• Being different from everyone else in some capacity means you'll fare better in grad-school admissions, job hunts, and life in general.
• That's according to Nick Black, the founder and CEO of GoodUnited.
• "Life's about résumé piles," his dad advised him, meaning you want your résumé in a different pile than anyone else, because you have something that makes you stand out.
• Black's military service and leadership experience have made him stand out for years, and now, when he hires, Black looks for people who stand out in some way.

Nick Black, the founder and CEO of GoodUnited, recently posted on LinkedIn about the best advice he ever got from his father: "Life's about résumé piles."

You can read the full post here, but the gist is that you want your résumé to sit in its own pile, apart from all the other candidates', because you have something that makes you stand out — and makes you irresistible.

We called Black to get more detail on how this advice has shaped his career as a captain in the army, a business-school student, and the head of GoodUnited, which helps nonprofits use Facebook Fundraisers.

When Black was 13 years old, his father gave him some tough love, telling him, "In the Black family, we're not good-looking, we're not smart, we're not athletic. But we never quit." That persistence, Black's father said, differentiated them from everyone else.

Black took this message to heart. In high school, he was a football player, but his grades were mediocre. Still, he ended up getting into schools he "had no business applying to," presumably because he'd expressed interest in joining the army. Black was admitted to Johns Hopkins, where he participated in the school's Army ROTC and served as president of his fraternity.

After college, Black served as a captain in the US Army, before deciding he wanted to apply to business school.

He had his heart set on the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. And while his GMAT score was low, Black told the admissions officers, "I'm going to make you look good" with his military experience. (By this point, Black had also lived all over the world.) The school accepted him, and he went on to launch his own company.

Don't bother competing against people with the exact same résumé you have

Today, as the CEO of GoodUnited, Black looks at what makes candidates unconventional.

He's not just choosing people who went to the Wharton School of Business, he said. "What else do you got?" he wants to know. "What else do you bring to the table?" For example, Black recently hired someone who had started working for GoodUnited without compensation because the person was so committed to the mission.

Read more:Starbucks' former HR exec says a job candidate's answer to a simple interview question predicts success better than their entire résumé

Black's insights recall those of marketing and strategy consultant Dorie Clark. In her 2015 book "Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It," Clark wrote that you can differentiate yourself professionally by applying your knowledge and talents in a new context.

Here's one of her favorite examples: If you're a lawyer who loves comic books, you might start a talent-management wing where you represent the legal interests of comic-book artists. "Becoming recognized in your niche is a pitched battle when you're up against others who have the exact same credentials you do," Clark writes.

As for Black, he remembers his father telling him when he was younger, "If you just apply for one thing, and you play by the rules, and you're cookie cutter, you're not gonna win."

SEE ALSO: The biggest threat to success isn't failure — it's something much harder to beat

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NOW WATCH: Navy SEALs debunk 5 misconceptions about good leaders in the military and the workplace

• The New York Times' exposé on Facebook's crisis management exposes a spectacular failure in leadership from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
• The report suggests he was at best uninterested in some of the scandals that engulfed his company and at worst complicit in exacerbating them.
• It's red meat to powerful investors who want to oust Zuckerberg as chairman.
• Stepping down as chairman would allow him to acknowledge his failings, throw a bone to Facebook's critics, and still maintain control of the firm he built.

If you haven't read The New York Times' blockbuster 6,000-word opus on how Facebook has dealt with a sequence of scandals, it's a worthwhile investment of your time.

Based on interviews with 50 people, it is rich with devastating anecdotes and mini-scandals. In its own right, the black-ops mission to cast George Soros as the puppet master behind an anti-Facebook movement is startling and disturbing.

But overall, the impression I took away was one of a spectacular failure in leadership. And in this sense, all roads lead to Facebook's CEO and chairman, Mark Zuckerberg.

The Times portrays Zuckerberg as, at best, uninterested in some of the existential issues that have threatened Facebook over the past three years and, at worst, even complicit in exacerbating them.

On the lack of interest, the report said Zuckerberg, and his right-hand woman, the chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, were "distracted by personal projects" as Facebook was dragged into danger.

As evidence of Russian meddling mounted last year, the report said, Zuckerberg was on a "listening tour." It also said he preferred to focus on "broader technology issues," leaving the politics to Sandberg.

In Zuckerberg's defense, Facebook on Thursday said he and Sandberg were "deeply involved in the fight against false news and information operations on Facebook."

And as far as making things worse, well there's an anecdote about his misjudging the anger against his social network in a clumsy conversation with Republican Rep. Greg Walden.

But something else stood out, and it speaks volumes about the way Zuckerberg deals with crises. In the heat of the Cambridge Analytica data debacle, Facebook was criticized by Apple CEO Tim Cook. Instead of taking it on the chin, The Times said, Zuckerberg was riled.

"Mr. Cook's criticisms infuriated Mr. Zuckerberg, who later ordered his management team to use only Android phones — arguing that the operating system had far more users than Apple's," The Times said.

It smacks of petulance at a time when Facebook needed reasoned responsibility. (Facebook said in response to the Times report that it had "long encouraged our employees and executives to use Android.")

Zuckerberg's failures are red meat for furious investors

All of this is red meat to the growing cabal of angry investors who want Zuckerberg gone as chairman.

Business Insider has spoken several times with activist shareholders, with holdings worth more than $3 billion. They believe Zuckerberg's feet need to held to the flames by an independent chairman.

Read more: These investors control $3 billion of Facebook stock — and they want to take Zuckerberg down

"He is not accountable to anyone, not the board or the shareholders, which is a bad corporate-governance practice,"one told me. "He's his own boss, and it has clearly not been working."

A proposal to oust him as chairman was put forward last year. Analysis has shown that it was supported by 51% of independent investors at the annual shareholder meeting. There is now a fresh proposal to split Zuckerberg's dual role that will be voted on at next year's shareholder meeting. It is already gathering support.

Facebook has consistently brushed off these demands. It has said an independent chairman would create "uncertainty, confusion, and inefficiency." This is despite this governance mechanism functioning pretty smoothly at other tech companies, including Apple, Twitter, and Microsoft.

And there's one element of The Times' story that underlines the value of independent oversight. It features the board member Erskine Bowles, the chair of Facebook's audit committee, conducting a foul-mouthed grilling of management on how the company allowed itself to become a tool for Russian interference.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg were stunned into action.

It's not as if Zuckerberg is blind to Facebook's failings. He accepts that the buck stops with him. "I designed the platform, so if someone’s going to get fired for this, it should be me,"he told Recode earlier this year.

Stepping down as chairman would allow him to acknowledge his failings, throw a bone to angry shareholders and Facebook critics, and yet still keep control of the $40 billion company he created in his Harvard dorm room.

It might also help achieve the ultimate aim of making Facebook a better, safer place for its 2 billion users.

SEE ALSO: Activist Facebook shareholder draws up a new proposal to fire Mark Zuckerberg as chairman

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NOW WATCH: NYU professor says Facebook should pay taxes for making us less productive

• Netflix drama "Black Mirror" once imagined a world in which tech could be used to recreate the dead. Now, people are working to make that a reality.
• Tech firm Eternime is beta testing an app that will allow users to create a digital "avatar" of themselves after they die.
• Eternime is not the only firm experimenting with AI technology to give people a voice after death.
• Business Insider spoke to four people working in and researching the death tech space. They laid out the benefits and dangers of creating digital alter-egos that live on after you die.

If thousands of years of human storytelling is anything to go by, waking the dead is rarely a good idea. From ancient Greece to "Black Mirror," fiction tells us that there are drawbacks in summoning loved ones from the grave.

But one tech entrepreneur is working to turn these tales on their head. Marius Ursache wants to make digital copies of the dead.

The 41-year-old grew up in Romania where he studied to be a doctor. He set up his own web design company while at medical school and dipped his toe in fintech, but quit because he hated working with banks.

He started taking courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is where he got the inspiration for a grander venture: Eternime.

Enter Eternime

The company was founded in 2014, and hopes to make people "virtually immortal" by creating a digital avatar of people after they die. Soon after founding Eternime, personal tragedy gave the project new meaning when Ursache lost his best friend in a car accident.

He repetitively watched footage of his friend's TEDx talk after his death. "It made me remember how important that person was to my life and how lucky I was for having him in my life and learning so many things from him," he said. He hopes Eternime could have a similar effect.

At the moment, Eternime takes the form of an app which collects data about you. It does this in two ways: Automatically harvesting heaps of smartphone data, and by asking you questions through a chatbot.

The goal is to collect enough data about you so that when the technology catches up, it will be able to create a chatbot "avatar" of you after you die, which your loved ones can then interact with.

"We collect geolocation, motion, activity, health app data, sleep data, photos, messages that users put in the app. We also collect Facebook data from external sources," Ursache told Business Insider. This is all done, of course, with your explicit permission.

A prototype demo of Eternime was recently on display in London's Victoria and Albert Museum, showing its user interface and how it amasses data from its users' digital lives.

Ursache has been funding the project with his cofounder and CTO Claudiu Baciu, who he met working at his first company. In the future, Ursache hopes to release Eternime as a free service with premium account options, but said he would never run ads.

"Even basic things like profiling would be a breach of privacy and confidence, so we're going to try to support basically the free plans through subscription fees from other users," he said.

The beta test has more than 40,000 signups, according to Eternime's website, but is so far only in the hands of around 40 people. The test involves users chronicling their day-to-day lives. Business Insider spoke to one of Eternime's beta testers, Claudiu Jojatu, who has been using the app for about a year.

"For me it's very important, and I am using it every day as a personal journal. I input a lot of data on how was my day and how I felt that day. And then it's very cool that it synchronises with my Facebook account and with my pictures from the phone," Jojatu said.

Eternime feels like having a "digital alter-ego," he added, and although the afterlife functionality of Eternime is a while off, Jojatu is relishing the prospect.

"Probably 99% of our memories get lost, and it's kind of awesome to know that you can actually leave something behind," he said.

How would you want to be remembered?

That same thought struck Eugenia Kuyda when her close friend Roman Mazurenko died in a car accident in 2015. He was just 32. Kuyda missed Roman so much, she created a chatbot of him.

"Roman was a close friend and a special one," Kuyda told Business Insider over email. "I wanted to tell a story about him and tell him some things I hadn't been able to. I put together around 10,000 of his text messages and together with a brilliant AI engineer on our team, Artem, we made a bot that could replicate the way Roman used to speak."

