Amazon Sells Everything For The Home, Including The House

by Pamela N. Danziger , -- Forbes -- I discovered you could buy homes on Amazon by accident one day while shopping. After I stopped laughing – “Who puts a $46,900 charge on their American Express there?” – I had to do more research. I discovered plenty of people are not afraid to buy a house on Amazon. Two companies that have built a home business on Amazon are Allwood Industrials selling cabin kits and MODS International offering container homes . Both companies have found a market there. Allwood cabin kits for the do-it-yourselfer With his roots in Scandinavia, Tapani Pekkala, who hails from Finland, offers an IKEA-inspired approach to home construction. The kit cabin market in Europe is well developed, he told me, where over 120,000 kits are sold each year. With limited space to build, Europeans who long for a Scandinavian-style lake house, erect kit cabins in their backyard to create a personal getaway. The trend is now moving state side. “Kit cabins are finally becoming popular here and they are playing a role in the tiny house movement, which happened to coincide with Allwood’s expansion into this category,” Pekkala says. After founding Allwood Industrials in 2000 selling imported wood products, Pekkala saw the opportunity to market cabin kits back in 2012. A friend from Finland who worked as head of sales for one of the largest cabin manufacturers there tested the product here. When that initial trial with the first US distributor did not work out, Allwood stepped in to secure its first major cabin kit supplier.

The company launched first on its own online website. Having been an established vendor with Home Depot and Lowes, Allwood approached these big-box home building retailers about selling kits, but they were originally lukewarm. Then after Allwood launched on Amazon in 2013, the big-boxes saw the light. “Back when we started working with Home Depot and Lowes, they were each others’ worse competitor. Now it’s becoming Amazon,” Pekkala shares. Today Allwood cabin kits are available on Houzz, eBay, Outlook.com and will shortly be added to HomeDepot.com and Wayfair. But Amazon will continue as a powerful third-party internet partner with great resources that they know how to use to the max. “Amazon is very thorough, so it is no surprise they are so successful,” Pekkala states. “Their seller support is great. They have been enthusiastic and supportive all the way even though we are a small company and sell a very unique product.” Allwood’s uniqueness has been a key advantage of listing its cabin kits on Amazon. When people come there searching for house or home, Allwood’s cabins end up in the Amazon Buy Box, the gold standard for a listing on Amazon, which is how I first came upon them. “Unlike in other product segments where different vendors have to fight to get a preferred listing in the Buy Box, we get there over 90% of the time. That is a huge driver of business and inquiries to us.”

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Russia claims foreign hackers are trying to interfere with its election

by Kieran Corcoran -- Business insider -- Russia, a country which has been accused numerous times of attempting to interfere with elections overseas, has claimed that its own presidential contest is under attack from foreign hackers. Officials in Moscow said that the Russian Central Election Commission's website was hit by a coordinated attack by IP addresses from 15 different countries on election day. It said that a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which bombards a website with data requests in an attempt to overwhelm it, hit between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. on polling day.

Russians are casting votes today for one of eight presidential candidates, including incumbent Vladimir Putin, who is all but guaranteed to win by a landslide. Putin faces no meaningful opposition in Russia — not least because his chief critic Alexei Navalny has been banned from running. The main source of interest in the results is almost certain to be the scale of victory for Putin, rather than whether he will win. The alleged DDoS attack was announced by election chief Ella Pamfilova, whose comments were reported by the Sputnik news website and the Tass news agency, both of which are controlled by the Russian government. It follows repeated accusations that the Russian state has tried to upend the democratic process in at least 20 countries around the world, using both cyber attacks and information warfare. A report published by US members of congress in January details alleged Kremlin efforts to destabilise 19 European countries, from its immediate Baltic and Scandinavian neighbours to more distant democracies like the UK, France and Italy. Russia has also been accused of meddling in the 2016 US election. Earlier this week the US

Facebook and its executives are getting destroyed after botching the handling of a massive data 'breach'

by Michelle Mark -- Business Insider -- Facebook and its executives faced a torrent of backlash on Saturday following news reports that the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked on the Trump campaign in 2016, improperly harvested private information from 50 million Facebook users. The company quickly faced calls for increased regulation and oversight, and Massachusetts' Attorney General, Maura Healey, even announced an investigation. "Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," Healey said on Twitter. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota also excoriated the company, demanding that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg face the Senate Judiciary Committee for questioning. "This is a major breach that must be investigated. It's clear these platforms can't police themselves," she said on Twitter. "I've called for more transparency & accountability for online political ads. They say 'trust us.' Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary." But much of the online outrage came after multiple Facebook executives took to Twitter to respond to the news reports, insisting the incident was not a "data breach." "This was unequivocally not a date breach," longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth tweeted. "People chose to share their data with third party apps and if those third party apps did not follow the data agreements with us/users it is a violation. no systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen and hacked."

In a series of tweets that have since been deleted, Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos, insisted that although user's personal information may have been misused, it wasn't retroactively a "breach." "The recent Cambridge Analytica stories by the NY Times and The Guardian are important and powerful, but it is incorrect to call this a "breach" under any reasonable definition of the term," Stamos tweeted. "We can condemn this behavior while being accurate in our description of it." Twitter users were not satisfied with that response — many accused the executives of deliberately missing the point by focusing on semantics. "It amazes me that [the Facebook executives] are trying to make this about nomenclature. I guess that's all they have left," Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor who has written about tech companies' use of data, told Reuters. "The lid is being opened on the black box of Facebook's data practices and the picture is not pretty."

