Last Wednesday Sony began contacting a number of companies, including Google, to ask if we’d be able to make their movie, "The Interview," available online. We'd had a similar thought and were eager to help—though given everything that’s happened, the security implications were very much at the front of our minds.
Of course it was tempting to hope that something else would happen to ensure this movie saw the light of day. But after discussing all the issues, Sony and Google agreed that we could not sit on the sidelines and allow a handful of people to determine the limits of free speech in another country (however silly the content might be).
So starting at 10 a.m. PST in the U.S., you can rent or buy "The Interview" on Google Play and YouTube Movies. It will also be available to Xbox Video customers and via www.seetheinterview.com.
International Space Station spotted in the sky over Britain on Christmas Eve
The shining object appeared in the sky above southern England about 5.22pm
Residents of southern England will be forgiven for thinking that Santa was making his annual rounds early this year, when theInternational Space Station appeared as a sparkling dot in sky on Christmas Eve.
Southerners enjoyed the best view of the man-made satellite, which looks like a small ball of light moving across the sky when viewed from earth.
It crossed the sky at about 5.20pm and was visible for about three minutes.
In London, people were advised to look at 35 degrees from the horizon and look to the west, and people further north at a slightly lower angle.
A spokesman for the Met Office said: “The space station will be passing over – and it might look like santa’s sleigh.”
Twitter was quickly flooded with images of the passing space station, including a festive snap posted by astronaut Sam Cristoforetti from inside the craft itself.
Police chief said officer who fatally shot black teenager Antonio Martin in St Louis suburb had been in ‘imminent danger’ and used ‘what he felt was appropriate force’
Toni Martin, cries out as she talks to police at the scene where she says her son was fatally shot Tuesday at a gas station in Missouri.Photograph: David Carson/AP
St Louis police have released a surveillance video of the final secondsbefore a black teenager was shot on Tuesday night, saying it shows the moment when the teen raised and pointed a handgun at the officer, who then killed him.
The city was disrupted by a protest that went into the early hours of Wednesday morning. Officers used pepper spray and several makeshift explosives were discharged from within the crowd.
Jon Belmar, chief of the St Louis county police, released the video at a press conference hours afterwards in the hope of defusing the tension. Describing the sequence of events at a gas station in Berkeley, a suburb of St Louis, he said that the officer had been in “imminent danger” and had used “what he felt was appropriate force at that time” by firing at the suspect across the hood of the car.
He said the officer fired probably three shots, one of which hit the suspect, one the front tire of his vehicle. As he shot, he stumbled backwards and fell. The suspect, Belmar said, appeared not to have discharged the gun he was allegedly pointing.
Though only one surveillance video has been released so far, the gas station is understood to have several cameras mounted at different locations. The police officer, who was acting alone, was also understood to have a body camera and a camera mounted on the dash of his police vehicle, though Belmar indicated neither was recording.
Belmar declined to identify the officer, who he said was a white male aged 34 who has been on the force for six years. He also declined to identify the shot teenager, though local reports have named him as Antonio Martin.
Martin’s death at about 11.15pm on Tuesday occurred just a few miles from Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed in August sparking nationwide protests. The latest police shooting attracted a crowd of about 300 people to the Mobil gas station where Martin fell, and about 50 officers were called to the scene, some of whom used pepper spray on the people there. On this occasion the Swat team was kept on standby and tear gas and flash bangs were not used – a conscious effort on the part of police, Belmar said, to learn from the lessons of Ferguson.
The police chief said that three “explosive devices” had been let off by individuals in the crowd, which he described as an “amalgam of fireworks that were packaged up and lit. It’s disturbing when it happens directly by a gas pump.”
Two officers were injured in the melee, he said, and there were four arrests.
The video released by police shows two black teens standing in the parking lot of the gas station. One is dressed in a dark coat and pants, the other in a dark coat with white pants and a white hat.
As they walk away from the lot, a police car with its headlights on is seen driving into the parking lot and stopping in front of them. The officer gets out of the car just as the teen wearing the white pants comes up to him.
Belmar said the officer had been called following reports of a theft, though he declined to go into details.
The officer appears to engage the teen with the white pants in conversation, and as he does so the other teenager walks away but then returns and stands in front of the police vehicle’s headlights. At the end of the video the teen with the dark pants appears to hold up his hand and point towards the officer just feet away.
According to police, he was holding a 9mm handgun which was recovered at the scene, with its serial number defaced. Belmar said the defacing of the gun indicated it could have been stolen or contraband.
