Fuller House Renewed for Season 3: Cast Reveals News in Christmas Eve Video

Well, Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen have another shot at reuniting with their Full House co-stars: Fuller House has been renewed for a third season by Netflix.
The news was announced on social media Christmas Eve, via a video starring the current cast members, who pass along a large gift until one of them, Jodie Sweetin, rotates it to reveal the words, "Fuller House season 3 coming soon."
"This gift's for you," reads the show's Instagram post. "Fuller House Season 3, coming 2017."
Sweetin, Candace Cameron Bure and Andrea Barber reprise their Full House roles of D.J. Tanner, Stephanie Tanner and Kimmy Gibbler, respectively

"We're picked up for Season 3!!!!" 

Sweetin wrote on Instagram. "Thanks netflix for the best Christmas present of them all! fullerhouse Season 3, coming 2017.#fullerhouse #season3."

"Oh Mylanta! Christmas came early! @fullerhouse Season THREE, coming 2017!! #FullerHouse

@netflix #MerryChristmas," Bure said.

Kim Kardashian & Kanye West Step Out to Attend The Nutcracker Ballet With FamilY

   

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West got out of the house and into the Christmas spirit Friday, marking the pair's most public joint outing in weeks, following personal turmoil for both.

The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star and her rapper husband attended a Los Angeles Ballet performance of The Nutcracker at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center with their daughter North West, 3, her sister Kourtney Kardashian and her daughter Penelope Disick, and a few friends. The group was also accompanied by bodyguards.
At the ballet, Kim wore a large red hoodie and sat next to Kanye, who wore a black one. The two seemed comfortable, gazing in each other's eyes and talking intimately, an eyewitness told E! News exclusively. North sat on her mother's lap. Penelope, seated next to her mother, fell asleep at one point.
But she was likely much more excited by what came after the performance; The family also got a special backstage tour, where they met the dancers. Kanye posed for a photo with them.

"The little ones were amazed by the costumes and the sets," another source told E! News. "Kourtney also went back with Penelope and brought back North and her friend and the little ones all watched the ballerinas put on their makeup!"

"We hope you guys enjoyed the show!" read a message posted on the troupe's Instagram page.Kim has largely kept out of the public eye since she was robbed at gunpoint in Paris in October. Kanye has also kept a low profile since he spent more than a week at a Los Angeles hospital in November after suffering from exhaustion, although he did make a surprise appearance with Donald Trump in New York in mid-December.

Last weekend, he and Kim were spotted grabbing dinner at a restaurant in Santa Monica, marking the first time they had been photographed together in public in weeks. Earlier this month, they appeared to be in good spirits and were "very sweet together" chilling at their home. "They are going through a lot but from what it seems like they are doing it together and getting through it," a source had told E! News at the time.

2016 was the year that Facebook tried to take over the world

But its refusal to accept its role as a media company could be its downfall.Facebook had a busy 2016. It introduced chatbots to Messenger, repositioned Instagram as a Snapchat competitor and helped make virtual reality mainstream with Oculus. But as all of that was going on, Facebook also became one of the most powerful media companies on the planet. As more than a billion people flocked to the site for news, its influence on the world stage is undeniable. With live video, the Presidential election and the fake news scandal that followed, Facebook's impact was more evident in 2016 than ever before.

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Even though it debuted a whole year after Periscope and Meerkat, Facebook Live is by far the dominant force today in mobile live video. Part of the reason for its success is sheer name recognition, but a lot of it also has to do with how hard the company has been pushing it. From day one, you could broadcast and view live videos from the main app, without having to download additional software. What's more, Facebook also took pains to pay news outlets and media companies to use its live video service. This gave the service more gravitas and also brought it plenty of publicity. A few months later, Facebook gave Live its own discovery section in the app, further boosting its visibility. From there, the videos on Facebook Live went viral. Candace Payne broadcaster a video of herself wearing a Chewbacca mask, and before she knew it, the clip had more than 140 million views. It was so popular that CEO Mark Zuckerberg invited her to Facebook's Menlo Park offices, and she also appeared on various shows like "Good Morning America" and "The Late Late Show with James Corden."

