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Buffon: 'Italy psychological shift'
By Football Italia staff
Gigi Buffon admits Italy lost confidence, momentum and enjoyment after a 1-1 draw with Macedonia. “We need a psychological shift.”
Giorgio Chiellini’s header was cancelled out by Palermo forward Aleksandar Trajkovski in Turin, the first time the Azzurri have dropped points in this World Cup qualifying group apart from the head-to-heads with Spain.
“It was not an exciting performance and perhaps the most worrying aspect is that in our first year, it was fuelled by enthusiasm and on the ascendant. The defeat to Spain damaged our confidence and certainty, as we probably thought we were at a superior level to what we really were,” Buffon told Rai Sport.
“We are still carrying the after-effects of that match. If we had won 1-0 tonight, I don’t think it would’ve changed anything in terms of performance as a team, as individuals, in the fluidity of our play.
“The draw only exacerbated the need to emerge from this difficult moment. Some of us, including myself, must take the responsibility and help the others to be part of a group that has enthusiasm, ideas and wants to go to the World Cup.”
The 3-0 loss to Spain in Madrid not only made it clear Italy wouldn’t top the group, and therefore had to go via play-offs, but also sapped enthusiasm from the side.
“We certainly lacked confidence and that is probably the fault of the match at the Bernabeu. It damaged our self-belief a great deal.
“At times, we were lacking something, but the more representative players must take the reins and help block off a negative situation.
“We must get back to enjoying our football, as it’s the only way to unleash creativity, to shake off fear and be less inhibited when playing. If we get sucked into the vortex of negativity and let our heads drop, we’ll only do worse.
“At this moment we absolutely need a psychological shift, as what we saw tonight is not the team we were in the first year.
“This is a moment where in my view those who know the situation must take on responsibility. We are talking about Italy, we are talking about the World Cup, and football is the treasure of our nation. We mustn’t feel self-pity, we need to get the energy to play another game and I hope against Albania the team proves this is not who we are.
“We need to try something and shake off the tension. We must give more, transmit something to teammates and find the key to be more positive, building up our path.”
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We at ToughPigs, in a joint effort with the Muppet Mindset, have news that will surely be noteworthy for the Muppet fan community and beyond: Steve Whitmire, performer of Kermit the Frog since 1990, is no longer working with the Muppets.
Over the past few months, several of our readers have noticed clues, forcing us to wonder if Steve was absent from the Muppets. For example, his characters weren’t being used in the recent “Muppet Thought of the Week” videos, and eagle-eared viewers noted that Peter Linz performed Statler in some recent advertisements. We chose not to comment on the speculation until we had concrete evidence one way or another. We reached out to the Muppets Studio at Disney for comment, who has confirmed the following facts:
Steve Whitmire is no longer working with the Muppets.
Matt Vogel will be the new performer for Kermit the Frog.
We will be seeing Matt’s first footage as Kermit in a “Muppets Thought of the Week” video next week.
Anything beyond these statements is pure speculation, which I’m sure many of us will be doing until we know more.
Of course, we’re still shocked by this news. Steve Whitmire has been a mainstay of the Muppets since 1978, starting on The Muppet Show. And for the past 27 years, he has been responsible for performing Jim Henson’s most personal creation, Kermit the Frog. We are more than aware of the gravity attached to the end of Steve’s tenure.
The other half of this bombshell is that Matt Vogel, Muppet performer since 1996, will be Kermit’s new performer. The irony that Matt previously performed Kermit imitator Constantine in Muppets Most Wanted is not lost on us. However, Matt has proven to be a talented and professional torch bearer for other classic characters, such as Floyd, Lew Zealand, and The Count, so we are intrigued to see how he will continue Kermit’s legacy.
And yet, we still have many, many questions. We don’t know anything about the reasons for Steve’s departure. We don’t know what will happen with his characters, both the ones he inherited (like Beaker) or the ones he originated (like Rizzo the Rat). With hope, we will have answers to these questions and more as time goes on.
We wish Steve the best in whatever his next projects will be, and we wish Matt Vogel the best of luck as he takes on one of the most iconic characters of all time.
Click here to drop a Muppet news bombshell on the ToughPigs forum!
by Joe Hennes – Joe@ToughPigs.com
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Earlier today, noted hater of streaming music Taylor Swift published an open letter to Apple, blasting its decision to not pay artists during the three-month free trial for Apple Music. A few hours later, it appears that Apple got the message, and is changing its policy on paying artists.
In a series of messages posted on Twitter, Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue (also known as Apple’s Mr Fix-It) reaffirmed the company’s dedication to indie artists, and more importantly, announced that Apple will pay artists for streams during the three-month trial period.
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In the wake of the Apple Music announcement, record labels and artists have been appreciative of Apple’s industry-high revenue-sharing offer (Apple is offering artists 71.5% of revenues, versus a standard 70%), but labels — in particular those representing indie artists — blasted the company’s decision not to pay artists anything during customers’ three-month free trial.
Although Apple argued that the higher revenue share would lead to greater payouts over time, artists worried that anyone releasing a new album during the first three months of Apple Music’s existence would receive diddly squat.
Although this is a big win for Ms Swift, there’s a few questions that still need answering: namely, will 1989 now be available on Apple Music, and how much revenue will Apple be sharing with artists during the 3-month trial period?
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Update: According to Recode’s Peter Kafka, Apple will be paying artists on a different, per-stream basis during the free trial, rather than the revenue-sharing model used for paying subscribers.
Contact the author at chris@gizmodo.com.
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After some time, coming with another review. This time, a pair of V2 Zebras from Sam, according to him this are his own batch from his own factory. These were sent for free for an unbiased and honest review.
Feel free to help spotting mistakes/flaws that I might have missed as this time I don’t have retails to compare unlike other V2s. At the same time, have in mind stuff that varies between sizes or even each pair. Not all retails look the same.
SELLER, SHIPPING AND PACKAGING
Sam communicated quite fast through Whatsapp (all his information will be at the end of the review), always answering within a few hours depending on how busy he was.
He shipped through EMS on the 19th and arrived on the 26th. No issues with customs or anything. Was delivered to my house through Correos which is the local/national shipping company for Spain, so depends on where you live, will be different. EMS is definitely safer regarding customs compared to DHL, although a bit slower most of the time.
Regarding packaging, it came double boxed, and this is the box that has arrived from China in the best condition. Almost flawless. Hell, it’s even in better condition than some of my retail boxes. Not a big deal for most people, but nice to see. Depending on the shipping company they might end up better or worse though.
The shoes came in independent plastic bags inside the box just so they arrived in good condition. There were included a business card with his information and a keychain just to match the shoes. Nothing uncommon, but always nice to receive a little gift!
THE SHOES VS RETAIL
As I said, I don’t have retails in hand to compare unlike on the Breds review, but will try my best to compare both.
The box label looks nice. No apparent big flaws. Just so you don’t get called out when your friends check your collection at your house or you don’t have to hide the box or something. This is the US retail label by the way. Not the international/european one.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Here you can have an overall view of them. They look good for the most part. But as soon as I took them out of the box something was wrong. Everything behind the toebox is higher than it should be. I compared the height of the ankle collar on this pair and a retail bred. It’s 0.5-1 cm too high on this pair of zebras. It’s weird though because on feet, it’s not noticeable and they look almost perfect, and on some pictures you can easily tell, in others you can’t.
Compared to the StockX pictures (angle can make a difference here but you can see what I mean), the lower part of the shoe, just above the midsole, it’s a bit too high. This might just be my pair as other pictures on his site look fine or at least better than mine.
The midsole and sole color are pretty accurate compared to others, although even the restock pairs, European and US pairs usually differ a bit in some characteristics as they used different factories.
At first I thought this would be an issue, but on feet (video and pics further down in the review) they look just fine. I also wore this pair a few times and got NOTHING BUT COMPLIMENTS (and this was with people who are sneakerheads and got retail V2s and other stuff too).
Let’s keep going. Checking the text on the side, it looks okay. Not too far from the pulltab, it’s slightly thinner and slightly taller than retail (I personally like it this way more than on retails but regarding accuracy, not 1:1, but not noticeable unless you have retails side by side) follows the white stripe properly…Nothing wrong.
The pulltab and the heel look fine too. Nothing caught my attention.
One thing that I don’t see mentioned a lot, is the primeknit. This one feels basically like retail, it’s pretty soft and comfy. Why do I mention this? Because I had PK Creams (one of the first batches, don’t know if this has changed) and the primeknit was stiff as fuck and wasn’t near as comfortable after a long time as retails or other reps, and honestly at first I cared mostly about how 1:1 the shoe was, but now, I rather have a minor flaw that’s not noticeable on foot than having an uncomfortable shoe. For example, the primeknit on the SS is lightly softer than retails and is comfortable af and I love wearing them even if they aren’t as 1:1 as other top tier batches. Same goes for these zebras.
Boost looks good. This part is inconsistent as fuck with every new V2 release (my retail Creams, which I sold long time ago, had the boost looking like melted marshmallow) so it isn’t a great way to LC or compare. It’s pretty soft, more or less like retail and feels basically the same on foot. I’d say that it’s more defined than retails for the most part though.
The black stuff on the ankle collar seems to be the black primeknit showing through the collar material, thought it was a stain but seems like I was wrong taking a closer look. Besides that, this part looks alright too, not 1:1 in shape and materials as retails, but that’s common on reps on this part.
The underside of the insole looks really damn close to retail compared to other reps, specially the text on the side. The adidas YEEZY print isn’t good though, pretty blurry. Not a big deal if you’re gonna wear these honestly, just don’t be a d*ck and try to scam people.
The size tag inside the shoe is fine, the UPC code matches with the box, the font isn’t 1:1 but it’s pretty darn close anyway. Has the production date of the Restock Zebras, not the first release. Sam told me they used a retail pair as reference to produce these, and the restock is known to have worse QC and more inconsistency between pairs so that might have something to do with some “supposed flaws” of this pair.
ON FEET
Click on the images to zoom in.
I’d say they looks pretty nice on feet. If you look straight from the floor, it still looks slightly taller than it should be. But if you have someone looking like that to check your shoes you should just smack them or something. As I said I worse this a few times and didn’t have any issue. They’re really nice and wore them for hours and hours without issue.
ON FEET VIDEO
Honestly they look even better on this video than on the pictures. Hopefully you enjoy it!
Video recorded with a Samsung S8, 1080p 60fps.
Conclusion
At first when I got them I thought the height-thing would be an issue. After wearing them and taking some pictures and video, I don’t care at all. They’re awesome. Yes, they can still be improved, but that is what this review is for. No glaring flaws where there usually are, like on the text, stripe height, etc. You won’t be disappointed if you get these, although all I can say is that I can recommend Sam as a seller, no matter which batch you want. He has a huge amount of models on his site, his service is quite nice and you have a trustworthy seller that might not be as busy as others so you can get your stuff quick and easy, at least in my experience.
W2C
He has a lot of shoes while he updates to the most recent batch as soon as possible, at least for the most part. 10% Discount: skru10
Sam’s website: http://www.sneakerkicks.ru/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sneakerkicksru/
Whatsapp: +8618559392863
Email: sneakerkicks@outlook.com
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EXCLUSIVE: It’s been over two months since Wonder Woman opened to a staggering $103.2M and went on to gross close to $800M worldwide for Warner Bros. (with Japan yet to bow). The movie, directed by Patty Jenkins, not only re-invigorated DC movies and the studio itself, but became a symbol of strength for women across the country. Now Jenkins is returning to the director’s chair to helm the second film in the franchise that she was so instrumental in starting.
Last month at Comic-Con, the studio confirmed both a sequel with Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot and a release date of Dec. 13, 2019. However, curiously, there was no deal with Jenkins. Why the delay? Because Jenkins — who was lauded repeatedly during the Women in Film Crystal Awards this year by several of its nominees — expects to be paid substantially more and the same as a male director would receive after such a box office coup. That desire was seconds away from becoming a reality on Thursday evening as a deal was being finalized which would elevate her as the highest-paid female director in town.
And why not? Wonder Woman shattered several glass ceilings at the box office, including the best opening ever for a title by a female director and the best global haul for a live-action film directed by a woman as well as the third-highest grossing film in Warner Bros.’ history (behind only Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight series).
Although no payday was revealed, we understand that her payday and deal is in line with any other director who has performed at this level. A studio source said they were “confident the deal will be reached soon.”
Typically, according to sources, a frosh director on a comic book movie gets $1.5M to $3M, while a director in the realm of Zack Snyder (who is helming DC’s Justice League) received $10M against 10% cash break even for his second DC film Man of Steel. (That’s usually paid out as 20% during pre-production, 60% during production, 10% during post and 10% following).
Wonder Woman continues to show that there’s a big demand and big business for female-led tentpoles after Star Wars Force Awakes, Rogue One, and The Hunger Games trilogy.
Jenkins burst on the scene with the critically acclaimed indie film Monster in 2003 — she wrote and directed while Charlize Theron won Best Actress — then directed a number of TV episodes for such shows as Entourage and The Killing before she was hired on for Wonder Woman. She handled the female super-hero film with a deft hand. Wonder Woman will go over $800M worldwide soon as it opens in Japan on Aug. 25.
Jenkins is repped by CAA, Anonymous Content, and attorney Alan Wertheimer at Jackoway Tyerman Wertheimer Austen Mandelbaum Morris & Klein.
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Taco Bell and Forever 21 super fan Andrew McBurnie. Credit: Taco Bell
Taco Bell and Forever 21 are collaborating on a clothing line. Yes, you read that right.
The collection will include items such as tops, bodysuits, cropped hoodies and anoraks in hunger-inspiring prints. They'll be available at select Forever 21 stores and on the retailer's website starting Oct. 11, following an Oct. 10 preview in downtown Los Angeles with a late-night runway show, music from a band supported by Taco Bell's Feed the Beat initiative and, of course, a taco truck.
The seemingly unlikely pairing is only the latest of its kind as food marketers realize the potential in expanding into the closet. This summer we saw the introduction of a KFC Ltd. collection including jewelry, pillowcases, shirts and socks, quickly followed by McDonald's and Uber Eats giving out items including Big Mac onesies and pillowcases to promote delivery. It's not just fast-food chains trying to up their fashion cred. Cheetos has its own line of everything from clothing to pricey jewels, while Kellogg's and State Bicycle Co. rolled out Froot Loops-inspired wheels.
Forever 21 has come under repeated fire for allegations of copycat designs and rip-off style—most recently the retailer was accused of copying the shirt of a young designer raising money for Planned Parenthood. It's unlikely, though, that someone will surface to say they're already selling pink men's sweatshirts emblazoned with taco patches.
Brittany Creech and McBurnie luv Taco Bell and Forever 21. Credit: Taco Bell
And these days it wouldn't be a campaign, especially one aimed at plenty of teens, without a social media tie-in. Fans can submit photos or videos on social with #F21xTacoBell for the chance to see their imagery incorporated into the Oct. 10 runway event. Models will include Brittany Creech and Andrew McBurnie, who cemented their Taco Bell super fan status by posing for senior high school portraits in Taco Bell restaurants.
Edelman said it is the lead agency on the project, working with Deutsch on creative, Digitas on digital/influencers, Spark Foundry on media and United Entertainment Group on experiential work.
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Five American bitcoin ATM operators have ceased to use Bitcoin Core as their wallet software solution. As a result, 29 bitcoin ATMs will process customer transactions on the bitcoin network via Classic nodes.
One of them, Bitlove, has published a statement explaining this choice:
“Because a functional Bitcoin network is a necessity to our businesses the blockchain debate is more than philosophical for us. We believe that by having larger blocks the physical infrastructure that we are building will have a real chance at becoming viable and successful.” Other four operators include Coinucopia, Herocoin, Tobitcoin and Sumbits.
The total number of affected US BTMs is 29, which is quite a significant percentage since the total number of devices in the country is 259.
Although the change from Bitcoin Core to Bitcoin Classic does not imply any notable difference to customers in terms of usage, every BTM functions as a bitcoin node as well. Therefore, 29 more nodes have been added to Bitcoin Classic, reinforcing the split in the bitcoin community over the way to increase the block size.
The heated debate on the block size is continuing. Following the agreement on 2017 hard fork timeline, reached on 21 February, many important bitcoin players are now turning to Bitcoin Classic, such as Coinbase, Xapo and one of the mining platforms Slush Pool.
As of now, Bitcoin Classic is receiving growing support, as the block size debate is still far from being resolved with a consensus supported by the absolute majority. Yesterday’s release of Bitcoin Core 0.12.0, according to some critics, can intensify the controversies in the coming weeks.
Anna Lavinskaya
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Like so many home bread makers, we started making bread when we learned about the “No Knead Method" popularized by Mark Bittman in The New York Times. The first time we made a loaf of bread at home in our dutch oven, it seemed like a miracle. Just as the recipe promised, it was so delicious, and it was so easy! We were hooked.
We became avid home bakers, and explored all kinds of variations of the basic recipe. Different ratios of flours, the addition of every imaginable ingredient, natural starters, longer fermentation times, and on and on and on … The recipe allowed for a huge amount of experimentation and creativity.
However, the tools available for baking did not. While the super-heated container method for baking produces incredible results, it's dangerous; After pretty much ruining our enameled dutch oven, we started looking for alternatives, and found that the right tool for the job just didn’t exist.
In the name of perfect crust, we had tried just about everything, and we got tired of hefting scorching hot casserole dishes out of the oven. We loved the result of baking in this way, but we were tired of the clunky tools.
We started to ask some questions …
What if you didn’t have to take the baking container out of the oven?
How could we have more control over the shape of the bread?
How could we make a baking device that felt more intentional for the method, but also felt like a classic piece of cookware?
As designers, we always see problems as opportunities. As avid bread makers, we felt motivated to do something about it.
After more than a year of design, development and prototyping, we’ve come up with a simple, elegant solution — The Fourneau Bread Oven — The perfect tool for making the most beautiful and most delicious bread at home.
Whether you are a practiced home baker or just starting to dip your hands in the flour, here’s why we think you’ll love The Fourneau ...
It’s Simple.
Place The Fourneau in your oven to preheat. When your oven gets up to temperature, you just put your dough on the peel and slide it into The Fourneau.
It’s Effective.
The cast iron walls heat the dough evenly, and the enclosed cooking space traps the steam from the baking bread — the magic ingredient for creating a golden, crispy crust.
It’s Easier, and Way Less Messy.
Since it’s designed to work with a bread peel, you simply slide your loaf in like the pros do. The days of tossing your bread into a scorching hot pot are over.
It’s Safer.
There’s no need to remove it from your oven. Just open and close the hatch to capture or release the baking steam.
It’s Versatile.
It accommodates multiple loaf shapes and sizes, giving you the freedom to bake rolls, baguettes, boules or even pizzas.
It’s Durable.
The Fourneau is made in the USA from cast iron. With care and use, it will just keep getting better.
This is a tool that will stand the test of time. We chose to make The Fourneau from cast iron, for it’s beauty, durability, and ability to evenly radiate heat. The peel, a classic bread baking tool, is crafted from solid wood, and has been designed to fit The Fourneau perfectly.
We began the design process by identifying what the tool needed to do in order to be a true improvement. We looked at all kinds of accessories, cookware, and baking products, and sketched hundreds of shapes and orientations. We made sketch models from cardboard and paper to test the size and fit in home ovens. Of all the materials we explored, we decided that cast iron would be the best choice for our baker. After establishing our basic design direction, we brought the design into the computer and worked through countless 3D computer models. Some were complicated, with pins and hinges, some were simple, just two parts. Of course, digital models and mock-ups are awesome but will only get you so far ... we wanted to get baking!
To transition from concept to reality, we started to search for manufacturing partners. We talked with dozens of foundries and learned from them about the possibilities and limitations of working with cast iron. With new perspective on the process of casting iron parts, we revised the design several times until we were ready to make prototypes.
We chose an exciting new method for creating the prototype molds; 3d printed sand molds. Working with a pattern shop in Indiana, we produced the first set and took them to our foundry partner for pouring. A special alloy of iron was mixed, melted, and poured into the molds. After cooling, we took the parts back to Chicago and after trimming, cleaning, and seasoning, we got baking!
Nothing reveals more about a design than high fidelity prototyping; in addition to being able to test the design in our home oven, we were able to get pre-production feedback from the manufacturer. The first prototype round led to new insights and improved our design. In order to have total confidence in our design revision, we made another high fidelity prototype. After baking dozens of loaves and testing it with amateur and professional bakers, we think it's ready to go!
The Fourneau is ready to go into production. We'll work with the same local toolmakers and foundries that created our prototypes to perform the engineering and manufacture of the tooling and set up our initial production run.
While our prototypes were cast in molds made from 3d printed sand, the production Fourneau will be cast in traditional green sand molds. The green sand is formed into a block and the impression of the parts to be cast is pressed into the sand with a tool called a match plate.
The foundry pouring the iron parts for The Fourneau is decades old and routinely produces products for respected, multinational companies. The foundry is staffed with experienced metallurgists and engineers. Because we developed our prototypes at this foundry, the team is already familiar with The Fourneau and its production requirements.
Match plate tooling for The Fourneau will be CNC machined from solid aluminum billets. There are many materials that can be used to make match plates, but aluminum is the best. Because we want to deliver the best possible parts, we've chosen to make the extra investment in aluminum tooling.
The standard peel will be manufactured from solid maple and finished with a food safe mineral oil coating. The profile of the peel is cut using CNC routing and the shaping of the surface is finished by hand sanding and hand oil application. We've partnered with a manufacturer who has more than 20 years of experience making wood products for the kitchen.
*final peel will be solid maple. The peel in this photo is our prototype.
*final peel will be solid maple. The peel in this photo is our prototype.
Strand Design is the collaborative partnership of designers Ted and Sharon Burdett. Founded in 2009, Strand Design has created an impressive breadth of work— from designing and building furniture for the movie industry, to wholesale product manufacture and fulfillment for international retailers. At the core of every project we design, regardless of scale, is a passion for local manufacturing.
You can learn more about us and our work on our website: http://www.stranddesign.org
Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook
Thanks to our bread testers and kitchen companions: Carly Cannel, Kevin Estrada, Joey Nakayama, Virginia Matos, Matthew Seliger, Alexa Lennard, Caitlin Grogan and Nick Martin, Patrick Gipson, Luz Agudelo Gipson, Bob + Lin Burdett, Billy + Katie Burdett, John Sayler Coon, John + Peggy Coon, Thanks for getting your hands in the dough with us.
Huge thanks to Alex and Sandra from Floriole Bakery Chicago, who let us perform a test run in their kitchen using some of their exceptional dough and gave us some great bread wisdom.
Special credit to NMF for amazing footage, guidance, and access to your talent.
Music by Podington Bear and Jahzzar
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"Clearly EPL fans are very passionate, we totally understand that, but we are trying to do something here to disrupt the market and we knew and expected that there will always be people that don't like change," Mr White said.
"We are not moving away from the principle that you have to be an Optus customer to get access to exclusive content from us. In the telco market one of our rivals positions itself as having the network, others position themselves around attractive prices ... we are very deliberately trying to stand apart in the market in offering exclusive content to Optus customers."
Rejecting complaints
Mr White rejected the idea that many Australians would be unable to subscribe for a reasonable price, or that problems with internet connections would hamper the quality of its EPL coverage.
He said customers could take up a postpaid offer on a month-to-month basis to avoid breaking contracts with existing suppliers, and believed most households would have at least one mobile contract up for renewal, which could be switched to an eligible Optus plan.
Ben White is currently acting managing director of Optus' marketing and product division, and helped devise the controversial EPL packages. Optus
He also reiterated earlier claims from Optus that its significant investment in its technology infrastructure would mean viewers would be able to rely on receiving broadcast quality coverage. This has included upgrading equipment in exchanges and increasing the capacity of links into the exchanges, and expanding its content delivery network.
Non-Optus customers hoping the telco will relent on its original idea and offer a Netflix-style subscription to EPL for a monthly fee will be left disappointed though, with Mr White saying it would follow a different model.
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However, he said there would be an, as yet unreleased, launch offer to be announced prior to the season, and that new package options would likely emerge over time.
"There are lots of different types of content delivery models ... we think ours is another very valid model to put into the market as well alongside pay TV, free-to-air and on-demand like Netflix," he said.
"We are very confident that our EPL offering is going to be far superior to what has been seen in Australia to-date, with not just live games, but much better pre-game, half-time and post-game shows and a host of other programs."
He declined to say whether Optus would be creating EPL shows locally, with local hosts, or taking pre-packaged shows from an overseas supplier.
World Cup coverage
While most attention has focused on Optus' acquisition of EPL coverage, perhaps of wider interest in Australia will be the fact that it has also snared the most comprehensive rights to the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
It will share coverage with SBS, but the majority of the tournament's matches will be exclusively live to Optus customers only.
An SBS spokeswoman said that, if Australia qualifies, it has the rights to show any of its matches. SBS has the rights to one live match per day, four matches from the round of 16, two quarter-finals, both semi-finals and the final, as well as a daily highlights show.
Mr White meanwhile, said he didn't expect the lead-up to its World Cup coverage to be subject to the same amount of fan angst as its EPL announcement.
"Obviously the World Cup is still a couple of years away, and I think the market's understanding of what it is we are offering will be clearer ... and people will have a much greater appreciation for what we are doing at that point in time," Mr White said.
"We will also have a road map of the way that we are going to offer content over time, so we could be in a very different world by the time we get to the next World Cup in 2018."
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Do the math, and you’ll find I’m referring to Saturday, Nov. 12, four days after Election Day last year. As I’ll explain in a moment, it took a few extra days to verify that Clinton had won the election on Earth 2.
This Thursday marks 250 days Do the math, and you’ll find I’m referring to Saturday, Nov. 12, four days after Election Day last year. As I’ll explain in a moment, it took a few extra days to verify that Clinton had won the election on Earth 2. This Thursdaysince the Associated Press and other news organizations declared Hillary Clinton to be the “apparent winner” of last year’s presidential election — and six months since Clinton took office. But it’s almost as though the election never ended. Just consider the stories that have dominated the news so far this week:
On Monday morning, Clinton and the rest of the political world awoke to a barrage of incendiary tweets from Donald Trump. “Crooked H is a failed, FAKE PRESIDENT,” said one of them, which linked to a Rasmussen Reports poll showing Clinton’s approval rating at 37 percent.
On Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr announced that he’d call upon former Attorney General Loretta Lynch to testify before his committee next week as part of hearings on whether Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, interfered with the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s private email server.
Also on Tuesday, Fox News’s Sean Hannity revealed what he said was “shocking new evidence” of widespread voter fraud in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states Clinton won by just 7,000 and 17,000 votes, respectively. On Earth 1, Clinton lost Michigan by roughly 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by about 23,000 votes and Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes. academic paper that has widely been discredited.) I’m referring to a I’m referring to a 2014 paper by Jesse Richman, Gulshan Chattha and David Earnest, which posited a high rate of noncitizen voting . The paper, which was cited by Trump in campaign speeches, failed to account for measurement error resulting from citizens who voted but incorrectly identified themselves as noncitizens. Fox News’s Sean Hannity revealed what he said was “shocking new evidence” of widespread voter fraud in(Hannity’s evidence consisted of an
And on Wednesday, White House press secretary Brian Fallon got into a shouting match with reporters at his daily press briefing, triggered by what he later said was frustration over the media’s failure to cover new revelations about Russia’s apparent interference in the 2016 campaign.
These storylines — Trump tweeting something inflammatory about Clinton, Republicans investigating Clinton, Clinton feuding with the press — keep repeating themselves. It sometimes seems as though we’ve spent the six months of Clinton’s presidency trapped in the Most Annoying News Cycle Ever, with no chance of escape. But the truth is that there hasn’t been a whole lot else to talk about. With Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, Clinton has little hope of enacting her legislative agenda. And although North Korea’s increasingly ambitious nuclear tests are a major concern, Clinton’s foreign policy has largely been a continuation of Barack Obama’s and so has seldom made news. At this month’s G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, for instance, the media devoted more coverage to Clinton’s choice of pantsuits than to the G-20’s reaffirmation of the Paris climate accords. So let’s tune out the noise of the news cycle and consider Clinton’s first six months from a historical perspective.
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Broadcom today announced a chip for cable modems that can power gigabit-per-second Internet service, and Comcast said it will use the chips to boost speeds this year.
Broadcom's cable modem system-on-a-chip relies on DOCSIS 3.1, a faster version of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. "DOCSIS 3.1 is a critical technology for Comcast to provide even faster, more reliable data speeds and features such as IP video to our subscribers' homes by harnessing more spectrum in the downstream," Comcast Executive VP Tony Werner was quoted as saying in the Broadcom press release. "By more effectively using our cable plant to grow our total throughput, we expect to offer our customers more than 1 Gigabit speeds in their homes in 2015 and beyond."
Gigabit service is generally available only from fiber providers. Comcast's fastest residential service today is 505Mbps downstream and 100Mbps upstream, but even that relies on fiber instead of cable, just as Comcast's business offerings do. At a June 2013 industry conference, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated a 3Gbps DOCSIS 3.1 connection.
As we explained in a December 2013 story, DOCSIS 3.1 will support higher data throughput a lot more efficiently than DOCSIS 3.0. This will help cable's download speeds compete against fiber-to-the-premises, but isn't likely to match the symmetrical upload and download speeds offered by many fiber services.
Broadcom said its "BCM3390 cable modem SoC delivers video content with a nearly 50 percent increased efficiency on existing spectrum allocations and allows for the delivery and use of a new range of content and services. The single device supports high-speed data rates exceeding 1Gbps. The BCM93390 modem reference design with integrated Wi-Fi provides up to 2 Gigabit speeds in the home, providing a path for cable operators to transition to all-IP video."
DOCSIS 3.1 "enables higher-order modulations in existing hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) networks without changes to the existing cable plant," Broadcom further explained. "The combination of low-density parity check-based Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology in DOCSIS 3.1 allow operators to more efficiently install more data in the existing spectrum."
The BCM3390 is being sampled to manufacturers for rollout later this year.
We asked Comcast what its gigabit service will cost and what the upload speeds will be, but the company said "that will come at a later date TBD." A Comcast spokesperson pointed to a CableLabs announcement that says, "DOCSIS 3.1 modems are designed to co-exist with older versions enabling incremental deployment based on market demand." That "flexible migration strategy" is the key point for Comcast. "When we roll this out, we’ll be able to leverage our existing plant and infrastructure to introduce this capability at scale," Comcast said.
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I have to say that nothing better demonstrates the absurdity of the Religious Right’s victimization complex better than Christian Anti-Defamation Commission poll asking readers to help them choose “top 10 most egregious acts of anti-Christian defamation, discrimination and persecution in America” in 2012.
Here are the nominees:
– 88 Pro-Lifers were arrested for protesting President Obama’s participation at a leading Catholic university, Notre Dame, and await trial for standing up for true Christian values.
– Michigan Muslims attack AGAIN; Christians attacked, denied their civil rights and falsely arrested for disorderly conduct at a public festival for peacefully sharing the gospel. This happened the previous year, too. They were again acquitted of all charges.
– Pat Robertson; was unfairly criticized after remarks he made were taken out of context concerning the Haiti earthquakes and Haiti’s difficult history, in an attempt to raise support to bring aid to its people.
– Southern Poverty Law Center; A liberal ACLU-like organization that has continued to label many Christian organizations that hold traditional values as “hate groups” in lists that include violent racists groups.
– Elena Kagan; President Obama’s radical appointment to the Supreme Court bench. While serving under the Clinton Administration, Kagan successfully corrupted unfavorable evidence on partial birth abortion to deceive the Supreme Court.
– Rex Parris; Mayor of Lancaster, California was faced with “hate crime” charges after calling his city “a growing Christian community.”
– Brit Hume; Fox News journalist who was met with great opposition when he commented on Tiger Wood’s downfall and said that, unlike Buddhism, Christianity offers Tiger true hope.
– Chai Feldblum; a liberal law professor and open lesbian, appointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Feldblum stated that in any conflict that might arise between religious liberty and homosexual “rights” she would have a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win; or “Gay’s win; Christians lose.”
– Employment Non-Discrimination Act; a proposed federal bill that would force ministries to hire people who oppose their beliefs or who live in open defiance of their values.
– Vaughn Walker; California judge who overturned Proposition 8, a State Constitutional Marriage Amendment, and the will of the people by making homosexual marriage legal.
– Stephen Ocean and Tite Sufra; two young men who were murdered in Boynton Beach, Florida while out sharing the gospel in their neighborhood.
– Virginia Phillips; activist judge out of Riverside, California who repealed the important “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military law. The law allowed homosexuals to serve in the military, just not openly.
– Larry Grard; Christian journalist fired from his job for sending an e-mail from his personal account on his own time in support of traditional marriage.
– Ken Howell; professor at the University of Illinois Champaign who was fired after teaching to his class on Catholicism that Catholics believe that natural law makes homosexual behavior immoral. Howell was later re-instated after Christians protested.
– Tony Perkins; Christian leader criticized after offering true hope to homosexuals struggling with depression and suicide, found through repentance and faith in Christ.
– Comedy Central; the cable TV was pushing to air a new show called “JC” based on Jesus Christ. With their past treatment of Jesus on their network this could only have turned out to be irreverent and blasphemous.
– Julea Ward and Jennifer Keeton; two women expelled from their respective Master’s programs in counseling at two different universities because they wouldn’t deny their faith and affirm the validity of the homosexual lifestyle.
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ON NOVEMBER 4, 2017
Take To The Streets And Public Squares
in cities and towns across the country continuing day after day and night after night—not stopping—until our DEMAND is met:
This Nightmare Must End:
The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
A Nightmare:
Immigrants living in terror—their next step could mean detention, deportation, being torn from children and loved ones.
A Nightmare:
Muslims and refugees demonized, banned and cast out.
A Nightmare:
Millions—children, the elderly, disabled, the sick, the poor—denied healthcare, food assistance, the very right to live.
A Nightmare:
Women objectified, degraded, and denied the basic right to control their own reproduction, with fundamentalist Christian fascism increasingly being made law.
A Nightmare:
LGBTQ people stigmatized, ostracized, and denied civil rights recently won.
A Nightmare:
Black and Latino people openly threatened by the President, with maximum sentencing, stop-and-frisk going national, intensified police brutality and murder of our youth with no holds barred.
A Nightmare:
People all over the world facing bombings, occupations, war and the threat of nuclear war with Donald Trump’s “America First” finger on the nuclear trigger.
A Nightmare:
The truth bludgeoned—lies and more lies—critical thinking being destroyed in education and public discourse.
A Nightmare:
The whole planet in peril from a regime that denies global warming and shreds all environmental protections.
A Nightmare:
A regime step by step discarding basic democratic rights, targeting group after group, and suppressing dissent and resistance. A regime unleashing the violence of white supremacists, anti-semites, and fascist thugs. This is fascism—a qualitative change in how society is governed. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.
THIS NIGHTMARE MUST END. Millions feel this and ache with the question of how to stop this unrelenting horror. The stakes are nothing less than the future of humanity and the planet itself.
Who will end this nightmare? We will. Only the determined struggle of millions of people acting together with courage and conviction can drive this regime from power.
ON NOVEMBER 4, 2017:
We will gather in the streets and public squares of cities and towns across this country, at first many thousands declaring that this whole regime is illegitimate and that we will not stop until our single demand is met: This Nightmare Must End: the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
Our protest must grow day after day and night after night—thousands becoming hundreds of thousands, and then millions—determined to act to put a stop to the grave danger that the Trump/Pence Regime poses to the world by demanding that this whole regime be removed from power.
Our actions will reflect the values of respect for all of humanity and the world we want—in stark contrast to the hate and bigotry of the Trump/Pence fascist regime.
Our determination to persist and not back down will compel the whole world to take note. Every force and faction in the power structure would be forced to respond to our demand. The cracks and divisions among the powers already evident today will sharpen and widen. As we draw more and more people forward to stand up, all of this could lead to a situation where this illegitimate regime is removed from power.
Spread the word and organize now. Be a part of making history. Don’t let it be said that you stood aside when there was still a chance to stop a regime that imperils humanity and the Earth itself. Join in taking to the streets and the public squares day after day and night after night demonstrating that In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America.
On November 4, 2017, we will stand together with conviction and courage, overcoming fear and uncertainty, to insist that: This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must GO!
This Nightmare Must End!
The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
Endorse the Call for November 4
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Thirty Boston College students got sick after eating at Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG.N) over the weekend, a school spokesman said, sending company shares down 6 percent in extended trading on Monday on fears of more food poisoning problems at the burrito chain.
A Chipotle restaurant is shown in Federal Way, Washington in this November 20, 2015 file photo. REUTERS/David Ryder/Files
Chipotle said it had temporarily closed its restaurant in Boston’s Cleveland Circle, where a college spokesman said all the students reported eating, while it works with local health officials to investigate the illnesses.
The sickened students included members of the Boston College men’s basketball team, spokesman Jack Dunn said.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health received more than 20 reports of illness from Boston College students and is working to determine if they are tied to a Chipotle-linked outbreak of E. coli, spokesman Scott Zoback said.
Federal health investigators said on Friday the E. coli outbreak had expanded to nine states, with 47 of the 52 people sickened having reported eating at the chain.
“We do not have any evidence to suggest that this incident is related to the previous E. coli incident,” Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said in an email. “There are no confirmed cases of E. coli connected to Chipotle in Massachusetts.”
Boston College officials sent alerts on Monday to students, informing them of the suspected food poisoning.
The time between ingesting E. coli bacteria and feeling sick is usually three to four days, but may be as short as one day or as long as 10 days, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms often begin slowly with mild belly pain or non-bloody diarrhea that worsens over several days.
The Chipotle outbreak was first identified in Seattle and Portland, Oregon, and the company temporarily closed all 43 of its restaurants in those markets on Oct. 31.
The states with reported cases are Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania, California, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, in addition to Oregon and Washington. People in those states were sickened between mid-October and mid-November.
Chipotle warned on Friday that the outbreak was expected to cause this quarter’s sales at established restaurants to fall for the first time in company history. It also said sales could be battered by additional reports of illness.
Chipotle shares were down 6.4 percent to $516.61. Before the reports of illness, shares traded at nearly $650.
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Sikh-American civil rights advocate Valarie Kaur delivered a passionate plea to America in front of a congregation at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington on Dec. 31, 2016. (Repairers of the Breach)
Editor’s note: A 39-year-old Sikh man was working on his car in his driveway in Kent, Wash., when a man wearing a mask walked up and said, “Go back to your own country,” and shot him in the arm Friday night. The shooting comes after an Indian man was killed and another wounded in a recent shooting at a Kansas bar after witnesses say the suspected assailant yelled “get out of my country.” Both incidents are being investigated as hate crimes.
Sikh activist and lawyer Valarie Kaur gave this six-minute address during a watch night service (a late-night service) at the Metropolitan AME Church on Dec. 31, 2016, in Washington. She joined several leaders, including the Rev. James Forbes of Riverside Church in New York City, Imam Talib Al Rashid of Harlem and the Rev. William Barber, a pastor in North Carolina, who stood beside her. Here is the text of her speech:
Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh. (The beloved community belongs to divine Oneness, and so does all that it achieves.)
On Christmas Eve 103 years ago, my grandfather waited in a dark and dank cell. He sailed by steamship across the Pacific Ocean from India to America leaving behind colonial rule, but when he landed on American shores immigration officials saw his dark skinned, his tall turban worn as a part of his Sikh faith, and saw him not as a brother but as foreign, as suspect, threw him behind bars where he languished for months until a single man, a white man, a lawyer named Henry Marshall filed a writ of habeas corpus that released him on Christmas Eve 1913.
My grandfather Kehar Singh became a farmer, free to practice the heart of his Sikh faith — love and oneness. So when his Japanese American neighbors were rounded up and taken to their own detention camps to the deserts of America he went out to see them when no one else would. He looked after their farms until they returned home. He refused to stand down.
In the aftermath of September 11th when hate violence exploded in these United States, a man that I called uncle was murdered. I tried to stand up. I became a lawyer like the man who freed my grandfather and I joined a generation of activists fighting detentions and deportation, surveillance and special registration, hate crimes and racial profiling. And after 15 years with every film, with every lawsuit, with every campaign, I thought we were making a nation safer for the next generation.
And then my son was born. On Christmas Eve, I watched him ceremoniously put the milk and cookies by the fire for Santa Claus. And after he went to sleep, I then drink the milk and ate the cookies. I wanted him to wake up and see them gone in the morning. I wanted him to believe in a world that was magical. But I am leaving my son a world that is more dangerous than the one I was given. I am raising — we are raising — a brown boy in America, a brown boy who may someday wear a turban as part of his faith.
And in America today, as we enter an era of enormous rage, as white nationalists hail this moment as their great awakening, as hate acts against Sikhs and our Muslim brothers and sisters are at an all-time high, I know that there will be moments whether on the streets or in the school yards where my son will be seen as foreign, as suspect, as a terrorist. Just as black bodies are still seen as criminal, brown bodies are still seen as illegal, trans bodies are still seen as immoral, indigenous bodies are still seen as savage, the bodies of women and girls seen as someone else’s property. And when we see these bodies not as brothers and sisters then it becomes easier to bully them, to rape them, to allow policies that neglect them, that incarcerate them, that kill them.
Yes, rabbi, the future is dark. On this New Year’s Eve, this watch night, I close my eyes and I see the darkness of my grandfather’s cell. And I can feel the spirit of ever rising optimism in the Sikh tradition Chardi Kala (ever-rising high spirits) within him.
So the mother and me asks what if? What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ears “You are brave”? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition?
What does the midwife tell us to do? Breathe. And then? Push. Because if we don’t push we will die. If we don’t push our nation will die. Tonight we will breathe. Tomorrow we will labor in love through love and your revolutionary love is the magic we will show our children.
Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh. (The beloved community belongs to divine Oneness, and so does all that it achieves.)
