Later this week, Taylor Swift will pack up her flame launchers and giant inflatable snakes as she wraps up the North American leg of her massive Reputation tour. But before jetting off to Australia for the next installment, she’ll make a pit stop at the American Music Awards on October 9 to do something very, very bad.

The pop star announced Tuesday morning (October 2) that she’s opening the AMAs next week with a performance of the Reputation banger “I Did Something Bad.” She and her kitty/bestie Meredith broke the news in a cute video, with Swift quipping, “Don’t be too excited about it, my god,” as Meredith slunk away mid-announcement (Mer wanted “Getaway Car” as the next single, I guess).

Though “I Did Something Bad” was never a single, it’s an easy fan-favorite thanks to its warped vocals and venomous lyrics like, “If a man talks shit them I owe him nothing / I don’t regret it one bit ’cause he had it coming” and “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one / So light me up.”

Even more exciting, this is Swift’s first awards show performance in almost three years, and her first of the infamously media-shy Reputation era. The last time she graced an awards show stage, believe it or not, was back in February 2016, when she opened the Grammys with “Out of the Woods.”

Besides performing at the AMAs, Swift is nominated in four categories, including Artist of the Year, alongside Ed Sheeran, Drake, Imagine Dragons, and Post Malone. The show airs on Tuesday, October 9 on ABC.

In a new video full of double entendres, The Avengers: Infinity War stars share intimate details about their “first time” as the song “Feels Like the First Time” plays in the background. 

“I mean, I didn’t know how to do it,” says Mark Ruffalo, who plays Hulk in the Marvel Avengers series. 

To be clear, he’s talking about voting, not sex. 

If you keep watching, you’ll hear similar quips from other Marvel stars like Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle, and Chadwick Boseman. March For Our Lives activists David Hogg, Delaney Tarr, and Emma González, and actresses Zoë Kravitz (Big Little Lies) and Rosario Dawson (Luke Cage) also join in the fun.

The star-packed PSA was made by March For Our Lives in partnership with We Stand United, a campaign that works to ensure voter rights and access. The video is part of March for Our Lives’ effort to turn out young voters for the November midterm elections. 

According to Time, more than 800,000 people registered to vote on National Voter Registration Day, which took place on Sept. 25. That’s an improvement over 2016, when 771,321 people registered on the holiday. 

So, don’t be the odd one out and register to vote. It will take you less than two minutes to register— and you have no excuses now that you know the Black Panther is going to vote, too.

US President Donald Trump engaged in “dubious tax schemes”, including cases of fraud in which he and his siblings helped their parents dodge taxes, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing more than 200 tax returns it has obtained.

The Times investigation showed Trump received from his father’s real estate business the equivalent today of at least $413m, the newspaper reported, citing a “vast trove” of confidential tax return and financial records.

The newspaper also said, citing interviews and records, that Trump and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents. 

Charles Harder, Trump’s lawyer, told the Times its report was inaccurate.

The Times said its analysis drew on tax returns of Trump’s father, among other documents, but not Trump’s personal tax returns. 

More soon… 

Kirsten Powers, Opinion columnist
Published 4:00 a.m. ET Oct. 2, 2018 | Updated 4:20 p.m. ET Oct. 2, 2018

I believe in redemption, but I wouldn’t want my attacker to be rewarded with a Supreme Court job. That’s the wrong message to send teen boys and girls.

When I was 15 years old, I passed out at a party after being fed all sorts of alcoholic concoctions by older boys I knew and idolized, but who in hindsight were eager to get me drunk.

I awoke with a popular senior basketball player on top of me, and my shirt off. Dizzy and confused, I could barely remember anything about the night before. I asked what had happened and the boy told me we had just snuggled, but he couldn’t explain why my shirt was off. 

A few days later, a male classmate I was close to exited the boys locker room visibly shaken. He told me this boy had bragged in the locker room that he had molested me when I was passed out. (“Molested” is my word. For his part, this boy chose to gleefully describe in salacious detail what he did to me while I was unconscious.)

My face burned with shame. I begged my friend not to tell anyone else, and as far as I know he didn’t. I feared that if more people in my small Jesuit high school found out about it, I would be viewed as a “slut” or “damaged goods.” 

Sexual assault used to mean strangers in alleys

The only people I would have trusted with this information were my parents, but to tell them would involve explaining why I was at a party drinking rather than at a sleepover I had been given permission to attend. I would have been grounded for eternity.

I told no one.

I don’t know what month it was. I don’t know whose house it was. I remember one of my two best friends being there but she doesn’t remember it, and why would she?  It was just some random party as far as she knew at the time.

I can hear the doubters: Why now? Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you report him?

Liar.

The answer is simple: While I knew something terrible had happened, I didn’t think I had been sexually assaulted. In the early 1980s, we didn’t possess the vocabulary to make such declarations. I thought I had done something stupid and paid a price for it.

I thought it was my fault.