Mobile live video made headlines again a few of months later when House Democrats used Facebook Live as well as Periscope to stream their sit-infrom the House floor when Speaker Paul Ryan shut off C-Span's cameras. It showed that live video doesn't just need to be about exploding watermelons or Chewbacca masks; it could also be a way to stream news events where traditional media outlets have little to no access.Unfortunately, there's also a darker side to live video. At least a couple of police shootings were captured on Facebook Live: one of Antonio Perkinsin Chicago and another of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The latter video was briefly deleted due to a "glitch," according to Facebook, but was soon reinstated with a graphic content warning. Facebook Live was also used to broadcast the deaths of 11 Dallas police officers during a protest over those aforementioned police shootings.For better and worse, it's clear that Facebook Live is an additional tool in reporting the news. Indeed, Facebook even teamed up with ABC for live coverage of both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, so users could see what was going on without needing to fire up their TV sets. Facebook is even looking into airing scripted shows and sports broadcastson the platform -- further evidence that the company is more media-driven than previously thought.

This all dovetails with Facebook's increasing role in news dissemination. Even though CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to deny it, Facebook has all the markings of a media company. Sure, it doesn't produce any content, but millions of people use the site every day to get information. A Pew Research study published this year showed that around 44 percent of Americans now consider Facebook their primary source of news. Seeing as several media organizations have partnered with the firm to produce so-called "instant articles" -- stories that are stored on Facebook's servers rather than their own -- it's clear that the company is at least aware of its role as a news hub.                                             For evidence that Facebook is indeed a media arbiter, consider the time its algorithm automatically censored the iconic "napalm girl" photo due to nudity. After realizing its importance, the company reinstated it, explaining that it's difficult for an algorithm to differentiate between child porn and an image of historical or cultural significance. The company faces the same issue with live video: When is violence permissible? These are questions that traditional tech companies don't have to answer but media companies do. Also, we learned earlier this year that Facebook had been using a team of human editors to curate the trending topics list you see on the right side of your News Feed. Obviously this indicates a certain amount of editorial decision-making, despite Facebook's arguments to the contrary. There were also critics who said this team of editors was suppressing conservative news in favor of left-leaning stories.

Then, in August, Facebook largely disbanded that team, leaving trending topics to be curated by algorithms. Unfortunately, just a few days later this led to a fake news article about Megyn Kelly getting top billing on the site. Months later, a 9/11 truther story appeared in the trending topics section as well. Considering Facebook's algorithm tends to favor stories with high engagement -- those that gain more Likes and clicks will naturally float to the top of the feed -- articles with sensationalist headlines would naturally get more traction. Despite Facebook's efforts to limit these stories, they're more likely to be clickbait or even false.                                                                                        Fake news would continue to plague Facebook's reputation for much of the year, especially as speculation increased that the rise of News Feed falsehoods had an impact on the outcome of the election. After initial statements that downplayed the role of fake news, Zuckerberg did eventually come forward and state that Facebook was taking steps to eradicate it, like cutting off advertising to fake news sites, making them easier to report and having third-party fact-checkers give them a second look.                                               As more people look to Facebook as their source of information rather than traditional media outlets, it's time for the company to take its role as a media entity more seriously. Right now it's mostly relying on AI and algorithms to filter through content, but it's clear by now that human beings are still required to judge what is real and what is not. Considering fake news has the potential to influence elections and sway people's minds, Facebook should take its responsibility as media arbiter a lot more seriously.

Check out all of Engadget's year-in-review coverage right here.

'Hidden Figures' is the uplifting NASA story we need right now

It's a much-needed reminder that black women were crucial to the early space program.Tales of the space race between the U.S. and Russia inevitably focus on the white male scientists and astronauts who seemingly did the impossible. But it's important to remember that those folks had plenty of support from people of all backgrounds. Hidden Figures, which hits theaters in a limited release on Christmas, is the rare opportunity to tell one such story: 

How three black women helped NASA launch the first American into orbit. Based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures is particularly timely as NASA is coming off of successful missions like the New Horizons Pluto excursion. The agency has finally found a groove on social media and it's also beginning to talk about exciting missions ahead, like bringing humans to Mars. And of course, Hidden Figures is also incredibly relevant as we approach the presidency of Donald Trump, a man who's proven to be resolutely anti-science when it comes to things like climate change.