From Roman, Replika was born. Replika is an app in which you confide in an AI-powered chatbot that learns about you as you chat to it. The app has more than 200,000 monthly active users, and has raised $11 million from investors including Y Combinator and All Turtles, the incubator run by former Evernote CEO Phil Libin.

Ursache recognizes the crossover with Eternime. "I think in terms of approach and mindset and surprisingly even personal stories, Replika is our closest competitor that we have," he said.

Creating Roman was a personal project and a memorial for a friend, but Kuyda points out that building chatbots like Roman's on a commercial scale poses a myriad technical and ethical challenges. For example: At what age do you wish to be immortalised?

"This is especially true for older people or people that have Alzheimer's and other diseases that change the way they act and talk a lot. Do you want to talk to your grandpa in his 20s? Or the grandpa you remember when you were a kid?" she said.

She also pointed out that a chatbot might accidentally divulge information the deceased would not otherwise disclose to their loved ones. "Think for example if you're building a bot for your best friend and she was gay and her brother doesn't know — will you program it to understand who the bot is talking to it? It's not an easy problem ethically and technically."

Ursache recognised that this is a challenge Eternime will have to overcome, especially if family members feel uncomfortable with the idea a chatbot that could potentially say anything.

The dangers of being virtually immortal

There are many other moral quandaries to consider. Researcher Carl Öhman, of the Oxford Internet Institute, explored the potential problems with "re-creation services" in a paper published in Nature, which named Eternime and Replika.

"The main problem as I see it is the updating of software," he told Business Insider. If you sign up to have your chatbot stored forever by a company, you won't be able to sign off on any software updates that might change the way that bot functions after you die.

He also warned that algorithms have been known to act unpredictably. "Just look at what happened to Microsoft's Twitter chatbot Tay — it turned into a racist, Holocaust-denying, bigot within a matter of hours. How can we guarantee this doesn't happen with chatbots claiming to portray a real person?"

"The crucial thing is that consumers understand how the data is to be used after their death, this is difficult to guarantee when you use complex algorithms fed with many different data sources,"Öhman added.

Ursache admits that the bots responding to stimuli poses an ethical conundrum. "There's tonnes of things to think of ethically and technically and behaviorally," he said.

Problems for the living

Another big question Eternime throws up is whether it's healthy for living people to interact with a digital alter-ego of their deceased loved ones.

Another tech entrepreneur looking to break into death care is concerned by this. Mark Alhermizi is the CEO of Everdays, a company which creates pop-up social networks when a person dies. These networks are used to notify people of that person's death, and thus far have been set up via funeral homes, although Everdays has recently launched a consumer app.

Alhermizi is optimistic about the potential tech has to improve the death care sector, but the thought of a legacy chatbot like Eternime's troubles him.

"The problem ethically allowing this to exist... is that you get stuck living a false reality," he told Business Insider. Alhermizi referred to the "Black Mirror" episode "Be Right Back," in which a bereaved woman resurrects her partner using his data but it quickly turns sour.

He is not worried about the immediate future, because the tech isn't yet good enough to make an AI chatbot that convincingly imitates a person.

"But one day they will be good, and I think about what the consequences are for people using them. Forget about ethics, it's about them living in a false reality. Not just not moving on with grief, but not moving on with their lives," he added.

Ursache said he collaborated with psychologists when designing Eternime, but admits there could be unforeseen consequences, like people isolating themselves because they become too involved with a chatbot.

For the moment at least, he said Eternime is beneficial because people can use it to reflect. "We had people from the beta programmes who said it's like having an imaginary friend and it's providing some comfort," he said.

Ultimately, Ursache and Alhermizi think tech needs to move into death care in earnest. "This is one area of human life that I don't think has been improved or touched by technology," said Ursache.

But researcher Carl Öhman thinks regulation needs to be set up before "digital afterlife services" become commonplace. "As a society, we should think twice before we leave the nature of our afterlives entirely to an unregulated market," he said.

We may be getting closer to making thousands of years of human storytelling about speaking to the the dead a reality, but it will not be without its dangers.

SEE ALSO: Google's cutting-edge artificial-intelligence unit is costing millions

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• Jo Wallace of ad agency JWT said she wanted to "obliterate" her company's reputation as a haven for straight, white men.
• Five men who asked the HR department what she meant by that lost their jobs shortly afterwards.
• Wallace had previously written a column complaining there were too many "white, pale, stale males" in the business.
• JWT denies it has done anything wrong, and layoffs were planned anyway.

Five straight, white men have retained a lawyer to look at whether they can bring a discrimination claim against ad agency JWT, after a senior executive said in a meeting she wanted to “obliterate” JWT’s reputation for being populated by white, British, privileged, straight men, The Times reports.

The men went to their HR department after hearing the remarks and lost their jobs days later, according to Campaign magazine and The Times.

JWT denies it discriminated against them.

The creative director of the agency, Jo Wallace, made the speech at an agency conference attended by JWT executive creative director Lucas Peon and James Whitehead, the chief executive. The context of her remarks was that JWT had been ranked near the bottom of its peers on a measure of how equally it paid men and women. JWT’s gender pay gap was 44.7%, The Times said.

Peon said at the meeting, "In the World Cup of sucking at pay gap numbers, we made the final."

“Wallace, who introduced herself to the audience as a gay woman, said she was going to ‘obliterate’ JWT’s reputation as an agency full of white, British, privileged, straight men,” Campaign reported on November 12. The magazine gave no further context for what she meant by “obliterate.” There is another account of the meeting here.

In 2017, however, Wallace wrote a column for The Drum, a marketing trade magazine, that said, “a hell of a lot of people are literally sleeping on the job when it comes to diversifying their creative department beyond white, pale, stale males.”

“If you’re going to troll me as an angry, white, privileged man claiming that you’re now at a disadvantage, (yes, I’ve had several white, privileged men try to convince me of this ridiculous notion), please check your stats, and please #CheckYourPrivilege. If I may point out, you still account for at least 80% of senior creative roles. Even after a concerted effort in recent years, women still only represent 13% of creative directors and still, in 2017, only 8% of senior positions are held by someone who’s black or from a minority ethnicity. Statistics, history and the resulting bias in society demonstrates that you are in fact unfairly advantaged,” her column said.

“If your department is full of white, straight men then there’s a very good chance you’re confusing talent with privilege and when that sentence comes out of your mouth you’re basically equating diversity to ‘talentless’,” Wallace wrote.

The men reportedly went to HR to ask what Wallace’s statement meant for their careers and were let go shortly afterwards. JWT has been conducting a rolling series of layoffs across the company, according to multiple reports.

In a press statement, JWT said, “It’s not appropriate for us to comment on individuals in an ongoing process. Any redundancies at J Walter Thompson London are handled fairly, lawfully and without any form of discrimination.”

JWT’s potential liability in the case is exacerbated because of the discrimination angle, according to Campaign columnist Jeremy Lee. "The damages for unfair dismissal are capped at about £80,000; however, if the group of creatives can prove that they were discriminated against, there is no limit to the damages they could receive. Some believe that this could cost the agency millions,” he wrote.

The advertising world has been roiled by claims of sexism at the management level for decades. In 2016, Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts was forced out of his job after he told Business Insider that “I don't think [the lack of women in leadership roles] is a problem.”

JWT's former CEO, Gustovao Martinez, left the agency earlier this year after being accused of making sexist and racist comments.

SEE ALSO: Apple pays its female staff up to 26% less than men in the UK

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When Amazon announced this week that it would locate half of its second headquarters (known as HQ2) in National Landing, Virginia, even locals were confounded by the name. 

"Amazon is so stupid rich [and] powerful they literally just rebranded an entire city," one writer tweeted.

Hours after the announcements came out, the website DCist was already brainstorming hilarious slogans, including "National Landing: Your Friends Still Won’t Visit You In Arlington," and "National Landing: Who Says You Can't Force A Nickname?"

But what does that nickname actually refer to?

According to the official page for Northern Virginia's HQ2 bid, National Landing consists of three "connected urban districts," including two in Arlington (Crystal City and Pentagon City) and one in Alexandria (Potomac Yard).

It's essentially a new neighborhood carved out by Amazon, though many of its details remain unclear. 

Much of the property in the area is currently held by local developer JBG Smith, which has given Amazon exclusive rights to purchase some of its land and lease space in several of its buildings. As development commences on a new headquarters, Amazon will rent out 500,000 square feet of office space for its incoming employees.

In the wake of Amazon's announcement, JBG Smith has opted to kick-start many of its unfinished projects, including a shopping and entertainment district with a 49,000-square-foot theater. Take a look at what National Landing could eventually look like. 

Amazon's National Landing headquarters will stretch 4.1 million square feet, with the goal of accommodating 25,000 new employees.

The new headquarters will likely be located at Pen Place, a development site in Pentagon City.

One of the centerpieces of National Landing will be a 130,000-square-foot shopping and entertainment space known as Central District Retail.

• YouTube's biggest star is still PewDiePie, who just reached 70 million subscribers.
• Researchers have predicted that PewDiePie, aka Felix Kjellberg, would be dethroned by the Indian music channel T-Series, but that has yet to happen.
• Kjellberg has still seen support from fans and popularity in the YouTube community despite a long history of disparaging racist and anti-Semitic remarks.

The pundits predicted that a new content creator would be crowned YouTube's biggest star come November, but the title still belongs to the Swedish vlogger PewDiePie.

PewDiePie became the first YouTuber to reach the 70-million subscriber mark, beating out the Indian music channel T-Series who has been quickly gaining ground. Research firms predicted that T-Series would overtake PewDiePie — who real name is Felix Kjellberg — by the end of October, but the content creator still led Monday by almost half a million subscribers.

Kjellberg has managed to keep his spot atop YouTube despite a history of making offensive remarks in his videos. Most recently, Kjellberg landed in hot water this summer over a (since deleted) Twitter post. Following Demi Lovato's hospitalization for an apparent drug overdose, Kjellberg tweeted out a comic that depicted Lovato asking her mom for money to buy a burger, then instead using it to buy heroin.

Although his subscriber base has remained loyal throughout his controversial past, YouTube itself has punished the creator for his actions. News surfaced in February 2017 that nine videos published on PewDiePie's channel featured Kjellberg making anti-Semitic comments, and the video platform responded by cancelling the second season of Kjellberg's original series on YouTube Premium.

Read more:PewDiePie criticizes YouTube's 'inept' leadership, accuses the company of giving Logan Paul a lighter punishment for offensive video

This sordid history hasn't stopped other YouTube influencers from calling on their fans to support Kjellberg in securing his spot atop YouTube. Tubefilter reports that fellow YouTube creator MrBeast campaigned heartily for Kjellberg through stints on local radio and purchases of advertisements on TV, websites, and billboards.

