January 20, 2017

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Best of the Week: Sundance Preview, Miles Morales Got a 'Spider-Man' Movie, New 'Logan' Trailers and More

The Important News

Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be the version of Spider-Man in Sony’s non-MCU animated feature.

DC Extended Universe: Dwayne Johnson will get his own Black Adam spinoff.

Star Wars: Lucasfilm announced they will not have a digital Carrie Fisher in Star Wars: Episode IX

James Bond: Tom Hardy could be the next 007 and he wants Christopher Nolan to direct.

Sequels: The Eastern Promises follow-up Body Cross is shooting this Spring. Richard Armitage joined Ocean’s Eight. Guillermo del Toro is polling fans on the Hellboy III demand.

Remakes: Kenya Barris is redoing White Men Can’t Jump. Andre Holland joined the Widows redo. Anne Hathaway joined Nasty Women, Emma Watson explained why she did Beauty and the Beast instead of Cinderella. Ridley Scott is remaking the Korean film The Wailing.

New Franchises: Lisa Frank school supplies are being turned into movies. Manga and anime series Attack on Titan is heading to Hollywood.

Video Game Movies: Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Chastain will star in The Division.

Voice Casting: Julia Roberts, Patrick Stewart and Mark Hamill all have new animated movie gigs.

Biopics: Michelle Williams will star in a Janis Joplin movie.

Box Office: Hidden Figures won another weekend.

Awards: The Oscar nominations will be announced differently this year.

RIP: The Exorcist author William Peter Blatty passed away at age 89, astronaut Eugene Cernan passed away at age 83 and character actor Miguel Ferrer died at age 61.

The Videos and Geek Stuff

New Movie Trailers: Logan, Power Rangers, xXx: Return of Xander Cage, Before I Fall, The Discovery, Collide, The Ottoman Lieutenant, American Fable, My Pet Dinosaur, Girlfriend’s Day and the TV series Powerless.

TV Spots: Beauty and the Beast.

Movie Clips: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.

Movie Pics: Thor: Ragnarok behind the scenes and Vivica A. Fox in Crossbreed.

Movie Posters: All of this week’s best new posters.

Remade Trailers: Spider-Man: Homecoming in 8-bit style animation.

Mashups: Silence meets Star Wars, Stranger Things meets Star Wars and La La Land crossed with Whiplash.

Fake Movies: SNL‘s Hot Robot 3: Journey to Boob Mountain and Rick and Morty‘s Two Brothers for real.

Fan Casting Concept Art: Derek Theler as Shazam and Pierce Brosnan as Cable and Mr. Sinister.

Our Features

Sundance Guides: We previewed our most anticipated movies and performances of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. And we rounded up highlights of the first day of the festival.

Horror Movie Guide: We highlight all the latest horror news and trailers.

Comic Book Movie Guide: We explored the potential plot of the animated Spider-Man movie.

Home Viewing: Our guide to everything hitting VOD this week.

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Trump's Executive Order Could Dismantle Parts Of ACA Before Replacement Is Ready

President Donald Trump, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, signs his first executive order on health care, on Friday. Evan Vucci/AP hide caption

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Evan Vucci/AP

President Donald Trump, fulfilling a campaign promise to start to repeal Obamacare on Day 1, signed an order directing federal agencies to waive enforcement of large swaths of the law.

The one-page order allows the head of the Department of Health and Human Services or any other agency with authority under the law, not to enforce regulations that impose a financial burden on a state, company or individual.

It’s so broad it could allow many of the law’s provisions, including many of taxes it imposes on insurers and the requirement that individuals buy insurance, to die from lack of enforcement.

The order is an important political act for Trump, who pledged throughout his campaign that he would act quickly to roll back the health care law. Its reach, however, depends upon exactly which provisions he decides to target.

The order comes as Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., is awaiting his confirmation hearing and vote, which could come within days or weeks.

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It’s unclear how much of this order could be carried out before Price, if he’s confirmed, is installed at HHS.

Trump’s order also pushes one of his favorite health care ideas — to allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines — by encouraging “the development of a free and open market in interstate commerce for the offering of healthcare services and health insurance, with the goal of achieving and preserving maximum options for patients and consumers.”

It lands just as members of Congress are working to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Trump and Republican lawmakers have promised that any repeal would be followed immediately by a replacement for the law and they’ve said that anyone who has insurance through the ACA will not lose it in the transition.

“While President Trump may have promised a smooth transition, the Executive Order does the opposite, threatening disruption for health providers and patients,” said Leslie Dach, director of the Protect our Care Coalition, a group of organizations trying to save the Affordable Care Act.

Health policy analysts have warned that repealing the unpopular parts of the law such as the taxes or individual mandate could lead to the collapse of the individual health insurance market. This executive order could allow those provisions to be rolled back before a replacement bill is ready.

Republicans in Congress have laid out a number of broad road maps for a new health care law but have yet to reveal a specific bill that would show how many people will get insurance coverage or how much it might cost.

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East Timor's Soccer Team Booted From Asian Cup For Fake Document Scheme

Timor Leste’s Patrick Fabiano, (far left) was one of the 12 players declared ineligible by the Asia Football Confederation disciplinary committee. Joshua Paul/AP hide caption

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Joshua Paul/AP

The Asian Football Confederation says it found out that a dozen Brazilian-born soccer players playing for East Timor were registered using phony birth or baptism certificates.

Now, it has booted the East Timor team out of the 2023 Asian Cup. The players involved in the scheme played in 29 matches, which included World Cup qualifying games.

The Football Federation Timor-Leste has been ordered to forfeit those matches and was fined $20,000, with an additional penalty of $56,000 suspended for a probationary period of two years.

The probe found that documents for 12 Brazilian-born players were falsified to show that they had at least one parent born in East Timor. The AFC launched the investigation in June, in collaboration with FIFA, the game’s governing body.

It’s not clear whether the players themselves were involved in the document doctoring.

“The investigations made no finding regarding the validity of the Timor-Leste citizenship held by those footballers,” the AFC stated. “That is a question for the state authorities of Timor-Leste.”

“East Timor has already been eliminated from the current World Cup, and now faces being expelled from 2022 qualifying in a separate FIFA disciplinary case,” according to The Associated Press.

East Timor is a tiny country with a population of approximately 1.2 million people.

The players with fake documents “helped the nation to its first ever win,” the BBC reported. It has had a total of five wins in just under 14 years, the broadcaster added.

The East Timor national team is sometimes “jokingly called the Little Samba Nation for its rapid, and sometimes suspect, naturalization of Brazilian players,” according to The New York Times.

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Striker Patrick Fabiano, one of the players with fake documents listed today, told the Times in 2015 that he “received an invitation from them and they say: ‘We give the passport, you play for us.'”

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Episode 749: Professor Blackjack

A croupier deals a card on a blackjack table at a Gaming Partners International Corp. (Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

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Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Ed Thorp was the first ‘quant’, the first person to make mathematical analysis and statistics the center of his investing. But he only got there because of a card game.

As a young man, Ed Thorp was a mathematician doing pretty much what you’d expect a mathematician to do: teaching, studying, trying to solve hard problems. There was one particular problem that nobody else had been able to solve. He wanted to come up with a mathematical system to beat the casino at blackjack.

He had a flash of insight, spent a year working out the details and wound up getting a big-money offer to test his theory in the casinos.

It involved an unexpected conversation with a man in a cadillac and a regular payment of deli meats. It also set him on a course to discover a key insight about setting and beating the odds that had implications far bigger than any casino game winnings could be.

He went on to bring his math skills to the financial markets, where he made hundreds of millions of dollars and changed the way people think about investing.

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