Marching Band Masterfully Covers Adele’s Hello

There’s nothing like Adele’s “Hello” to get a bunch of college kids in the mood for the game, right?

This weekend, the Southern University Marching Band — one of the top marching bands in the country and a self-proclaimed human jukebox — went where so many people (Joe Jonas and Demi Lovato included) have already gone by covering the lead single off Adele’s massive 25. And just because the British singer’s heartbreaking lyrics of lost love aren’t there, doesn’t mean this version is any less emotional.

25, Adele’s third studio album, sold a record-breaking 3.38 million copies in the U.S. in its first week, surpassing previous record-holder *NSYNC (for 2000’s No Strings Attached).

Assad: Coalition Airstrikes Made IS Stronger

As MPs prepare to vote on whether Britain should join its allies launching airstrikes in Syria, the country's president accused them of "supporting terrorists".

But he praised military action by his ally Russia, which has been accused of targeting moderate rebels as well as jihadists.

Mr Assad said: "Since the beginning of that (US-led) coalition, if you want to talk about facts, not opinion, since the beginning of that coalition, ISIS (Islamic State group) has expanded and the recruiting from around the world has increased.

"While since the participation of Russia in the same fight, so-called against terrorism, ISIS has been shrinking. And al-Nusra (Nusra Front) of course and the other terrorist groups. So this is reality. The facts are telling."

Asked what it would take to end Syria's four-year civil war, which has killed more than 200,000 people, Mr Assad said: "When those countries that I mentioned - France, UK, US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and some other - stop supporting those terrorists.

"(the next) day the situation will be better and in a few months we will have full peace in Syria, definitely. If they stop."

The US, UK, and other Western powers fighting Islamic State have demanded that Mr Assad steps down and have backed rebel groups fighting his forces.

Meanwhile the Syrian president has referred to all his opponents as "terrorists" and accused world leaders pushing for his departure of "supporting terrorists".

The Syrian leader is backed by Russia and Iran and he praised Vladimir Putin for launching a bombing campaign backing Assad's forces in September.

In a wide-ranging interview with Czech TV, Mr Assad also said: 

"The feeling is very sad. Especially if you think about every person of those Syrians who left Syria has sad story behind him.

"It reflects the hardship of the Syrians during the crisis. From this (rational) way of looking at the situation, it's a loss.

"Every one of those is a human resources that left Syria. So that will undermine. Undermine your society and your country. Definitely. But at the end we have to deal with the reasons."

:: On Turkey Downing A Russian Jet:

"I think it has shown the real intention of Erodgan (Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan) who, let's say, lost his nerve because the Russian intervention has changed the balance on the ground.

"So the failure of Erdogan in Syria, the failure of his terrorist groups means his political demise."

:: On Relations With The West:

"If you look at the relation with the West, in 2005 I was the killer. In 2008 and after I was a peacemaker.

"Then in 2011 I became the vulture. Now, there's some positive change - of course shy kind of change, not the explicit one."

:: On Stepping Down:

"Now in the middle of the war, I'm not going to say I'm leaving for any reason," he said.

"When there's election, the Syrian people will decide if they want me, I'll be happy to be president, if they don't want me, I'll be happy to leave it, I don't have any problem."

:: On France's Effort To Broaden The Anti-IS Coalition:

"If they wanted to learn from what happened in Paris recently, why didn't they learn from Charlie Hebdo (attack)? The same principle, the same concept.

"And we said at that time that this is only the tip of the iceberg. What's under the water is much bigger. They didn't learn."

Mark Zuckerberg Will Donate Almost All Their Facebook Shares

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, plan to give away 99% of their Facebook shares to charity, Zuckerberg said Tuesday in a Facebook post. The news comes as the couple also announced the birth of their first child, a daughter named Max.

That portion of Facebook shares is currently valued at $45 billion, according to Zuckerberg. The donations won’t happen right away: a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission says the Facebook CEO plans to “sell or gift” no more than $1 billion worth of Facebook stock every year over the next three years.

That SEC filing also indicates Zuckerberg plans to contribute the funds to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He will continue to control the voting rights of any shares held by that organization.

