Star Wars Monopoly Game Criticized For Leaving Out Rey

ChinaFotoPress/Getty ImagesActress Daisy Ridley attends "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" premiere at Shanghai Grand Theatre on Dec. 27, 2015 in Shanghai, China.

Star Wars: The Force Awakensmay revolve around the disappearance of Luke Skywalker, but some fans of the space fantasy are up in arms over the absence of another character — Daisy Ridley’s Rey.

Although the plucky young space scavenger is the undisputed protagonist of The Force Awakens, she’s conspicuously missing from some tie-in merchandise, including a new Star Wars-themed Monopoly game.

According to a description on the Hasbro website, the game features four player tokens, all of whom are male characters: John Boyega’s Finn, Mark Hamill’s Luke, Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, and Darth Vader (who doesn’t appear in The Force Awakens).

In recent weeks, Star Wars fans have been vocal about an apparent lack of Rey tie-in toys, spawning hashtags such as #WheresRey and #WhereIsRey. (Last summer, Marvel fans — and even a prominent Marvel actor — similarly complained about Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow being shut out of Avengers merch.)

UPDATE: Reached for comment, a Hasbro spokesperson said in a statement to EW, “The Star Wars: Monopoly game was released in September, months before the movie’s release, and Rey was not included to avoid revealing a key plot line that she takes on Kylo Ren and joins the Rebel Alliance.”

The spokesperson added that Rey is featured in several Hasbro games, including Hands Down, Guess Who, and chess, and that “fans will see more Rey product hitting store shelves this month, including 6-inch and 12-inch Rey action figures. We are thrilled with the popularity of this compelling character and will continue to look for ways to showcase Rey across all of our product lines.”

Venezuelans losing hope as gridlock looms

Caracas, Venezuela - When Kilder Telleria, a 40-year-old graphic designer, voted for the opposition in last December's parliamentary elections, he was not feeling particularly hopeful.

For Telleria, the Venezuelan government has consistently found ways to "cheat" its way into amassing more powers. At best, he thought, the opposition would seal a close win.

"They control the supreme court, the electoral council and the military," Telleria said.

"They've even given away houses and taxis so people vote for them."

When the opposition won 112 out of the 167 seats - and secured a supermajority in Venezuela's once government-controlled assembly for the first time since 1999 - Telleria felt the country had taken a slow turn for the better.

"These elections mean we can bring about a change democratically and not through a coup or violence like it's happened in the past."

Venezuela has the highest proven oil reserves in the world. Yet, it has been suffering from chronic shortages of anything from milk to medical-diagnosis kits for over three years now.

Block-long queues outside shops of people standing under the tropical sun for hours has become a familiar sight.

According to the IMF, Venezuela's economy is expected to contract 10 percent next year.

Economists say the country faces a real chance of defaulting on its debt before the end of the year.

The drop in oil prices is expected to worsen conditions in Venezuela whose economy depends almost exclusively on oil revenues.

In addition, a lot of the country's infrastructure is crumbling with power outages often leaving half the country in darkness.

The government says the blackouts are the product of sabotage designed to destabilise Nicolas Maduro's presidency.

Dire economic state

December's polls suggested fewer people trust the government's explanations for the country's dire economic state.

Adding insult to injury, Venezuela has an abysmal crime rate. A local human rights group claims the murder rate is as high as 90 per 100,000 people, making it one of the most dangerous places in the world.

For Carolina Falcon, a public school teacher, it is no wonder that voter participation over 75 percent and that the opposition achieved such a sweeping victory.

She hoped this defeat, which she describes as a silent protest, would give the government a clear message.

"All you hear while you stand there in an endless queue is how angry people are at the government," Falcon said.

However, her hopes have since been dashed.

"The illusion lasted less than a week," she said, referring to the series of measures the government has taken since December's elections and before the inauguration of the new assembly on Tuesday.

Despite signing a document in which it pledged to recognise the results - it recognised the results on election night - the government seems set on neutralising the opposition's supermajority.

A week after the elections, president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, fast-tracked the approval of 13 Supreme Court judges who can effectively challenge any legislation passed by the parliament.

Choice of top judges

In addition to this, members of the ruling party have challenged the election of eight legislators.

Four of these charges, three opposition and one pro-government, have been approved by the government-friendly Supreme Court.

The move is seen as a clear indication that the government is seeking to block the opposition’s two-thirds majority, and has reawakened fears that the country will enter a gridlock scenario, with none of the much-needed economic measures being passed.

"The government continues to ignore what people, including its supporters, have been screaming for months. Things have to change," Falcon said.

The opposition has called the decision a "judicial coup".

It has pledged to attend the National Assembly's inauguration on Tuesday with the 112 elected legislators that grant the loosely based coalition the super-majority they could use to name new ministers, draft a new constitution and even set in motion a recall referendum on Maduro's presidency.

Chavismo, as the hybrid system that combines democratic elections with increasingly autocratic features is known, has derived much of its legitimacy on winning 18 of the 20 elections held in the 16 years since its been in power.

