the day when the company’s colossal ad business tops out. To that end, Google is throwing a lot of resources into developing cloud and artificial intelligence.

GCP’s management, led by Diane Greene, have described the new streaming-game initiative as a test of Project Stream’s technology, formerly code named Yeti (You can read more about the announcement here). Google will face steep technical hurdles in making the effort a success — as Business Insider’s Dave Smith writes, this kind of thing has been tried before by others with mixed results.

But there’s a big payoff if Google can pull it off by providing an opportunity to forge direct ties to gamers, which Google could mine in the future.

‘A source of upside’

“We learned last week at our AMZN Disruption Symposium that AWS is currently the leading provider of cloud tools for video game development,” Nowak wrote. “This represents Google’s first attempt to move ahead in distribution… the company has strong engineering talent and cloud gaming has proven to be a difficult engineering problem.”

Project Stream also represents a chance for GCP to continue its rapid expansion into the broader cloud market, Nowak said.

When it comes to the market leaders, GCP trails Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure cloud services by a significant amount Nowak indicated.

According to the analyst’s estimates, GCP has a value of $45 billion while he values AWS at $375 billion. Still, Nowak likes the direction that GCP is headed.

“Success in gaming,” he wrote, “could be a source of upside.”

Image: Getty Images/ Drew Angerer

Microsoft just put Apple on notice with its new Surface devices.

The company showed off a new Surface Pro 6, Surface Laptop 2, and Surface Studio 2 during a press event in New York on Tuesday. All three devices deliver significant performance boosts, and are available in a new matte black finish.

The new Surface Pro 6 — Microsoft apparently opted to go back to numbered names for its Surface line — has notable upgrades from last year’s Surface Pro. The first Surface to come with a quad-core processor, it’s 67 percent more powerful than its predecessor, according to Microsoft, and will get up to 13.5 hours of battery life. It weighs just 1.7 pounds.

Image: pete pachal/mashable

The Surface Pro 6, available now for pre-order, will start at $899 and ship Oct. 16. In addition to the new matte black color, it’s available in silver. 

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop received similar upgrades in power and efficiency. The Surface Laptop 2 is 85 percent faster, according to Microsoft, with battery life clocking in at 14.5 hours. 

It also has the “thinnest touchscreen display on any laptop,” according to Microsoft Surface chief Panos Panay.

The Surface Laptop will also be available Oct. 16, and will start at $999. It’s available for pre-order now in four colors: silver, black, red, and blue. 

Finally, Microsoft unveiled an updated Surface Studio 2. Much of Microsoft’s improvements went toward the display, which is now 38 percent brighter and has 22 percent more contrast. 

It will also come with up to 2 TB of SSD storage, and supports “next-gen” Pascal graphics. The Surface Studio 2, available now for pre-order, starts at $3,499 and ships Nov. 15.

And, in a surprise twist, Microsoft also revealed its $350 Surface Headphones, which bring Cortana to your ears.

If you need help paying for all the new Surface gadgets, Microsoft followed Apple and Google’s lead with a new Surface All Access program, which lets you finance bundles of Surface devices and accessories.

In addition to the new Surface devices, Microsoft also released the latest Windows 10 update, which make it easier to use your iOS or Android phone with Windows 10.

 

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Tuesday expanded his criticism of the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault and used his strongest words yet to question women coming forward to report abuse.

Speaking to a packed hall in Mississippi, Trump also openly mocked Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s accuser, remarking on her difficulty remembering aspects of the alleged attack 36 years ago when the two were in high school.  

Trump described the nation’s current political climate as “an important time for our country.” Though he did not mention the #MeToo movement directly by name, he went on to suggest that men like Kavanaugh are under siege from accusations of assault.

“It’s a damn sad situation, okay?” Trump said to the Southaven, Miss., crowd. “And we better start as a country getting smart, and getting tough.”   

Trump laid out a scenario in which a man gets a job at General Motors but then is faced with accusations of sexual assault from a woman.