The memory of this event came flooding back last week with Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh. Many people have focused on the fact that she didn’t mention the event to anyone until 2012. As a former teenage girl in the early 1980s, this does not seem remarkable to me. In fact, the first time I spoke of the incident chronicled here was last week. And yet I have zero doubt of what happened and who did it to me.

More: Christine Blasey Ford’s silence on Kavanaugh is normal, not a reason to doubt her

Don’t judge Kavanaugh accusers. I covered the police and didn’t report my own rape.

I confronted Jeff Flake over Brett Kavanaugh. Survivors like me won’t stand for injustice.

When I was in high school, the phrase “sexual assault” was reserved for incidents of women being grabbed in dark alleys by strangers. It was always violent. If it wasn’t, then it wasn’t sexual assault. It wasn’t something the popular boy you went to school with did. 

Lance Morrow, a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, channeled the 1980s view writing about Ford’s allegation in The Wall Street Journal: “No clothes were removed, and no sexual penetration occurred. The sin, if there was one, was not one of those … that cry to heaven for vengeance.” 

He didn’t rape you for God’s sake. Get over it. You don’t want to ruin a promising young man’s life do you?

The same boy who molested me had forced one of my best friends to give him oral sex the year before while they were on a date. We were disgusted by him. We thought he was a creep. But the phrase “sexual assault” never came up. In a recent conversation with this friend, she told me that she was too insecure to protest. She marveled that because they were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time of the incident, she didn’t think that it was possible that what happened was sexual assault.

But that’s exactly what she calls it today. It’s also what I call what happened to me. 

Redemption, but no Supreme Court job 

If the person who sexually assaulted me and my friend turned into an outstanding citizen, good father and husband, do I think he should be put on the Supreme Court? No, I don’t. I don’t say this out of vindictiveness or a need for retribution. As a Christian I believe in forgiveness, grace and redemption. I am a big believer that people can make terrible mistakes in life and learn from them and go on to make significant and important contributions to the world. 

However, we cannot send teenage boys the message that they can sexually assault someone and, as long as they eventually become good citizens, we will elevate them to one of the most important positions in our society. We cannot send the message to teenage girls that attacks on their bodies don’t matter because the perpetrator is young like them.  

We also cannot send the message to teenage girls that their response to being attacked, or lack thereof, is what will be put on trial. The fact that my friend and I continued to go to parties where this boy was, or said hello to him in the hallway despite thinking he was a dirtbag, does not mean these things did not happen. Our behavior then is not the problem, just as Ford’s failure to talk to anyone about what happened to her for decades is not the problem. We were young teenagers who didn’t even understand what had happened to us.

There is a problem, though, and it’s this: The culture failed to give us the language to describe such violations, and made us feel that talking about what happened to an authority figure would only make things worse for us.

Fortunately for women, what happened in the 1980s isn’t staying in the 1980s. It’s a reckoning that is well overdue.

Kirsten Powers, a CNN news analyst, writes regularly for USA TODAY and is co-host of The Faith Angle podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @KirstenPowers

 

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Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh won’t return to Harvard Law School to teach this winter, the university said in an email Monday night.

“Today, Judge Kavanaugh indicated that he can no longer commit to teaching his course in January Term 2019, so the course will not be offered,” Catherine Claypoole of the school’s curriculum committee wrote to students, according to multiple news outlets including the Harvard Crimson.

Whether Kavanaugh withdrew out of anticipation of a position on the Supreme Court remained unclear as of Tuesday.

Kavanaugh’s decision to withdraw from the commitment comes as Harvard students and alumni protest his involvement with the school after three women publicly accused him of sexual misconduct. More than 800 graduates signed a letter calling for Kavanaugh’s position as a lecturer to be fully rescinded. 

“The accusations against Judge Kavanaugh, including those by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, are credible and grave,” the online letter states, adding the claims “should disqualify him from any position of esteem, including lectureships at HLS.”

Harvard Law School confirmed to the Crimson on Monday that Kavanaugh’s three-week course, “The Supreme Court Since 2005,” would no longer be offered during the winter term.

“The showdown over Kavanaugh has roiled the campus where he spent ten years instructing Harvard Law students,” the university’s student newspaper reported.

John F. Manning, the law school’s dean, remained largely silent as accusations mounted against the school’s lecturer, per the Crimson, before breaking his silence in an email to law students Friday night.

“When concerns and allegations arise about individuals in our teaching program, we take those concerns and allegations seriously, conduct necessary inquiries, complete our process, and then act,” Manning wrote.

Harvard Law School declined to comment on whether it had opened its own investigation into Kavanaugh, the Crimson reported, noting Kavanaugh’s profile had seemingly vanished from the school’s public directory.

Read the Crimson’s full reports on Kavanaugh’s withdrawal and Manning’s email.

More: ‘Mean drunk’ Kavanaugh was ‘handsy’ with girls, accuser says

More: Kavanaugh fight over sex assault allegations unlikely to end

 

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Buried within Facebook’s admission of the massive cyber attack affecting 50 million people was a surprising and worrisome nugget for some its business customers: a few of Facebook’s Workplace corporate customers could also have been impacted.