St Louis police will be hoping that the release of the video, and the evidence that they claim shows that the officer was acting in self-defence at a moment of mortal danger, will defuse the anger that has erupted again in the city and avoid a repetition of the nightly protests that occurred in Ferguson. But on social media the initial response remained sceptical.
The company's "Trending People" list consists mostly of what one would expect: celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence who have generated a ton of buzz throughout the year.
Here's a look at the full list, ranked from the most popular to least popular search term:
More than 76,000 students across the state have been able to access their HSC marks from 6am, with many taking to Twitter to discuss their results.
They are now in for another 24-hour wait before ATAR results are released online tomorrow at 9am.
Official ATARs are calculated by the University Admissions Centre and will be available on their website on Thursday. Main round offers for university places will be made on January 21, next year.
Top-ranking students for each subject were revealed at yesterday's First in Course ceremony, with Janek Drevikovsky and Grant Kynaston emerging as the standout performers after they came first in five and four subjects respectively.
An honour roll of all the students who received a band six, a mark above 90, in any subject will appear in Thursday's Sydney Morning Herald.
The Herald will run a live blog from 8.30am on Thursday as students discover their ATARs.
The dominoes fell swiftly Tuesday. The group behind the massive Sony hacks released another cache of confidential information, threatening violence against movie theaters that dare play the Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy The Interview. Soon both actorscanceled the rest of their promotional appearances for the film, and Sony told theater chains that it "wouldn’t object" if they chose to drop the film due to safety concerns. Carmike Cinemas was the first company to take Sony up on its offer, with Landmark Theatres calling off the movie’s New York premiere hours later.
As an event, it’s unprecedented: a cyberattack has rocked a major corporation in the most public of ways, and is now dictating the release of a major motion picture in the United States. And yet the studio still has one card tucked in its back pocket.
Sony should release The Interview online. Right now.
THREATS OF VIOLENCE CAN'T BE TAKEN LIGHTLY BY THEATER OWNERS
Almost from the beginning the hacks have been about stopping people from seeing the movie. It’s such a bizarre tactic that if the stakes were lower you’d almost think it was an elaborate PR stunt — the kind of thing that would fit right in with a story about a TV personality recruited to kill the leader of North Korea. But threats of physical violence can’t be taken lightly, not by theater owners worried about legal liabilities nor by Sony Pictures itself. This is a post-9/11, post-Aurora America, and frankly a movie premiere being attacked doesn’t sound all that implausible. So while it’s tempting to flip a jingoistic middle finger and chant "We won’t let the terrorists win!" the realities of huge corporations looking out for their own best interests is another matter.
Does it smack of censorship and impinging of free speech? Absolutely — though what it feels like most is the conservative choice. Hollywood loves a safe bet, and Sony making the passive move to let theaters opt out at their leisure is as safe as it gets, no matter what creative voices get stifled. Of course, the film industry has always been more about business than it has been about creative expression anyway, and in that sense The Interview can simply be framed as fallout from a bad business decision: Sony Pictures decided to make a movie about killing a real-world dictator, and is suffering immeasurably as a result.
EVERY LIVING ROOM, COMPUTER, AND PHONE CAN BE A MOVIE THEATER
But it’s foolish for anybody — even the hackers themselves — to think that The Interview will simply disappear, or that a movie’s life begins and ends at your local multiplex. Things leak. They spread. A version of Kim Jong-un’s death scene is already out in the wild. So what Sony should really do is take the game online. Throw the movie up on iTunes and Amazon. Get crazy and give Crackle a shot. Take the threat of attacking theaters and diffuse it with the truth that the hackers don’t seem to understand: we live in a world where every living room, every computer, and every phone is a theater. And whether it’s leaked government documents or a goofy comedy from the Neighbors guy, nothing stays hidden for long.
Would it open Sony up to having additional additional emails leaked? Would it open up content providers to potentially adding their names to the hackers' hitlist? Potentially, and we certainly don’t know what other personal threats have been made directly to the heads of Sony Pictures. But anyone expecting the leaks to stop at this point hasn’t been paying attention, and as long as the movie is kept under wraps there’s that dangling, implied threat: don’t show it or else. Releasing the movie online would allow the company to take a principled stand against its attackers and shatter that tension.