It's worth nothing that this title of "YouTube's biggest star" is based on the number of subscribers. Based on viewership, PewDiePie sits down at No. 7 on a leaderboard from research firm Social Blade. T-Series, however, leads all of YouTube in terms of viewership with more than 53 billion all-time video views.

As of Monday, Social Blade revised its estimates to predict that T-Series would overtake PewDiePie for the most subscribers on November 30.

Meanwhile, PewDiePie posted on Twitter that he's already eyeing 100 million subscribers.

SEE ALSO: Jack Dorsey says Twitter needs to fully understand the 'use cases' of an edit button and can’t just 'rush it out'

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• LinkedIn has become the social network to turn to for Donald Trump supporters who are being kicked off Facebook and Twitter for false and abusive posts, Buzzfeed News reports.
• Buzzfeed talked to eight pro-Trump users who say that LinkedIn hasn't been as quick to heavily censor posts that include Obama birther memes, doctored images of Democrat politicians, and aggressive political rhetoric.
• In response, LinkedIn told Business Insider that "while most of our members do not share political content, we do believe that high quality discourse ... has a place on our platform."

Donald Trump supporters who have found their accounts suspended and content flagged on Facebook and Twitter have found a new home for their content to live — LinkedIn.

Buzzfeed News wrote this week on the proliferation of pro-Trump political content shared on the professional networking platform. Buzzfeed interviewed eight LinkedIn users who said they had left Facebook and Twitter, and turned to LinkedIn, where they were actively sharing MAGA memes, misleading messages, and false political claims on LinkedIn.

"Facebook banned me, they hate me. But that’s all good — I started posting on LinkedIn and everybody is following me," one of the pro-Trump LinkedIn users told Buzzfeed. "I think it’s going to be huge for the president."

In the face of criticism that hate speech and political misinformation was too easily shared across social media without any policing, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have publicly shared their efforts to halt the spread of such content. Ahead of the midterm elections this week, Facebook had built a "war room" aimed at preventing election-meddling that was prolific on the platform leading for the 2016 presidential election.

See more: A mysterious glitch on Facebook asked if every single post was 'hate speech'

A search of "#MAGA" on LinkedIn by Business Insider found a slew of posts that included:

• a meme that implied people who voted for Democrats should be shot.
• a photoshopped image of Obama with the caption, "America's first non citizen, gay, Muslim, anti-America black thug president."
• a post calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "a woman whose IQ is lower than a salamander" and Ilhan Omar "an anti-Semitic America-hater who married her brother."
• a doctored comic showing Charlie Brown saying, "these days a Democrat is a man who believes he's a woman, dressed up as a giant v----a screaming that Trump is not normal."

Much of this content appears to be in violation of LinkedIn's professional community policies, which ask members "to behave professionally by not being dishonest or inappropriate," and bans hate speech that includes "attacking people because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, political or religious affiliations, or medical or physical condition." 

Buzzfeed says that some of the posts it pointed out to LinkedIn were removed  — including a post with instructions for liberals on how to kills themselves — but that many others remained.

LinkedIn's policies also states that members "need to be real people" with accurately provided information, but Buzzfeed found several accounts promoting pro-Trump content that had no profile photo and minimal personal information. One person told Buzzfeed they created a LinkedIn profile with fake information after their initial account was suspended.

LinkedIn spokesperson Nicole Leverich told Business Insider in a statement that the platform does not allow for any type of abusive behavior, which includes "harassment of others or sharing of inaccurate or misleading content." She also added that conversation regarding politics is allowed on LinkedIn, but most members are on the site for "constructive conversations with other professionals."

"While most of our members do not share political content, we do believe that high quality discourse that is relevant to our purpose, to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, has a place on our platform," Leverich wrote in a statement. "Our User Agreement and Professional Community Policies are clear on what is acceptable, what is inappropriate and when we may take action."

Read the full Buzzfeed article. 

SEE ALSO: You'll soon be able to delete a Facebook message up to 10 minutes after it's already been sent

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The third quarter was a tough one in the tech business.

Scandalsabounded. Many companies saw their sales growth slow or user numbers falter. Stocks that once seemed to defy gravity got knocked down. And the president of the United States made a sport out of publicly attacking many companies and executives in the industry.

Whether at startups or public companies, tech executives were challenged to show their mettle. Some provided a steady hand at the wheel and reaped the rewards of a prescient plan of action; others reeled, took cover, or acted out. Some were hapless victims of circumstance; others suffered from self-inflicted damage.

Here are some of the notable winners and loser in the third quarter:

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WINNER: Kelly Bennett, Netflix's chief marketing officer

As the head of Netflix's marketing efforts, it's Kelly Bennett's responsibility to get consumers excited about the company's shows and movies and to convince more people to sign up. He seems to have done a spectacular job in the third quarter. Netflix added nearly 7 million subscribers in the period, which was about 2 million more than Wall Street was expecting.

That surge helped the company post a profit that blew through analysts' projections, which boosted Netflix's shares as much as 15% immediately after the report.

But Netflix saw the benefits of Bennett's marketing efforts elsewhere. Thanks in part to his promotions, the company earned 23 Emmy awards in September, tying HBO for the most of any network.

LOSER: Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer

If another company had sold fewer of its products than Wall Street was expecting, the management team might talk about how it would increase marketing, cut prices, or revamp products to rekindle sales. Not Apple.

After the company sold fewer iPhones than analysts had expected in its fiscal first quarter, chief financial officer Luca Maestri announced on Apple's earnings call that he would solve the problem by no longer releasing unit-sales numbers for its smartphones or any other products.

Maestri rationalized the decision by saying that unit sales weren't really "representative" of the strength of Apple's business. But he didn't offer to replace that information with other data that might be more representative.

The net effect: Apple shareholders will know less about their company. Investors — already unhappy with the disappointing sales numbers and a weaker-than-expected outlook for the fourth quarter — expressed their displeasure that Maestri was curtailing their information by sending Apple's shares even lower than they were before the announcement.

WINNER: Bob Swan, Intel's interim CEO

When Brian Krzanich was forced out suddenly in June as Intel's CEO, the company handed the reins — at least for the time being — to Bob Swan. In his first full quarter running the company, Swan, who also serves as the chipmaker's CFO, showed he could provide a steady hand.

Intel's third-quarter revenue and profit both topped Wall Street's expectations, and it offered better-than-expected guidance for the fourth quarter to boot. Investors cheered, sending Intel's stock up 6% after the report. Not bad for an interim CEO.

• Amazon announced on Tuesday that it will split its second headquarters project, which it calls HQ2, in two with locations in Queens, New York, and Arlington, Virginia.
• Jeff Bezos bought a residential property in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, DC, for $23 million in 2016.
• The two structures on the property have nearly 27,000 square feet of living space — it's the largest home in Washington, DC.
• Bezos is said to be spending $12 million to renovate the homes and the surrounding property.
• The new mansion will have a ballroom, a whiskey cellar, elevators, a garden room, 11 bedrooms, and 25 bathrooms. 

Amazon announced on Tuesday that it will split its second headquarters project, which it calls HQ2, in two with locations in Queens, New York, and Arlington, Virginia.

In 2016, Bezos paid $23 million in cash for a property in DC's exclusive Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas as well as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. It's less than six miles from the future site of Amazon's offices.

Bezos is said to be spending $12 million to renovate the homes and the surrounding property. 

While the property doesn't appear to offer much privacy in the front — it was the site of the Textile Museum for about a century — it includes two separate structures with nearly 27,000 square feet of living space and a spacious backyard.

The larger of the two homes, the Wood House, will be for entertaining guests, while the Pope House will serve as the family's living quarters when they're in town. The Bezos' home base is in Medina, Washington — a secluded, 5.3-acre compound on the shores of Lake Washington.

The renovation plans were approved in September 2017 and are now underway. Below, check out the floor plan of Bezos' future mansion in Washington, DC.

SEE ALSO: Jeff Bezos is so rich that spending $1 to the average person is like $88,000 to him — here's what spending looks like when you're a billionaire

DON'T MISS: Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, thinks it's possible to blow through his entire $131 billion fortune — and he has one big purchase he plans to spend it on

The property comprises two buildings plus a garage with staff quarters, a garden pavilion, and an attached garden room.

The Washingtonian got its hands on the blueprints for Bezos' home renovation earlier this year, and Business Insider used them to create these floor plans. The architecture firm overseeing the expansion, Barnes Vanze, specializes in historic restoration.

The plans show that the lot size is 34,000 square feet and has two structures, which made up the former Textile Museum, connected by a second-story walkway. Both structures were built in the early 1900s and are part of the National Register of Historic Places.

According to the plans, the existing driveway will be widened and restored, and the curb will be replaced with granite. "Privacy plantings" will be added to the perimeter of the property as well.

In the backyard, a new terrace will be added off the back of the Wood House with a "garden room" linking the two. Behind the Pope House, a wooden pergola and existing fountain will be restored. At the back of the lot there's a new garden pavilion that will have a gas fireplace. A pathway leads to a one-bedroom house for the property's caretaker that sits above a two-car garage.

The Pope House will be the family's private living quarters.

The Pope House was designed by and named for John Russell Pope, the architect behind the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

On the left side of the property and standing three stories tall, this home will be the Bezos' main living quarters, according to the Washingtonian. Plans were publicly available for only the lower level, so it's possible other floors aren't being renovated now.

A huge lounge with a bar is the main event on the lower level, in addition to a whiskey cellar (complete with drying racks), an adjacent wine room, and a large kitchen.

Upstairs, there appear to be multiple bedrooms, an exercise room, a TV room, and a kitchenette. The house has a total of 10 bathrooms.

The Wood House will be used for entertaining.

The Washingtonian said Bezos and his wife, Mackenzie, would most likely use the Wood House for "A-level socializing," describing it as the "party pad of epic proportions."

A nearly 1,500-square-foot ballroom takes up one side of the main level and rises two stories. A new limestone fireplace, staff bar room, and promenade with a balcony overlooking the space add to the grandeur.

On the other side, a spacious living room and a gallery lined with windows looking out to the front of the property are separated by another set of stairs. Visitors can also opt for the nearby elevator.

Apple's newest crop of phones is here, which means you may be thinking about finally upgrading from your older iPhone. 