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WASHINGTON – A jury in Natchez, Miss., yesterday convicted a Natchez Police Department officer of violating the civil rights of an arrestee by stealing credit and debit cards from the arrestee. The officer, Dewayne Johnson, 33, will be sentenced on July 12, 2011.
The evidence at trial showed that while Johnson drove a man under arrest to jail, he stopped the patrol car and stole credit and debit cards from the arrestee in his custody. Johnson’s cousin, Patricia A. Wilson, testified at trial and admitted that Johnson had given one of the stolen cards to her to use for personal purchases. Wilson further testified that Johnson had used one of the stolen cards to buy sneakers at retail stores in Natchez and that he later admitted to her that he had tried to use a second stolen card. Evidence at trial showed that the cards were used at a gas station, restaurants and retail stores in Natchez and Vidalia, La. Wilson, 34, of Ferriday, La., had previously pleaded guilty to conspiring with Johnson to commit identity theft, credit card fraud and bank fraud.
“Every community must be able to rely on their law enforcement officers to serve and protect, and Officer Johnson violated that public trust when he broke the law he had pledged to uphold,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “The department will aggressively prosecute any officer who violates the Constitution.”
“This guilty verdict should not reflect negatively on law enforcement or the Natchez Police Department,” said John Dowdy, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi. “There are thousands of law enforcement officers who maintain the highest level of integrity and professionalism as they put their lives on the line every day, but when a cop goes bad and crosses the line, like this defendant, then they will be prosecuted and punished just like the criminals they arrest every day.”
Johnson and a fellow officer, Elvis Prater, 36, were also charged with civil rights offenses related to the physical abuse of two arrestees and with lying to the FBI. Johnson was also charged with conspiracy to commit identity theft, credit card fraud and bank fraud. The jury acquitted Prater on one abuse count and failed to reach a verdict on the remaining counts. Retrial of both officers will begin on June 13, 2011.
The case was investigated by the FBI and the Mississippi State Office of the Attorney General, and was prosecuted by trial attorneys Erin Aslan and Kevonne Small of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenda Haynes of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi.
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I got a message from my arbitrary match saying that they also had an interest in Magic so I was already excited about getting maybe a couple booster packs or something simple. But then I got this, which was not at all what I expected, but even more amazing than what I was expecting.
Four cards autographed by their respective artists and a print of one of those cards, also autographed. The most exciting thing is I actually use two of the cards in my decks, and one of them (the arbor elf) is going into a legacy deck, so it will be used for as long as I play! Not that I am not excited about the other two cards, as they will happily join my binder full of odds and ends, such as promos!
Can't wait to frame the print and hang it up with my TF2 print I got from a different exchange.
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Jurgen Klopp insists there is still a way back for Lazar Markovic at Liverpool.
The Serbian winger joined Hull City on loan for the rest of the campaign this week after his season-long loan at Sporting Lisbon was terminated.
Klopp turned down the chance to have Markovic on board at Melwood for the coming months, but says that’s not proof that the 22-year-old is destined to leave the club on a permanent basis this summer.
Klopp said: “He still has a contract. Why should I say now: ‘no chance for Lazar Markovic’.
“If he plays very well at Hull....if he plays very good against us then there’s no future for him at Liverpool!
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“But if he’s really good in all the other games then why not? He’s still a young boy.
“He struggled with a few injuries. If he can stay fit and help out at Hull then it’s easier for us to look with him there compared to Portugal.”
Reminded that under Premier League rules Markovic won’t be eligible to face Liverpool when the clubs meet on February 4, Klopp added: “Is it always like this? In Germany if you are on loan then you can play.
“Well, if he can’t play against us then he has a future! Ha ha.”
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There will never be a definitive ranking of the most dominant college football teams of all time — and in a sport in which the subjective act of voting was the primary mode of determining a champion until only very recently, that’s probably fitting. Even the computer power ranking systems can’t always agree (as the Bowl Championship Series found out time and again). But according to one particular metric we like to use here at FiveThirtyEight — the Elo rating — the 2016 Alabama Crimson Tide are closing in on the greatest college football season in at least 80 years.
Here are the rankings as they stand now, using the Elo rating system I developed with FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver during the 2014 season:
SEASON SCHOOL DATE OF PEAK RECORD AT PEAK PEAK ELO 1 1995 Nebraska 1/2/96 12-0 +33.9 2 2016 Alabama 11/12/16 10-0 +33.4 3 2015 Alabama 1/11/16 14-1 +32.8 4 1974 Oklahoma 11/30/74 11-0 +32.3 5 1988 Miami (FL) 1/2/89 11-1 +32.2 6 1973 Oklahoma 12/1/73 10-0-1 +31.9 7 2008 Florida 1/8/09 13-1 +31.9 8 2012 Alabama 1/7/13 13-1 +31.9 9 2004 USC 1/4/05 13-0 +31.8 10 2014 Oregon 1/1/15 13-1 +31.6 11 1971 Nebraska 1/1/72 13-0 +31.6 12 2014 Ohio State 1/12/15 14-1 +31.6 13 1997 Nebraska 1/2/98 13-0 +31.3 14 2005 USC 12/3/05 12-0 +31.2 15 1996 Florida 1/2/97 12-1 +31.0 16 2002 Miami (FL) 12/7/02 12-0 +30.9 17 2013 Alabama 11/23/13 11-0 +30.7 18 2011 Alabama 1/9/12 12-1 +30.4 19 1945 Army 12/1/45 9-0 +30.3 20 1989 Miami (FL) 1/1/90 11-1 +30.1 21 2009 Florida 11/28/09 12-0 +30.1 22 1975 Oklahoma 11/1/75 8-0 +29.9 23 1993 Florida State 1/1/94 12-1 +29.8 24 1973 Alabama 12/1/73 11-0 +29.8 25 2011 LSU 12/3/11 13-0 +29.7 26 1996 Nebraska 11/29/96 10-1 +29.7 27 2001 Miami (FL) 1/3/02 12-0 +29.6 28 1983 Nebraska 11/26/83 12-0 +29.5 29 1992 Miami (FL) 11/28/92 11-0 +29.5 30 1999 Florida State 1/4/00 12-0 +29.4 The best college football Elo peaks (1936-2016) Includes only the highest rating for each team in a season Sources: ESPN, Sports-Reference.com
Some additional background on the rating system: It’s designed to mimic ESPN’s Football Power Index, in the sense that it’s optimized to predict future results, and it’s on the same scale as points per game (so you can take the difference between any two teams’ ratings and get a basic point spread if they played at a neutral field). Just like in our NFL Elo system, the ratings update after each game depending on who won, by how much and where the game was played, and before each season, the ratings from the year before are carried over after being reverted slightly toward the mean.
The upshot is a rolling power rating for each team that tries to pinpoint how good they are at any given moment. And at this particular moment, Alabama is really, really good. After their 51-3 destruction of Mississippi State last Saturday, the Crimson Tide’s Elo rating moved to +33.4 — meaning they grade as about 34 points per game better than the average FBS team. (Think of Air Force, South Carolina or Kentucky. ) That’s the second-highest peak rating recorded by any Division I-A/FBS team going back to the start of the AP poll era in 1936, trailing only Nebraska’s +33.9 rating after the Cornhuskers crushed Florida in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl.
Alabama won’t get a chance to break Nebraska’s record this weekend. The Tide do have a game, but it’s against Chattanooga, a Football Championship Subdivision opponent, and the game is so lopsided that Elo will give ’Bama barely any credit for a win, no matter the margin. (Within reason, of course: Alabama could technically pass Nebraska if it beats Chattanooga by 28,228 points — or about a touchdown and a two-point conversion every second of the game. Eat your heart out, 1916 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.) But assuming that its rating stays constant against the Mocs, Alabama could surpass Nebraska’s rating if it beats Auburn by at least 32 points a week from this Saturday, in the regular-season finale. That’s not likely (Elo considers Alabama only 20-point favorites), but because Elo guarantees a ratings boost for wins against good competition, the Tide would almost certainly break the record if they beat Auburn by any margin and maintain their winning streak through the SEC Championship Game and the College Football Playoff.
Will that make them the greatest team of all time? Like most things in college football, that’s up for debate. But it is one piece of evidence from which they can build a case. And it’s bad news for any opponent standing between them and coach Nick Saban’s sixth career national championship.
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The ruling coalition of Finland has broken up after nationalists swept the leadership of Finland’s second largest political party.
The Finns party was part of the ruling coalition with two centrist parties. Together they held 124 out of 200 seats.
Over the weekend, Jussi Halla-aho was elected Chairman of The Finns party. He is a current member of the European Parliament who was fined for “hate speech” in 2012. The multiple vice chairmen spots were all filled with nationalists as well. All of the newly elected leaders are considered hardliners on immigration.
The two centrist parties immediately began virtue signaling about how the The Finns party no longer shares their values. They are officially breaking up the ruling coalition. They are expected to replace The Finns party with two other minor parties. This would give the new ruling coalition only 101 out of 200 seats. This imagined new ruling coalition is already being called “unusually weak” and pundits are predicting it will have a very hard time passing legislation.
The Finns would become the largest opposition party and have the potential to be a “kingmaker.” The new leadership says that any party wanting their support must make concessions on immigration. The media is alleging that the breakup is a failure on the part of the new leadership of The Finns party. In reality, it is probably going to make them more popular than ever.
Note: The Finns party used to be called True Finns.
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This is a huge rumor right now, so please do read with caution. Citing "impeccable sources" from within Intel who have talked with TechEye, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich is set to fire Intel's entire public relations team ahead of Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in hopes of turning the company's public image around.
TechEye's source said: "Tightening up the budget is the motto on the marketing side. The old timers are all gone and we are on track to get back our mojo on mobile. The head of PR will be changed, and then it will 'waterfall'. Brian wants 'open books'." He also said that Intel "isn't the same, anymore" and that Intel has learned that it can get its "ass kicked" by AMD and ARM.
This will be some interesting news, we've reached out to our people at Intel and will edit the story once we get some words on it.
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Bell could receive a transition tag from the Steelers during the offseason, Jason La Canfora of CBS Sports reports. Bell became ineligible for 2018 when he failed to report to the Steelers on Tuesday. He will now turn his focus to the upcoming offseason, at which point a third franchise tag would be prohibitively expensive for the Steelers, thus giving Bell all the leverage. The Steelers still have the option to use a transition tag for approximately $14.5 million, which would give them the right to match any offer sheet Bell signs with another team. The problem with that option is a lack of draft-pick compensation, whereas Pittsburgh likely would receive a mid-round pick if it simply allowed Bell to become an unrestricted free agent. The final option makes the most sense and would enable Bell to choose his next home without the Steelers having any involvement. He'll turn 27 years old in February and may find that some teams are worried about his year-long absence from football, even though the running back met his stated goal of avoiding wear and tear during a contract year.
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In may last article on Asset Allocation, I had discussed how Asset Allocation and Rebalancing of portfolio is done at periodic frequency.Now in this article I have given a back testing of the same for a period of 31/12/2006 to 31/12/2014. Let us see below, how Asset allocation and rebalancing actually works and help investors to reduce risk in their portfolio and make reasonable returns.
In below calculation I have taken an investment of Rs. 1 lac and divided it in 50% to Sensex (Equity) and 50% to Franklin India Short Term Bond Fund ( Debt) and thereafter rebalanced on a half yearly basis. Figures of the Sensex and NAV of Fund are real.
Rebalancing of Portfolio : In above table, you can see that every six months I have made both equity and Debt equal (50%:50%) and for that I have done rebalancing of portfolio, in real life we try to rebalance the portfolio by putting fresh money in the asset class which has fallen and bring it to the percentage allocation that is required initially and if we cannot meet the required percentage of allocation by putting fresh money then only we rebalance the portfolio and sell the asset class which is above required allocation and invest in asset class which is below the required allocation.
Above table clearly proves that Rs. 1 lack invested in Sensex (Equity) has given a compounded annualized return of around 9.01% p.a. whereas Rs. 1 lack invested in Franklin India Short Term income Plan (Debt) has given 9.53% p.a. compounded annualized returns and money invested in 50 : 50 allocation and rebalanced on half yearly basis has given around 10.43% compounded annualized returns which is higher than both asset classes in which actually investment is done. You can also observe in above chart that money invested in equity had highest volatility and money invested in Bond fund had very low volatility whereas money invested in both in equal proportion and rebalanced has moderate volatility but higher returns. So asset allocation offers higher returns at lower risk.
Benefits of Asset Allocation:
Risk Management: By rebalancing or investing fresh money in asset class which has fallen, you will be investing in asset class which has not done good in recent past and is available at cheaper rate and vice versa. In above table you can observe that in Dec-2007 when Sensex had gone up sharply from 14650 to 20286. Money was taken out from Sensex (Equity) and was invested in Bond Fund. Where as in Dec-2008 when Sensex had fallen to 9647 levels money was invested to Sensex (Equity) . This helps you to invest in asset class which is cheaper and keeps you away from asset class which is overvalued so the risk of investing in equity or any other asset class at the time when it is overvalued is taken care and that is why I always say that Asset allocation is a most effective method of risk management.
Buy at Low and Sell at High: Normally investors always want to buy when markets are low and sell when markets are high. But normally most of the investors fail in doing this because they are always confused about whether markets are high or low right now and whether they should buy or sell right now. But Asset allocation is a mathematical model which resolves this confusion and helps us to buy at low and sell at high.
Keeps you away from Market Timing:
Market timing is an activity by which you try to predict the future movement of market and believe that you can catch bottom of the market and sell at peak of the market. This appears very simple but it is actually impossible. A research by landmark Brinson, Hood and Beebower, “Determinants of Portfolio Performance” (1986, 1991) argues that Asset Allocation accounts for 94% of the variation in returns in a portfolio, leaving market timing and stock selection to account for only 6%.
Conclusion: Asset allocation seems a very simple method so most of the investors don’t understand its importance. But I would recommend that asset allocation is the Back bone of your portfolio and you should adopt it without any doubt.
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Almost a week ago, Google Project Zero security researcher Tavis Ormandy discovered an issue with Cloudflare's edge servers, finding corrupted web pages being returned by some HTTP requests run through Cloudflare.
Cloudflare's edge servers were running past the end of a buffer and returning memory that contained private information such as HTTP cookies, authentication tokens, HTTP POST bodies, and other sensitive data, with some of that data cached by search engines.
"I'm finding private messages from major dating sites, full messages from a well-known chat service, online password manager data, frames from adult video sites, hotel bookings. We're talking full HTTPS requests, client IP addresses, full responses, cookies, passwords, keys, data, everything," Ormandy wrote.
The researcher's theory is that Cloudfare had code in its "ScrapeShield" feature that performed something similar to this:
int Length = ObfuscateEmailAddressesInHtml(&OutputBuffer, CachedPage);
write(fd, OutputBuffer, Length);
"But they weren't checking if the obfuscation parsers returned a negative value because of malformed HTML," Ormandy added.
"My working theory was that this was related to their "ScrapeShield" feature which parses and obfuscates HTML -- but because reverse proxies are shared between customers, it would affect *all* Cloudflare customers."
In response to Ormandy's findings, Cloudflare identified the cause of the problem, and turned off three minor Cloudflare features that were using the same HTML parser chain that was causing the leakage: Email obfuscation, Server-side Excludes, and Automatic HTTPS Rewrites.
As a result, it was no longer possible for memory to be returned in an HTTP response.
After fetching a few live samples and observing encryption keys, cookies, passwords, chunks of POST data, and HTTPS requests for other major Cloudflare-hosted sites from other users, Ormandy said he immediately paused his investigation and contacted Cloudflare.
"We keep finding more sensitive data that we need to cleanup. I didn't realise how much of the internet was sitting behind a Cloudflare CDN until this incident," Ormandy wrote.
After back and forth with Cloudflare regarding its time to disclosure throughout the week, the DNS provider told Ormandy it would be notifying customers by Wednesday of the data leak. However, with notification still not sent by Thursday, and Project Zero's "7-day" policy for actively exploited attacks being increasingly pushed, Ormandy made public his findings on Thursday.
"Cloudflare has always terminated SSL connections through an isolated instance of NGINX that was not affected by this bug," the company wrote in a blog post following Ormandy's public disclosure on Thursday.
"We are disclosing this problem now as we are satisfied that search engine caches have now been cleared of sensitive information. We have also not discovered any evidence of malicious exploits of the bug or other reports of its existence."
Cloudflare confirmed that customer SSL private keys were not leaked.
Cloudflare also confirmed that the greatest period of impact was during the period of February 13 and February 18, with around one in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests through Cloudflare potentially resulting in memory leakage.
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Drug users have discovered a method of adapting electronic cigarettes to vaporize a potent class A hallucinogen known as dimethyltryptamine or DMT.
The straightforward “hack” is being discussed openly on multiple web forums, with DMT enthusiasts describing how simple it is to consume the drug using an electronic cigarette and a little dexterity.
Certain e-cigarettes reportedly generate precisely the correct temperature needed to vaporize the drug.
Described as “the spirit molecule” by some users, DMT is estimated to be one of the strongest hallucinogens in the world. It is considerably more powerful than comparable drugs such as LSD. If smoked through a pipe, however, its effects are more transient.
Depending on the dose consumed and means of ingestion, DMT’s effects range from short-lived mild hallucinations to much more immersive and hypnotic experiences.
Many who consume DMT report having deeply spiritual experiences, often traveling to other ‘realms.’
Users say ingestion of the powerful drug encourages intricate visions of glistening gateways, mechanical elves, aliens, temples of pulsating light, pyramids, and Egyptian gods.
Others say smoking DMT can unveil a taste of the collective unconscious, frightening forces, seismic shifts in perception and finally an abrupt return to reality.
One user described his experience of vaping the drug on the social media platform Reddit.
“Of the five strongest psychedelic experiences I have had in my life, I would say three have been by vaping,” he said.
“Two or three hits handed me a hefty incapacitation [sic] and quite the journey.”
Although modifying an e-cigarette in preparation for smoking DMT is relatively simple, errors in this process could prove dangerous. Reports have surfaced online of people claiming to have felt a burning sensation on their lungs while attempting to smoke the drug in this manner.
DMT comes from a naturally occurring chemical compound found in many plants and species. South American tribes often use it in shamanic rituals. Its discovery is generally credited to Brazilian chemist, Oswaldo Gonçalves de Lima.
The drug's psychotropic effects were first explored scientifically in the mid-1950s by Hungarian psychologist and chemist, Dr Stephen Szára.
American writer, ethnobotanist, psychonaut and self-described anarchist Terence McKenna (1946 –2000) wrote extensively on the subject of DMT, and the role of psychedelic narcotics in society.
Noted for his in-depth knowledge of shamanism, mysticism and biology, McKenna’s work also broached the relationship between psychedelic drugs and metaphysics.
McKenna experimented liberally with smoking DMT. In his book, The Archaic Revival, Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness, he wrote about his experience with the drug.
“Once smoked, the onset of the experience begins in about 15 seconds. One falls immediately into a trance,” he said.
At another juncture, McKenna described the feeling of taking DMT “as though one had been struck by noetic lightning.”
“The ordinary world is almost instantaneously replaced, not only with a hallucination, but a hallucination whose alien character is its utter alienness. Nothing in this world can prepare one for the impressions that fill your mind when you enter the DMT sensorium,” he said.
For decades the drug has been quite rare. But it has surged in popularity recently as a result of online narcotics markets.
Marketed predominantly as an odorless powder, tiny amounts of DMT are said to produce extremely strong effects. It is generally not sold on the street, and isn’t physiologically addictive.
Smoking DMT, however, can cause nausea, intense fear and throat and lung irritation.
Harry Shapiro of the British charity Drugscope said e-cigarettes are an ideal tool for consuming a wide spectrum of drugs.
“This [DMT] is a very powerful hallucinogenic drug, there's no doubt about that,” he told the Mirror.
“You can adapt those e-cigs to smoke just about anything. Not just what you’re supposed to.”
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'I don't do anything to bring on dying - I live day by day': Harper Lee's sister, Alice, still practicing law at 100
Though her sister Harper famously stopped granting interviews in 1964, Alice Finch Lee still talks to the public from time to time, and at 100 years old, is the oldest practicing lawyer in Alabama.
Her latest interview aired last night on PBS in a documentary about her famous sister, Harper, and her only novel – To Kill A Mockingbird.
Miss Alice, as she is called, is 15 years older than Harper, and still lives in Monroeville, Alabama – along with her law practice, she sporadically updates the public about her sister.
Scroll down for video
Going strong: Alice Finch Lee, sister of author Harper Lee, recently celebrated her 100th birthday
Real life Atticus: She still practices law above a bank in Monroeville; in a vault below is the original manuscript of To Kill A Mockingbird
In the PBS documentary , Miss Alice said Harper drew back from the public eye in the 1960s because ‘as time went on, she said reporters began taking too many liberties with what she said.’
Harper, who is now 85, still enjoys her life away from the eyes of the press. Miss Alice told the Alabama Press-Register last year: ‘Everybody who comes to Monroeville wants to visit with Nelle, and she’s not up to that.
Magnum opus: Harper Lee wrote only one novel, To Kill A Mockingbird
'She sees her good friends and her family.’
The Press-Register said Miss Alice has become something of a gatekeeper between her sister, whom she calls Nelle, and the general public.
Miss Alice said her sister suffered a stroke which left her in a wheelchair and partially paralysed. In addition, Harper’s sight has deteriorated significantly.
Miss Alice practices law in offices on the upper floor of the Monroeville bank.
The original manuscript of her sister’s famed novel is locked deep below in one of the bank’s vaults.
She said there’s no one secret in particular to her longevity – only that she lives ‘day by day’ and ‘doesn’t do anything to bring on dying.’
The documentary, called ‘Hey Boo,’ aired on PBS as part of the American Masters series last night, and in part examines the impact of Harper’s powerful work.
Miss Alice was interviewed for five hours by Mary McDonagh Murphy for the documentary. At the time of the interview, Miss Alice was 98 and nearly deaf.
Even so, she told of her young life in Alabama, and how the Great Depression delayed her slightly when becoming a lawyer.
Her father encouraged her to join his firm after she passed the bar in 1943.
She asked how a woman would be received in a small law office, to which her father responded: ‘”You never know until you try.”’
The book, which was first published in 1960, details the goings on in the fictitious sleepy town of Maycomb, Alabama between 1932 and 1935.
Famous faces: In 2007, then-president George W. Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Harper Lee
Sister, sister: Attorney Alice Lee, left, accepts birthday wishes from Monroe County Circuit Judge-elect Dawn Hare, center, and sister Harper, right, in 2006; Alice serves as a gatekeeper between the public and Harper
It is told through the eyes of Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch, who is a knowledgeable six-year-old tomboy who has the mind of a child but the understanding of an adult.
'I don't do anything to bring on dying - I live day by day.' -Alice Finch Lee
Among other things, the story details the trial of a black man accused of rape by a white woman.
Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, represented Tom Robinson, a 25-year-old farm worker.
Though Tom was obviously innocent, he was convicted by the all-white jury and was shot dead while trying to escape from prison.
The novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is considered an American classic and is often taught within schools, teaching students important lessons of race, prejudice, misrepresentation, and the loss of childhood.
Ironically, winning the Pulitzer caused the friendship between Harper and famous writer Truman Capote to deteriorate.
Capote, it was said, was the model for Charles Baker ‘Dill’ Harris, the best friend of Scout and Jem. Dill spent much of the novel trying to get reclusive Boo Radley out of his house.
He was jealous that Harper's work received the ultimate prize, and his did not.
Famous film: In the 1962 film adaptation, actor Gregory Peck, right, played attorney Atticus Finch, earning Peck an Oscar for Best Actor
No justice: In the story, Tom Robinson, seen right, is convicted of raping a white woman even though he was innocent
Harper's Bazaar: Actor Gregory Peck and novelist Harper Lee on the set of To Kill A Mockingbird, seen in 1962
After Miss Alice celebrated her 100th birthday party, she told one of her law partners that she didn’t want another party until she turned 105.
For now, she’s content to do the New York Times crossword puzzles, and falls asleep after reciting all of the U.S. presidents.
Watch video here: (Alice's interview begins near the 25-minute mark)
Watch Harper Lee: Hey, Boo on PBS. See more from American Masters.
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For other people named Gary Coleman, see Gary Coleman (disambiguation)
Gary Wayne Coleman (February 8, 1968 – May 28, 2010) was an American actor, comedian, and writer best known for his role as Arnold Jackson in Diff'rent Strokes (1978–1986). After a successful childhood acting career, Coleman struggled financially later in life. In 1989, he successfully sued his parents and business adviser over misappropriation of his assets, only to declare bankruptcy a decade later. On May 28, 2010, Coleman died of a subdural hematoma at age 42.
Early life [ edit ]
Gary Wayne Coleman was born[1] in Zion, Illinois, outside Chicago,[2] on February 8, 1968. He was adopted by W. G. Coleman, a fork-lift operator, and Edmonia Sue, a nurse practitioner.[3] Due to focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (a congenital chronic kidney disease), and the corticosteroids and other medications used to treat it, his growth was limited to 4 ft 8 in (142 cm),[4] and his face retained a childlike appearance well into adulthood. He underwent two unsuccessful kidney transplants in 1973 and 1984, and required frequent dialysis.[5]
Career [ edit ]
In 1974, Coleman's career began when he appeared in a commercial for Harris Bank. His line (after the announcer said, "You should have a Harris banker.") was "You should have a Hubert doll."[6] "Hubert" was a stuffed lion representing the Harris bank logo.[7][8] The same year, he appeared in an episode of Medical Center.[7]
While best known for his role on Diff'rent Strokes, Coleman had appeared earlier on television, on The Jeffersons as Raymond, George Jefferson's nephew, and on Good Times as Penny's friend Gary. He also appeared in a 1977 pilot for a revival of The Little Rascals as Stymie.[9] VH1 rated Coleman first on a list of "100 Greatest Child Stars" on television.[10]
Diff'rent Strokes [ edit ]
Coleman was cast in the role of Arnold Jackson in Diff'rent Strokes, portraying one of two black brothers from Harlem adopted by a wealthy white widower in Manhattan. The series was broadcast from 1978 to 1986.
He became the most popular fixture of the series, enhanced by his character's catchphrase "What'chu talkin' 'bout, Willis?", uttered skeptically in response to statements by Todd Bridges who portrayed his character's brother. At the height of his fame on Diff'rent Strokes, he earned $100,000 per episode. A Biography Channel documentary estimated he was left with a quarter of the original amount after paying his parents, advisers, lawyers, and taxes.[11] He later successfully sued his parents and his former advisers for misappropriation of his finances and was awarded $1.3 million.[12] According to Bridges' autobiography Killing Willis, Coleman was made to work long hours on the set of Diff'rent Strokes, despite his age and health problems and this contributed to his being unhappy and separating himself from the cast.[13]
Later character appearances [ edit ]
Coleman became a popular figure, starring in a number of feature films and television films, including The Kid from Left Field (1979), On the Right Track (1981) and The Kid with the Broken Halo (1982). The latter eventually served as the basis for The Gary Coleman Show in 1982. He also made video game appearances in The Curse of Monkey Island (1997) and Postal 2 (2003). In 2005, Coleman appeared in John Cena's music video for his single "Bad, Bad Man" (from the album You Can't See Me), Coleman played himself as a villain taking Michael Jackson and Madonna hostage. The video was a spoof of 1980s culture, focusing on The A-Team.[14][15]
Candidacy for Governor of California [ edit ]
In the 2003 California recall election, Coleman was a candidate for governor. His campaign was sponsored by the free newsweekly East Bay Express as a satirical comment on the recall. After Arnold Schwarzenegger declared his candidacy, Coleman announced that he would vote for Schwarzenegger. Coleman placed 8th in a field of 135 candidates, receiving 14,242 votes.[16]
Avenue Q [ edit ]
Coleman is parodied in Avenue Q, which won the 2004 Tony Award for Best Musical. A fictionalized version of Coleman works as the superintendent of the apartment complex where the musical takes place. In the song "It Sucks to Be Me", he laments his fate.[5] On Broadway, the role was originated by Natalie Venetia Belcon.[17]
The show's creators, Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez, have said the Coleman character personifies one of Avenue Q's central themes: that as children we are told we are "special", but upon entering adulthood we discover that life is not nearly as easy as we have been led to believe. They added that their original intent was for Coleman himself to play the Gary Coleman role, and he expressed interest in accepting it but never showed up for a meeting scheduled to discuss it.[18]
In 2005, Coleman announced his intention to sue the producers of Avenue Q for their depiction of him, although the lawsuit never materialized. At the 2007 New York Comic Con, Coleman said, "I wish there was a lawyer on Earth that would sue them for me."[19]
Personal life [ edit ]
In a 1993 television interview, Coleman said he had twice attempted suicide by overdosing on pills.[20] Around the same time[clarification needed] he was living in Denver, Colorado, where he hosted a Sunday night show on local radio station KHIH (now KPTT) titled Gary Coleman's Colorado High, in which he played light jazz and new-age music. He gave part of his salary to the Colorado Kidney Foundation.[21]
In 2005, Coleman moved from Los Angeles to Santaquin, a small town about 50 miles (80 km) south of Salt Lake City, Utah, where he lived for the remainder of his life.[22]
In early 2007, he met Shannon Price, 22, on the set of the film Church Ball, where she was working as an extra.[23] Price and Coleman married several months later.[24] On May 1 and 2, 2008, they made a well-publicized appearance on the show Divorce Court[25] to air their differences in an attempt to save their marriage. Nevertheless, they divorced in August 2008, and Coleman was granted an ex parte restraining order against Price to prevent her from living in his home when he was hospitalized after their divorce.[26] According to a court petition later filed by Price, she and Coleman continued to live together in a common-law marriage until his death.[27] However, a judge ultimately ruled against Price after hearing evidence that she carried on affairs with other men during the time she claimed to be with Coleman, and "physically abused Coleman in public, led him around by the hand like a child [and] displayed no physical affection toward him in front of anyone."[26]
Financial struggles [ edit ]
In August 1999, Coleman filed for bankruptcy protection.[28] Multiple people, he said, were responsible for his insolvency, "from me, to accountants, to my adoptive parents, to agents, to lawyers, and back to me again."[29] He lost $200,000 on an arcade he named the Gary Coleman Game Parlor, which was located at Fisherman's Village in Marina del Rey, California.[30][31]
Ongoing medical expenses contributed significantly to Coleman's chronic financial problems and compelled him, at times, to resort to unusual fundraising activities. In 1999, he partnered with UGO Networks on an online auction titled "Save Me!". Items included his couch, a "tiny pimp suit" with matching gold Nikes and an autographed ice scraper. Items attracted more than $5,000 in bids.[32] In 2008, he auctioned an autographed pair of his pants on eBay to help pay his medical bills.[33] The auction attracted considerable attention, including fake bids up to $400,000. The pants were eventually bought for $500 by comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who hung them from the rafters of his television studio.[34]
Legal troubles [ edit ]
In 1989, Coleman sued his adoptive parents and former business advisor for $3.8 million, for misappropriating his trust fund,[35][36] and won a $1,280,000 judgment in 1993.[37]
In 1998, Coleman was charged with assault while he was working as a security guard. Tracy Fields, a Los Angeles bus driver and fan of Coleman's work on Diff'rent Strokes, approached him in a California mall and requested his autograph, while Coleman was shopping for a bulletproof vest. Coleman refused to give her an autograph, an argument ensued, and Fields reportedly mocked Coleman's lackluster career as an actor. Coleman then punched Fields in the face several times in front of witnesses. He was arrested and later testified in court that she threatened him, and he defended himself. "She wouldn't leave me alone. I was getting scared, and she was getting ugly," he said. Coleman pleaded no contest to one count of assault, received a suspended jail sentence, and was ordered to pay Fields' $1,665 hospital bill, as well as take anger management classes.[38][39][40]
In 2007, Coleman was cited for misdemeanor disorderly conduct in Provo, Utah, after a "heated discussion" in public with his wife.[41][42]
In 2008, Coleman was involved in a car accident after an altercation at a Payson, Utah bowling alley, which began when Colt Rushton, age 24, photographed Coleman without his permission. The two men argued, according to witnesses. In the parking lot, Coleman allegedly backed his truck into Rushton, striking his knee and pulling him under the vehicle, before hitting another car. Rushton was treated at a local hospital for minor injuries and released.[43][44] Coleman later pleaded no contest to charges of disorderly conduct and reckless driving, and was fined $100. In 2010, he settled a civil suit related to the incident for an undisclosed amount.[45][46][47]
In 2009, Coleman and his ex-wife were involved in a domestic dispute, after which Price was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence, and both parties were cited for disorderly conduct.[48]
In January 2010, months before his death, Coleman was arrested on an outstanding domestic assault warrant in Santaquin, booked into the Utah County Jail,[49] and released the following day.[50]
Trains and model railroading [ edit ]
Coleman was an avid railfan, model railroader, and supporter of Amtrak. He became interested in trains sometime before the age of 5 during his frequent train trips to Chicago, in support of his burgeoning acting career.[51] Fans often saw him at stores specializing in model trains in areas in which he lived, and he worked part-time at Denver-area, Tucson-area, and California hobby stores to be around his hobby.[51][52]
Coleman built and maintained miniature railroads in his homes in several states. One of his train layouts appears in the September 1990 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. Coleman is photographed on the front cover, with his "Rio Grande" layout.
He preferred to model in HO scale, but modeled in other scales, as well. One such model railroad was over 800 square feet (75 m²) in size. Currently, at least one of Coleman's model railroads is being preserved in Colorado Springs, Colorado.[53]
Death and memorial [ edit ]
Very few details of Coleman's medical history have been made public. His short stature (4 feet, 8 inches or 142 centimeters) stemmed from congenital kidney disease and its treatment.[54] He underwent at least two unsuccessful kidney transplants early in his life and required frequent dialysis, which he preferred not to discuss. In 2009, Coleman underwent heart surgery, details of which were never made public, but he is known to have developed pneumonia postoperatively.[22] In January 2010, Coleman was hospitalized after a seizure in Los Angeles, and in February he suffered another seizure on the set of The Insider television program.[55]
On May 26, 2010, Coleman was admitted to Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo, Utah, in critical condition[56] after falling down the stairs at his home in Santaquin and hitting his head, possibly after another seizure, and suffering an epidural hematoma.[57] According to a hospital spokesman, Coleman was conscious and lucid the next morning, but his condition subsequently worsened.[10] By mid-afternoon on May 27, he was unconscious and on life support.[58] He died at 12:05 pm MDT (18:05 UTC) on May 28, at the age of 42.[59][60]
The casts of the Off Broadway production of Avenue Q in New York City and the Avenue Q National Tour in Dallas dedicated their May 28 performances to his memory, and the actors playing the part of Coleman paid tribute to him from the stage at the performances' conclusions.[61][62] The Coleman character remained in the show after modifications were made to relevant dialogue.[63]
The weekend after Coleman's death, a scheduled funeral was postponed and later canceled due to a dispute regarding the disposition of his estate and remains among Coleman's adoptive parents, former business associate Anna Gray, and Price. Coleman's former manager, Dion Mial, was involved initially, but withdrew after Coleman's 1999 will, which named Mial as executor and directed that his wake be "...conducted by those with no financial ties to me and can look each other in the eyes and say they really cared personally for Gary Colemen [sic]",[64] turned out to be superseded by a later one replacing Mial with Gray,[65] and directing "...that there be no funeral service, wake, or other ceremony memorializing my passing."[66][67]
Questions were also raised as to whether Price, who approved discontinuing Coleman's life support, was legally authorized to do so. The controversy was exacerbated by a photograph published on the front page of the tabloid newspaper The Globe depicting Price posed next to a comatose, intubated Coleman, under the headline, "It Was Murder!"[68]
The hospital later issued a statement confirming that Coleman had completed an advance health care directive granting Price permission to make medical decisions on his behalf.[69] An investigation by Santaquin police was closed on October 5, 2010, after the medical examiner ruled Coleman's death accidental, and no evidence of wrongdoing could be demonstrated.[70][71]
While Coleman's final will, signed in 2005, named Gray as executor and awarded his entire estate to her, Coleman and Price married in 2007. Although they divorced in 2008, Price claimed in a court petition that she remained Coleman's common-law wife, sharing bank accounts and the couple presented themselves publicly as husband and wife until Coleman's death, an assertion that, if validated by the court, would make her the lawful heir.[66]
In May 2012, Judge James Taylor ruled that while Price had indeed lived in Coleman's home after their marriage ended, their relationship at the time of his death failed to meet Utah's standard for a common-law marriage.[72] The disposition of his ashes remains unreported. Price said, were she granted disposition, she would scatter the ashes at the Golden Spike National Historic Site in Utah as a tribute to Coleman's lifelong love of trains.[73]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Video games [ edit ]
Postal 2 at E3 in Coleman promotingat E3 in Los Angeles California on May 15, 2003
Coleman portrayed a fictional version of himself in Postal 2, providing the voice and motion capture. He also portrayed Kenny Falmouth in The Curse of Monkey Island.
Music videos [ edit ]
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Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback addresses reporters on Wednesday. (Thad Allton/Topeka Capital-Journal via Associated Press)
Kansas's legislature voted this week to increase taxes, with Republicans revolting against a years-long string of tax cuts pushed by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback that left the state with huge budget shortfalls.
But even after the hike, the rich are still paying less — and the poor are paying more — than they did before what Brownback called a “real-live experiment” in conservative economic policy, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The bill, which the GOP-dominated legislature passed by overriding Brownback's veto on Tuesday night, will increase taxes for taxpayers of all income levels. It eliminates some of the benefits the rich enjoyed under Brownback's policies and raises their rates, while also raising taxes on the poor.
Had Brownback's policies not been enacted, poor Kansans could expect to pay the state about 9.8 percent of their income on average in taxes, while the very rich would be paying about 5.5 percent. Now — after this year's tax increase — the richest will pay 4.8 percent, while the poorest will owe 11.8 percent.
“When you look at that picture, the full picture of where we’re at now — where we would have been had policy never changed — you’re still going to see the top 1 percent actually come out looking better,” said Meg Wiehe, the institute's deputy director.
These figures refer to the share of income paid in taxes by different households, not the amount in dollars. Because wealthier taxpayers make so much more, the amounts they pay are much greater than what the poor pay in terms of dollars — even though they are paying less relative to their income.
The disparate tax burdens stem in part from the fact that Kansas relies on sales taxes for much of the state's revenue. Sales taxes are disproportionately paid by the poor, who spend more of their income on ordinary goods, which often are taxed. The rich, by contrast, can save more of their money or spend it on services, whether to hire lawyers or have their houses cleaned. Those expenses are rarely subject to sales tax.
Not all taxpayers will pay more under the new plan than they have been under Brownback. The bill restores some of the deductions and credits that Brownback had eliminated — such as a break for child-care expenses and a write-off for mortgage interest.
Brownback argued that cutting taxes for households and businesses would stimulate the state's economy, and because more Kansans would be working and investing, there would be more income for the state to tax. But economic growth in Kansas has lagged behind national rates, and when the promised boom didn't materialize, the state was short on cash. Looking to close some of the gap, Brownback and the state legislature increased the sales tax in 2015, adding to the burden on the poor.
Brownback reduced the number of brackets for the tax rate on marginal income from three to two — giving wealthy taxpayers a big break by allowing them to pay the same rate as people in the middle class. He also created a new break to foster small business, but analysts say rich residents of the state have been able to pretend to be small businesses to shelter their incomes from taxes, turning that break into a loophole.
The legislation enacted over his veto eliminates the break for small business and restores the third tax bracket. The maximum marginal rate, however, will still be well below what it was when Brownback took office.
The richest household in every 100 will pay about 1.7 percentage points more as a result of this week's vote — an average of $31,000 more a year. That is a major increase in taxes on the richest, but it amounts to only about two-thirds of Brownback's cuts for that group.
And the bill does not bring the sales tax down to pre-2015 levels. Instead, it includes other provisions that will modestly increase taxes on some households among the poor and the middle class.
The marginal rate on their incomes will be increased. Also, married couples earning less than $12,500 are generally exempt from paying taxes now, but that threshold will decline to $5,000.
In total, the new legislation will increase the share of their income the poorest household in every five pays in state taxes by 0.1 percentage points on average.
Among Kansas's middle class, the share the typical household pays in state taxes will increase by 0.3 percentage points, or an average of $160 more annually. Overall, the new law increases taxes for about three quarters of middle-class households in Kansas. Others will benefit when deductions and credits for child-care, mortgage payments and other expenses are restored.
Correction: An earlier version of the chart accompanying this post was inaccurately labeled. The bars represent the share of all state taxes paid in Kansas, not state income taxes only. This version has been corrected. Additionally, the corrected version reflects revised data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
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In the UK, 26 people have been accused of raping and sexually assaulting underage girls, some as young as 11. Before you ask, no, they were not Methodists. Shocking, I know (see Georgetown Professor: Slavery, Rape is Totally Cool Under Islam and Sweden’s Open Islamic Immigration: Now Officially the Rape Capital of the West).
Our friend Tommy Robinson attempted to get a word with them…
Today as they arrived at court in Huddersfield, northern England, I confronted the 24 men and two women charged with abusing over 120 underage girls. In light of the disappointing media turnout, I tried to ask the masked and laughing accused perpetrators — some of whom are standing trial for as many as 21 counts of rape — why they felt justified allegedly abusing so many girls as young as 11.
If only someone would have just taught them not to rape underage girls. Or just not to rape at all. What with cultural differences being what they are and all, rape isn’t permissible in the UK so much. Tea-drinking, crumpet-nomming, and using more words than necessary (why whatever do you mean, fine sir?), that’s more up the Thames. Gang-raping school girls? No.
You know who I didn’t see confronting these rapists? Feminists all hot and bothered about “rape culture.” The slut-walking kind who like to parade their ta-tas for the world to see, while bitching about white men who may or may not be frat boys at a university near you. They were nowhere to be found here. No spitting, no screaming, no pouring urine on anyone. Instead, a bull-doggish British WHITE MAN was there to confront these (alleged) rapists on behalf of female honor and justice. Bear that in mind.