RELEASING IT FOR FREE WOULD BRING A BONANZA OF GOOD WILL
Releasing it for free would bring a bonanza of good will at a time when the studio needs it, but charging could be an even stronger choice, serving as a bold experiment in day-and-date video-on-demand releases. For years studios, theaters, and VOD services have butted heads over narrowing theatrical windows and release strategies: theaters want to have movies longer, while studios want to start collecting that VOD money as soon as possible. With many theaters already dropping out, why not take the most dangerous studio movie in the world and let audiences decide what they prefer? Make it a premium rental, even; I’d certainly pony up to see The Interview from the comfort of my home, even if it just turns out to be the goofy bro-com it appears to be.
This is a scenario unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, and Sony Pictures is at a unique point in history. As theater chain stocks dipped Tuesday, the hacks began to look more like true economic terrorism — impacting an entire industry, not just a lone company. TV shows and movies will undoubtedly stay away from portraying North Korea in a negative light moving forward, the chilling effect that this kind of strong-arming leads to. And what happens between now and Christmas Day, when the film is (still) scheduled for release, will establish a precedent that sets the tone for years to come.
The hackers, whomever they may be, have used the internet to attack Sony Pictures. They’ve used it to intimidate Sony Pictures. Now Sony can use that same internet to fight back and spread The Interview across the world.
Spoiler alert: This story contains significant details, including the winner's name, from Tuesday's season finale of The Voice.
LOS ANGELES — The Voice's Season 7 winner almost didn't make it to the NBC singing competition.
Craig Wayne Boyd, 35, the country singer who moved to Nashville a decade ago to pursue a music career, came close to giving up his dream in the face of financial pressures.
"I remember a little more than a year ago sitting in a pickup outside of a club after I had played to basically no one and talking to my drummer and saying, 'Listen, I may have to quit because it's not paying my bills and I'm losing my house.' I lost my pickup. I didn't know what I was going to do. And him telling me, 'Dude, you can't do that,'" the singer said Tuesday during a post-finale press conference with his coach, Blake Shelton, and host Carson Daly.
"And then randomly the opportunity (came) up to go audition a few months out for The Voice and I was like, 'You know what? You ought to go do that,'" said Boyd, who is from Texas but moved to Nashville when he was 25.
Boyd's intuition served him well, as he triumphed Tuesday, the lone survivor from coach Blake Shelton's team facing three finalists training under coach Adam Levine: Chris Jamison, Matt McAndrew and wild-card qualifier Damien.
Boyd, who kissed his 2-year-old son after his victory, said he was "caught … so off guard" with the news of his win that "I screamed like a girl."
After playing more than 1,000 shows in the last 10 years, he said the victory "truly feels like validation that all the hard work I put in up to this point has been worth it."
Daly said a new Voice twist, giving each finalist an original song to perform in Monday's competition finale, could help Boyd gain a stronger toehold with fans. Voice singers have had success after winning, but the show has not created a star of the magnitude of American Idol's Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood.
Boyd sang his original song, My Baby's Got a Smile on Her Face, as Tuesday's show ended.
"The thing about any of these competition shows (is that) when somebody wins, the marketplace has been invested in these people for so long and they're ready to wake up tomorrow like, 'OK, I'm in the Craig Wayne Boyd business.' Now, for the first time, which is unprecedented for us as a show, we have product for people to go out there and get," Daly said. "It can be the great launching pad for a great career."
For Shelton, Boyd is the fourth singer from his team to win The Voice in seven seasons of coaching. He reveled in the victory, which prevented Levine from tying him for overall wins.
"It's (bleep) awesome!" Shelton said, causing Daly to interject: "Merry Christmas, kids! From your Uncle Blake."
"Yes, (I will) rub it in Adam's face," Shelton continued. "He may quit the show before I'm done rubbing this in his face."
On a more serious note, Shelton praised Boyd for his perseverance.
"I know how much he's put into this competition firsthand, but I'm also aware of how much he's put into trying to make it as an artist in the music industry and the struggles and the ups and mostly the downs that he's had. All the doors shut in his face, the carpet yanked out from under him," he said. "And all of a sudden, here's a guy who is the winner of The Voiceand he's already sold a (lot) of music. There has never been a more deserving person to hold that trophy than Craig Wayne Boyd as far as paying dues."
Boyd might want to hold Shelton to an offer he made after the show. The popular country star said: "I told Craig I'd open for him as long as he'd have me."
The press conference ended so that Boyd could catch an overnight flight to New York for appearances Wednesday on NBC's Today and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Shelton did a double take. "You're doing The Tonight Show already? It took me 10 years to do that."
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