During the past few years, it hasn't been easy to justify shelling out for a new phone if you're using an iPhone 5S, 6, or 6S. The design has been similar, the camera hasn't seen a major upgrade, and the battery life hasn't necessarily been such a major jump from older devices. 

But now that the iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max have arrived, it feels like time to consider a new phone, especially if you're on an iPhone 6S or earlier. 

If you haven't bought an iPhone in the last year, however, you're going to be in for a few major changes, especially if you opt for the extra-large iPhone XS Max, which is a pretty big departure from iPhones of years past.

Here are the six biggest things you'll notice when making the switch:

SEE ALSO: Here's how the new $400 Apple Watch Series 4 compares to last year's model, the Apple Watch Series 3

1. The screen

The most notable thing about the iPhone XS Max is the screen — the big, beautiful screen. 

First and foremost, the XS Max has an OLED display, which no older iPhones have, save for the iPhone X. Blacks look blacker, whites look whiter, and the whole display is just more gorgeous and immersive than what you're probably used to on an LCD screen. 

Besides being a better display, it's also going to be much bigger than what you're used to. It's the largest display of any iPhone, ever, and goes nearly edge-to-edge (save for the notch at the top, and some thin bezels along all four sides). 

2. The size and weight

Beyond having a great big screen, the XS Max has a great big body, too. It's the biggest, heaviest iPhone Apple sells, and also the largest phone it's ever made. 

Here are the specs:

• Height: 6.20 inches (157.5 mm)
• Width: 3.05 inches (77.4 mm)
• Depth: 0.30 inch (7.7 mm)
• Weight: 7.34 ounces (208 grams)

Compare that to the iPhone 6, which is 5.44 inches by 2.64 inches and weighs just 4.55 ounces, and it's pretty striking. If you're used to your small, lightweight phone, you may be in for a bit of a shock. 

3. The camera

When I compared my iPhone 6S to the iPhone 8 Plus last year, I was taken aback by how little difference there was between the two cameras, which were two generations apart. While the 8 Plus won in a few situations, there wasn't enough of an improvement to warrant buying the new device for the camera alone. 

One year later, that's no longer the case. 

I've been using the XS Max for about a week, and every time I switch back to my own phone, I'm disappointed by how my photos look. The camera isn't as sharp, it doesn't perform half as well in low light, and the colors look dull. Plus, my old phone can't do things like portrait mode on both the front and rear cameras. 

It's officially gotten to the point where the 6S (and, I imagine, the phones that came before it) feel outdated, camera-wise.

• Picking the right wine to bring to a holiday party can be tricky — you want it to complement the food being served and you want everyone to like it.
• We talked to a sommelier and beverage expert for her picks on the best bottles of wine to bring to seven different types of holiday parties.
• Our expert gave bottle suggestions at three different price points: under $20, $20 to $50, and $50 and up.

'Tis the season for parties — and unlimited trips to the wine store.

From Thanksgiving to Hanukkah to Christmas, it's not surprising that wine consumption spikes in October, November, and December, according to The Beverage Spot.

Bringing the right bottle to any holiday party or dinner can be tricky — there's a lot of pressure to pick a bottle that complements the food you'll be eating and guests' palates, especially if you're on a budget. 

We talked to Gretchen Thomas, sommelier and vice president at Del Frisco's Grille and Barcelona Wine Bar, to get her picks on the best wines to bring for eight different holiday occasions. The holidays can get expensive, so we included three different price points: under $20, $20 to $50, and $50 and up.

From Friendsgiving to your best friend's Secret Santa party, here are the best wines to bring to your next holiday party.

SEE ALSO: The 3 most important things to look for on a wine label, according to an expert

DON'T MISS: 12 secrets to enjoying the perfect bottle of wine, according to wine experts

Family Thanksgiving reunion: Pinot noir

Under $20: Montinore Estate, Willamette Valley

$20 to $50: Anthill Farms, Anderson Valley

$50 and up: Domaine de la Cote, Santa Rita Hills

According to Thomas, Thanksgiving needs a wine that can bridge different flavors and textures since sweet sides and sauces are often served with the meal.

"The wine also needs to please many palates and work as a complement (not a scene stealer) to what is the most important dinner of the year for many American families," she said. "A fruity, medium to full-bodied west coast Pinot Noir works great for this."

Friendsgiving feast: Sparkling wine

Under $20: Juve y Camps Reserva de la Familia Brut Nature

$20 to $50: Schramsberg Mirabelle Brut

$50 and up: Billecart-Salmon Blanc des Blancs

"Friendsgiving is my favorite annual holiday, and it's all about eating fall-inspired foods often more adventurous than what might be served at the traditional family Thanksgiving and celebrating life with your best friends," Thomas said. "Nothing works better for this than a great bottle of bubbles."

A Hanukkah dinner: Sparkling wine, rosé, or a full-bodied red

Kosher options/non-Kosher options:

Under $20: LaMarca Prosecco / Gramona La Cuvee Gran Reserva Cava

$20 to $50: Celler Capcanes Peraj Petita Rosat / Robert Sinskey Vin Gris of Pinot Noir

$50 and up: Celler de Capcanes Peraj Ha'abib / Casas del Bosque Gran Reserva Pinot Noir

Traditional Hanukkah dishes offer an array of flavors, Thomas said, adding that some, like the sweetness of noodle kugel, are difficult for wine pairing, while others, like potato latkes and matzo ball soup, pair easily. 

"Rather than suggesting one type of wine to cover the entire dinner, the kosher suggestions offer the perfect pairings for the dinner — beginning with a sparkling, [continuing] with a soft and fruit rosé, and finishing the dinner (brisket time!) with a full-bodied and rich red wine," she said.

• After nearly three weeks of denials, Saudi officials said on October 19 that the journalist Jamal Khashoggi died in an altercation inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
• Khashoggi, 59, who was often critical of the Saudi government, entered the consulate on October 2 and had not been seen since.
• Saudi Arabia previously said, without evidence, that Khashoggi left the consulate, and officials had rejected assertions that he was killed.
• US President Donald Trump has shifted from expressing concern about the case to defending Saudi leadership since Khashoggi's disappearance.
• Trump has said that stopping arms sales to the Saudis as punishment for Khashoggi's disappearance would be a "tough pill to swallow," but he's facing growing calls in Congress for the US to cease or diminish its relationship with the kingdom.
• US intelligence may have known before Khashoggi's disappearance about a Saudi plot to capture him, The Washington Post reported in early October.
• The Saudis' narrative on Khashoggi's killing has shifted multiple times, even after acknowledging he was killed. The most consistent aspect of their story is the claim that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had no prior knowledge of Khashoggi's killing.
• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has put pressure on the Saudis to be more transparent and cooperative in the ongoing investigation. The Turks maintain that Khashoggi's killing was premeditated and have rejected assertions that a "local collaborator" disposed of his dismembered body.
• The Turks have said Khashoggi's killing was ordered at the "highest levels" of the Saudi government.
• Pompeo has said the US would take "appropriate actions" against people it has identified as connected to Khashoggi's killing, including revoking visas and possibly imposing economic sanctions. Little has occurred in this regard.
• The Saudi public prosecutor's office on Thursday said 11 people had been indicted in connection with Khashoggi's killing, adding that the death penalty had been requested for five of them.
• The prosecutors said the Saudi agents involved had orders to abduct the journalist but ultimately killed him via a lethal injection after a "fight and quarrel." Khashoggi's body was then dismembered and given to a local collaborator, they said. None of the suspects were named.
• The CIA has concluded Prince Mohammed ordered Khashoggi's killing, The Washington Post reported on Friday, contradicting the kingdom's narrative.

Jamal Khashoggi's death has captured the world's attention.

Khashoggi, 59, a Saudi journalist, was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in early October.

The Saudi government on October 19 acknowledged his death, claiming he died during an altercation in the consulate. The Saudis had given conflicting accounts about the case over the nearly three weeks that Khashoggi's disappearance remained a mystery.

The journalist entered the consulate on October 2 to obtain documents necessary to marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz.

Cengiz has said she waited for Khashoggi outside the consulate for roughly 11 hours but he never came out. She tweeted in early October: "Jamal is not dead. I cannot believe that he has been killed."

Here's a timeline of the events surrounding Khashoggi's disappearance and death.

Who is Jamal Khashoggi?

Khashoggi, a prominent journalist who was often critical of the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, wrote for The Washington Post's global opinion section.

Karen Attiah, Khashoggi's editor at The Post, told CNN on October 7: "We're still hoping for the best, but of course this news, if true, has us all completely devastated. This is an attack on us as well at The Washington Post."

Khashoggi had a long, complicated career.

He went from interviewing a young Osama bin Laden in the 1980s to becoming one of the top journalists in his country to living in self-imposed exile.

Khashoggi was at one point an adviser to senior officials in the Saudi government and worked for top news outlets in the country. He was long seen as close to the ruling elite there.

But last year, Khashoggi had a falling out with the government over Prince Mohammed's controversial tactics as he has worked to consolidate his power, including arresting powerful business executives and members of the royal family.

The Saudi royal family also barred Khashoggi from writing after he was critical of US President Donald Trump, and it drove Khashoggi to leave Saudi Arabia for the US in the summer of 2017.

Months before his death, Khashoggi reportedly told colleagues he had feared for his life.

After leaving Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi divided his time between London, Istanbul, and Virginia. He was a US resident with a green card, but not a citizen.

The Post on October 17 published an op-ed article Khashoggi filed shortly before his disappearance. In it, Khashoggi called for a free press in the Arab world. Attiah, who edited the article, wrote a note at the top.

"I received this column from Jamal Khashoggi's translator and assistant the day after Jamal was reported missing in Istanbul," Attiah said. "The Post held off publishing it because we hoped Jamal would come back to us so that he and I could edit it together. Now I have to accept: That is not going to happen. This is the last piece of his I will edit for The Post."

She added that Khashoggi's article "perfectly captures his commitment and passion for freedom in the Arab world."

What Saudi Arabia has said about Khashoggi's disappearance

Saudi officials initially claimed that Khashoggi left the consulate, and they maintained that story for roughly 17 days.

"Mr. Khashoggi visited the consulate to request paperwork related to his marital status and exited shortly thereafter," an unnamed Saudi official told The New York Times in October.

The Saudi government previously denied allegations that Khashoggi was killed, describing them as "baseless."

Prince Mohammed told Bloomberg News in early October that Turkish authorities were welcome to search the consulate. "We have nothing to hide," he said.

"He's a Saudi citizen, and we are very keen to know what happened to him," he added. "And we will continue our dialogue with the Turkish government to see what happened to Jamal there."