Incidentally, I didn’t see a lot of white men walking up to the court to be charged with rape. Even though the narrative is white frat boys rape women. Sure, sure, the “brave” men accused of raping school girls had their faces covered but methinks they be not of the white, episcopalian variety.
But of course, noting how they were not white Christians would be Islamophobic.
NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT’S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE.
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Dundalk 0
AZ Alkmaar 1
Ben Blake reports from Tallaght Stadium
DUNDALK’S HOPES of qualification to the Europa League knockout stages suffered a setback tonight as they went down 1-0 to AZ Alkmaar at Tallaght Stadium.
Playing in their first competitive match for two-and-a-half weeks, the home side lacked the spark we’ve seen from them so often in Europe this season and began the game poorly.
Dutch striker Wout Weghorst struck the decisive goal nine minutes in after slack defending allowed him to pounce on a loose ball and blast home.
A third consecutive defeat in the competition leaves the Lilywhites needing a win from their final group game away to Maccabi Tel-Aviv on 8 December to guarantee second place — although a score draw would be enough if Zenit St Petersburg defeat AZ.
Dundalk's starting XI. Source: Morgan Treacy/INPHO
Ciaran Kilduff, the super sub in Holland two months ago, was handed a start ahead of regular first choice striker David McMillan, while skipper Stephen O’Donnell was deemed fit to start after struggling with injuries recently.
With Ireland manager Martin O’Neill, assistant Roy Keane and President Michael D Higgins all watching on, it was the visiting team who struck first early in the first half, however.
After a succession of corners, Mats Seuntjens recycled the ball and crossed from the left flank. Andy Boyle missed the header and Dane Massey took a heavy touch to hand Weghorst the chance and he made no mistake from ten yards.
Ipswich Town boss Mick McCarthy was also in attendance to watch the in-demand Daryl Horgan — so effective all season — but the winger had one of his quieter nights.
Instead, it was Ronan Finn who led the Dundalk charge as they steadily improved the longer the first half went on.
Good footwork from the former Shamrock Rovers man very nearly created an opening on 34 minutes and Kilduff headed wide from the resulting corner.
Finn then took a shot on 30 yards out, only to see it sail wide of Sergio Rochet’s goal.
Stephen Kenny was forced into a change minutes before the half-time whistle as O’Donnell’s recent fitness troubles continued.
The midfielder had pulled up with a hamstring problem and despite attempting to play on, had to be replaced by John Mountney.
AZ goalscorer Wout Weghorst (right). Source: Tommy Dickson/INPHO
Despite a bright start from Dundalk after the interval, it was AZ who had several chances to double their advantage with Gary Rogers regularly coming to the rescue. The experienced goalkeeper was kept busy and pulled off saves from Weghorst, Seuntjens, Jahanbakhsh and Rienstra to keep his side in the game.
But Dundalk held in there and threw on David McMillan in place of the largely-ineffective Kilduff for the final 15 minutes.
With AZ content to sit on their one-goal advantage as the clock ticked down, the home team pushed numbers forward with Finn coming close and Gannon’s goalbound strike blocked but it wasn’t to be.
DUNDALK: Rogers; Gannon, Boyle, Gartland, Massey; O’Donnell (c) (Mountney 41), Benson, McEleney (Shiels 80), Finn, Horgan; Kilduff (McMillan 76).
AZ ALKMAAR: Rochet; Johansson, Vlaar (c), Wuytens, Haps; Luckassen, Seuntjens, Rienstra; Jahanbakhsh (Dos Santos 75), Weghorst (Friday 87), Tankovic (Ouwejan 80).
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Alexander Imich (February 4, 1903 – June 8, 2014) was a Polish Jewish-born American chemist, parapsychologist, and writer, who was the president of the Anomalous Phenomena Research Center in New York City. He was born in 1903 in Częstochowa, Poland (then a part of Russian Empire) to a Jewish family.[1][2]
Imich, a supercentenarian, became the oldest living man after the death of Arturo Licata, of Italy, on April 24, 2014.[3][4][5] Until his own death a little more than a month later, at the age of 111 years, 124 days, Imich was certified by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest living man.
Imich was also the last surviving veteran of the Polish-Soviet War.[6]
Early war service [ edit ]
Imich stated that, at age 15, he and the rest of his class joined the Polish forces to fight the Bolsheviks in 1918.[7] His older brother served as instructor in the automobile division, so Imich learned to drive trucks for the army until the Bolshevik forces were pushed back and Imich returned to school.[8]
Academic career [ edit ]
He earned a Ph.D in zoology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1929,[8] but as he could not find an academic position in zoology, he switched to chemistry. During the 1920s and 1930s he did some research on a medium, Matylda, for the Polish Society for Psychical Research. He published a report in 1932 in a German journal, Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie, but all of the unpublished notes and photos from the research were lost during World War II.[9]
World War II [ edit ]
During World War II, Imich and his wife Wela (pronounced Vela) fled to Soviet-occupied Białystok, where he was employed as a chemist.[10] The couple were later interned in a labor camp for the duration of the war due to their refusal to accept Soviet citizenship. They were eventually freed and chose to emigrate to the U.S. in 1951, as almost all of their Polish relatives and friends had died in the Holocaust.[1]
Life in the United States [ edit ]
In 1952, Imich and his wife Wela (died 1986) emigrated to the United States, first to Pennsylvania and then to New York, dividing their time between both places. To make a living, Imich initially took up chemistry, but once Wela made a career for herself as a psychologist in 1965, he turned to parapsychology.[5] After becoming a widower in 1986, he continued his lifelong interest in parapsychology, giving out the Imich prize for parapsychology research for several years until he began experiencing financial problems.[10]
Imich wrote numerous papers for journals in the field and edited a book, Incredible Tales of the Paranormal which was published by Bramble Books in 1995. He formed the Anomalous Phenomena Research Center in 1999, trying to find a way to produce "The Crucial Demonstration", the goal of which is to demonstrate the reality of paranormal phenomena to mainstream scientists and the general public.[11] In 2012, he began to transfer the records of his research into the paranormal to the University of Manitoba Department of Archives and Special Collections.[5] He practiced calorie restriction and attributed his longevity to this.[1]
Imich died on June 8, 2014 at 9:03 AM from natural causes at the age of 111.[12] He was succeeded as the world's oldest man by Sakari Momoi of Japan (born February 5, 1903, one day after Imich).[12]
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Chicken Coops
Somerzby Chook Pens, Chicken Houses and Coops
Coops | Coop Sizing Guide | Reviews | Payment Options | Shipping | Related Products
Somerzby have an exciting range of coops, cages and pens in models and sizes to meet the needs of you and your chickens.
All our high quality chicken coops exhibit the same exacting standards that you have come to expect from Somerzby products.
Look through the exciting features of our range and you will see why our customers are consistently happy.
We recommend that you lay concrete pavers to rest your chicken coop on, as they will give added protection from ground moisture and ensure the long life of your backyard coop.
Chickens will often share the nest box and all lay in the same place, one nest box for each chook is not needed.
The Estate
New Design, Stylish Trims
The Somerzby Estate is the ultimate chook house. It's a large, luxury coop for those looking for luxury accommodation for your Chooks.
It has a large door, and is super easy to access and clean. The coop comes with a large metal pull-out tray and full height opening door.
The strong, robust frame is made with rot resistant fir wood, with it's stylish charcoal trim coated in a non-toxic stain.
More great features:
• waterproof asphalt roof
• pull-out metal floor tray at waist height for easy cleaning
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• walk-in access to run
• nesting and sleeping area is elevated - good ventilation and protects from damp ground conditions
• optional add-on run can add 3m of safe area for your chickens or rabbits
It's a Big Chook House
This is one of our larger models (L2570mm x H1670mm x D1010mm).
This coop is large enough to house 8 chickens but do let them out for a run from time to time.
The nesting box is approx W800mm x H450mm x D470mm but dividers allow you to customize this space for the comfort of your chickens.
There is a large enclosed sleeping area (770mm x 1000mm) with an external access door.
Rot resistant fir timber is our timber of choice for this and all our coops and cages.
The stain is water based and non-toxic and we have chosen a warm brown colour for the Somerzby Manor.
More great features:
• waterproof asphalt roof
• pull-out metal floor tray at waist height for easy cleaning
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• walk-in access to run
• nesting and sleeping area is elevated--good ventilation and protects from damp ground conditions
• optional add-on run can add 3m of safe area for your chickens or rabbits
Extra Large Chicken House
The Homestead is another of our larger models, suitable for up to 12 chickens.
It has many of the same outstanding features as the Manor including walk-in access for cleaning and elevated nesting/sleeping areas.
It can also house cats or rabbits very comfortably.
Check out these features:
• waterproof asphalt roof
• pull-out metal floor tray at waist height for easy cleaning
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• large nesting and sleeping area with 3 roosting poles
• nesting and sleeping area is elevated--good ventilation and protects from damp ground conditions
• optional add-on run can add 3m of safe area for your chickens or rabbits
Huge Run for Your Chickens
Otherwise known as the Chook Pen, it can be used as a stand alone chook enclosue, or as an optional add-on run for the Manor, Estate or the Homestead adds another 3 metres.
Multiple runs can be joined together to suit your needs.
Check out these features:
• fir construction–tough
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• walk-in access
Super Deluxe Mansion
Chook House with the Lot.
Our Super Deluxe Mansion chicken coop has wire mesh on the floor to protect against snakes, foxes,rats and to prevent wily rabbits digging their way out.
This model also has fly and mosquito proof screens on all sides of the run.
This is really important to prevent your rabbits being infected with mosquito-borne diseases such as myxomatosis and RCD (Rabbit calicivirus disease).
The Super Deluxe Mansion features:
• measures L2250mm x H1430mm x D940mm
• waterproof asphalt roof
• pull-out metal floor tray for easy cleaning
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• large nesting and sleeping area with 2 roosting poles
• nesting and sleeping area is elevated--good ventilation and protects from damp ground conditions
• comes in Brown with green trim colour.
• is suitable for up to 6 chickens
• has a detachable run—screw on or hooks and eyes—easy to move
Chook House for 6 Chickens
This is a simpler version of the Super Deluxe but packed full of great features and will comfortably house up to six chooks (don’t forget to let them out for runs).
Check out these features:
• measures L2250mm x H1430mm x D940mm
• waterproof asphalt roof
• pull-out metal floor tray for easy cleaning
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• large nesting and sleeping area with 2 roosting poles
• nesting and sleeping area is elevated—mesh screens give good ventilation and protect from damp ground conditions
• choose from these great colours: Charcoal, green or blue with white trim–non-toxic water-based stain
Plus, the dependable strength of rot resistant fir.
Mansion Run
Add-on or Stand Alone
Perfect extension for the Mansion or Mansion Deluxe, it can be used as a stand alone chook enclosue, or as an optional add-on run, chooks love it as it adds another 2 metres.
Multiple runs can be joined together to suit your needs.
Check out these features:
• fir construction–tough
• L 2000 x H 820 x W 1120 approx
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• White non-toxic water based stain
• 3 opening doors for easy access
Click to View our full list of Chook Coops We Sell.
Fits Four Chickens
You will love this classic design full of superior features.
Look at the ease of access provided by the fully opening front door, the asphalt roof covering the entire outdoor run and it’s topped off with the beautiful golden brown stain with green trim.
This coop features:
• L2260mm x H1175mm x D730mm APPROX
• waterproof asphalt roof--green
• nesting box - 680mm x 440mm approx
• 1 Perch
• pull-out metal floor tray for easy cleaning
Four chickens will feel right at home in the Chalet.
Chicken Tractor with Wheels
For the chickens that are going places.
Chickens love to scratch and peck in the grass and dirt, and it’s not long before they need to move on to fresh grass.
Wheels and convenient handles make this backyard coop highly mobile. One person can easily move the Lodge.
The nesting area has a galvanised metal floor.
This is the only product in our range where the floor doesn’t slide out but is removable.
This coop features:
• easy access doors at both ends and on the side
• green and white stained fir—long-lasting
• good ventilation
Great Easy to Clean House for 3 - 4 Chickens
This stylish design is also highly practical.
The front and roof panels open for full access to all areas—so easy to clean!
You get these unbeatable features too:
• waterproof asphalt roof
• pull-out metal floor tray for easy cleaning
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• nesting and sleeping area is elevated--good ventilation and protects from damp ground conditions
• perch for chickens
Perfect Coop for Children
Your chickens will be clean, dry and safe in the Cottage and these colours will brighten up any backyard.
The Cottage is perfect for 2 chickens if you let them out for daily runs, or 3 small rabbits.
You get these unbeatable features too:
• measures: L1840mm x H820mm x D1010mm
• waterproof asphalt roof
• pull-out metal floor tray for easy cleaning
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• large nesting and sleeping area with 1 perch
• available in Pink with white trim, Blue with White Trim or Classic Brown and Green
Thoughtfully placed doors make access easy.
Coop With All the Features
Your pets will be clean, dry and safe in the Deluxe Cottage and the Modern colour will suit any decor.
The Deluxe cottage comes with added protection of Mozzie/Fly screens to protect your Chickens from Disease and a wire mesh floor to prevent foxes and predators digging in.
The Cottage is perfect for 2 chickens if you let them out for daily runs, or 3 small rabbits.
• measures approx: 1860mm x H840mm x D1100mm
• waterproof asphalt roof
• pull-out metal floor tray for easy cleaning
• 10mm galvanised wire mesh allows good ventilation but keeps out pesky vermin
• large nesting and sleeping area with 1 perch
• available in Charcoal with white trim
The Somerzby Coop Range - Perfect For Every Chicken
The Somerzby range of hen coops are designed to provide safe and comfortable roosting and nesting spaces for your hens.
Our Chicken Coop Sizing Guide shows you the recommended Somerzby chicken coop for your chicken family.
1 – 2 chickens - Cottage, Deluxe Cottage
3 – 4 chickens - Bungalow, Lodge, Chalet
5 – 6 chickens - Mansion, Deluxe Mansion
6 – 8 chickens - Manor, Estate
9 – 12 chickens - Homestead, Resort
Click Here to see our Chicken Coop Sizing Guide
Spoil Your Chickens With A Safe, Secure and Comfortable Chicken Coop
Making the choice to raise chickens is great choice for the whole family. Planning your backyard and where to keep your chooks is important for the health, safety and comfort of your new pets.
Somerzby make choosing the right type of enclosure easy, our coops are great for keeping your pets safe, they are comfortable for your chickens and they look fantastic in any backyard.
When you choose a Somerzby coop your chickens will thank you for making the right decision.
See our Keeping Chickens Information Centre
See Also
Somerzby Chicken Coop Reviews
"Purchased from you recently. Just wanted to let you know how happy I am with your service and product - prompt delivery, easy to assemble, quality product, value for money. Thank you."
Maree Frederiksen (via Ebay)
"Thank you so much for quick delivery of this item! Appreciated very much. And a bonus that it's been so easy to construct. Wonderful product and fantastic service!"
Trish Hunt (via Ebay)
"Very impressed. Great product, price and fast delivery. I'll be ordering more"
brodog69 (via Ebay)
"Grand daughter is absolutely stoked. Would definitely recommend this seller"
bill2005bill1943 (via Ebay)
Payment Options
Somerzby want to make it easy for you, we accept all methods of payment including:
Credit Card
PayPal
Direct Transfer
AfterPay
Local Pick-up
Plus we are excited to now offer Afterpay! To purchase with Afterpay (online lay-by payment system, select “ Afterpay ” at the checkout page.
Australia Wide Shipping
Somerzby Chicken Coops are shipped Australia wide including Sydney , Brisbane , Melbourne , Adelaide, ACT, and Perth.
Related Products
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Environment artist Maarten Hof showed how he modeled and painted an incredibly detailed environment.
Introduction
Hey! My name is Maarten, I was born and raised in the Netherlands. At the moment I am graduating as a “Multimedia specialist”. I chose 3D as a minor and started focussing on environment modelling, texturing and lighting. My first experience with 3D was about 3 years ago, during a group project at school.
I had an internship at Triangle Studios here in the Netherlands where I worked on Uphill Rush and Real Farm. After my internship ended I worked there for a bit as well. Those are my only professional titles so far but I am planning to add a lot more!
Cyberpunk Environment Blockout
First of all, thank you! And thanks to Helio Frazao for this awesome concept art. It was one of my main goals to show that Unity is a really powerful engine graphics wise. The new post-processing stack really pushed its capabilities.
The first step was to get my camera at a fixed position as early on as possible. It was a bit of playing around with the field of view and the early block-out but because I got my camera right early on, it gave me a good view/perspective of where I had to put my priorities.
When blocking out the environment I looked for strong straight lines to position my camera and frame the block-out. See the picture below:
I looked at where these straight lines intersected with the frame of the picture and tried to get this the same in Unity. Notice the right sign that is cut through the half and the red sign at the top of the image. These are all indicators of where I should place my camera. Also, I noticed that the horizon is not straight and adjusted my camera to that.
This is my first block-out. These guys are there for spacial reference. I call these my “ref-guys” and everyone should have them.
Once I had my camera right I could basically make a list of which assets I had to make first based on how prominent they were in the frame. The first thing I needed to establish were the buildings because they were a major part of the concept art.
In order to keep these kind of projects fun for myself I like to make some assets in between major parts. For instance, when I finished the blocking I really wanted to make a prop or an asset because that is what I enjoy the most. The ATM was the first asset I created and it served as a benchmark for all the other assets that had to be made.
I also wanted to make sure I could achieve this typical neon glow with emissive textures. A major part of the concept art is neon signs so I wanted to make sure these came out nice.
First neon sign test.
Production of Assets
Making all these assets was pretty straight forward. First of all, reference is key. For every single asset I made I used google pictures or one of Helio’s call out sheets as reference.
My workflow for assets with a dedicated texture goes like this: Model > Highpoly > UV map > Bake > Texture. This goes through various iterations. I only used ZBrush for the garbage bags. The rest of the high-poly models are made in Blender with the subdivision modifier and adding bevels. Other models such as the cables and the pipes share the same tiling material to save time and since it is quite a dark scene I could get away with this. For the cables I used two different sets of variations that I could position everywhere and one set of cables fixed to a position in the scene.
Looking back on how many assets I actually made, it doesn’t feel like many, probably because it’s my favorite part. Blocking out this environment and its lighting were definitely the most difficult parts of this concept art & challenge.
Key elements prop wise where the ATM, the CTC network point, and all the garbage. All the signs, of course, play a major part in the overall look of the scene. These took the most time to make.
Once I got all the elements in place I started experimenting with some humans, more or less… Only one survived and made it to the final post. These humans were made with MakeHuman and I tweaked the textures a little in Photoshop.
Assembling The Environment
My Blender scene and Unity scene are actually synced through one fbx file I named “blockout”. This was initially for the block-out of the scene but I later on modeled all my assets in the same scene. This way I could model them at exactly the right scale. I could even model it in the right place (where it would end up in the final scene). Once I got the model down, I zero it out, set the pivot right and export it to Unity. In Unity I arranged all the individual models such as the container, the ATM, the garbage etc. Once I get the scale and position right I make a high-poly model, which I UV map and texture.
The block-out and the buildings were the only things I arranged in Blender. I chose to not go with a modular approach since the scale of the scene is not that big and I didn’t see the benefits of it. Also this way I could make some nice dedicated textures for the building.
Working on Materials
For this environment I made 3 different materials in Substance Designer, the other materials are made or are standard in Substance Painter. As far as I know Unity doesn’t support decals natively so I just painted all the decals in the texture. I could justify this to myself knowing that Naughty Dog didn’t use decals until Uncharted 4 (correct me if I am wrong).
My standard workflow in painter goes like this: Getting my bakes right. This is one of the most important things and if not done right it can ruin your whole texture. Once I got that down, I add little details in the normal map with stamps and bake everything in the other maps. (e.g ao map, world space normal map, position map etc.)
When I am satisfied with my maps I start texturing. Most of the time I take standard materials and tweak these until I’m satisfied. After that I add some wear and tear along with some dirt. One smart material that really works great for me is the “sand” smart material from Substance Share. I could really tweak this smart material to how I wanted it to look. As one of the last layers I often add a fill layer, mask it and add a generator for some extra details, noise, dirt and tear.
If the asset has decals I also add these in Substance Painter. It is worth noting that I only used the standard shader from Unity, no fancy stuff there!
Creating The Lighting
I am really interested in how 3D environments are lit and I wanted to use this challenge as a good learning opportunity to better my skills in lighting. It really comes down to using your eyes. I looked at all the little difference in colors and values of the concept art and tried to mimic this in Unity. Every time I added a new asset I also tweaked the lighting. One trick I used was to apply a lot of saturation to the concept art in photoshop so I was able to see the colors and the way the lighting bounced better. To check my values I made a thumbnail of my scene and put it next to the original concept art. Making it black and white made it even clearer where my values were compared to the original concept art.
Here is a picture of the lighting without the materials.
Unfortunately I was not able to bake the lights (my laptop can’t handle this) so all the real-time lights had a pretty big impact on the frame rate. As you can see on the screenshot I used a lot of lights the get all the different colors and the way it “bounces” from the light sources. I don’t have any experience lighting a scene for a real game but my guess is that I went a bit overboard.
Here are all my lights!
Post Production
First of all I didn’t add any post effects in photoshop after that the screenshot was taken.
Everything you see is rendered and captured directly from Unity.
I used 2 different post-processing effects. The Unity “post-processing stack” and “Beautify”. I could easily go with only the post-processing stack of Unity but I wanted to add a little more to it. Something that I really like about Beautify is that I can sharpen the image a little. This really added a lot to the overall quality of the render. It’s subtle but noticeable.
The neon signs that are made up of an alpha texture with emission don’t use mipmaps, this reduced the blockiness significantly. Especially in the far away neon signs. Also what really helped in pushing this environment to the next level was to add small bevels on the hard corners. It doesn’t seem to make a big difference in the first place, but when all the hard corners bend the light nicely, it adds a lot to the overall quality of your environment.
One trick/cheat I use for capturing screenshots for my portfolio is capturing at double the resolution and scale this down in Photoshop with bicubic sharpener enabled. This way you get some really clean shots with a little bit of nice anti-aliasing.
Tip: This also works really well for normal maps that don’t have anti-aliasing yet.
Conclusion
The biggest challenge was to get the mood that the concept art had right. And with mood I mostly mean the lighting. All these neon signs and different light-sources are super cool to have in such a scene but getting it right was the biggest challenge. Also keeping the quality consistent through the whole challenge was quite a challenge, this is my biggest personal project so far but all the different assets and stuff kept me motivated. In total it took me about 7 weeks to build minus 2 weeks vacation. I didn’t work full time on this environment, there were days that I didn’t come near my computer and there were days that I worked till deep in the night.
Maarten Hof, Environment Artist
Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev.
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Kenneth Arnold Chesney (born March 26, 1968) is an American country music singer, songwriter, and record producer. He has recorded 20 albums, 14 of which have been certified Gold or higher by the RIAA. He has also produced more than 40 Top 10 singles on the US Billboard Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts, 29 of which have reached number one. Many of these have also charted within the Top 40 of the US Billboard Hot 100, making him one of the most successful crossover country artists. He has sold over 30 million albums worldwide.[1]
Chesney co-directed and produced a film for ESPN entitled The Boys of Fall. He has received six Academy of Country Music awards (including four consecutive Entertainer of the Year awards from 2005 to 2008),[2] as well as six awards from the Country Music Association. He is one of the most popular touring acts in country music, regularly selling out the venues in which he performs.[3][4] His 2007 Flip-Flop Summer Tour was the highest-grossing country road trip of the year.[5]
The Country Music Association honored Chesney with the Entertainer of the Year award in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008. Other notable awards he received include the Academy of Country Music's 1997 New Male Vocalist of the Year, 2002 Top Male Vocalist of the Year, and the Triple Crown Award in 2005. He was awarded his fourth consecutive Entertainer of the Year award from the Academy of Country Music on May 18, 2008.
Early life [ edit ]
Chesney was born on March 26, 1968, in Knoxville, Tennessee, at St. Mary's Medical Center and was raised in Luttrell, and is of English and Irish descent. He is the son of David Chesney, a former elementary school teacher, and Karen Chandler, a hair stylist in the Knoxville area. Chesney has one sibling, a younger sister named Jennifer Chandler. In 1986, Chesney graduated from Gibbs High School, where he played baseball and football. He received his first guitar, "The Terminor", for Christmas and began teaching himself how to play it.[3] Chesney studied advertising at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, where he was a member of the ETSU Bluegrass Program and the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity and graduated in 1990 [6]In 1982, Kenny won the best male yodeler at the International Yodeling Championship in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1989, he recorded a self-released demo album at the Classic Recording Studio in Bristol, Virginia. He sold 1,000 copies while performing at the local clubs in Johnson City and used the money from album sales to help himself buy a new guitar. After graduation from East Tennessee State in 1990,[6] he headed to Nashville and performed at several local clubs. He became the resident performer at The Turf, a honky tonk bar in the city's historic district.[citation needed]
Career and awards [ edit ]
Signing first publishing and record deals [ edit ]
In 1992, the head of writer relations at BMI, Clay Bradley, recommended Chesney to his friend, Troy Tomlinson, at Opryland Music Group by saying: "I met this kid today from East Tennessee. He's a good singer, a good songwriter, and more than anything, I think you're going to really like him as a person."[7] Chesney performed five songs during his audition for Tomlinson. Tomlinson's reaction was enthusiastic, later telling HitQuarters:
First of all I was attracted to the songs, because I thought that he painted great pictures in his lyrics, particularly for someone who had not been around the typical Music Row co-writes. I thought that he sang very well too. But more than anything there was a kind of this 'I-will-do-it' look in his eyes - I was really drawn in by the fact that he was so set on being successful in this business.[7]
Chesney left the audition with a songwriter's contract. A year later, an appearance at a songwriter's showcase led to a contract with Capricorn Records, which had recently started a country division.[citation needed]
In My Wildest Dreams (1994) [ edit ]
Chesney's debut album, In My Wildest Dreams, was released on the independent Capricorn Records label in April 1994. The album's first two singles, "Whatever It Takes" and "The Tin Man", both reached the lower regions of the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart. The album sold approximately 10,000 copies before Capricorn Records closed its country music division in Nashville later that year and moved to Atlanta.[8]
All I Need to Know (1995) [ edit ]
Chesney then signed with BNA Records, and released his second studio album All I Need to Know in 1995. The album produced three singles. "Fall in Love" and the title track both reached the Top 10, while "Grandpa Told Me So" peaked at number 23.[8] That same year, Chesney co-wrote Confederate Railroad's single "When He Was My Age" from their album When and Where.[9] Chesney utilized fiddle and steel instrumentation within this album in order to highlight the down-home sentiments and the unique Tennessee twinge in his voice. This album seemed to capture the traditional spirit that made country music popular.[10]
Me and You (1996–1997) [ edit ]
Chesney's third studio album and his second major-label one, entitled Me and You, was released in 1996.[8] Its first single, "Back In My Arms Again", peaked just outside the Top 40 on the country charts, while its title track (which Chesney had recorded on his previous album) and "When I Close My Eyes" (which was previously recorded by Keith Palmer on his 1991 debut album and then by Larry Stewart on his 1993 debut album Down the Road) both peaked at number 2. Me and You was Chesney's first album to be certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).[8] A cover of Mac McAnally's 1990 single "Back Where I Come From" was also included on this album. Even though Chesney's version was never released as a single, it has been regularly performed during his concerts. In recognition of his successful year, Chesney was honored with the 1997 Academy of Country Music's New Male Vocalist of the Year award.[citation needed]
I Will Stand (1997–1998) [ edit ]
I Will Stand, Chesney's fourth album and his third from BNA Records, followed in 1997. The album's first single, "She's Got It All", became Chesney's first number one hit on the Billboard country charts and spent three weeks at that position.[8] The album's second single, "A Chance", peaked just shy of the Top 10. The third single, "That's Why I'm Here", peaked at number 2 in 1998.[citation needed]
Everywhere We Go (1999) [ edit ]
Everywhere We Go, Chesney's fourth album from BNA, came in 1999. That album produced two consecutive number one hits with "How Forever Feels" and "You Had Me from Hello" (the latter inspired by a line in the movie Jerry Maguire).[8] The album also produced two more singles with "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" and "What I Need to Do",[8] which peaked at numbers 11 and 8 on the country charts, respectively. Everywhere We Go was Chesney's first album to be certified platinum.[8]
Greatest Hits (2000) [ edit ]
By 2000, Chesney released his Greatest Hits compilation album.[8] It included four new tracks, as well as updated versions of "Fall in Love", "The Tin Man", and "Back Where I Come From". The new version of "The Tin Man" was one of the disc's three singles, along with two of the new tracks, "I Lost It" and "Don't Happen Twice".[8]
No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems (2002–2003) [ edit ]
The album No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems was released in 2002. Its lead-off single, "Young", peaked at number 2, while the follower "The Good Stuff" spent seven weeks at number 1 and became Billboard's number one country song of the year for 2002. The video for "Young" was honored by CMT with the Video of the Year and Male Video of the Year awards for 2002. In 2003, ACM honored Chesney as Top Male Vocalist of the Year, while "The Good Stuff" received the award for Single Record of the Year. CMT later recognized the video for the album's title track as the Hottest Video of the Year.[citation needed]
All I Want for Christmas Is a Real Good Tan (2003) [ edit ]
In 2003, Chesney recorded All I Want for Christmas Is a Real Good Tan. The album's title track peaked at No. 30 on the country charts from holiday airplay.[citation needed]
When the Sun Goes Down (2004–2005) [ edit ]
2004 saw the release of the album When the Sun Goes Down. Its lead-off single, "There Goes My Life", spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard country charts. On April 21, 2004, the accompanying music video for that song was honored by CMT with the Male Video of the Year award. The album's title track, a duet with Uncle Kracker, also went to number one. The music video for the album's third single, "I Go Back", was honored on April 11, 2005 with Country Music Television's Male Video of the Year Award. This song, along with the album's fourth single, "The Woman with You", both peaked at number 2. The fifth single, "Anything But Mine", reached number one, and the final single, "Keg in the Closet", peaked to number 6.[citation needed]
When the Sun Goes Down was honored with the 2004 CMA award for Album of the Year while Chesney was honored as the Entertainer of the Year. He was also presented with AMA's 2004 Artist of the Year award.[citation needed]
Be as You Are and The Road and the Radio (2005–2006) [ edit ]
In January 2005, Chesney released the album Be as You Are (Songs from an Old Blue Chair), supporting it with his Somewhere in the Sun Tour. Be as You Are is composed mostly of ballads. The album reached the top of the mainstream of popular music as well as country charts. Although it qualified for platinum status, it seemed a lot less popular than his more traditional albums.[11]
In spring 2005, Chesney was honored with the prestigious Triple-Crown Award presented by the Academy of Country Music. This award was presented after Chesney's 2004 Academy of Country Music's Entertainer of the Year award was combined with 1997's New Male Vocalist of the Year award and 2003's Top Male Vocalist of the Year award. The following year, on May 23, 2006, Chesney was honored with his second Entertainer of the Year at the Academy of Country Music Awards.[12]
Chesney's next album, The Road and the Radio, produced five singles. "Living in Fast Forward", "Summertime", and "Beer in Mexico" all reached number one, while "Who You'd Be Today" and "You Save Me" both broke the Top 5. Chesney promotes his beliefs of perfection, as getting songs right in the studio, ultimately leads to performing[13] it right on the road and on the radio.
Live: Live Those Songs Again (2006) [ edit ]
Live: Live Those Songs Again, Chesney's first live album was released on September 19, 2006 via BNA Records. This album includes live renditions of 15 songs, 11 of which were singles. "Live Those Songs", "Never Gonna Feel Like That Again", "On the Coast of Somewhere Beautiful", and "Back Where I Come From" were never released by Chesney as singles, although "Back Where I Come From" was released as a single from Mac McAnally's 1990 album Simple Life.[citation needed]
Collaborations [ edit ]
Chesney collaborated with one of his personal heroes, Jimmy Buffett, on a remake of Hank Williams' single "Hey Good Lookin' (with Clint Black, Alan Jackson, Toby Keith, and George Strait), and a second song "License To Chill". Both songs are on Buffett's 2004 album License To Chill.[citation needed]
Chesney, along with Tim McGraw, contributed to a version of Tracy Lawrence's single "Find Out Who Your Friends Are", which can be found on his album For the Love. The official single version, only featuring Lawrence's vocals, was released in August 2006 but did not reach the Top 40 on the country charts until January 2007, when 'the album was released. After the album's release, the version with him, Chesney, and McGraw began receiving significant airplay, helping to boost the single to No. 1 on the country charts. The song became Lawrence's first No. 1 single in 11 years, as well as the second-slowest climbing No. 1 single in the history of the Billboard music charts.[citation needed]
With Neil Thrasher and Wendell Mobley, Chesney also co-wrote Rascal Flatts' 2007 single Take Me There", which served as the lead-off single to their album Still Feels Good.[14]
Chesney also recorded a duet with Reba McEntire on her No. 1 2007 album Reba: Duets. "Every Other Weekend" peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and No. 104 on the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart. The album has sold 2.1 million copies world-wide and is certified Platinum by the RIAA for sales of over 1 million. "Every Other Weekend" was the final single from the album.[citation needed]
Super Hits (2007) [ edit ]
On November 7, 2007, Chesney was named the CMA Entertainer of the Year for the third time in four years. The following week, on November 15, 2007, the compilation Super Hits album was released as part of Sony BMG's Super Hits series.[citation needed]
Kenny Chesney in concert at the Madison Square Garden, New York City on August 30, 2007
Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates (2007–2008) [ edit ]
On September 11, 2007, Chesney released the album Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates. This album represented a move to a more gulf and western sound with a number of "breezy, steel-drum island songs."[15] Kanye West and 50 Cent's albums Graduation and Curtis were both released that same day. Those artists were in the midst of a competitive sales war, with the latter claiming that he would end his solo rap career if West sold more albums than he did (remarks he later retracted as terms of his contract conflicted with the promise). Chesney, however, decided that he would give country music a place in the competition, claiming country artists were just as popular as those in the rap genre. Chesney came in third place in record sales among the three musical artists.[citation needed]
The lead-off single from Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates was "Never Wanted Nothing More". That song became Chesney's twelfth number one hit on the Billboard country charts.[16] On the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs chart dated for the week ending on September 15, 2007, the album's second single "Don't Blink" debuted at No. 16, setting a new record for the highest debut on that chart since the inception of SoundScan electronic tabulation in 1990.[17] This record was broken one week later by Garth Brooks' "More Than a Memory", which debuted at No. 1 on the same chart, making it the first song ever to do so. The third single, "Shiftwork" (a duet with George Strait) peaked at No. 2 on the country charts. During the week of June 28, 2008, the fourth and final single, "Better as a Memory", became Chesney's fourteenth number one hit.[citation needed]
Kenny Chesney's Poets and Pirates tour bus in 2008
Chesney started his Poets and Pirates Tour on April 26, 2008 at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina. During the introduction of his set, his boot got caught between a hydraulic lift and the lip of the stage surface, which crushed his foot causing a severe hematoma in the ankle; most of the damage was centering within his toes. It took about 30 seconds for Chesney to pry his foot loose as he squatted down on the stage while the band continued to play an extended introduction of the song. When Chesney finally freed himself, he stood up and held his hand on his knee as he began singing.[citation needed]
Chesney didn't acknowledge the injury during the early part of his performance. However, he was visibly limping and seemed to rest near a drum riser while leaning over and holding his knee during the instrumental breaks of his songs. As he came offstage, a doctor from the University of South Carolina cut off Chesney's cowboy boot and immediately began treating the foot injury. X-rays that were taken afterwards revealed several crushed bones in his right foot.[citation needed]
That injury did not have him cancel any shows, as saying "[the doctor] told me it's going to hurt – though nothing could hurt worse than Saturday, I don't think – and they can give me something to deaden the pain when I get out there. I also have to have a doctor standing by should something give, but I'm going to tape it up, and I'm going to get out there."[18]
On May 19, 2008, just a day after being honored as the ACM Entertainer of the Year at the 43rd Annual Academy of Country Music Awards, Chesney criticized the lack of choice in the producers' awarding the honor based on fan votes. "The entertainer of the year trophy is supposed to represent heart and passion and an amazing amount of sacrifice, commitment and focus," he said. "That's the way Garth [Brooks] won it four times, that's the way I won it, that's the way [George] Strait won it, Reba [McEntire], Alabama all those years. That's what it's supposed to represent."[19]
Lucky Old Sun (2008–2009) [ edit ]
Kenny Chesney during a performance in Jacksonville, Florida on August 30, 2008
On July 24, 2008, Chesney announced that he would be releasing a new single from an upcoming album entitled Lucky Old Sun. The song was titled "Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven", and for the chart week of August 16, 2008, it debuted at No. 22 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. The album was released on October 14, 2008.[20] "Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven" became a No. 1 hit. It was followed by a cover of Mac McAnally's 1990 single "Down the Road".[citation needed]
Chesney's 2009 tour was titled the Sun City Carnival Tour and featured both small and large venues in order to keep his ticket prices down.[21] The tour included a performance at Gillette Stadium again, marking the fifth year in a row that he played at the Foxboro, Massachusetts football field.[22]
Greatest Hits II (2010) [ edit ]
In May 2009, Chesney released his second compilation album, Greatest Hits II. This album included the No. 1 hit, "Out Last Night", as the lead single. On May 19, 2010, this album was re-released with two new tracks "This Is Our Moment" and "Ain't Back Yet", with the latter becoming the album's third single in February 2010. Also included on this album is one that Willie Nelson recorded before Chesney did, "I'm Alive". Chesney himself later recorded a version of the song as a duet with Dave Matthews. This version was released in August 2009 as the album's second single.[citation needed]
Hemingway's Whiskey (2010–2011) [ edit ]
In July 2010, Chesney released "The Boys of Fall" as the lead-off single from his album Hemingway's Whiskey, which was released in September 2010. The song hit No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart for the week of October 9, 2010, marking Chesney's eighteenth number one hit.[citation needed]
He then appeared at the 44th Annual Country Music Awards on November 10, 2010.[23]
The second single from Hemingway's Whiskey, "Somewhere with You", was released in November 2010. The song debuted at No. 35 on the country chart for the week of November 6, 2010. Both it and its followup, "Live a Little", went to number 1 on the country charts. The next single was "You and Tequila", co-written and originally recorded by Deana Carter. Chesney's rendition, which featured Grace Potter on backing vocals, went to number 3. After it, "Reality" also went to number 1.[citation needed]
Chesney produced and narrated a biographical film, The Color Orange, on his favorite football player growing up, University of Tennessee quarterback and Canadian Football League hall-of-fame Condredge Holloway. The film was produced for ESPN's "Year of the Quarterback" series, and premiered on February 20, 2011.[citation needed]
Welcome to the Fishbowl (2012) [ edit ]
Chesney released his fourteenth studio album, Welcome to the Fishbowl, on June 19, 2012.[24] Its lead-off single, a Tim McGraw duet titled "Feel Like a Rock Star", debuted at number 13 on the country charts, making it the second-highest debuting country song since the Billboard charts were first tabulated via Nielsen SoundScan, and the highest-debuting duet on that chart.[25] Despite its high debut, the song peaked at number 11 only six weeks later before falling.[citation needed]
BNA Records closed in June 2012. As a result, Chesney was transferred to Columbia Nashville.[26] His first release under Columbia was the album's second single, "Come Over", which went to number 1. The album's third and final single was "El Cerrito Place", which was written by Keith Gattis and originally recorded by Charlie Robison. Chesney's rendition, which featured Grace Potter on backing vocals,[27] went to number 10 on the country charts.
Life on a Rock (2013) [ edit ]
Chesney released his fifteenth studio album, Life on a Rock, on April 30, 2013.[28] The first single from the album, "Pirate Flag", was released to iTunes on February 5, 2013 and peaked at number 3 on the Country Airplay chart in May 2013. Pirate Flag peaked at number 7 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, May 25, 2013.[29] The album's second single, "When I See This Bar", was released to country radio on June 10, 2013. When I see This Bar peaked at number 25 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart, September 14, 2013.[30] This specific album was a drastic change from his regular country feel, to an all beach and island touch.[31]
The Big Revival (2014) [ edit ]
In June 2014, Chesney released the new song "American Kids" to radio. This song served as the lead-off single from his sixteenth studio album The Big Revival, which was released on September 23, 2014.[32][33] The album's second single, "Til It's Gone", was released in mid-October.[34] It reached number one on the Country Airplay chart the week of January 31, 2015. The third single "Wild Child", which is a duet with Grace Potter, was released two days later. It reached number one on the Country Airplay chart the week of June 27, 2015. The album's fourth single, "Save It for a Rainy Day", was released to country radio on June 29, 2015. It reached number one on the Country Airplay chart the week of October 9, 2015.[citation needed]
On October 24, Chesney announced his 2015 tour The Big Revival Tour, which began on March 26, 2015.[35] On October 27, he and Jason Aldean announced that they would perform 10 joint stadium shows in the summer of that year.[36] Two days later, Brantley Gilbert announced that he would be opening for the Chesney/Aldean stadium shows, as well as five additional shows on Chesney's solo tour.[37]
Cosmic Hallelujah (2016) [ edit ]
On March 7, 2016, Chesney announced that he was in the studio working on new music. The lead single to the album is titled "Noise", which was released to country radio on March 24, 2016.[38] The album, Cosmic Hallelujah, was released on October 28.[39] The second song in the album, "Setting the World on Fire", featuring singer P!NK was released to country radio on July 28, 2016.