“This is a time when your father, when your husband, when your brother, when your son could do great,” Trump said, who then changed the inflection of his voice to dread as he intoned a conversation between the accused and his mother.

“Mom, a terrible thing just happened,” Trump said. “What do I do, mom?”

Trump’s remarks came hours after he told reporters at the White House that it was a “scary time for young men.”  

More: Trump: It’s a ‘very scary time for young men in America’

More: Even if Kavanaugh confirmed, fight over sex assault allegations unlikely to end

Trump also mocked last week’s testimony of Ford, the California professor who accused Kavanaugh of assault. Trump noted that she did not remember during her testimony how she got home following what she described as a sexual assault by Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh has denied the allegations. 

“I had one beer, that’s all I remember,” Trump said, mocking Ford.

“I don’t know – over and over,” he said, framing Ford’s testimony. “And a man’s life is in tatters.”

 

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WASHINGTON – The FBI has so far interviewed at least four key witnesses in its investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct when he was in high school and college.

President Donald Trump directed the FBI to reopen its background investigation of Kavanaugh last Friday. Trump issued the order after Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said he would only vote to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate Judiciary Committee if GOP leaders promised to allow a week-long FBI probe before holding a vote in the full Senate.

As of Tuesday evening, the FBI still had not contacted Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the committee last Thursday that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school house party in the early 1980s.

Agents also have not contacted Julie Swetnick, who alleges in a sworn statement that Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge, tried to get teenage girls “inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.”

Kavanaugh and Judge have vehemently denied all the allegations.

Here’s a look at the people the FBI has contacted so far:

Deborah Ramirez

Ramirez is a board member and volunteer at Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence, a Colorado-based group that helps victims of domestic violence.

Ramirez alleged in an interview with The New Yorker that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a dorm party when they were both freshmen at Yale University. She and Kavanaugh and a few other students were playing a drinking game and were both drunk. Kavanaugh then exposed his penis and shoved it in her face, Ramirez alleges.

Kavanaugh has denied the allegation. 

Ramirez’s attorney, John Clune, confirmed over the weekend that the FBI had reached out to interview Ramirez. He said she was cooperating with the investigation.

Mark Judge

Judge, a conservative writer, was a friend and classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Georgetown Preparatory School, a private, all-male Catholic school in North Bethesda, Maryland. 

Ford alleges that Judge was in the room watching and laughing when a drunken Kavanaugh pinned her down on a bed at a high school house party in the early 1980s.

Ford said Kavanaugh tried to remove her clothes and held his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming. She said she was able to get away and run into the bathroom after Judge jumped on her and Kavanaugh, knocking them off the bed.

Judge has said that he has no memory of the alleged incident and never saw Kavanaugh behave like that. His attorney, Barbara Van Gelder, confirmed that the FBI has interviewed Judge.

Leland Keyser

Keyser, a longtime friend of Ford’s, was present at the small party where Ford was attacked, according to Ford’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee. Ford said Keyser, a former professional golfer and coach, was downstairs when the alleged attack happened and was not aware of what was happening in the upstairs bedroom.

Keyser’s attorney, Howard Walsh, has confirmed that she was interviewed by the FBI.

“Ms. Keyser does not refute Dr. Ford’s account, and she has already told the press that she believes Dr. Ford’s account,” Walsh wrote in a letter to the Judiciary Committee last week. “However, the simple and unchangeable truth is that she is unable to corroborate it because she has no recollection of the incident in question.”

Patrick “P.J.” Smyth

Ford said that Smyth was also at the party where she alleges that Kavanaugh attacked her. She said that Smyth, like Keyser, was downstairs at the house when the alleged attack took place upstairs.

Smyth, who works in insurance and investment management, has said that he has “no knowledge” of the party or the alleged attack. His attorney, Eric Bruce, said that Smyth repeated that statement in his interview with the FBI. Bruce, in a statement, said Smyth answered all of the investigators’ questions.