When asked whether there were any charges against Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed said, "Actually, we need to know where Jamal is first."

The Saudi ambassador to the US told The Post on October 8 that it would be "impossible" for consulate employees to kill Khashoggi and cover up his death "and we wouldn't know about it."

Turkish media reported early last month that 15 men arrived at Istanbul's airport on October 2, the day Khashoggi went missing, and left Turkey later that night. Turkey has alleged that they were sent to kill Khashoggi.

The Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV network on October 11 aired a report claiming that the 15 men weren't sent to Istanbul for the purpose of capturing or killing him but were just tourists.

On October 19, Saudi Arabia said Khashoggi died in a fistfight in the consulate, a claim that has been met with a great deal of skepticism.

The Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, told Fox News on October 21 that Khashoggi was killed as a result of a "rogue operation," claiming that Prince Mohammed had no prior knowledge of the incident. He described Khashoggi's death as a "murder."

A Saudi official told Reuters on October 21 that Khashoggi's body was rolled up in a rug and given to a "local cooperator" for disposal. But a Reuters report the next day suggested the operation was run via Skype by a top aide to the crown prince.

Saudi Arabia's official press agency on October 25 quoted a prosecutor with knowledge of Turkey's investigation into Khashoggi's fate as saying evidence indicated that his killing was premeditated, marking yet another shift in the kingdom's narrative about what happened to the journalist.

"Information from the Turkish authorities indicates that the act of the suspects in the Khashoggi case was premeditated," Saudi Arabia's public prosecutor said in a statement.

The Saudi public prosecutor's office on Thursday said 11 people had been indicted in connection with Khashoggi's killing and that the death penalty had been requested for five of them. Prosecutors added that 21 people had been detained overall. Riyadh said in October that 18 people had been detained.

The prosecutors said the Saudi agents involved, including the head of forensics for the national intelligence service, had orders to abduct the journalist but ultimately killed him via a lethal injection after a "fight and quarrel." Khashoggi's body was then dismembered and given to a local collaborator, they said, contradicting earlier claims that the killing was premeditated.

None of the suspects were named, and a spokesman for the prosecutor reiterated the kingdom's claims that Prince Mohammed had no prior knowledge of the killing.

What Turkey has said about Khashoggi's disappearance

Turkish officials have consistently accused the Saudis of brutally killing Khashoggi.

A high-level Turkish official told The Associated Press on October 16 that police who entered the consulate found "certain evidence" that Khashoggi was killed there.

Turkey has been putting a great deal of pressure on Saudi Arabia to be more transparent. On October 8, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded Saudi officials provide proof that Khashoggi left the consulate.

"Do you not have cameras and everything of the sort?" Erdogan said. "They have all of them. Then why do you not prove this? You need to prove it."

Throughout the investigation, there have been somewhat conflicting messages from Turkey on Khashoggi's disappearance as details of what might have happened to him have been gradually leaked to media outlets.

In a report on October 9, The Times described a senior official as saying Turkey had concluded Khashoggi was killed "on orders from the highest levels" of the Saudi royal court.

But Yasin Aktay, an adviser to Erdogan, said on October 10 that "the Saudi state is not blamed here," suggesting that "a deep state" was responsible for Khashoggi's disappearance.

On October 11, Erdogan increased pressure on Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi's disappearance.

"We cannot remain silent to such an incident," Erdogan was quoted by Turkish media as telling reporters, according to The Post.

"How is it possible for a consulate, an embassy not to have security camera systems? Is it possible for the Saudi Arabian consulate where the incident occurred not to have camera systems?" he continued.

"If a bird flew, if a mosquito appeared, these systems would catch them," he said, adding that he believed that the Saudis "would have the most advanced of systems."

Erdogan on October 23 contradicted Saudi Arabia's narrative of Khashoggi's death, describing it as a premeditated act. The Turkish leader said Khashoggi was the victim of a "savage" and "planned" murder.

"We have strong evidence in our hands that shows the murder wasn't accidental but was instead the outcome of a planned operation," Erdogan said.

Erdogan also called for the 18 men the Saudis arrested in connection with Khashoggi's death to be brought to Turkey to stand trial. The Turkish president said Khashoggi's body had not been found, pushing back on reports suggesting otherwise.

Erdogan on October 30 called on the Saudis to identify the people responsible for Khashoggi's killing.

"Saudi officials need to reveal the local cooperators," he said. "Let us know whoever this person is, and we will find them."

He added: "We cannot leave this issue unsolved — we need to solve it now. There is no point in procrastinating or trying to save some people from under this."

Istanbul's chief prosecutor, Irfan Fidan, said on October 31 that Khashoggi was strangled shortly after he entered the consulate and his body subsequently dismembered. The prosecutor also called on the Saudis to reveal the location of Khashoggi's body.

Erdogan said in an op-ed article in The Post on November 2 that Khashoggi's killing was ordered by the "highest levels" of the Saudi government, and he rebuked Riyadh for not being more cooperative. The Turkish leader reiterated calls for Saudi Arabia to answer basic questions about Khashoggi's death, such as where his body is.

"Some seem to hope this 'problem' will go away in time," Erdogan wrote. "But we will keep asking those questions, which are crucial to the criminal investigation in Turkey, but also to Khashoggi's family and loved ones."

Erdogan on Saturday said he passed on audio recordings of Khashoggi's killing to the US, the UK, France, Germany, and Saudi Arabia.

What we know about the investigation into Khashoggi's disappearance and death

There appears to be video footage of Khashoggi entering the consulate. Turkish officials have said that some footage from it mysteriously disappeared.

Local police were examining video footage from security cameras in the area, and on October 15 police entered the consulate to investigate for the first time. Erdogan said the next day that investigators found some surfaces that had been newly painted over.

Turkish officials allege that the Saudi government sent a 15-man team to Istanbul via private jets to kill Khashoggi at the consulate. The AP described Turkish media as saying the team included "Saudi royal guards, intelligence officers, soldiers, and an autopsy expert."

Turkish media published what it said were videos of Saudi intelligence officers entering and leaving Turkey via Istanbul's airport.

Citing an unnamed US official, The Post reported on October 7 that Turkish investigators believed Khashoggi was killed and his body most likely dismembered, placed in boxes, and flown out of the country. But some reports suggest Khashoggi's body may have been dissolved with acid.

A senior official who spoke to The Times said Turkish officials believed the team used a bone saw to dismember Khashoggi's body.

The Guardian reported last month that officials were looking for a black van with diplomatic number plates that was seen departing the consulate roughly two hours after Khashoggi went in. They also thought Khashoggi's Apple Watch could provide clues about what happened to him, though experts have cast doubt on that claim.

A Post report published on October 11 described several unnamed Turkish and US officials as saying the Turkish government told US officials it had audio and video recordings suggesting that a team of Saudis killed Khashoggi.

The newspaper quoted one official as saying the audio recording indicated that Khashoggi was "interrogated, tortured, and then murdered," adding that both Khashoggi's voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic could be heard on the recording.

The recording "lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered," The Post's source said.

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 16 that Turkish officials shared with the US and Saudi Arabia details of an audio recording said to illustrate how Khashoggi was beaten, drugged, and ultimately killed in the Saudi consul general's office minutes after entering the consulate.

The Journal described people familiar with the matter as saying the recording included a voice that could be heard urging the consul to leave the room, as well as a voice of a person Turkish officials identified as a forensic specialist urging people nearby to listen to music as he dismembered the body.

In a Times report on October 17, a senior Turkish official described audio recordings suggesting that Khashoggi's fingers were cut off shortly after he arrived at the consul and that he was eventually beheaded.

A Turkish official on October 19 said investigators were looking into the possibility that Khashoggi's remains were taken to a nearby forest or to another city in the country.

On October 22, CNN reported that surveillance footage suggested the Saudis involved in the operation had a man wear Khashoggi's clothing, a fake beard, and glasses around Istanbul in an attempt to act as a body double.

The Post quoted a diplomat familiar with the deliberations as saying the Saudis decided not to move forward with the story because the double appeared too "flawed" in the footage.

Saudi officials who spoke with the AP acknowledged that a body double was used but said it was part of a plan to kidnap rather than kill Khashoggi.

Meanwhile, Reuters and The Post reported on October 25 that CIA Director Gina Haspel heard audio of the killing while visiting Turkey that week.

Khashoggi's last words were "I'm suffocating ... Take this bag off my head, I'm claustrophobic," according to a Turkish journalist, Nazif Karaman, who told Al Jazeera on Sunday that he listened to audio of Khashoggi's death recorded at the consulate. According to Karaman, the killing lasted roughly seven minutes.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday said Canadian intelligence had listened to recordings of Khashoggi's killing.

"Canada's intelligence agencies have been working very closely on this issue with Turkish intelligence, and Canada has been fully briefed on what Turkey had to share,"Trudeau said.

One of the men involved in Khashoggi's killing told a superior over the phone in Arabic to "tell your boss" that "the deed was done," The Times reported on Monday, citing three people familiar with a recording of Khashoggi's death collected by Turkish intelligence.

US intelligence officials believe it was a reference to Prince Mohammed, though he was not explicitly named, the report said.

The CIA has concluded Prince Mohammed ordered Khashoggi's killing, The Washington Post reported on Friday, contradicting the kingdom's narrative. Officials have reportedly accepted the CIA's assessment with "high confidence."

What Trump and the White House have said about the Khashoggi case

Trump initially expressed concern about the Khashoggi case, then shifted to defending Saudi leaders while exhibiting a reluctance to punish them.

On October 8, he told reporters that he was "concerned about" Khashoggi's disappearance.

"I don't like hearing about it. Hopefully that will sort itself out,"Trump said. "Right now nobody knows anything about it, but there's some pretty bad stories going around. I do not like it."

During an interview with "Fox & Friends" on October 11, Trump said that "we're probably getting closer than you might think" to finding out what happened to Khashoggi, adding that US-Saudi relations were "excellent."

In an interview with Fox News on October 10, the president seemed reluctant to guarantee repercussions against the Saudis — especially in terms of US arms sales to the country — if it turned out that they harmed Khashoggi.

"I think that would be hurting us," he said of stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia. "We have jobs. We have a lot of things happening in this country ... Part of that is what we're doing with our defense systems, and everybody is wanting them, and frankly I think that that would be a very, very tough pill to swallow for our country."

During the interview, Trump said that it was "looking a little bit like" Saudi Arabia was responsible for Khashoggi's disappearance but that "we're going to have to see."