No Shoes Nation(2017) [ edit ]
On August 25, 2012 at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, Kenny Chesney announced to his fans that he would call his fan following No Shoes Nation.[40] The term No Shoes Nation originated from Chesney's hit song "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problem".[40] The symbol of No Shoes Nation is a black flag with a white skull and crossbones.[41] The name was accompanied by a live album called Live in No Shoes Nation, which topped the Billboard 200 after its release in late 2017.[42] No Shoes Nation inspired the name of Chesney's Sirius XM channel, No Shoes Radio.[43]
Songs for the Saints (2018) [ edit ]
In January 2018, it was announced that Chesney had ended his contract with Sony Music Nashville and signed to Warner Bros. Records Nashville.[44] Chesney released his first album with Warner, entitled Songs for the Saints, on July 27, 2018.[45] In November 2018, he announced plans to tour the U.S. in 2019, hitting smaller-sized venues and arenas rather than massive stadiums.[46]
Personal life [ edit ]
In 2000, Chesney and Tim McGraw became involved in a scuffle with police officers in Buffalo, New York after Chesney attempted to ride a police horse. McGraw came to Chesney's aid after police officers nearby believed the horse was being stolen.[47] The two were arrested and charged, Chesney for disorderly conduct and McGraw for assault, but were acquitted in 2001.[48]
On May 9, 2005, Chesney married actress Renée Zellweger in a ceremony on the island of St. John. They had met in January at a tsunami relief event. On September 15 of that same year, after only four months of marriage, they announced their plans for an annulment. Zellweger cited fraud as the reason in the related papers, and after media scrutiny of her use of the word "fraud", she qualified the use of the term, stating that it was "simply legal language and not a reflection of Kenny's character". Chesney later suggested the failure of his marriage was due to "the fact that I panicked".[49] In an interview by 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper, Chesney commented on the failed marriage. "The only fraud that was committed was me thinking that I knew what it was like…that I really understood what it was like to be married, and I really didn't."[50] The annulment was finalized in late December 2005.
In 2015, Forbes estimated Chesney's annual income at $42 million.[51]
Philanthropy [ edit ]
In 2017, Chesney came to the aid of the U.S. and British Virgin Islands victims of Hurricane Irma, one of whom was given a free lift to the mainland United States.[52] Chesney owned a mansion on St. John in the U.S Virgin Islands, where many stayed to weather the storm. Chesney also set up a charitable fund, Love for Love City[53], to help victims of the storm.[54] Chesney will donate all proceeds from Songs for the Saints to the fund.[53]
Tours [ edit ]
Chesney won the Billboard Touring Award for Top Package Tour five consecutive years between 2005 and 2009, and again in 2011[55]
Headlining
Co-headlining
Discography [ edit ]
Studio albums
Compilation albums
Live albums
See also [ edit ]
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This article was recently published in Russian media. We found it truly informative and impressive so we decided to translate it for our English-speaking readers. Our apologies if the quality of the translation suffers – we did our best.
Vladislav Inozemtsev, Doctor of Economics, Director of the Center for Post-Industrial Studies
Slon.ru, translated by Moskvaer
One often hears that the Russian economy is “seriously ill.” Those, who talk about it, usually look for the causes of this disease and offer different treatments ranging from surgery to modern shamanism. Sometimes I have also been involved in such debates, but today I do not want to delve into the history and speculate about what should be. This text is just a commentary on ten simple and obvious figures. Each reader is quite able to draw conclusions on their own.
1.
66.3% – the amount that the Russian export of oil, petroleum products and natural gas fell from 2013 to 2014. In their production, processing and transportation 1.34 million people were employed, or 0.9% of Russians. The rest – en masse – successfully parasitized on oil and gas revenues, which were providing more than half of all federal revenues.
It should be noted that this figure is the highest in the history of our country: even during the Soviet Union’s decline in 1989 it was “only” 36.9%, on the eve of default in 1998 – 42.8%, by the end of the first presidential term of Vladimir Putin – 57.7%.
Yes, we are still quite far from Venezuela (94.2%) and Nigeria (97.2%), but the United Arab Emirates, a “single-industry” state in former times, reduced the share of oil and gas exports from more than 80% to 53.3% in a quarter of a century. And in Brazil, which President Cardoso once described as uma Rusia tropical, hydrocarbons make up 9.8% of exports.
2.
10.6 times – the amount that the Russian ruble depreciated against the dollar over the past 17 years, after the country emerged from a long period of economic recession and galloping inflation.
It is significant that most of this time was marked by relatively strong economic growth, the rate of which exceeds, for example, South Korea and Eastern Europe.
However, in Korea, from the pre-crisis level in 1997, the Won fell by only 36%, and the currencies of our western neighbors fluctuated along with the rate of the Euro. The explanation that the ruble is “tied” to oil does not help: in Saudi Arabia a fixed exchange rate to the dollar established since 1986, is holding despite the volatility in the commodities market.
In this respect we are similar not to the leaders of the oil market but to the weakest of the players on it – Venezuela (official devaluation of the bolivar in 1998 to 7.5 times) and Nigeria (where the Naira had fallen 9.2 times in price).
Along with the ruble, living standards of citizens has also fallen. The average salary in August 2015, converted into dollars at market exchange rates ($ 525) conform to the figures in June 2007. Eight recent years simply flowed into sand.
3.
20.4% – that was the share of gross capital formation in GDP at the end of 2014. Comparing with the index of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s period, that level fell by more than half.
Namely the decumulation of former industrial and infrastructural potential allowing to “save” 12-13% of GDP each year (up to 10 trillion rubles), provides a relatively high standard of living in today’s Russia. Its contribution to the well-being is significantly higher than gain provided in the 2000s by the price of oil rising.
However, the flip side is well known: in the post-Soviet era there have been more than 11 thousand objects of industrial purpose abandoned; over the past 10 years the country has built only 390 km of railways and 2,700 km of roads; no new refineries or a major enterprise producing modern electronics.
Russia, which respectively lags behind the US and Germany, per capita GDP at market prices, by 4.2 and 3.9 times, directs to the investing slightly larger share of GDP than America, and 1.3 times less than Germany. And there’s no point to compare to China: Russian share of investment is 2.4 times less.
4.
2.1 times – is as many times service industries have outstripped the industrial sector by development over the period from 1997-2014. Between all countries that demonstrated a high GDP growth rate, Russia was the only one where the manufacturing industry has not acted as an engine of economic growth.
The drivers were financial services (an increase of 94% over 2000-2008 years), wholesale and retail trade (+ 132%), mobile telephony and Internet (+ 148%), and even catering.
Russia did not generate growth, but imported it by spending petrodollars for imported goods, borrowed technologies and the relatively primitive (by international standards) equipment for the development of the service sector. Massive de-industrialization of the country occurred as a result. If today the Western powers really wanted to paralyze Russia with sanctions, they should start with a ban of consumables for imported office equipment delivery – import substitution in this field would have taken years.
I should note: in Korea in the 1980s, the industry grew 2.3 times faster than the service sector. In China in the 2000s – by 1.8 times.
5.
61% – is the proportion of foreign investment in Russia that came from … offshore jurisdictions. According to this indicator, we have no equal in the world – as well as on the amount of assets controlled in the country itself by companies registered in offshore zones.
Aside from these investments, the accumulated foreign investments in Russian economy amounted to 2015 January 1 $ 138.2 billion, or $ 958 per person, which is 13 times less than in deprived of all riches Estonia.
It would be okay if foreigners do not invest in Russia, but the fact is that it is Russian funds running away. According to official data, in 2014 the outflow of capital reached a record $ 151.5 billion – if you count them at the current market rate it is about 10 trillion rubles, or 12.6% of Russia’s GDP in 2015.
6.
34.1% – the ratio of revenues to all level budgets to Russia’s GDP. The tax burden, as they call this figure, is 2.05 times more than China’s, 1.57 times more than Turkey’s, 1.34 times – more than the US, and almost equal to the Austria’s.
At the same time this figure does not take into account informal taxes and “social responsibility” of business. Collected funds are spent quite irrationally.
If the US federal budget puts 28% less funds to defense than to the healthcare, the Russian military appropriations in the federal budget in 2014 would exceed the costs of health care by 4.6 times.
Officials also did not forget themselves: in 2013, on the eve of the current crisis, Russia spent 850 billion rubles, or $ 26.7 billion for so called “General expenses” – more than the US spent for General Government in the same year ($ 25,9 billion ).
I am not even going to compare the size of the economies and standards of living in Russia and America – it is clear that Russian bureaucracy refers to the country just as its property.
7.
798 points – at this level the RTS index closed on Friday, September 11, 2015. Thus, the market showed its assessment of the effectiveness of the Russian economy and the Russian state system. In 2008, at the peak of the rise, the indicator was 2488 points – and since then it has fallen by more than 67%. In the US over the same period, a basic S & P500 index rose by 35%, and the German DAX30 rose by 42%.
Now “Gazprom”, once the leader of the Russian economy, costs $ 49.7 billion – just half as much as McDonald’s. “Rosneft” is estimated at $ 39.1 billion – 29% less than the amount that in 2013 was paid by its talented managers for absorption of TNK-BP, which now dissolves in the state financial funnel.
8.
0.15% – that was the share of patents granted by the European Patent Agency to the Russian applicants for scientific discoveries and inventions in 2014; the proportion of Russians among the authors of scientific publications in the world’s most cited scientific publications amounted to 2.1%.
9.
88 – this is the number of dollar billionaires in Russia as of mid-February 2015. Together, they controlled the property comparable to the 34% of GDP of the Russian Federation. Assets of 537 US billionaires compared with the sum of less than 14% of GDP.
At the same time the average monthly salary, converted into dollars, decreased from May 2014 to August 2015 of 43.5%, while the number of people whose income does not reach the subsistence level reached by the summer of this year, 22.9 million people, or 16% of the total population.
The minimum amount of unemployment benefits in 2015 is defined for 850 rubles per month; for the care of a child under the age of 1.5 years – 2576 rubles per month, etc. These figures are an average of 12-16 times smaller than, for example, similar payments in France (where, by the way, there are almost twice less billionaires than in Russia).
10.
71.1 years – according to official statistics, that is the average life expectancy in Russia. According to this indicator, we for the first time in the XXI century entered the hundred… most successful countries of the world in this regard, barely beating the Philippines, Indonesia and India. However, we are still at the level of African countries by life expectancy of men.
And finally…
86% – this is the activity level of approval of Vladimir Putin as president of the Russian Federation in August 2015, according to the Levada Center.
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What are we funding?
This Kickstarter is to hopefully collect Unshaven Comics' first original, independently produced graphic novel... The Samurnauts: Curse of the Dreadnuts. The book itself is 192 pages, collecting issues #1 - 4 of mini-series, and includes nearly 50 pages of bonus content – never seen before by anyone! This includes:
150 pages all from the original issues
Essays by comic book legends Mike Gold ( former DC Comics editor, and founder of First Comics ) and John Ostrander ( acclaimed writer of the Suicide Squad, GrimJack, The Spectre, Wasteland, and more )
( ) and ( ) A never-seen before backup story by Dan Dougherty
A gallery of pin-ups by Unshaven friends Mikey Babinksi (Star Wars) , Javier Avila, Jr. (Freelance Illustrator) , Kristen Gudsnuk (Henchgirl) , Wesley Wong (Metal Locus) , Don Kramer (Doctor Fate, JSA, Detective Comics) , and more!
, , , , , and more! Behind the scenes photos from all the Samurnaut model shoots
Concept to page: how Unshaven Comics makes a comic book
Other surprises we can't tell you about (cause we're sure we've forgotten something)
What's the story?
The Curse of the Dreadnuts is an all-ages team-action adventure that spans time and space. The Dreadnuts were one of the first enemies Master Al and his Samurnauts ever faced. Now, 1000 years in the future, the Dreadnuts mysteriously resurface with vengeance on their mechanically-altered minds!
As we love to tell our fans on the convention floor... this epic team-action adventure features giant robots, zombie-cyborg pirates, psychic nightmares, team combat, special moves, and of course, the immortal Kung-Fu monkey master leading the charge against an alien-tech-enhanced zombie pirate captain in a fight 1000 years in the making. Sound like fun? We sure hope so!
Who Are The Samurnauts?
The Samurnauts are a team of Samuraui-Astronauts, led by Albert V, an immortal kung-fu monkey master. As an immortal, Master Al has raised numerous teams of honorable men and women to defend humanity from threats from across the universe. This of course includes the zombie-cyborg pirate brigade... the Dreadnuts!
Sample pages, you say?
Watch this little montage. Enjoy!
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How about some rewards?
Unshaven Comics is pulling out all the stops to deliver the biggest and best rewards we can possibly offer. Reward packages include:
The Curse of the Dreadnuts Original Graphic Novel – offered in both Digital and Printed formats.192 pages, including the original issues #1 -4 content, as well over 40 pages of bonus material!
Collectible Buttons – A set of 6 of our most popular designs. 2 versions of Albert V, the Samurnauts Symbol of Power, the Dreadnuts Logo, the whole book pitch (because being able to prove all that awesome fits on a pin makes you that much cooler), and how could we not include a giant robot!?
Collectible Stickers – We've got our original pair of Albert V and Captain Blackstar stickers of course... And backers stay tuned... NEW DESIGNS will be added as the campaign goes on.
Fantastic prints taken from the pin-up gallery (including the aforementioned superstars like Don Kramer, Mikey Babinski, Kristen Gudsnuk, Javier Avila Jr., Wesley Wong, and more!). NOTE: We will release more designs as we get funded! The graphic above showcases Wesley Wong's AWESOME print!
A limited edition T-Shirt – What better way to show you world you love the Samurnauts them making them read the pitch right off your chest! Backers will be able to choose from over a dozen shirt colors and black or white ink after funding.
A VERY limited-edition Albert V Figure (with bonus hat and staff!. We're elated to debut this very limited run Albert V, the Immortal Kung-Fu Monkey leader of the Samurnauts, as his own "Pop-Esque" Figurine! He comes in "Astral Projection White", and is individually numbered and boxed!
Original paintings or ink-toned pages from the actual book
Commissioned sketch art from Marc Alan Fishman and Matt Wright! That's right... literally anything you can think of can become a piece of original art! Matt will be offering a full color 9" x 12" commission level, and Marc will do the same, in digital art – allowing you to make a piece as large or as small as you'd like!
An opportunity to become one of the NEXT Samurnauts in future publications!
Add-On Rewards, and Super Size Your Contribution!
While we've tried to accommodate every iteration of reward package we could think of, no doubt you can make it better! Add on any of these items to ensure you're receiving everything you want!
$10 – One poster print of your choice from our esteemed Unshaven Pin-up Gallery!
of your choice from our esteemed Unshaven Pin-up Gallery! $20 – One limited edition Samurnauts Tee-Shirt
$30 – One very limited edition Albert V Figurine
$75 – Digital Art Commission from Marc Alan Fishman. Marc will draw-up anything you desire in glorious digital color, and provide you with a file to print at your discretion!
from Marc Alan Fishman. Marc will draw-up anything you desire in glorious digital color, and provide you with a file to print at your discretion! $75 – Original Art Commission from Matt Wright! Matt will draw up anything your heart desires, in a 9"x12" full color commissioned piece of original art
And now, for the emotional plea...
As we mentioned above, Unshaven Comics has been working on the Samurnauts now for over 4 years. Over the course of our indie comic publishing journey we've seen 8+ apartment moves, 2 state moves, 2 weddings, 2 births, a dozen day jobs, and an extremely forgiving set of wives / fiancés.
Throughout our journey, we've long said that our success is tied directly to those people we have met at over the two-dozen conventions we've attended – from amazing small shows like the Kokomo Comic Con, to gargantuan mega-cons like the New York Comic Con. The relationships and bonds we've formed with our fans, and compatriot creators has been worth all the work put in.
We're truly proud to be releasing The Samurnauts: Curse of the Dreadnuts, and we're hopeful that with your help... this graphic novel will become a success. We've put in 1000 man hours to make this book. We can't wait to get it into your hands.
How About Some Thank Yous?
Our sincere thanks go out to Mikel Pickett and Dan Panol of Rooftop Sessions Chicago for the video production. Thanks to Yoni Limor for the animation help. Thanks to Eric Abarbanell for his 3D modeling of the Albert V figurine. Thanks to Ben Krygsheld for production of the Albert V Figurine. Big thanks to Past Times Comics & Games in Niles, IL and The Zone Comics in Homewood, IL for use of their awesome shops to film. Thanks to Owen O'Malley for the Samurnauts Theme song. And big thanks to ComicMix and Kraken Printing for production assistance on the actual book!
But way more important than those folks....? Thank YOU for backing this campaign, and for helping us make Samurnauts the awesome property we know it can be.
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THE brother of hard-line WA Islamic preacher Junaid Thorne is one of five men arrested by Federal Police over an alleged plan to pilot a boat to Indonesia and join ISIS.
According to The Courier Mail, Shayden Thorne and Musa Cerantonio are among those who were arrested in Cairns, in north Queensland.
Shayden Thorne is the brother of former Perth man self-styled Islamic preacher Junaid Thorne, whose rantings have attracted support from Australian high school teens and university students, many of them in Brisbane.
In 2011 Shayden Thorne was arrested in Saudi Arabia for alleged terrorism offences and deported to Australia in 2014.
Camera Icon Shayden Thorne’s mother holds a photograph of her son, when he was being held in a Saudi Arabian jail in 2011. Picture: News Limited
Cerantonio, 30, has had his passport cancelled and tried to carry out his jihadi dream by getting to Indonesia in a tinnie.
He has been previously arrested in the Philippines for his radical views and has been described as an “inspiration’’ to terrorists worldwide for his preachings.
The Courier-Mail reports five men hitched a seven-metre runabout to a clapped-out car for a road trip from Melbourne to Cairns, the first leg in a bid to sail to Indonesia then join ISIS terrorists in Syria, it is alleged.
The five men were arrested in Cairns on Tuesday and questioned by Australian Federal Police.
The bizarre plot involved the men launching their 7-metre boat in far north Queensland to get to Indonesia, police say.
It’s believed the AFP decided to swoop because they feared the men would come to harm at sea.
Australian Federal Police assistant commissioner Neil Gaughan confirmed on Wednesday the men had been under investigation for “a number of weeks”.
The men, aged between 21 and 33, have not been charged with any offence.
Shayden Thorne was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2011 for terrorism offences and deported to Australia in 2014.
“I must stress that the investigation remains active and the focus is on ensuring community ... safety and disrupting criminal activity either on Australian soil or by Australians attempting to join overseas conflicts,” Mr Gaughan said.
Authorities are investigating whether the men were planing to make their way through Indonesia to the Philippines, with a plan to end up in Syria.
Victoria Police deputy commissioner Shane Patton said there was no threat of a terrorism incident arising from the investigation.
Still, he said the alleged plot should not be downplayed.
“This is a serious attempt by five men who have had their passports cancelled in attempting to exit Australia ... ultimately we’re investigating the intention to possibly end up in Syria to fight,” he said.
The men five men were described by authorities as “associates” but police would not say if they attended the same mosque.
Deputy Commissioner Patton said authorities were “continually monitoring persons of interest”.
“We will continue to disrupt, if they’re trying to get this, be it via boat, via plane or any other method. We have an obligation to ensure that people can’t go and support terrorism or fight in other conflict zones,” he said.
He said he would not divulge where the men were being held for security reasons.
Deputy Commissioner Patton also confirmed eight warrants were executed on Tuesday in Melbourne and one in Queensland in relation to the alleged plot.
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Tywan Claxton believes in his hands.
The 7-0 (amateur) Blackzilian fighter boasts some Division II All-American collegiate wrestling credentials, but it's putting fist to face that gets his blood moving.
In his next fight, Claxton will make his professional MMA debut. While nothing is announced on that front yet, he already knows who he wants to face.
"I called out a hype train," Claxton told FloCombat. "I called out somebody that Bellator's kind of pushed and pushed and [somebody] that I know that I can beat in less than 24 seconds. I called out Aaron Pico and told him, 'Hey, let's get down in the middle of that ring, bite down on that mouthpiece and throw.'
"I haven't gotten a response yet, but it is what it is. It's making noise. I'm gaining fans. I'm gaining followers. Different organizations are hitting me up trying to get me fights, so it's doing everything it's supposed to do."
[instagram url="https://www.instagram.com/p/BW7nYX_hkJJ/?taken-by=tclax149" hide_caption="0"]
Training alongside the likes of Michael Johnson, Gilbert Burns, Desmond Green, Gesias "JZ" Cavalcante, and a host of other noted mixed martial artists in South Florida, Claxton boasts supreme confidence in his abilities. If his spotless amateur record isn't enough, he also draws some swagger from his unsanctioned run of scraps on the streets. With a mouth like his, sometimes you have to back up your words, and that's something he's more than happy to do.
"I will say that I am a savage," Claxton said. "I had a couple brawls back in my day, back in my college days, Court Street (in Pomeroy, Ohio). You can ask my old teammates. All those guys know that. I got a big mouth, and sometimes when you got a big mouth, you gotta back it up.
"I'm not a huge guy, so the way I talk, people gotta see, 'Hey, let me see if this dude is about what he says he's about.' I'm a savage. I say what's on my mind, and I don't really care what the consequences are -- if there are consequences."
Claxton is ready to put that mentality to the test against Pico, a fighter he's called out in various ways across social media.
[instagram url="https://www.instagram.com/p/BXEcq6OBiQ9/?taken-by=tclax149" hide_caption="0"]
To "Speedy," Pico isn't an intimidating fight. He's easy work, and he's the perfect name to make a splash against to kick off Claxton's professional career.
"One, I got beaters, and he has no chin," Claxton said. "So if I touch him one time, it's over. It's not a matter of 'if' I touch him. It's 'when' I touch him. That's a fight that I can go out there and try new moves. That's like a little brother fight. I can put my hand on his head and let him swing a couple times and touch him on the chin...
"Even the guy who beat Pico [Zach Freeman], hell, if you want to throw me on the main card, I will starch his ass in less than 24 seconds. I'll starch the guy that beat Pico. I'll make my pro debut against a guy that's 10-2, 10-3, whatever that guy's record is. I'm not worried about it."
While Claxton dabbled in the boxing gym throughout college and currently trains alongside a stable of killers, he does note Pico's experience advantage inside the ring. While Pico's credentials far outweigh his own, Claxton doesn't see that as an issue in the slightest. Paper credentials mean nothing to him.
"He's got more technical boxing experience than me," Claxton said. "But these hands are street certified. Let's take your technique versus my savagery and let's see who wins. It's worked out in my favor so far."
With no opponent announced just yet for Pico's sophomore appearance inside the cage, Claxton notes the fight is currently marked as "possible." He's not getting too excited just yet, though, because he understands why Bellator would be reluctant to book it.
"The thing is, when you have a vested interest -- Pico is a vested interest for Bellator, they put all this money behind him," Claxton said. "Do they want to take the chance of putting him in the cage with somebody like me and him getting starched again? That's up for debate.
"But at the same time, you got somebody like me who's got a big mouth and he can fight. So it's checks and balances. It's all about how they want to go about it. If I was to sign with Bellator -- I'm not saying I have a Bellator contract. I'm not saying I don't have a Bellator contract. I'm saying they kind of have to pick and choose who's worth investing in the most. One simple YouTube search, you'll see these hands are real."
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Acer Debuts World's First Chromebook with 14-hour Battery Life
Industry's First Chromebook to provide up to 14 hours of battery life for day-to-night productivity and fun(1)
Acer's first Chromebook with a large 14-inch IPS display; ideal for enjoying content, collaborating and video conferencing with 720p HD webcam
Sleek with a premium, thin design, this is Acer's first Chromebook with an all-aluminum chassis
First Acer Chromebook with two first-generation USB 3.1 ports
Customers can enjoy robust capabilities of Chrome for only $299.99 USD
San Jose, Calif., (March 29, 2016) Acer today expands its line of award-winning Chromebooks with the Acer Chromebook 14, the industry's first model that provides long battery life of up to 14 hours.(1) In addition, this is Acer's first model with a large 14-inch display and an all-aluminum chassis. It is priced at just $299.99 USD, making it ideal for students, businesses and anyone who wants a computer with style and great value.
According to data from Gartner, Acer Group is the world's leading Chromebook brand with over 33 percent market share in 2015.(2)
"With its industry-leading battery life of up to 14 hours, the Acer Chromebook 14 is an important new product in Acer's award-winning Chromebook line," said Jerry Kao, president of Acer Notebook Business Group. "Customers have a wide range of needs for battery life, size, performance and features, and our line of Acer Chromebooks is expanding to make sure customers get exactly what they want. The Chromebook 14 is an excellent choice for customers who want a stylish, large-screen Chromebook with long battery life at an attractive price."
Large Full HD Display is Great for Viewing, Sharing
The Acer Chromebook 14 is the company's first with a large 14-inch display. The display is 20 percent larger than 11-inch models, so customers have extra screen real estate to enjoy additional tabs and websites, enjoy video and collaborate more comfortably. The display features IPS technology and comes in either a full HD (1920 x 1080) or HD (1366x768) resolutions, which both ensure clarity in text and graphics as well as wide viewing angles up to 170 degrees. The Acer Chromebook 14 reduces eye fatigue thanks to the display's ComfyView low-reflection and anti-glare properties.
Group video conferences are easy and enjoyable with the Acer Chromebook 14's 720p webcam with 1280 x 720 resolution as well as HD audio and video recording. The webcam provides High Dynamic Range imaging as well as a wide field of view, so multiple students, colleagues or friends can be seen while video conferencing. The system provides top-notch audio to match the excellent video experience; it has dual stereo speakers and an integrated digital microphone.
Productivity-Minded with Long Battery Life, Performance
The Acer Chromebook 14 is the first on the market to deliver up to 14 hours of battery life on models with the HD display; full HD models provide up to 12 hours of battery life.(1) Business users, students and families will be confident using the system for day-to-night productivity and fun. The Acer Chromebook 14 is powered by an Intel Celeron quad-core or dual-core N3060 processor for solid performance and the ability to multi-task with ease through apps and online games. The Chromebook features either 4GB or 2GB dual channel LPDDR3 SDRAM.(3)
Acer's first Chromebook with All-Metal Chassis
The new Chromebook 14 is Acer's first Chromebook to have an all-metal chassis; the case is made entirely of aluminum, making it stylish and lightweight. It boasts a touch and feel that is unmatched by any other Chromebook on the market thanks to its classic hairline-brush finish and perfectly rounded corners. Ultrathin and lightweight, weighing only 3.42 pounds (1.55kg) and measuring just 0.67 inches (17mm), it delivers cool and quiet computing thanks to Acer's fan-less technology.
Staying Connected to Peripherals and Wirelessly On the Go
The Chromebook 14 is Acer's first with two first-generation USB 3.1 ports for enjoying extra-fast speeds from connected peripherals. The device can be used to share HD video and audio onto an external display with its HDMI port. The Chromebook also connects to peripherals via Bluetooth 4.2.
Fast dual-band 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac/a/b/g/n Wi-Fi on the Acer Chromebook 14 keeps customers connected and in touch with up to three times faster wireless connectivity compared to 802.11n.(4)
Acer Chromebook 14 Simplifies Security and Collaboration
The Acer Chromebook 14 is simple to use and ideal for sharing by multiple users, such as families, schools or at different shifts at a business. Customers can log into their own account to access Gmail, Docs, website bookmarks and other information. The Acer Chromebook 14 comes with 100GB of free storage on Google Drive(5) to protect files, documents, and photos safely in the cloud. This also ensures that the most current version of the file or document is always available and safe, even if the Chromebook is lost or stolen. Acer Chromebook 14 users can view, edit, create and collaborate on-line and off-line with a growing number of programs, such as Office documents and Gmail.
Security is a key benefit of the Chrome operating system, as it's automatically updated to guard against ever-changing online threats. This is especially useful for families and schools that want to protect children. In addition, the Supervised Users feature helps get children online in a safe, controlled way.
Pricing and Availability
Several models in the Acer Chromebook 14 line (CB3-431) will be available with either 16GB or 32GB eMMC storage and either 2GB or 4GB of RAM.(3) The premiere model will be available in April with a Full HD display, 32GB storage and 4GB RAM starting at $299.99 USD in the United Stated and $399.99 CAD in Canada. This model is available now for pre-sale at Amazon and will be available at https://www.androidcentral.com/e?link=https%3A%2F%2Fclick.linksynergy.com%2Fdeeplink%3Fid%3DJAF5WzpxbKM%26mid%3D38606%26u1%3DUUacUdUnU53238%26murl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fbestbuy.com&token=0L6749XG in April.
Exact specifications, prices, and availability will vary by region. To find out about availability, product specifications and prices in specific markets, please contact your nearest Acer office or retailer via www.acer.com.
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Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Update After 23 Years
March 2017, Mark Weisbrot, Lara Merling, Vitor Mello, Stephan Lefebvre, and Joseph Sammut
En español
This paper compares the performance of the Mexican economy with that of the rest of the region and with its own economic performance, over the 23 years since NAFTA took effect, based on the available economic and social indicators. Among the results, it finds that Mexico ranks 15th out of 20 Latin American countries in growth of real GDP per person, the most basic economic measure of living standards; Mexico’s poverty rate in 2014 was higher than the poverty rate of 1994; and real (inflation-adjusted) wages were almost the same in 2014 as in 1994. It also notes that if NAFTA had been successful in restoring Mexico’s pre-1980 growth rate — when developmentalist economic policies were the norm — Mexico today would be a high-income country, with income per person comparable to Western European countries. If not for Mexico’s long-term economic failure, including the 23 years since NAFTA, it is unlikely that immigration from Mexico would have become a major political issue in the United States, since relatively few Mexicans would seek to cross the border.
This report updates a version released in February 2014.
PDF | Flash
Press Release
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The other night I stayed up until three o'clock in the morning because I was so enjoying the book that I was reading that I couldn't put it down. (It was Sisterland if you're wondering.) The next morning I woke feeling dead tired, exhausted, with my head pounding. I had known better than to stay up so late, but I did it anyway, and the morning light brought the head-throbbing, blurry-eyed repercussions. You've probably had some of those nights too — where you couldn't (or didn't want to) sleep — and you've probably faced the blinding, regret-laden mornings as well. Even if you were up doing something you enjoyed (which, as adults, is rarely the case), the hazy, drunk-on-lack-of-sleep feeling isn't pleasant, and it makes it really tough to stay positive.
You're probably no stranger to the notion that sleep is important. It's an opportunity for our bodies and minds to recharge, and without it, we can suffer some pretty negative side effects. Lack of sleep diminishes alertness and attention, increases appetite, impairs judgment, and prompts microsleep (when you're sleeping and you don't even know it, like when you drive somewhere and then have no recollection of the drive). And, of course, lack of sleep wreaks havoc on your mood. If you're sleep deprived, you're likely to feel one (or all!) of these emotions: irritable, angry, sad, hostile, forgetful, distracted, stressed, guilty, or even depressed.
Clearly, no sleep is no good, but it happens to all of us. There are times when you choose something else over sleep. And there are times when your mind or circumstances chooses for you (like when you're really worried or have a new puppy). Whatever the reason, if you're fighting the battle against fatigue, here are some ways to stay positive:
STREAMLINE YOUR DAY.
Start your groggy morning off by asking yourself: what really needs to get done today? The more you can push off to a day when you're feeling like your normal self, the better. It'll probably be tempting to plow on through the day as you normally would, but if you do whatever you can to make your schedule easier for yourself, you'll be able to handle whatever tasks really must get done with more effeciency and attention. Also, the less you put on your place, the less you'll have to drive, and driving when you haven't had any (or little) sleep is extremely dangerous. Don't do it if you can avoid it. No errand or to-do list item is worth getting in an accident for.
EAT + DRINK NUTRITIOUSLY.
This is the hardest one for me. When I'm tired, I'm ravenous. I want to eat everything in sight — and all of those things better be salty, sweet, or fried. Of course, eating unhealthy food is never a good idea and it's especially bad when you're tired. On extra-tired days, strive to eat well-balanced meals and incorporate healthy, energy-boosting snacks (like nuts or fruit). Drink lots of water and avoid sugar. Apparently it's not a bad idea to indulge in a little caffeine, too — as long as you realize that you will crash after it. (On a really tough day, though, sometimes that energy high is worth the low of the crash...)
LIMIT SOCIAL INTERACTIONS.
Let's face it: when you're exhausted, you're not at your peak communication capacity, which means the day after a sleepless night is not the time for an important meeting, a difficult conversation, or connecting with new people. If at all possible, cancel or reschedule anything important. It might be a pain to adjust your schedule, but it's way better than dealing with the repercussions of your potential irritability, forgetfulness, or inattentiveness. Even with the little events in life — chatting with your partner or kids, talking with a close friend, or conversing with a coworker — try to shorten your interactions to avoid becoming irritated or saying something your un-exhausted self wouldn't normally say.
GO FOR A WALK OUTSIDE.
When you're exhausted, a big dose of exercise isn't recommended (so don't feel guilty about skipping the gym), but a brisk walk in the sunlight can work wonders. Moving around can encourage alertness and sunlight (with sunscreen!) can be an excellent mood booster. Being in nature can really help your mood too, so if there's somewhere you can walk with lots of trees and flowers, even better. When you're really tired, walking around might seem like the last thing you want to do (sitting sounds so much better), but it's really useful to get moving, particularly when it comes to boosting your mood — one of the most essential elements of making the most of sleep-deprived day.
TAKE A (SHORT) NAP.
Not gonna lie: I'm not a fan of napping. I didn't care for it as a kid, and I don't care for it now. It always seems to throw my whole day off, and I hate the confused feeling I typically have when I wake. That being said, I've read over and over again that taking a nap (less than 25 minutes) is recommended when you haven't had any sleep. Even if you're not a nap-taker, give it a try, and even if you can't fall asleep, just resting for a little bit might help your body gain a bit of extra energy to get through the day. If you are a nap-taker, consider this a free pass to sneak a midday snooze.
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Arizona Cardinals fans have been pretty spoiled lately with the success the team has had and is having. They seem to make all the right moves. It wasn't always the case. Now, every team makes mistakes in free agency, giving out big contracts to someone who doesn't end up being any good.
ESPN recently shared who they think the worst free agent signing for each team has been.
For the Cardinals, they say it was Hall of Fame running back Emmitt Smith.
The three-time Super Bowl champ and four-time rushing champ signed a two-year, $7.5 million contract with the Cardinals in 2003 and was a shadow of the back he once was. In two seasons he ran for 1,193 yards -- fewer rushing yards than he had in a single season nine times. He averaged just 3.3 yards per carry with the Cardinals, and the team went 10-22.
If you recall the move, it was clearly a move to get more fans in the seats. There were so many Cowboys fans here at the time, so trying to cash in on that made sense for a terrible team.
But was the worst? Probably not.
Just a few seasons ago, the Cardinals signed guard Adam Snyder to a five-year contract. He was cut after one seasons and was viewed as a terrible player that season.
They signed Dexter Jackson, who was the previous Super Bowl MVP to a five-year deal in 2003.He had six picks in 2003, but was cut after six games in 2004.
Cornerback Duane Starks was another terrible signing. After four fantastic seasons with the Baltimore Ravens and being part of one of the greatest defenses of all time, Starks signed with Arizona on a five-year, $23 million contract. He was supposed to be a shutdown corner after 20 interceptions in four seasons.
In Arizona he was no good and injured. He only started 18 games in two seasons before being released.
Ted Ginn signed in 2014 to be a returner and number three receiver. He did return a punt for a touchdown, giving the Cardinals a win in New York, but he was awful on kick returns and was useless on offense for the most part. He was cut after one season of his three year, $9.75 million deal.
Who was the worst signing?
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Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas on Tuesday pushed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to account for his department’s use of what may be illegal taxpayer-funded social media campaigns aimed at legislation pending before Congress.
In a letter to Geithner, the two GOP senators note how “over the past few years” Geithner’s Department of Treasury has “expanded significantly” its use of YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and the department’s own “Treasury Notes” blog. Moran and Hatch say this increased social media presence comes “at some cost to the taxpayers.”
“In recent postings to the Treasury Notes blog, Treasury’s Twitter account, Treasury’s Facebook page, and to slideshare, the Treasury department broadcast, under Treasury’s logo, the attached ‘infographic’ which identifies appropriations legislation pending before the Congress as ‘Pound Foolish,'” Moran and Hatch wrote to Geithner as an example of such behavior.
“Elsewhere throughout many of your social media postings, there are links to presentations designed to support or defeat legislation pending before the Congress,” they added. “For example, there are links in your social media postings to a 2011 interview on BloombergTV with you, during which you advocated that Congress adopt what the President labeled his ‘American Jobs Act’ and you stated that ‘if Congress doesn’t act, it’ll be because Republicans decided they did not want to do anything to help the economy.'”
Moran and Hatch suggested the behavior on behalf of the Treasury Department may be illegal, too.
“Your political rhetoric aside, Treasury’s social media links to instances in which you advocate that Congress act on legislative proposals seem contrary to appropriations language (e.g., Sections 716 and 719 of P.L. 112-74),” the GOP senators wrote. “The infographic referred to above appears clearly to be designed to defeat legislation pending before the Congress. At a minimum, such activity runs counter to P.L. 112-74 and a statute (P.L. 66-5; 41 Stat. 68; 18 U.S.C. 1913) forbidding agencies from spending appropriated funds to encourage the public to contact Members of Congress.”
The GOP senators asked Geithner to respond with a full accounting of his department’s social media program, its costs and the policies surrounding it. They gave Geithner until the close of business on July 30.
Hatch and Moran both hold some sway over Treasury as Hatch is the ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee and Moran is the ranking minority member for the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.
A spokesperson for the Department of Treasury didn’t immediately return The Daily Caller’s request for comment on the letter.
Follow Matthew on Twitter
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Please join us at the Green Party's 2016 Annual National Meeting, which runs from Thursday, August 4 through Sunday, August 7.
SPECIAL EVENTS
Thursday-Sunday: Visit the Jill Stein Campaign Store in the Student Center at the University of Houston. You can pick up buttons, bumper stickers, and some great t-shirts.
Friday, August 5: Meet Jill at a meet-and-greet reception to start at approximately 7pm in the Student Center at the University of Houston. Light refreshments will be served.
Saturday, August 6: Green Party Presidential Nominating Convention. Come show your support for Jill as the delegates nominate the presidential and vice-presidential candidates for the Green Party.
Saturday, August 6: Come to the Party for the Revolution which starts at 7pm in the ballroom in the Student Center. This will be a celebration of what we have accomplished as well as a blockbuster campaign rally to launch Jill into the home stretch. Free tickets will be provided for everyone attending the ANM. Additional tickets will be available for Jill's supporters who were not at the ANM. Can't make it to Houston? Find out how you can host your own watch party with the event's livestream!
Thursday-Sunday: A series of campaign training workshops will be held in the Student Center. These are a great opportunity to plug into the volunteer initiatives of the campaign and to hit the ground running when you return home. The Stein campaign is rewriting the book on how to run a Green campaign, and our experts will help you acquire skills in social media and press relations that will be invaluable in your local party building initiatives. The greatest number of workshops are scheduled for 9am-12 noon on Sunday. A complete schedule will be provided in July.
HOW TO REGISTER FOR THE ANM
The Annual National Meeting runs from Thursday, August 4 though Sunday, August 7, and includes the Presidential Nominating Convention which will occur on Saturday, August 6. Anyone may register for the ANM, but only people who have been designated as delegates by their state party will be able to vote at the Presidential Nominating Convention. For more information on the Annual National Meeting, go to http://www.gp.org/pnc-2016
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Using computational modeling and neutron scattering, physicists have discovered a novel state of water molecule.
In a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the scientists describe a new ‘quantum tunneling state’ of water molecules confined in hexagonal ultra-small channels – 5 angstrom across – of the mineral beryl, characterized by extended proton and electron delocalization.
“At low temperatures, this tunneling water exhibits quantum motion through the separating potential walls, which is forbidden in the classical world,” said Dr. Alexander Kolesnikov of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, lead author on the paper.
“This means that the oxygen and hydrogen atoms of the water molecule are ‘delocalized’ and therefore simultaneously present in all six symmetrically equivalent positions in the channel at the same time. It’s one of those phenomena that only occur in quantum mechanics and has no parallel in our everyday experience.”
The existence of the tunneling state of water should help physicists better describe the thermodynamic properties and behavior of water in highly confined environments such as water diffusion and transport in the channels of cell membranes, in carbon nanotubes and along grain boundaries and at mineral interfaces in a host of geological environments.
“The discovery is apt to spark discussions among materials, biological, geological and computational scientists as they attempt to explain the mechanism behind this phenomenon and understand how it applies to their materials,” said co-author Dr. Lawrence Anovitz, also from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“This discovery represents a new fundamental understanding of the behavior of water and the way water utilizes energy,” he added.
“It’s also interesting to think that those water molecules in your aquamarine or emerald ring – blue and green varieties of beryl – are undergoing the same quantum tunneling we’ve seen in our experiments.”
The neutron scattering and computational chemistry experiments showed that, in the tunneling state, the water molecules are delocalized around a ring so the water molecule assumes an unusual double top-like shape.
“The average kinetic energy of the water protons directly obtained from the neutron experiment is a measure of their motion at almost absolute zero temperature and is about 30% less than it is in bulk liquid or solid water,” Dr. Kolesnikov said.
“This is in complete disagreement with accepted models based on the energies of its vibrational modes.”
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Alexander I. Kolesnikov et al. 2016. Quantum Tunneling of Water in Beryl: A New State of the Water Molecule. Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 116, no. 16; doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.167802
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MacLaren Directs Episodes 7 and 8
Thanks to a head’s up from Maureen Ryan of the Huffington Post, we now know that director Michelle MacLaren—who’s won plaudits, and well-deserved ones, for her work as a producer and director on Breaking Bad—will be directing episodes 7 and 8 of the third season of Game of Thrones, and she’ll start lensing the series “soon”.
For those who may not recall, episode 7 is of particular interest since it’s George R.R. Martin‘s script contribution for the season, and we know the name of that episode already: “Autumn Storms”.