How Every Generation of the Last Century Got Its Nickname

Coining a nickname for an entire generation has become something of a pastime for academics, journalists and marketers. This week, the cable network MTV joined the generational name game when it announced it had its own moniker for the millions of kids coming after millennials: the Founders.

The idea that the people who make up a generation share certain characteristics—and thus should share a name—dates back to the mid-19th century, and most cohorts from even before that time have been given retroactive nicknames. But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that those groupings gained mainstream popularity in the United States.

The woman who should perhaps be given credit for starting the trend was the novelist Gertrude Stein, who reportedly first coined the term the Lost Generation to describe the people who were born roughly between 1880 and 1900 and who had lived through World War I. That phrasing was popularized by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, the epigraph for which quotes Stein saying, “You are all a lost generation.”

As for the first generation of the 20th century, those born between 1901 and 1924, generational theorists Neil Howe and William Strauss have dubbed it the G.I. Generation. “The initials ‘G.I.’ can stand for two things—‘general issue’ and ‘government issue’—and this generation’s lifecycle has stood squarely for both,” the two wrote in their 1991 book Generations.

In 1998, however, journalist Tom Brokaw largely supplanted that moniker when he wrote The Greatest Generation, which profiled individuals who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II. The name stuck.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMTV's logo circa 1982.

On the heels of the Greatest Generation came the Silent Generation, a group born between 1925-1942 who were children during World War II but too young to fight. The name’s first recorded appearance was in an essay in TIME in November 1951, though the unnamed essayist does not take credit for the idea. “By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today’s younger generation is a still, small flame,” declared the magazine. “It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters. It has been called the ‘Silent Generation.’ But what does the silence mean? What, if anything, does it hide?”

This relatively small generation found itself sandwiched between the war hero G.I.s and the large and influential Baby Boomer generation, a term that first appeared in the Washington Postin 1977 and pushed aside other names like Rock and Roll Generation and Generation Jones. That moniker came about from the “boom” in the number of children born once soldiers returned home following World War II.

The next cohort — Generation X — gained the perception of being a slacker generation and more realist than their predecessors, and the moniker first came about from a Robert Capa photo essay from the 1950s. But it was popularized as a name for this group thanks to a 1965 book called Generation X as well as 1991 Douglas Coupland book called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

The naming of Gen X began a rather lazy era of alphabetic generational names. Gen Y was soon used for those born between 1980 and 2000. In 1991, however, the term “millennials” was used in the book Generations, and the name eventually became widely accepted, helping Neil Howe become a preeminent expert on generations—and leading to half a dozen books written by Howe on millennials alone.

For this latest generation, Gen Z and Founders are just two of many names in the running for this post-millennial group, including iGen, Homelanders, Plurals, Posts, ReGen, and now, Founders. All of them attempt to reflect some aspect of what defines those roughly 14 years and younger today, whether it’s their diversity, their reliance on social media, or their desire to fix what they see as a society disrupted. It just might take a generation to know which name will win out.

German Holiday Ad Is the Definition of an Emotional Rollercoaster

A German supermarket released a tearjerker ad that shows an elderly man faking his own death so all of his kids will come home for the holidays. The spot starts off with his daughter and grandchildren calling to say they won’t be able to visit him this year and then proceeds to show each of his other kids’ reactions to hearing that he has passed away. When they all go to his house, he appears, saying “How else could I have brought you all together? Mmh?” It’s an ad that’s guaranteed to make you feel all the feelings—confusion, anger, sadness and more.

Restored photos retrace Shackleton's Antarctic voyage

Hurley is seen here outside a makeshift hut that had become home. Courtesy: RGS-IBG

London, UK - One hundred years ago, 28 men were putting the final touches on a ramshackle camp on a drifting iceberg.

That was not how it was supposed to be: Ernest Shackleton and his crew had set off from England in 1914 to be the first to cross the white continent of Antarctica.

But on November, 21, 1915, their ship, the Endurance, sank after having been stuck in the pack ice for nearly a year.

The expedition photographer, Frank Hurley, managed to save his photographic equipment and continued to document the journey.