In a "60 Minutes" interview that aired on October 14, Trump said that "we would be very upset and angry" if it turned out the Saudis were involved in Khashoggi's disappearance, adding that the Saudis "deny it every way you can imagine."

The president also reiterated concerns about the economic impact of reducing arms sales to the Saudis.

"I tell you what I don't want to do: Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon ... I don't want to hurt jobs. I don't want to lose an order like that," he said. "There are other ways of punishing, to use a word that's a pretty harsh word, but it's true."

After a phone call with Saudi Arabia's King Salman on October 15, Trump suggested, without evidence, that "rogue killers" could be behind Khashoggi's disappearance and said the king flatly denied any involvement.

On October 16, Trump escalated his defense of the Saudis, suggesting in an interview with the AP that the criticism leveled against the government was another instance of "guilty until proven innocent."

In an interview with Fox Business that aired that evening, Trump said it "would be bad" if it turned out that the Saudis were behind Khashoggi's disappearance, but he emphasized the US-Saudi relationship.

"Saudi Arabia's our partner, our ally against Iran," Trump said. "They've been a great ally to me."

Trump on October 17 said he'd contacted Turkish officials and requested audio and video related to the case, "if it exists."

When asked whether he had sent the FBI to investigate, Trump said, "Why would I tell you?"

Trump stressed the fact that Khashoggi was not a US citizen and boasted about billions of dollars in planned US arms sales to the Saudis.

When asked by reporters on October 18 whether he believes Khashoggi is dead, Trump said, "It certainly looks that way to me."

The president also said there would be "very severe" consequences if investigations into Khashoggi's disappearance conclude the Saudis are responsible.

"We're waiting for the results of about — there are three different investigations, and we should be able to get to the bottom fairly soon," Trump said at the time, adding that he plans to make a "very strong statement" once they've concluded.

After the Saudis acknowledged Khashoggi's death, Trump said he found their explanation about how he died credible and offered his support to the crown prince.

In an interview with The Post published October 20, Trump described the crown prince as "a strong person, he has very good control."

"He's seen as a person who can keep things under check," Trump added. "I mean that in a positive way."

Trump also said he didn't think Prince Mohammed should be replaced, describing the controversial 33-year-old as Saudi Arabia's best option. The president expressed some doubts to The Post, however, saying that "obviously there's been deception, and there's been lies."

The president told reporters on October 22 that he wasn't satisfied with what he'd heard from the Saudis about Khashoggi's death, adding, "We're going to get to the bottom of it."

Trump on October 23 described Khashoggi's killing as one of the worst cover-ups in history.

Additionally, the president said he'd leave any ramifications against the Saudis up to Congress.

Trump told reporters on November 7 that he was consulting with Congress on how to respond to the killing, adding that he would have "a very strong opinion" to offer on the subject next week.

The president on Saturday responded to reports the CIA concluded Prince Mohammed ordered the killing by touting America's partnership with the Saudis. 

“We...have a great ally in Saudi Arabia, "Trump said. "They give us a lot of jobs...a lot of business, a lot of economic development."

The president claimed he hadn't been briefed on the CIA assessment yet, but a report from The Washington Post suggests Trump had already been shown evidence of Price Mohammed's alleged involvement in Khashoggi's killing by intelligence officials. 

Khashoggi's fiancée has called on Trump to do more

Cengiz urged Trump in an op-ed article for The Post, published on October 9, to "shed light" on his disappearance. She added that she and Khashoggi "were in the middle of making wedding plans, life plans," when he disappeared.

On October 10, Trump said that he had spoken with the Saudi government about Khashoggi and that he was working closely with the Turkish government to get to the bottom of what happened. He would not say whether he believed the Saudis were responsible for the journalist's disappearance.

The president also said he invited Cengiz to the White House.

Cengiz wrote in an op-ed article for The Times published on October 13: "In recent days, I saw reports about President Trump wanting to invite me to the White House. If he makes a genuine contribution to the efforts to reveal what happened inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul that day, I will consider accepting his invitation."

Pompeo went to Saudi Arabia to discuss the case with the king

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Riyadh on October 16 to discuss the Khashoggi case with King Salman. A State Department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, told The Times that Pompeo"thanked the king for his commitment to supporting a thorough, transparent, and timely investigation of Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance."

Later in the day, Pompeo met with Prince Mohammed for roughly 35 to 40 minutes.

"We are strong and old allies," the crown prince told reporters as he met with Pompeo. "We face our challenges together."

After his meetings, Pompeo said the Saudi leadership "strongly denied any knowledge of what took place in their consulate in Istanbul."

"We had direct and candid conversations," Pompeo said. "I emphasized the importance of conducting a thorough, transparent, and timely investigation, and the Saudi leadership pledged to deliver precisely on that."

The secretary of state said he believed there was a "serious commitment to determine all the facts and ensure accountability, including accountability for Saudi Arabia's senior leaders or senior officials."

Pompeo added: "We're going to give them the space to complete the investigation of this incident."

The US received a $100 million payment from Saudi Arabia that day. The timing of the payment raised questions, but the State Department said it had no connection to Pompeo's visit.

After returning to the US, Pompeo said he told Trump the US "ought to give" the Saudis "a few more days" to complete an investigation before deciding "how or if the United States should respond to the incident surrounding Mr. Khashoggi."

"There are lots of stories out there about what has happened," Pompeo said at the White House. "We are going to allow the process to move forward."

On October 18, ABC News cited a senior Turkish official as saying the Turks let Pompeo listen to audio and view a transcript offering evidence that Khashoggi was killed. Pompeo promptly denied ever hearing or seeing such a recording, and Ankara's top diplomat subsequently denied supplying any audio to the secretary of state.

Pompeo said on October 23 that the US would take "appropriate actions" against people it has identified as connected to Khashoggi's killing.

"We have identified at least some of the individuals responsible, including those in the intelligence services, the royal court, the foreign ministry, and other Saudi ministries who we suspect to have been involved in Mr. Khashoggi's death," Pompeo said, adding that the repercussions could include revoking visas or imposing economic sanctions.

Pompeo had a call with Prince Mohammed on Sunday in which he told the Saudi leader the US would hold accountable everyone involved in Khashoggi's death, The Guardian reported.

The US intelligence community reportedly knew about a Saudi plot to capture Khashoggi

A Post report on October 10 said US intelligence intercepts showed that Prince Mohammed sought to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and detain him there.

The newspaper said the intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan were described by US officials familiar with the intelligence.

Under a directive signed in 2015, the US intelligence community has a "duty to warn" people — including those who are not US citizens — who it believes are at risk of being kidnapped, seriously hurt, or killed. This directive was a central aspect of the conversation about the US's response to Khashoggi's disappearance.

The White House and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. A representative for the National Security Council declined to comment.

But a State Department spokesman, Robert Palladino, told reporters that the US government did not have prior knowledge of a Saudi plot to capture or harm Khashoggi.

Trump is under mounting pressure to address the situation more forcefully

Senators on both sides of the aisle had expressed serious concerns about Khashoggi's disappearance. And those who commented about the Saudi government's announcement of Khashoggi's death expressed doubt about the Saudis' explanation.

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he believed the Saudis were"buying time and buying cover."

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said: "The announcement that Jamal Khashoggi was killed while brawling with a team of more than a dozen dispatched from Saudi Arabia is not credible. If Khashoggi was fighting inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he was fighting for his life with people sent to capture or kill him.

"The Kingdom and all involved in this brutal murder must be held accountable, and if the Trump Administration will not take the lead, Congress must."

"To say that I am skeptical of the new Saudi narrative about Mr. Khashoggi is an understatement,"said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a top Senate Republican, adding, "It's hard to find this latest 'explanation' as credible."

Nearly two dozen senators sent a letter to Trump on October 10 invoking the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act of 2016.

The letter — written by Sens. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Bob Menendez, its ranking Democrat — gave the White House 120 days to "determine whether a foreign person is responsible for an extrajudicial killing, torture, or other gross violation of internationally recognized human rights against an individual exercising freedom of expression."

At the end of 120 days, the letter said, Trump is to report back to the committee on the investigation's findings and how his administration plans to respond.

"We request that you make a determination on the imposition of sanctions pursuant to the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act with respect to any foreign person responsible for such a violation related to Mr. Khashoggi," the senators wrote. "Our expectation is that in making your determination you will consider any relevant information, including with respect to the highest ranking officials in the Government of Saudi Arabia."

The letter paves the way for sanctions to be imposed on Saudi Arabia and puts pressure on Trump to investigate Khashoggi's disappearance.

Speaking with reporters about the letter, Corker said, "It's the forcing mechanism to ensure that we use all the resources available to get the bottom of this, and if in fact at the very highest levels of Saudi Arabia they have been involved in doing this, that appropriate steps will be taken to sanction them."

Meanwhile, Graham called for the crown prince to step away from the world stage, describing him as "toxic" in an appearance on "Fox & Friends."

Other Republican senators, including Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Ben Sasse, have also been deeply critical of Saudi Arabia and the US's relationship with it in the wake of Khashoggi's disappearance.

"It's time to rethink America's relationship with the Saudi Kingdom," Paul wrote in an op-ed article for Fox News.

"We can start by cutting the Saudis off," he added. "We should not send one more dime, one more soldier, one more adviser, or one more arms deal to the kingdom."

The UN has called for an independent investigation into the Khashoggi case

Meanwhile, UN experts have called for an independent and international investigation into the case.

"We are concerned that the disappearance of Mr. Khashoggi is directly linked to his criticism of Saudi policies in recent years,"they said in a statement on October 9. "We reiterate our repeated calls on the Saudi authorities to open the space for the exercise of fundamental rights, including the right to life and of expression and dissent."

SEE ALSO: The meteoric rise of Saudi's powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is now suspected of ordering the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi

READ MORE: Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance is an 'embarrassing' 'crisis' for Trump and 'one of the roughest foreign-policy challenges' he's faced yet, experts say

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Trump approved the largest weapons deal in US history — here's what Saudi Arabia is buying

• The highlight of President Donald Trump's trade policy has been the new trade deal with Mexico and Canada — the USMCA.
• The deal must still be approved by Congress.
• Democrats are generally more skeptical of free trade deals.
• They now control the House following the midterms and could vote to reject the deal without some important changes.
• Additionally, some conservative GOP members have raised concerns about provisions in the USMCA that strengthen workplace protections for LGBT workers.

The biggest success of President Donald Trump's prolonged trade battles has come in the form of a revised trade deal with Canada and Mexico. 

