Top News Stories –

Canada helicopter sex chat heard by Winnipeg public –
Canadian police have apologised after an explicit conversation was inadvertently broadcast from one of its helicopters. Whilst on patrol over Winnipeg, the chopper’s crew accidentally turned on its loudspeaker allowing members of the public below to hear them. Those listening say they heard pilots swearing and discussing oral sex. The officers were unaware that the loudspeaker was on due to the noise from the helicopter’s engine. Winnipeg Police Service say some of the “conversation was inappropriate” and have promised an internal review. [BBC]

5 Seconds of Summer fans go wild for ‘Doge Family’ hashtag after band change their Twitter profiles –
5SOS have changed their Twitter names and profile and the most bizarre hashtag is now trending. Fans have been tweeting #DogeFamily after the stars put up a photograph of a dog as their main images and changed their names, leaving us all asking: “WHAT IS GOING ON?!?” Well, we did some digging and found that ‘Doge’ is a internet meme based upon pictures of a Shiba Inus, and a slang word for dog. [Daily Mirror] See Top Twitter Trends below.
@SOS Twitter

An end to email shame? Gmail’s ‘Undo Send’ comes to the masses –
“Today we’re adding ‘Undo Send’ as a formal setting in Gmail on the web,”explained Google in a blog post as the change went live. The feature, which can prevent massive social embarrassment and help avoid long chats with the HR department about what you just mistakenly sent to a colleague, is to be a standard part of Google’s webmail. It can be turned on from within Gmail’s settings menu and enables people to set a “cancellation period” of five, 10, 20 or 30 seconds after sending any email, during which they can call it back. The feature has been available in Gmail’s experimental Labs settings for some time, and was recently added to the company’s Inbox mobile email app – so many of Gmail’s more tech-savvy users will have set it up already. [The Guardian]

Reddit celebrates its 10th birthday with a ton of wacky stats –
It’s been 10 years since Reddit first launched – basically an eternity in Web time – and it’s celebrating its birthday by looking back at its history, as well as some statistics on where the platform is today. In the ten years since its inception, Reddit has garnered over 16 billion upvotes, compared to ‘just’ 2.6 billion downvotes. It’s kind of nice to know that in a platform often infamous for its trolls, more feedback has been positive than negative. There have also been 190 millions posts, 64 percent of which are links. On these posts, there have been 1.7 billion comments, of which 0.36 percent have mentioned cats. That’s over 6 million cat comments. [The Next Web] See List of the Day

Video of the Day –

Lexus has created a real, rideable hoverboard

List of the Day –

Statistics from the first 10 years of Reddit [Reddit]

• 10 years, 0 months, 0 days
  • (ok, fine, technically it’s 9 years, 11 months, 30 days, 22 hours, and 16 minutes at time of posting this at 10 am PDT)
  • (also 5,258,776 minutes, 87,646 hours, 3651 days, or 521 weeks)
• 16,063,942,290 upvotes
  • (and 2,563,574,752 downvotes)
• 1,715,454,785 comments
  • (.36% of which mention cats)
• 334,626,161 monthly page views per Reddit engineer
  • (also 7,637,686 unique monthly visitors per engineer, at 30 engineers—we’re hiring more!)
• 190,227,552 posts
  • (36% self posts vs link)
• 36,136,190 user accounts
  • (26,222 of which include some variation of “pm me” or “don’t pm me” requests)
• $29,559,467.54 spent on 877,218 presents for RedditGifts exchanges
  • (in 201 gift exchanges)
• 1,867,184 months of Reddit Gold purchased
  • (804,952 of which you’ve gifted to someone)
• 853,824 subreddits created
  • (9,601 of which were active yesterday)
• 213,078 lines of code total
  • (1,081,873 lines of code added and 868,795 removed in 10,128 commits since Jan. 23, 2007, the second complete rewrite of Reddit)
• and 1 genderless, raceless, time-traveling alien from the future named Snoo.

Top Twitter Trends –

Other News Stories –

Armed conflicts and attacks

• Boko Haram
  • Over 42 people are shot dead by suspected Boko Haram gunmen in two attacks on villages in Nigeria‘s Borno state. (AFP via Dawn)
• Xinjiang Conflict
  • A police checkpoint on the outskirts of Kashgar in Xinjiang is attacked by ethnic Uighurs, with at least 18 killed according to U.S. government’sRadio Free Asia. (BBC)

Disasters and accidents

• Pakistani heat wave
  • The death toll from the heat wave reaches nears 800 in Sindh province with 744 people dead in the city of Karachi alone. (BBC)

Health

• Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak in South Korea
  • The government of South Korea announces that it will provide maximum financial aid to hospitals and clinics affected by the MERS outbreak.(Yonhap)

International relations

• The People’s Republic of China claims that the Golden Triangle regions of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand are the source of most of its imports ofheroin and methamphetamine. The region has been known for drug cultivation for centuries. (AP via ABC News America)
• The President of France François Hollande warns that France “will not tolerate” acts that threaten its security following claims by Wikileaks that theUnited States spied on him and his two predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac between 2006 and 2012. (BBC)
• Israel revokes permits for 500 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to enter Jerusalem for Friday prayers following the murder of an Israeli man in the West Bank. (AFP via France 24)
• Trans-Pacific Partnership
  • The United States Senate approves a motion giving President Barack Obama fast track authority to complete trade negotiations with 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. (CNBC)

Law and crime

• A Dutch court orders the Netherlands to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 25% by 2020. (BBC)
• Boston Marathon bombing
  • Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is formally sentenced to death in a federal court. He confirms his guilt and apologizes to the victims. (CNN)

Politics and elections

• United States presidential election, 2016
  • Bobby Jindal, the Governor of Louisiana, announces that he will be a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the 2016 Presidential election.(New York Times)
• The United States House of Representatives votes 247-180 to allow states to opt out of Barack Obama‘s carbon emissions reduction if the state governor believes compliance would increase electricity bills too much or have an adverse effect on reliability of supply. (AP)

Sports

• In ice hockey:
  • The National Hockey League announces that it has formally opened the process of expanding the league and will begin evaluating bids from interested parties. The most widely speculated expansion markets include Las Vegas, Seattle, Quebec City, and a second team in the Toronto area. (ESPN)
  • Montreal Canadiens goaltender Carey Price wins the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player, the Vezina Trophy as the league’s most outstanding goaltender, and the Ted Lindsay Award as the league’s most outstanding player as chosen by fellow players. Price becomes the first player to win both the Hart and Vezina Trophies in the same season since José Théodore, also of the Canadiens, in 2002. (AP via ESPN)

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