Workplace is Facebook’s competitor to workplace collaboration tool Slack. It’s used by more than 30,000 businesses as of a year ago, the last time Facebook released statistics on the product.

The good news is that most of those Facebook Workplace customers are not impacted by the hack. However, Facebook’s earliest customers could have been and Facebook is reaching out to those at risk to warn them, according to an email sent by Facebook to a Workplace customer seen by Business Insider.

To recap: Facebook’s revealed last week that hackers had managed to gain control of tens of thousands of its “access tokens,” the bit of software that allows you to get onto Facebook without having to enter your user name and password each time. This token is also used whenever you sign in to another app using your Facebook credentials, for example Tinder or Spotify. Control of the token gives hackers full access to your Facebook account, as well as to any apps that use Facebook’s login.

When it comes to Workplace customers, only those that signed up before June 2016, when the product was still in beta, are at risk. Facebook officially launched the product in October 2016.

In the beta product, Facebook allowed employees to link their Workplace account with their personal account. And that would have put them at risk for this hack. “The stolen token would let you read the files and posts in the community — the equivalent of reading work email,” a concerned user of Facebook Workplace told Business Insider.

Some big companies could be a risk

Facebook removed that linking feature when it formally rolled out the Workplace. “There may not be that many people in that bucket, but there were some pretty large companies using it early,” that person said.

For instance, back in 2015, Facebook announced that the Royal Bank of Scotland had signed up to use the Workplace service, intending to roll it out to 100,000 employees. And when Facebook launched the Workplace product in 2016, it said it already had about 1,000 customers using it.

Facebook

A Facebook spokesperson sent Business Insider the following statement: “Workplace is set up differently than Facebook. A very early feature of Workplace, enabled during its beta stage, allowed users to link their Workplace and Facebook accounts. A very small percentage of customer accounts are still linked, but once the vulnerability was fixed on Facebook, (when people were logged out and asked to log back in) the vulnerability was fixed for Workplace. Right now there is no evidence to suggest that any Workplace customers have been impacted, but we are investigating and reaching out to customers directly to keep them informed.”

Still, it’s not clear why some early users’ accounts were still linked when Facebook abolished that feature.

The user told us:”It is quite surprising that Facebook has touted that personal and work accounts are (since June 2016) separate — but they didn’t delete the link for pre-June 2016 accounts.”

A security breach is the nightmare scenario for IT professionals and Facebook knows it. “Security” is literally one of Facebook’s selling points for the product, promising businesses on its promotional materials for Workplace that Facebook is “serious about security. We’re proud to exceed the industry standard for protecting your data.”

So, in addition to putting 50 million consumer accounts at risk, Facebook also put some of its early paying customers at risk. This is another bit of ammo for the people who say that Facebook can’t be trusted with the anyone’s data.

Image: mondo / danny reams

Mondo, the Austin-based boutique art house behind so many amazing limited edition pop culture posters (and an assortment of other collectibles), has a new line of toys incoming. He-Man toys.

If that fact alone isn’t enough to get your ’80s fandom radar screaming, here’s an extremely content-appropriate trailer.

For anyone who’s missing the joke here, this is riffing on an actual He-Man toy commercial from the 1980s. Those adults are there for a reason though; these toys aren’t necessarily for kids.

Mondo tends to deal primarily in high-end collectibles, and the first two releases in this new Masters of the Universe line reflect that: The He-Man figure is priced at $160 and the Mondo-exclusive He-Man — which includes a bonus, swappable Skeletor head — is priced at $165.

Pre-orders can be placed here. Check out the figure below.

The 1/6-scale figure has more than 30 points of articulation, features fabric clothing, and comes with a whole mess of accessories, as you can see. The green Skeletor head in the image above is the only added piece that’s exclusive to the slightly pricier Mondo set. Both versions are otherwise the same.

He-Man is only the first action figure in the new toy line. Man-At-Arms, Mer-Man, and — of course — Skeletor are all confirmed. The Mondo-exclusive Skeletor head in the He-Man set actually goes with the upcoming Skeletor figure.

Here are some looks at concept art and prototypes for the future releases.

Image: mondo / danny reams

Iraq‘s lawmakers have elected veteran Kurdish moderate politician Barham Salih as the country’s new president, the state television reports.

Salih was chosen on Tuesday after a dispute between the two main Kurdish parties delayed the vote, eventually forcing them to choose among 20 nominees.

Shia lawmaker Hamid al-Moussawi said the session was delayed because the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan were unable to agree on a single candidate.

The new president will have 15 days to task the nominee of the largest parliamentary bloc with forming a new government.

Under an unofficial agreement dating back to the 2003 US-led invasion, Iraq’s presidency – a largely ceremonial role – is held by a Kurd, while the prime minister is Shia and the parliament speaker is Sunni.