But recent statements from key members of Congress have potentially thrown the future of that deal in question.

Creeping doubt from leading Democrats and a group of conservative House members have created fresh concern that the the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was agreed to by the three member countries on September 30, will be able to pass Congress without some significant changes.

Th USMCA, which is primarily an update of the existing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), would make adjustments to rules on cars, dairy, and other goods flowing between the US, Canada, and Mexico.

But some of the smaller details in the agreement could also cause it to hit some snags.

Democratic pushback

The USMCA always faced the headwind that it was moving forward at a heightened period of political uncertainty, such as the presidential changeover in Mexico and the midterm elections in the US.

Before it comes into effect, each country's legislature must pass the USMCA:

• In the US, Trump renegotiated NAFTA under what is known as Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA.
• Under TPA, only a majority of lawmakers need to vote for the USMCA to pass.
• But required waiting periods with TPA mean a vote will likely not come until the next Congress is seated in January.
• So Democrats will have a chance to leave their mark on Trump's agreement, since the president will need to win over at least a handful to pass the deal.

Democrats in general are more skeptical of free trade agreements than their GOP counterparts. The original NAFTA was passed with mostly Republican votes despite being agreed to under President Bill Clinton. Former President Barack Obama, meanwhile, needed extensive GOP support to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Despite not being able to make large changes to the text — that would require Trump to reopen negotiations with Mexico and Canada — legislation can help determine the level of enforcement of certain parts of the USMCA.

Rep. Bill Pascrell, who could lead the critical House Ways and Means Committee next year, told Bloomberg that the USMCA can't pass as is. He said there needs "to be not only changes in the legislation but more enforcement" in the deal to get enough Democrats on board.

Other Democrats have also expressed misgivings. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, considered the frontrunner to be the next House speaker, has called for strengthening the pro-labor and environmental aspects of the deal by making them legally enforceable, instead of just guidelines.

"Most important of all are the enforcement provisions in terms of labor and the environment," Pelosi told The New York Times."Enforcement, enforcement, enforcement."

Read more: A top Republican senator just made it clear that Trump's new trade deal with Mexico and Canada could still fall apart

But amid the early wobbles, most analysts expect the deal to eventually get done. If Democrats don't agree to the deal, Trump could threaten to pull the US out of NAFTA entirely — which would be an economic disaster — and Democrats don't have an alternate track to take.

"We believe that will happen early next year as we don’t believe Democrats will derail the USMCA without a viable alternative just to deprive Trump of a 'win,'" Nancy Vanden Houten, senior economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a post-midterm note to clients.

Conservative pushback

Given Democrats' hesitation, Trump needs near-unanimous support from his own party to ensure the USMCA's passage.

On that front, a small clause in the deal could actually cause a revolt among the GOP.

Forty conservative House members sent a letter to Trump on Friday expressing displeasure with a provision in the USMCA that requires member countries to beef up workplace protections for LGBT people.

The House members argue that the deal could force the US to make significant changes to labor laws to make sexual orientation and gender identity a protected class — or risk getting kicked out of the economically critical deal.

"A trade agreement is no place for the adoption of social policy," the letter said. "It is especially inappropriate and insulting to our sovereignty to needlessly submit to social policies which the United States Congress had so far explicitly refused to accept."

Read more: The US, Canada, and Mexico's new trade pact looks a lot like NAFTA. Here are the key differences between them.

Losing 40 GOP members in the House would require more than 50 Democrats to flip and support the deal for it to pass, which is highly unlikely. 

But making any such changes would be difficult. The deal text is set to be signed at the G20 summit on November 30, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is unlikely to accept any side deals to allow the US to ease up the protections.

But without those changes, conservatives say the deal could be in trouble.

"This is language that is going to cause a lot of people to reconsider their support of the trade agreement, and to the point that it may endanger the passage of the trade agreement unless something is done," GOP Rep. Doug Lamborn told Politico on Friday.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Trump once won a lawsuit against the NFL — but the result was an embarrassment

Change can be hard, especially when it comes to your inbox. 

Over the last few months, Google has been rolling out its new Gmail design, and some users aren't so keen on its look and feel. 

The biggest shock seems to be coming from Gmail's new default view, which is much more bubbly and shows icons on the inbox home screen if there are any attachments within an email -- like images, slides, documents or spreadsheets. 

Google has stopped allowing users to revert to the old version of its email product. However, there is a workaround that should bring some sanity back into your workflow if the new design is too much for you. 

Here's how to get your inbox looking like the older version of Gmail: 

SEE ALSO: I stopped making lunch for a week and switched to Ritual, the order-ahead app sweeping San Francisco that lets you skip the line. Here's what I found.

Click on the settings gear in the top right hand corner.

Then click on "Density Display."

From there, you'll be able to choose your view. The "default" view has the new bubbly design and attachment icons that can be seen right from the inbox.

• Silicon Valley-based digital health venture firm Rock Health recently made its first forays into the addiction treatment space, an estimated $35 billion industry.
• Bill Evans, Rock Health's managing director, called addiction treatment"among the largest opportunities to deliver tremendous value to patients and the healthcare system."
• In a new report, researchers at Evans' firm lay out what they look for in a startup that claims to help treat addiction — along with the red flags they avoid.

With more than 20 million Americans currently living with addiction and a treatment market that's estimated to be a $35 billion industry, it's clear to the folks at one venture capital firm that the problem is an area ripe for new, tech-driven solutions.

"We see this as an exciting space with significant potential to have a positive impact,"Bill Evans, the managing director of the firm — a Silicon Valley-based digital health fund called Rock Health — told Business Insider.

In the past, Rock Health has backed buzzy startups like Virta Health, which boldly claims to reverse diabetes without drugs using Silicon Valley's favorite diet, as well as Sano, a startup that aims to make a non-invasive blood sugar monitor.

And recently, they funded some of their first addiction therapeutics platforms, such as Marigold Health, a brand new tool that links people with addiction to text-based peer support.

But choosing the right addiction-treatment startup to fund is hard work. Although thousands of apps currently claim to help treat everything from alcoholism to opioid addiction, very few are truly equipped to help make a dent in the problem, according to Evans and his team.

So in a recent report, the researchers at Rock Health outline what makes a startup in the addiction space worth backing. They also lay out several red flags they aim to avoid.

One of the 'largest opportunities to deliver tremendous value to patients and the healthcare system'

One of Rock Health's main criteria for backing an addiction-focused startup is ensuring that it's grounded in comprehensive research, Chipper Stotz, one of the report's authors, told Business Insider.

That's not always an easy task. With thousands of apps currently available that claim to treat some aspect of substance use disorder — whether it's curbing alcohol cravings or working up the courage to attend a peer support group meeting — it can be difficult to distinguish a legitimate tool from a scam.

"As an industry there are 100s if not 1000s of apps that might 'help' with substance use disorder, but whether they're actually collecting data on their efficacy and viability is another matter," Stotz said.

Two startups in the report that Rock Health felt met these criteria were Marigold Health, a platform that links people with addiction to text-based peer support, and Chrono Therapeutics, which uses a combination of wearable patches and an app to help people quit smoking.

Read more: A 22-year-old Johns Hopkins dropout is pioneering a new way to treat drug addiction using your phone, and health VCs are lining up to invest

Evans believes there will be a shift in addiction treatment spending toward more services that take after the Marigold model, something that he said makes the industry "among the largest opportunities to deliver tremendous value to patients and the healthcare system."

Something that 'works better than the current gold standard of treatment'

To ensure that a startup is worthy of their investment dollars, Stotz and his peers at Rock Health look for at least two key things, he said:

• Are they working with academic medical centers, such as the University of California, San Francisco's Headache Center or the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Medicine?
• Do they have a full-time staff dedicated to collecting that evidence-based data?

"We're not looking at solutions that are pen-to-napkin scenarios," said Stotz. "We're really looking for evidence-based programs and solutions that have had some success in different trials."

Those trials could be large peer-reviewed papers or smaller-scale clinical trials. The most important factor is that there's data behind the program. This isn't just important from a patient perspective, Stotz said. It's also vital to encourage buy-in from insurance providers who are considering whether to cover the cost of an intervention.

"Providers want to see that [a tool] works better than the current gold standard of treatment," Stotz said.

Areas ripe for a tech solution

Although addiction treatment models have been around for decades, many of them aren't well-regulated, and the quality and kind of care can differ immensely from place to place. Patients in one zip code, for example, may get one kind of treatment, while patients in another are offered an entirely different set of options.

Medication-assisted treatment, for example, is largely regarded as the gold standard for treating opioid use disorder, or addiction to painkillers like fentanyl or morphine. The treatment involves providing patients with access to medications such as buprenorphine and naltrexone which have been shown to curb deaths from the disorder.

But very few rehabilitation facilities offer the treatment, instead pushing patients to completely abstain from all medications.

Read more: Most rehabs don't offer a science-backed treatment for drug addiction. A new initiative aims to change that.

"The great majority of people seeking treatment do not receive anything approximating evidence-based care," the report reads.

New digital solutions could help avoid this type of situation by capturing more data on a more consistent basis, allowing clinicians to see how well a program is working and tweak it accordingly.

Digital tools could help in another way, too: they can help ensure that patients have more regular and consistent contact with the support systems they need to stay healthy.

That continuous support might take one of many forms, whether it's texting with a therapist, video calling a peer group, or doing text-based cognitive behavioral therapy, a heavily researched clinical approach to mental illness that encourages people to examine how they react to challenging situations.

"Ongoing support is really critical," Stotz said.

SEE ALSO: A 22-year-old Johns Hopkins dropout is pioneering a new way to treat drug addiction using your phone, and health VCs are lining up to invest

DON'T MISS: Most rehabs don't offer a science-backed treatment for drug addiction. A new initiative aims to change that.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The first woman in space almost didn't make it back to Earth and she had to keep it a secret for 30 years

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald."

Many "Harry Potter" fans pride themselves on their knowledge of J.K. Rowling's intricate, magical world — which inevitably means that any newly introduced information will be dissected and analyzed. 

"Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" has many flaws, but constantly contradicting "Harry Potter" canon is among its worst missteps.

Here are eight glaring inconsistencies that are sure to bother shrewd fans of the franchise.

Newt uses "Accio" to retrieve his Niffler, which isn't supposed to be possible.

After the premiere of the first "Fantastic Beasts" film, many fans wondered why Newt couldn't simply use the famous retrieval spell "Accio" to round up his escaped creatures.