More: ‘Mean drunk’ Kavanaugh was ‘handsy’ with girls, Julie Swetnick says in first televised interview

More: Report: Brett Kavanaugh was once questioned over bar brawl in 1985

 

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Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyers are scolding the FBI for failing to contact Ford about her claim the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted when they were teenagers in the 1980s.

In a letter addressed to FBI Director Chris Wray and the general counsel Dana Boente, Ford’s attorneys lay out the steps they took to offer Ford’s cooperation, which they said began with a Friday night conversation with Boente.

Ford’s attorneys say they heard nothing from anyone at the bureau since that Friday night phone call, and they say it is “inconceivable” that the agency could conduct a deeper inquiry into the allegations against Kavanaugh without interviewing Ford.

“We also sent you a series of emails and letters in which we identified witnesses and evidence that would likely assist the FBI in its investigation into Mr. Kavanaugh’s sexual assault of Dr. Ford and asked you to forward them to the supervisory agent,” the letter reads.

“Despite these efforts, we have received no response from anyone involved in this investigation and no response to our offer for Dr. Ford to be interviewed.”

Several news outlets on Tuesday, including NBC News, cited sources who said the FBI does not plan to interview Ford or Kavanaugh.

Ford gave hours of testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, in which she outlined in extensive detail her claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during a high school party in the 1980s, and talked about the emotional and psychological trauma she says followed her for years after the alleged attack.

Republican leaders hired Arizona sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell to question Ford during the hearing. Afterward, Mitchell told Republican senators in a memo that a “reasonable prosecutor” would not bring charges against Kavanaugh based solely on Ford’s testimony.

Kavanaugh denies any wrongdoing. During his testimony to the committee, he said he does not deny that Ford was sexually assaulted “at some point in her life.”

Several other women have accused Kavanaugh of various forms of sexual misconduct. He denies those accusations as well.

Meanwhile, Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court hangs in the balance. Senate Republicans have indicated they intend to vote on the matter, despite the renewed FBI probe. President Donald Trump, who nominated Kavanaugh in July, has defended his pick, but appeared to temper the endorsement in recent days.

“A lot is going to depend on what comes back from the FBI in terms of their additional — No. 7 — investigation,” Trump said.

On Tuesday, while speaking with reporters at the White House, he acknowledged the rising suspicions about whether Kavanaugh had been truthful to senators on questions about his high school and college-age drinking habits.

Several of Kavanaugh’s former classmates have contradicted his assertions that he never drank excessively or behaved inappropriately while intoxicated, raising questions about whether Kavanaugh could have lied while under oath. To that, Trump said it is not “acceptable” to lie to Congress.

Four months after Australia made a landmark decision to scrap its controversial tampon tax, it’s finally bloody happening.

Following years of public protest, resulting in a proposal by the Australian government, the country’s states and territories have unanimously agreed to scrap the tax on tampons and feminine hygiene products.

No date has been announced for the repeal of the tax, but according to the ABC, it will cost state governments $30 million a year. The Federal Government reportedly says this will be easily managed thanks to overperforming Goods and Services Tax (GST) revenue.

Back in June, the country’s Senate passed a bill drafted by the progressive Greens party to remove the tax on sanitary products, previously considered by law to be “luxury” items. All that was left to do was convince the country’s state and territory governments to agree — and now they have, unanimously.

In Australia, GST is charged on these sanitary items that women, transgender, and gender-non-binary people can require on a monthly basis. 

Since 2000, a 10 percent GST has been added to the cost of tampons, pads, liners, cups, sponges and 11 other feminine hygiene products. They’re incredibly considered “non-essential items,” by the Australian government, while other health-related products like condoms, lubricants, sunscreen, and nicotine patches are exempt from the tax.

Public protest against the tax has been fervent in Australia for many years, with critics calling it discriminatory and unjust, and protests taking place across the country. One 2015 petition titled “stop taxing my period,” garnered over 100,000 signatures.

Tampon tax still reigns in the U.S., however, where menstrual products are excluded from tax-exempt product categories in most states. 