That means we now know the majority of what directors are directing which episodes, with Daniel Minahan directing episodes 1 and 2 and Nutter directing episodes 9 and 10. That leaves the episodes directed by Alik Sakharov, Alex Graves, and executive producers David Benioff & Dan Weiss up in the air. We do know Benioff and Weiss are directing only one episode, so that means either Sakharov or Graves is tackling two episodes.
For more information on the season 3 directors, see our earlier reporting.
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Singer claims it would be her 'dream' to direct a new version of the '80s film
Grimes has revealed that she wants to remake ’80s cult movie Dune.
The electro-pop artist, who has referenced Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel in her songs, claims it would be her “dream” to make a new film version. David Lynch previously brought the book to the big screen in 1984. Grimes told Bust magazine: “I want to direct a full-length film of Dune. I liked the David Lynch version, but everyone knows that he didn’t really care about it. I just feel there isn’t really a great Dune movie in the same way that there’s a Lord Of The Rings movie. I think by the time I’m 50, it’ll be time for another Dune movie, and I’d love to make it. That’s the dream of my life.”
Grimes is due to perform at the Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival in California on April 14 and 21. Other acts scheduled to play include The Stone Roses, Blur, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Biffy Clyro and NME Godlike Genius Johnny Marr. For more information head to Coachella.com. Earlier this week Lou Reed pulled out out of the festival due to “unavoidable complications”. He had been due to play on April 12 and 19.
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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday tightened the economic embargo on Cuba, restricting Americans from access to hotels, stores and other businesses tied to the Cuban military.
A lengthy list of rules, which President Trump promised in June to punish the communist government in Havana, came just as Mr. Trump was visiting leaders of the communist government in Beijing and pushing business deals there. Wednesday’s announcement was part of the administration’s gradual unwinding of parts of the Obama administration’s détente with the Cuban government.
Americans wishing to visit Cuba will once again have to go through authorized tour operators, and tour guides will have to accompany the groups — making such trips more expensive.
People who already have booked and paid for a trip on their own will be allowed to go, and transactions with businesses on the barred list can be completed, the administration said. The new rules, which go into effect Thursday, apply only to future travel and commerce. Eighty-three hotels are on the banned list.
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A European tax on petrol could help pay to ease the migrant crisis, Germany's finance minister says (AFP Photo/Paul Ellis)
Berlin (AFP) - Germany's Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Saturday raised the prospect of introducing a tax on petrol in Europe to pay for solving the migrant crisis, in remarks to the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
"If national budgets or the EU budget are insufficient, let's agree to set up, for instance, a tax of a certain amount on each litre of petrol," Schaeuble said.
"This way we would have the means for a European response to the refugee issue," he said, in an apparent reference to beefing up security at the European Union's outer borders in order to stop the migrant inflow.
"Finding a solution to the problem must not fail because of a lack of means."
His petrol tax proposal however met with swift criticism even from within the ranks of his CDU conservative party -- also that of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The party's vice president Julia Kloeckner, who claims to have talked with Merkel, said such an idea was indefensible because it tells taxpayers that it's up to them "to pay the bill" for refugees.
A business group within the party accused the finance minister of indirectly campaigning against welcoming the refugees, while the government's coalition partner the left-wing SPD party warned about playing one faction against the other.
Schaeuble said it was the New Year's Eve mass sexual assaults in Cologne on women blamed on Arab and North African men that had stepped up the pressure to find "a solution to the problem of controlling the European Union's external borders."
"The problem must be solved at a European level," he said.
"Otherwise, it won't just be Germany that suffers the consequences, as some seem to think, but our neighbours will be massively affected too, as will the Balkans, and all the way down to Greece."
Contacted by AFP, the German finance ministry stressed that Schaeuble's comments were aimed at speeding things up.
"Things are moving too slowly in Europe,"Schaeuble told the newspaper, adding that he fully backed Merkel's efforts to solve the challenges posed by the migrant crisis.
"I support, with the full force of my convictions, what the chancellor says: we need to solve the problem starting from Europe's external borders," he said.
Otherwise, he added, "Europe will find itself in an even bigger crisis."
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Some residents in Turner Valley are speaking out after learning the town’s only bank will shut its doors and relocate to Okotoks in seven months.
The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) sent letters to its clients in late April informing them the branch will relocate to Southbank Boulevard in Okotoks in early December due to a reduction in foot traffic at the Turner Valley branch.
“It’s a disaster for the whole community because if the bank closes and people allow their accounts to be shifted then they are going to do more of their business in Okotoks instead of locally,” said Turner Valley-area resident Muriel Dais. “I find it absolutely appalling that the Royal Bank can declare that it has x million dollars in funds and then they can turn around and do this to a community.”
News of the closure has sparked debate on social media, including the possibility of a petition.
The Turner Valley branch will close its doors at noon on Dec. 1, said Mark Brown, RBC’s regional vice-president of the Alberta South.
“After careful consideration we’ve made the difficult decision to relocate our Turner Valley branch to a new location in Okotoks,” he said. “Decisions like this are never easy, nor made lightly, and we recognize this is a big change.”
Brown said there will be no layoffs as a result of the relocation and that “the branch team our clients know so well will continue to be a big part of how we deliver advice to clients in the area.”
RBC’s intention, he said, is to maintain a presence in Turner Valley through financial services, employee volunteerism and other initiatives and that its mobile banking team will meet with clients where convenient, such as in their homes.
“We are connecting with clients to ensure they know about the number of solutions available to meet their unique needs,” he said.
Brown said the closure is the result of evolving banking habits, with 89 per cent of its Turner Valley customers banking online, on the phone and at ATM machines, resulting in is a reduction in foot traffic.
Dais said she is not part of this banking evolution.
“I happen to be somebody who is not very computer literate and I’m in my 80s,” she said. “There are some things you can’t do at the ATM.”
Dais, who joined the RBC after moving to the community in 1988, said she prefers the tellers.
“The tellers in Turner Valley that are just outstanding,” she said. “They know us by name, they know our families, they know what we do, they’re genuinely concerned about how we are. It’s a pleasure to go into the bank and do business with the tellers. The tellers have established this friendship with the clients.”
Dais said she doesn’t want to be have to make frequent trips to Okotoks, which she currently visits once or twice a month in warmer months and not at all in the winter.
Turner Valley Mayor Kelly Tuck, also an RBC client, said she sees the closure as a loss to the community.
“It’s sad because they have been in our area for 88 years and they’re the only bank in the community,” she said. “My concern is our seniors not being able to do their banking.”
The absence of the bank will also have an impact on Tuck personally, who enjoys doing her banking business face to face with the Turner Valley tellers.
“It’s my social time,” she said. “You see and connect with the people that work at the branch.”
According to information sent to clients, RBC is hosting a community information session at the Royal Canadian Legion Turner Valley Branch #78 on June 19 at 7 p.m. to allow clients to express their views and discuss concerns with respect to the branch relocation.
Options will be explored regarding the building itself, which is owned by RBC, and maintaining an ATM in the community, Brown said.
“We cannot speak to specifics at this time but will certainly inform our clients and the community as soon as we’re able,” he said.
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WARNING: This story includes descriptions of sexual assault
WHEN Maria* was 13 her mum got engaged to a new man. She immediately knew something was odd about him, and her observation turned out to be spot on.
Now 34, and living in Western Australia, Maria has decided to speak out about how her mum’s relationship has affected her life.
***
I WAS close to my mum growing up. When I think back, I do have happy memories of spending time together and laughing. It used to be me, my mum and my two brothers. I was happy.
After she split from my dad, she married her second husband who was violent. Their relationship didn’t last long but she had another son. To say I was relieved when it was just mum and us kids again is an understatement.
But mum wasn’t happy on her own. She put a lonely heart ad in the local paper and started dating a new guy.
They got engaged after one month and he started living with us. When I first met him, my stomach went topsy-turvy. He made me feel uncomfortable but I didn’t know why, then.
He tried really hard to win over my brothers and me. I think at the beginning, he was hoping we could be a normal family. My youngest brother was only three and took to him immediately. He started calling him dad straight away and mum told us we all had to do the same. I didn’t like it.
We saw my biological father, who lived in a different state, when my mum said we could. Years passed and we weren’t allowed to see him. I missed him.
I loved spending Christmas with him when I was 13. It was after that Christmas that everything changed.
We’d had a foster boy living with us, who was also 13. One day he took off from the school we were all at. The same day, I twisted my ankle and needed medical attention but mum’s husband — who was a counsellor at our school — focused all his attention on finding this boy.
I knew why.
Two months before I’d crept downstairs for a drink in the middle of the night. We’d always been told to stay in bed and not go downstairs during the night, so I was moving as quietly as I possibly could.
The foster boy was allowed to stay up, which I thought was strange because we were the same ago.
I looked in the lounge room and the boy was on the floor with my mum’s husband.
I felt sick.
I was shaking. I moved back to my bedroom as quietly as I could. I thought about going into my mum’s bedroom and waking her so she could see for herself, but there was a squeaky door on the way and I knew it would alert him.
The next day, I got up and went to school. I told no one.
So when the boy ran away from school, I knew why.
Mum’s husband was arrested and the cops said she couldn’t see him anymore.
Then one night I questioned why there was an extra plate in the oven. The next day I was sent to live with my dad.
My mum tried to defend her husband.
To me, she made her choice then.
She said the foster child was lying. She didn’t know what I saw. I finally opened up to a counsellor at school who encouraged me to tell the police what I’d seen. I made a statement.
When mum’s husband found out I was a witness in the trial, and had made a statement, he pleaded guilty. He got four years.
I’ve never spoken to my mum about it.
I now have four children of my own. I don’t want her in my life.
I’ve seen the very worst things anyone can see. I’ve seen the worst men that walk this planet. People often say to me, “you must really hate men”. It makes me furious.
I have beautiful sons and I have a great relationship with my father now. I resent my mother for not letting us kids see him when we were younger.
I haven’t spoken to her in about three years. I’m livid with her.
She’s still with that man, and it disgusts.
She should have chosen us kids over him.
My dad and the father of my children have restored my faith in men — they are not all the same and they’re not all evil monsters. I help online now with fathers who are alienated from their children. I know how it feels as a child, and I know how hard it was for my dad.
No mother has that right to keep children away from their father. She kept me away from my father, and brought evil into our home. I will never forgive her. I never want to speak to her again.
If this story has brought up any issues for you, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, or 1800 Respect on 1800 737 732.
*Name has been changed.
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On Monday, a Reddit thread surfaced with links to Pastebin files containing a slew of Dropbox logins. And, said the hacker, there’s plenty more where that came from—roughly 7 million compromised accounts in total.
The initial leaks came to hundreds of unencrypted Dropbox usernames and passwords, all available in plain text. The anonymous perpetrator claimed this was just a taste of the voluminous hack and promised to leak more in exchange for bitcoin “donations.” The top of one of the Pastebin files reads:
6,937,081 DROPBOX ACCOUNTS HACKED PHOTOS – VIDEOS – OTHER FILES MORE BITCOIN = MORE ACCOUNTS PUBLISHED ON PASTEBIN As more BTC is donated , More pastebin pastes will appear
At this time, the source of the data is unknown.
Although 7 million accounts only comes to about 3% of the 220 million that Dropbox services, that’s no consolation for the folks whose logins have been compromised.
Just after contending with a Selective Sync glitch that errantly deleted user files, Dropbox finds itself at the center of another data integrity issue. But this time, the company says, it’s not to blame. In a statement to The Next Web, the cloud storage provider flat-out denied that it was hacked. Instead, it pointed the finger at third-party services:
Dropbox has not been hacked. These usernames and passwords were unfortunately stolen from other services and used in attempts to log in to Dropbox accounts. We’d previously detected these attacks and the vast majority of the passwords posted have been expired for some time now. All other remaining passwords have been expired as well.
The Reddit community set about checking if the logins were legitimate, and some members claimed that, while several were expired, some others still appeared to be valid as of late Monday night.
How To Safeguard Yourself
Some Dropbox users may notice a prompt or message from the company, urging them to change their passwords or turn on two-factor authentication, a secondary measure that requires entering a six-digit security code in addition to login credentials.
But whether you see the warning or not, you would still be wise to take action. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
Log into your Dropbox account and change your password. (For tips on choosing good ones, click here.) On the same page, you can switch on two-step verification. For more information about this extra step, check out Dropbox’s description here.
Once you’ve secured your Dropbox account, take one more step and think about anywhere else you may have used the same username and password combo. You’ll want to change those too—and then vow never to use the same credentials in multiple places again. Once logins are out in the open, other parties can try them at various sites, from Facebook and Gmail to the major online banking sites. Automated bots would make very easy work of this.
As for this breach, ReadWrite has contacted Dropbox for more information, and will update this post if the company responds.
Update: Dropbox posted a message on its blog stating that the logins were “stolen from unrelated services.” Unlike Snapchat, whose data breach stemmed from other services using its APIs to connect with it, Dropbox chalks this one up to a much more mundane reason: people using the same password on different services.
The company says the attackers just kept trying the logins at various sites, including its own:
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Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau says he will "continue to not engage" with Sun Media – one of the country's largest newspaper and media organizations – after one of its columnists and TV hosts made critical and personal remarks about Mr. Trudeau's parents.
The five-minute segment from Ezra Levant, aired last Monday, took aim at former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau. Mr. Levant spoke at length about the "conquests" of the two and called the former Prime Minister "a slut."
Justin Trudeau's office released a statement Tuesday saying Mr. Levant's segment "crossed the line by airing a personal attack on the Trudeau family that was offensive and breached any reasonable measure of editorial integrity." The statement said he had "raised this issue with the appropriate people at Québécor Inc.," the parent company of Sun News. Until Québécor "resolves the matter," Mr. Trudeau said he personally will "not engage with Sun Media."
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The practical effect of the move is unclear. A spokeswoman for Mr. Trudeau said the threat to "not engage" applies to all of Sun Media – that includes the Sun News television station, which is fiercely critical of Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals, but also 36 paid-circulation daily newspapers and almost 200 community newspapers. Many of the chain's papers aren't part of the Sun brand, but the Liberal statement did not discern between them – raising the prospect of the entire chain being frozen out.
Mr. Levant and other Sun employees said Tuesday that Mr. Trudeau has already been avoiding them. "It's useful for Trudeau to blame a commentary I did in 2014 for why he didn't answer our questions in 2013, 2012, etc.," Mr. Levant wrote in an email.
He said Mr. Trudeau is trying to censor him by pressuring Quebecor.
"There are two separate issues here. The first is: do people agree with my political commentary? It's not surprising that the Liberals don't. It's called freedom of speech. The second is: was it appropriate for Trudeau to contact Quebecor and demand that I be censored? And, when Quebecor did not accede to that demand, that Trudeau then engages in mass punishment of every Sun journalist?" Mr. Levant wrote in an e-mail.
A key figure of Mr. Trudeau's inner circle, Gerald Butts, pointed to several graphics produced by Sun News, the network, critical of Mr. Trudeau and the Liberals. "Is there a line, and has Sun crossed it? We believe the answer to both questions is yes," Mr. Butts wrote on Twitter, adding that reporters from "real journalistic outlet[s]" won't face reduced access.
Mr. Levant's segment was sparked by a photo, published on Twitter by a Liberal official earlier this month, that showed Mr. Trudeau kissing the cheek of an unidentified bride. Mr. Trudeau was said to be leaving a party event when he stumbled across the bride, who appeared to be shooting photographs with her wedding party. He kissed her on the cheek.
In his segment, Mr. Levant criticized Mr. Trudeau for kissing the bride as well as the media's coverage of Mr. Trudeau. He then discussed the "conquests" of Mr. Trudeau's parents, saying they were "promiscuous and publicized how many conquests they had." He said Pierre Trudeau was "a slut," listing some of his previous partners, and that Margaret Trudeau "tended toward rock musicians." Mr. Levant then added: "Now, if that's your moral compass, kissing another man's bride on her wedding day is pretty cool." He published a similar column a week later. While it didn't use the word "slut," Mr. Levant said on Tuesday he doesn't regret the word choice. "I do stand by calling Pierre Trudeau a slut, though. I don't believe in double standards, e.g. men are virile, women are sluts," he wrote on Twitter.
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Speaking to reporters after question period, Mr. Trudeau declined to detail the move, saying the written statement released by his office was clear.
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The point is that the number of children born depends on families' choices about how many children they want to raise. And when a family is deciding whether to have another child, it is usually thinking about things other than the national or the world population. Who would know or care if world population were to drop from, say, 5.85 billion to 5.81 billion? Population change is too slow and remote for people to feel in their lives -- even if the total population were to double or halve in only a century (as a mere 0.7 percent increase or decrease each year would do). Whether world population is increasing or decreasing doesn't necessarily affect the decisions that determine whether it will increase or decrease in the future. As the systems people would say, there is no feedback loop.
WHAT does affect fertility is modernity. In almost every country where people have moved from traditional ways of life to modern ones, they are choosing to have too few children to replace themselves. This is true in Western and in Eastern countries, in Catholic and in secular societies. And it is true in the richest parts of the richest countries. The only exceptions seem to be some small religious communities. We can't be sure what will happen in Muslim countries, because few of them have become modern yet, but so far it looks as if their fertility rates will respond to modernity as others' have.
Nobody can say whether world population will ever dwindle to very low numbers; that depends on what values people hold in the future. After the approaching peak, as long as people continue to prefer saving effort and money by having fewer children, population will continue to decline. (This does not imply that the decision to have fewer children is selfish; it may, for example, be motivated by a desire to do more for each child.)
Some people may have values significantly different from those of the rest of the world, and therefore different fertility rates. If such people live in a particular country or population group, their values can produce marked changes in the size of that country or group, even as world population changes only slowly. For example, the U.S. population, because of immigration and a fertility rate that is only slightly below replacement level, is likely to grow from 4.5 percent of the world today to 10 percent of a smaller world over the next two or three centuries. Much bigger changes in share are possible for smaller groups if they can maintain their difference from the average for a long period of time. (To illustrate: Korea's population could grow from one percent of the world to 10 percent in a single lifetime if it were to increase by two percent a year while the rest of the world population declined by one percent a year.)
World population won't stop declining until human values change. But human values may well change -- values, not biological imperatives, are the unfathomable variable in population predictions. It is quite possible that in a century or two or three, when just about the whole world is at least as modern as Western Europe is today, people will start to value children more highly than they do now in modern societies. If they do, and fertility rates start to climb, fertility is no more likely to stop climbing at an average rate of 2.1 children per woman than it was to stop falling at 2.1 on the way down.
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Apple is in the process of introducing a series of features (or perhaps better to say, restrictions) to its Safari browser, along with the new version of its operating system OSX High Sierra, which promise to put serious obstacles in the way of advertisers tracking you across the web. There are countless ways this happens. But you see it most clearly when you go check out a new suitcase to purchase at some online vendor and then see suitcase ads following you around the web. Some people find this creepy and annoying. Others find it amusing and don’t care. Probably few consumers would mind seeing it go. But there’s some deeper stuff going on.
What Apple is doing is placing restrictions on persistent cookies that live on your web browser. These are tiny files, little snippets of data that do all sorts of things. One of the simplest and most helpful is that they keep you logged in to your most favorite sites and keep certain levels of customization in place. You probably would find it annoying not to have those benefits. But they are also what makes that tracking possible. Having ads for a store you visited tracking you across the web is only the most obvious. There’s lots of other stuff going on that isn’t visible to you.
The buzzword for this is what Apple calls Intelligent Tracking Prevention. You need to know a decent amount about advertising and browser architecture to understand the specifics. I haven’t read all the documentation. And even fairly familiar with these things, I probably couldn’t fully understand them myself. I’ll try to provide a general but accurate overview. The gist is that Apple is trying to drastically curtail the use of “third-party cookies.” That’s cookies that aren’t from sites you visit everyday but third parties that are sort of along for the ride and there pretty much only to track you.
The big way Apple will determine what we’ll call “good” and “bad” cookies is through a mix of machine learning to learn how “tracky” the cookies are and how often you visit the site that ‘owns’ the cookie. Let me try to make this a bit more concrete. If you visit a site every day, Apple will give pretty much free rein to that site’s cookies. If you visit less frequently or never, Apple will clamp down hard.
The big time factor dividing line is 24 hours. This makes a lot of sense. If you visit a site everyday you are probably gaining some customization, ease of use benefits from that cookie. If you’ve never heard of the site, they’re tracking you without your explicit permission and you’re probably getting nothing in return.
So here’s where it gets interesting and more than just arcana of ad-tech.
The digital ad industry is flipping out over this. A month ago basically every major ad industry trade group published an open letter to Apple saying its heavy handed approach was threatening to destroy a whole segment of the digital ad industry.
This is from a month ago in AdWeek …
In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as “opaque and arbitrary,” warning that the changes could affect the “infrastructure of the modern internet,” which largely relies on consistent standards across websites. The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more “generic and less timely and useful.” “Apple’s unilateral and heavy-handed approach is bad for consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content and services consumers love,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by Adweek this morning. “Blocking cookies in this manner will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, and it will make advertising more generic and less timely and useful. Put simply, machine-driven cookie choices do not represent user choice; they represent browser-manufacturer choice.”
The scope of this kind of tracking goes way, way beyond what you probably think if you’re not in the adtech world. In the old days advertisers would use publications as proxies for the identities of people they were trying to reach. CEOs and investors? The Wall Street Journal. People into Tech? Wired and Ars Technica. Affluent, educated liberals? TPM. Now it’s different. Advertisers (or more the major agency holding companies who act on their behalf) sometimes have a defined list of say 500,000 people they want to contact. You can show the advertisers ad to those people and only those people. To be clear, we’re not talking about a demographic class. We’re talking about 500,000 specific people. How can they possibly know who they are? Well, there are vendors who have this data and have the architecture that allows you to use it. (One of the big players is called LiveRamp.) There are databases the have profiles of individual people – more datapoints, more value. So email, that’s one. Name is another. Address, device ID. The more of these you have the more confident you have that it’s that specific person. Whereas the publisher was once the gatekeeper now the data vendor is the gatekeeper.
So let’s review.
Apple wants to position itself as the defender of privacy and quality user experience. So it’s cracking down on cookies. (The European Union is doing similar things in the Eurozone. So that gives more force to the changes that go beyond just Apple.)
The digital ad industry is freaking out. Do you care?
Well, the consensus within the ad tech industry press seems to be that this will actually strengthen the monopolistic hold which Google and Facebook have over the ad industry and the web itself. Why would that be? Well, how often do you visit Facebook? And how often do you do a Google Search or got to Youtube, Google Maps, Gmail or all the other Google services? Probably quite a lot. Probably most of you do one of them almost every day. The smaller players, companies purely focused on tracking could be hit very hard. But Google and Facebook will probably come within that 24 hour window pretty easily. So Apple’s move could take an industry where Google and Facebook are already the hugely dominant players and wipe everyone else.
Good for Google and Facebook.
But here’s another possibility. Recently I was talking to someone who’s spent years in the digital ad industry who sees it a little differently. This person saw the whole move as actually aimed at Google. I’m not sure if this person is right or not. I’m not sure how considered a take it was. I’m less interested in whether this is the current intention as what it shows us about what could happen and how the interests and positions of the various tech monopolies lines up. If this person is right the logic would go like this.
Google (actually now the holding company Alphabet) is the second largest company in the world by market capitalization. (Apple is the largest.) It’s done that overwhelmingly by its control of profits from advertising. The advantage in advertising comes from data and tracking. The whole digital advertising industry depends on those little snippets of data we call “cookies”. It’s amazing to think how many hundreds of billions of dollars depend on this little lynchpin piece of digital data architecture. Get rid of the cookie and everyone in the digital publishing industry is truly screwed. What’s good for Google is that cookie technology is fundamentally controlled by the browser. The Chrome browser, which is owned by Google, has nearly 50% market share.
When I talk about Apple doing this or doing that they can only “do” anything through their own browser, Safari, which has significantly less market share. One industry metric puts Safari’s share of the market at just over 30%.
But those percentages obscure the real story.
On desktop Safari is only barely a player. The same industry metric puts it at under 10% of market share on desktops. On Smartphones Safari has over 50% share and on tablet that jumps to over 70%. The reason should be obvious: control of the iOS operating system which run iPhones and iPads. Add to this that the more affluent consumers tend to be on Safari, mainly because more affluent consumers tend to have iOS devices and to a lesser extent because they use Mac desktops. What all of this means is that while Apple can’t control the whole Internet architecture it has it within its power to seriously disrupt the cookie architecture over a significant percentage of the web, especially for mobile devices and more affluent consumers.
My friend’s theory is that Apple wants to start creating turbulence within Google’s business model, even if it’s at first only at the margins. Remember, Google now competes with Apple in the hardware market. And critically, advertising is a space Apple has never seemed interested in playing in. Virtually every Apple business is focused on payments and subscriptions – pricey hardware, iTunes music and video which is anchored in Apple TV, Apple Music, etc. If the digital ad industry explodes, it’s not much skin off Apple’s back. In any case, Apple’s never been big on the open web in any case. They want you in curated, controlled spaces – either in the much more tightly circumscribed OSX environment or iOS apps.
And here’s one more part of this equation. How does this affect digital publishers?
Here’s where it gets especially interesting to any publisher. We rely on tracking in as much as tracking is now pervasive on the ads running on basically every website, including TPM. But really tracking has been a disaster for publishers, especially premium publishers.
Here’s why.
I’ll use TPM as an example. But it’s only for the purposes of illustration. The same applies to countless other publications, particularly quality publications as opposed to content farms. TPM has an affluent, highly educated, generally progressive audience. They also tend to be political influencers. Our readers also have a strong brand affinity with TPM. Our core audience visits day after day. All of those attributes make our audience very desirable for many advertisers. So great, even though we’re small, advertisers want access to that kind of audience. So we can command good rates.
Tracking has shifted that equation dramatically. (And again, TPM is just here as illustration. This is an industry-wide phenomenon.) Let’s say we take the whole core TPM audience, this set number of people. They have these attributes I mentioned above. Tracking now allows the ad tech industry to follow those people around the web and advertise to them where they choose. So an advertiser can identify “TPM Readers” and then advertise to them at other sites that aren’t TPM. Or they can find a group that has the attributes that I describe above and track them around the web regardless of which site they’re on. You don’t have any reason to care about that. But we care about it a lot because it basically takes from us any market power we have. Tracking means almost all publishers are being disintermediated in this way. This is one big reason the platforms and the data vendors are scarfing up all the new revenue.
So in many ways, disruptions in tracking are good for publishers. Actually basically in all ways it’s good. In this way, we have a vaguely common interest with Apple since we see our business future as tied to paid services, memberships, etc. Apple does too. In practice, the little players have the least ability and resources to protect themselves during periods of market chaos. But in theory at least, if Apple’s self-interest led it to disrupt the cookie architecture and wreak havoc in Google’s business model, that would likely be good for publishers.
In any case, these are all reasons why we have focused our energies on moving toward paid memberships and subscriptions, even though we continue to get at least half of our revenue from paid advertising. Technology has placed the ability to extract the greatest profits from advertising into the hands of the players that do not shoulder the costs of creating the content that make it possible. The industry more generally is controlled by a handful of dominant players trying to engross as much of the profits as possible in something of a zero sum game with each other. That’s a battle where we as a small publisher are the warfare analogs of helpless civilians in the midst of great power conflict. We want to isolate ourselves from that as much as possible. Every publisher should. But in the advertising world they have little power to do so.
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Image copyright Peter Whatley
Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton airports have been sold by owners Heathrow Airport Holdings (HAH) in a £1bn deal.
The three airports will now be owned by a consortium formed by two companies - Spanish firm Ferrovial and Australia-based Macquarie.
The sale is expected to be completed in January of next year.
The three airports will be managed locally but supported by Ferrovial's and Macquarie's shared ownership.
Ferrovial already part-owns Heathrow, the UK's busiest airport, and holds a 25% stake in HAH, which was previously known as BAA.
The deal means HAH will now operate only its flagship London hub.
The company had previously operated seven airports but an inquiry by the Competition Commission ordered it to be broken up.
By the time of the ruling it had already sold Gatwick, before later disposing of Edinburgh and announcing the sale of Stansted last year.
Douglas Fraser
BBC Scotland business and economy editor
The sale of Glasgow, Aberdeen and Southampton airports has been some time coming. Since the competition regulator took aim at the formerly nationalised British Airports Authority, later BAA plc, the break-up of that empire has looked likely.
Gatwick was sold five years ago for £1.5bn, and is now fighting hard to get the planning nod for a new runway, instead of letting Heathrow expand.
Either Edinburgh or Glasgow had to be sold, BAA was told, so the capital's airport went to the same infrastructure investors who own Gatwick for a whopping £807m.
Renaming itself Heathrow Airport Holdings plc, the parent company then had to shed Stansted, going for £1.5bn to council-controlled Manchester Airport. And that left the three smaller parts of the company awaiting their fate.
The uncertainty over ownership has not been helpful for them. New owners may be willing to invest in upgrading Aberdeen's facilities, while helping Glasgow compete more effectively with both Edinburgh, its new rival, as well as the beleaguered Prestwick. But then, those investors will also want a return on their billion pounds.
Heathrow itself is 25% owned by Ferrovial with other stakes controlled by investment vehicles from Qatar, Quebec, Singapore, the US, and China.
Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye said: "This sale enables us to focus on improving Heathrow for passengers and winning support for Heathrow expansion.
"Heathrow is the UK's only hub airport, connecting the whole of the UK to the world and bringing economic benefits locally and nationally."
Edward Beckley, Macquarie's European head, said the firm had a "long and successful track record of investing in and developing airports around the world".
He added: "We look forward to working with these airports over the long term to support route growth and enhance the passenger experience for the communities they serve."
Ferrovial chief executive Inigo Meiras said: "We are committed to improve these facilities and their services looking to a better passenger experience and in order to grant access to further domestic and international destinations."
Glasgow is the eighth busiest of the UK's airports, with 7.4m passengers and 104,000 aircraft movements in 2013.
Aberdeen is 14th busiest, with 3.4m passengers and 73,000 aircraft movements.
Southampton is 18th busiest with 1.7m passengers and 36,000 movements.
Amanda McMillan, managing director of Glasgow Airport, said: "Clearly this is a landmark day for Glasgow Airport and whilst we will be sorry to leave the Heathrow group, we do so knowing we're in an extremely strong position.
"We have benefited from considerable investment in recent years and have achieved a great deal of success in securing new routes and growing passenger numbers. Together with my team, I am looking forward to working with Ferrovial and Macquarie to further develop our airport and ensure it continues to deliver for Glasgow and Scotland."
Carol Benzie, managing director of Aberdeen Airport work on the deal had been taking place behind the scenes for several months.
She added: "Locally things remain very much business as usual. Our passenger numbers continue to grow, and we will continue to operate as we have been with a focus on the safety and security of our customers, as well as on delivering an excellent standard of customer service.
"No changes to the way we operate are planned and we will keep striving to deliver on all our commitments in the run up to a formal handover by the end of the year."
The deal was welcomed by local authorities, with Glasgow City Council leader Gordon Matheson saying: "Glasgow Airport is of huge strategic importance for the city and the west of Scotland with over 5,000 jobs dependant on its continued success.
"Its success is vital to ensure that Glasgow and our city region continues to be an attractive location for investment and for local businesses to expand overseas.
"I'm encouraged to see that this deal is backed with a wealth of experience in both the air industry and public infrastructure - and my council will continue to work in close partnership with our airport to ensure it meets the needs of local business and leisure travellers."
Mark Macmillan, the leader of neighbouring Renfrewshire Council, said the deal would give Glasgow Airport "security of ownership and more certainty for the future".
Glasgow Chamber of Commerce chief executive Stuart Patrick said: "The existing management team has done an excellent job in promoting the airport's assets and attracting in new flights over what have been rough times. There is still huge potential for growth and route development, and that has obviously influenced the attractiveness of Glasgow as an investment."
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Bernie Sanders continued his New Hampshire victory lap Wednesday night by making his second appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And while he was still a major underdog when he visited Stephen Colbert last September, this time he was riding high.
The senator from Vermont began by crashing Colbert’s monologue. When the host protested that the show should begin with him alone standing on stage and telling jokes, Sanders replied, “That’s what the elites want you to think.
“You’ve got to go your own way, follow your own heart, the revolution is possible,” Sanders told Colbert before delivering the final line of the monologue. “Last night, Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary by 22 points. No joke!”
When Sanders entered as Colbert’s guest later in the show, he quickly faced questions about how he managed to win 86 percent of voters 18-24 in New Hampshire. “By definition, young people are idealistic,” he said. “And they look at a world with so many problems and they say, why not? Why can’t all people in this country have healthcare? Why can’t we make public colleges and universities tuition-free?”
Playing devil’s advocate in the vein of his former Colbert Report character, the host argued that Sanders was promoting “class warfare” and reasoned that the 1 percent is not going to give up their power and influence so easily. “And I’ll tell you how I know, I am in the top 1 percent,” he said.
When Bill O’Reilly was on Colbert’s show earlier in the week, he said Sanders and Donald Trump were essentially the same person with different haircuts. While Sanders acknowledged that his and Trump’s supporters share a certain anger, he criticized the “false message” that Trump is pushing that discrimination will somehow lead to a better America. Sanders also noted that O’Reilly has said he will move to Ireland if he becomes president, an outcome he referred to as a “two-fer.”
Moving on, Colbert challenged Sanders by bringing up Hillary Clinton’s critique that he is promising solutions to the country’s problems that can never be achieved, for example his plan to provide single-payer healthcare.
“The question is, do we have the ability to stand up to the private insurance companies and the drug companies?” Sanders asked the host, before answering his own question. “I believe that when people are aroused, when they’re organized, when they’re prepared to stand up and fight back, yes, we can take on the drug companies and the insurance companies.”
As a South Carolinian, Colbert asked Sanders to explain how he plans to break Clinton’s alleged Southern “firewall.” At first, the candidate launched into what sounded a lot like a rehearsed campaign speech. “Why do we have more people in jail than any other country on earth, disproportionately black and Latino?” he asked. “Why is it that we have a system today where our campaign finance system is now corrupt, where billionaires are literally buying elections?”
But when Colbert pressed him to provide an overarching solution to those troubling questions, Sanders came back to the “revolution” rhetoric that has driven his campaign. Asked how he plans to break up America’s “oligarchy,” Sanders said, “The only way that I know how to do it is the way change has always come about, in this country and in the world.
“We used to have a segregated society,” he continued. “African-Americans couldn’t go to schools, couldn’t drink at water fountains. Millions of people stood together and said, ‘Hey, enough is enough. That is not what America is supposed to be about.’”
Warning against the risks of revolution, Colbert quoted John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” But Sanders resisted the idea that his revolution could go that way.
“What the goal of this campaign is about is to look at the Civil Rights Movement, look at the women’s movement, look at the gay movement, understand that when people come together we can accomplish enormous things,” Sanders said. “But I think what people are saying is enough is enough. We need fundamental changes in our political system and our economic system.”
“Bernie Sanders, everybody, he’s running for president,” Colbert said by way of ending the interview. Not only is he running, but at this still early stage, he appears to be winning.
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Performance -- Red Hot Chili Peppers / Pearl Jam / Nirvana
San Francisco, CA, The Cow Palace, December 31, 1991
by Gina Arnold
Every year for the past twenty years on December 31st, San Francisco's famed Haight Street has been overrun by a fluorescence of Deadheads, in town for the annual Grateful Dead show at the Oakland Coliseum. Their inescapable presence on that particular day has long been a frustrating symbol that for much of America, culturally speaking, time has continued to stand stock-still.
On the afternoon of December 31st, 1991, however, the Deadheads finally met their match. They were greeted on the streets by a healthy host of obsteperous young longhairs clad in cutoffs and combat boots, their thighs all bulging from a lifetime spent on skateboards. This new contingent of rock fans had invaded the city not for the Dead, but for the concert featuring Pearl Jam, Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even the most casual observer would have had no trouble deciding which side of youth culture would be more fun to belong to.
An atmosphere of jubilation pervaded the Cow Palace as the 16,000 fans who crowded the sold-out arena celebrated a mass victory for a new popular-rock aesthetic. The victory was articulated by all three bands, each of which dissed their cross-Bay rivals in very specific terms, beginning with opening act Pearl Jam, whose singer, Eddie Vedder, greeted the roaring throng with "Want to hear some songs by the Dead?" The audience booed with gleeful derision, as Vedder burst into an a cappella rendition of Fugazi's antirape song "Suggestion." "Don't go partying on other people's pussies unless they want you to," he said (referring to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' anthem "Party on Your Pussy").
The point was well taken, for despite the rampant Seventies-isms of much of the evening's music -- Nirvana's work is often compared to Blue Oyster Cult's, the Chili Peppers draw heavily on Seventies funksters like George Clinton, and Pearl Jam is equally rooted in other, more staid classic-rock-radio conventions -- there is clearly an entirely different sensibility at work here. One of the most visible differences is a reliance on athleticism to carry each show, and the ingenuity of each band is quite amusing, from Nirvana's impromptu baseball game -- which utilized guitars as bats and amplifiers as balls -- to Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis's long handstand during one of Flea's impressive bass solos. Pearl Jam's opening set was particularly energetic. Singer Vedder climbed up the lighting ladder and, at the set's close, leapt courageously into the audience's maw.
The crowd was impressed, but the night clearly belonged to the next band up, Nirvana, whose new album, Nevermind, hit number one on the Billboard charts that very week. In fact, the record sold so unexpectedly well in the months since the show was booked that its popularity had well outstripped the headlining Chili Peppers by a factor of four to one.
Thus, after the briefest of set changes, Nirvana played a taut forty-five minute set that completely wrecked what was left of the audience's composure. Members of the mosh pit, which stretched from the stage to the back of the arena, were being thrown in the air like clods of dirt caught up in a live minefield. By the time Nirvana threw in its hit "Smells like Teen Spirit" in midset, the crowd had risen up, rolling forward in a relentless wave of motion. The atmosphere was so infectious that even members of the band's own entourage, standing in the comparative safety of the stage wings, periodically lost their heads and leapt off the rim into the boiling crowd below.
Nirvana's set drew largely from its first album, Bleach, but the audience was as familiar with those songs -- "School," "Floyd the Barber," "About a Girl" -- as it was with the selections from Nevermind which included "Lithium," "Breed," and "Drain You." Singer Kurt Cobain, his hair dyed purple for the occasion, vacillated onstage between nearly cataleptic detachment and unnerving inner intensity. The instant the set finished, he and his band mates destroyed their instruments in a cheery display of wanton violence. They didn't just throw them around, either -- they lovingly unscrewed each piece, the better to batter them into little tiny shards, while the audience howled with glee. There was no encore.
When the lights came up, the exhausted audience attempted to marshal its resources to match the Chili Peppers' legendary live force. But when the Peppers appeared -- bassist Flea upside down, lowered to the stage by ropes tied to his ankles -- they seemed to have trouble finding their much-vaunted groove. Despite the two fire-eaters, numerous naked dancers painted in Day-Glo and huge sonic booms that were set off at midnight, the final twenty minutes of the set -- which included bits of Clinton's "Atomic Dog" and all of Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic" -- were by far the best. Once again, the audience roiled. The final stage diver, Eddie Vedder, took the plunge during an encore version of "Yertle the Turtle."
The Chili Peppers ended up ruling the night out of sheer noisiness and force of character. But it was Nirvana that had already had the last word -- when bassist Chris Novoselic butchered the Youngbloods' "Get Together" as the band ended its set with the song "Territorial Pissings." "Gotta find a way, a better way," goes the manic chorus -- but it was an injunction that had just rendered itself entirely needless. Well before midnight the crowd already had.
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Burial Rights: Who Owns Dead Bodies, Anyway?
Enlarge this image Linda Bucklin/iStockphoto.com Linda Bucklin/iStockphoto.com
On Halloween, we play around with what may scare us. Kids suit up in zombie and vampire costumes, of course, and there's also a lot of imagery connected directly with our own life trajectories: skeletons, skulls, gravestones, cemeteries.
Some of this is just pure fun. But death and burial make good Halloween subjects, in part because our society is so edgy about them. I got to thinking about this when I read in The New York Times of a man in Alabama who gained national fame by burying his wife in their front yard — at her request. He found out pretty quickly about that societal unease with death and burial.
James Davis of Stevenson, Ala., was married to his wife, Patsy, for 48 years. As a teenager, James asked Patsy to a strawberry festival; they were a couple from then on. In 2009, when Patsy was dying, she told James she wanted to be buried in the front yard of their home.
The town of Stevenson has no ordinance on the books against private burial of this sort. But when he sought approval for that burial, it was denied. Davis forged ahead. Thanks to his determination and a backhoe, Patsy Davis, encased in both a vault and a coffin, was laid to rest exactly where she wanted to be.
Now, four years later, the legal problems for Davis haven't ceased. The town of Stevenson sued him years ago, and earlier this month, the Alabama Supreme Court sided against him as well.
What's this all about? As far as I can tell, no public health concerns were cited; the New York Times account refers to arguments by the town about property values, precedents and care in perpetuity. I asked Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, for her take. Scheper-Hughes wrote me in an email:
The current controversy is about "Who Owns the [Dead] Body?" The grieving relatives? The state? The Public Health Department? The Church? In northern California various "home death" movements are spreading, some with the idea, quite similar to Mr. Davis's, that birth and death are deeply private matters and should be left up to the next of kin to decide. Secret burials take place without anyone being the wiser. Alternatively, there are organizations promoting communal parks where the dead bodies are returned to the earth as quickly as possible, without fuss or fanfare, no use of toxic embalming fluids, no caskets, and the smallest footstep type markers or no markers at all. Some envision communal gardens and parks, others a nature sanctuary, but all want the dead to share space with the living, so that nature trails, concerts, children's parks can use the space where bodies are laid to rest. In teaching a freshman seminar at UC-Berkeley on "Bringing Death back into Life" we discussed various family traditions. One young man spoke of his grandfather who had recently died, his body unable to be properly disposed in his Parsi community in India. He explained, tearfully, that his Grandpa was heaped underneath dozens of bodies waiting for the vultures to come and pick their bones. But the vultures were fast disappearing, destroyed by urban toxins that had made their way into the food chain. I sucked in my breath. Was this too heavy for my newbie freshmen students to hear? No, not at all. They encircled the young Parsi student and said that they hoped the vultures would return and that his grandfather would have the proper burial that he and his family and community wanted. Who Owns the Body? The closest next of kin, at least in my humble anthropological and therefore naturally iconoclastic view.