Rowling took to her website to answer the valid question: "'Accio' only works on inanimate objects," she wrote.

Read more: 12 confounding 'Fantastic Beasts' and 'Harry Potter' questions J.K. Rowling has since explained about the Wizarding World

"While people or creatures may be indirectly moved by 'Accio-ing' objects that they are wearing or holding, this carries all kinds of risks because of the likelihood of injury to the person or beast attached to an object travelling at close to the speed of light."

This explanation makes perfect sense — but maybe Rowling forgot her own rule. Newt can specifically be heard saying "Accio Niffler" in "Crimes of Grindelwald" to summon the creature into his arms.

Apparently, making an Unbreakable Vow causes scars to form on your hand.

In one confusing sub-plot, newly appointed Auror Tina Goldstein is trying to uncover the identity and motives of a strange wizard, Yusuf Kama. She notices scars lining his right hand and tells Newt that the markings "suggest an Unbreakable Vow."

We know that making an Unbreakable Vow involves grasping another person's right hand while a third person (a "Bonder") uses their wand to weave a stream of fire around the handshake. But we have never seen this practice leave any kind of scarring on either party.

In "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Narcissa Malfoy has Severus Snape make an Unbreakable Vow so he will protect her son, Draco. If the Vow were to leave suspicious scars, as Tina suggests, someone at Hogwarts — or another Death Eater — would have noticed.

The Unbreakable Vow carries severe, deadly consequences if broken, so it's hard to imagine that anybody would simply disregard Snape (a noted double-agent) making one with anybody.

Minvera McGonagall makes a cameo before she was born.

"Crimes of Grindelwald" brought back beloved "Harry Potter" character Minvera McGonagall for two separate scenes, but it doesn't make any sense that she's there.

She first appeared in Dumbledore's classroom. Dumbledore, who was in the middle of teaching students, told the young wizards to exit the room and follow Professor McGonagall. She also appears, played by Fiona Glascott, in a flashback to when Newt and Leta Lestrange were students at Hogwarts. 

Newt began as a first-year at Hogwarts in 1908. The film is set in 1927. McGonagall was not born until 1935.

McGonagall's birth year can be calculated from her Pottermore biography (written by Rowling herself) and from McGonagall's own words in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." She tells Dolores Umbridge that, in 1995, she had been teaching at Hogwarts for 39 years.

If she began teaching at Hogwarts in 1956 after working at the Ministry for two years immediately after graduation, this places her graduation in 1954, her first year in 1947, and her birth in 1935.

Additionally, as we explain here, Minerva McGonagall has the surname of her Muggle father — which makes it impossible that the McGonagall in "Crimes of Grindelwald" is meant to be one of her family members.

DevOps is going from buzzword to serious business.

The term DevOps combines the words "development" and "operations," and it refers to the tools and practices that help engineers fix and deliver code faster and more frequently. Development teams large and small are turning to DevOps as a way to keep up with the increasing importance of software to modern business. 

In fact, according to LinkedIn, a DevOps engineer is the most in-demand job recruiters are looking to fill today. Companies are increasingly looking for the best DevOps tools to use, as well, and more businesses are launching DevOps teams to adopt those practices.

DevOps startups are also a gold mine for investors. Before, venture capitalists often said "pass" to startups aimed at software engineers. But now, investors have gone all in, throwing millions of dollars at startups like PagerDuty. The valuations for DevOps companies are multiplying as well.

And in case you're wondering, IT Central Station also reviewed the top 20 cybersecurity companies in the industry.

So which DevOps companies are the best, according to users? Here's a list of the top 18 DevOps companies, based on user reviews from IT Central Station.

Splunk

Market Cap: $14.33 billion

Rating: 4.4 / 5 stars

Product: Splunk

RankingScore: 87

Category: Log Management

Most Compared to: IBM QRadar (19%), LogRhythm NextGen Siem (13%), ArcSight (8%)

Splunk analyzes huge amounts of data to help IT and developer teams figure out exactly what's going on with their systems. It can make predictions about performance, and manage the system logs when a service goes down or something otherwise goes wrong. It's also used by business teams to analyze huge amounts of data and give insights into trends. 

Based in San Francisco, Splunk has more than 12,000 customers in over 110 countries.

Cisco's AppDynamics

Market Cap: $202.65 billion

Rating: 4.2 / 5 stars

Product: AppDynamics

RankingScore: 76

Category: Application Performance Management

Most Compared to: Dynatrace (25%), CA APM (11%), New Relic APM (10%)

AppDynamics can track application performance to make sure software is working correctly, as well as monitor how customers interact with an application. It also helps companies see their infrastructure's impact on application performance.

AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal sold his company to Cisco for $3.7 billion last year, right before AppDynamics was planning to go public — a move that was surprising some of its bankers. He spent four days without sleep struggling with the decision, but in the end, Cisco made an offer that was nearly twice what AppDynamics was pricing at its IPO. Bansal grew AppDynamics to a $1 billion company in under seven years.

Dynatrace

Market Cap: private

Rating: 4.4 / 5 stars

Product: Dynatrace

RankingScore: 92

Category: Application Performance Management

Most Compared to: AppDynamics (23%), New Relic APM (16%), CA APM (10%)

Dynatrace, a Massachusetts-based company, helps IT departments in medium and large businesses manage performance for a company's programs and systems. It monitors, manages and optimizes business-critical applications, which helps companies track and understand the performance of their software applications.

• Amazon announced it's splitting its second headquarters between Long Island City, a neighborhood of Queens, New York, and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia. 
• The megacompany said it will bring more than 25,000 high-paying jobs to each city.
• Business Insider looked at some of the high-paying roles at Amazon's current Seattle headquarters to get a sense of what jobs could come to its second headquarters.

Amazon has at last announced its HQ2 picks: Long Island City, a neighborhood of Queens, New York, and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia.

Amazon HQ2 will likely fundamentally change those two cities. Critics have predicted traffic snarls, rising rent prices, and gentrification, while proponents are expecting a surge of jobs and economic opportunities.

Indeed, Amazon said the HQ2s will bring 25,000 jobs to each city.

To figure out what those jobs are, we took a closer look at Amazon's first headquarters in Seattle, since it stands to reason that many jobs commonly found at Amazon's current headquarters would be in demand once a second headquarters is established.

Business Insider sifted through the 16,300 Seattle-based occupations and salaries Amazon employees shared on Glassdoor to find jobs that earn more than $90,000 a year and received the most reviews from Seattle-based Amazon employees. We also included the job descriptions for each role, as described in recent Amazon job postings. 

Based on that analysis, here's a look at some of the most lucrative jobs Amazon HQ2 might bring to its future home city:

SEE ALSO: A head recruiter at Amazon says the biggest mistake people make on their résumés comes down to their job title

DON'T MISS: Amazon is launching a new delivery program and hiring thousands of drivers, with a warning against 'peeing in bottles'

Data engineer

Data engineers construct and maintain data pipelines and systems.

Average annual salary, according to 68 Glassdoor reviews: $101,057

Operations manager

Operations managers oversee teams that handle inventory management, purchases, and work flow. 

Median annual salary, according to 41 Glassdoor reviews: $106,000

Business intelligence engineer

Business intelligence engineers work with data to ensure more efficiency and better market understanding.

Average annual salary, according to 40 Glassdoor reviews: $108,109

• In an interview with Axios, Tim Cook said that regulation was "inevitable."
• On the issue of user privacy, Cook said, "we have to admit when the free market is not working. And it hasn't worked here."
• Previously, Cook urged other tech companies to self-regulate, saying Facebook had failed in that regard.

Apple CEO Tim Cook says regulation is coming but plans to roll with the punches.

In an interview with Axios, previewed on their site early Sunday, Cook told Mike Allen that despite his general dislike of government regulation on business, "we have to admit when the free market is not working." In regards to user privacy, Cook said, "it hasn't worked here."

Cook was blunt in warning "I think the Congress and the administration at some point will pass something." 

Previously, Cook has advocated for self-regulation, particularly around privacy issues. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cook told Recode, "I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation, however, I think we’re beyond that here.”

Read more: There's only one color you should consider if you're thinking about buying the iPhone XS

Recently, however, Cook has begun to discuss government regulation as an important aspect of the recent cultural discussion happening around user privacy. In a Vice News interview, Cook said, "some level of government regulation is important."

Cook told Axios that he welcomes coming regulation in the realm of privacy, arguing pitting privacy and profits or innovation against each other was "a false choice."

Besides his recent promotion of some regulation, Cook has shown a willingness to work with government officials, having met with President Donald Trump multiple times in 2018.

SEE ALSO: How Slack's CTO survived 2 failed game startups and a painful sale to Yahoo to build a $7.1 billion company

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The NFL is using this football helmet that morphs on impact to reduce head injuries

• Not everyone wants to stay in on Thanksgiving.
• There are a number of restaurants that will remain open on Turkey Day this year.
• Keep in mind that many of these chains operate as franchises — so results may vary.
• If you're set on eating out on Thanksgiving, make sure to call ahead to ask about the restaurant's hours.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is the day we dedicate to stuffing ourselves in the presence of friends and family.

But if you'd rather go out to eat — or you end up burning the turkey to a crisp — don't worry. A number of restaurants will remain open on Thanksgiving.

Offers.com compiled a list of restaurants that are set to open their doors on Thanksgiving. Keep in mind that some of these chains will only be open on a regional basis. Others may be closed depending on the franchisee.

So, if you're planning on spending Turkey Day at one of these eateries, it's better to be safe and call ahead.

With that in mind, here are restaurants that are going to be open in some capacity on Thanksgiving:

SEE ALSO: Walmart is kicking off Black Friday on Thanksgiving with millions of free cookies and cups of coffee

DON'T MISS: The true story behind Thanksgiving is a bloody struggle that decimated the population and ended with a head on a stick

Applebee's

Want to eat good in the neighborhood on Thanksgiving?

A number of Applebee's restaurants will remain open on Thanksgiving, as well as Christmas Day, this year. And all Applebee's will be opened the day before Thanksgiving and on Christmas Eve, with reduced hours.

A restaurant spokesperson told Business Insider that prospective patrons should contact their local Applebee's to determine the restaurant's holiday hours.

Bahama Breeze

A Bahama Breeze spokesperson confirmed that select locations will remain open on Thanksgiving. The chain will offer up a tropical Thanksgiving menu.

Bob Evans

Offers.com reported that Bob Evans will be welcoming in dine-in customers on Thanksgiving, although restaurant hours will vary by location.