According to The New York Times, while a handful of states have nixed the tax, there are 36 states that are yet to remove taxation for sanitary products. New York, Illinois, Florida, and Connecticut abolished the tax in the last two years. 

India scrapped its 12 percent tax on sanitary products in June following intense campaigning by activists.

In the UK, tampons, sanitary pads and other menstrual products are also subject to a value-added tax (VAT) of 5 percent — though notably, the standard VAT rate for any goods or services in the country is 20 percent. 

In 2016, the European Union voted to allow member states, including the UK, to either keep or scrap their tampon taxes, giving more independent flexibility to each country. For example, France cut the VAT on sanitary products from 20 percent to 5.5 percent in 2015.

Perhaps Australia and India’s move to completely repeal the tax on these essential items could set a precedent worldwide. Fingers crossed.

Over the past few months, pundits have obsessed over the unprecedented surge in the number of female candidates in the upcoming congressional elections in the United States, calling it “the year of the woman” or the “pink wave”. Some have insisted that this significant increase (from 183 in 2016 to 262 this year) is a forceful response to the Trump administration.

There is certainly a lot of rage among women (and men) against the sexism and racism oozing out of the White House, but Donald Trump is not the only factor contributing to this phenomenon. Rather, over the past few years, the public discourse and political and cultural environment in the US have evolved in such a way as to enable more women to engage actively in the public arena. 

Since 2010, women’s empowerment, confidence and advancement have been endlessly promoted across mainstream and social media. Indeed, even before Trump announced his candidacy, the “f-word” had already become so popular that many public figures seemed to want to claim the label – from COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg through actress Emma Watson to singer Beyonce and, more recently, Princess Meghan Markle. 

Women’s rights have increasingly become part of common sense and, after years of being held in disdain, feminism has taken on a new life in the public sphere. 

While it is true that mass feminist protest – like the Women’s March – only reemerged en force in the wake of Trump’s election, it is important to remember that these protests came on the heels of other mass mobilisations, such as SlutWalk, the transnational demonstrations against rape culture and its attendant victim-blaming. 

And although many people still think that #MeToo originated with Alyssa Milano’s tweet in October 2017, this campaign, too, has a longer history. It started as a grassroots movement organised by African American activist Tarana Burke over a decade ago.

A feminist renaissance

The amazing number of women candidates at the upcoming midterm elections should, therefore, be understood as the effect of an ongoing feminist renaissance.

But this upsurge in feminist activity in the public sphere, however, consists of a number of contradictory trends, not all of which are worth celebrating.

One of them revolves around the rise of neoliberal feminism, a strand of feminism that has been championed by the likes of Sheryl Sandberg with her Lean In Circles initiative and corporations like Nike with their women-focused PR campaigns.

This kind of feminism centres on individual women gaining access to the halls of power. It encourages women to invest in themselves and their own aspirations and to build confidence and “lean in”. And while this trend acknowledges the gendered wage gap and sexual harassment as signs of continued inequality, the solutions it posits do not address the structural and economic undergirding of these phenomena or the plight of poor and immigrant women and women of colour.

The other prominent trend is, of course, the resurgence of mass feminist movements and mobilisations, which recognise the structural nature of sexism. This feminist trend is informed by anger towards male entitlement and spurred by continuing injustices faced by millions of women.  

The persistent culture of sexual harassment galvanising the #MeToo movement is obviously one example, but there have been other, arguably more radical, mobilisations, such as the International Women’s Strike, which have articulated a much wider array of inequalities women, minorities, and precarious populations in general face. 

Thus, the historic number of women candidates in national and state elections must also be understood within this complex cultural context. 

Numbers are not enough

And while this milestone is worth celebrating, numbers are not sufficient to produce meaningful change. Like the divergent trends of the feminist renaissance, these women, too, represent vastly different agendas.  While some are promoting democratic socialism, others are advocating a familiar form of neoliberal individualism.