As Scheper-Hughes' comments indicate, the number and type of death rituals seems to be ever-increasing. As far as paleoanthropologists can tell, the practice of interring the dead as a community custom began about 100,000 years ago in places like Qafzeh, Israel. Our Neanderthal cousins sometimes buried their dead too, for example at Shanidar, Iraq, at about 50,000 years ago.
Today we have (or in relatively recent times had) a menu of options, ranging from an underwater graveyard in Florida to cliff-side cave burials in the Philippines. There are catacombs, such as the ones I walked through a few years ago beneath the streets of Paris. We may opt for green burials or, of course, not to be buried at all but instead to be cremated or to donate our bodies to medical schools or places like The Body Farm.
James Davis' case demonstrates, though, that burial on private land may still engender resistance. As long as no public health risks are involved and interment plans are registered with authorities, should this really be the case? Unless individual preference or cultural practice leads us to opt out of burial, each of us, after all, will turn to bone, gradually becoming a genuine representation of those Halloween skeletons you'll see everywhere today.
Like Scheper-Hughes, I'm on James Davis' side. I hope his wife can stay where she is, in her yard, at peace.
Barbara's most recent book is How Animals Grieve. You can up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape
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Recipe
1 teaspoon green seasoning paste (optional)
1/2 cup of shredded white cabbage
1/2 white onion thinly sliced
1/2 sweet pepper thinly sliced (red)
1/2 chayote, peeled and thinly sliced length wise
1 pimento pepper thinly sliced (Trinidad seasoning pepper)
1 teaspoon freshly grated garlic
1 teaspoon freshly grated ginger
3 tablespoons sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/4 teaspoon Chinese seasoning
1 tablespoon chopped chives
egg roll wraps
1 pound of very small shrimp, peeled and deveined.
Oil for deep frying
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Directions
Season your shrimp, with a pinch of salt and black pepper and the green seasoning paste. Set aside to marinate for 30 minutes.
While your shrimp is marinating stir fry the vegetables.
Heat a skillet on medium to high heat. Add the sesame oil to the skillet.
Add ginger, garlic and pimento pepper to the skillet. Let this fry for 30 seconds.
Add the sliced onion and sauté until translucent. Add the carrots. Mix to combine. Let this fry for 3 minutes. The carrots is the longest cooking vegetable here so we have to let that cook first for a bit.
Add in the chayote and the sweet peppers. Allow to cook until the sweet peppers are just al dente. We do not want it soft.
Now add in your shrimp and stir fry this for a minute. Since the shrimp is tiny it will cook super fast. Add in the cabbage, salt, black pepper, white pepper, Chinese seasoning, soy sauce and the chopped chives. Mix thoroughly.
As soon as the cabbage has just started to wilt, turn off the heat.
Lay out the egg rolls. Have one tip facing you so when you look at it, it looks like a diamond.
Add some of the filling to the tip closest to you. It must be towards the end. Not in the center. Brush all the ends with water then start to fold in the ends, try to get it tight. Follow the picture to see how I folded mine. Be gentle so you do not tear the wrappers.
Place the rolled eggroll on a baking sheet sealed side down.
Heat the oil to 375 degrees.
Fry eggrolls until golden brown and crispy!
Serve with your favorite dipping sauce!
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FILE PHOTO: Special Counsel Robert Mueller departs after briefing the U.S. House Intelligence Committee on his investigation of potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 20, 2017. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Investigators working for U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia, have asked the White House for documents related to his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the New York Times reported on Friday.
“Though not a formal subpoena, the document request is the first known instance of Mr. Mueller’s team asking the White House to hand over records,” said the Times, which cited unnamed people close to the investigation for the report.
The Times also said the investigators had questioned witnesses about whether Flynn was secretly paid by the Turkish government during the final months of the 2016 campaign.
The White House and Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, did not immediately respond to requests from Reuters for comment.
The Times quoted Ty Cobb, special counsel to Trump, as saying “We’ve said before we’re collaborating with the special counsel on an ongoing basis.”
Trump has denied any collusion between his campaign and Russia and called the investigation a witch hunt.
The Republican president fired Flynn in February after it became clear that he had falsely characterized the nature of phone conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to Washington in December.
Reuters reported in June that according to a subpoena, federal prosecutors in Virginia were investigating a deal between Flynn and Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin as part of a grand jury criminal probe.
Alptekin’s company, Netherlands-based Inovo BV, paid the now-inactive Flynn Intel Group $530,000 (406,554 pounds) between September and November 2016 to produce a documentary and research on Fethullah Gulen, an exiled Turkish cleric living in the United States. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan blames Gulen for a failed coup last year.
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Image caption Robert Fidler built the house in 2002 and hid it behind hay bales for four years
A farmer who built a mock-Tudor castle without planning permission has failed to demolish it despite a court order.
Robert Fidler built the home at Honeycrock Farm, in Salfords, Surrey, in 2002 and hid it behind hay bales.
He has been fighting to keep it ever since but in April lost an appeal against a High Court order that it should be demolished by 24 June.
Reigate and Banstead Borough Council said planners would be considering the council's next course of action.
The four-bedroom property, on greenbelt land, includes a kitchen, living room, study, a gravelled forecourt and a conservatory.
Image caption Robert Fidler said he needed to live on the farm because of his cattle
Mr Fidler, who keeps a herd of Sussex cattle at the farm, submitted a new planning application in February 2014 to retain the house, in Axes Lane, on the basis of agricultural need.
Permission was refused and the case, once again, went to the High Court.
An injunction last June ordered the house to be demolished.
"As Mr Fidler has not complied with the injunction, the planning committee will be considering the council's next course of action at their meeting on 1 July," said a council spokesman.
Mr Fidler said in April he accepted he had no choice but to demolish the house but said on Friday it would be like Picasso ripping up his best oil painting.
He also said he had sold his home to an Indian businessman.
"The greenbelt law says that any new house should not be allowed unless there are very special circumstances," he said.
"The example that Parliament gives for very special circumstances is a farmer who has to be here to look after his cattle, which is exactly my situation."
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Hello from sunny San Diego! I’ve been soaking up sunshine on the beach and clinking drinks with a good friend over the past few days. Maybe a little too much of each. For once, I’m looking forward to returning to my regular routine. Long walks with Cookie and big green salads like this one sound mighty appealing at the moment.
Before I skipped town, P.F. Chang’s challenged me to create an original recipe containing a few of their summer seasonal ingredients. Avocado, pineapple, quinoa, lime, red bell pepper, Thai basil? Challenge accepted! I really love creating recipes around special ingredients; constraints seem to inspire creativity. Please let me know if you have any recipe requests for me.
For this challenge, I ended up an Asian-inspired kale salad tossed in a homemade tamari-ginger vinaigrette. It’s loaded with crisp carrots, bell pepper and snap peas, and balanced with creamy avocado and edamame. The kale salad recipes on this blog are among my favorites, but this one might just be tops.
I only wish I had one of these detoxifying kale salads waiting for me at home. Cookie and I walk past a P.F. Chang’s every evening, so we might sample their fresh summer menu while my fridge is empty.
Chopped Kale Salad with Edamame, Carrot and Avocado Author: Cookie and Kate
Prep Time: 20 mins
Total Time: 20 mins
Yield: 4
Category: Salad
Cuisine: Asian ★★★★★ 5 from 26 reviews A colorful chopped kale salad bursting with Asian flavors, including ginger, cilantro, Thai basil and soy. This salad is vegan and gluten free, so it would make a great potluck dish. Ingredients Salad 1 bunch kale (preferably lacinato/Tuscan/dinosaur kale but regular curly kale works, too)
fine-grain sea salt
1 cup chopped snow peas (slice off tough ends first)
1 large carrot, peeled and ribboned with a vegetable peeler
1 small red bell pepper, deseeded and chopped
1 heaping cup organic edamame (if using frozen edamame, defrost by tossing into a pot of boiling water for 3 to 4 minutes)
1 avocado, pitted and sliced into small chunks
1 large shallot, finely sliced
handful cilantro, chopped
handful Thai basil (or regular basil), chopped Tamari-Ginger Vinaigrette ¼ cup olive oil
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon finely grated ginger
1 tablespoon low-sodium tamari (or other low-sodium soy sauce*)
2 teaspoons lime juice
3 garlic cloves, pressed or minced Instructions Use a chef’s knife to remove the tough ribs from the kale, then discard them. Chop the kale leaves into small, bite-sized pieces and transfer them to a mixing bowl. Sprinkle the kale with a dash of sea salt and use your hands to massage the kale by scrunching up the leaves in your hands and releasing until the kale is a darker green and fragrant. Toss the remaining salad dressing ingredients with the kale. To make the vinaigrette, whisk together all the ingredients until emulsified. Toss the dressing with the salad and serve. Notes Yields 2 enormous salads or 4 medium.
Storage suggestions: Leftovers will keep well in the fridge for a day or two.
*Make it gluten free: Tamari is a gluten-free Japanese soy sauce that has a flavor I love and is readily available at stores. If you want your salad to be gluten-free, be sure to pick a gluten-free soy sauce.
Want more kale salads? Check out my kale salad roundup and tips! ▸ Nutrition Information The information shown is an estimate provided by an online nutrition calculator. It should not be considered a substitute for a professional nutritionist’s advice.
Disclaimer: This post is sponsored by P.F. Chang’s. All thoughts are my own, always. Thank you for being supportive of the sponsors that help me serve up more recipes.
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The long-gestating project will be directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The Prohibition Era drama Ezekiel Moss is finally moving forward, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams coming aboard to star.
Philip Seymour Hoffman has long been attached to direct the film from a Black List script by Keith Bunin.
PHOTOS: 'American Hustle': Behind the Scenes With Christian Bale, Amy Adams
Exclusive Media has come aboard to handle international rights, and will launch the project to foreign buyers at Berlin's upcoming European Film Market.
Adams will play Iris, who, emotionally fragile after the loss of her husband, runs a boarding house to get by and provide for her spirited son, Joel. They reside in a small town overrun by religious fervor, and their lives are forever changed when she begins to fall in love with Ezekiel Moss (Gyllenhaal), a mysterious drifter who has the divine ability to channel and physically inhabit the spirits of the dead.
VIDEO: 'Enemy' Trailer: Jake Gyllenhaal Discovers His Double
Likely Story’s Anthony Bregman, PalmStar Media Capital's Kevin Frakes, Merced Media Partners’ Raj Brinder Singh and Cathy Schulman of Mandalay Vision are producing. Singh recently collaborated with Exclusive Media on Rush, on which he served as co-executive producer.
Adams, who is represented by WME, is up for the Oscar for best actress for her role in American Hustle.
Gyllenhaal was last seen in Prisoners. He is also repped by WME.
Screen International first reported the news.
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A Laysan albatross named Wisdom has hatched what could be her 40th chick, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, an impressive feat at her ripe age of at least 65.
Baby Kūkini, which is Hawaiian for “messenger,” was spotted cracking out of its shell on February 1 while under the care of its father, known simply as “Gooo,” a name that reflects the number 6,000 on the identification band around his leg. Gooo served on incubation duty for more than two weeks while waiting for Wisdom to return from gathering squid, small fish, and fish eggs to regurgitate to Kūkini.
“As soon as Kūkini was secure under Wisdom, Wisdom’s mate (shown here helping Kūkini hatch) quickly marched the length of a football field towards a path through the dunes and took flight. We expect him to be back within a week or less because newly hatched albatross chicks require a consistent supply of fresh seafood,” wrote staff from the United State’s largest conservation area, Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Honolulu, on Facebook on February 8. The area includes the Midway Atoll Refuge which houses the world’s largest albatross nesting colony, including Wisdom and her family.
Wisdom is the world's oldest known banded wild bird, and one of a million albatrosses nesting and raising their families at Midway. Albatrosses live from 40 to 60 years and can breed annually with their monogamous, lifelong partners, which are only replaced after death or disappearance.
The seabirds meet their partners at the same location each year to build a new nest together. For the Laysan albatrosses, the breeding happens primarily on the Hawaiian Islands between November and July. For the rest of the year, the birds stay in the northwestern and northeastern range of the Pacific Ocean, where they feed on sea creatures plucked from the surface of the water.
The aeronautical masters can soar for hours or even days without flapping their wings, and touch land only during breeding season, though they do rest on the water to feed and sleep. They can fly in their sleep to avoid predators such as whales and sharks.
Wisdom was first discovered by biologist Chandler Robbins, who is now 97 years old. He banded her when she first started breeding on Midway Atoll in 1956. He discovered her again, near the same location, 46 years later. When Dr. Robbins banded Wisdom more than half a century ago, he estimated that she was at least 5 years old, the youngest age at which an albatross can breed. This means that she could be much older than 65 today, notes the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Throughout her long life, Wisdom has raised as many as 40 chicks, at least eight of them since 2006, say Papahānaumokuākea officials. Hawaiian conservationists estimate that she has flown more than three million miles since she was first tagged – the equivalent of six trips from the Earth to the Moon and back.
“Wisdom is an iconic symbol of inspiration and hope,” Robert Peyton, Midway refuge manager, said in an announcement.
“From a scientific perspective, albatrosses are a critical indicator species for the world’s oceans that sustain millions of human beings as well,” he said.
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The birds face constant threats, including choking on ocean debris, getting scooped up as bycatch in fishing nets, losing breeding areas to environmental degradation, and being crowded out by invasive species. They were slaughtered in great numbers in the 19th century, when they were coveted for their valuable feathers, sold in Europe for use on women’s hats, and for the albumen from their eggs, which was used to develop film.
According to federal conservationists, a 19th-century report from a Smithsonian expedition to Hawaii first brought attention to the birds' plight, inspiring president Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 to designate the northwestern Hawaiian Islands as one of the first federally protected seabird reserves in the country.
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Sage Northcutt’s big UFC push will continue next month when he makes his first appearance on a FOX-televised main card.
Northcutt (7-0 MMA, 2-0 UFC) will fight fellow undefeated lightweight Andrew Holbrook (11-0 MMA, 1-0 UFC) at UFC on FOX 18 on Jan. 30. The main card airs on FOX following prelims on FOX Sports 1 and UFC Fight Pass at Newark’s Prudential Center.
The matchup was announced on tonight’s UFC on FOX 17 broadcast.
Northcutt is coming off his second UFC win in a 68-day stretch when he submitted Cody Pfister in the second round at UFC Fight Night 80 earlier this month. The 19-year-old is the youngest fighter on the UFC roster and will attempt to make it three octagon victories before his 20th birthday.
Holbrook will attempt to end Northcutt’s hype train in a more convincing fashion than his first UFC win. He picked up a controversial split decision win over Ramsey Nijem at UFC on FOX 16 in July in what was his first-ever fight to go the distance. Holbrook has earned 10 of his 11 career victories by stoppage, nine in the first round, and will attempt to add Northcutt’s name to his resume.
For more on UFC on FOX 18, check out UFC Rumors section of the site.
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Barack Obama's new campaign plane is nothing short of grand. Well, for the candidate that is.
Obama's section of the plane rivals that of any first class. Recently the front cabin of the Boeing 757 was retrofitted to install four individual chairs that resemble La-Z-Boys. They are free-standing and made of plush leather with pockets on the sides. There is also a booth which seats four for a meeting or a meal.
His chair has his name and campaign logo embroidered on the back top -- "Obama '08" on one line and "President" underneath. To one side is a small table stacked with newspapers ready for the candidate's arrival. The table of the booth is always covered in snacks and cheese and is where Obama spends most of his time during flights meeting with staff and sitting for the occasional interview.
"Typically the candidate's cabin is like business class -- roomier and less chaotic than the staff and press areas, but still short of the accoutrements of a pro team's charter," says Politico's Mike Allen, a frequent campaign flier.
After looking at a few photos of Obama's cabin, Allen quipped, "Air Force One may seem a tad claustrophobic." Check it out for yourself:
(CBS/Allison Davis O'Keefe)
(CBS/Allison Davis O'Keefe)
(CBS/Allison Davis O'Keefe)
There are five sections on the 757, the first of which is Obama's section, which can seat up to eight people at a time, although rarely are all eight seats taken. Depending on the destination or length of trip, Sen. Obama is joined by body man Reggie Love and a few senior staff members or perhaps a key Senate colleague. Recently, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., hitched a ride from Washington, D.C., to her home state for a full day of campaign events.
The next two sections are outfitted with expansive business class seats for senior and junior level staff including Obama's media team, which films all of the candidate's events for promotional purposes.
The back two sections are traditional coach seats where the Secret Service, reporters, cameramen and some of the communications staff sit. It is a rite of passage each election cycle for the party's nominee to retrofit an aircraft to distinct specifications. While the campaign pays for their share of the plane, the news media also pay thousands of dollars to fly with Obama for each leg of his campaign.
CBS News' John Bentley, who's covering the John McCain campaign, reports that McCain flies in a slightly smaller Boeing 737, which has four compartments: the first class area, where he sits; the "straight talk" area for interviews; a business class section for staffers; and the back of the plane, where the press and secret service sit.
In McCain's spacious first class area, there are 12 plush leather seats for the candidate, his wife and senior staffers. The "straight talk" area features a long leather bench and another first class seat which McCain sits in when he talks to the press – or would, if he used the area.
Since they acquired the plane with its specially modified area, McCain has spoken to the press there precisely once, over a month ago. All of these sections are separated by curtains, which are always shut as tightly as possible as soon as the plane takes off in order to keep the different sections of the plane from interacting with each other.
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When times are tough, humans will do what they have to in order to survive. But what about machines? Google’s DeepMind AI firm pitted a pair of neural networks against each other in two different survival scenarios. When resources are scarce, the machines start behaving in an aggressive (one might say human-like) fashion. When cooperation is beneficial, they work together. Consider this a preview for the coming robot apocalypse.
The scenarios were a simple fruit-gathering simulation and a wolfpack hunting game. In the fruit-gathering scenario, the two AIs (indicated by red and blue squares) move across a grid in order to pick up green “fruit” squares. Each time the player picks up fruit, it gets a point and the green square goes away. The fruit respawns after some time.
The AIs can go about their business, collecting fruit and trying to beat the other player fairly. However, the players also have the option of firing a beam at the other square. If one of the squares is hit twice, it’s removed from the game for several frames, giving the other player a decisive advantage. Guess what the neural networks learned to do. Yep, they shoot each other a lot. As researchers modified the respawn rate of the fruit, they noted that the desire to eliminate the other player emerges “quite early.” When there are enough of the green squares, the AIs can coexist peacefully. When scarcity is introduced, they get aggressive. They’re so like us it’s scary.
It’s different in the wolfpack simulation. Here, the AIs are rewarded for working together. The players have to stalk and capture prey scattered around the board. They can do so individually, but a lone wolf can lose the carcass to scavengers. It’s in the players’ best interest to cooperate here, because all players inside a certain radius get a point when the prey is captured.
Researchers found that two different strategies emerged in the wolfpack simulation. The AIs would sometimes seek each other out and search together. Other times, one would spot the prey and wait for the other player to appear before pouncing. As the benefit of cooperation was increased by researchers, they found the rate of lone-wolf captures went down dramatically.
DeepMind says these simulations illustrate the concept of temporal discounting. When a reward is too distant, people tend to disregard it. It’s the same for the neural networks. In the fruit-gathering sim, shooting the other player delays the reward slightly, but it affords more chances to gather fruit without competition. So, the machines do that when the supply is scarce. With the wolfpack, acting alone is more dangerous. So, they delayed the reward in order to cooperate.
DeepMind suggests that neural network learning can provide new insights into classic social science concepts. It could be used to test policies and interventions with what economists would call a “rational agent model.” This may have applications in economics, traffic control, and environmental science.
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Here's the latest installment of Bates By the Numbers, a weekly feature by Boston real estate agent David Bates that drills down into the Hub's housing market to uncover those trends and people you would not otherwise notice. Follow him on Twitter and check out his ebook, Context: Nine Key Condo Markets, 2.0.
In recent weeks, Curbed Boston readers have expressed increasing frustration about the lack of condominium inventory in the Hub. Even though I have been writing about the area's incredibly shrinking condo supply for almost as long as I have been writing for this blog, it was these outbursts that finally provoked me to look at the Hub's future condo inventory to see if there was any light at the end of the tunnel.
There isn't.
Nick Martin, communications director for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, told me over email that of the nearly 8,000 housing units currently under construction in the city, only 1,503 units had been declared by developers as condos. Almost all the rest are considered apartments.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Hub's real estate market that many of the 1,503 condos under construction have already been spoken for. Of the 422 units classified as under-construction at Millennium Tower, for instance, more than 300 may have already found buyers; of the 83 condos under-construction at the Sepia in the South End, 82 are said to be under agreement; and of the 109 under-construction at Twenty Two Liberty in the Seaport, a lot have been pre-sold.
So, after scrutinizing only three of the 100 condominium projects that accounted for the total amount of Boston condos under construction, I had already re-classified about one-third of Boston's "under-construction condos" as "under-agreement condos." Yet, it was entirely possible that an even a larger percentage of Boston's under-construction condos had found buyers. One person familiar with the sales pace of new construction told me, "Even the smaller condo projects in the South Boston market are having very good success pre-selling their units."
Related:
Most of Sepia Boston's Future Condos Have Now Sold [Curbed Boston]
Millennium Tower 70 Percent Sold, Mostly to Local Buyers [Curbed Boston]
Unfortunately, there's another reason why the 1,503 condos under construction in Boston might not have much of an impact in alleviating the lack of supply in the near future. That's because unless a project is well on its way construction-wise right now, it won't deliver in the next 12 to 18 months. Brad Horner of the Raveis Marketing Group*, who is familiar with every residential construction project in the city and whose team markets larger projects, told me that this is precisely why he doesn't expect Boston's tight inventory conditions to change much in the next 12 to 18 months. "I think in two years it's going to be a different story," he added optimistically.
Outside of Boston, the condo-inventory picture is similarly dire. George Proakis, Somerville's planning director, told me the city needs to build 9,000 housing units by 2030, but "probably less" than 100 new condos will be delivered there in the next 12 months. Proakis also told me that in recent years the hipster haven has beared witness to an unusual trend: permitted condo developments becoming apartment projects. This happened with Maxwell Green and also more recently when one buyer decided to buy a 16-unit condo development that was under construction on Linden Street.
Alison Steinfeld, Brookline's planning director, told me there are no condo developments currently under construction in the town. There are not even any apartments under construction in North Brookline. In fact, Steinfeld said that Brookline would prefer commercial development over apartment or condo because it would not burden the school system.
*Disclosure: RMG is a division of the brokerage I work at.
· Our Bates By the Numbers archive [Curbed Boston]
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If you could take a time-lapse movie of a city block starting in the 1920s, the changes would be predictable: Trees would rise and fall. The cars would change from boxy black Model T’s to colorful models with tail fins to the indistinct cars of today. Toys would litter the sidewalk as families start up, then disappear as they move on, only to be replaced by a new young family. The houses would stand like statues, occasionally changing their costumes. They would be the constant on the block while everything around them moved.
But what of the lives inside?
It seems like we’ll never know. Family histories are written in broad strokes and short paragraphs, if they’re written at all. Who perished young, who was carried down the stairs at the age of 90. Who went off to war and never came back; who moved away and started a branch of the family in another state. Outside of these stories — which are often oral, half-remembered, and eventually forgotten — there’s no place for the quotidian details of life to be matched to a particular place.
Until Lyfmap.com. This new local website anchors memories to a specific spot on a map. Click on a location — your old house, your elementary school, the park where you got your first kiss — and add your recollections and photos.
According to the site, which went live this summer, “As your Lyfmap grows, you will rediscover former childhood friends and neighbors, reconnect with lost acquaintances, and share your fond memories with others who have enjoyed those places as well.”
Larry Bieza, the St. Paul man behind the site, said he got the idea from listening to his father’s tales of growing up in Chicago.
“As a little kid, you’re not paying a lot of attention. But when he passed away, I felt this loss of history,” he said. “People have history that is only specific to them, and it disappears.”
“Star Wars” was an influence, as well.
“Two days after it came out, I was still thinking of the Cantina scene, and how, as I watched that film, I wondered what happened with all these other characters. What are their lives about? What’s interesting about them?”
Everyone has a story, after all. Even aliens.
You could make the case that placing memories isn’t all that vital. Who cares if you click on a location and it says a mean old lady lived there for a while and then there was a young couple who drove a VW bus? It’s not up there with sequencing the genome.
But imagine going back to your childhood neighborhood — at least on a map — and seeing entries about the kids who triked up and down the street, the grown-ups you knew only as the moms and dads. (The woman two doors down was a principal? The quiet retired man at the end of the block was a former POW who spent his summers volunteering in South American villages?)
You’d not only learn what you couldn’t have known earlier, but you’d also have a snapshot of the place at a time in American culture.
It’s hard to say which is more compelling — marking your own history around the city, or finding out where your history intersected with others. You might have a particular attachment to Uptown, an old apartment on the Mall, where a certain portion of your single days played out, for better or worse. Then you find out it also was where someone’s mom once lived. She was in accounting at Powers Department Store before she got married, and suddenly it’s not just your place. Of course you knew it had tenants before and after, but the ones in the past are ghosts, and the ones who came afterward seem like trespassers. Still, when you put a name to it, a story, a history, one nondescript apartment building becomes what it is: a real-life novel in progress.
It’s no less your home because it was once someone else’s. That’s true of a block. A city.
When you open Lyfmap and see all the dots, you marvel at the number of stories each represents. It’ll never be complete. Not even close. But it’s a start.
Bieza says he wants to start a Lyfmap for every business in the area, so you can learn the history of commercial as well as residential buildings. As it is, the site holds promise.
“Right now you can post in the middle of a lake, you can upload pictures of your fishing trip,” he said. “Wherever someone has a memory, it can be saved.”
Just don’t lie about the length of the fish. History is depending on you.
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by OLIMEX Ltd in Allwinner, Android, ARM, new product Tags: A31, Allwinner, som
We just assembled our first A31-SOM module prototypes.
They have these features:
A31 Quad Core Cortex-A7 @ 1Ghz, Octa core Power VR SGX544MP2 GPU, designed for power efficiency, 1MB L2 Cache, 32K I-Cache, 32K D-Cache, FPU, NEON SIMD
2GB DDR3 RAM with 64 bit data bus for fast access
optional 8GB NAND Flash
Power Management Unit AXP221
LiPo battery charger and step up for USB 5V supply
micro SD card
3 buttons
UART0 console connector
all GPIOs and pins on x6 40 pin 0.05″ connectors
RTC, Timer, HS-Timer
16-Ch DMA
USB-OTG
x2 USB Low/Full/High speed Hosts
4SPI, 5 TWI/I2C
x6 UARTS
x2 PCM
x2 I2S
ITU601 / MIPI CSI
MIPI DSI
HDMI 1.4
x2-CH LVDS
x2-CH RGB LCD
IR
LRADC
GMAC
Audio codec
4K x 2K video playback
We need some weeks to test them before run production, so these modules will be in stock end of September earliest. A31-SOM price will start from EUR 44 for 1000 pcs, A31-SOM-8GB price will start from EUR 54 for 1000 pcs order.
We also designed A31-SOM-EVB for A31-SOM modules, which is OSHW mother board reference design and have these features:
Gigabit Ethernet
USB-OTG connector
2x USB Host connectors
UEXT1 and UEXT2 connectors
SD-MMC connector
LCD connector compatible with our LCD displays – 4.3″, 7″, 10″, 15.6″, 15.6″HD
Audio output 3.5 mm jack
Audio input 3.5mm jack
2Mpix @30 fps Camera on board
HDMI connector
LiPo battery connector
RTC CR2032 Li battery backup connector
GPIOs on prototype friendly 0.1″ connectors
Power jack 6-16VDC
A31-SOM-EVB evaluation board with A31-SOM-8GB on it will cost EUR 97 in single quantity.
Although A31 is only Cortex-A7 you can see here interesting comparison between RK3188 and A31 video performance.
A31 have better picture and faster video playback than RK3188 which do not have native HDMI but used LCD-> HDMI converter.
A31 supports up to 4K video playback and have 64 bit RAM data bus.
Android 4.2.2 runs fine on A31-SOM and all features are supported.
Regarding the Linux Support, there is more than year and half efforts from Maxime Ripard @ Free Electrons to bring A31 to mainline, but still some major drivers are missing though like Video, Audio and NAND.
Linux-Sunxi tree miss A31 so far, probably because there is no good development hardware for A31 platform – all devices available are either tablets either Android dongles with no Ethernet, GPIOs etc. exposed. Now when this changes perhaps some Linux-Sunxi developers may be interested 😉 we built 5 prototypes and use only 2 of them so we have 3 to send to interested developers.
With the current Linux support A31 is still good for headless Linux server with the Quad cores, 2GB RAM and Gigabit Ethernet.
Linux kernel from Allwinner SDK is also option but it will be step back from mainline. Anyway with the missing Linux-Sunxi support this is also an option for these who need Linux instead of Android.
A31-SOM will be good platform for digital signage, video processing, IP cameras, or VoIP etc.
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Ian Holloway has launched an audacious bid to try an sign Arsenal striker Nicklas Bendtner.
The £52,000-a-week star met with the Crystal Palace for talks at a central London hotel on Sunday afternoon.
Bendtner has been told by Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger that he is surplus to requirements at the club.
Also in attendance at Sunday’s meeting, at the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair, was Palace chairman Steve Parish.
Palace’s move for Bendtner has raised eyebrows because the south Londoner scrapped a planned move for ex-west ham star Carlton Cole over personal terms.
Bendtner has also seen moves to several clubs in Germany and Spain fall through over his wage demands.
Should Palace succeed with their move for Bendtner the Danish striker would join another former Arsenal frontman Marouane Chamakh, who scored against Stoke on Saturday.
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On September 1 in Texas, SB 4 will take effect. And on that day, all law enforcement across the state will be immediately transformed from police officers into something much different.
“SB 4 says that every local police officer, sheriff, and mayor throughout Texas now needs to enforce immigration law,” according to Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. And these public servants have every incentive to comply with the law, he notes, because SB 4 “imposes fines in the tens of thousands of dollars, jail time, and even removal from office for violations of law.”
The fear of losing their jobs is palpable among police officers. “I’m worried because my career … it could end,” says Officer Edgar Garcia of the El Cenizo Police Department. “We can be penalized or even … they’ll give us jail time.”
%3Ciframe%20allowfullscreen%3D%22%22%20frameborder%3D%220%22%20height%3D%22326%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FJRqVPSAuckE%3Fautoplay%3D1%26version%3D3%22%20thumb%3D%22%2Ffiles%2Fvid17-el-cenizo-thumbnail-580x326_0.jpg%22%20width%3D%22580%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube.com.
The penalties combined with the very nature of the law, Gelernt explains, will further erode the trust between the police and the communities they serve. This is for two predictable reasons. Police will undoubtedly racially profile Hispanic or Latino people — communities that make up nearly 40 percent of the state’s population. And they will improperly apply the law for fear of being seen as weak on immigration enforcement.
Officer Garcia agrees. “I want to be out here … making people feel safe,” he says. “I don’t want them to feel afraid.”
But under SB 4, they will be.
At a time when there’s a lack of confidence in policing and immigrants are under attack from the highest offices of state and federal government, SB 4 is a terrible law. But it’s also patently unconstitutional, which is why the ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, and cities and counties across the state are currently challenging it in federal court. We expect a decision before September 1, when SB 4 goes into effect.
Stay tuned.
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RIT professors create new method for identifying black holes Techniques connect solutions to Einstein’s equations directly with observations
Carlos Lousto and Richard O’Shaughnessy
Rochester Institute of Technology professors have developed a faster, more accurate way to assess gravitational wave signals and infer the astronomical sources that made them.
Their method directly compares data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory to cutting-edge numerical simulations of binary black holes, including simulations performed at RIT.
In a paper available online, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration reanalyzed the first gravitational wave detections using this method. Insights from these simulations indicate that the first detected black holes were slightly more similar in mass than previously thought. RIT authors on the paper include faculty Richard O’Shaughnessy, Manuela Campanelli, Carlos Lousto, John Whelan and Yosef Zlochower; postdoctoral researcher James Healy; graduate students Jacob Lange and Yuanhao Zhang; and undergraduate student Monica Rizzo and recent graduate Jackson Henry. They are all members of RIT’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
“It is the first time numerical simulations of binary black holes are used directly to estimate the parameters of a binary and, in this paper, it is proved that this can be done to the highest accuracy,” Lousto said.
A validation study of the method is being done by Lange, a Ph.D. student in RIT’s astrophysical sciences and technology graduate program. “Our approach compares waveforms directly to numerical relativity simulations to reanalyze the first gravitational wave detection,” he said.
Lange’s research supports Lousto and O’Shaughnessy’s efforts to enhance a new gravitational wave-data pipeline using targeted simulations. O’Shaughnessy presented the paper earlier this month at the Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop in Cape Cod, Mass.
“Most of the interesting information arrives at the end where the black hole does its most wild motions and all the cool physics of Einstein’s theory really comes to the fore,” said O’Shaughnessy, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences. “We think by simulating the most interesting part and attaching the simple part, we’ll be able to do some really interesting science that is not possible any other way.”
RIT scientists played a key role in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration’s landmark discovery. Their simulated signal independently verified the observed waveform produced by the black hole merger and helped confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This new study demonstrates the role of simulated signals in the analysis of gravitational waveforms.
“These simulations are what we have leveraged for all these years to get all the insight we have about how black holes merge and their gravitational radiation,” O’Shaughnessy said. “They are the most complete and accurate models of binary black-hole coalescence.”
Simulations of black holes with different masses and spins that match, or which are oddly aligned, require the complex mathematics of Einstein’s strong field equations. O’Shaughnessy collaborated on the data pipeline with Lousto, a leader in the field of numerical relativity, who simulates black holes scenarios on supercomputers.
Their approach uses simulations to extract information about the black holes’ properties directly from the gravitational wave data. By contrast, the initial analyses of the first gravitational waves used approximations derived from previous simulations to gain insight.
“Richard’s method allow us to avoid the intermediate step and is faster and more accurate,” said Lousto, professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences and fellow of the American Physical Society. “The method always improves itself because with every new simulation, it adapts. It can only get better.”
Lousto’s simulations apply the computational techniques from the 2005 landmark research he conducted with Campanelli, director of the RIT’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and Zlochower, associate professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences.
Video of binary black hole merger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYncv7z9Zyc
Scientists at RIT's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation use the world’s fastest supercomputers to solve Einstein’s equations for general relativity. The binary black-hole system in this video is one of the longest ever simulated. The two black holes complete 48 orbits before they merge into a single remnant black hole. This system also displays an interesting phenomenon called a “flip-flop,” in which the spin of one of the black holes switches directions over the course of the evolution. The simulation are based on the work published in two Physical Review Letters articles: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/ and http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/. Credit: RIT's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation
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Quote: Originally Posted by andy I believe the VTX-1100 tunes to channel 125 and is otherwise the same and the VTX-1000.
There was a BIG problem with failing caps in the DC-DC converter circuit in the VTX tuners. I can't remember the locations and values, but there are 5 or 6 that I usually change. Symptoms range from wiggling on-screen display to humming and patterns, and non-startup. The caps are mainly under a metal can.
Charles Yes... I have a few of the 1100s in service, and they go at least into the 100s. It wouldn't be practical to modify the 1000. There are also several newer versions of Sony component tuners which were meant to go with the PVM series monitors; made up through the late 90s at least. They have no DIN plug, but they do have the CONTROL S socket so the remote will control the KX monitors.There was a BIG problem with failing caps in the DC-DC converter circuit in the VTX tuners. I can't remember the locations and values, but there are 5 or 6 that I usually change. Symptoms range from wiggling on-screen display to humming and patterns, and non-startup. The caps are mainly under a metal can.Charles __________________
Collecting & restoring TVs in Los Angeles since age 10
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Marina Abramovic, likely the world’s most famous performance artist at the moment, told a German newspaper that she’s “free,” because she has no husband and no children, and that children hold female artists back, according to Art Net News, which translated the sprawling interview.
“The difference between theater and performance is that in the theater the blood is ketchup, and in performance, it’s real,” she told the paper, adding that she is exhausted by the need to be physically present (her most recent signature work, after all, is called The Artist is Present) for her work to be shown. This has made for an exhausting international travel schedule that could not easily accommodate children.
“I had three abortions because I was certain that it would be a disaster for my work,” she said, because it takes so much of her energy already, and, as we all know, children require lots of energy.
Coming up on her 70th birthday, the artist—who divorced her second husband, video artist Paolo Canevari, in 2009, and was sued by her former lover, the German artist Ulay, last year, over the custody of works they made together—is low on fucks to give, it would seem. Indeed, the German article’s headline is a direct quote from Abramovic, translated roughly by Google as “With 70 You Have To Reduce The Bullshit.”
“In my opinion [children are] the reason why women aren’t as successful as men in the art world. There’s plenty of talented women. Why do men take over the important positions? It’s simple. Love, family, children—a woman doesn’t want to sacrifice all of that,” she said.
She also hints that she’s been learning pole dancing (!) and might descend via pole for her next appearance in New York—her birthday celebration at the Guggenheim.
She’s not the only artist to eschew children for her art, and to let the world know about it. YBA Tracey Emin told the U.K.’s Independent in 2014 that she couldn’t be a mother because she’s no flake and does everything she does 100 percent. And you can’t do two things—parenthood and art—100 percent.
“There are good artists that have children. Of course there are,” she said. “They are called men.”
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Police are investigating after a homicide in Little Rock early Monday morning. (KATV)
UPDATE (11/28):
Authorities have identified the victim and the suspect involved in what is being investigated as a murder-suicide.
LRPD says Stefany Teague, 23, of Little Rock was shot by Christian Ramos, 27, of Little Rock.
According to officers, they heard several gunshots coming from inside the house shortly after arriving on scene. SWAT was immediately called out.
After SWAT arrived and entered the residence, they reported finding Teague dead from a gunshot wound and Ramos dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police say there were five other juveniles and three other adults inside the house at the time of the shooting, however, no one else was injured or witnessed the incident.
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UPDATE (10:30 A.M.):
Little Rock police are now saying an overnight homicide is being investigated as a murder-suicide.
LRPD tells Channel 7 they were called out the scene around 2:40 a.m. for shots fired.
When officers arrived on scene they found one victim shot outside the residence and learned another person was inside the house, located in the 12109 block of Stagecoach Road.
Authorities say SWAT was called out to the scene after it was discovered there was an individual still inside the house.
Lieutenant Michael Ford with Little Rock Police said SWAT negotiators didn't get anywhere with the individual inside the house so they entered and secured the scene, that is when police found another victim and discovered they would be investigating a murder-suicide.
Officers say it is unclear who shot who, or if SWAT was successful in speaking with anyone when they arrived.
LRPD believes the two people involved may have been boyfriend and girlfriend.
Other children and adults were reported to be in the house at the time of the shooting but were outside by the time police arrived on scene.
This is an ongoing investigation, we will update the story as more information becomes available.
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ORIGINAL( 6:00 A.M.):
Police are investigating after a homicide in Little Rock early Monday morning.
LRPD says the incident occurred in the 12000 block of Stagecoach Road and that a SWAT team was involved
Channel 7 has a crew on scene.
This is a developing story, we will provide an update as more details become available.
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Between now and Opening Day, HardballTalk will take a look at each of baseball’s 30 teams, asking the key questions, the not-so-key questions, and generally breaking down their chances for the 2017 season. Next up: The Chicago Cubs.
The Cubs finally ended their 108-year-long championship drought by winning the most thrilling World Series in years last November. Where do the Cubs go from here? There’s only one answer: repeat.
The roster the Cubs will go into the 2017 season with is not that much different from the roster they opened with in 2016. The biggest changes are in center field, as Dexter Fowler has gone to the division rival Cardinals, and Wade Davis now owns the closer’s role.
The Cubs acquired Davis from the Royals back in December in exchange for outfielder Jorge Soler. Davis, effectively, is replacing Aroldis Chapman who was acquired by the Cubs from the Yankees in July last season, then went back to the Yankees in free agency. Few relievers have ever been as dominant as Davis has been these last three campaigns. Since the start of the 2014 season, Davis owns a 1.18 ERA with 47 saves and a 234/59 K/BB ratio in 182 2/3 innings. The right-hander did battle a forearm injury last season, limiting him to 43 1/3 innings, so the Cubs are banking on the 31-year-old staying healthy.
Fowler had what was arguably the best season of his career last year after returning to the Cubs. He hit .276/.393/.447 with 13 home runs, 48 RBI, 84 runs scored, and 13 stolen bases in 125 games. The Cardinals offered him $82.5 million over five years during the offseason, so the veteran outfielder went from Illinois to Missouri. The Cubs have the left-handed-hitting Jon Jay – inked to a one-year, $8 million deal in November — and right-handed Albert Almora, Jr. on the depth chart in center to replace Fowler. The duo will likely operate in a platoon. As the market for center fielders wasn’t exactly bustling, the Cubs did about as well as they could have reasonably done addressing the position.
Other than those two spots, it’s all familiar faces for the Cubs. After winning the 2015 National League Rookie of the Year Award, Kris Bryant followed up with an outstanding 2016 season, resulting in the NL Most Valuable Player Award. He hit .292/.385/.554 with 39 home runs, 102 RBI, and an NL-best 121 runs scored in 699 plate appearances. Along with that, he was one of the best fielding third basemen. Bryant turned 25 years old in January and it’s scary to think what he can accomplish not having yet hit his peak. He should be the favorite to win the 2017 NL MVP Award and if the Cubs continue to pace the league, Bryant will be a big reason why.