For political scientists here, failing to recognise the opposition's supermajority or trying to block legislation the new parliament tries to pass will only drive the nation deeper into political paralysis.

It foils efforts to take painful but necessary economic measures, and portends another flare-up of violent streets protests which left 43 people dead in February 2014.

"Chavistas have said their government was for the people but it seems they only meant it when the people did what they wanted them to," Telleria said from his working-class neighbourhood.

"Let's just hope the opposition is different."

The Quiet Crisis in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The latest uproar between Saudi Arabia and Iran has spread far and fast since the Saudis executed 47 people by beheading on the day after New Year’s Day.

Within hours, hardliners from Iran overran the Saudi Embassy in Tehran because the victims included prominent Shi’ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Diplomatic relations were quickly severed in both capitals, and downgraded in another Saudi ally, the United Arab Emirates. The fallout has further dimmed the already dismal prospects for peace in Syria, where the Saudis and Iranians support different sides in that country’s civil war, and of course sparked a rise in oil prices (though not as much as you might expect).

It was a full-on Mideast Crisis, with events cascading at a rate that challenged even those who follow the Middle East closely. But the search for meaning leads back to where it all began: the Saudi kingdom, which is facing pressures both inside and out. “There’s been 70 years of idle and completely erroneous speculation that the Saudis were unstable,” says Charles Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “This is the first time that they might be.”

Overseas, arch rival Iran threatens both the Saudis’ traditional dominance of the region and its alliance with the United States. Washington’s engagement with Tehran on a nuclear program has enhanced Iran’s international stature while depriving the Saudis of their privileged place beside the Americans. Wars in neighboring Iraq and Yemen — where the kingdom has involved itself in a bloody and indiscriminate air campaign against rebels backed by Iran — only add to the feeling of isolation. “There’s vulnerability, I think, the feeling of being vulnerable and surrounded by hostile forces,” says Madawi Al-Rasheed, a Saudi expert and visiting scholar at the London School of Economics.

Things at home aren’t much better. Gaping budget shortfalls caused by low oil prices are forcing rulers to cut subsidies and raise fuel prices, moves sure to foment discontent among the population of 29 million. “They’re not sure I think of the acquiescence of the domestic audience,” Al-Rasheed says. “They have kept them under control since the Arab uprising, but it’s a question.”

Freeman, who served during the First Gulf War, says the challenges to Saudi stability have been amplified by the actions of King Salman, who took over as monarch a year ago and upended the kingdom’s traditional governing structure. He placed a cousin, Mohammad bin Nayef, as Crown Prince, and made his own very young, untested son, Mohammad bin Salman, his chief of staff, Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defense.

So where once the House of Saud maintained stability by encompassing all manner of lineages “from left wing to the regressive religious right wing,” Freeman says, the kingdom has now consolidated power in a single line of the family. “The decision-making has not only been narrowed to one lineage, but even closer to the descendants of one man, Salman. That means the possibility of rash decisions went up, and you could argue that the war in Yemen is an example of that. You could argue that the executions are an example of that.”

The Jan. 2 mass execution was the largest since January 1980, when 63 people were beheaded for taking over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in a siege intended to topple the House of Saud on grounds that the ruling family had strayed from the strictest tenants of fundamentalist Islam. The threat prompted the royal family to empower conservative religious authorities in the Kingdom, to avoid being flanked by the retrograde fundamentalism critics say the Saudis have exported worldwide in the decades since. In October, 55 prominent fundamentalist Saudi clerics signed a letter of complaint after Russian jets targeted ISIS, the Sunni militant group which has wide support in some elements of Saudi society.

Some analysts say the beheading of al-Nimr alongside three other Shi’ite activists amounted to a sop to fundamentalist Sunni sentiment in the kingdom. The other 43 victims, after all, were all Sunni fundamentalists associated with al-Qaeda, imprisoned for more than a decade for attempting to overthrow the rule of the royal family. Killing Shi’ite activists would presumably offer a measure of sectarian balance.

But neither Freeman nor Al-Rasheed buy that rationale. Both saw the executions as of a piece with efforts to deter Saudi Arabia’s restive Shi’ite population from organizing against a governing structure that treats them as second-class citizens. “It goes beyond religion,” says Al-Rasheed. “I wouldn’t call it conservative, I would call it repressive. It is autocratic, it prohibits people from talking, from free speech. More people are being lashed. For tweets. For blogs. There are people who are languishing in prison because of writing a poem. So that is an augmented repression which reflects in my view a vulnerability.”

At the same time, she adds, the mass execution serves to distract attention from Yemen, where King Salman’s air war has produced thousands of civilian deaths over 10 months but no visible gain for the ousted Yemeni president Saudi Arabia claims to champion. “In 50s the Saudis removed a king for incompetence, King Saud, that was the effect of the ‘council of brothers,’ as it was called,” says Freeman. “Now there’s no such check … there’s no way to address that institutionally.”

Letters have been leaked to the media, purportedly from a member of the royal family, claiming the king was senile and being manipulated by his son and chief of staff Mohammed bin Salman. It called on the kingdom’s elders to unite and overthrow King Salman’s regime. “That has not happened,” says Freeman, “because the institutional basis for that examination has largely been destroyed.”