Set in the lead-up to the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission in 1962, the film focuses on Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson), a math genius who played a crucial role in calculating flight trajectories for NASA; Dorothy Vaughan (Viola Davis), who led black women at the West Area Computers division; and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), NASA's first African-American female engineer. They're also supported by a coterie of other black women who served as "human computers" -people making complex mathematical calculations before the advent of traditional computers. (Annie Easley, another human computer at NASA, also had a lasting impact on modern spaceflight.) From the start, Hidden Figures doesn't waste any time proving why we should care about these women. Katherine Johnson is portrayed as a child prodigy who makes her way through college by the age of 18 with degrees in Mathematics and French. In an early scene, as the three women are dealing with a broken down car by the side of the road, they catch the attention of a white male police officer who has no problem wielding his authority over them with disrespect. But after learning they work at NASA, he offers them an escort to their offices, which leads to a striking image of the women speeding after his police car to keep up. That's not something you usually expect to see in a film set in the early 1960s.NASA (and its previous incarnation, NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) counts itself as one of the pioneers for diverse employment during the civil rights era in the U.S., but that doesn't mean there weren't any hurdles for black employees. The West Area Computers Division in Langley, Virginia, where the three subjects of Hidden Figures initially worked, was completely segregated by race. And, as you'd expect during that time, they also had to live with things like segregated bathrooms and dining areas.

Hidden Figures confronts those equality issues head on. Once Johnson moves away from the human computer pool and gets assigned to the Space Task Group, she's forced to deal with a room full of mostly white men who offer her little respect. There's a hush when she pours herself a cup of coffee for the first time, and eventually someone sets up a ratty secondary machine to serve as the "colored" coffee maker. When she needs to use the bathroom, she's forced to run all the way across the NASA campus to use the colored facilities by the West Area group. And she works with a colleague, played by Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons, who pays her little respect. Naturally, Johnson's boss, a fictional NASA manager portrayed by Kevin Costner, is clueless about all of the issues she's facing.Things aren't much better for the other women, either. Dorothy Vaughan gets rebuked from her white supervisor (played by Kirsten Dunst) when she asks for official manager status, even though she's doing the work of a manager. When Mary Jackson wants to be promoted to an engineer, she's forced to petition the city to let her take night classes at a segregated high school.

These are all issues we've seen before, but as we move further away from the indignities of Jim Crow laws and the struggle for civil rights, its easy to underestimate their impact. It also isn't difficult to trace a line between the problems presented in Hidden Figures and diversity issues we're still dealing with today. For example, Dunst's character seems to mean well as a supervisor. And yet, she still blocks any attempt at advancement. (I also found it interesting that she addresses Vaughan as "Dorothy," while subordinate calls her much younger supervisor "Ms. Mitchell.") It's the sort of casual discrimination that people of color still have to deal with these days. At the Space Task Group, Katherine Johnson argued to attend high-level meetings about the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission -- something no woman attended before -- so that she could have the most current data for her orbital calculations. She plotted the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space, in 1959, though we don't see that in the film. Instead, Hidden Figures focuses on her calculations for John Glenn's mission aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft in 1962, which made him the first American to orbit the Earth. While NASA was moving away from human computers and towards IBM machines by then, Glenn famously asked for Johnson to double-check the machine's figures before he took off.

Speaking of IBM, we also see how Dorothy Vaughan was wise enough to start learning FORTRAN as soon as NASA received the machines. She encouraged her group at the West Computing Area to learn programming skills as well, which made them invaluable as NASA started relying more on IBM's equipment. Vaughan would eventually go on to become NASA's first African-American manager, all the while helping other black women at the space agency.Hidden Figures has some issues you'd find in many biopics. At times it's a bit too sentimental, and it glosses over historical moments quickly. But it's ultimately an important film, one that brings to light just how much NASA -- and really, America as a whole -- owes this group of black women. It's a reminder that, even during a more tumultuous racial climate, we were able to overcome our differences to work towards a common (and seemingly) impossible goal. And as the world is getting increasingly more divisive, that's worth remembering.