Across the diamond, Bryant’s teammate Anthony Rizzo was nearly as impactful to the Cubs last season. The 27-year-old finished fourth in NL MVP balloting, hitting .292/.385/.544 with 32 home runs and 109 RBI in 676 PA. He, too, was slick-fielding at his position which the Cubs’ pitching staff certainly appreciated. Rizzo has been one of the scariest and most consistent bats over the last three years — hitting 32, 31, and 32 home runs – so it wouldn’t be surprising if he had a career year and found himself as the leading Cub in MVP discussions.
Slugger Kyle Schwarber will open up the season in left field, just as he did last year. His season abruptly ended, unfortunately, when he collided with Fowler in the outfield trying to catch a fly ball in Arizona on April 7. He suffered a torn ACL and LCL. Even without Schwarber, the Cubs made it all the way to the World Series, so he was able to return on October 25 to open the Fall Classic against the Indians. He performed admirably, contributing six singles, a double, and three walks in 20 plate appearances for a robust .500 on-base percentage. Now with a full and healthy season ahead of him, the 23-year-old Schwarber is primed for a big season. As manager Joe Maddon is considering Schwarber for the leadoff spot, more plate appearances will mean more opportunities to showcase his power.
Let’s hop into the starting rotation quickly. Four of the five members of baseball’s scariest rotation last year are returning to the Cubs in 2017: Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, Kyle Hendricks, and John Lackey. Jason Hammel has been replaced by either Mike Montgomery or Brett Anderson, whoever pitches the best during spring training.
The veteran Lester pitched to a second-place finish in NL Cy Young balloting, going 19-5 with a 2.44 ERA and a 197/52 K/BB ratio in 202 2/3 innings. Sabermetrically, Lester pitched a bit better in 2014 with the Red Sox and Athletics, but by more traditional metrics his 2016 performance was the best of his career. Now 33 years old, Lester hasn’t lost much life on his fastball. Pitchers usually do as they get into their mid-30’s. The Cubs are hoping he can avoid age-related decline for at least one more season.
Arrieta was the league’s best pitcher in 2015 and he appeared to be well on his way to a second consecutive Cy Young Award as he carried a 1.74 ERA after his June 17 start against the Pirates. Clayton Kershaw – Arrieta’s steepest competition – was battling back issues. But Arrieta struggled the rest of the way, putting up a 4.31 ERA in his final 17 starts. His overall stats were fine – 18-8 with a 3.10 ERA and a 190/76 K/BB ratio in 197 1/3 innings — and he finished ninth in Cy Young balloting, but he was no longer the lights-out right-hander we saw in 2015. Fortunately, he figured things out just in time. After the Cubs lost his first two playoff starts against the Giants and Dodgers, they won his final two starts, both in the World Series against the Indians.
Hendricks deserves being mentioned as he led the majors with a 2.13 ERA. He finished third in Cy Young balloting, though, behind Max Scherzer and teammate Lester. Appropriately, Hendricks is very late-career-Greg-Maddux-esque, as he doesn’t feature an overpowering fastball. Rather, he relies on pinpoint command and mixing up his pitches to fool batters. Now that Hendricks is on the map, if he’s able to repeat what he did last year, the 27-year-old might take home some hardware.
The Cubs’ top-three is the best rotation top-three in baseball. Then you look at Lackey as their No. 4 and you realize why they won 103 games in the regular season last year. Lackey, now 38, put up a solid 3.35 ERA in 29 starts. His postseason starts were lackluster – eight runs allowed in 13 innings – but ate up just enough innings not to shortchange the bullpen.
The Cubs are very strong elsewhere, but in the interest of keeping these previews condensed enough to read during a break at the office, we’ll stop here. The Cubs’ catching situation is quite good with the young Willson Contreras backed up by veteran Miguel Montero. Hector Rondon, Pedro Strop, and Carl Edwards, Jr. are well-equipped to bridge the gap to Davis in the late innings. Jason Heyward will hope to finally figure things out offensively as he returns to right field. Shortstop Addison Russell appears poised to take the next step towards stardom. You can always set your watch to Ben Zobrist at second base. And last but not least, Maddon reprises his role as baseball’s oddest manager. We can only wait to find out what weird methods he’ll come up with to unite his team this time around.
A team hasn’t repeated as World Series champions since the 1999-2000 Yankees. If any team is going to do it, it will be these Cubs.
Prediction: 99-63, 1st place in NL Central
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The prognosis is not good for charlatans. Nor does the future look bright for wellness practitioners—the earnest touch therapists, energy healers and reiki masters—who post their business cards at health food stores. Those operating on the margins of the scientific and medical communities were served notice last November when Joe Schwarcz received a $5.5-million grant to further his work as Canada’s leading quackbuster.
“He’s the Carl Sagan of Canada,” said Lorne Trottier, the philanthropist who gave the endowment to McGill’s Office for Science and Society (OSS), where Schwarcz is the founding director. When Maclean’s reached Trottier via phone in Brazil, he was reading about climate science. “Like Joe, I’m appalled by the amount of sheer nonsense out there about health, the environment, everything,” said Trottier, co-founder of electronics company Matrox.
“Dr. Joe” is the public face of the OSS, as well as a working chemistry professor, radio host, newspaper columnist for the Montreal Gazette, author of 13 books and tireless tub-thumper against pseudoscience. The OSS was established in 1999, and McGill brought in Schwarcz, along with fellow chemists Ariel Fenster and David N. Harpp, to educate the public about matters of food, health, nutrition, medication, cosmetics—and misleading claims and possible fraud. The chemists and three interns offer continuing education classes, symposiums and public lectures. Working with the new cash injection—the interest from the $5.5-million endowment, minus the costs to run the annual Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium to promote public science awareness—Schwarcz and his team have approximately $130,000 each year to extend the OSS’s reach and ensure the office continues when Schwarcz, 64, retires.
“Some of the quacks are well-intentioned. Some think they’re on a mission from God, and some are out to make a buck,” said Schwarcz, sitting in his office in McGill’s chemistry building, where he got his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1973. A carpeted room full of awards, the OSS is a curiosity shop with a bookcase full of antique tonics and Schwarcz’s collection of rubber duckies—his “quacks.” Beside the main door, there is a framed program from Houdini’s last performance. “I fell in love with magic as a kid, and that’s when I first tuned in to how easily people can be defrauded,” said Schwarcz, who still uses magic to entertain his grandchildren, but deploys the scientific approach to investigate commonly held beliefs and suspicious marketing claims. “People don’t want their minds confused by the facts, especially if they’re seeking a health cure, eternal youth or a lucrative career selling supplements.”
Schwarcz is taking on health fads like acai berries and noni juice, rhinoceros horn aphrodisiacs, coffee enema cancer cures (“You can’t find the people who gave testimonials—they’re dead”), anti-wrinkle diets, crusaders against artificial sweeteners and detox products (“any scheme that claims to detoxify the body smacks of quackery”). He takes issue with health tips propagated by celebrities like Suzanne Somers (“She claims mistletoe extract helped her breast cancer; never mind that she had a lumpectomy and radiation treatment”), and Demi Moore, who swears by leeches. “Websites for herbal supplements are the worst, bilking the public out of millions of dollars,” said Schwarcz, who scans hundreds of Internet sites a week. “They all sell the same conspiracy theory: their cure from the Amazon is being suppressed by the evil alliance between science, doctors and Big Pharma. Look, there is no conspiracy to keep cheap, effective cures from the public.”
Last year he came under attack when he wrote in the Gazette about a chemical in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets. “People were in a flap because McNuggets have a small amount of an additive called dimethyl polysiloxane, which is also in Silly Putty. Like all additives, it’s regulated. The problem isn’t the dimethyl polysiloxane. The real issue with McNuggets is that they’re high in fat and salt,” said Schwarcz. “Well, one camp accused me of being bought by McDonald’s. The other accused me of not being venomous enough in my attack.”
Schwarcz now plans to focus more inquiry on homeopathic medicine. “It’s contrary to everything we know about physics and chemistry,” he said. “Homeopathic medicine contains virtually nothing except shaken water. Health Canada gives their products an official number—a DIN-HM number—which is inappropriate because it implies safety and, here is the important part, efficacy.”
“We’re not in a position to debate this,” said Stéphane Shank, senior media relations adviser at Health Canada, referring to the issue of efficacy. “Health Canada approves the homeopathic products, but not the practice.” No doubt for Schwarcz, this debate and many more are far from over.
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J.D. KING
This was a fiery good year for poetry — maybe it’s just all those poets trying to get a last word in before, you know . . . that thing that didn’t happen a couple of weeks ago. What follows is an attempt at sorting through this surprising bounty for what books kept me coming back to them.
In the poetic spirit of absence being as crucial as presence, let it be known that C.A. Conrad’s “A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon” would be on my list if I wasn’t so sure that I need at least another year with the thing. I likewise suspect Patricia Lockwood’s “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black” might have made it, had I finished reading it. Those are the breaks; here are the books.
Michael Andor Brodeur
Pink Thunder
By Michael Zapruder (Black Ocean)
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With handwritten text, lovely illustrations, pink vinyl 7-inch and 22-track CD, this project, born aboard a leg of the 2006 Poetry Bus Tour (which, full disclosure, I rode for a two-city stint, big fun was had), Zapruder’s “Pink Thunder” is at once a curious experiment and a beautiful document. A musician entranced by the chorus of poetic voices around him (Dorothea Lasky, Joshua Beckman, Hoa Nguyen, Mary Ruefle, D.A. Powell, David Berman and a gang of others), Zapruder set out to put some favorite recent poems to music. The hazards of freighting poetry with “emotional ground” are not lost on Zapruder — it’s as though he sets the poems free into unfamiliar pop habitats to find their own way.
Mayakovsky’s Revolver
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By Matthew Dickman (W.W. Norton)
Fear, loss, and death hang over Dickman’s second collection, but they maintain the singular brightness of his language — and the pull between the hope that moves Dickman from word to word and the profound grief of which he writes keeps the poems in a tense balancing act. Of special note, a central suite on his older brother’s suicide, and a collection of “elegies” — one especially pertinent to recent horrors, “My friend’s daughter is growing up and no one can stop her. . . ”
Thunderbird
By Dorothea Lasky (Wave)
One of the reasons that Sharon Olds’s “Stag’s Leap” is relatively deep down on my list is Lasky. Her poems on loss have made just about every loss-poem I’ve read in the past year seem overcooked. Her blood-red realness howls fresh in the poems of “Thunderbird.” It’s intense, dark, assertive, timely, and true. In “What Poets Should Do,” she writes: “And the townspeople, they say to you/ That they may have seen/ A monster/ But no no I was only the dawn.” Chills. Every time. It’s what poets should do.
Quick Question
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By John Ashbery (Ecco)
Ashbery is the Sonic Youth of my inner canon, not just because he has his own uniquely identifiable and almost dangerously influential brand of white noise, and not just because anything he does I tend to eat right up, but because of his ability to make dissonance downright idiomatic. “Quick Question” is restless, wise, and hard to put down.
Alien vs. Predator
By Michael Robbins (Penguin)
“In front of Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,/ but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?” Robbins’s debut collection is full of hard-hitting questions like these, that probe the void of consumerism, desperately searching for a connection — or a Wi-Fi signal. Where David Berman’s tone toward American desire was more contemplative (take his “caribou crossing the Nikon”), Robbins’s lines read like feral tweets that have been tamed into jingles. The grand tradition of our poetry, lost in a brunch coma: “Where are the snow tires of tomorrow?”
As Long As Trees Last
By Hoa Nguyen (Wave)
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Nguyen proceeds through Oppen-like regard for space, silence, and detail; a Dickinsonian balance of weighty wisdom and delicate expression; and an entirely unique way of translating the defects and hazards of American life (from mounting debt to shrinking glaciers) into incredibly personal portraits — ones that involve us, together, in the burdens we feel are ours alone. These poems reflect the futility of fear in a world without beginnings or ends (“The middle part playing/ again and again”), and there’s a lovely sense of surrender in Nguyen’s lines, which could so easily be burdened with fear. Think of these poems as a sustainable repurposing of modern hopelessness.
Music for Porn
By Rob Halpern (Nightboat)
The rest of this list may betray my general fondness for contemporary poets who are unafraid of the first part of that term, and Halpern was as fearless as they came in 2012. His stunning third collection was both statement and experiment — a gruesome, erotic, studied, unflinching dissection of the ways that violence, sex, and social order tear at each other. Halpern uses the body as a battleground, and the solider as a stand-in for a range of repressed (and fulfilled) desires. Light reading, it is not; enlightening, challenging, and upsetting, it will be for years to come.
Place
By Jorie Graham (Ecco)
For a number of reasons, Graham’s collections are never a sure thing for me — often her sweeping sense of scale can leave me feeling detached from her lines, and the struggle to find footing can prove as challenging as trailing her associative leaps. “Place,” her 12th collection, was at once a relief and a revelation. The best aspects of Graham’s poetry — her high-resolution attention to detail and her elastic treatment of time, her skill with distilling history (on scales geologic to political) into personal experience, and the compassionate regard she extends to every element of experience, from cells to stars — are on full display here.
Michael Brodeur is a member of the Globe staff. He can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com
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Each month, my contemporary poetry review series at The Huffington Post selects between five and ten collections published since 2000 to recommend to its readership. These collections are selected from a pool of more than a thousand contemporary poetry collections available for review. Publishers interested in submitting review copies to the series should contact the above-listed reviewer. All submitted books remain eligible for inclusion in the series for a 10-year period.
1. Song of a Living Room, Brigitte Byrd (Ahsahta Press, 2009). Byrd's cerebral prose poems are couched in an air of hyper-rationality that belies their visceral energy. As those progenitors of the contemporary avant-garde, The Futurists, so famously encouraged in the years leading up to WWI, Byrd casts her analogic net so widely it convincingly illuminates the interrelationship between mind and body, subject and object, ego and environment. The sum of these efforts is no less than a new way of knowing--and of knowing the self. Also, some of the most accomplished prose poems of the last decade, work which demands an active readership--one prepared to be challenged by verse so rewarding it bears not only careful reading but re-reading and re-re-reading. Very, very highly recommended. [Excerpt: "(a brittle day passed by)"].
2. A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, Tim Dlugos [ed. David Trinidad] (Nightboat Books, 2011). In the past decade, there have been a number of critical additions to, and clarifications of, the twentieth-century avant-garde canon. Consider, for instance, the recent emergence (or rather reemergence and resurgence) of Ted Berrigan, John Wieners, and Ed Dorn. It's time to add the name of Tim Dlugos (1950-1990) to this roster of archival resurrections. Dlugos' Collected charts the artistic output of a singular talent most commonly associated with New York City--in whose literary scene he was ubiquitous from 1978 to 1990--who in fact wrote his best poems as a recently-out college student in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. This early work is that of a young man still coming to terms with his sexuality and politics; there is a gentle, tentative longing here that would border on the saccharine were the poet not so evidently and deeply invested in every line. Indeed, Dlugos offers us some of the most touching and earnest work ever associated with any wave of the New York School. The poet may have self-identified as "part of the nostalgia craze," and certainly there's more than a hint of the sentimental in many of these poems, but it's also true that no understanding of American poetry in the seventies or eighties would be complete without some exposure to, and appreciation of, these highly personal--and yet also highly political--lyric poems. [Excerpt: "The Truth"].
3. The Louisiana Purchase, Jim Goar (Rose Metal Press, 2011). From a resolutely historical, "mappable" origin-point, The Louisiana Purchase evolves into an exquisite article of hypertextuality. Goar uses the titular land-grab as a springboard for imaginative--and instructive--investigations into what it means to be an American, and, too, what it means to be steeped in a national narrative with which it becomes increasingly difficult to establish any personal relationship. Goar reifies the interconnectivity of our highly-plastic American iconography--seamlessly integrating cultural touchstones from Ozzie Smith to Richard Nixon to the Immaculate Conception--and in so doing succeeds at an even greater task: Penning a collection of poems brilliantly of and for its time. The Louisiana Purchase is a sterling exemplar of what post-postmodern verse can do in the twenty-first century. [Excerpt: from "The Louisiana Purchase"].
4. Holy Land, Rauan Klassnik (Black Ocean, 2010). These poems may well be among the most vulgar and violent published in the English language in the past quarter-century. Many will be offended by what's in this book; Klassnik doesn't just gore sacred cows, he disembowels them and devours their entrails. A superficial reading of the text might even produce a damning accusation of homicidal misogyny. Yet such a careful study of violences--which is what, in toto, Holy Land is--permits a notable accumulation of gravitas, and Klassnik earns his strong language and deeply distressing imagery. In both its tender and horrifying moments, Holy Land aptly maps how we are chained to time, place, ourselves, and one another by a million minor assaults--only some of which are physical. As a wide-ranging, metaphoric look at death, power, gendered bodies, sublimity, despair, and anguish, Holy Land succeeds even as it terrifies and, yes, turns the stomach. A remarkable achievement, and one which deserves to be (and must be) read in its entirety. [Excerpt: from "Wounded Soldier"].
5. The Bigger World, Noelle Kocot (Wave Books, 2011). The series of third-person narrative vignettes of which The Bigger World is comprised is compulsively readable and not infrequently brilliant. Kocot's characters boast their own distinctive symbology; the landscape upon which these breezily-recounted stories unfold is one in which nothing whatsoever is as might be expected, and what often seem preposterous plots and personalities soon enough take a turn toward the sublime. Kocot's language is more often prosaic than cleverly subtle, but the whole is without question more than the sum of the parts: The Bigger World is one of the most pleasurable reads this reviewer has encountered in some time. Every page in this collection offers a new delight. [Excerpt: "The Circle of Life"].
6. Enola Gay, Mark Levine (University of California Press, 2000). Reading Mark Levine's Enola Gay is a near-religious experience. These poems occupy a landscape at the very brink of its Apocalypse; lovers of Cormac McCarthy's prose will find much to admire in the dark urgencies of Levine's enigmatic yet eloquently stern verse. There can be no doubt that Levine offers readers of American poetry a singular vision, one whose temperate, almost holy prosaicism paradoxically offers a stunningly expansive view of what's possible in the English language. There is real terror beneath the surface of these poems, but also an ethereal dignity that somehow, impossibly, retains a distinctly human cast. You could read contemporary American poetry for many years and not come across a work as distinctive as this; these poems wrench the gaze forward toward a time that has not yet been, one which we hope (for our own sake) and yet do not hope (for the sake of its terrible, pressing beauty) will never be. [Excerpts: "Then for the Seventh Night" and "Eclipse, Eclipse"; click on "Read Chapter 1" at link].
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The TrueNorth system, as it's been dubbed, employs modular chips that act like neurons. By stringing multiple chips together researchers can essentially build an artificial neural network. The version that IBM just debuted contains about 48 million connections -- roughly the same computing capacity as a rat's brain -- over an array of 48 chips.
These systems are designed to run "deep learning" algorithms -- similar to Facebook's new facial recognition feature or Skype's insta-translate function -- but at a fraction of the cost, electrical draw and space needed by conventional data centers. For example, a TrueNorth chip contains 5.4 billion transistors but only uses 70 mw of power. An Intel processor, conversely contains just 1.4 billion transistors and draws between 35 and 140 watts.
In fact, future iterations of the TrueNorth system could (theoretically at least) be shrunk small enough to fit inside cell phones or smart watches. These chips also hold an advantage over the GPUs (graphics chips) and FPGAs (function-specific programmable chips) that the industry currently uses because TrueNorth chips operate much the same way that the deep learning algorithms running on them do, Peter Diehl, a PhD student in the cortical computation group at ETH Zurich told Wired. With it, IBM hopes to eventually shift some of the computing power requirements away from traditional data centers and onto end user devices.
This should speed up the computing process since data isn't being sent back and forth over the network. Instead, companies could simply develop a deep learning model (say, to count the number of cars in a photo), upload it to a central data server and then have the model run on the user's TrueNorth-enabled device. The system would be able to spot every car in the user's image gallery without having to upload each photo to the remote server for processing. Unfortunately, the system is still in its infancy and years away from your phone.
[Image Credit: IBM]
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METAPHORS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION
Joseph Campbell
In the normal course of a well-favored human lifetime the unfolding of the body's vital energy transpires through marked stages of transformation which in the pictographic lexicon of India's yogic schools are represented as controlled from separate spinal centers known as cakras (pronounced "chakras," meaning "circles, wheels"), also as padmas ("lotuses"). These are pictured and experienced as ranged in ascending order along an invisible spinal nerve or channel called sushumna ("supremely blessed, rich in happiness") (see Figure 3). The first and lowest of the series, described as situated between the anus and genitalia, is known as muladhara ("root base") and identified as the motivating center of that simple, primal holding to life which is of infancy and early childhood. The body's urgency at this stage is to feeding and assimilating, which, as noticed in our Prologue, is the precondition of all animal life, which can exist only by consuming lives. The second bio-energetic station, svadhishthana (energy's "own, or especial, standing place"), is of sexuality, awakened during adolescence. And the third, known as manipura ("city of the shining jewel"), at the level of the navel, is then of the will to power, mastery, and control, which in its healthy, positive aspect is of power achieved, with a sense of pride in responsibility; but in its morbid, negative form it appears as an insatiable will to conquer, plunder and subjugate, converting everything and everybody within reach into one's own or one's like.
In the normal course of a lifetime, according to this yogic psychological schedule, the biological urges generated from these three pelvic spinal centers mature naturally in succession as the body develops through it first three and a half decades. These, and these alone, have supplied the motivations of historical man, his effective moral systems, and his nightmare of world history. They are the centers of the basic urges, furthermore, that mankind shares with the beasts — namely, (1) to survive alive by feeding on other lives, (2) to generate offspring, and (3) to conquer and subdue. Unrestrained by any control system, these become devastating, as the history of the present century surely tells. For as declared in the Indian Arthasastra, "Textbook on the Art of Winning": "When uncontrolled by virtue (dharma) and the big stick (danda), men become wolves unto men."
The elevation of the human will to aims transcendent of this bestial order of life requires, according to the yogic model, an awakening that will not be of the pelvic region, but of chakra 4, which is of the heart. The name of this transformative center, anahata, has the curious meaning "not hit," which is interpreted as signifying "the Sound that is not made by any two things striking together." For every sound heard by the physical ear is of things rubbing or striking together. That of the voice, for example, is of breath on the vocal cords. The one sound not so made is the great tonic, or hum (sabda), of the creative energy (maya, sakti) of which things are the manifestations, or epiphanies. And the intuitive recognition of this creative tone within a phenomenal form is what opens the heart to love. What before had been an "it" becomes then a "thou," alive with the tone of creation.
Figure 3 . Figure seated in the yogic Lotus Position (padmasana), illustrating the distribution of subtle Lotus Centers (padmas, or cakras) along the subtle spinal nerve or channel known as sushumna. Two interlacing lateral nerves, ida (here dark) and pingala (light), carry the vital breaths of the left, respectively, and right nostrils to the lowest center, where they may be brought to enter the sushumna.
Each Lotus resounds to a special syllable and is endowed with symbolic features: 1. muladhara (situated between the anus and genitals), of the element Earth, having four crimson petals and a yellow, rectangular interior bearing the sign of the syllable lam; 2. svadhishthana (region of the genitals), of the element Water, with six vermilion petals and a white interior containing a crescent moon and the sign of the syllable vam; 3. manipura (region of the navel), of the element Fire, with ten smoky-purple petals and a fiery triangle within, resounding to the syllable ram. These lowest three are centers of basic physical energies and urges.
4. anahata (region of the heart), of the element Air (breath, spiritus, prana), having twelve red petals and an interior showing a six-pointed star composed of two opposed triangles, one downward, the other upward turned, within which a golden lingam-yoni symbol connoting a subtle spiritual rapture resounds to the syllable yam.
Just below this Lotus of spiritual birth there is a minor center with eight petals, as a vestibule of meditation upon one's "chosen guardian deity" (ishta-devata). There the "Wish-fulfilling Tree" (kalpatara) is found, set upon a jeweled altar (manipitha).
The uppermost three centers are of increasingly sublimated spiritual realizations: 5. visuddha (region of the larynx), of the element Space (akasa, often translated "ether"), having sixteen smoky-purple petals (same color as 3), a white triangle within (at 3 it was red, here clarified), and resounding to the syllable ham. This is the center of spiritual effort, leading to 6. ajna (at the forehead, between and above the eyes: compare in Figure I the place of the Jinas, the "Victors"). The Lotus here is of two petals, white and radiant as the moon, supporting a supreme vision of the Goddess, or of a God-with-Form, from which the tone is to be heard sounding of the syllable OM; beyond which there is, finally 7. the Lotus of a Thousand Petals, sahasrara, inverted over the whole crown of the head, representing a rapture beyond any god known as of a name or form.
This is the way of seeing things that is of mythology and of what in Chapter 3 is discussed as "The Way of Art": an awakening (metaphorically) to a New World (the Promised Land) and to Life in the Spirit (the Virgin Birth). In the way of nature one may experience, from time to time, glimpses of the world in this light — after the pelvic bio-energetic commitments have been honored and fulfilled, so that, freed from the dictatorship of the species, one is released to live as an individual (some little time, say, after the age of about thirty-five). The disciplines of yoga and devotional religion are meant to facilitate and ensure attainment of this revelation. However, as every chronicle of war and peace unquestionably demonstrates, it has simply not been within the power of our historical religions to open the hearts of congregations beyond their own recognized horizons: which at this historic moment is unfortunate, since (to repeat the argument of our Prologue) with the populations of the planet now on the point of becoming one, there are in fact no more horizons beyond which to project upon aliens the malice of God's un-sublimated product, historical man. Apparently, the words of Christ, "But I say to you Love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44), have today to be taken seriously, even by monotheists.
The transformation of character that is prerequisite for living in the light of a transformed world is symbolized in the imagery of the yogic lotus ladder by a final triad of chakras — numbers 5, 6, and 7 — which are of the head and mind pursuing aims and ends beyond range of the physical senses. The first of these, visuddha ("cleansed, clarified, perfectly pure"), is pictured at the level of the larynx (the seat of abstract speech), and the work to be accomplished there is a clarification of the senses, to the end of Blake's already quoted dictum: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." The required method to this end is known as the turning about of the energy, which is to say, simply, an application of all the available malice and aggression of Chakra 3, not outward to the correction of the world, but inward, upon oneself; as in Jesus' thought: not removing the mote from one's brother's eye, but casting out the beam from one's own (Matthew 7:3-5, abridged). The Indian pictorial metaphor is of a wrathful deity in demonic form, wearing necklaces of severed heads, kilts of severed arms and legs, flourishing weapons and trampling down human shapes underfoot. This demon is a manifestation of one's own impulse to aggression turned back on oneself, the vanquished shapes underfoot representing attachment to physical desires and the fear of physical death.
The next and last two stages of the ascending lotus series are then of the two ways of experiencing what is known as "God," either as "with form" or as "without." The lotus at Chakra 6, known as ajna ("authority, order, unlimited power, command"), is situated within the head, above, behind, and between the eyes. There it is that the radiant image of one's idea of "God" is beheld, while at Chakra 7, sahasrara (the lotus, "thousand petaled") — which is represented as an inverted corolla covering the crown of the head, "bright with the brightness of ten million suns" — both the beheld image and the beholding mind dissolve together in a blaze that is at once of non-being and of being.
In a sermon entitled "Riddance," the great Dominican mystic, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328), declared; "Man's last and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God." And the Indian saint Ramakrishna (1836-1886) is reported to have remarked, "At the break of day He disappears into the secret chamber of His House." Dante (1265-1321), in the culminating canto of his poetical account of his own spiritual ascent in vision up the metaphorical scale, from Hell, through Purgatory and the ranges of Heaven, to the Beatific Vision beheld in a blaze of eternal light, declares that there, within the profound subsistence of that light, there appeared, besides the triune image of his God, three circles of three colors and one magnitude. And "I wished to see," he states, "how the image conformed to the circle and how it has its place therein; but my own wings were not sufficient for that, save that my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it."
There is a Hindu tantric saying, nadevo devarn arcayet, "by none but a god shall a god be worshiped". The deity of one's worship is a function of one's own state of mind. But it also is a product of one's culture. Catholic nuns do not have visions of the Buddha, nor do Buddhist nuns have visions of Christ. Ineluctably, the image of any god beheld — whether interpreted as beheld in heaven or as beheld at Chakra 6 — will be of a local ethnic idea historically conditioned, a metaphor, therefore, and thus to be recognized as transparent to transcendence. Remaining fixed to its name and form, whether with simple faith or in saintly vision, is therefore to remain in mind historically bounded and attached to an appearance.
In the vocabulary of yoga, the two modes of realization, at Chakra 6 and Chakra 7, are termed, respectively, of saguna brahman (the "qualified absolute") and nirguna brahman (the "unqualified absolute"), while the two related orders of meditation are, respectively, savikalpa samadhi ("discriminating absorption") and nirvikalpa samadhi ("undifferentiated absorption"). "But this," said Ramakrishna in discussion of the latter, "is an extremely difficult path. To one who follows it even the divine play in the world becomes like a dream and appears unreal; his I also vanishes. The followers of this path do not accept the Divine Incarnation. It is a very difficult path. The lovers of God should not hear much of such reasoning."(14)
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space
Mindfire
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Search resumes for boy feared taken by croc
Updated
The search will continue this morning for a five-year-old boy feared taken by a crocodile in far north Queensland.
Searchers have found several crocodiles close to where a boy went missing on the Daintree River, north of Cairns, yesterday.
Rangers from the Environmental Protection Agency conducted spotlighting on the river overnight to locate crocodiles.
A local tourism operator who helped with the search says three crocs - a male known as 'Lumpy' and two females - were spotted near where the boy disappeared.
Police say he vanished after following his dog into the water from a boardwalk on his parents property on the river's northern bank.
His seven-year-old brother was with him and told police he saw a crocodile soon after his brother vanished.
His parents are local tourism operators and his father has been involved in the search overnight.
Authorities are hoping to search the area on foot where the boy disappeared before the tide rises later this morning.
The disappearance has shocked the small Daintree community.
If confirmed as a fatal crocodile attack, it would be the second in far north Queensland since October when a 62-year-old man was killed near Cooktown.
Topics: emergency-incidents, disasters-and-accidents, crocodile, daintree-4873, qld, cairns-4870, cooktown-4895
First posted
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Last year, German coin producer, MCI-Mint debuted it’s first silver bullion coin depicting elephants and issued for the African Republic of Benin. With a tight mintage of just 5,000 pieces, and with other African issued bullion coins having popular early releases, the coin was well received. Last October the mint followed up that coin with a second one that also created good buzz, so at our recent trot along to the World Money Fair in Berlin, we expected to see perhaps a third elephant-themed coin.
What we saw was the new Hippo coin that had recently been filtering through to dealers and is depicted below. The surprise is that this one is issued for a different African country, the Republic of Chad, and heralds the continuation of what is now called Silverline. There’s no difference in specification from the first two coins, although the reverse design has some fundamental changes in layout from them. They all carry the ‘Protection de la Nature’ inscription, but the hippo loses the ring of twelve profile animals in favour of a larger central design. Both are good, but in light of what’s to follow, we’re not sure if the change is a one-off, or there is to be a little more variety in the Silverline range than before.
A bigger surprise was tucked in a glass cabinet and as yet had no obverse. The Zebra coin goes back to the Elephant style of reverse design and is again, an attractive beast. Specification remains identical, but this one is likely a couple of months away at least. Well worth waiting for in our opinion.
The Hippo again goes for around €35, so a touch more expensive than most bullion coins, but the limited mintage and the weakness of the Euro certainly soften the cost somewhat. It’s extremely unlikely the Zebra will stray far from that price. It looks like MCI’s new Silverline African nature series is shaping up to be one to watch.
UPDATE:
The Zebra coin will be issued for Benin like the Elephant coins, so will likely have the same obverse but it isn’t the third coin in that series, but rather the first of a new one. Interesting news.
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WASHINGTON — A fight between the White House and State Department has broken out over ambassadorships after chief of staff Reince Priebus tried to circumvent Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to hand out the coveted posts to GOP loyalists, sources told The Post.
“Tillerson had a deal that if he were to come on board, he would have a decision on who the ambassadors were going to be,” a transition source said.
“The process was supposed to be where transition was going to give two names for each position and Tillerson was going to interview those people for each country — and Tillerson would make the decision,” the source explained.
But Priebus is using his Oval Office access to get President Trump to sign off on a list of some of the most desirable diplomatic postings, angering State Department officials, multiple sources confirmed.
So far, Priebus has pushed — and won signoffs — for Miami Marlins owner Jeff Loria to head to France, GOP activist Georgette Mosbacher to Luxembourg, financier Lew Eisenberg to Italy and hedge funder Duke Buchan to Spain.
The list has led some at the State Department to worry that Priebus has not properly vetted the diplomats-to-be.
“The people Reince has put up are problematic as well,” said a State Department official.
see also Rex Tillerson and Trump clash over State Department deputy Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has lost his first fight...
“Eventually, what Reince is doing has to be squared with process and reality. I’m not sure the White House is exactly stoked about this as they dig deeper into the background of these people,” he added.
In a joint statement, Tillerson and Priebus denied any rift.
“We have a very close relationship and speak often. We have a great system in place to assure mutual agreement on all Ambassadorships.”
Eisenberg, a Republican National Committee loyalist who helped lead the effort to raise funds for Trump’s presidential campaign, was pushed out of Goldman Sachs after a sexual harassment accusation — an issue that would surely come up at a confirmation hearing. (His accuser reportedly recanted her claims.)
Buchan, who donated to a super PAC supportive of Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio before finally coming around to Trump, was an owner of a company, NewCastle Investment Corp., that in 2009 sued Trump.
“Mr. Buchan’s investment fund previously owned shares of Newcastle, but does not currently and was never a part of company management or its board,” Kevin Madden, a spokesman for the hedge funder, said.
But Buchan also has Cayman Island funds and faces other financial issues that could make his confirmation contentious.
In addition to Nikki Haley to the UN, the Trump administration has officially only nominated two ambassadors — David Friedman for Israel and Terry Branstad to China.
The president has also signaled that he intends to select businessman William Hagerty to be ambassador to Japan and Jets owner Woody Johnson to the UK.
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Image caption The US military uses different versions of its most advanced fighter jet
The Pentagon has said it will resume flights on its F-35 fighter jets, after the whole fleet was grounded last week.
A cracked turbine blade found on a plane prompted the suspension. But tests showed that this was a "unique" problem and not a design flaw, engine maker Pratt and Whitney said.
Thousands of F-35s are due to be made for the US and its foreign partners.
The F-35 is the Pentagon's most expensive weapons programme, with a cost of nearly $400bn (£260bn).
Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Single-seat, single-engine, fifth generation multirole fighter with a top speed of 1,930 km/h
Designed to perform ground attack, reconnaissance and air defence missions
Makers say more than 3,000 F-35s are planned for production
By 2016 makers say they want to build one F-35 per day
The fault was detected during a routine inspection of an air force version of the jet (F-35A) at Edwards Air Force Base in California,
But on Thursday a spokesman for Pratt and Whitney, Matthew Bates, told Reuters news agency: "The team has determined that root cause is sufficiently understood for the F-35 to safely resume flights,"
Extensive tests on the plane's engine revealed the crack was a result of the "unique operating environment" of the test flight, and was not a widespread issue, he added.
The engine had been running at high temperatures for four times longer than a normal F-35 flight, causing a separation of the "grain boundary" on one blade, Mr Bates explained.
The Pentagon later confirmed that all its 51 planes had been cleared to resume flights.
Last week's order to ground the planes - in the US air force, army and Marine Corps - marked the second time in two months planes from the F-35 range have been grounded.
The Marine Corps variant (F-35B), a short take-off and vertical landing variant (STOVL), was grounded for nearly a month after a manufacturing defect caused a fuel line to detach just before a training flight in January.
The F-35 programme includes partners from nine countries.
The construction of the plane has been plagued by problems - it is seven years behind schedule and has required numerous re-designs because of delays in software delivery and bulkhead cracks.
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Sideshow Collectibles has revealed the first and last Doctor Doom collectible you will ever need! Be warned though, this baby will set you back a pretty penny, but would be well worth it if you have the dough!
Pre-order and check out more details about the Marvel Doctor Doom Marvel Legendary Scale(TM) Figure at Sideshow Collectibles!
Archnemesis of the Fantastic Four, the monarch of Latveria strikes a commanding pose on a stone corner pedestal reminiscent of his castle refuge. Celebrating the popular villain's comic book evolution, Sideshow's artists have crafted two interchangeable masks for classic and modern interpretations, which can be removed and displayed separately to reveal Victor Von Doom's scarred portrait beneath.Each flourish and rivet has been artfully embellished on Doctor Doom's titanium armor battle suit, the primary source of his vast array of scientific gadgets and mystical weaponry. His costume is layered with the trademark hand-tailored fabric billowing green tunic and cape, held fast and finished with ornate metallic clasps and chain, and durable broad buckled belt.Measuring in at a colossal four feet tall, the eye-catching Doctor Doom Legendary Scale™ Figure makes the ultimate centerpiece for any Marvel collection. Underestimate him at your peril!
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By Joe Leogue
A 32-year-old man has appeared in court following an investigation into an incident that saw six horses and two dogs shot dead in Co Cork over the weekend.
Tom O’Connor, aged 32, with an address at Ballyduane East, Newmarket, Co Cork this morning appeared in Mallow District Court charged with a single firearms offence alleged to have taken place last Saturday, September 9, at Barnacurra, Newmarket.
Mr O’Connor was charged with possession of a .232 Tikka bolt action rifle with intent to commit criminal damage to a colt foal that was the property of Denis McCarthy.
The foal was born out of ‘Take Me To The Island’ in May 2017.
Tom O'Connor from Newmarket, Co. Cork, at Mallow District court in relation to firearms offences. Pic: Daragh McSweeney
Evidence of arrest, charge and caution was given by Detective Sergeant Hugh Twomey of Mallow Garda Station.
He said that when cautioned Mr O’Connor replied: “Will they give me help when I go to court?”
Defence solicitor Charlie O’Connor said there was no application for bail, but that he was seeking a psychiatric evaluation of his client. He also applied for legal aid, and said his client had no savings to pay for his defence.
Inspector Tony O'Sullivan said the case was to be tried on indictment before a jury at circuit court.
Mr O’Connor, who appeared in court in jeans and a Munster rugby jacket and had visible head injuries, spoke only to confirm his name.
Judge Brian Sheridan remanded Mr O’Connor in custody to appear again in Mallow District Court next Tuesday, September 19. He ordered that Mr O’Connor receive medical and psychiatric treatment and assessment to determine his fitness to enter a plea on the charge.
The shootings last weekend sparked a major search by gardaí to find the gunman.
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The invited guest author is the general manager of the Houston Rockets. He can be reached on Twitter at @dmorey.
IN A famous detective story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”, a minister steals a letter containing compromising information from a woman and uses it to blackmail her. The police scour every corner of his hotel room in search of the document: they check behind the wallpaper, under the carpets, and even examine the tables and chairs with microscopes, all to no avail. Defeated, they summon C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur detective, to help them with the case. Mr Dupin surmises that the minister would try to outwit the police by leaving the letter in plain sight. He duly spots it tucked into a card rack, delivers it to the authorities, and collects a reward of 50,000 francs.
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According to a series of news reports, the C. Auguste Dupin of the National Basketball Association (NBA) this year is Ed Weiland, a driver for Federal Express in Bend, Oregon. The personnel experts of all 30 NBA teams poke, prod, and spend millions of dollars attempting to find the best players in the league’s annual draft of amateur players. But in 2010 not one of them was able to identify Jeremy Lin of Harvard as a future professional star. He went undrafted, and was later ignored as a free agent by virtually every NBA team.
Meanwhile, Mr Weiland, who contributes to the HoopsAnalyst.com website, singled out Mr Lin from among the 5,000 or so players at Division I colleges, and wrote that his statistics suggested he had a good chance to succeed in the NBA. Once “Linsanity” erupted on both sides of the Pacific following Mr Lin’s incandescent start for the New York Knicks, Mr Weiland became a minor celebrity. The story of the hidden genius giving the experts their comeuppance is just as compelling today as it was when Poe wrote it in 1844—right?
Not so fast. It is true that Mr Lin has turned out to be a very good player. But Mr Weiland’s seemingly clairvoyant forecast is a red herring. In fact, no one could have predicted the level of play Mr Lin has attained—at least not without mistakenly foreseeing similar achievements for dozens of other players as well. Rather than life imitating Poe’s art, what Mr Lin’s story really demonstrates is the old Niels Bohr adage: prediction is difficult, especially about the future.
As in many other professional sports, the basketball world today can be divided between a new wave of objective statistical techniques and traditional methods of visual observation. Both schools of thought, however, rely on historical examples in order to produce their predictions.
Looking to the past is indisputably the best way to shift the odds in a forecaster’s favour. However, in order for it to be successful, the historical cases it is based on need to be reasonably comparable to the case in question. You would be rightly sceptical of someone who attempted to predict height from shoe size for women based on a sample of men.
Similarly, Mr Lin’s story is extremely unusual. There have been precious few point guards in the NBA who, like Mr Lin, were not recruited by college basketball teams while in high school, played against weak competition while in college, and played a position other than point guard for most of their college careers. When comparables are hard to come by, the flaws in a historically-based method are laid bare.
Defenders of the statistical approach will insist that there was ample quantitative evidence of Mr Lin’s potential. As Mr Weiland noted, he was a dominant guard at Harvard. The models used by teams and amateur analysts alike to predict how college players will fare as professionals invariably identified him as a strong NBA player.
However, those models suffer from an inescapable selection bias: they are based only on the roughly 2% of college players who went on to play in the NBA. As a result, they are all but useless when applied to the broader pool of all college players. In the 2010 draft alone, there were more than 20 other players who had faced relatively weak competition whose statistical probability of NBA success was similar to Mr Lin’s.