Indeed, some of these women candidates are Republicans who are endorsing regressive policies that will continue hurting the most vulnerable women among us. Even among the Democrats, very few espouse more “radical” agendas. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (running in New York state), Sarah Smith (Washington), Ilhan Omar (Minnesota), and Deb Haaland (New Mexico) are all campaigning on the progressive platforms of reproductive freedom, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal, but they are just a tiny minority among the 202 women Democrats running for office in November. 

Given our increasingly frightening reality, it is only those candidates willing to articulate a structural critique calling for profound transformations in our society who generate any real hope for effecting change in the lives of the vast majority of women – whether they are cisgender, black, Native, poor, immigrant, disabled, Muslim, lesbian, queer and/or trans.

The idea that simply having more women in office – even if they identify as feminists – will automatically make the lives of most US women better is misguided. This is part and parcel of the neoliberal feminist imaginary, where individual women’s success and empowerment are deemed the end game for feminism.  

We may be witnessing “the year of the woman”, but the real question is whether we can bring about “the year of social justice feminism”.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

For U.S. men’s golf, the embarrassment is flowing like the Europeans’ champagne. Humiliation on the course has been followed by humiliation in the news. First, the U.S. Ryder Cup team was soundly defeated over the weekend by Europe, 17½ to 10½. Then, the Americans opened their mouths and things really got bad.

Patrick Reed, who always appears to be about one minute away from creating his next controversy, threw U.S. captain Jim Furyk under the bus when he told the New York Times on Sunday that he was “blindsided” by not playing with Jordan Spieth after the duo’s past success in the Ryder Cup.

Reed said he wanted to be paired with Spieth but Spieth didn’t want to play with him, so Reed got Tiger Woods by default. This burden apparently was just too much for Reed to bear; he and Woods lost both of their matches as Tiger was terrible at another Ryder Cup, going 0-for-4, while Reed finished with a 1-2 record.

“The issue’s obviously with Jordan not wanting to play with me,” Reed told the Times.

No, that’s not the issue, according to a member of the U.S. team who wished to remain anonymous.  

That person told the New York Post that Reed wasn’t blindsided at all and that he begged to play with Tiger. 

More: Spectator loses vision in right eye after being hit by errant Koepka tee ball

More: Don’t let 2018 flop fool you, Team USA has a bright Ryder Cup future

Boys, boys, boys. Talk about making us all proud: ladies and gentlemen, your 2018 U.S. Ryder Cup team.

Everyone seems to be handling losing so spectacularly well, aren’t they? If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were a bunch of spoiled brats.

It appears the Americans are better at pointing fingers than they were at hitting fairways in Paris over the weekend, and they seem to be singling out one guy: Reed.

The Post source said Reed would have shot 83 on his own ball Saturday and had no clue how to play team golf.  

Not surprisingly, Reed, the defending Masters champion, saw things differently.

“For somebody as successful in the Ryder Cup as I am, I don’t think it’s smart to sit me twice (both Friday and Saturday afternoon),” he told the Times.

Although Reed and Spieth had a record of 4-1-2 as partners in two previous Ryder Cups, there were rumblings that they weren’t getting along of late. So in Paris, Spieth moved on to Justin Thomas, going 3-1, leaving Reed stuck with Tiger and not very happy.

In the post-match news conference Sunday, when they were asked about their split, Spieth quickly replied, “We were totally involved in every decision that was made. Jim allowed it to be a player-friendly environment.”

Reed didn’t get a chance to answer the question, so he unloaded later on the phone to the Times.

“I think Jordan could see in my eyes that I was about to light up the room like Phil (Mickelson) did in ’14 (blasting captain Tom Watson after that U.S. loss), and that’s why he jumped on the answer,” said Reed, who maintains that he didn’t have any say in the pairings.

Meanwhile, there is late word that two other U.S. Ryder Cup players, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka, did us all proud by having to be separated Sunday night while visiting the European team room. 

So far no one is blaming that one on Reed. At least not yet.