The legacy of Stephen Hawking - a Catholic scientist reflects

By Kevin Jones - Cambridge, England, (CNA/EWTN News).- The death of Stephen Hawking this week prompted a leading Catholic scientist to reflect on the life of the famed physicist, including his “astonishing” contributions to physics and his lifelong atheism. “He was of course a very great physicist and one of the greatest physicists of his generation,” Stephen M. Barr, a particle physics and cosmology researcher who is a professor at the University of Delaware, told CNA. “He made several major contributions to the understanding of gravity and the big bang and the black holes that will be remembered as long as physics is known.” Hawking, a Cambridge University physicist, passed away Wednesday morning at the age of 76. Author of the bestselling 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” he became a symbol of science in pop culture, appearing on shows like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “The Simpsons.” In 1963, as a 21-year-old graduate student, Hawking he learned that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular disease known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Doctors expected him to live only a few years. Hawking far outlived his prognosis, though over decades the disease gradually limited his ability to move, eventually to the point where he could only flex one finger and make eye movements. By the 1980s, computer technology had progressed to the point where he could communicate through a computer and voice synthesizer—though with an American accent. Barr reflected on Hawking’s success despite his poor health. “It’s amazing that he was able to do physics at such a high level when for example, most of us write on blackboards and do calculations on pieces of paper. We can hardly imagine being able to do our work when we can’t do those basic things,” he said. “It’s astonishing. It’s simply astonishing. A lot of what he did, he did in his head.” Hawking’s work developed several key insights, including calculations which appear to show that black holes, the densest objects in the known universe, do in fact emit energy – energy now known as Hawking radiation. Previously nothing was believed to escape the black hole’s intense gravity. Hawking’s intellectual process involved an unprecedented application of quantum mechanics to gravity. “The most important thing about Hawking radiation is that it shows that the black hole is not cut off from the rest of the universe,” Hawking said. Barr, the current president of the Society of Catholics Scientists, reflected on what Hawking’s role as a scientist means for beliefs about the origin of the universe.

In “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking “made some rather perceptive remarks to the effect that physics cannot even in principle explain why there is an actually existing universe,” Barr said. “In other words, he understood and said rather pithily in that book why physics can never substitute for a Creator, though he didn’t phrase it quite that way, that was the import.” Barr was critical of a later work of Hawking, “The Grand Design,” co-authored with theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow. “He seems to have forgotten his earlier insights,” said Barr. “He was arguing, in effect, that physics can explain why there is a universe at all and why there is an actually existing universe. I find this very puzzling. He actually understood the issue in the earlier book and got confused in the later book.” Barr suggested that Hawking’s lifelong atheism might have had an effect on those who overrate scientists’ ability to speak on non-scientific topics. He countered that many great scientists have also been religious.

Hawking himself found recognition from the Catholic Church, being named a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. This academy includes 80 global leaders in science from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs. He attended the group’s annual meeting in 2016 and gave a talk on “The Origin of the Universe.” He credited Catholic priest and physicist Msgr. Georges Lemaitre, a past president of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, as the true father of the “Big Bang” theory of the universe—a theory sometimes credited to another physicist. “Georges Lemaitre was the first who proposed a model according to which the universe had a very dense beginning. He, and not George Gamow, is the father of Big Bang,” Hawking said. Hawking also took part in an academic session marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Lemaitre, which closed with remarks by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Saudi Arabia Calls for Supporting Lebanese Army As Sole Legitimate Power

by aawsat.com -- Saudi Arabia called for supporting the Lebanese Army based on a clear mechanism that ensures that it is the sole legitimate power in the country. In remarks before the Rome 2 Conference on Thursday, the head of the Saudi delegation, Deputy Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Abdullah Al-Ayesh, said that the vision of Saudi Arabia “meets with the objectives of the conference that seeks to preserve the security and stability of Lebanon under Security Council Resolution 1701, which defines the army as the sole legitimate power in accordance with the Constitution and the provisions of the Taif Accord.” He emphasized the Saudi stance towards the need to develop a clear vision of a mechanism that supports the Lebanese army according to its needs. On the sidelines of the conference, which is hosted by Italy to rally support for the Lebanese Army and security institutions, Hariri held separate meetings with Ayesh, the personal representative of the Russian President for the Middle East, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni.

In his speech before the conference, the Lebanese premier said: “The Lebanese government recognizes that it is enjoying an exceptional moment of international consensus and support. We consider that it is in our national interest to preserve this international consensus and as such, we are committed to doing our part.” Hariri touched on the issue of the national defense strategy, which President Michel Aoun said he would address following the upcoming parliamentary elections. “The President of the Lebanese Republic, Michel Aoun, announced three days ago, that the National Defense Strategy will be discussed following the legislative elections in May. I join President Aoun’s call to the International community to support the Lebanese Armed Forces, to enable them to assume their duty of preserving security and stability in accordance with the National Defense Strategy,” he stated. The Lebanese premier emphasized that his government’s priority was to create a “virtuous cycle of security, stability, growth and employment for Lebanon and the Lebanese.” He noted in this regard that Rome 2 was a first step towards achieving this end, underlining his country’s commitment to the policy of dissociation, which was adopted by the government in December.

Marcel Ghanem announces departure from LBCI

The Daily Star BEIRUT: Veteran TV host Marcel Ghanem will leave LBCI TV channel after more than two decades of hosting the late night political show Kalam Ennas. The news was confirmed Friday night in a joint statement issued by Ghanem and LBCI’s CEO Pierre Daher. The statement reported that Ghanem's departure from the station came after years of cooperation and between the two in the fight for freedom of expression. Ghanem is one of Lebanon's renowned journalists and talk show hosts. He has been hosting Kalam Ennas, currently airing every Thursday night, since 1995. The show deals with social, political and economic issues.