Take, say, Josh Slater, a guard from Lipscomb University who is the same height (six feet, three inches or 1.91 metres) as Mr Lin. Mr Slater averaged 17 points, five rebounds, five assists, and two steals per game—a dead ringer for Mr Lin’s 16 points, four rebounds, five assists, and two steals per game. Just as Mr Lin put up 30 points, nine rebounds and three assists against Connecticut, a powerhouse team, Mr Slater posted 21 points, nine rebounds and four assists versus North Carolina, another elite basketball school. Was Mr Slater, and all the other college players like him, unjustly passed over as well? Could your favourite NBA team go on a magical playoff run by inserting him in their starting lineup?
Of course not, counter advocates of the traditionalist camp. Mr Lin and Mr Slater might look the same in a spreadsheet, but they couldn’t look more different on the court. All one had to do, they claim, was watch Mr Lin play—and shame on those teams like the Golden State Warriors, Dallas Mavericks and my own Houston Rockets, who had him in their organisation and failed to recognise his brilliance.
Neither argument is completely wrong. Maybe Mr Slater could succeed in the NBA, and maybe Mr Lin should have been given playing time sooner. But the structure of professional basketball makes it impossible for teams to give a chance to every prospect who shows some potential.
For example, Major League Baseball (MLB) drafts some 1,500 players a year. Once selected, they must work their way up four levels of minor-league teams before joining the parent club. This gives MLB organisations the incentives of salmon, which spawn scores of young far upriver in hopes that a handful make the treacherous journey all the way back to sea. Each team can invest in hundreds of prospects and see which pan out, needing only a few winners that “hit it big” to make up for all the failures.
In contrast, NBA teams cannot hold the rights to anyone beyond the 15 players on their active roster. That makes them more like elephant mothers, who give birth to very few babies and have to gestate them for almost two years. With limited investment opportunities, teams are forced to choose only the players with the greatest likelihood of success, and then give them a long-term contract and a potential path to significant playing time. And no one could have called Mr Lin a high-probability prospect. In the end, he only got his break after he had polished his game for a year in the NBA Development League (“D-League”), basketball’s minor league, and when a series of injuries on the Knicks created an opening at his position.
The NBA has made some movement towards a model more like baseball’s. It launched the D-League a decade ago, and is now trying to promote exclusive relationships between NBA and D-League clubs. In fact, in 2009 the Rockets became the first NBA team to pair up formally with a D-League counterpart in a baseball-like hybrid-owner relationship, when we entered a partnership with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. Other NBA clubs, such as the San Antonio Spurs, have chosen outright ownership of a D-League team. Hopefully, in the long run, this will allow teams to provide opportunities to more prospects than they can now. Nonetheless, the elephant-mother model will remain entrenched for at least the next few years, since NBA teams can still hold a maximum of 15 players, regardless of whether they are affiliated with a D-League club or not.
Mr Lin has received so much attention because he embodies the reason we love sports: every time you watch, something amazing might happen that no one anticipates. He is an outlier and an underdog whose hard work is paying off at last. Just don't tell me that anyone—even C. Auguste Dupin—could have predicted it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Three months after this article was published, the author’s Houston Rockets signed Mr Lin to a three-year contract.
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The new chief executive of Tesco has made a decisive break with the troubled supermarket’s past, axing the retailer’s emblematic Cheshunt head office in Hertfordshire and raising the spectre of thousands of job cuts as part of a shakeup that will also see the closure or abandonment of nearly 100 stores.
As the architect of the major restructuring, Dave Lewis lived up to his nickname “Drastic Dave”, which was earned on the back of a brutal drive he led at former employer Unilever.
Lewis declined to put a figure on potential job losses but admitted: “This is a significant restructuring of a significant-sized business.” With 314,000 UK staff Tesco is the country’s biggest private sector employer, and with a goal to reduce head office costs by 30% – part of a plan to shave £250m from the group’s annual running costs – the number of job losses is expected to be substantial.
After the markets had closed on Thursday, credit rating agency Moody’s slashed Tesco’s investment rating to junk, saying discounters such as Aldi and Lidl posed a continuing problem, Lewis’s turnaround plan was not guaranteed to work and would take time to take effect.
Some 3,000 people are employed in Cheshunt, which will close next year, while a significant number of store staff will be affected by the unprecedented shutdown of 43 loss-making stores and a plan to strip out layers of store managers.
Lewis has hired a new boss for the key UK stores, Matt Davies, who has been poached from Halfords.
“We are restructuring the group in a way that does not sacrifice any customer-facing roles,” said Lewis. “These stores [the 43 closing] are a drain on the finances of the business and a loss we can no longer bear.” He refused to identify the locations of the stores to be closed.
The shares jumped nearly 15% on the back of Lewis’s plan, which includes the closure of the company’s defined-benefit pension scheme – which has a £3.4bn deficit – and the sale of the Tesco Broadband and movie streaming service Blinkbox to TalkTalk for an undisclosed sum.
Despite the strong rally Lewis confessed to mixed emotions given the backdrop. “Today hasn’t been a day for thinking about the share price but the impact on colleagues of the changes we have to make,” he said. The shares closed up 27.25p at 209.25p.
With the company’s balance sheet under pressure, Tesco also said it had hired Goldman Sachs to weigh up whether to sell its Dunnhumby data-mining business, which is the brains behind its Clubcard loyalty scheme.
Tesco’s is among only a few remaining defined-benefit pension schemes - which promise pensions linked to salary -in the private sector. One of the largest in the country, it has 350,000 members, of whom 203,000 are current employees.
Independent pension consultant John Ralfe said: “Closing the defined benefit pension scheme to all members is an easy way for the new Tesco management to save around £250m a year, boosting operating profit by 10%. This saving, is of course, a reduction in the overall pay and perks of its 300,000 employees.” The retailer also axed its final dividend, which combined with the cut to the interim payout has saved the cash-strapped company about £800m this year. Tesco was among the top 20 biggest dividend payers in the UK, and a key investment for individuals and funds seeking income.
New Tesco House – the squat 1970s tower block on a grim industrial estate that the supermarket has called home for more than 40 years – used to be held up by former boss Sir Terry Leahy as a symbol of the “no-frills” corporate culture that was good for customers.
It was also the setting of some tough negotiations. In 2008, at the height of the downturn, Tesco renamed one of its satellite buildings Discounter House to provide an intimidating setting for negotiations with suppliers during a shortlived bid to become “Britain’s biggest discounter”.
“There was some soul-searching but this is a new chapter for Tesco,” Lewis said. “My job is to think about the future.”
From next year its head office will be at an existing campus in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. A swish office in Mayfair used by chairman Sir Richard Broadbent is also being offloaded. Broadbent is in the process of being replaced.
Even Lord MacLaurin, the former Tesco boss who turned the company into Britain’s biggest retailer, did not mourn the end of the Cheshunt era. MacLaurin said he had purchased the land as a “field with horses on it”, but added: “There can’t be any sacred cows in business. You have got to do what you have got to do.”
Tesco said all types of stores were affected by the closures, but more than half were Express convenience outlets, its smallest type. An Express store employs up to 25 people while an out-of-town Tesco Extra can have 1,000 staff.
Lewis has also abandoned the construction of 49 large supermarkets which he said the retailer “quite simply could not afford”.
Tesco is still reeling from the autumn accounting scandal which revealed a £263m hole in expected profits. Last year it issued five profit warnings. The cull means the equivalent of 2m sq ft of new Tesco supermarket space will not be built.
With campaigners trying to block Tesco store openings usually making the headlines tThe decision to pull the plug on big projects around the country was met with anger in some communities, where plans have taken many years to come to fruition, often scarring the local environment in the interim.
The list of casualties includes Dartford, where Tesco fought for 11 years to win planning permission for a development that included 100 homes, and a £60m development in Wolverhampton.
Pat McFadden, MP for Wolverhampton South East, said Tesco had “broken its word”. He added: “Tesco has owned this site for 14 years. During that time it has remained undeveloped and a blight on the city.”
As Lewis set out his plans, he reported slightly improving trading with like-for-like sales down 2.9% over the past 19 weeks. Within that, like-for-like sales (which strip out new space) were down only 0.3% for the key six-week Christmas trading period. The retailer said its UK stores had recorded their first volume growth in fresh food in five years over Christmas - a time when he slashed the price of Christmas vegetables to 49p a bag.
“We delivered a marked improvement in our performance across the period.” Lewis said the extra 6,000 staff drafted into shopfloor roles were making a difference in customer service. “Over Christmas it felt like we brought “every little helps” to life in store.”
In an attempt to compete even harder, the retailer launched a wave of price cuts on Thursday involving 380 branded grocery lines, including Hovis bread, Coca-Cola and Tetley teabags, reduced by an average of 26%. Lewis said Tesco’s prices had been “significantly out of line” with rivals. He is also cutting the number of products on the shelves by 20,000 to 70,000.
Lewis refused to rule out selling the company’s successful Asian hypermarket operations: “We are committed to keeping all our operations overseas until we make a decision otherwise.”
Shore Capital analyst Clive Black said Lewis had put together “as credible a strategy as they can”, but added: “There is no quick fix to this and they are not totally in charge of their own destiny due to the challenging and volatile markets Tesco is operating in. They can cut prices, increase staff and improve customer service but they also need to make a profit for shareholders – and devise a business model that is able to do that.”
Its departure from Cheshunt sounded a melancholy note, he added. “It’s a symbol of the plight of the company which is having to cut thousands of head office jobs.
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Authored by Denis MacEoin via The Gatestone Institute,
Theresa May herself is also not entirely to be trusted in this area. Despite her calls for no tolerance for extremism, she has recently been widely criticized for blocking publication of a major report into foreign funding of extremist Muslim groups.
For years now, radical preachers, terrorist recruiters, and fundamentalists who openly hate this country, its democratic values, and its tolerance for all faiths, have walked British streets, campaigned on university campuses, and converted and radicalised young men and women.
What seems not to be understood about "the religion of peace" is that "peace" comes only after the entire world has been converted to Islam so that a "Dar al-Harb", the "Abode of War," will no longer even exist.
Since the beginning of March, 17,393 people have been listed as terror suspects. — French Senate report: "Prevention of Radicalism and Regional Authorities", April 2017.
On May 26, four days after the major terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, British intelligence officials stated that they had identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in the UK, all of them considered potential terrorist attackers. According to The Times,
About 3,000 people from the total group are judged to pose a threat and are under investigation or active monitoring in 500 operations being run by police and intelligence services. The 20,000 others have featured in previous inquiries and are categorised as posing a "residual risk". The two terrorists who have struck in Britain this year — Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, and Khalid Masood, the Westminster killer — were in the pool of "former subjects of interest" and no longer subject to any surveillance.
A police officer stands guard near the Manchester Arena on May 23, 2017, following a suicide bombing by an Islamic terrorist who murdered 22 concert-goers. (Photo by Dave Thompson/Getty Images)
The report adds that the two men who beheaded British soldier Lee Rigby in London, in 2013, had been known to the security services, just as Abedi and Masood were, but had been dropped to low priority.
David Anderson, QC, the former reviewer of anti-terrorism laws, noted concerns in his 2015 report about the "speed with which things can change" around suspects and "the difficulties in knowing how best to prioritise limited surveillance resources". Senior police have also spoken of the difficulty in identifying the triggers that might "reactivate" extremist behaviour.
Others had expressed similar concerns about how the jihadi ideology, based in radical religious belief, is so intensely ingrained that it never leaves individuals and may easily reactivate a desire to commit atrocities.
Ben Wallace, Minister of State for Security at the Home Office, told The Times that the existence of a database of thousands of potential attackers clearly indicates just how serious the threat has become: "This reveals the scale of the challenge from terrorism in the 21st century," he said. "Never has it been more important to invest in intelligence-led policing."
One problem is that the police and MI5 lack enough resources to investigate any more than 3,000 suspects at a time, leaving the other 20,000 free to pass without surveillance and under the radar. According to a report issued this year by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), and detailed in The Guardian, budget cuts to the police forces in England and Wales have left law enforcement inadequately prepared:
In a stark message about the current state of policing, Zoë Billingham, Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary, said the "disturbing" practices did not apply to the majority of forces but the watchdog could see the problems spreading if action was not taken. "We're leading to a very serious conclusion regarding the potentially perilous state of policing," she said. "It's a red flag that we're raising at this stage. A large red flag."
Ironically, this austerity-produced situation stands in stark contradiction to comments by one of the country's leading security experts:
Anthony Glees, head of security and intelligence studies at the University of Buckingham, said: "To have 23,000 potential killers in our midst is horrifying. We should double the size of MI5, as we did in World War Two, and expand the number of intelligence-led police by thousands. We can't go on as if this wasn't happening."
In April, as Islamic State was facing defeat in Mosul and Raqqa, a small national study found that many young British Muslims believed that jihadists returning from Syria to the UK should be given a "second chance" and should "reintegrate" within society. This is estimated to be around 800 or 850 individuals. One person interviewed argued that:
When people feel isolated and angry because they are not being treated with respect and if they go out and fight in Syria and when they come back there is no help, then I promise you, you will see more terrorism because these young people will think why should I do anything when my own Government don't care about me.
That appears to be a threat that ignores completely what sorts of crimes returnees may have committed abroad. As such individuals do return, they may well add significantly to the list of potential terrorists living in a country they had already found occasion to hate. In 2016, "the Government admitted [that] just 14 of nearly 400 returnee fighters have been jailed, raising fears the rest are living off the radar and may be vulnerable to radicalisation."
Adam Deen of London's anti-radical Quilliam Foundation stated that:
What is important here is that the more Isis are under siege and the more territory they're losing, the more they're going to channel their efforts and energies into terrorism," he said in an interview with The Independent. Those individuals that have managed to get back into the country will be activated or will be conspiring to commit some kind of terrorist act. That's a major concern.
Britain is not alone in facing such potential threats, but it may have the largest population of potential terrorists.
There is confusion in Germany, for example, as to how many such individuals there are. According to a report from the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt), the number of suspects is on the rise, but they list only 657 people as capable of carrying out an attack, alongside another 388 "relevant persons" who might lend assistance to perpetrators. Separate information, however, from the country's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz), stated that the number of radical Salafists in Germany had risen from 8,350 in 2015 to 10,100 in 2016 (with 680 classified as "dangerous"), and that hundreds of jihadis entered among the more than one million migrants welcomed into the country during the two previous years. Overall, however, the same agency estimates that 24,400 Islamists are active in Germany, a figures similar to that of the UK.
Things are little better in France, which, according to Gatestone author Yves Mamou, has a large but never-quantified Muslim population of at least six million. In April 2017, the French Senate published its "Prevention of Radicalism and Regional Authorities" report, showing that since the beginning of March, 17,393 people had been listed as terror suspects. As in Britain, French authorities said that not all suspects are being constantly monitored; smaller numbers are investigated at regular intervals.
In May, the general secretariat of the international police organization, Interpol, published a list of Islamic State fighters who were thought to have already returned to Europe and may be planning suicide attacks in different countries:
Interpol has circulated a list of 173 Islamic State fighters it believes could have been trained to mount suicide attacks in Europe in revenge for the group's military defeats in the Middle East. The global crime fighting agency's list was drawn up by US intelligence from information captured during the assault on Isis territories in Syria and Iraq European counter-terror networks are concerned that as the Isis "caliphate" collapses, there is an increasing risk of determined suicide bombers seeking to come to Europe, probably operating alone.
The situation in the UK is, in some ways, the most alarming, not only because of cuts to the police budget. Cuts have also been made to the security and intelligence services, even more sharply since the June general election. Prior to that, on June 4, Prime Minister Theresa May delivered a speech the day after the London Bridge attack. Her speech included strong promises to tackle terrorism by introducing fresh measures to strengthen existing legislation.
While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations. Since the emergence of the threat from Islamist-inspired terrorism, our country has made significant progress in disrupting plots and protecting the public. But it is time to say "Enough is enough".
She even named the ideological basis for the attacks:
while the recent attacks are not connected by common networks, they are connected in one important sense. They are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism.
This was progress. Three days after that, May presented proposals for fresh legislation to clamp down hard on Islamic extremism. They included amendments to Britain's 1998 Human Rights Act, which protects potential terrorists; tougher Terrorism Prevention Investigation Measures based on a 2011 Act, but in 2016 only used for six individuals; more deportations of suspects, and longer prison sentences, even though much radicalization takes place in prisons.
That was one day before the June 8 general election. May, overly confident that she would win handily and increase her majority in parliament, led a disastrous campaign that left her with a much reduced majority, forcing her to make an alliance with Northern Ireland's controversial Democratic Unionist Party. Tim Worstall, writing for Forbes magazine, wrote:
"It would be both reasonable and fair to say that Theresa May has just run the worst British election campaign of modern times... Theresa May has in fact achieved something that no one in modern times has managed, to start a general election campaign 20 percentage points up and then arrive without even a parliamentary majority for her party. There simply isn't anything to compare with this in the annals".
To make matters worse, the Labour party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, came close to winning the election and performed considerately better than anyone might have thought a month earlier. Corbyn and his increasingly far-left party had been considered unelectable. Now, they were a force to contend with in the House of Commons.
Corbyn is the last person to be entrusted with Britain's security. Addressing a Stop The War Coalition conference in 2011, he told the crowd: "I've been involved in opposing anti-terror legislation ever since I first went into Parliament in 1983". He has also opposed the UK's involvement in all foreign wars: Sir Gerald Howarth, the former Tory defence minister, said: "Jeremy Corbyn has opposed every British military intervention and represents complete capitulation and weakness". He refused for many years to condemn IRA terrorism, preferring to condemn the British army posted there. He called terrorist groups Hamas and Hizbullah his "friends"; refused to denounce them as late as 2016, and only said he regretted his support for them after heavy pressure was put on him.
Since the election, Labour has made it clear that it opposes any changes in current human rights legislation, and claims that terrorism can be tackled through the laws presently in force. Given the strains the British government is now under, especially with weak negotiations for Brexit and May's increasing unpopularity even within her party, the strong opposition within parliament is certain to weaken further attempts to block radicalism and terrorism, particularly where action against both involves (as it inevitably will) Muslims from various ethnic minority groups.
There has already been vehement opposition to the government's core anti-radicalization program, Prevent, with schoolteachers, students, and others claiming it snoops on Muslim communities. Within the Labour party, Corbyn's radical followers in the Momentum Movement are already planning to force the deselection of members of parliament who oppose Corbyn, unless the such MPs "get on board" by wholeheartedly supporting the leader and his far-left policies. As this takes place, the hard left will strengthen its grip on parliament and make it even more difficult for strong new legislation to be passed.
Theresa May herself is also not entirely to be trusted in this area. Despite her calls for no tolerance for extremism, she has recently been widely criticized for blocking publication of a major report into foreign funding of extremist Muslim groups. Following an enquiry commissioned by May's predecessor David Cameron, the report was due for publication in 2016, but is unlikely now to be revealed for public scrutiny because it is deemed too "sensitive". The sensitivity derives from Saudi Arabia being exposed as a major financier of Islamic extremism worldwide, yet May and the UK government depend heavily on selling arms and other things to the Wahhabi kingdom.
According to the London-based Henry Jackson Society, in its short report on foreign funding of extremism,
The foreign funding for Islamist extremism in Britain primarily comes from governments and government linked foundations based in the Gulf, as well as Iran. Foremost among these has been Saudi Arabia, which since the 1960s has sponsored a multimillion dollar effort to export Wahhabi Islam across the Islamic world, including to Muslim communities in the West. In the UK this funding has primarily taken the form of endowments to mosques and Islamic educational institutions, which have in turn played host to extremist preachers and the distribution of extremist literature. Influence has also been exerted through the training of British Muslim religious leaders in Saudi Arabia, as well as the use of Saudi textbooks in a number of the UK's independent Islamic schools. A number of Britain's most serious Islamist hate preachers sit within the Salafi-Wahhabi ideology and are linked to extremism sponsored from overseas, either by having studied in Saudi Arabia as part of scholarship programmes, or by having been provided with extreme literature and material within the UK itself.
If the British government itself prefers to cover up such ties, opting to rescue its trade balance at the cost of endangering the lives of its own citizens, our concern for the future security of the country deepens immeasurably. The UK, like much of Western Europe and Scandinavia, stands at a crossroads. For years now, radical preachers, terrorist recruiters, and fundamentalists who openly hate this country, its democratic values, and its tolerance for all faiths, have walked British streets, campaigned on university campuses, and converted and radicalized young men and women. Sometimes they have been watched, but almost none has been deported, almost none has been imprisoned, and almost none has been singled out, due to the pretense that "Islam is a religion of peace". In Islam, the whole world is divided into two parts" the Dar al-Islam [Abode of Islam] and the Dar al-Harb [Abode of War]. What seems not to be understood about "the religion of peace" is that "peace" comes only after the entire world has been converted to Islam so that a "Dar al-Harb", the "Abode of War," will no longer even exist.
Theresa May's promise of tightened legislation to protect the British public was the right response to three major recent terror attacks. Yet fall-out from the election and May's own wish to protect Saudi Arabia from scrutiny are likely to guarantee that the serious measures we so much need may never be implemented. When there are further attacks and more people die, who will step forward to give us the protection we need? Or by then will it be too late?
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Australia Launch – 12 a.m. AEDT / 5 a.m. PST
Australia, lit up the iconic Sydney Harbour for the launch of Xbox One. With the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House as a backdrop, Xbox hosted a midnight event to celebrate with fans.
Francis King and Angela Tran were the first Australian’s to receive and Xbox One. The couple, who picked up their console at the Sydney event, ordered their console two years ago.
Fans celebrated the night with a performances from guest, The Presets
400 media fans and celebrities celebrated the night in the Crystal Ballroom at Sydney’s Luna Park
To bring in the official countdown to midnight a show stopping 3D water projection marking the countdown, games lineup and Xbox One logo was displayed in Sydney Harbour
Master Chief arrived before midnight to ensure the safe deliver of the first Xbox One
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× City, NFL Scouting Combine nearing 5-year contract agreement
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (Jan. 13, 2016) – Anyone expecting the NFL Scouting Combine to join the Rams’ relocation to Los Angeles is advised to pump the brakes. Actually, push them to the floor.
Combine officials and representatives of the Capital Improvement Board and Visit Indy are close to finalizing a five-year contract that will tie the NFL’s annual, high-profile player evaluation event to Indianapolis through 2020. A deal could be in place sometime this week.
The city has hosted the NFL Scouting Combine since 1987 – it again takes over downtown Feb. 23-29 – despite attempts by other cities to lure it away.
“As far as we’re concerned, there’s a reason we’ve been here for 30 years,’’ said Jeff Foster, president of the locally-based National Football Scouting, Inc. “And those reasons have gotten better every year.
“We’ve had (relocation) discussions before. We were having them as I was coming on board 10 years ago. Moving the draft to Chicago last year and having great success in Chicago stimulated the conversation again.
“There are a lot of people who liken the NFL draft and the NFL Combine. I would disagree with that.’’
The possibility of the NFL Scouting Combine being moved to the proposed $2-3 billion stadium/complex in Inglewood that will house the Rams apparently was part of the Rams’ relocation proposal to NFL owners on Tuesday.
According to the Los Angeles Times, venue developers envision the complex hosting such indoor events as the NCAA’s Final Four, the Pro Bowl, the NFL Combine, conventions and award shows.
Including the combine in the presentation, insisted Foster, “was an interesting throw-in. I can’t speak for the NFL, but I can tell you nobody involved in that presentation talked to anybody in this office.’’
The Inglewood venue is projected to open for the 2019 season and expected to be off-the-charts extravagant.
“The stadium is nice,’’ Foster said, “but it’s way down the list of priorities of what we need to run a successful combine. I think that was all a marketing piece done by the Rams.
“Until IU Health and the Crowne Plaza move to Los Angeles, I’m not interested in talking about it.’’
Those are two of the prominent partners and reasons the combine has worked seamlessly in Indianapolis. Another plus is the city’s “connectivity,’’ according to Foster.
Everything is in close proximity: Lucas Oil Stadium, site of on-field testing, interviews and physical/medical examinations; the Crowne Plaza, which houses more than 300 players and offers a conference center; the downtown hotels, which are filled by nearly 2,000 coaches, general managers and league personnel, and more than 1,000 members of the media.
Foster noted it was recently announced the NFL Combine is the league’s No. 2 media event, trailing only the Super Bowl.
The closeness of the combine’s moving parts, most notably the medical exams, can’t be overstated. Last year, there were 400 MRIs and 2,000 X-rays in four days on the 330 draft prospects.
“That doesn’t even take into play the EKGs, the labs, all the different scans we do,’’ Foster said. “The scheduling gives me a headache.
“I would ask this L.A. group if they have a pipeline underground where they can connect four mobile MRI units to their local hospital. That’s what we do here. When Lucas Oil Stadium was built, there were enough people who had the forethought to build that infrastructure to where we can drive four mobile MRI units into the basement of Lucas Oil Stadium, literally connect them and it’s as if you’re sitting 16 blocks up to IU Health.
“That’s invaluable to us. Those are little things that I don’t expect anybody to understand, but if you want to know if we can successfully move this event you should ask the people who operate it.’’
According to Chris Gahl, vice president of Visit Indy, the NFL Combine’s economic impact on the city is about $8.27 million. The event’s overall impact, though, “is immeasurable,’’ he said.
The national media along with NFL owners and coaches are exposed to the city’s convenient infrastructure.
“To say that didn’t help us win the Super Bowl (bid) and be in the running for others is underestimated,’’ Gahl said. “Our city was built to host major sporting events, and this is no different.’’
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TORONTO — Political leaders of the world’s 20 leading industrial and developing nations took note at their economic summit of the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in their concluding statement yesterday.
The document recognized “the need to share best practices to protect the marine environment, prevent accidents, . . . and deal with their consequences.’’
The April 20 explosion on the BP -leased Deepwater Horizon rig unleashed the worst offshore oil spill in US history. BP is London-based and the disaster has contributed to strains between the United States and Britain.
Britain’s new conservative prime minister, David Cameron, told reporters BP was working hard to cap the well, “clean up the mess,’’ and compensate victims. At the same time, he said, “what we all want is for this important company to be strong and stable for the future.’’
Cameron and President Obama held a meeting yesterday on the sidelines of the economic summit.
Obama also said the international community must stand behind South Korea and send a clear signal to North Korea that its provocative behavior is unacceptable. North Korea is blamed for the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship.
Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed in the March attack.
“It is absolutely critical for the international community to rally behind’’ South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, Obama said.
“There’s a difference between restraint and willful blindness to consistent problems,’’ Obama said, referring to Beijing’s worry that instability in the North could cause major problems across the border in China.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
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Violence engulfed the Temple Mount and the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City for a third consecutive day on Tuesday, following the Defense Ministry’s decree last week outlawing violent Islamist radical groups from entering the contested holy site.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that five Border Police officers were lightly wounded by rocks, firecrackers and pipe bombs thrown by masked Palestinian youths Tuesday morning shortly after visiting hours commenced at 7:45 a.m.
“For the third straight day Arabs rioted and attempted to attack police and visitors when visiting hours for non-Muslims began in the morning,” said Rosenfeld. “Police used non-lethal stun grenades to disperse the rioters, who fled into Al-Aksa Mosque, which police did not enter.”After the mob was contained in the mosque, Rosenfeld said visiting hours for Jews and other non-Muslims resumed until 11 a.m. without further incident.The wounded officers were treated at the scene by Magen David Adom paramedics, he said.According to Amin Abu Ghazaleh, director of the Palestine Red Crescent Society emergency unit, 26 Palestinians were lightly injured during Tuesday’s clashes.Although no arrests have been made on the Temple Mount since Sunday, Rosenfeld said over a dozen Palestinian youths, some of whom were lightly wounded, were apprehended in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City during separate rock throwing attacks on police and Jews. Following the spate of attacks, Rosenfeld said security has been markedly heightened in the area.“Security assessments have been made and extra units have been called in to ensure no more attacks take place in the Old City or on the Temple Mount,” he said, adding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for an emergency meeting Tuesday night to discuss the ongoing violence.In the meantime, Rosenfeld said that police will continue to allow non-Muslims to visit the Temple Mount.The spike in violence on the compound and Old City began days after Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon signed a decree last Tuesday banning the Murabitun and Murabatat male and female Islamist activist groups, which gather on the Temple Mount to intimidate and shout at Jewish visitors on a daily basis.Ya’alon’s office stated that he acted in line with a recommendation by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), as well as in accordance with the Israel Police’s view. He said he became convinced that the step was necessary to protect national security and public order.The Islamist groups’ activities “create a central component in the creation of tension and violence on the Temple Mount in particular, and Jerusalem in general,” the defense minister’s office said.Ya’alon described the radicals as engaging in “dangerous incitement” against tourists, visitors and worshipers on the Temple Mount, which leads to violence and could put lives at risk.“The Murabitun and Murabatat’s goal is to undermine Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount, change the reality and the existing arrangements, and harm freedom of worship,” the defense minister’s office stated.“They are linked to hostile Islamist organizations and are directed by them,” the statement continued, saying that the ministry’s decree received approval from Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein.While emphasizing that the government views freedom of worship to all citizens and tourists who visit the Temple Mount, irrespective of religion, as a “basic, central, and important value,” Ya’alon said violence would no longer be tolerated under any circumstances.“[W]e have no intention of allowing violent elements that incite [to violence] to harm public order and threaten the peace of worshipers, certainly in a sensitive and holy site like the Temple Mount,” his office said.The Palestinian Authority on Tuesday strongly condemned Israel for allowing Jewish “extremists” to “storm” the Temple Mount, and imposing restrictions on Muslim worshipers.Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal phoned PA President Mahmoud Abbas and discussed with him the recent developments at the Temple Mount, Palestinian officials said. The two also discussed ways of ending the dispute between the PA and Hamas, the officials added.In addition on Tuesday, Abbas phoned Jordan’s King Abdullah, discussing with him the latest developments at the Temple Mount amid Palestinian calls for a “day of rage” on Friday to protest against Israeli “assaults” on the Temple Mount and Muslim worshipers.The PA government, which held its weekly meeting in Ramallah, accused the Israeli authorities of permitting Jewish “extremists” to carry out the largest “incursion” of the Aksa Mosque compound.The government accused Israel of using “poisonous gas” to disperse Muslim worshipers during clashes at the compound over the past few days.The PA condemned Israel’s decision to ban Muslim women and girls from entering the compound as a “crime against all religions and a flagrant assault on freedom of worship.” It said that Jerusalem and its holy sites were being subjected to “war crimes.”The PLO Executive Committee held an emergency meeting in Ramallah and called for “confronting Israeli terror schemes” against the Islamic holy sites. The committee called for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the situation at the Temple Mount.The PA Foreign Ministry called on the international community to intervene to stop Israel from “dragging the region to a religious war.” The ministry further accused Israel of seeking to divide the Temple Mount in time and place between Muslims and Jews.In the Gaza Strip, Hamas said that Israel’s recent actions in Jerusalem were tantamount to a declaration of war.“The international community must move to stop the Israeli crime before the situation explodes,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. “Our people won’t allow the criminal Israeli scheme to pass.”The United States and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon both voiced concern about the ongoing violence on the Mount, while Jordan’s King Abdullah said Israeli actions were provocative and could imperil ties between the countries, state media reported in Tuesday.Jordan’s Hashemite dynasty derives part of its legitimacy from its traditional custodianship of the holy site.“If this continues to happen...Jordan will have no choice but to take action,” King Abdullah, whose father King Hussein signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, was quoted as saying.The tensions that led to the fighting are a product, at least in part, of growing Palestinian fears that Jews are visiting the Temple Mount as part of an Israeli plan to assert sovereignty over the site, or to divide it.Although sovereignty of Judaism’s holiest site – where the First and Second Temples once stood – was reclaimed by Israel during the 1967 War, it granted Jordan’s Wakf religious trust oversight of Islam’s third holiest site to avert unrest.However, the arrangement has resulted in a highly contested and volatile “status quo” that severely limits Jewish visitation and precludes Jewish prayer of any kind, while granting Muslim worshipers unlimited access and prayer rights.Jewish activists, led by Yehudah Glick, have been increasingly pushing the government to allow Jewish prayer on the compound since Glick was nearly killed in an assassination attempt for his advocacy last year.On Tuesday, acting Israel Police Commissioner Asst.- Ch. Bentzi Sau said that the police are in the midst of “a nationwide operational effort” to increase security with the greatest emphasis on Jerusalem, where he said “unfortunately we see over the past three days attempts by a number of different players to inflame and incite the security situation in the city and harm the coexistence in the city.”Sau said that, in light of the situation, police will continue to reinforce their officers in the city while allowing access to holy sites for all three religions. The reinforcements so far have consisted of hundreds of additional officers sent to patrol.He added that police see recent events as “a new escalation,” in particular the smuggling of pipe bombs onto the Temple Mount, as well as the use of firebombs by rioters on the mount.He said that where they have the intelligence to reach those responsible, they will make arrests and seek indictments.Sau’s comments came following a meeting held with Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan and other security officials at the Western Wall complex, to discuss the recent violence and how to proceed.On Sunday, Erdan said that the violence on the eve of the holiday “obligates us all to take into consideration the arrangements on the Mount.”He added that “it’s unacceptable that Muslim rioters would barricade themselves overnight on the Temple Mount and turn this holy place into a battle field.”Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat issued a statement on Tuesday night condemning the ongoing Muslim violence on the Temple Mount, while adding that there will be no changes to the holy site’s tenuous status quo.“The government must not allow the Temple Mount to serve as a haven for terrorists under any circumstances,” Barkat said. “[It] must act fearlessly to restore order, peace and sanctity to the holy site.”“We are committed to maintaining freedom of religion and the status quo in Jerusalem,” the statement continued. “I vigorously condemn the cynical use of this freedom by extremists who transform holy sites into places of terror. Jerusalem’s mosques, churches and synagogues will not harbor violence, just like the Vatican, Mecca and other sites around the world.”Meanwhile, in a separate incident on Tuesday afternoon, a Palestinian throwing a firebomb was shot in the legs and lightly wounded during a clash with the IDF near Tulkarm.An army spokeswoman said that the clash began when rioters hurled rocks and firebombs at soldiers.The IDF initially responded by using non-lethal riot dispersal means.During the course of the clash, the spokeswoman said, a “central instigator threw a firebomb. Soldiers fired at his legs and struck him. As far as we know, he was lightly injured.”The injured man was evacuated to a Palestinian hospital for medical treatment.Earlier on Tuesday, soldiers patrolling the Gaza Strip border heard gunshots fired in their direction from the Gazan side of the border.The IDF unit responded by firing back, and a suspected attacker was hit by the return fire, according to the army.Reuters contributed to this report.
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The short (just a day) visit of US President Donald Trump to Israel ended on May 23. For the record, the head of the strongest power of the planet even visited Bethlehem, but his meeting with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was, more likely, of symbolic significance. The main discussions took place in Jerusalem, at the meeting between Trump and the PM of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu.
No analyst or journalist would exactly tell you what issues were discussed, argued or agreed. The Israeli right is happy that the pro-Iranian idealist Barack Obama was replaced by Trump, who, they believe, will not prevent the Jewish state from developing, building new settlements, and who knows, can really move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Israeli left added a new verse to their endless bleak “Song of Peace” titled “Since Trump found a common language with Netanyahu, then it’s time to negotiate with the Palestinians.”
Everyone is satisfied, and everyone is wrong. Trump is not a “messiah”, he is not bothered by the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, is indifferent to where the US Embassy is located, will not initiate the peace process just for the sake of the process and has got enough problems in his homeland.
I have no doubt that Trump – unlike Obama – is a true ally of Israel. He does not bow to the Saudi king – it is the latter who performs a traditional Bedouin dance of swords in honor of the dearest guest. Trump perfectly understands that Iran is a cancerous tumor not only on the body of the Middle East, but also of the whole world. So, in general, all the moderate powers in the region have found a partner in his person (although, frankly speaking, we can only call Riyadh moderate because of hundreds of billions of dollars, that become tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs in America itself).
But Trump is a deal maker, a businessman, a man of specifics. It is easy to forget that he ran a financial empire if we look at his epatage and scandals, but when it comes to deals, he is exactly good at them. And having such a bargaining chip as the entire military and economic power of the United States, it becomes easier to conclude deals. And Trump lets everyone know that the “freebie” times have passed. Enough, “Basta”! And therefore all actors know that the rules of the game have changed.
Mr. Abbas, do you want us to help you reach a peaceful settlement? Very good, but what will you give in return? And if you really believe in peace, then let me ask the reason why you direct the lion’s share of foreign aid to the support of terrorists? Mr. Netanyahu, you are claiming that you want normalization of relations with moderate Arab countries? I understand, I understand. But what concessions are you ready for? What are you willing to give us, the United States, for our intervention? King Salman, are you concerned about Iran? We can help solve this problem. But, what about a fatter contract and the normalization of relations with a small country on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea? This is the approach of Donald Trump to what is happening not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world. If you want something, pay the bills, or at least come towards us.
It can be said that the mischievous saxophonist, the narrow-minded cowboy and the short-sighted dreamer were replaced by an assertive deal maker. Despite his ostentatious scandalousness, silly statements and a dubious reputation, it is possible that he will be able to slightly alleviate the tension in our region, and even, who knows, throughout the world.
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Posted on: January 6, 2016 5:38 PM
[ACNS] The crozier of the sixth century Pope who sent Augustine to England to begin the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons will be in Canterbury as the Primates of the Anglican Communion gather for their meeting in the city next week.
The ancient carved ivory headed crozier will be on public display at Canterbury Cathedral during the weekends before and after the Primates Meeting after being loaned to the Cathedral by the Roman Catholic monks of San Gregorio al Celio in Rome. Saint Augustine had been prior of the monastery, which had been built by Pope Gregory I before his elevation to the Papacy. Augustine lead a seven-year mission to England and is recognised as the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
“We are very pleased to receive the crozier as a symbol of ecumenical encouragement at this time of the meeting of Anglican Primates and as a link with St Gregory whose vision of the conversion of England caused Augustine to found the community at Canterbury,” the Dean of Canterbury, the Very Revd Dr Robert Willis, said.
Commenting on the loan, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said: “Allow me at this point to congratulate you on the highly symbolic value of the loan of this relic, dear to the Church of England, which venerates Pope St Gregory the Great, the promoter of the evangelising mission to the Anglo-Saxon people and is therefore a mark of the bond that spiritually unites the Catholic and Anglican Churches.”
The loan of the crozier head has been made possible by the Italian Government’s Fund for Religious Buildings, administered by the Ministry for the Interior and with support from the British Government. It will be on public display in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral Crypt on Saturdays 9 and 16 January from 10 am to 4 pm; and on Sundays 10 and 17 January Midday to 2 pm. Usual admission charges apply.
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Branches of Kabul Bank across the country were crowded as anxious depositors joined hundreds of thousands of government employees queuing to collect their salaries, which were being paid through the bank on Saturday.
The privately-owned bank has been the subject of reports alleging large-scale corruption by executives, though the government and central bank have said it is solvent and there is no need for customers to panic.
Banks were closed on Friday for the weekly holiday, providing respite after a day of mild panic following the reports, which saw the Washington Post say the Kabul Bank had been taken over by the central bank.
The governor of Afghanistan’s central bank, Adbul Qadir Fitrat, said the bank had not been taken over and along with the finance minister reassured depositors their money was secure.
US newspapers, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, reported on Wednesday that the central bank had replaced the bank’s two top executives — chief executive Khalilullah Ferozi and chairman Sher Khan Farnud — and ordered Farnud to hand over 160 million dollars’ worth of luxury property purchased in Dubai for himself and for cronies.
Fitrat denied the reports, saying the men had resigned voluntarily as new regulations did not permit shareholders to hold executive positions.
Finance Minister Hazrat Omar Zakhailwal reassured Kabul Bank customers the institution was solvent, saying the administration of President Hamid Karzai gave its full backing and cash was being delivered to branches nationwide.
He said 100 million dollars had been deposited in the bank to cover government salaries, which were due to be paid Saturday to police, army, teachers and many other civil servants.
The US newspaper reports said a cash crisis at the bank could undermine the stability of Afghanistan’s financial system and efforts to quell a nine-year-old Taliban-led insurgency.
On Saturday, the Washington Post quoted Ferozi as saying he had warned Afghan officials that a change of senior bank personnel could be destabilising.
Finance ministry spokesman Aziz Shams told AFP: “A change in the leadership of the bank is a normal thing. The government of Afghanistan has always supported the private sector, including private banks.
“People are always chasing rumours and speculation,” he said, referring to the reports.
“There is no real problem in this bank. We support the bank and we are not concerned that it will collapse.”
The deputy commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF),Lieutenant General Nick Parker, said Afghan and foreign forces were prepared for any potential security threat that might arise from the bank’s troubles.
“We have to be ready to react to a security situation,” Parker told reporters.
Crowds thronged Kabul Bank branches in the capital, in eastern Herat, southern Kandahar and northern Mazar-I-Sharif cities on Saturday, many simply wishing to withdraw money ahead of the upcoming Eid holiday.
Eid marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, when Muslims buy gifts, clothes and special foods to celebrate with their families.
Mohammad, a 35-year-old doctor, said he came to withdraw 800 dollars from his savings of 2,500 dollars at Kabul Bank’s main branch in the capital “because Eid is approaching and I need the cash”.
“I don’t believe the bank will go bankrupt,” he said.
By contrast, 22-year-old Waheed, after waiting in line at a Herat branch for two hours, said: “Kabul Bank has lost the trust of the people, I heard from the news that even the chairman resigned so everyone is concerned.
“I am pulling my money out of the bank.”
The Washington Post said on Friday that the US Treasury Department had despatched a team to Kabul to help deal with the crisis, and said that a brother of the president had called for Washington’s intervention.
The US embassy did not answer queries.
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