His photographs have now been digitised from the fragile original plates and negatives and are on display at the Royal Geographical Society.

The images are enlarged to show greater resolution and bring out details never before seen.

In The Night Watchman's Story, a sixth man is seen in the photo who wasn't obvious before. The ship became ensnared in the pack ice in January 1915.

Despite attempts to free her the Endurance was stuck in the pack ice for nearly a year before sinking. Courtesy: RGS-IBG

One journal entry notes that for three hours they used the full thrust of Endurance's engines and any wind the sails could gather to try to free the ship.

Hurley got on an ice floe to record the attempt.

It's hard to imagine how difficult photography was 100 years ago; the cameras were huge, the barrels of developing fluid were heavy and there was no luxury of taking another shot just to be sure.

"Every image had to earn its place because it cost a lot;  both to buy the glass plates and to develop and each one had to matter," curator Meredith Hooper told me on a recent visit.

Add to that the extreme circumstances - complete darkness for months and sub-zero temperatures.

Hurley used flares to light his subjects; you can see the bright areas where he set the pans of flash powder around the ship.

"It must have been an extraordinary flash of light in the middle of an Antarctic dark night, in the middle of the ice,'' Hooper said

''In total, total darkness is this one ship hundreds of miles from any known human, stuck on the ice and when he [Hurley] does capture the image it's so powerful. It's the only way we can get a sense of the loneliness and isolation."

All of the men were finally rescued in August 1916, after Shackleton and a five-man crew managed an epic journey, sailing 1,200km in a lifeboat to South Georgia.  

I brought a veteran polar explorer along to get his take on the  Enduring Eye exhibition.

Jim McNeill is preparing to lead the Ice Warrior Project: an expedition of 28 to the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility.

The men onboard Endurance before the ship sank in the Weddell Sea. A sixth man can just be seen behind the man with the glasses. Courtesy: RGS-IBG

The centre of the Arctic Ocean is one of the last places on this planet that hasn't been explored. 

McNeill has tried to get there twice: the first attempt, in 2003, ended when he contracted necrotising fasciitis - the flesh-eating disease; the second, in 2006, ended when he fell through the ice and didn't have enough fuel to fully dry his clothes and gear.

McNeill said Shackleton would have kept up a regime for the crew. You can see Reginald James, a naturalist on the expedition, taking observations.

"It's very good to keep people busy," McNeill told me as we looked at a picture of the men weighing the dogs, a completely useless exercise.

''There's nothing worse than a crew that's sat still and wondering." 

That's where good leadership skills are critical.

"One thing you have got to do is teach people to take the rough with the smooth, the peaks and the troughs of emotion, and when they are feeling the desperate situation they're in, how to avoid getting too gloomy about it," McNeill said.

The show Enduring Eye runs through February and will then travel to the US, Canada and Australia.

Emma Watson Says She Was Advised to Not Say the Word ‘Feminism’ in U.N. Speech

Gerard Julien—AFP/Getty ImagesEnglish actress Emma Watson poses during the photocall of Hispano-Chilean director Alejandro Amenabar's movie "Regression" in Madrid on August 27, 2015. AFP PHOTO/ GERARD JULIEN (Photo credit should read GERARD JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images)

Emma Watson is not afraid to call herself a feminist—despite some advice she’s been dealt in the past. The actress made waves last year when she delivered a much-praised speech at the U.N. Women’s HeforShe launch event encouraging men to fight for women’s equality across the world. She earned praise, in part, for dismissing the complicated connotations of the word “feminism” and defining it simply as “the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.”

“The more I have talked about feminism, the more I’ve realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating,” she said at the time. “If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop.”

But it turns out Watson was advised not to use the term in her now-lauded oratory.

“I was encouraged not to use the word ‘feminism’ because people felt that it was alienating and separating and the whole idea of the speech was to include as many people as possible,” she told the Evening Standard in a recent interview. “But I thought long and hard and ultimately felt that it was just the right thing to do. If women are terrified to use the word, how on earth are men supposed to start using it?”

The Harry Potter actress, who has continued to lobby for women’s right in the last year, did not specify who gave her the advice.