The result is more of that thing the Middle East produces even more reliably than petroleum — uncertainty — but this time in the belly of the beast.

Here’s What’s Wrong With Donald Trump’s Campaign Ad

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s first TV ad shows dozens of people attempting to jump a border fence as a narrator talks about illegal immigration from Mexico. But fact-checkers pointed out that the ad actually shows Moroccans.

PolitiFact traced the footage shown right as a narrator says “he’ll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for” back to a video posted by Italian television network RepubblicaTV.

On May 1, 2014, about 800 Moroccan migrants tried to cross the border into Melilla, a territory of Spain. They rushed the wall that separates Melilla from the rest of the African continent, according to PolitiFact. The video later surfaced on YouTube in a July 2015 post titled, “1,000s of immigrants try to cross the border at once.”

PolitiFact rated the campaign ad as Pants on Fire, meaning “the statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”

To which the Trump campaign responded that they knew exactly what they were doing, writing in a statement that the video was selected “to demonstrate the severe impact of an open border and the very real threat Americans face if we do not immediately build a wall and stop illegal immigration.”

Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski added some color, telling NBC News, “No sh– it’s not the Mexican border, but that’s what our country is going to look like. This was 1,000 percent on purpose.”

As with most things Trump, Twitter users had some fun.

Hoverboard fire destroys Australia family's home

Fire crews said the popular electrical product was charging in a girl's bedroom in the Melbourne suburb of Strathmore when the blaze started.

Local media said the girl saw sparks coming out of the hoverboard. 

Metropolitan Fire Brigade Acting Commander Phil Smith said the family was lucky to escape unhurt, but the home was severely damaged.

"It overheated for some reason and caught fire and no one saw it till it was too late," Acting Commander Smit

"In this case the family was fortunate to be able to get out of the house."

He said it served as a warning not to leave charging items unattended.

Last year UK consumer protection agency National Trading Standards found that 88% of the self-balancing boards they examined could explode or catch fire.

Southern States Braced For Mississippi Floods

Days of torrential downpours saw more than 10 inches of rain pushed into the Mississippi and tributary rivers starting on Christmas Day.

Levels in the river were expected to begin receding in Illinois and Missouri on Monday, with hundreds of families choosing to remain in their homes despite warnings.

Water is pumped over a levee in Valley Park, Missouri

Record or near-record river levels have threatened levees in southern Illinois, where nine people died and a dozen counties were declared disaster areas, according to Illinois Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Patti Thompson.

The other victims were killed in flooding in Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Significant flooding is expected later this week further downstream in Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana.

The river is expected to peak on Thursday in Memphis, Tennessee, according to the National Weather Service.

It is predicted to reach major flood stage between Arkansas City, Arkansas, and Natchez, Mississippi.

Further heavy rain is also expected later in the week, which could spark fresh flooding.

On Saturday, President Barack Obama signed a federal emergency declaration for Missouri, allowing federal aid to be used to bolster state and local efforts.

In St Louis, two sewage treatment plants were so badly damaged by the floodwaters that raw sewage was forced into the river.

Hundreds of people were evacuated in the Missouri towns of Pacific, Eureka, Valley Park and Arnold.

The Amtrak train service between St Louis and Kansas City was restored on Sunday, four days after high waters reached the tracks in some locations.

Barack Obama takes action over US gun laws

The plans will be announced on Tuesday by the president, despite opposition from Congress to new gun laws.

All sellers who operate online or at gun shows will be forced to conduct background checks on potential buyers.

Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul said he would fight the executive actions "tooth and nail".

And several of his Republican rivals said they would erase the measures "on day one" if they win the White House.

But Mr Obama says his new measures will be within his legal authority and consistent with the Second Amendment, which grants Americans the right to bear arms. 

And while they will not solve every violent crime in the US, he said they will potentially "save lives and spare families the pain" of loss.

Under the plan announced on Monday evening by the White House: 

• All sellers must be licensed and conduct background checks, overturning current exemptions to some online and gun show sellers
• States must provide information on people disqualified due to mental illness or domestic violence
• FBI will increase workforce processing background checks by 50%, hiring more than 230 new examiners
• Congress will be asked to invest $500m (£339m) to improve access to mental healthcare
• The departments of defence, justice and homeland security will explore "smart gun technology" to improve gun safety

Earlier on Monday, the president heard recommendations from Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and other top law enforcement officials.

At a gun show - North America editor Jon Sopel

One charming man I spoke to had a stall of fine old pieces, including a Remington rifle from the 1970s. Because he wasn't registered, all I had to do was show him a driver's licence - and answer this question: am I a felon or mad?

Say no to that, and all I had to do was hand over the cash and the gun was mine with as much ammunition as I could carry. And as he pointed out to me, if I lied, how would he know?

There were also individuals walking around the show carrying rifles and revolvers, with flags coming out of the muzzle saying "for sale" - again no restrictions at all for people who just wanted to flog their old firearm.

These are some of the issues that the president wants to address with his executive action.