KAUN TUJHE Video | M.S. DHONI -THE UNTOLD STORY |Amaal Mallik Palak | Sushant Singh Disha Patani

KAUN TUJHE Video | M.S. DHONI -THE UNTOLD STORY |Amaal Mallik Palak | Sushant Singh Disha Patani

What I wore this week: jeans and a going-out top

What I wore this week: jeans and a going-out top

Jeans have climbed back up the food chain, from being clothes for a Monday off to clothes for a Saturday night out

I’m not big on nostalgia, but I do quite miss the dress code that served through much of my youth, which went: 

Denim goes with everything.’ Photograph: David Newby for the Guardian

jeans and a going-out top . This was as close to a formal dress code as evening engagements – as we never, ever called them – got. It worked a treat. You had a favourite pair of jeans, and then just swapped the top in and out as if you were dressing up one of those paper dolls with tabs on them. No heart-searching over whether you should wear tights, no need for complex underwear “solutions”, and no colour clashes to think about, because denim goes with everything.

eans-and-a-going-out-top hasn’t worked as a dress code for ages. Instead, we’ve been expected to either lean in to the party spirit with frocks that add to our to-do lists (fake tan application Friday morning, dry cleaner dropoff Saturday) or create dashing androgynous lines set off by impossible-to-source obscure Japanese trainers. And sometimes you think, “I’m not styling a look book here – I’m going to the pub. Can I not just keep my jeans on, step into high heels, put on a snazzier top and be done with it?”

Well, dear reader, you can. A happy side-effect of 2016’s renewed obsession with jeans – the weirder the better, with stepped “mullet” hems and asymmetric Frankenstein patches of dark and light denim – 

has been that jeans have climbed back up the food chain, from being clothes for a Monday off to clothes for a Saturday night out. You don’t need to go that far, but you do need a modern jean, by which I mean a loose shape on the leg, a high waist and a hemline that ends at the ankle or above. Leg-lengthening hipster skinnies are for losers. Harsh but true.Now all you need is a going-out top. Anything in velvet works, as does anything that gets your shoulders out. Lace is excellent, but only with a high neckline. A bodysuit, under belted high-waist jeans, slays all-comers. That’s it. No fuss needed. Time to go out.

Petra Kvitova released from hospital after knife attack

Petra Kvitova released from hospital after knife attack 

Czech star upbeat at news conference in Prague  ‘I do not feel sorry for myself and I will not look backwards’ Petra Kvitova described being able to move the fingers on her left hand as “the greatest Christmas present I could have wished for”. Kvitova, 26, was speaking publicly for the first time since being attacked by an intruder at her apartment in the Czech Republic on Tuesday. Kvitova suffered potentially career-threatening injuries to her dominant hand, which was covered in a substantial bandage as she addressed the media in Prague after her release from hospital.The two-times Wimbledon champion looked remarkably relaxed, smiling and laughing as she first read out a statement in Czech.

“I’m happy to tell you I’m feeling well,” she said, switching to English. “The medical staff, the police, my family and my team have all provided me with amazing support in this difficult situation.“I want to thank each and every one of them for the important part they have played in the past four days. I have been overwhelmed by the flood of messages and love I have received from the tennis family, fans and the public – thank you.”Kvitova revealed that movement had returned to her fingers during a session with her doctor on Thursday morning.

The world No11 needed surgery lasting nearly four hours after tendons in all four of her fingers and her thumb were damaged along with two nerves.The intruder gained access to her apartment in Prostejov by posing as a utilities man before pulling out a knife and putting it to Kvitova’s throat. The injuries occurred as she pulled the knife away.

Petra  Kvitova described being able to move the fingers on her left hand as the greatest Christmas present I could have wished for. Kvitova, 26, was speaking publicly for the first time since being attacked by an intruder at her apartment in the Czech Republic on Tuesday.


I’m happy to tell you I’m feeling well, she said, switching to English. The medical staff, the police, my family and my team have all provided me with amazing support in this difficult situation.


I want to thank each and every one of them for the important part they have played in the past four days. I have been overwhelmed by the flood of messages and love I have received from the tennis family, fans and the public – thank you.”

An identikit photo of Kvitova’s attacker was released by the police on Thursday. The man remains at large.

The popular Czech has been told she will not be able to hold a racket for three months, and she is not expected to return to the court for six months.While what happened to me was very scary, I do not see myself as a victim, she said. I do not feel sorry for myself and I will not look backwards. I will use all my energy to focus on my recovery and I will do everything I can to return to the sport I love as soon as possible.I am now looking forward to spending time with my family and I ask for privacy and peace as I start my journey towards a return to the tennis court.

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